The next morning the timekeeper stopped me to ask, “What the hell were you doing, anyway?”
They put a number of us to digging holes four feet square and down to hardpan for concrete piers to support a building soon to be erected. There were at least a dozen of us on the job and the ground was partly frozen. After we got down a short distance, water had to be bailed out, so progress was slow. There was a husky young German, a couple of years older than I, and we got into a contest to make the work more fun. The average was two and a half holes per day, while several were doing three. The German and I were doing four holes a day apiece.
Our boss was an easygoing Irishman who saw what was going on and wisely stayed out of it, but the management in its wisdom decided he was not gung-ho enough as a boss and brought in a new man.
Knowing nothing of any of us, he came suddenly into the area and found the German and me leaning on our shovels, having just finished our second holes for the day, while nobody else had finished one. He promptly fired both of us for loafing, along with another chap who had been doing three holes a day. In his first day on the job he had fired his three best men.
But it was time to move on, and we did.
I saw the German just once more, meeting him suddenly on the street in Portland. He was a strong, rugged guy with whom I had enjoyed wrestling around and he was also very bright. We walked the streets for hours that night, just talking of books, men, work, and the times. I have often wondered what happened to him.
That, too, was education. I learned that when I was in charge I should keep my eyes open and understand the situation before I moved. And I learned it is also risky to break up teams that are used to working together. No matter what seems to be gained, much is also lost.
Even then, I was trying to write. Often I sat alone in my room at the hotel or at a table in the library trying to tell stories. It is never so easy as it seems and I had so much to learn. If at that time I had had an income of just $100 a month of which I could be sure, it would have saved me ten years of hard work. In one year I could have learned what I needed to know, or most of it.
Writing, however, is a learning process. One never knows enough, and one is never good enough.
In so many areas my ignorance was impressive—to me, at least. One evening a girl I knew (I always knew a few here and there) read one of my efforts at verse and commented that it did not scan. I did not want to betray my ignorance, so did not ask her what she meant, but the truth was I had no idea, except that something was wrong with what I had attempted. The following day I went to the library and found a book that cleared up the mystery: A Study of Versification by Brander Matthews.
If one is any good as a writer at all, he must be constantly improving, learning, finding better ways of saying what needs to be said. He must also be constantly aware of what is happening in his world and in what direction it seems to be going.
My first stories were largely of the Far East, of the Indonesian waters where I had spent some time. I still have a nostalgic feeling for some of those little ports, such as Gorontalo, Amurang, and Medan. Having grown up in the West and worked around over a dozen western states, I absorbed a lot of material there and, in the years that followed, tried to absorb more.
How many nonfiction books I read about the West I do not recall, but in earlier years I had read Josiah Gregg’s Commerce of the Prairies, which I consider one of the basic books of the westward movement. Henry Inman’s book, The Great Salt Lake Trail, is also very good, but the West is a vast panorama and there are an infinite number of phases and aspects. The exploring, the trading and trapping, the wagon trains to Oregon and California, the Gold Rush days, the buffalo hunting, the cattle drives, the ranching, the stage-driving, the bandits, the hanging-judge period in Oklahoma and Arkansas, the sod-house settlers, the Indian-fighting in the Southwest and Northwest, the silver mining in Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and Montana, the gold mining in all those places—one could go on for a long time listing the various phases, down to the bone-pickers who gathered and sold bones left by buffalo hunters and others. Much has been written about all phases of the westward movement in this country.
One of the richest sources of understanding the westward movement is the diaries and journals of the people themselves. Reading such books or manuscripts puts the researcher on the ground at the time the events described were taking place, so one gets the feelings as well as the information. I have read hundreds of diaries of various lengths and have never used an incident from any of them. That is not why I read, and indeed, one rarely finds stories there. They have to be created. The material is there, the background and the situations, but one has to take this material and weave it into a story pattern.
When I do research, I am saturating myself in the time, the place, and the feelings. But reading is never enough. One must know the land. In every story of the westward movement the land itself is often the most important aspect. No one could move without knowing something of what lay ahead. What are the landmarks, if any? Where will I find water?
The journals are, as a rule, rather dull day-to-day accounts of what was happening along the way, in the town, at the ranch. These, of course, are things a writer must understand. He must see the canvas against which his story will take place.
Also, I might add, anyone who attempts to write for western readers had better know, because they do. Having a variety of cactus growing where it is never found will disgust a reader and he will toss your book aside. Western readers fire black-powder guns; they ride; they go on treks. Many of them still punch cows. Others have spent years studying various Indian tribes.
During the great days of the West, guns were changing, new rifles coming in, old ones hanging on. Some pistols were black-powder weapons loaded carefully with ball, while others were cartridge weapons. Some were converted from one to the other. Many gunfighters altered their weapons for one reason or another, and European weapons were brought in by pioneers.
To write a story of the West, one must have more accurate knowledge than for any other writing I can think of, aside from some kinds of science fiction.
One does not, as some imagine, simply “dash off a western.”
*
A book is a friend that will do what no friend does—be silent when we wish to think.
—WILL DURANT
*
MANY OF THE Army officers serving in the West of the period before and after the Civil War were cultured, intelligent men, and although they were defending the frontier against raids by Indians, many of them had a strong interest in the Indian and his culture. Much that we know might have been lost had it not been for their intelligent observation and comments.
On the Border with Crook by Major John G. Bourke and Life Among the Apaches by John C. Cremony are examples, but only two of many. That much maligned man General George Armstrong Custer—about whom more nonsense has been written by people who know nothing about him than has been written about any man in history—was another. Secretary of War William Belknap (later dismissed from office) had been appointing political friends of his as Indian agents, and they were robbing the Indians, starving them, and taking every advantage. Custer objected, but a mere Lieutenant Colonel (Custer’s actual rank) got nowhere by complaining to the Secretary of War, and later they contrived an excuse for a court martial.
Custer saw the Indians being mistreated and in his book, My Life on the Plains, said that if he were an Indian he would be fighting.
How many Indians were present at the Little Bighorn we will never know. Their numbers were estimated at from two thousand to nine thousand. Logic was completely on Custer’s side. The Indian had never been able to field a large force because of the supply problem. When so many Indians came into an area, the game fled the country, so whatever food the Indian had he must bring with him. For the same reason he could not stay long in the field.
A fact often missed is that just a few miles south and a few days earlier, General George Crook
, another of our most successful Indian fighters, had made the same mistake.
In the bitter Battle of the Rosebud, often overlooked due to the drama of the Custer massacre, Crook was fought to a standstill by many of the same Indians. Had it not been for the protests of Frank Grouard, Crook’s chief of scouts, and the fact that he was down to eight rounds of ammunition per man, Crook might have pursued the Sioux down the canyon of the Rosebud into an even worse trap than Custer’s, where he would have lost three times the men.
Knowing the Indian problems with supply, neither Crook on June 17 or Custer on June 25 was willing to believe that such a large force was in the field.
Few of those who write so glibly about Custer have ever examined his career. His defeat of Jeb Stuart was without doubt one of the major reasons the North won the Battle of Gettysburg. Some may object to the term defeat, but without a doubt Custer prevented Stuart from obtaining his objective, and Stuart was a great cavalry officer.
Custer’s troops often complained about some of his brutally long marches, but no matter how far he asked them to go, he was up there in front of them and in plain sight. The men called him old “Iron-Ass.”
Often forgotten is the fact that the Seventh Cavalry, proud of its name and reputation, had an unusually large number of raw recruits when they left Fort Lincoln, which contributed to the great loss of life at the Little Bighorn.
There are so many things about Indians and their ways that were simply not known. For example: no Indian who was not present at the signing of a treaty felt bound by it. For this reason many Indians would deliberately absent themselves on such occasions.
In most cases, when a chief signed a treaty, he was signing for himself. He had no authority to force other Indians to abide by it. This most white men never understood.
In most cases the only way for a young Indian to become a man and a warrior was to take a scalp or to count coup, which meant to strike a living, armed enemy. Until he had done so, he could not get a bride and he could not speak in council. He was literally a nobody. This is why Indians often said they could not live without war.
A strike against the Indian in dealing with white men was that to him, a battle was a war. The Indian never learned about campaigns, a series of extended battles. When the Indian battle was over, all the Indians went home. The white man kept coming.
Although Crazy Horse was but one of the chiefs present at the Little Bighorn, he is usually given credit for the tactical planning. It is more likely that it grew out of a council. The fact of the matter is, had the Indians a supply system of food and ammunition, they might have whipped General Alfred Terry (Custer’s commanding officer) and Gibbon as well.
That’s a wild speculation, of course, but they had put Crook’s command out of action and had whipped Custer and knew that Terry and Gibbon were approaching.
Personally, I do not believe that the sites of the battles were a matter of chance. I believe the Indians deliberately led the coming battle into terrain favorable to their way of fighting and where such traps as they often used were available.
Military tactics had interested me since my youth, and when I got older I read Sun-tzu, Marshal Saxe, Vegetius, Clausewitz, and dozens of others on the subject. Sun-tzu, who composed his work about 500 B.C., laid down the basic principles of military strategy and has rarely been improved upon. The American Indian used a variety of tactics but the favorite was always a variation of what Hannibal used to defeat the Romans at Cannae. It was also used by T. E. Lawrence at the Battle of Tafila, in World War I. This was definitely what was prepared for Crook at the Rosebud but he failed to enter the trap. It also was used by the Sioux and Cheyenne at the Fetterman massacre in Wyoming, in 1866.
My mention of Vegetius, who wrote on the tactics and camps of the Roman legions, offers an opportunity to correct a mistaken impression that has long existed. When Jesus was suffering on the Cross, a Roman soldier offered him vinegar to drink, and this has been considered by many to have been an unkind act. As a matter of fact, vinegar was what the Roman legions drank, believing it a better thirst-quencher than plain water. We often put lemon in water for the same purpose. In any event, that Roman legionnaire was simply trying to share his own drink with Jesus.
Fortunately, we who write about America’s frontier have no shortage of basic material. Soldiers of every rank have written of their experiences in one place or another, and the records in many areas are excellent. The only limitation on any writer is how much effort he or she is willing to put in to be accurate.
We cannot, of course, know all the story, but we do know much of it, and from what we know can easily surmise the rest. We who write fiction are not writing history, yet I do not believe anybody has a right to alter history for the sake of a story. If nothing else, it betrays a lack of creative ability. The actual history is amazing enough and I prefer to put my characters into what is actually happening and let it happen to them.
My reading in the library continued with Why We Behave Like Human Beings by George A. Dorsey, Thus Spake Zarathustra and The Will to Power by Nietzsche, a volume of essays by Schopenhauer, and another by William James.
In fiction I read The Case of Sergeant Grischa by Arnold Zweig, which I consider the best novel to come out of World War I, although Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front attracted more attention and was a good book also. I read The Master Mind of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, a continuation of the series I had read when I was twelve. Bitter Bierce by C. Hartley Grattan was a biography of one of my long-time favorites, Ambrose Bierce.
Becoming briefly interested in psychiatry, I read two books by Coriat, as well as the Psychology of Insanity by Bernard Hart, and The Mind at Mischief by William Sadler.
In the meanwhile, my brother Parker and I had been developing a small conspiracy. My parents were living in Oregon at the time, near Klamath Falls. I was preparing to move on from Portland. When I did, they would be some distance from any of the family, and they were growing older.
Parker was Washington correspondent for the Oklahoman-Times, dividing his time between Oklahoma City and Washington, D.C. So we planned to find an excuse to get my parents to move to Oklahoma. Parker bought an acreage east of Oklahoma City near Choctaw and began telling Dad the difficulties he was having in getting anyone to plant trees, care for them, and generally protect the place.
The upshot of it was that Dad decided to drive down and see what he could do, and I was to make the trip with them.
We could not know then that Parker was soon to leave for a job with Scripps-Howard in Ohio, and would only occasionally visit in Oklahoma.
Using a name I had never used before and never used again, I entered an amateur boxing contest and fought but one fight, which I lost. Most of my fighting was done in small-town rings, with only here and there a venture into big city clubs. I never did well in the amateurs, largely because I was not eating as regularly as I should and because of conditions generally. As I had the idea I might someday turn to boxing seriously I did not want a blemish on what I hoped would be a good record.
I was working nights, dead tired, and they tied the gloves on us well before we were to enter the ring, as is often done in amateur bouts where many end quickly. I was so tired I fell asleep waiting to be called to the ring.
I fought a fairly good fight, with one flurry in the second round that won the round for me, but lost the decision to a good fighter.
In all I read 115 books and plays in 1930.
I do not believe that any writer has ever presented an account of his reading or education. Some of what I am writing here may seem dull stuff, but I have enjoyed digging into the reading habits of many great men and women and have tried where possible to get a list of the books in their libraries. I have in mind a book about the American Revolution which I am eager to write, though unhappily the time may not be allowed me, as I have so many projects on the fire and could not do them all in two lifetimes. However, in researching this book, I had occasion
to visit the estate of George Mason and there I collected a list of the books he had in his study and those he had read in preparing himself. He was without a doubt one of the most influential men of his time, and the sources of his ideas were important to me. Still, a book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.
I hoped that by understanding the books these men and women read I might grasp at the basic sources of some of their ideas.
In several of my western novels I have had characters reading Plutarch. I believe more great men have read his Lives than any other book, except possibly the Bible. But, as many pagans read Plutarch, his work may still be the most widely read. In reviewing the reading histories or libraries of great men, I have come upon him again and again, and justly so. His is a sophisticated, urbane mind dealing with aspects of leadership.
Once more now, I was upon the road, this time with my parents, traveling through eastern Oregon, a section of Idaho, into Wyoming, and on to Oklahoma. Each night in some café or other stopping place I sought out the people who knew about the area. It was always easy to get them started, and all that remained was to listen.
In each town there are collections of pamphlets about local history, but once you leave the town they are rarely available elsewhere. I had it in mind to build a library and gather them all together, from every state in the union, as a source for scholarly research.
I know that I have profited much from such accounts—often simply some old pioneer or soldier telling how it was. Many of these booklets are only a few pages, but each has value in itself. Our land is rich beyond belief in the memories of its pioneers but much of this material is being lost through sheer lack of awareness that it exists. Many of the best stories of our country are in such booklets, unavailable to scholars, and many of them can throw revealing light on the pages of history.
Education of a Wandering Man Page 10