Education Of a Wandering Man (1990) (13 page)

We talked a little there, and later had coffee together. One day he brought me a manuscript which he hoped to publish. Limited as my publishing experience was, I could see he had almost no prospect of success. His paper was a brilliant piece of Socratic-type dialogue between a Citizen and a Senator, and his subject was that the Preamble to the Constitution was not intended as a Preamble but as an integral part of the Constitution.

This is the stand that Franklin Roosevelt took when he became President and which he used as authorization for some of the dramatic moves he made to turn things around. As my friend had mailed copies of his dialogue to several senators, I have often wondered if Roosevelt himself got the idea from that old gentleman in the library.

He was, like Eric Hoffer, a longshoreman.

Meanwhile I was working out in a small gym, hoping to make some money fighting. I would leave my hotel, go to the gym, get my lunch fixed at the counter in the poolroom above the gym, and go on to work.

My reading followed no pattern. I read a dozen plays by Eugene O'ationeill, two by George Bernard Shaw, three by Racine, and others by Oscar Wilde, Moli@ere, John Drinkwater, Ashley Dukes, Ferenc Moln@ar, and Carlo Goldoni.

In philosophy I read four books by George Santayana, three by Nietzsche, one by Schopenhauer. I read several books by H. G. Wells, at least two by Joseph Conrad, several by Rabindranath Tagore, and a real delight, Black Sparta by Naomi Mitchison.

Each book gave me much to think about, and on my long bus rides I frequently went over what I had read. For a while during this period I lived on one sandwich a day so I could save the money to buy three books of which I had read reviews. They were Marriage and Morals by Bertrand Russell, Liberty Under the Soviets by Roger Baldwin, and Men and Machines by Stuart Chase.

The subject of the influence of the machine was much under discussion at the time, as evidenced by Eugene O'ationeill's play Dynamo and other works.

Although written more than a century ago (1872), Samuel Butler's Erewhon is still one of the most provocative on the subject.

The paperback book, which has done so much to revolutionize reading, did not exist at the time, and hardcover books were expensive for one in my position.

Bookstores were fewer than today, when paperback books are everywhere. There were many wonderful old bookstores operated by people who both knew and loved books, and to browse their shelves was and is pure delight.

It is not uncommon today to find no one working in a bookstore who reads anything but the current best sellers, if that much. In the days I speak of, bookstores were usually operated by book lovers. Now they are run by anyone who can ring up a sale. Yet there are exceptions, and to come upon them is always a pleasure.

The work I was doing offered no chance for standing around, had I been so inclined. The plant was a noisy, busy place and we all fell into a rhythm that made the hours pass quickly, yet when the shift was over I was tired and often slept halfway back on the bus.

One night, not having bus fare, I walked back to town. I believe it was about seven miles and through a dark, deserted area along the river. Walking along, half asleep, I was suddenly startled by a man who stepped out from behind a signboard and told me to "Get 'em up."

I hit him.

It was not an intelligent reaction, nor a brave one. I was a fighter and I reacted.

My punch landed solidly and he went down, the gun flying from his hand. I grabbed the gun in midair and ran at least a block before it dawned on me that I had the gun.

Whoever the man was, his tactics were bad.

Had he come up behind me, he could have had whatever I had, which was only a few cents, but he startled me into an instinctive reaction.

However, he was a benefactor. Back in my room I checked the pistol. It was a .38 caliber, fully loaded, but for some incomprehensible reason the barrel had never been cleared of Cosmoline or some such substance. Had he attempted to fire it he might have blown his hand off. I cleaned up the gun, took it to a pawnshop, and sold it for six dollars.

In Klamath Falls, I had worked for a time as a laborer in building the Weyerhauser Mill, working there for several months at various jobs. Each of us was expected to fill out a small slip saying what we had been doing each day. On one occasion they had me simply walking about, picking up tools, stacking spare lumber--a number of little things that needed doing-- so when I filled out my slip that night, I simply wrote: "Removing obstacles in the path of progress."

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.