Education Of a Wandering Man (1990) (21 page)

It was a perhaps-accidental meeting with a Scotsman, a former British-India Army officer named Haig. He had left the service and become a Buddhist, but I always suspected he was with British Intelligence.

We talked, and he knew of Slim. He introduced me to a young couple, brother and sister, who were half-castes. They had an independent income from somewhere--not a lot of money, but security. She painted, Chinese-style; he wrote very elegant poetry which he rarely tried to publish.

Through them, and at several parties, I became acquainted with a small group of would-be artists and writers, mostly half-castes. Markets for what they wrote not existing, they simply wrote for their mutual pleasure--although the sister who painted occasionally sold something of hers. Indeed, a few years ago I came upon a painting of hers in a home I was visiting, but the owners had no idea who the artist was, and I did not enlighten them. They had come upon a charming piece of work and bought it for no other reason.

I knew the young half-castes for a few days only, and since have heard they were in Nanking when the Japanese came. It is hardly to be expected that they escaped. Haig would have, and Slim if sober, but the artists were flowers that bloomed in the spring and can scarcely have escaped the first freeze.

Our world is made up of a myriad of microcosms, of tiny worlds, each with its own habitu`es, every one known to the others. A neighborhood bar or caf`e can be a comforting place to go, to talk with friends or acquaintances, people unknown just a few blocks away. Often, driving down a street, I notice such places and am tempted to drop in, listen, and enter briefly another small world people have created for themselves.

In some neighborhoods it is not a good idea at all, and better you should keep driving.

Many people have the idea that a writer of stories should live in the area of which he writes, but if he knows his subject matter, he carries it with him wherever he goes. Much of my life has been spent in deserts and mountains; much of what I have seen I remember. Sitting here now, I can close my eyes and see the desert in all its many aspects. There is no need to see it again, although I often shall, nor is there need to go to the mountains, for the mountains are with me always. I have walked the high country; I have breathed its air, bedded down under its trees, watched the white clouds drift and the storm clouds gather. Far away I have seen dust-devils do their weird dance and I have heard the pelting rain on the trees above me.

I remember the decks of ships where I have walked, the feel of the wheel in my hands, the drip of water from yellow oilskins, and I have heard the crash of great trees coming down in the forest. One does not have to live among these things to remember them, and I do. They were and are a part of me.

Indeed, I find that distance lends perspective and I often write better of a place when I am some distance from it. One can be so overwhelmed by the forest as to miss seeing the trees.

Even now, after so many years, I can close my eyes and feel that old E. K. Wood Lumber Dock where the steam schooners lay in their slips, waiting to discharge their cargo of timber from Grays Harbor or somewhere to the north. I can feel the dampness of fog on my face, see the lights of loading ships across the channel on the old Luckenbach dock, and hear the deep-throated blast of a whistle on a steamer outward bound for the far places.

One does not forget the dark, lonely nights, or the odd little memories that linger for no specific reason.

The worlds of which I write are no longer out there. They are here, ever present in my mind.

Seated at my typewriter, I can in one moment move to the mountains of Pakistan or India, to vast invading armies with their forests of spears, all bright and golden in the noonday sun. I have read the history; I know the land.

I know how it feels to be a fighting man entering combat, so I can ride with those men, fight beside them, fall to the field and lie wounded or die with them.

A writer is bound by no earthly ties; what he is and what he sees he creates in his mind, or his subconscious creates it for him. Thanks to the lands I have seen and the books I have read, I know what it was like. The world of which I write is my world always. It is a claim I have staked and continue to stake, and each writer has his own way of telling a story.

When at the typewriter I am no longer where I sit but am away across the mountains, in ancient cities or on the Great Plains among the buffalo. Often I think of what pitiful fools are those who use mind-altering drugs to seek feelings they do not have, each drug taking a little more from what they have of mind, leaving them a little less. Give the brain encouragement from study, from thinking, from visualizing, and no drugs are needed.

My reading continued, as always, in many areas:

The Ethno-Botany of the Cahuilla Indians by David Prescott Barrows, Pioneer Days in Arizona by Frank Lockwood, My Sixty Years on the Plains by William T. Hamilton, The Vedic Age by Majumdar and Pulsalker, The Art of Teaching by Gilbert Highet, Rome Beyond Imperial Frontiers by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, and many another.

I had taken to dropping in at the Brown Derby on Vine Street in Hollywood.

Cobb, who operated the place, had connections among the Crow Indians in Wyoming and Montana and we often talked about that country.

There was a group of us who gathered at the corner of the bar to talk about motion pictures, writing, the West, and whatever came to mind. One night I told a story of some happenings during World War II, and a few months later it appeared in a motion picture called Red Ball Express with my role, much exaggerated, played by Jeff Chandler.

Other than those occasional evenings at the Derby, my time was divided between the Hollywood library and my typewriter.

As I wrote the stories I could sell, I was like a squirrel, gathering the nuts of future stories and storing them for the years when my writing would be better and my market larger.

My first motion picture was East of Sumatra, with Jeff Chandler, Anthony Quinn, and Marilyn Maxwell. The story was of tin mining, and made a bit of sense as written. A big company was rushing in to exploit an island ruled by a native Rajah, played by Quinn. He wanted a hospital, medicines, and doctors for his people.

The Company wanted to get in and get the tin and get out with as little trouble as possible. The idea was good, the cast was capable--and instead of a meaningful picture, the producers or somebody turned it into a sex and jungle epic.

In any jungle picture with a beautiful native girl, you can almost be sure that before long you will find her swimming naked or nearly so in a pool, usually with a waterfall, and there the leading man comes upon her. He is often in the pool himself, and it leads to what is expected to be a titillating scene. So it was in this case. The sincere young Rajah is largely forgotten, he doesn't get his medicines, and his hopes and the picture go down the drain.

As I delved deeper into the background of America, I became tantalized by the unwritten chapters, most of which we will never know because the information simply is not there. Of course, there is always the chance that in old records in England, France, or Spain we may turn up stories now unknown.

The records we have are those of known explorations, but what of the many that were unknown? In doing research one stumbles upon tantalizing tidbits, mentions of white men living with Indians in areas where no white men were known to be, mentions of boatloads of Carolina adventurers at the mouth of the Ohio a hundred years before Daniel Boone was born, of that party of French people who went west from Illinois to Washington before Lewis and Clark's trek over almost the same route. In almost every instance where somebody was supposed to be first, we find there was somebody already there.

No doubt many a long hunter went west and never returned; no doubt other explorers did the same. We must always understand that what we have is only a small piece of history.

Our forefathers were a restless, venturesome lot and that vast land to the westward, beyond the far blue mountains, was always a challenge.

To understand what happened in our country it is enough to read the major histories, which follow the main lines of thought and of our affairs, but to get down to the nitty-gritty, one must go to the lesser-known books, the pamphlets, the individual memoirs.

There are local histories also, histories of small towns, of counties, of areas important to the writers of the booklets or articles. Newspapers frequently ran the life stories of local pioneers, and they are often valuable additions to the larger pages of history. The story of Robert E.

Lee as a young officer, facing the Indian Wildcat and his band, is one I have not seen in any biography of Lee.

My reading continued with Byzantine Civilization by Steven Runciman, Sagebrush Dentist by Will Frackelton, History of the Nation of Archers by Grigor of Akanc, My Life as an Indian by J. W. Schultz, The Secret of the Hittites by C. W. Ceram, and Dodge City: The Cowboy Capital by Robert Wright. Bob Wright was mayor of Dodge in its wild days, and a hide-trader as well.

Frackelton, the dentist mentioned above, once was asked by a lady gambler to set a diamond in one of her front teeth. As the tooth was healthy and solid he did not wish to, but she insisted. Finally he asked what the idea was, and she replied, "You're a doctor and not supposed to talk about your patients, so I'll tell you. When I'm playing poker I keep my mouth shut, but when I start to deal, I smile." The idea was that, when they were looking at that diamond, they were not watching the cards she was dealing.

Before going overseas to the war, I had met Chris Madsen, a Dane who had done a year in the Danish Army, then seven years in the French Foreign Legion when it was seeing some of its toughest service. Following that, he had come to America and joined the Fifth Cavalry, where, due to his experience, he was immediately made sergeant. I was fortunate enough to talk to him several times. He had been present when Buffalo Bill Cody killed Yellow Hand in a hand-to-hand fight. Cody was a scout for the Fifth at the time and had been challenged before a battle by Yellow Hand.

Chris Madsen lived to be over ninety years old and was a salty, interesting man to the last. He, in company with Bill Tilghman and Heck Thomas, had been one of the Three Musketeers who helped to clean out the outlaw population of the Indian Territory and what became Oklahoma. He was a Deputy United States Marshal at that time.

Bill Tilghman, a gentleman and an honorable man, was one of the best peace officers on the western frontier, respected by his peers. One way of judging how good a man was is by the respect others had for him.

Bob Wright said that if the truth were known, Mysterious Dave Mathers had probably killed more men than any other, yet on one memorable night when he had slain another peace officer in a personal fight, Tilghman went out to arrest him.

Mathers had holed up in an office on the second floor. Tilghman came to the foot of the steps and called up. "Dave? Are you coming down or am I going to have to come up after you?"

Mathers came down.

But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains.

--Robinson Jeffers from "Shine, Perishing Republic"

One evening when we were driving across west central Texas we stopped at a ranch house where my companion had once worked as a cowboy. He was now a moderately successful small-business man and interested in promoting some fights.

We stopped to buy a meal, but of course our money was refused, and as the hour grew late we were invited to spend the night.

It was my first experience with a feather bed, but an experience I fought all night long. The trouble was that on the bedside table was a battered copy of Olive R. Dixon's book on her husband, The Life of Billy Dixon. At that time the book was scarce (it has since been reprinted) and it was doubtful I would ever see another copy.

The basic facts of Billy Dixon's life were known to me. He had been in the Adobe Walls fight, where twenty-eight buffalo hunters and one woman fought off seven hundred to one thousand Comanche and Kiowa warriors. At that time, Billy shot an Indian off his horse at a distance checked by an army engineer as seven-eighths of a mile.

Billy had also survived the Buffalo Wallow fight, and was famous as a buffalo hunter and as one of the best rifle shots on the frontier, so I very much wanted to know his story.

The result was that, despite the feather bed, I managed to stay awake most of the night to finish the story before leaving. As I was very tired, it was something of a struggle, but I completed the book just before sunrise, which was getting-up time.

(recently I reread the book and found it every bit as good as I had remembered.)

Dixon was a man born for the frontier.

He came west at fourteen, worked as a teamster, a scout for the Army, and did a lot of hunting and guiding. He survived some incredible storms and took it all without complaint. It was part of the day's work. Going west was a romantic adventure and so it always remained for him.

Whenever I could, I sought out the stories of those who had lived the western adventure, and by comparison could judge the quality and the truth of what I was reading. Times were often very rough for me but I can honestly say I never felt abused or put-upon. I never felt, as some have, that I deserved special treatment from life, and I do not recall ever complaining that things were not better.