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Content A HISTORY OP MISSOURI LITERATURE: 1780-1930
A Dissertation
Presented to
the Faculty of the Department of English
The University of Southern California
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
by
Elijah L* Jacobs
August 19^8
UMI Number: DP22992
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77m dissertation, written by
..................ELIJAH..JAO.QBS.................................
under the guidance of /A.S.... Faculty Committee
on Studies, and approved by a ll its members, has
been presented to and accepted by the Council
on Graduate Study and Research, in partial fu l
fillm ent of requirements fo r the degree of
D O C TO R OF P H IL O S O P H Y
Date.
Dean
Committee on Studies
Chairman
„ _
£. Z
(yus , i
< S $ A 3 ^ 3u
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is a pleasure to acknowledge a debt to the officials
of the Library of Central Missouri State College, the St. Louis
Public Library, the Mercantile Library of St. Louis, and
especially the Kansas City Public Library and the Library of
the University of Kansas City for the use of resources essen
tial to this study. Valuable assistance has been received
also from the Library of Franklin College, the Indiana State
Library, the Library of the University of Missouri, the
Doheny and Hoose Libraries of The University of Southern
California, and the Los Angeles Public Library.
Personal-acknowledgment is due to Bay Lefman, to
Professor Ben B. Craig of Central Missouri State College,
and to Dr. Ward Allison Dorrance of the University of Missouri
for their several courtesies in lending material from their
private libraries; also to Mr. Floyd C. Shoemaker of the
Missouri Historical Society for both counsel and bibliograph
ical material, and to Miss Dorothy. B. Dorsey of the University
of Kansas City for generous and expert assistance.
It would be ungrateful not to record here the kindness
and helpfulness of all the members of my graduate committee,
and especially of Dr. Frank C. Baxter, chairman of the com
mittee, who has borne a large part of the burden of my guid
ance and whose services to me in the final-stages of this
study have gone far beyond the just boundaries of professional
iii
obligation*
And, lastly, I must acknowledge with gratitude the
forbearance and helpfulness of my wife, Edith Holes Jacobs,
who has given me important help with the manuscript and
upon whose judgment I have relied in many matters*
To all, my thanks*
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION................................... 1
II. THE BEGINNINGS— LITERATURE IN FRONTIER MISSOURI:
I78O-I8 5 0. ............... 12
III. FICTION IN MISSOURI: 1850-1930............... 80
IV. POETRY IN THE MISSOURI HINTERLAND: 1850-1900. . . l¥f
V. POETRY IN THE MISSOURI CITIES: 1850-1900. .... 196
VI. POETRY IN MISSOURI: 1900-1930 ............... . 2^6
VII. THE LITERATURE OF THE CIVIL MAR IN MISSOURI. . . . 286
VIII. DRAMATIC COMPOSITION IN MISSOURI: 1850-1930 . . . 325
IX. HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY IN MISSOURI: 1850-1930. . . 336
X. MISCELLANEOUS LITERATURE IN MISSOURI . ...... 38*f
XI. CONCLUSION . *H0
BIBLIOGRAPHY. ...................................^21
V
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
To define the term “literature of Missouri1 1 involves
certain difficulties, both in selecting the writers to be
treated and in determining the range of subjects that are
characteristic of, or peculiar to, Missouri* These difficul
ties of definition occur whenever the literature of a specific
region is to be studied* Of the wisdom of including certain
authors and certain works in a history of such regional liter
ature, no question can arise* But about the inclusion of some
others, decision has ultimately to be a matter of the more or
less arbitrary judgment of the historian* It is necessary for
the purpose of this study to establish criteria— as definite
as possible— for determining the.right of an author to classi
fication as a “Missouri writer” or of a book as “Missouri
literature.“
The place of birth or of education is not necessarily
\
an important matter in the regional classification of a writer
and his work. Obviously many writers whose production has
been intimately associated with the life of the State of
Missouri have not been natives. It Is equally apparent that
a person might be born within a state and yet live elsewhere,
quite without influence of his birthplace upon his mental
development or his writing. Between these extremes are
1
infinite shadings of the influence of the writer upon the
state or the state upon the writer. The propriety of classi
fying authors like Kate Chopin and Sara Teasdale as Missouri
writers is at least debatable; and it is doubtful that
Timothy Flint would ever have thought himself a Missourian,
though he spent a few years as a missionary west of the
Mississippi River. Far the greater part of his voluminous
writing he accomplished elsewhere. Yet in some part the work
of each of these three writers has sufficient bearing on the
literature of the region to justify its receiving a degree of
attention in a study of that literature.
Plainly a definition of the literature of Missouri must
be sufficiently inclusive to admit categories somewhat blurred
in outline. An .author born in the state, writing and publish
ing in it and for its people, would be beyond question. But
a native of Missouri might live in.the state or out of it,
write and publish in the state or out of it, write entirely
for Missourians or partly for Missourians and partly for
other readers, or entirely for readers outside the state.
Similarly a writer born elsewhere might associate himself and
his work with the state in such fashion as to make his classi
fication unquestionable: Angus Umphravillemay have resided
in Missouri only briefly, but one could hardly maintain that
his Missourian Lavs is not a work of Missouri literature.
Other writers not native to the state may exhibit its impact
upon their work in degrees shading off into the completely
indistinguishable* It is inevitable, therefore, that though
the historian's judgment should be as objective as possible,
it must sometimes be more or less dogmatic.
Every student of regional literature encounters this
problem of selection. There have been several essays at
defining the Missourian and identifying his work.
Miss M. M. Brashear of the University of Missouri, for
example, has given some study to Missouri authors and has
defined them as "those who were born in the State or whose
work shows some influence of Missouri training or the
Missouri spirit."1 She does not define the "Missouri spirit,"
but leaves it to be indicated "chiefly by implication."
The definition is unsatisfactory in two respects.
Birth in the state gives one no inevitable mental or emo
tional kinship with its people, no inevitable ties with its
culture. And in the term, "Missouri spirit," resides con
siderable vagueness— so much vagueness, in fact, that though
Miss Brashear uses the term she does not attempt to explain
it.
One may doubt the existence of anything which can
clearly be isolated as "the Missouri spirit"; if one believes
it to exist, it may still be so elusive as to constitute no
1 M. M. Brashear, "Missouri Verse and Verse Writers,"
Missouri Historical Review. XVIII, p. 316.
useful touchstone for the classification of writers who may be
under consideration* A fondness for the state, its traditions,
or its people might be considered a Missouri spirit, and an
author exhibiting such a sentiment would doubtless be entitled
to a place in the history of Missouri literature; so might
also an author exhibiting an aversion for those people or
those traditions* But if the term is understood as signify
ing any specific traits of mind or character— intellectual
ferment, independence of spirit or judgment, preoccupation
with any sort of sectional concern, the love of good horses
and languid women— no such traits, nor any others, are pecu
liar to the people of Missouri, and no. combination of them
is either confined to Missourians or generally characteristic
of Missourians. To consider the Missouri spirit as consisting
of any such complex of general qualities is to make the term
so metaphysical that it becomes useless* On the other hand,
to make it consist of anything but a quality or combination
of qualities is to make it meaningless*
The definition of Missourians accepted by the State
Historical Society of Missouri is as follows:
From the viewpoint of the Author, the rule
includes all native-born Missourians and resident
Missourians who did their literary work while
living in the State.
From the viewpoint of the Subject, the rule
includes everything that relates to Missouri
5
and Missourians.2
This definition might seem to exclude some material
such as Timothy Flint * s George Mason, a novel written when
Flint no longer lived in Missouri. Its setting is not
Missouri, its characters are not identified as Missourians,
and Flint called it a novel of Mississippi, rather than of
Missouri. Yet there is reason for believing that the charac
ters and the settings of this story are really derived from
Missouri, where the Flints had lived, rather than from
Mississippi, 'where they had not. It seems, therefore, proper
to interpret this book as in a sense related to Missouri, and
as a part of the story of the literature of that state.
If the historian* s judgment be given sufficient lati
tude as to what ’ ’ relates to Missouri and Missourians,” the
State Historical Society’s definition of Missourians may,
indeed, serve very satisfactorily as a criterion for what
ought to be included in a literary history of the state, with
the limitation that such a history shall concern itself only,
or chiefly, with those works which are primarily artistic
literature rather than with scientific or practical documents,
and only with literature which, whether or not it relates to
Missouri and Missourians, is by writers who have been in some
2
James M. Breckenridge, William Clark Breckenridge.
His Life. Lineage and Writings. p. 32.
sense Missourians* Such is the literature with which the
present study proposes to concern itself*
The beginnings of writing and of publication of all
sorts in the territorial period and in the early days of the
state are of sufficient interest and importance to deserve a
chapter to themselves in the classification of the material
that is to be examined* This initial period properly extends
to about the middle of the nineteenth century* A. N. DeMenil,
who was one of the best informed of Missourians on the early
history and literature of the state, would divide Missouri
literature into three periods: (1) the period of the terri
torial and early days; (2) the period beginning with the works
of several writers whose books were published in the early
thirties or forties; and (3) the period beginning about 1 8 6 1,
3
the epoch of the Civil War. Ployd Shoemaker, Secretary of
the Missouri State Historical Society, would extend the first
period to about the beginning of the Civil War, designating
it as the "settler period," characterised by several features:
(1) the authors were all Missourians by adoption rather than
by birth; (2) they made their Missouri homes in St. Louis, or
generally so; ( 3) the literature of the period consisted
largely of description, travel accounts, biography, and
3
A. N. DeMenil, "A Century of Missouri Literature,"
Missouri Historical Review. XV, pp. 7^ ££•
history, although it included some poetry, fiction, and drama;
( * ♦ • ) all the writers followed literature as only an avocation.
Relatively few books were published, and relatively few men
were interested in authorship, but those few were men of
education, and their works, though not now widely read, are
still well regarded by historians and scholars.
No specific date, of course, Is ever quite satisfactory
for a point of division between two literary periods. One
might regard the year of the beginning of the Givil Mar as a
time of cleavage in state and national life sufficient to mark
the end of the period of settlement and growth in Missouri;
but examination of the development of literature in Missouri
suggests that for literary rather than political history a
somewhat earlier date is preferable. It has seemed suitable
for this study to include approximately a decade before the
Givil War in the second period of development rather than in
the first, remembering that any such division is in part a
matter of arbitrary judgment. The plan, therefore, is to
consider any Missouri literature of the first half of the
nineteenth century as belonging in a study of the beginnings
of letters In the state.
After that point it is convenient to consider the very
copious literary production of Missouri chiefly by types, such
* * Floyd C. Shoemaker, A History of Missouri and
Missourians, pp. 319 f* ~
as fiction, poetry, and drama, rather than to classify it pri
marily on the basis of theme or geographical section of the
state. One chapter will be an exception to this general prin
ciple of classification: the Civil Mar has given rise to so
voluminous and varied a production that the works dealing with
the themes of the war demand separate treatment. These books
not only made their appearance during the years of conflict
and in those immediately following, but have continued to do
so at least sporadically to the present day, as is indeed to
be expected as long as old men's memories provide reminiscences
of the war, and as long as old men' s sons treasure such memo
rials as the cannon ball still lodged in a pillar of the
5
courthouse at Lexington,
Some students might be disposed to break the chronologi
cal study of specific types of literature at some such point
as the beginning of the twentieth century, and such a division
has been considered for this study. But though it is true
that in a general way the spirit of much twentieth-century
literature of Missouri, as of other parts of the world, differs
from that of the nineteenth century, it is difficult to settle
upon any date which marks an actual change. The principal
<
' It is reported, possibly correctly, that the original
iron cannon ball was once removed because of the danger that
its weight might dislodge it, and that the present ball.visible
in the pillar is in reality a wooden substitute.
advantage of such a division would seem, therefore, to be in
giving brevity to certain chapters, a brevity to be won at
some loss in continuity. Continuous treatment of each type
seems, consequently, at least as satisfactory as any arrange
ment which would ignore the continuity of literary development.
But again there is one exception. A single chapter detailing
the history of poetry in Missouri from 1850 to 1930 would be
so long as to be forbidding; it has seemed best to divide
that discussion in such a fashion_as to avoid excessive incon
venience in its reading and yet to sacrifice as little as
possible of unity.
On one subject, namely the Mormon movement, this inves
tigation has not turned up books in the quantity that might
have been anticipated. A few such works have come to light,
but it is reasonable to suppose that a good deal more of such
writing must once have been, and probably.still, is, in exist
ence. A search for such scattered material-would possibly
yield interesting and even copious results. Another sort of
literature offering attractive possibilities for further
investigation is that having to do with the outlaws of the
pioneer era and the post-Civil-War days. Such books were
ephemeral, of course; but they existed in considerable number,
and many of them are still to be found in the hands of collec
tors and in libraries and museums. Though they are scattered,
the search for them might well be rewarding. Consideration of
10
the literature discussed in this history will doubtless sug
gest many other fields for more intensive study.
This history of the literature of Missouri covers the
nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth
century. It does not profess to be exhaustive; but it does
seek to give a view of the development of letters in the
state and to consider not only the more prominent and endur
ing figures in that development but also many of the writers
who are now forgotten even by antiquarians— writers, often,
who were responsible for no more than one or two books, about
whose own history little is known, whose importance was never
more than brief and perhaps local, but..who ..had their part in
the expression of the life in a highly literate state with a
very exciting history.
Unhappily, it has been necessary to rely upon secondary
sources for much information concerning early Missouri imprints.
Many of these imprints are undiscoverable• Doubtless some are
in private possession, if one could ferret them out, but cer
tainly many have perished. And yet a knowledge of them is
important to any adequate conception of the early writing and
publishing in Missouri. It is fortunate that a few men have
devoted themselves to compiling bibliographical information
concerning these early imprints, and particularly fortunate
that some such men, like William Clark Breckenridge and
Alexander.N• DeMenil_lived in St. Louis and_ had access both
11
to private libraries and to the memories of persons who had
lived in St, Louis during the period in question. These bib
liographers did not always see the publications they recorded,
but they left testimony of which the interest to such a study
as the present one can hardly be overestimated.
CHAPTER II
THE BEGINNINGS— LITERATURE IN FRONTIER
MISSOURI; 1780-1850
Of all the cities up and down the length of the
Mississippi River only one is known to have had a printing
press earlier than St* Louis* The first printer of the river
towns was Denis Braud of the French town of New Orleans* The
second has been thought to be Joseph Charless, who came from
Kentucky to St* Louis and in 1808 established the Missouri
Gazette.^ This paper continued publication as the Missouri
Republican and later as the St. Louis Republic until it was
2
suspended in 1919 after 111 years. If Joseph Charless was
the second of these printers, the third was Matthew Duncan,
who established the Illinois Gazette at Kaskaskia in l8l*f.^
But it appears that New Orleans had at least one other
printer besides Braud before Charless came to St. Louis, and
that the first press in Missouri may have been set up in
Sainte Genevieve rather than in St. Louis. For in 1795 a
certain Peyroux de la Coudreniere offered, in his will, a
1 D. C. McMurtrie, Beginnings of Printing in the Middle
Mest. p. 13.
^ Floyd C. Shoemaker, A History of Missouri and
Missourians, p. 3 1 8.
3 McMurtrie, loc. cit.
12
13
printing press for the use of the public of Sainte Genevieve,
and especially for the use of a school and hospital. This
press was in New Orleans— it is to be remembered that Missouri
was part of the Territory of Louisiana— and the will contained
minute directions for packing and shipping it. But whether
those directions were carried out is unknown. No record can
be found of the arrival or the use of the press in Sainte
Genevieve. If it arrived and was used for printing a news-
b
paper, that paper antedated any other in the Upper Louisiana.
In any case the first Missouri literature did not come
from Missouri's first printing press. At least one poem which
is distinctly Missouri literature antedates Joseph Charless by
twenty-eight years. In 1780 a force of Canadians and Indians
made an attack on the village of St. Louis, which was then in
Spanish territory. Though these attackers were driven off,
they killed several of the inhabitants of St. Louis, among
them a man named Matthew Kennedy, who was probably the first
American merchant west of the Mississippi. After the battle
a schoolmaster, Jean Baptiste Trudeau, composed in French a
poem on the event, the "Chanson de l'Annee du Coup," or
"Ballad of the Year of the Surprise." It is said to have been
taken to New Orleans by the courier who carried news of the
Ward Allison.Dorrance, The Survival of French in the
Old District of Sainte Genevieve, p. hi*
lb
battle to the governor-general, and is in. the form of a dia
logue between that official and the courier. According to
Judge Wilson Frlrom it was set to music and for years was sung
in Missouri with the zest of a Frenchman singing his
“Marseillaise• “ ^
A tradition has existed that even before 1808 the French
had a small printing press in St. Louis and that they struck
6
off broadsides and handbills. This.tradition is unverified.
It may have some connection with the press bequeathed to
Sainte Genevieve. In any case, no specimens of such early
French printing are known to exist. But there are some broad
sides in English dating from I818 to l8*+ 8. William Clark
Breckenridge, who had access to private libraries not now
available, speaks of one of the earliest, an amusing_contribu
tion to the knowledge of Creation, which declares that
the earth is hollow and habitable within, contain
ing a number of concentrick spheres, one within the
other, and that it is open at the poles 12 or 16
degrees; I pledge my life in support of this truth,
and am ready to explore the hollow if the world
will support and aid me in the undertaking.7
The author of this treatise was John Cleve Symmes, If
the world listened to the revolutionary cosmogonist or
^ James M. Breckenridge, William Clark Breckenridge.
His Life, pp. 192 ff.
6 Ibid.. pp. 253 ff*
^ Loc. cit.
15
supported his proposed exploration of either polar entrance to
the wonderful hollow shell he described, the fact has been
lost to history. He is not the first Columbus who has failed
to find his Isabella.
The. first book printed in Missouri was The Laws of the
Territory of Louisiana. Comprising All Those Which Are in
Force within the Same. This compilation came from the press
of Joseph Charless, Printer to the Territory, in I8 0 8. In
1810 Charless printed another book, Laws of the Territory of
Louisiana: Passed by the Governor and Judges Assembled in
Legislature, in the Month of October. l8lQ. Between that
year and 1819 Char less printed several volumes of the acts
passed by the General Assembly. One of them is perhaps the
first Missouri book of considerable size and embodying much
of scholarship or labor which can be ascribed to any single
author. This is A Digest of the Laws of Missouri Territory.
« « 8
by Henry S. Geyer, published in 1818.
But a considerable number of publications of another
sort had already appeared. These were sermons and other
orations or addresses. The earliest example known is an ora
tion delivered by Frederick Bates before St. Louis Lodge No. Ill,
“at the Town of Saint Louis in the Territory of Louisiana," on
the ninth of November, 1 8 0 8, the day following the installation
8 Ibid., pp. 275 ff.
16
of that lodge. This was probably the second book issued by
9
Joseph Charless.
In 1816 Charless*s paper, the Missouri Gazette, printed
for Charles Lucas copies of an address: To the People of
Missouri Territory. Charles Lucas1 Exposition of a Late
Difference between John Scott and Himself.^ In 1818 Sergeant
Hall published-for Salmon Giddings A Sermon Delivered at
St. Louis. August 17. 1817. on Account of the Death of
Edward Hempstead. Esq.13, Other publications in the category
of addresses are Charles D* Drake*s The Duties of American
Citizens, a speech delivered before the Franklin Society of
St, Louis and published in 1837 by Charles Keemle, and a
lecture on classical literature delivered in l8*+l by John Rocke
before the Columbia Institute.
Probably of somewhat the same sort is Essays on Marriage
and Divorce, by Jacob Creath, a pioneer Baptist preacher who
became one of the leaders of the sect known as the Campbellites.
Ibid., pp. 261 f. Breckenridge did not see this
imprint, and it may not be in existence. He copied the descrip
tion from an old catalogue, which did not give the number of
pages,
10 Ibid.. p. 125.
R. M. Snyder, an unpublished index, on cards, of
Missouri imprints, now in possession of the University of
Kansas City. ¥. C. Breckenridge also mentions this sermon,
saying erroneously that it was the first discourse put into
type west of the Mississippi River. (See J, M. Breckenridge,
op, cit.. p. 290. )
17
Creath came from Kentucky to Missouri in 1 8 3 9, liyed in Lewis
County, and went on preaching tours not only in Missouri but
through various other states* He was the man.sent for in
their last hours by ten men condemned by the Federal commander
to die in reprisal for the Palmyra massacre during the Civil
12
Mar.
It is impossible, of course, to complete the tally of
orations, addresses, and essays published in Missouri during
the first half of the nineteenth century, for this sort of
publication, if less perishable than the. broadsides, is never
theless only casually preserved. Breckenridge lists nineteen
such titles between 1839 and l8*f9.Some of them he had not
seen; he had got the titles from old catalogues. Nobody can
say how many have disappeared without trace.
The year 1821 saw the publication of several books in
St. Louis, each the. first of its kind in the state. One of
them is the first Missouri book printed in the Latin language,
namely, Louis Guillaume Valentin du BourgVs Officia Propria
pro Diocesi Ludovicensi. Du Bourg was born in San Domingo
in 1776. He was educated in.France, came to Baltimore in
179* 1 - , became Bishop of the Diocese of New Orleans in 1 8 1 5,
^ W• C. Breckenridge, "Bibliography of Early Missouri
Imprints,H in Breckenridge, op. pit., pp. 250 ff.
13 Ibid.. p. 251.
18
and came to St. Louis to live in 1 8 1 7. He lived in that city
Ilf
until l82*f.
The first almanac published in the state was Charless*
Missouri Almanac for 1821. Breckenridge lists twelve other
15
almanacs between that year and l8* f 8. John Messinger*s
A Manual or Handbook Intended for Convenience in Practical
Surveying. published by William Orr, belongs to the year
l6
1 8 2 1. So does the St. Louis Directory and Register of
17
John A. Paxton. And as early as March of that year a school-
book, The Missouri Primer, was advertised in the Missouri
■ 18
Gazette.
None of these publications is purely literary in nature,
but they indicate the expansion of the publishing business in
the chief city of Missouri. And there were at least two books
issued in the important year of 1821 which were truly literary
rather than religious, scientific, pedagogical, or practical
in their intent. One of these was a play, the other a small
volume of verse. Fortunately both are preserved, though only
in a very few copies, and each will be examined.
Ibid., p. 291.
Ibid., p. 2 5 2.
16
Snyder, loc. cit.
17 Floyd C. Shoemaker, ' ‘ Red-Letter Books Relating to
Missouri,M Missouri Historical Review. XXXII, p. 201 *.
Loc. cit.
19
Alphonso Wetmore1 s play which constitutes the begin
ning of dramatic composition in Missouri is The Pedlar, a
farce in three acts. It was written for the St. Louis
Thespians, evidently an amateur organization of actors, possi
bly associated only for the performance of this play. The
cast includes seven “Thespians “~T. Goddard, W. M. Gunnegle,
B. P. L. (Benjamin F. Larned), E. L. Pearson, W. B. Alexander,
D. B. Hoffman, and J. A. Paxton. Larned, like Wetmore, was a
paymaster in the United States army, and the play was dedicated
to him. Paxton was the publisher. In addition to the mascu
line roles taken by these amateurs, there are three parts for
women, all acted by persons listed as “regular performers?1—
Mrs. Goshen, Mrs. Hanna, and Miss Seymour. One can only specu
late, in the absence of discoverable information, upon the
presence in this Western town of the three actresses and upon
the circumstances which impelled them and seven masculine
Thespians to add The Pedlar to the gaieties of St. Louis. But
the result is an interesting combination of eighteenth-century
dramatic conventions with frontier scenes and characters.
The setting, if not specifically St. Louis or its
vicinity, might well be so; and it is certainly in the new
country, where the river-boatman, the “barr" hunter, and the
boastful bully are familiar characters, and where before a
“rastling“ match it is agreed that gouging of eyes and biting
of ears are or are not to be within the rules. The meeting
20
of Oppossum [sic] and the Boatman illustrates this use of
local color:
(Enter Boatman, with n red shirt, and tow browsers
fsic 1 on— a little drunk, singing soundings.)
Boat. Quarter less twain. (Oppossum rises and
advances.)
Op . Who are you stranger?
Boat. A steamboat, damn your eyes.
Op . Then I'm a Missouri snag— I'm into you.
Boat. I'm full of chain pumps— come on— I'm a
five horse team.
Op . Then I'll blaze your leader. (Strikes him
in the face, they fight. Boatman's hat is
knocked off and dirty pack of cards falls
out.)
Boat. No gouging? jq
Op . And no ear biting.
This Oppossum, the son of Old Prairie, is a hunting,
fighting, boasting constable. He calls himself "Half horse
20 21
and half steamboat," a "snapping turtle," "a Missouri
22 2*f
snag," "a white barr." and "a whirlwind." And the final
speech of the play, which is spoken by Oppossum, is a pecu
liarly interesting bit of local color because of its reference
to Mike Fink, the keelboatman whose name was famous up and
down the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio rivers. Mike Fink
^ Alphonso Wetmore, The Pedlar, act 3, sc. 1, p. 22.
20 Ibid.. p. 7.
^ I»oc» cit.
22 Ibid., p. 22.
23 Ibid.. p. 23.
2lf Ibid., p. 26.
21
was still alive in 1821, and his name had not, so far as is
known, appeared in any St, Louis newspaper. Many stories were
later to he written ahout him, in Missouri and elsewhere, but
thus far he was a fighter, a marksman, and a wild prankster
of oral legend. In the curtain speech of the last act of
The Pedlar. Oppossum makes what may be the first literary
reference to this bully of the rivers;
Op. No, if you'll let me live single, till after
dog days, Mike Fink and I will go and catch
barr. and we'll have a barbacue fsicl for a
wedding supper anyhow.
As a whole, the play is a good enough comedy, consid
ering that it was the work of an amateur playwright and writ
ten for amateur performance. A Yankee peddler comes over the
mountains and all the way from New Haven with his Yankee
tricks. He sells Old Prairie a lantern, and then sells one .
each to four other members of Old Prairie's household, none
of them aware that any other has purchased the lantern that
26
Old Prairie wants. And Nutmeg, the Yankee, serves as a sort
of mischief-maker and director of events and complications
reminiscent of eighteenth-century comedy. There are entangle
ments growing from two love affairs, plots for elopements,
counterplots and disguises to prevent elopements— Old Prairie
Ibid., p. 31 *.
26 Ibid.. pp. 6 ff.
personating his daughter, Mary; Sable, a black servant, per
sonating Old Prairie's niece, Pecanne-— with resulting ludi
crous situations. There is an old soldier, Old Continental,
who tries vainly to tell how he and “Old Putnam” commanded
27
the troops at Blinker’s Hill. There is the returned sailor
who turns out to be Old Continental’s son. He mistakes Old
Prairie’s house for a tavern, and there are developments
reminiscent of She Stoops to Conquer. A paymaster turned
playwright for the nonce is not to be reproached if such
echoes sound in his first play. Amateur writers have often
done far worse. Wetmore deserves credit for incorporating
picturesque aspects of the life about him with these tradi
tional ingredients, and thus providing an amusing farce for
his St. Louis audience.
This play is extremely rare. Only two copies are known
28
to exist, and they may constitute the total. And so far as
is known, Wetmore wrote no other plays. But he was later
associated with Charles Keemle in editing the St. Louis
Saturday Hews, a literary and family paper which lasted for a
29
year and a half, or thereabouts, during 1837 and 1 8 3 8. And
27 Ibid., p. 21.
pQ
One is in the St. Louis Mercantile Library, the
other in the Boston Public Library.
w. C. Breckenridge, og. cit.p. 258.
23
in 1837 he published a Gazetteer of the State of Missouri,
with a large folding map and an appendix containing tales
and sketches intended to illustrate frontier life and the
character of the Indians to be encountered in the region.
A seeond early Missouri drama was Thomas Somers Nelson*s
Loss and Gain, a comedy in five acts. Nelson, born in Ireland,
came to Missouri in 1835. He was an eminent lawyer, master
of seven languages, and highly regarded as am orator. He
wrote voluminously for the daily press on economic matters
and was the author of an unpublished book on political econ
omy. He wrote one poem, “Suggestions on the Death of General
Lyon,“ which was published in 1866 by the Lyon Monument
30
Association of the State of Missouri.
Nelson’s play, Loss and Gain, is rare if it is now
extant at all. In 1919 one copy was known to exist, in the
possession of Nelson’s daughter. It was published in 1835 by
Meeeh and Dinnies of St. Louis, and may never have been acted.
And by the account of one reader who has seen it, it hardly
has the qualities that would impel its readers to treasure
it. 31
It is a comedy based on a well worn and never too
30
Ibid., pp. 258 ff*
hoc, cit. The University of Kansas City has a
photostatic copy of the title page.
2b
valuable plot. The son of a wealthy mother associates with
dissolute companions, becomes deeply involved in debts, and
acts dishonorably toward his mistress. Earlier in his life
he had been married, but had left his bride at the altar with
out even a glance toward her. In the course of the play he
meets this wife, desires her, and plans to seduce her. Some
of his friends also desire her, and hence arise the comic
32
complications. It is a coarse play and probably no true
picture of any time or place, certainly not connected with
the Missouri into which the author had recently come.
There were one or two other St. Louis men about the
middle of the century who wrote plays with some success,
though like Nelson they did not look to St. Louis for their
themes. Edmund Flagg, a newspaper writer and editor, was
the author of at least two plays, Blanche of Valois and The
Howard Queen, which were performed not only in St. Louis but
in New York and other cities. And Joseph M. Field, also an
editor and something of a poet and dramatist, is known to
have written or adapted a number of plays. One of them,
Such It Is, was performed at the St* Louis Varieties
Theater. 33
In view of the fact that the population of St. Louis
3 2 Ibid.. p. 216.
33 Loc. cit.
25
included a large German element, it is not surprising that
plays in the German language should have been presented in
the city at a fairly early date. According to the recollec
tion of W. C. Breekenridge, the first of these was performed
in 1835 by a group of traveling actors at the Green Tree
Hotel. Afterward German plays were produced with some regu
larity, and in the second half of the century the Apollo
Theater, whieh was started by Alexander Pfeiffer as a summer
garden, became a notable German theater. But of the earliest
dramas presented in St. Louis in that language, no remains
are to be found. Many plays were written for amateur acting
on special occasions and then lost. The Germania Club and
various Turnvereins staged many such plays, some of them quite
pretentious. But none written in St. Louis until about the
3* 1 -
middle of the century or a little later are to be found.
Perhaps the earliest surviving imprint is that of a
play in doggerel German verse which was published in St. Louis
shortly after the middle of the century. This was E. Leonhard's
Das Juengste Gericht in St. Louis. Mo. [sic]. It is uncertain
35
whether this play was ever staged.
Leonhard appears to have been one of the dupes of the
Frenchman, Etienne Cabet, who promoted the communistic
Ibid., pp. 213 ff.
35 Loc. cit.
enterprise, the Colonie Iearienne, whieh settled first in
Texas and later, in 1 8 5 6, at Cheltenham, now a part of
St* Louis. Whether or not this "dramatizirter Dialog in
Knittelversen" was acted or written for acting, its chief
purpose appears to be exposure and ridieule of Cabet. He is
one of the characters in the play, and shamelessly proclaims
his own unscrupulous practices, reciting the history of the
deceptions he has practiced and receiving from the other
characters invidious comments on himself. And in the prologue
he is again upbraided for his chicanery. There are also many
local references in the dialogue, references to such matters
as the cholera and the cholera quarantine, to Baden the school
master, and to a land-grabbing scheme for getting possession
of Duncan's Island.3^ These details would suggest that the
play was at least intended for performance, and on a St. Louis
stage.
The student of the early English poetry written in
Missouri is in better case than the student of the early drama,
for his material is better preserved. The story of that poetry
also begins in the momentous year 1821, with the publication
of Angus Umphraville' s Missourian Lavs. and Other Western
Ditties. This book deserves attention, for it is not only
the first book of original poems to be published in Missouri
36 Ibid., pp. 259 f.
but also the first published west of the Mississippi* And of
greater interest than the mere fact of its publication in
Missouri is the fact that some of the poems take for their
themes persons and places of Missouri and the West, of which
the latter, at least, are here described by a writer who has
actually seen them and felt their appeal.
Of the life of Angus Umphraville not a great deal is
known. On the authority of his own statement, he was born in
Philadelphia, probably in 1798* Except for his statement
there is no direct evidence of his living in Pennsylvania,
but he wrote a letter from Philadelphia in l8l9 and published
poems in Pittsburgh in 1820. He lived at least a part of his
boyhood in the British Isles and was educated there. At the
outbreak of the War of l8l2 he sailed for the West Indies,
was robbed during a mutiny on shipboard, and finally reached
Baltimore, penniless. The duration of his residence in
Baltimore is not known, but in 1819 he wrote a letter from
Philadelphia to the Secretary of the Navy in connection with
certain inventions. A letter in the American Student1s Maga
zine for February, 1819, described certain ideas for defense.
In 1820 he published in Pittsburgh An Oration on the Death of
Commodore Stephen Decatur Who Was Killed in a Duel, by James
Barron. Formerly Commander of the Chesapeake. Perhaps he
gave up ambitions he had entertained in the East; though he
had been commissioned to write The Siege ofBaltimore when
after his disastrous voyage from England he arrived *in that
city, and though he had made ventures in literature and one
or two other fields, he may well have been disappointed in
both the fame and the fortune accruing from those enterprises.
At any rate, he came westward. He probably reached Missouri
in 1821 or late in 1 8 2 0, for though his name is not in the
Paxton Directory for 1821, he signed the dedication of the
Missourian Lays to William Clark as 1 1 your fellow citizen."
It may be that he was omitted from the Directory because he
had not lived long enough in St. Louis to have established
3 7
himself as a permanent resident.
The poems of Missourian Lavs tell little about the
author beyond the fact that he had some appreciation for
natural scenery, particularly for the Mississippi and Missouri
Rivers and the country along their shores, that he traveled
in Indiana and Illinois and perhaps in Kentucky, that he had
some inclination toward satire and ribald humor, and that his
patriotic attachment to America was strong. One might draw
the further conclusion that although he possessed perhaps the
rudimentary impulses of a poet, he was no artist. There is,
as has been observed, some feeling in him for certain aspects
of nature, and there is a degree of sentimentality, particularly
37 Fioyd C. Shoemaker, "Red-Letter Books Relating to
Missouri,” Missouri Historical Review. XXXII, pp. 203 ff.
29
with reference to the desolation of the exile yearning for his
native land. Otherwise there is in his poems little or no
sign of any of the deeper feelings of human nature. His
verses are crude and unskillful and often prosaic, not only
in substance but in movement.
Several of the poems show at least a slight acquaint
ance with Missouri. "A Morning*s Walk to the Mamelles” cele
brates in heroic couplets two beautiful hills near St. Charles,
to which about four years later Mieah Flint, a son of Timothy
38
Flint, also wrote a poem. Umphraville*s praise of these
mounds provides him an opportunity to assert his patriotism
by comparing American and European scenery:
Near where Missouri vast its mighty tide
Pours by St. Charles, a young state*s rising pride,
Two gently swelling hills, in nature’s green
By every passing trav’ller may be seen.
A noble prospect now before me lies,
Superior to Italian sceneries:
A wide prairie spreads— a vast campaign,
Gf richest mould th’exuberating plain5
In breadth full seven, in length a score of miles,
The wild bush grows, the desert daisy smiles.
Lol there the bounding roe, the elk, the deer
Skim the wide plain, and dread the hunter near;
Here dark and gloomy wave umbrageous woods ,_Q
Far off proud Mississippi pours his floods.^
Perhaps this is not poetry; it has few of the graces of
^ John Ervin Kirkpatrick, Timothy Flint, p. 106.
39
Angus Umphraville. Missourian Lavs and Other Western
DittiesT pp. 23 f.
poetry, though it has distant echoes of what may have been
somewhere the sound of poetry. It has, also, some lines
which are hard to excuse. But whatever its faults, it exhibits
something of a response, banal in expression but nevertheless
a poet’s or any sensitive man’s response to natural scenery
that is still worth seeing and that must in its more primitive
state have been worth making a Grand Tour to see. And it
shows, though weakly, that Umphraville is moved by the majesty
of the great river, in the contemplation of which only a very
dull man could remain unmoved. Better and worse men than
Umphraville have felt its power.
Other poems dealing with Missouri specifically are
’ ’Birth of Missouri” and ’ ’The Queen of Hi vers.” In a footnote
to the latter he again expresses, perhaps more successfully
because with less of the unskillful artifice which his manner
of versifying demands, his awe of the same river:
The Missouri is one of the most considerable
rivers in North America, and rises in the Rocky
Mountains. The vast volume of its waters, aug
mented by many tributary rivers, flows through a
level, romantic, umbrageous, naked, fertile,
barren, cultivated and rude, until after bestowing
on an extensive state its name, it loses CLts
identity?] at its junction with the Mississippi
River, and the allied powers majestically move on,
until they become confluent with the waves of the
vast Atlantic ocean. This river is 3 >096 miles
in length. • . •
But he does not appreciate what many present readers with a
feeling for the picturesque in folkways might regard as one
of the most romantic aspects of the Missouri River region,
31
namely, the legen&ry In Its place names. He continues:
The task of describing the course of the Missouri
is rendered peculiarly disagreeable by the mean,
low, absurd, inharmonious, and unappropriate names
with ■which [sic] traders and discoverers have con
ferred on its tributary streams and most romantic
beauties. Why were not the names of the most cele
brated of the few philosophers and poets this country
has produced, bestowed on these additions to geogra
phical and commercial knowledge? What absolute neces
sity is there for borrowing antiquated European names
for American things, as if we were too penurious in
invention to find new appellations, or too envious
to do honor to the merits of our compatriots? Why
erowd the nomenclature and gazeteers of America with
barbarous names? What poet would not be deterred
by the mere locality of their residence, from cele
brating “The Beauty of the Cannonball,” or “The
Maid of Boon's Lick,” or “The Nymph or the Yellow
stone,” or “The Hero of the Conewango?,,w
Perhaps the explanation of Umphraville's distress in
contemplation of these delightful names lies in his being
only in very limited degree a poet at all; but it may be
merely in the fact that things which are new if not actually
contemporary may be commonplace and that they may take on
mystery and romance with time and distance. It may be doubted
whether Baghdad would be mysterious or Kashmir beautiful if
they were not ancient and Asiatic names but only recently
coined designations for road-makers1 depots.
In any case, Umphraville does not confine himself to
majestic or romantic themes. In “Apollo's Advice” he counsels
poets not to pursue themes of war, Indians, trade, or learning,
1+0 Ibid. T p. 20
32
but to sing of matters which, it may be supposed, were more
familiar to many Missourians in 1821:
**0 sing of Angelina dear,
The bar-maid of the dancing bear;
Soft nymphi and kind, and sweet as honey
Who blesses men for love or money.
Goddess of whiskey, brandy, gin,
Who swearing hates for *tis a sin;
She never charges you for grog,
And once she treated to egg-nogg.
What tho her hair be red as scarlet,
And spiteful misses call her harlot,
What tho her pockmarked face, and pale
Discarded suitors tempt to rail;
Boarders in debt should sue, and sigh,
Find charms divine in her cat's eye,
A thousand charms in her discover,
Should be, (or seem to be)— her lover."
Thus spake the god, then vanished quite;
And Angelina blest my sight:
With lisping tongue, and leering look,
Her minstrel by the hand she took:
"Gome drink a glass of rumI" said she.
"Then to the cellar come with me;
I have a picture there to show, ^
You've seen the same before, you know."
Such was the advice given by Apollo to the poet; and
in fact this poet appears to find himself more at ease in
handling the theme of Angelina than in describing the
Mamelles or the Missouri landscape or the Missouri River. It
is not a theme which demands elevation of language beyond
Umphraville*s power to respond, and if the verse is doggerel
it is not a doggerel decorated with bounding roes which skim
the plain or with other imitations of pretty figures.
1+1 Ibid.. p. 33.
33
That the coarseness of this humor is suited to
Umphraville1s genius is indicated also by other poems, "The
Old Woman* s Remonstrance** is a pastoral which represents a
mother’s talk with her daughter’s too saucy and too persistent
lover, “The Old Maid of St, Louis*’ is a gross narrative poem
telling the story of a woman who shrieked and fainted in
chapel until the Methodists esteemed her a saint, and who
k2
then was detected in sin with the preacher, ’ ’ Letitia
Lamenting** is a satirical tale of a sick lap-dog which was
bitten by a bulldog*
Other poems of a more sentimental sort are ’ ’ The
kb bS
Hibernian Exile** and **The French Exile.** The former shows
the Irish expatriate in his log house in the hills, free from
oppression, but by a slow-stealing tear informing the
benighted traveler that Erin is still dear to the Irish far
from Ireland. The latter exhibits the Frenchman who has fled
the tyranny of his former country and found a home in the
wilds of Kentucky, where in freedom the bread of his labor is
wholesome and sweet.
It is impossible to determine what the popularity of
1+2 Ibid., pp. 28 ff.
^ Ibid.. p. 56,
^ Ibid.. p. 52.
^ Ibid., pp. 53 f*
the Missourian Lays may have been. It was sold for fifty
cents at the office of the St. Louis Enquirer and at a book
store, and was advertised in the Enquirer and in the Missouri
Gazette through the month of June, 1821. A review in the
Enquirer of June 23, 1821, appears to have been designed to
stimulate its sale. Ho mention of it occurs in the papers
after August b of 1821. Three of the original copies of the
book have escaped destruction, and of one of them two photo-
static copies have been made. Either from one of these or
from one of the original imprints at least two typed copies
have been produced for the Kansas City Public Library and the
library of the University of Kansas City. But whatever may
have been the popularity of the Missourian Lays at the time
of Its publication, any present renewal of interest in the
volume can only be the result of historical rather than of
literary motives.
After Umphraville's book not many volumes of verse are
known to have been published in Missouri for more than a quar
ter of a century. Such poetry as was printed came to light
chiefly In newspapers or other periodicals. Toward the middle
of the century, however, a few books of poetry appeared. In
1839, for example, a poem entitled Braddock1s Defeat: or.
1* 6
Floyd C. Shoemaker, f , Red-Letter Books Relating to
Missouri/1 Missouri Historical Review. XXXII, pp. 209 ff*
35
The First Field of the West is said to have been published in
St. Louis. It is a Missouri imprint, but its substance is
obviously not Missouri literature. And the unknown author
may not have been a Missourian. He is identified only as a
b 7
"Citizen of the West."
Five years after Braddock*s Defeat, another book of
poems was published in St. Louis. This was Lewis Foulk
Thomas’s Inda. a Legend of the Lakes. a romantic and melo
dramatic tale of an Indian maiden. The title poem, according
to the poet's own account, was written in 183**, except for
one small portion which was added later, and was read before
the Cincinnati Literary Society. In 18M-2 Thomas was invited
to read a poem before the St. Louis Lyceum. He complied with
his Inda. and was requested to furnish a copy. In order to
"eke out a volume," he added some minor pieces, some of them
^■7 Snyder, loc. cit. W. C. Breckenridge also lists
Braddock1s Defeat in the Bibliography of Early Missouri
Imprints, p. 2867 He did not see a copy, but got the descrip
tion from an old catalogue. Whether or not Snyder ever saw a
copy, he did not leave one in his collection. He may have
got his knowledge of it from Breckenridge. The Bibliography
of the latter is a valuable but a tantalizing work.
Breckenridge was an industrialist who became a collector of
Missouriana and a compiler of historical information concern
ing Missouri. Frequently he indicates that he has not seen
an imprint on his list. But he lived in St. Louis and knew
many people whose memories went back to the early days of
the century; and sometimes, as in the case of Braddock*s
Defeat. he relied upon old catalogues for undiscoverable
items. But he had access also to various private libraries,
and he must have seen imprints which may still be in existence
but which diligent search fails to reveal to the current his
torian.
36
juvenile productions and some of them against the advice of
3 + 8
his friends.
The tale of Inda is the story of a maiden loved by two
brothers, Ullwa and Waynim, the former a noble Indian, the
latter evil and furtive, chiefs of a now extinct tribe. They
captured a Sioux warrior, and the brothers disagreed over
whether to torture him or to spare his life. Waynim toma
hawked Ullwa, settling not only the disagreement of the moment
but also a fraternal feud of longer standing. For Inda's
parents had betrothed her as a child to Waynim, but she had
grown to love Ullwa.
Shortly after the murder the Sioux burst upon the tribe
and overwhelmed it. Only Inda escaped alive. She placed the
body of her lover, Ullwa, in a canoe, floated down the river
with it, and went over a fall, thus preventing the Sioux from
3 + q
taking Ullwa*s scalp, but losing her own life. 7 Better
romancers than Thomas have thought suicide a fitting end to a
blasted love. And if one may judge from the geographical
prevalence of precipices known as “Lover’s Leap,** it must have
been a peculiarly satisfying end for the noble savage.
In the minor, supplementary poems of Inda are reminis
cences of Byronic woes— blighted lives and loves, beautiful
1+8
Lewis Foulk Thomas, Inda. a Legend of the Lakes.
pp. v f.
^ Ibid., pp. 1 ff.
37
ladles, disillusionment* Thus “To Ella*1 is an address by a
wounded lover to a fair maiden who has proved to be only a
coquette, and to whom the speaker addresses his sorrowing
adieus:
50
Farewell, I pity, and— forgive.
Suffering, sorrow, and disappointment appear in these verses
to be the lot of men.
In the “Advertisement” to Inda the publisher, V. Ellis,
refers to the book as “the first volume of poems that has ever
emanated from the press west of the Mississippi,“ and offers
it as a “specimen of the Arts connected with literature in
Western America,“ the entire work being made up in St. Louis.
The author’s portrait was lithographed by J. C. Wild from a
painting by C. Deas, both of St. Louis. The engraved title
page was executed by the Southern Bank Mote Engraving Company,
which had an agent in St. Louis. An engraving in illustration
of the chief poem was prepared by T. R. Whitney, and the book
51
was bound at the Franklin Bindery— of St. Louis.
Ellis was wrong in the claim of priority, of course,
for both the Missourian Lavs and Braddock’s Defeat antedate
Inda. It is understandable that he should be unaware of the
former, even if he had lived in St. Louis at the time of its
Ibid., p. 96.
^ Ibid., p. iii.
38
publication; its original circulation may have been so small
that many residents in the city had not known of it, and that
twenty years later it had been forgotten by those who knew it.
Of Braddock1s Defeat, though it was published only five years
before the date of Ellis's statement, it is also possible that
Ellis was entirely unaware, for nothing is known of its recep
tion and a stillborn book can be forgotten in a shorter period.
It is probable that comparatively few people were
enabled to read Inda. for shortly after the volume was pub
lished, a fire in a warehouse destroyed nearly all the printed
52
copies. It was not reissued* And though Thomas is said to
have written a considerable quantity of verse after Inda.
none of it is known to be preserved* He published one other
book, Rhymes of the Route, but it is doubtful that any copy
53
is now in existence. Unless those rhymes were of a higher
order than the poems in his first book, the loss is not great*
At least three other books of poetry were published in
St* Louis before the middle of the century* The first was
5*f
The Judiad. a poem dealing with the rise and decline of the
Jews between their exodus from Egypt and the destruction of
Snyder, loc* cit. Snyder calls Inda the second
volume of verse published west of the Mississippi. He seems
not to have been aware of Umphraville.
^ Loc* cit*
t d j .
' Loc* cit.
their temple by the Romans. Johnson Pierson, the author of
this book, was a native of Virginia who had come to the West
in 1 8 3 5, when he was twenty-one years old. He is said to
have written several other books, some of which were poetry,
but which have evidently disappeared— if they ever actually
existed. The Judiad was published in l8¥*; but while its
publication in St. Louis suggests a possible degree of interest
in poetry among the people of that city, it is not in any sense
regional literature. Nor is the second of the three books.
This is C. H. G. Havekluft*s Von Humboldt: an Epic Poem in
Nine Cantos. published by the author in 18U-7.
But the third is a different matter. This is a small
book published in 18^9, containing a twelve-page poem by
John Russel, 4 Mournful Elegy on the Unfortunate Victims Who
Fell Sacrifices to the Ravages of that Fell Destroyer, the
Asiatic Cholera at the Gravois Coal Diggings Near St. Louis,
Mo., in June and July 18U-9. Containing More Startling and
Melancholy Truths than the Annals of the Country Elsewhere
l 5 * >
Can Possibly Present. The material of the poem, though
repellent, is regional and historical; even the boast of the
superlative in_ misfortune may at times seem to be characteris
tic of writers on this frontier. But it is a common tendency
among regional writers that they should boast.
55 ibid., pp. 286 ff.
This John Russel, known as Scotch Jock Russel, describes
himself on the title page of the Mournful Elegy as a teacher
in the district doomed by the plague. Later he became a
dealer in second-hand books in St. Louis, and something of a
picturesque character about town. According to report he was
the author of one or two more books, though they may not have
gone further toward publication than the prospectus. It is
thought probable that he was the same person as the author of
a Narrative of Mormon Persecution in Missouri, published at
56
Bluffdale, Missouri, in 18 38. He brought his career to a
close by suicide, in a manner which he himself would probably
have described as unparalleled elsewhere in the annals of the
country. According to A. N. DeKenil this event occurred after
1855* Breckenridge describes the occurrence as it had been
told to him:
As to the date and facts of his suicide: I had
it only from tradition and do not recall the date
named to me. I know it occurred immediately after
his last drunk, when he was repenting. I was told
he deliberately walked into the river and on out
into the current from the foot of Chestnut Street,
waving as long as his hand rose out of the water,
a farewell to the roustabouts on the wharfboat.57
Two other books deserve a place in the account of
Missouri poetry of this period, though neither was published
56 Ibid., p. 287.
57 Loc. cit.
* 4 - 1
in the state and though the authors were only involuntarily
Missourians and only briefly so. If Scotch Jock Bussel had a
fancy for the startling and melancholy truths of misfortune
in the young state, he should have enjoyed the acquaintance of
P. P. Pratt, author of The Millennium and Other Poems (lS^O),
and George Thompson, who entitled his book by his own sobri
quet, The Prison Bard (lS^-S).
The former of these men was Parley P. Pratt, one of the
twelve Apostles of the early Mormon church, venerated in Mormon
annals as a devoted and heroic man, though non-Mormon accounts
58
treat him somewhat less kindly. He enters Missouri history
by virtue of the struggle between the Mormons and the
“Gentiles,1 * a conflict regarded by the Mormons as a persecu
tion of the Chosen People, regarded by other Missourians as
resistance to opprobrious heretics whose reported doctrines
and practices were dark and sinister. Ho doubt there was
guile as well as violence on each side.
The Mormon-anti-Mormon frenzy was only one of two deep-
rooted fanaticisms which existed in Missouri at this time.
The other was the mounting bitterness over the slavery matter,
for slavery in Missouri was one of those compromises which
satisfy none of the parties to the contest. The state was a
frontier in more ways than one. And it was still a time of
^ Dictionary of National Biography. XV, p. 175.
b-2
the expansiveness of spirit, the slow-burning excitement, that
attended the settlement of new territories in the United
States, Men were ready to use their weapons— firearms, legal
chicanery, the oratory that excites the mob. Sometimes men
who devoted themselves to what they regarded as sacred causes
went to prison; sometimes they were killed.
Pratt went to prison for resisting first a mob and
then a detachment of soldiers who, as he tells the story,
attacked the Mormons, killed twenty or thirty of them,
ravished some of their women, and made free booty of their
59
cattle and grain. Some of the poems of The Millennium. he
states in the ‘ •Preface,*1
came forth upon the bank of the far-famed Niagara,
and some were the plaintive strains poured from a
full heart in the lonely dungeons of Missouri where
the Author was confined upwards of eight months
during the late persecution.
And though the strains are crude and artless, they
are as plaintive as the writer of them says. Perhaps the
ultimate truth of religion, breaking upon the earth, should
bring only inexpressible joy and freedom to those who receive
and those who announce it; but the annunciation has commonly
been accompanied by pain and tears. Spiritual parturition has
its agonies too, and its cries of pain are often not more dig
nified than many of the circumstances of a less significant
^ B, P. Pratt, The Millennium -and Other Poems. pp. 95 ff.
birth. Let that consideration be what apology it can for the
poet of the Mormon persecution. His lines are ludicrous, but
there is agony in them. A good example is “Birthday,1 * written
in prison, April 12, 1 8 39:
This is the day that gave me birth
In eighteen hundred seven;
From worlds unseen I came to earth,
Far from my native heaven.
Thirty and two long years have pass*d,
To grief and sorrow given;
And now to crown my woes at last
I am confined in prison.
Another, the “Lamentation by P. P. Pratt. In Memory of
His Departed Wife, Who Died, March 25, 1837,“ suggests the
bleakness of the life which many of the apostles of the
Prophet shared for the propagation of the faith:
When in distant climes I wandered
To bear glad tidings to mankind;
She shared my toils and travels gladly,
Or would consent to stay behind.
Returning from a distant journey,
She always met me with a smile;
Wash’d my feet and changed my raiment,
And bad me rest from all my toil.^i
Another of the poems written in prison reproaches
Missouri for a falling away from the beneficent laws of right
said protection under which the Mormons had hoped to establish
themselves as a peculiar people, and concludes:
60 Ibid., p. 70.
61 Ibid., p. 8 7.
¥f
Let us fly, let us fly to the land, where the light
Of Liberty*s stars still illumine each spot,
Mhere the cottager's smile forever is bright,
And the chains of a tyrant encircle us not.
In the fair Illinois the eagle's bold wing £p
Is stretched o'er a people determined and free.
The story of Nauvoo was still to unfold.
George Thompson, like Pratt, suffered for his belief in
a cause; not, however, the religious fanaticism but the
Abolition impulsion that sent earnest men into conflicts they
might have avoided entering. Thompson was an Abolitionist
who came from Illinois to Missouri with the purpose of incit
ing slaves to escape from their masters. But he was betrayed
by the slaves whom he undertook to advise. He was captured
and taken to jail at Palmyra, and after his trial was impri
soned in the penitentiary at Jefferson City. This was in
1 8 1 + 1 . Before his release in 1 81 +6 he composed a great number
of verses which he later published under the title of The
Prison Bard (181+8).
Thompson says of the poems that while they lack the
graces of poetry— as they do— they exhibit "the heart of a
prisoner— the feelings of one suffering very unjustly, and the
power of Religion to cheer and support • . • its possessor."^
They are generally as melancholy as the circumstances of their
"G, Missouri, How Art Thou Fallen." ibid.. pp. 8l f.
George Thompson, The Prison Bard, p. iii.
composition would lead a reader to expect. Many of them pre
sent distressing pictures of the dreariness of convict life
and the despair of the prisoners: for example, "Death in a
Penitentiary,and “A Petition to Gov. [sic] Edwards.’ *^
The latter is a plea for pardon, arguing that the law under
which Thompson was imprisoned had been passed after the begin
ning of the imprisonment. Other poems deal with death, a
frequent theme, with religion, with each birthday which the
poet passed in the penitentiary. In the spring of the year
l8*f6 Thompson heard that the Governor had gone to the East to
marry. The unhappy man wrote a "Nuptial Address to Governor
Edwards," wishing the Governor happiness and imploring pardon
to return to his own wife; his partners in crime had already
been released. Wien he was permitted to present this poem
for the Governor’s reading, it was kindly received; but the
66
Governor replied that he was not married.
The poem may, however, have served its purpose.
Thompson was released not long afterward and returned to
Illinois. There is no record of his making further attempts
to induce slaves to run away from Missouri,
The fact that few books of poetry were written and
Ibid., p. 9^.
^ Ibid., p. 123•
66 Ibid.T p. 202.
published in St, Louis during the first half of the century
signifies little concerning the reading tastes of people who
bought books in that city, though it may signify that few
poets of any considerable attainment were writing books of
verse there, a fact which should occasion no astonishment.
It is hard to tinderstand, indeed, how even the books that
were published could have either influenced or satisfied
greatly a taste for poetry; literate people had, after all,
the resources of English and American poets of greater skill
to call upon. And they bought books of poems, at least to
give away as presents, and to lay upon their own tables if not
to read. Annuals or gift books appear to have been popular,
as they were elsewhere at the time. The St. Louis Beacon for
January 6, 1 8 3 0, carried advertisements of five such annuals:
The Atlantic Souvenir. The Talisman. The Token. The Pearl. and
Friendship1s Offering. If these were not Missouri publica
tions, they were at least American; and one of the merits
asserted for them by the advertiser was their superiority to
similar publications of the "Queen of the Isles.” But on
February 3 of the same year the same paper had a list of eight
of the English annuals. And such lists were advertised in
67
other St. Louis papers.
^ Carl Brooks Spotts, “The Development of Fiction on
the Missouri Frontier,” Missouri Historical Review. XXXVII,
p. 27?*
Though volumes of poetry were not numerous, miscella
neous books of other sorts were published in considerable
number. From time to time gazetteers of the state made their
appearance, Lewis C, Beck came in 1820 from his home in
Albany, New York to St. Louis5 there he looked about and began
taking notes. In 1823 he published the first Gazetteer of
68 „
Missouri. In 1837 Alphonso Wetmore published the Gazetteer
of the State of Missouri already mentioned in connection with
69
his name. Of somewhat similar nature were various geogra
phies, of which the two most interesting are perhaps
W. Clayton’s The Latter Bay Saints’ Emigrants* Guide, of the
year 18^-8, and Lewis Foulk Thomas’s The Valley of the
Mississippi Illustrated. W. C. Breckenridge once complained
that the latter had been the source for most of the views of
St. Louis and its vicinity, chiefly without credit to the
artist, and that the plates were, in fact, so much in demand
that second-hand book dealers had often removed them from
copies of the Gazetteer and sold them separately, with the
result that unmutilated copies of the work had long ago become
almost impossible to obtain.^
^ J. T. Scharf, History of St. Louis City and County.
II, p. 1591 ! - .
^ Supra, p. 23.
Breckenridge, oja. cit., pp. 263 ff.
There were publications from time to time of scientific
or educational nature. The first medical treatise was probably
G. Paul's translation, Leroy*s Curative Medicine or Purgation
71
Directed against the Course of Disease, published in 1 8 3 0.
Between the years 1836 and 1850 there were at least eight pub
lications intended to foster education. Their variegated
character is suggested by the titles of two: an address by
William S. Potts of Marion College on Obligations of Profes
sors in Christian Colleges, , and a first reader in German,
Erstes Uebungsbuechlein fuer Kinder Welche Schnell und Gruend-
72
lich Lesen Lernen Wollen, by Friedrich Steines. And as
early as 1823 a Frenchman, Paul Rene, had published an Elements
n-i
of Arithmetic.
newspapers, of course, rapidly increased in number, not
only in St. Louis but, following the trend of settlement, in
many other towns and cities of the state. The first Missouri
newspaper was the Missouri Gazette, which had a continued
existence, as has been noted, of more than a century, though
not without a change of name. The second was also a St. Louis
paper, the Western Journal, later the St. Louis Enquirer. for
71 Snyder, loc. cit.
^ W. C. Breckenridge, "Bibliography of Early Missouri
Imprints," in J. M. Breckenridget ojj. cit.. pp. 260 f.
73 Snyder, loc. cit.
some years largely edited and controlled by the statesman
Thomas Hart Benton, The third was published farther west, at
New Franklin, beginning in 1819 as the Missouri Intelligencer
and Boon^ Lick Advertiser. Other papers were being published
at Jackson in 1819, at St. Charles in 1820, and at Jefferson
City in 1823* The first in the Ozarks region was the Ozark
Standard, founded at Springfield in 18 30. The first daily
in the state was the St. Louis Herald, starting in l83*f.
In the beginnings, naturally, these periodicals were
printed with little mechanical equipment, and their emphasis
was on ideas rather than news. They were generally small,
four-page issues, each page about eight by twelve inches,
increasing by the middle of the century to the so-called
"blanket sheets" of a size about twenty-five inches by thirty-
one, and giving more attention, as the agitations preceding
the Civil War developed, to political questions and "news"
<7l f
stories.
Some of these papers served particular causes or philos
ophies: for example, the Western Examiner of St. Louis was in
75
the thirties an organ of the Freethinkers." Many of them, in
n \.
f Floyd C. Shoemaker, "A History of Missouri and
Missourians.1 1 See Chapter 8, "A Century of Journalism and
Literature.” for a detailed account of many Missouri news
papers of -chis period. Carle Brooks Spotts, oj5. cit. f Part I,
also discusses in considerable detail the contents of many
Missouri newspapers published between 1830 and i860.
75 spotts, o|>. cit.. pp. 275
50
the character of family papers, were the mediums for fugitive
verses and tales. Joseph M. Field, one of the editors of the
Reveille. for example, was not only a playwright but a poet
and a writer of prose tales. His "Mike Fink, the Last of the
Boatmen,” published in two issues of the Reveille. June 1*+ and
June 21, 18*4-7} is a specimen of the legendry which accumulated
about the name of a riverman who had roistered up and down the
Mississippi and its tributaries in the first quarter of the
century. Earlier in the year, in the issue for January 25,
the same paper had published John S. Robb's "Trimming a Darkey's
76
Heel,” another tale about the fabulous Mike Fink. Joseph
Field's brother, M. C. Field, was also a prominent writer for
the Reveille. and the verses of both the Fields are said to
77
have had a wide circulation.
Many of the papers of the first half of the century
existed only briefly, disappearing or being merged with other
publications, or giving way to new journalistic experiments
by the same owners and editors. Charles Keemle, who in 1817
was in charge of the St. Louis Emigrant. had at one time or
another about half a dozen papers in St. Louis. As late as
18*4-5 he was still interested in the establishment of new
periodicals. In that year he was one of the founders of the
7^ Walter Blair and Franklin J. Heine, Mike Fink. King
of Mississippi Keelboatment p. 275.
77 J. T. Scharf, op. cit., II, pp. 1596 f.
51
Reveille. which was considered during the five or six years
of its existence to he one of the best literary periodicals in
the West— periodicals which gave a good deal of space to
sketches, essays, light'verse, and stories, either reprinted
from other magazines or supplied by contributors. The Reveille
is particularly interesting for its use of the tall tale, a
type of fiction which flourished on the American frontier,
and of which Joseph Field and John S. Robb, editors of the
78
Reveille. were excellent practitioners.
While a good deal of the literature of Missouri in the
first half of the century centers in St. Louis and the region
about St. Louis, it is to be remembered that this city had
only a small proportion of the total population of the state—
5,852 of l*fO,^55 in 1830, and l6,*f69 of 3 8 3 ,7 0 2 in 18* 40. The
typical Missourian of the time was not the city dweller or
the comfortably established and literate farmer. At least in
the early part of the period, the typical Missourian was
nearer to the lonely settler described by Cortambert, the
rough and adventurous pioneer, a crude and unlovely oaf or a
noble child of nature, according to the point of view of his
observer. There is ample testimony to his presence in the
new country. But many of the settlers doubtless brought books
with them, though the quantity and quality of these books may
^ Spotts, op. cit., pp. 275
52
not easily be determined. And books could be obtained in some
places, though as late as l8*+5 E. Hart, proprietor of the
Boonville Book Store, advertised that his was the nonly regu-
79
lar Book Store west of St. Louis in this state,*1
Public schools, moreover, were not very early develop
ments in the state. Though the Missouri Gazette for October
1 7> 1 8 0 8, advertised some school books for sale, and though
various private schools were advertised in the following
years, the Missouri Republican asserted as late as April,
1 8 3 7, that there was not a single common school system under
public patronage and that a large part of the population was
growing up without knowing how to read. Abundant direct tes
timony of travelers corroborates this impression of the typi
cal Missourian. And the early rhymes and stories of the
periodicals of the state were not written for this typical
Missourian.^
He did, however, have his part in that literature. He
often sat for the picture. Short stories of the day often
show him at his amusements, more often than at his serious,
everyday work, perhaps because those amusements were more
picturesque and exciting— horse races, gander-pullings, shoot-
ing-matches for turkeys, corn-shuckings, house-raisings,
79 Ibia., pp. 201 ff.
80 T
Loc. cit.
53
wood-choppings, rail-splittings, camp-meetings, sessions of
county courts, public sales or "vendues,” and political barbe
cues. These amusements were often boisterous, rough, whiskey-
drinking occasions, but they were worth telling about.
One rhymester of the early days suggests that the
Missouri pioneers found hunting bear and wild honey more enter
taining than the prosaic labors of farm work:
His wife, poor dame, now raised her voice,
And told him if it was his choice
To live like pigs on roasting ears
She really must express her fears
He'd die in ten or fifteen years;
•Though ague never killed a man,
I know that Bears and honey can;
I wish, instead of hunting bees,
You'd clear away these cotton trees,
And let the air and sun assail
The damp recesses of this vale;
Then garden vegetables would grow
And better soups we'd make, you know,
That work on invalids such cures; 3^
'Twould redden, too, that face of yours. • . •
The crudity and lawlessness of Missouri made a strong
impression on Timothy Flint, a New Englander who came to the
frontier territory from the Missionary Society of Connecticut.
He spent approximately four years, from 1816 to 1 8 1 9, in
missionary and ministerial work in or near the town of
St. Charles. In his Recollections of the Last Ten Years (1829)
he devotes a hundred pages to this period of his life. There
^ Ibid., p. 201. The lines are quoted from the Missouri
Intelligencer for October 1, 1822.
9*
are in existence six letters written by Flint from St, Charles
to the Missionary Society, and three written at this time to
the same Society by the Reverend Salmon Giddings, which largely
concern Flint. His unhappiness, coming from incompatibility
with much of his surroundings, is very evident.
In his Recollections Flint records his impressions and
experiences in the new society which he saw forming. He
speaks of the great numbers of people in emigration, the insta
bility of the population, the vulgarity and vice of their
lives, particularly of their amusements. He describes the
classes of people who were to be seen, frontiersmen, villagers,
emigrants, Indians from as far away as the Rocky Mountains.
His record notes the tendency of the French and Indians to
marry each other; the methods of real estate development with
its flamboyant advertising; the crudity and cruelty of society,
and the consequent disregard of literature; the frequency of
duels and murders; and the enormous cost in suffering and in
the destruction of life which marked the westward movement of
population. At the same time, many novel aspects of the region
interested Flint, such things, for example, as the mounds of
82
the prehistoric Americans. In addition to his own record
of these mounds he includes a poem by his son, Micah Flint,
on the subject of such remains in the Cahokia (Illinois)
^ John E. Kirkpatrick, Timothy Flint, pp. 102 ff.
55
Prairie; and in his History and Geography of the Mississippi
Valley he describes Indian relies which he discovered while
digging a ditch on his farm near St* Charles, and others found
83
near St* Louis before he went to St. Charles.
Several years after Timothy Flint left Missouri, he
wrote a novel, George Mason* the Young Backwoodsman * with a
secondary title, Don1t Give u p the Ship: he calls it a story
of Mississippi. But there is reason to believe that in so
far as the setting of the story is not imaginary it is Missouri
rather than Mississippi which furnished the background. For
the Flints never lived in the latter state, and the Mason
family of the novel is, like Flint*s own family, that of a
New England minister; and it suffers as Flint's family did in
Missouri from the rude society of the region to which it goes,
particularly because the Masons will not conform to the rough
8b
customs, religious and social, of their neighbors.
Flint was the author of many works besides those which
have any connection with his life in Missouri. Besides the
novel already mentioned, his Letters. The History and Geography
of the Mississippi Valley, and A Condensed Geography and His
tory of the Western States have some connection with this
On
Timothy Flint, History and Geography of the
Mississippi Valiev. I, pp. 126 ff.
Kirkpatrick, ©£. cit., pp. 136 f.
56
period in his experience. Of a considerable number of poems
•which are found in some of his works it is not possible to
establish the authorship, but most of them are by Flint. Of
these verses ’ ’ Reflections on Grossing the Missouri” is dis
tinctly related to his experience in the territory. The date
85
of the poem is uncertain.
Flint's works are not now much read, but once they were
well known. Perhaps the most widely familiar of them was a
prose tale, The Lost Child, which has its connection with
Missouri only in the author's general interest in the West,
and in the lasting impression which the lawlessness of the
West made upon him while he was in Missouri. The story is a
pathetic tale of a religious and law-abiding couple who moved
from a Southern state to somewhere near New Mexico, where they
prospered but gained the enmity of the evil and unregulated
people who abounded in the region as they had abounded about
St. Louis and St. Charles. Three of these wicked men conspired
to lay claim to a slave, but were refused possession. In
revenge they kidnapped a boy, the oldest of the family*s three
children. Though the criminals were pursued, all trace of
them disappeared. One of the kidnapers became a schoolteacher,
and long after the heat of pursuit had died away, he wrote an
offer to give information for payment. He was arrested, and
Ibid., pp. 350 ff
57
in an attempt to escape he drowned, without having given
information concerning the fate of the child* Three or four
years later the boy was quite accidentally discovered by a
friend of the family, and was eventually returned to his
parents*
This is not a tale of fiction but an account of an
actual crime* Flint talked with witnesses of the events and
satisfied himself of the truth of their statements* He
believed the boy to have been born in 1 8 2 0, and wrote his
story not long after what must have been the date of the
recovery of the boy; he thought of it as embodying a useful
lesson for parents. The quickness of this unfortunate child*s
mind had produced a sinful pride in his father and mother*
They had praised their son frequently, and had encouraged
him to display his knowledge to other people* Flint will not
assert that the kidnapping was a punishment from heaven— but
he will hint as much. He suggests that God may with propriety
punish those who make an idol of a child, by taking away the
idol "and causing them to stand corrected by leaving them
86
nothing but himself to love*”
Timothy Flint, The Lost Child, p* 17* This book was
published in Boston, 1 8 3 0. Collectors have sometimes confused
it with a narrative poem with the same title, published anony
mously in Philadelphia in l8ll. There is no similarity in the
tales. The poem tells of an English waif, found naked and
wounded in a shed, succored by various kind-hearted people,
and after seven or eight years restored to his father and iden
tified by a locket which had been given to the boy by his mother.
The confusion arises merely from the identity of title. No
reason exists for supposing Flint to be the author of the poem.
This is the gentle man who found Missourians brutal,
and who was saddened by the cost in cruelty and brutality of
the westward migration.
At least one other book by Timothy Flint belongs to his
part in the saga of Missouri. This is his The First White Man
of the West (1856), an account of the life and exploits of
Daniel Boone, whose more active years are associated with
other places but who spent his later years in Missouri. And
there is every reason to suppose that Flint must have drawn
on the strong and often unhappy impressions of his years as a
missionary in Missouri for many details of others of his works
which are not ostensibly connected with that experience. Such
transmutations of the poignancies of the past are well known
sources for all imaginative and creative minds; and the most
minute and patient research can trace only generally and
imperfectly the connection between an artist's early experi
ences and his later fruition.
In a frontier country violence and crime are more or
less commonplace; that is not to say, however, that they are
always viewed with equanimity. Violence and crime have fur
nished the subjects for many books dealing with the settlement
of every section of this country. Such books commonly appear
in greatest profusion after the times which they commemorate
have receded into the past, rather than during the vigorous
and violent period itself, though sensational crimes have
59
doubtless always found their contemporary chroniclers, whether
in ballads, in broadsides, or in books. Missouri, where the
period of settlement and expansion was accompanied or followed
by the strifes of a border state during the anti-slavery
struggle, the animosities of the Mormon movement, and the
horrors of guerrilla warfare, had perhaps more than her share
of the material for stories of violence. Much of this litera
ture belongs to a period later than the one now under consid
eration, but even in the beginnings of Missouri literature,
crime and violence have their part.
Mention has already been made of the French poem,
“Chanson de l'Annee du Coup,*1 a narrative of violence, and of
Timothy Flint1s The Lost Child. a tale of crime. A story more
closely associated with Missouri than Flint's book is a
Narrative of the Capture and Providential Escape of Misses
Frances and Almira Hall. published in St. Louis in 1 8 3 2. This
is an ostensibly factual account of the experiences of two
sisters of sixteen and eighteen years, captured by the savages
at the frontier settlement of Indian Creek, in Illinois. To
87
it is added a narrative of the captivity of Philip Brigdon.
At least three other accounts of Indian outrages were published
^ W. C. Breckenridge, “Bibliography of Early Missouri
Imprints," in J. M. Breckenridge, o p . cit.y pp. 27*+ ff. In
1915 Charles Scanlon published in Milwaukee an account of the
capture, captivity, and release of these girls, whose names he
gives as Sylvia ana Rachel Hall.
60
in St, Louis by the year 1850. Their title pages are inter
esting, In 1839 Charles Keemle printed for E, House
a narrative of the captivity of Mrs, Horn, and her
two children, with Mrs. Harris, by the Camanche
f sicl Indians, after they had murdered their hus
bands and travelling companions; with a brief
account of the manners and customs offtthat nation,
of whom so little is generally known.
In l8*+0 appeared an anonymous horror story,
a Narrative of the horrid massacre by the Indians,
of the wife and children of the Christian Hermit,
a resident of Missouri, with a full account of qq
his life and sufferings, never before published. y
And in 1850 William Beschke published a narrative with
a title page designed to excite the prospective reader:
The Dreadful sufferings and Thrilling Adventures
of an Overland Party of Emigrants to California,
Their Terrible Conflicts with Savage Tribes of
Indians!! and Mexican Bands of Robbers!!! with
Marriage, Funeral, and Other Interesting Ceremonies
and Customs of Indian Life in the Far West. Com
piled from the Journal of Mr. George Adam, one of
the Adventurers, by Prof. Wm. Beschke.90
Another St. Louis publication of the sort, in which,
however, Indians are not the villains, is an anonymous
McDaniel and Joseph Brown, an account of parties to the murder
of a man named Chavis, who was killed on the “Santa Fe
88 Ibid., p. 275.
8^ Doc, cit.
90 Breckenridge got a description of this - imprint from
an old catalogue, but did not^see a copy. . See loc. cit.
There Is a copy in r the library^ of-the University of Kansas City.
For discussion of this narrative, see Chapter IX, infra,
pp. 3^0 f•
61
Trace.
One of the most Interesting writers who have described
early Missouri from first-hand observation is Henry Marie
Brackenridge, who lived in Ste. Genevieve as a small child and
who later returned to visit that village and to travel over a
good proportion of the Mississippi valley. He visited
St. Louis, and remained to collect material for a history of
the region. His Recollections of Places and Persons in the
Far West, published in l83*f, is interesting for its pictures
of life in the French town of the latter part of the eighteenth
century, and of Missouri in the early days of its possession
by the United States in the nineteenth.
Brackenridge was born in 1786 at Fort Pitt, now
Pittsburgh. His mother died before he was eighteen months
old. His father, an eccentric lawyer, writer, and classical
scholar, decided when the child was about six years old that
he should learn French, and arranged with a friend to bring
the boy to Ste. Genevieve and there to put him to live with
a French family. It was a hard and dangerous journey of
about fifteen hundred miles, partly through country where
the Indians were still dangerous, but the father overlooked
the perils and difficulties. The boy was duly deposited in
^ Ibid., p. 256. Breckenridge got the description of
this imprint from an old catalogue.
62
Ste, Genevieve. There he lived with the family of a
M. Bauvais, learned French, forgot his English, played with
little Kiekapoo Indian boys who would come into town on
friendly terms with the white children, and became in effect
a little French boy. Mme. Bauvais was at first uneasy about
allowing a little heretie to sleep with her own children, but
a kindly priest made a Christian of the lad and eased her
fears.
After about three years the father sent for Henry Marie,
and he returned down the Mississippi, up the Ohio, and at last,
after a long delay because of fever, back to Fort Pitt, there
to learn English again and to grow up.
92
In 1810 he returned to Missouri to practice Law. The
crudity and roughness of the region.could hardly be better
suggested than by some of the details of his experiences. The
captain of the boat on which he traveled swindled Brackenridge
and a companion out of their provisions. In New Madrid a boor
against whom Brackenridge had been a witness before a justice
93
of the peace challenged him to a duel with butcher knives.
While traveling across virtually unsettled country, he came
upon a veteran of Braddock1 s defeat who was so ignorant that
92 DeMenil, loc. eit. DeMenil is authority for the
date of Brackenridge * s return to Missouri.
Henry M. Brackenridge, Recollections of Places and
Persons in the Far West, pp. 22o ff.
63
Qif
he did not know who was President of the United States. On
the same journey he was entertained by an Indian chief whose
wife clattered unavailing objections to such hospitalityj and
the Indian was better informed than the old soldier of
Braddock’s army. He knew the Presidents name, and inquired
concerning affairs with England and France and about the pros-
95
pects of peace or war with either.
Though the Recollections is Brackenridge*s most impor
tant work, he is the author of several publications concerned
with the Louisiana Territory in general and with Missouri in
particular. While he lived in St. Louis he wrote numerous
articles for the Missouri Gazette, and these he later used as
the basis for his Views of Louisiana (1812) • Another book of
regional interest is his Journal of & Vovag® u p the Missouri
qA
River. Performed in 1811 (l8l6). And after 1832, in
Pittsburgh, he wrote numerous pamphlets and articles for
periodicals.
One of the frequent subjects of the literature of the
frontier, both in Missouri and elsewhere, was the famous keel-
boatman, fighter, trapper, marksman, who has already been
Ibid.« p. 239.
Ibid., pp. 238 f.
96
' The former of these books was published in Pittsburgh,
the latter in Baltimore. For notes on these and other publica
tions, see DeMenil, op. cit., pp. 7^ ff.
mentioned— Mike Fink, He belongs to the company of Daniel
Boone, Kit Carson, Davy Crockett, to that of Beowulf and
Cuchullain and the other legendary, half-mythical men of
heroic mold in heroic times. Stories about Mike Fink were
once told by campfires, in saloons, on river boats, wherever
people recounted the tales of marvelous exploits, exploits
of skill and strength and daring and disregard of restric
tion, performed by strong and rough and fearless men, Mike
was real, though doubtless many of the tales told about him
were concoctions of rumor and fancy and lie. In 18^7j when
Mike had been dead for about a quarter of a century, a writer
enumerated cities in which during the preceding fifteen years
he had heard yarns of Mike Fink— Cincinnati, Louisville,
New Orleans, Natchez, St, Louis, Since that time the name
and the exploits for which it was once celebrated have nearly
faded out of oral tradition, but as late as 1932 Meigs 0, Frost,
a New Orleans writer, stated that back in the sandy bottoms and
the thick brush there were still mothers who frightened their
children into good behavior by threats that Mike Fink would
97
get them.
The Missouri Republican for July 10, 1823, printed an
account of Mike Fink’s death at Fort Henry, near where the
Yellowstone flows into the Missouri, The news had come down
^ Walter Blair, and Franklin J,. Meine, op, cit., pp. 252 ff.
the river in a letter from a trapper* This appears to have
been the first time the doings of Mike had got into print,
though the tales about him were already widely current up and
down the river, and he had been familiarly mentioned in
Wetmore*s The Pedlar. Six years after his death the first
literary treatment of his legend appeared in what would seem
the most improbable place— a ladies* annual, The Western
Souvenir, published in Cincinnati in 1829. There, in company
with pictures of "The Peasant Girl1 1 and “The Deserted Children,*1
and with stories of a Greek revolution and a French village,
Mike killed an Indian from ambush and performed the exploit
which was his own contribution to the lore of the frontier,
which was probably an ingredient of nearly every tale told
about him— he shot a cup of whiskey off the head of another
boatman.
In 18 3 2 Mary Russell Mitford introduced Mike Fink into
England In her Lights and Shadows of American Life. She had
picked up the tradition from some one of the American publica
tions which had printed an account of the keelboatman*s feats
as told by Morgan Neville of Cincinnati. It had been reprinted
also in other publications, among them, in 1829, the year of
its original appearance, The Western Pilot. a book intended
to help boatmen in navigating the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.
And in the same year a St. Louis correspondent furnished some
additional details to Neville*s sketch? these were published
by Timothy Flint in his Western Monthly Review. One new story
98
appeared about Mike Fink as late as 1895. In the meantime
the legend had received literary treatment of one sort or
another in many places. Several St. Louis newspaper men had
written tales about the man. Charles D. Drake, a St. Louis
editor and one of the founders of the St. Louis Law Library,
had written a book on the subject, which appears to have had
a continued popularity.^ In more recent times the story of
Mike Fink has been told again by the poet, John G. Neihardt,
in The Song, of Three Friends.
In addition to such fiction or semi-fiction as has been
considered, some books written in Missouri or elsewhere by
Missourians, and published in other states, deserve mention
in an account of the beginnings of Missouri literature. Such
would be the two novels of Judge Beverly Tucker if it were
certain that they were written during his residence in the
state. George Balcombe (New York, 1 8 3 6) may have been, though
it was not published until three years after Tucker left
Missouri; The Partisan Leader (Washington, 1856) almost
Loc. cit.
99
Scharf, loc. cit. Scharf uses the popularity of
this book in 1883 as the standard of measurement for the
popularity of The Swamp Doctor, by John S. Robb and Madison
Tensas.
6?
certainly was not.” *^ Tucker had lived in Missouri from l8l5
to 1 8 3 3, but he had remained a Virginian at heart, and in the
latter year he returned to that state.
If George Ealcombe was written in Missouri, it is the
first novel composed west of the Mississippi, and it opens
with a Missouri scene; but its plot has to do with an estate
in Virginia which has been fraudulently obtained by a man
named Montague, the black sheep of a good family, who has fled
to the frontier, George Balcombe is a Virginian, a graduate
of William and Mary, and remarkable both physically and men
tally. The women in the story are virtuous and beautiful as
it is fitting that Southern ladies in.fiction should be. One
may regret that the cruder forms of frontier life, in so far
as they appear in the story, are used mainly for background,
but Tucker was a Southern aristocrat and disapproved of
102
democracy. It is not a cause for surprise that his interest
100 For a discussion of the evidence concerning the com
position of George Balcombe. see Carle Brooks Spotts, The
Development of Fiction on the Missouri Frontier ( 18 30-186O),
footnote, p . " " " ! ? 1 * - * Scharf (o£. cit.. II, p. 15o9) thought that
The Partisan Leader was written in Missouri, but according to
an unsigned explanatory note in the edition of 1861 Tucker
began writing it in 1 8 3 6, at which time he lived in Virginia.
Even that date may be too early, for the date on the title
page of the original edition is 1 8 5 6, and the first sentence
of the story sets the action in 1 8^9•
101 DeMenil, oj). cit.. p. 71*
Spotts, op. cit.. p. 55*
68
in fiction led him to write of aristocratic gentlemen and
ladies with more fervor than of the cruder frontier scene.
But though the modem reader may feel little enthusiasm for
the novel, both Poe and William Gilmore Simms are said to
103
have praised it.
The Partisan Leader. as has been said, was in all proba
bility, not written in Missouri, and it does not deal with the
Western scene. It is a novel dealing with states1 rights and
directing the Southern mind toward secession, and was much
read in the South; thus, like Uncle Tom1s Cabin, it had a part
in preparing the way for the War between the States. Its
genesis may have been in a letter written in November, 1833,
to Tucker by Duff Green, whom Tucker had known in Missouri.
This letter suggested a series of articles on states* rights.
Whether the idea of the novel came from the letter cannot be
10*f
determined.
James D. Nourse, born in 1816 in Bardstown, Kentucky,
studied both law and medicine but gave up both professions for
journalism and literature. He had experience as editor of
three different papers In Bardstown before his removal to
St. Louis, and at the time of his death from cholera in 185k
he was editor of the St." Louis Daily Intelligencer. In his
103 Ibid., p. 56.
Ibid., pp„ 5k f
69
day he was a prominent writer, a contributor to many periodi
cals. He is the author of two novels in which the antiquarian
reader will find some interest, both of them dealing with
Western life. These are The Forest Knight, published in
Philadelphia in l8*f 6, and Leavenworth. published in Louisville
in l8*+ 8. The latter is subtitled A Story of the Mississippi
and the Prairies: the reader is prepared, therefore, for the
scenes of steamboat life, the squatters, and the frontier
spectacles. He finds also a great deal of adventure and melo
drama, and he meets fine gentlemen and ladies, damnyankees and
hot-blooded Southerners, sinister Mexicans, duels, murders, and
robberies. In addition to these thrillers, Nourse devoted his
scholarship to two volumes on history, Philosophy of History.
and Remarks on the Past, and Its Relation to American Society.
or God in History.
Edmund Flagg was born in Wicasset, Maine. After his
graduation in 1835 from Bowdoin College, he moved to St. Louis
with the intention of establishing a school. But instead of
carrying out that purpose he studied law and in 1837 was
admitted to the bar. He became a writer of both verse and
prose; among his poems was an ode which was sung at the Fourth
of July celebration in 1 8 3 7. In 1838 Harpers of New York com
piled a series of articles on Western life and scenery which
1G^ Loc. cit.
Flagg had contributed to the St. Louis Republican, and pub
lished them in a book, The Far West, or A Tour beyond the
Mountains. In the same year Flagg became associated with
S. B. Churchill in the editorial management of the St. Louis
Bulletin; later he was editor of other publications in
St. Louis and in Kentucky and Ohio. In 18^7 or afterwards
he wrote several plays, one of which, Mary Tudor. was success
fully produced in Mew Orleans and elsewhere. About l8*+8 he
produced The Howard Queen, a prize tale in a contest which
was conducted by the St. Louis Union. Later, while abroad as
secretary to the Minister to Berlin, he wrote Edmund Bantes
106
as a sequel to Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo.
In Edmund Dantes Flagg undertakes to lay bare 1 1 all the
coneedled causes of the French Revolution of February, 18M3,
which began acting as long as shortly after the Revolution of
1 8 3 0.** In spite of this expository purpose, the tone of the
narrative is sprightly, and the character of Edmund Dantes is
interesting. Having seen the devastation in unforeseen quar
ters which had been wrought by his vengeance, he devotes him
self to freeing the people, and is the chief moving spirit in
the Revolution of 1 8M- 8. It is interesting to observe that
Flagg puts into his character's mouth predictions of revolu
tions in other capitals over Europe— revolutions that did not
Scharf, oe> cit.« II, p. 159^*
71
materialize.
In lQJ+l Flagg was appointed consul to Venice. Mien he
returned to St. Louis after a year or two, he became editor
of the St. Louis Times, but continued the writing of fiction
and history. In 1853 his Venice, the City of the Sea was pub
lished in New York in two finely illustrated volumes. In 185*+
he furnished a series of articles for Myers' United States
Illustrated. And as superintendent of statistics in the State
Department he later prepared four quarto volumes on the commer
cial relations of the United States. His novels include,
besides those already mentioned, Carraro. the Prime Minister.
Francis of Valois. Blanche of Artois, and several other
10?
romances. He was the author, also, of several plays.
Flagg's interests were obviously not Missourian or,
indeed, Western; they were, in fact, chiefly European rather
than American. His books were not published in Missouri,
except as through his connection with St. Louis periodicals
they were in some instances first published in papers of that
city; otherwise they were not even intended particularly for
Missouri readers. They belong in the tale of Missouri litera
ture only by virtue of the author's residence in the state and
by virtue of their suggestion of the cosmopolitan range of one
early Missouri writer.
Ibid.,11, p. 1595.
A writer for children who lived in Missouri during the
first half of the century was the Right Reverend Cicero Stephen
Hawks, D. D., a bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church, He
was consecrated Bishop of Missouri at the age of thirty-two;
his written work suggests that if he had not been in the
church literature might have been at least temporarily the
gainer. He edited two juvenile series for Eastern publishers
and wrote also some volumes for children, including an early
treatment of the mutineers from the Bounty who have since been
rendered fairly familiar to readers of adventure in strange
places. This book was Friday Christian, the First-Born of
Pitcairn* s Island. These stories were popular among children
of their time. Scharf says ( 1 8 8 3) that old boys of fifty will
108
remember taking them to read in bed.
The earliest book of fiction actually published in
Missouri was probably Heinrich Zschokke*s Die Rose von Bisentis.
a volume of 136 pages, in German, issued at St. Louis in iS^.
This is the story of a brother and a sister who have been
befriended, when they were poor and orphaned, by a wealthy
«
manufacturer. This benefactor sends Florian, the brother, to
Vienna for his education, and makes no secret of the fact that
he is doing so at great expense. In time, he marries Sabine,
the sister, in spite of the disparity in their ages. Florian
108 Ibid.. II, p. 1597.
73
is displeased, and develops a dislike for the old man, con
sidering his conduct outrageous; hut the wifely Sabine defends
her husband and undertakes to persuade the restless and adven
turous Florian to settle down. The tale ends happily, with
the comforting reflection, ”Ende Gut, Alles Gut.*1 It is a
slight story, moralistic and sentimental, and with little
interest except for those tastes which lean toward a story of
difficulties happily settled,
F, W. Thomas, a brother of Lewis Foulke Thomas, lived
in St. Louis for a time and wrote a collection of stories,
Sketches of Character, and Tales Founded on Fact, which was
published in Louisville in 18^9• These tales are loose and
discursive in structure, but show some gift for characteriza
tion and something of liveliness of style. Fair examples are
109
1 1 Boarding-School Scenes; or, a Frolic among the Lawyers,”
110
and ”The Unsummoned Witness.”
The former is a story of a severe headmaster and a mean-
spirited subordinate. Certain lawyers involve them both in an
uproar and get the subordinate, Dogberry, very tipsy, with the
result that the boys of the school have an evening of whole
some excitement. The latter is a human-interest story of a
criminal reformed by a good woman. After his reformation he
109 f . W. Thomas, Sketches of Character. and Tales
Founded on Fact, pp. 1 ff.
110 Ibid.. pp. 35 ff.
7b
is accused of a murder which had actually been committed by
one of his old confederates, and is acquitted through the tes
timony of a wronged sweetheart of the real murderer. They are
absurd and improbable stories, but every age has its absurd
and improbable stories and its readers for them, as well as
its sentimentality and its horseplay. Thomas made his contri
bution to the satisfaction of the taste for such literature.
Three years after Zschokke's Die Rose von Pisentis
appeared the first novel in English written in St. Louis by a
citizen of St. Louis and published in that city. This was
The Unknown, by Pierce C. Grace.
Grace was a lawyer, and appears to have been held in
considerable esteem, for when he died in 185^ members of the
St. Louis bar passed resolutions in his memory, one of them
to the effect that the surviving lawyers of the Association
should wear badges of mourning for thirty days. Though litera
ture was an avocation with him, he was the author of at least
two books besides The Unknown, namely, Outlines of History
The Rejected Packet.111
The Unknown is a sentimental and melodramatic tale on a
hoary theme, namely, the villainy of a fraudulent successor to
a title and an estate. The true heir, preserved by certain
111
W. C. Breckenridge, "Bibliography of Missouri
Imprints," in J. M. Breckenridge, 0£. cit., p. 261.
75
humble'fisher folk who have rescued him from the water, has
disguised, himself as a ragged vagabond. Twice— once in London
and once in Charleston— this vagabond saves the heroine, the
beautiful daughter of a certain Lord Moreton, from dishonor
at the hands of the villain. The hero eventually establishes
his identity, brings about the destruction of the false Lord
Falkland and his evil henchmen, himself succeeds to the title,
and inherits the estate. And, of course, he marries the
heroine.
Lady Harriet Moreton, the heroine, is beautiful and in
every imaginable way noble. The villain is unmitigated wicked
ness; there are no shadings of character between white light
and utter darkness, and if there were any conventional phrases
of the time which were applicable to characters or action and
which Grace neglected to use, the omission must have been mere
oversight. Whatever skill Grace may have had at the bar, it
had not prepared him for subtlety or ease in fiction. The
dialogue is as formal and artificial as the plot is trite.
The villain addresses Lady Harriet as ”my proud beauty,” and
when he is foiled— as such villains are born to be foiled— he
strikes his forehead. One or two specimens will adequately
represent the style of the novel:
"Sir,” said Lady Harriet, imploringly, 1 1 tell
me, I beseech you, of what plot— of what villains—
of what purposes, do you speak?”
”Lady,” said the Unknown, earnestly, "believe
76
me, I deeply regret having kept you so long In
suspense, but I wished first to know fully the
posture of affairs, before I revealed to you the
nature of the designs of those who seek to wrong
you, in order that I might render you instant and
effective service* I have determined on the
course I shall pursue, and now will give you the
information you desire*™-12
"You certainly did not imagine," said Lady
Harriet with a look from the depths of her beau
tiful eyes which sent a thrill through the frame
of Carleton— "you certainly did not imagine that
you could be forgotten!1 1
"Nay," said Car let on, "the thought that your
remembrance might occasionally revert to me has
been a source of constant pleasure; but I did not
anticipate the assurance which you have now given
me, that the thought was not presumptuous.”1^
In this novel Grace takes occasion to protest repeat
edly against the low estimate of Afieriean manners frequently
held by Englishmen* Though Dickens and Mrs. Trollope had not
formed their opinions of American behavior in St. Louis, they
had aspersed Americans; and Americans as far west as St. Louis,
and farther, had doubtless seen many of the same spectacles
that disgusted the English observers— and had been disgusted
just as the English visitors were. Grace complains that the
English judge us by our cruder specimens, not by our highly
cultivated urban society* Perhaps he gets what revenge he
can when he puts into the mouths of Englishmen praise of
112
Pierce C. Grace, The Unknown, p. 68.
113 Ibid.* p. 157*
77
America as the country with the best of all possible govern
ments, and admiration for the surpassing virtue and culture
of the persons whose merits are bred under this superior
government.
As a writer, Grace was plainly an amateur. Nothing
could better exemplify this fact than his preface to The
Unknown, explaining the circumstances of publication. The
St. Louis Union conducted a contest in 18^8, offering a prize
for the best novel submitted by a St. Louis writer— the same
paper had conducted a similar contest for plays, it will be
remembered, and had given Edmund Flagg the prize for The
Howard Queen— and Grace had submitted The Unknown. But though
the committee of judges awarded the first prize to Grace, the
Union failed to pay the sum promised. Grace, therefore, with
drew his manuscript and considered having it published in some
Eastern city. But at the urging of his friends and of the
committee who had judged it the best of the novels offered in
the contest, he had it published in St. Louis.
As a novel it is a poor thing. Lords and ladies, fraudu
lent claimants to titles, rightful heirs supposedly drowned at
sea,lllf conspiracies among the gentry— these are surely not
11 k
There is no connection with the celebrated Tichborne
case. The Unknown was published in l8*f8. The Bella, on which
Roger C. Tichborne was lost, foundered in 185^, and the
Tichborne trial was held in 1871.
78
the subjects for an amateur novelist living on the bank of the
Mississippi, drawing his acquaintance with the world he writes
about only from books other people have written. It would seem
that a writer living in St. Louis could have found enough of
excitement in the real world about him to furnish his first
experiment in fiction with all the interest it needed. When
one looks backward it seems a sufficiently variegated and
exciting place and time. But if Pierce Grace had had the
eye to see the drama that was in St. Louis and in Missouri,
perhaps he would have been a novelist instead of a lawyer.
And as one looks backward not only to l8*+8 but to 1803,
one sees that there was an astonishingly copious production of
written and published work in Missouri during the first half
of the nineteenth century, which was approximately the first
half-century of the region as a part of the United States.
Most of it was the work of amateurs, and not of natives. The
state was young, and its writers had come to Missouri in pur
suit of other occupations; literature with them was an avoca
tion. It is doubtful that most of them had talent enough to
succeed in literature as a profession. Certainly little of
what they wrote was better than second-rate, a great deal
was worse.
Still, it is something that there should be so much
of it; that Emphraville and Flint should see the Mamelles and
celebrate their loveliness, one man in high-flown poetry, one
in at least respectable prose; that people should form com
panies of amateur actors, and write and produce their own
plays, even if they did not write or act them well; that a
man should look back on his boyhood in Ste. Genevieve and
remember with pleasure the French gardens and the little
Kickapoo boys with whom he used to play. It is a good deal
that men should write of Indian outrages and Mormons and
slaves who would not escape and duels and murders and bear-
hunters and waitresses in the Dancing Bear and Mike Fink
roaring up and down the river. Perhaps it is even reason for
gratulation that Pierce C. Grace should write an unconscion
able novel. It is better that men write ill than that they
should not write at all.
CHAPTER III
FICTION IN MISSOURIs 18 50-1930
As has been noted In the previous chapter, some fiction
was produced in Missouri, specifically in St. Louis, before
the middle of the nineteenth century. This fiction included
not only numerous tales in periodicals but even a small begin
ning in the novel. It also included work in both English and
German. It was to be expected that as the state became more
thoroughly settled, as the pioneer generation gave way to its
children and grandchildren, the reading and writing of books
should increase. The passions and controversies of the Civil
War, moreover, inevitably stimulated the writing of some
kinds of literature.
The Civil War literature is to be examined in another
chapter. The present intention is to trace the growth of
Missouri fiction concerned with other matters.
The earliest novel produced in Missouri during the
second half of the century is a spectacular performance. This
is Pi® Geheimnisse von St. Louis, the work of a German Jew,
Heinrich Boernstein, who was an aggressive atheist with a
particularly vindictive enmity for the Roman Catholic church.
The book was published in St. Louis in 1851, and a second edi
tion, in English, was immediately prepared and published
80
81
under the title, of The Mysteries of St. Louis.1
It is a story of blood, conspiracy, murder, and horror,
with the Jesuits east in the role of collective villain, and
with individuals of the St. Louis Jesuits well representing
the conscienceless wickedness of the order. Father Antonio,
for example, is a thief, murderer, and seducer, who amply
deserves the vengeance he suffers for his sins; he is buried
alive tinder a chest of jewels, loot of the Jesuits, in the
2
section of St. Louis called the Prairie du Noyers.
In one of the numerous attacks upon the Jesuits there
is a bitter description of the lavish entertainment at a
dinner of the Jesuit College of St. Louis, and a contrast of
the luxury enjoyed in that place with the mendicant practices
of the monks:
In contrast with their immense collection in
the churches, their going round into all the
families on begging excursions, to support their
institutions and build new churches— their visit
ing the sickbed of the dying parents, to catch a
part at least, of the heirdom of the children or
their coaxing from weak women, or pious simpletons,
a few hundred dollars for pious works . . . was
laid out heavy, but nevertheless very tastefully
worked silver-plate . . . in superfluity. Spark
ling by the side of costly ehinaware. . . .
The first part of the English version was published
in l85l; the whole translation in 1852. A note on p. 163
implies that Boernstein was not himself the translator: "The
translator joins in with the author in his praise of the
German Sunday.f *
2
Heinrich Boernstein, The Mysteries of St. Louis,
part I, pp. 88 ff.
. • • one, who is acquainted with the easy,
worldly tone of these colleges, will readily
understand, that ladies in abundance were not
wanting.- 3
In another place Boernstein puts into the mouth of a
Jesuit the claim* that his order had
thrown the slave question between the South and
the North, and expected to overthrow the Union,
because it was a, haughty asylum of revolutionists
and unbelievers.^"
It is a harsh and vituperative story, but it does not
depend on vituperation alone for the violence of its impact.
It makes use of extremely vivid descriptions of crimes and of
the horrors of the cholera plague of 18^-9. The robbers of
river boats are shown murdering their victims and disembowel
ing their victims before sinking them, so that the corpses
5
shall not rise to the surface. A man who is thought to have
died of the cholera is about to be buried. But a knocking
comes from inside the coffin. The man sits up, asks for a
drink of whiskey and a chew of tobacco, and cheerfully has
6
the hearse-driver take him home. An old woman in a boarding
house with her granddaughter is thought to have died of cholera
she revives and appears for about eight days to be convalescent
3 Ibid.T pt. II, p. 193-
** Ibid., p. 203.
? Ibid., p. 168.
6 Ibid.. pp. 1M+ ff.
but a Jesuit priest so frightens her that her condition becomes
alarming* Her granddaughter runs for the doctor. When the
girl returns, the old Woman has died and been taken away for ,
burial, and the boardinghouse people have precipitately
departed, without even waiting to tell the girl that her
7
grandmother has died.
The book is highly melodramatic, of course, and doubt
less quite unjust to the Jesuits; but its St. Louis is very
real, and no reader at the time of its publication, certainly,
could peruse it with indifference. Copies of the novel are
now rare in either language; there is an oral tradition that
the Catholics tried to suppress it by destroying copies they
could obtain. While the report is unverified, it could well
be true, for the story was unquestionably designed to create
passion.
Whatever the justice or injustice of the attacks on the
Jesuits, which were a conspicuous element in Die Geheimnisse
von St. Louis, the plague scenes have possibly a good deal of
realism in their description of the horrors of what was recent
enough to be still vivid in the memories of survivors. It
was a St. Louis story, and it was intended for St. Louis
people. There was a good deal of fact in it, whatever else
it might contain.
7 Ibid., pp. 13*+ f.
81+
Not many novelists or the time were ready quite to deal
in such eye-on-the-object substance. Four years after the
English version of Boernstein1s novel, Augustin Kennerly*s
romance, The Heiresses of Fotherineav (l8j?6) was published in
St. Louis. It professes on the title page to be "a tale
founded on fact." Whatever that basis of fact may be, the
result is a far cry from the Mysteries. In length and in
complications of the plot this story is reminiscent of the
romances of Sir Walter Scott. Its action begins in the time
of the American Revolution and extends into the early years
of the nineteenth century, covering the lives of two genera
tions of its characters. It provides excitement and suspense
for the reader through use of the elements of adventure within
the enemy lines, sinister conspiracy, apparently insoluble
mysteries, and a long-continued masquerade by two young women
who pretend to be deaf mutes and thus take unfair advantage of
certain young men. Kennerly*s interest in the picturesque
pioneer costumes and in the rugged scenery of the country adds
further suggestion of a debt to Scott. The style is unnatural
and high-flown; instead of standing, people "occupy a spot in
a standing posture"—
Hyne had scarcely endorsed the opinion of his
friend ere both occupied, in a standing posture,
a spot butoa few steps dxstant from the man
spoken of.0
® Augustin Kennerly, The Heiresses of Fotheringay. p. 19*+ •
85
It may have been more suited to the taste of the time than
Boernstein*s manner, but it is somewhat hard for a twentieth-
century reader to bear.
Another book of the same year is not easier. T. Addison
Richards* Tallulah; or. The Trysting Rock, described on the
title page as a romance of the South, is, in fact, a highly
sentimental love story. The volume contains not only the tale
Which provides the title but also five other stories, all senti
mental and melodramatic, and -written in the florid manner char
acteristic of many inferior writers of the time. In the con
clusion of "Jacassee; or II Caponeto,*1 for example, the girl,
Neva, "suffered her fair hand to remain passively in his
9 10
grasp." In "The Phrenologist," two escaped convicts deceive
a whole town and are on the point of marrying wives much too
good for them, but fate and the police intervene. The con
victs are recaptured, and the fair ladies are saved from a
destiny of shame and sorrow.
In 1858 a Philadelphia publisher reissued in one volume
under the title, The Swamp Doctor * s Adventures in the South-
West . two books which had been earlier separately published.
These were Madison Tensas* Odd Leaves from the Life of a
Louisiana "Swamp Doctor" (18^3) and John S. Robb’s "Streaks of
^ T. Addison Richards, Tallulah. p. 190.
10 Ibid*, PP. 193 •
86
Squatter Life and Far-Western Scenes” (18^7). Robb -was a
St. Louis newspaper man. Tensas was a Kentucky and Louisiana
man, rather than a Missourian. But the two books were very
similar in their contents— sketches and tales illustrating
the primitive settlers of the early days and the backwoods in
Missouri, Louisiana, and the West generally. The volume con
taining the two books had, it is said, a considerable and
lasting popularity,3' ' * ' which the modern reader, comparing them
with such stories as The Heiresses of Fotheringav and Tallulah,
will easily comprehend. For they are robust and humorous, and
they deal with a real world even if they do not deal with it
altogether truthfully. If they deviate from fact, the devia
tion is often delightful.
The stories in The Swamp Doctor purport to be histori
cal and biographic, to exhibit characters and to record inci
dents of their times and places, and no doubt in part they do
so. But they strain.credulity; they employ largely the sort
of humor that consists of wild exaggeration. Tensas* story of
his experience with a panther is a typical specimen of his
part in the backwoods record.
According to this narrative the doctor was once riding
through a dense forest, carrying in his pocket some valerian,
J. T. Scharf, History of St. Louis City and County.
II, p. 1J91 *.
an herb of which the domestic cat is fond* A panther followed
the horseman, screaming, and approached nearer and nearer in
spite of the terrified flight of the horse. With a pen-knife
the doctor punctured an artery of his mount, hoping that the
beast of prey would stop and feed on the carcass while he
escaped on foot. But when the horse fell and the doctor
staggered on, the panther followed. Suicide by means of a
bottle of prussic acid appeared to be the only chance of escap
ing death by the claws and teeth of the animal, but pioneer
doctors had to be resourceful men. The panther overtook the
doctor and leaped upon him; he had his bottle of prussic acid
uncorked and ready, and with a desperate motion he emptied it
into the open mouth of the great cat. Then he fainted. When
he recovered consciousness, the panther was dead beside him;
it had in its mouth the pocket of his coat containing the
12
valerian.
In Robb's part of the book the longest tale is the
first, "The Western Wanderings of a Typo." This is the story
of an orphan reared by a kindly shoemaker and his wife; the
boy learned the printer's trade and,wandered into the West,
where he had a series of amusing and sometimes distressing
experiences, each providing its episode for the story. Once
Madison Tensas, and John S. Robb., The Swamp Doctor*s
Adventures in the South-West. pp. 88 ff.
88
he attempted to operate a weekly paper in a small town, where
everybody demanded that he attack a neighboring village, vilify
its editor, and praise his own town. His subscribers took his
paper but never paid for it; and when his rival editor printed
an attack on him, they clamored for a duel— all the more
insistently because the other editor had included in his asper
sions the men, the women, and the pug-nosed babies of the town.
The young newspaper man had become so deeply involved with
the local interests that he had to leave the place in haste
to save his skin.
Others of Robb’s tales and sketches depend for humor on
the boast and the tall tale, or the practical joke, °z* both.
They are commonly embellished with what at this distance
appears an exaggeration of the uncouth backwoods speech. In
”Hoss Allen’s Apology; or, the Candidate’s Night in a Mosquito
13
Swamp,” for example, Allen and his opposing, candidate, Judge
Edwards, are traveling together, making political speeches from
the same platforms. Allen pretends to be sick, and Edwards pro
ceeds alone. Then Allen gets up, has Edwards misdirected into
an unfamiliar swamp road, and himself goes on to Benton, the
town where both are to speak. Edwards cannot find his way
out of the swamp; he spends the entire night there and is
John S. Robb, Streaks of Squatter Life. in The Swamp
Doctor, pp. 70 ff.
89
terribly bitten by mosquitoes* VSien at last he arrives in
Benton, Allen is making a speech which vilifies the judge, and
pretends not to recognize him. Edwards protests the treatment
and is ignominionsly hustled away. Then Allen makes public
apology for his failure to recognize the other candidate,
calling attention to the latter*s swollen face. The homespun
settlers of the "bar" (bear) counties are delighted with Allen’s
jest at the expense of the more polished Edwards, and over
whelmingly elect "Hoss" Allen, who knew how to appeal to the
voters among whom he campaigned. Witness the following
passage:
“Boys,1 * said he, "as an honorable man who finds
himself in the wrong, I am bound to apologise, pub
licly, to my friend Jedge Eddards— the Jedge is a
leetle changed in appearance since we wur last
together, and I did not re-cognise him; I, tharfore,
ask his pardon fur orderin' him off the ground."
“I grant itI" shouted Edwards, glad here to wind
up the apology, then turning round he added, "Come
boys, let us drink friends.”
“Wait a minit, boys,” said Hoss, **the Jedge and
I havin' smoothed that little marter over, I jest
want to tell you why I didn't know him at fust
sight. You all know that the mosquitoes in cedar
swamp are an oreful hungry breed, and when they git
a passenger they present him with numerous 'relief
bills'; well I had gained considerable popularity
in that swamp, by presentin' their condition before
the legislatur' and askin' for relief for the poor
distressed inhabitants,— the Jedge. to head me down
that, passed all last night on a limb of one of the
trees makin' stump speeches to the varmints, and
you can see by his countenance that expectin' to ^
be elected he has accepted all their mosquito billsJ"
llf Ibid., pp. 82 f
90
In this sort of humor, one does not expect to see far
below the surface of frontier life, and indeed one suspects
that the uncouth aspects of that life are exaggerated for a
journalistic variety of entertainment. That it is not accur
ate reporting is suggested, moreover, by other records of men
who saw the same stage of the frontier’s development.
Undoubtedly the “Pike,” a notoriously uncouth type of pioneer,
occurred in sufficient number not only in Missouri but wherever
the frontier pushed westward, but it is more than doubtful that
he constituted the entire population even in the rougher sec
tions. The chief value of work such as Robb's is, perhaps,
to remind the modern reader of such types as the homespun
orator and politician, and to reveal something of newspaper
humor in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Such humor, of course, was not indigenous to Missouri,
but was characteristic of journalists and other writers in
many states. They had, moreover, precedent enough in Dickens
and other English humorists. Often such sketches as those of
Robb and his contemporary, Joseph M. Field of the St. Louis
Reveille, were collected and republished in volumes of
“American humor.'1 Two such books were Field's The Drama in
Pokerville and a collection edited by William.T. Porter under
the title 4 Quarter Race in Kentucky and Other Sketches. Both
were published in Philadelphia in l8*f6, and they were repub
lished in one volume as Ma.lor Thorpe * s Scenes in Arkansas in
91
1858. In A Quarter Race in Kentucky and Other Sketches two
stories are by Field, the others by various newspaper men of
several states in nearly all sections of the country, East,
South, and West. But as far as any individuality in manner is
concerned, they might almost all have been written by the same
hand. And whether the locale is Missouri, Kentucky, Louisiana,
or Arkansas, most of them might have been concerned with the
same people.
Most of the sketches and tales in The Drama in
Pokerville, also, are cut from the same cloth. Nearly all
are farcical; the chief purpose is to exhibit, and sometimes
to satirize, the crudity of tansophisticated types in this
relatively new country. The title story, for example, util
izes the old themes such as the small-town woman* s ambition
for social priority among her unsophisticated neighbors, the
small-town editor's inflated literary style, and the absurd
15
pretensions of the actors in a visiting stock company.
"Establishing the Science" tells of a mesmerist's proving his
16
powers upon a case of feigned rheumatism. "Mr. Nobble"
exhibits an unbelievably henpecked husband accompanying his
17
wife on a sea voyage. A different sort of tale is Field's
^ Joseph M. Field, The Drama in Pokerville. pp. 9 ff.
16 Ibid., pp. 129 ff.
17
Ibid.. pp. 1^9 ff.
92
18
"The Death of Mike Pink,*1 originally published in the Reveille
in 18V 7 to correct a version of Pinkfs death given by Morgan
Neville of Cincinnati in The Last of the Boatmen. Field gives
Charles Keemle of the Reveille as authority for his account of -
the matter. But if for a moment Field seems to have turned
away from the tall tale, the appearance is deceptive. Mike Fink
was a living tall tale while he was drinking, fighting, and
shooting up and down the rivers, and to correct a mistaken
account of his death is merely to keep the most preposterous
of sagas straight.
No account of the fiction of St. Louis in the fifties
would be complete without mention of the works of two women,
Mrs. Anna T. J. Bullard and Mrs. Sally Rochester Ford. Their
works are imbued with high moral and religious purpose. The
newspaper men might laugh at the sins and errors of frail
humanity; these ladies reprehend sin, grieve over it, exhibit
the awful consequences.
Mrs. Bullard's novel, Matrimony, or Love Affairs in Our
Village Twenty Years Ago, avows the purpose
to call the young, especially the Christian profes
sors, to a consideration of the follies which per
vade fashionable circles, and the evik consequences
which certain courses of conduct in love matters are
sure to bring in their train. - * - 9
In accord with this intention, Mrs. Bullard brings to
18 Ibid., pp. 177 ff.
19 Mrs. Anna T. J. Bullard. Matrimony, or Love Affairs
in Our Village Twenty Years Ago, pp. iii f.
light a series of follies, or, at the best, mistakes in judg
ment, such as young people may easily make in the conduct of
their love affairs, A too trusting girl -who believes in the
sincerity of a male flirt falls in love with him; and when
he turns his attention to another girl, she goes into a
decline and dies. A girl whose parents neglect their duties
of supervision elopes with a dissipated man, and within a few
years she is living with a drunken husband and two strangely
attractive children in squalid quarters in New Orleans; she
undergoes the misery of having one of her children buried as a
pauper, A man who has no religion is refused for that reason
by a very sensible young woman, and is obliged to wander deso
lately over Europe seeking relief from his sorrow. A girl
who listens to a Frenchman on the subject of mesmerism and
soul-mates ends in an asylum. The he-flirt is punished by a
wealthy and beautiful young woman who allows him to nurse
false hopes, and disillusions him by appearing with another
young man and a minister at the moment whenJie thinks the girl
is about to marry him. Probably nothing else in the story
could give the reader greater satisfaction than the discom
fiture of this selfish young man. Love was a perilous thing
in those days.
The novel is both pious and sentimental. The single
attempt at humor is in the narrative of a funeral. W a e n the
minister, conducting the funeral of a man whose life had been
9h
somewhat disreputable, reads the lines of a hymn, he mispro
nounces the word ”curse," and seems to be referring to the
"cuss** whose obsequies are under way* The audience is highly
diverted. Mrs. Bullard, it is safe to say, had only the
slenderest gift for humorous writing.
A fair specimen of the style of this book may be quoted
from the reflections of the male flirt, at the moment when he
searches his soul to determine whether he truly loves the
heiress from Boston:
This was the very question he was endeavoring to
solve in his own mind, as he sat picking his teeth
one day after dinner in his office, leaning back
in a most cozy manner in his cushioned arm-chair
with his legs perched upon another in front of
him.20
Such a man should be a valuable object-lesson to those
who are unacquainted with the pitfalls of love.
This novel is not Mrs. Bullard*s sole contribution to
the instruction of the young. In her preface to Matrimony
she mentions the fact that she has previously been known to
readers as 1 1 A Lady,** the author of Louisa Ralston: or. What
Can I Do for the Heathen: of The Wife of a Missionary: and of
21
other unnamed books “designed for Sabbath schools.'*
20
Ibid.. p. ? 6.
21
Ibid., p. iv.
95
22
Mrs, Ford’s novel, Grace Truman. has as serious a
purpose as has Matrimony. In an explanation of her reasons
for writing the book, Mrs. Ford explains that her intention
was to put into the form of a story a complete explanation of
the truth of certain Baptist doctrines, specifically the neces
sity of baptism by immersion and of close communion. Its chief
present interest is probably in its exhibition of the vital
importance which once was, and to some extent indeed still is,
attached to such matters. Correctness of belief in such
articles of faith was a matter of considerably more than life
and death; it was a matter of the eternal salvation or damna
tion of the immortal soul. In Grace Truman it was a matter of
being fundamentally honest or of being the weak character who
would violate his own conscience under the pressure of rela
tives or relatives-in-law. The fact that such a book makes
the world of the author, or of the characters, seem an unwhole
some place does not alter the fact that a great deal of spiritual
distress has had its origin in exactly such convictions as those
which motivate Mrs. Ford's characters.
The story begins on the morning of Grace Truman’s
wedding, at the age of seventeen, to John Holmes. The only
omen of future unhappiness is the fact that the Trumans are
22
Truman is an old name in Missouri, and continues to
be prominent in controversial matters-^at least in A. B. 19^8.
96
Baptists and the Holmeses are Presbyterians* And Grace*s
father-in-law immediately begins an attempt to proselyte his
son*s bride. Grace, however, supported by the immutable
truths of Holy Writ and by the fact that the Presbyterian
pastor is a shifty and dishonest man in.contrast to her own
benign and logical Baptist mentor, not only defeats all efforts
of her husband's relatives to convert her but actually succeeds
in bringing the light of truth to several of those misguided
people*
23
Mrs. Ford was the author of several other books,
and maintained a position as a successful writer for many
years. Nearly thirty years after the publication of Grace
Truman she undertook in The Inebriates to provide instruction
on the shame and sin of drunkenness. This novel begins with
the story of George Maitland, who at the age of ten takes to
drink because his mother, though a Christian, neglects her
family while attending the meetings of fashionable church
organizations. Her later neglect of the church in a pre
occupation with the affairs of fashionable society does nothing
23
On the title page of her Raids and Romances of Morgan
and His Men Mrs. Ford is credited with Grace Truman. Mary Runyan.
Romance of Free Masonry, "etc., etc., etc.1 1 The Raids and
Romances was published in 186U-, and belongs to the literature
of the Civil War. According to Sampson's bibliography Grace
Truman was published in 1852, - The inebriates in 1880. The
former was republished at least once, in l886, and the latter
in 188^.
97
to rectify the evil she has done. Her son grows up, marries
a pure woman, and makes his bride unhappy. After several
years of neglecting both his wife and his business, he kills
one of his two sons by hitting the boy's head against the
mantel-piece. The shock of this experience deranges his
already unstable mind, and he has to be confined in an asylum.
After several years of confinement the unfortunate man escapes,
is given a drink by some misguided kind person, and falls in
front of a train.
The remainder of the book follows the fortunes of
various characters, stringing together a long series of epi
sodes in which drunken people and their miseries serve as
warning to those who have not yet fallen victim to alcohol.
There is for some tastes, perhaps, a degree of relief from
gloom in the love affairs and the successful marriages—
successful unless the Demon Rum ruins them, as it sometimes
does. The purpose of this story, after all, is to demonstrate
the horrors of drink. And in addition to the object lessons
implicit in these tales of grief, the story contains numerous
moralizing passages intended to prove that God is good, Satan
is the author of all evil, and one must not question the
inscrutable ways of Providence.
There is no trace of regional interest in the novels of
either Mrs. Bullard or Mrs. Ford, and no critical taste could
ever have found more than a trace of any other literary
98
interest. But they were not, in fact, primarily literary;
they were designed for moral and religious teaching. They
must have had their popularity. No age has lacked uncritical
tastes.
It is something of a relief to turn from these rather
dreary ladies to Jedediah Vincent Huntington, though he is to
be classified as a Missourian only because he lived a part of
his life in St. Louis, not because he was formed by the state
or ever became assimilated to its mores.
Huntington, born in New York in 1815, was descended
from prominent families of New England and Virginia. He was
educated by private tutors and by an academy which prepared
him for Yale, but he transferred from that university and was
graduated in 1835 from the University of the City of New York.
Later he studied at the University of Pennsylvania, taking a
medical degree in 1 8 3 8. Instead of practicing medicine, how
ever, he studied theology and was ordained an Episcopal minis
ter in 18^1. As early as 1838 he achieved something of a repu
tation as a poet, especially in England, for a sonnet sequence
published in Blackwood1s Edinburgh Magazine. He traveled in
England, became unsettled in his creed, and went to live with
his brother Daniel in Rome. Here he and his wife were con
verted to the Catholic faith. Here also he wrote the novel,
Lady Alice, published in England in 18^9.
After he returned to America he edited a short-lived
99
magazine, the Metropolitan Magazine (Baltimore, l853“5I« - ) and
engaged in the movement to establish an international copy
right agreement. He had thus become a man of some inter
national distinction before he came to Missouri in 1855* Here
he edited the St, Louis Leader, a Catholic weekly, later a
daily with Catholic inclinations. But he was tactless about
such controversial matters as slavery, the crudities of the
frontier life, and other subjects on which the West was sensi-
2*f
tive, and the paper consequently failed.
Of Huntington*s novels, only two can be considered as
belonging to a history of Missouri literature, and they only
as they illustrate what was being written in Missouri in the
period shortly after the Civil War. These are Blonde and
Brunette (1859) and Rosemary, or Life and Death (i860). The
latter was regarded as his best novel, and is an adequate
sample of his work.
Rosemary is a romance arid a mystery story. The open
ing scene is cast in an anatomical dissecting laboratory, into
which is brought a coffin containing the body of a young woman
dressed in her bridal garments and her bridal jewelry. But
it is discovered that the girl is alive and under the influ
ence of some subtle poison which gives the semblance of death.
And the one authority on poisons who knows an antidote for the
p) .
Dictionary of American Biography. IX, p. *f8.
100
substance which has been administered to her is induced by
threats to produce his mysterious little vial and restore her
to health. The story then unfolds a tale of conspiracy to
murder the girl and other members of her family for the sake
of their fortune, a conspiracy which is successfully circum
vented. The great toxicologist and his mistress, who is the
girl's aunt, are exposed and punished. The plot is ingenious,
though it leans sometimes on coincidence, and it taps numerous
sources of melodramatic suspense, some of them ancient enough,
such as the author's medical lore, the hazards of having for
physician the Occident's greatest authority on poisons, doubt
of the heroine's legitimacy, burial alive, the hair-breadth
escape of a living person from dissection, forgery, adultery,
the fear of the supernatural, the hot blood of the ancient
royal Irish O'Morra, and the perils of traffic in a New York
winter of the fifties. The last, at any rate, is a novel
theme.
It was not to be expected that Huntington should, write
a genuine Missouri novel. He was a cosmopolitan who did not
find the West too happy a place. Neither his memories nor
his later experiences were of the kind to turn his pen to
such themes. But about this time another man was getting
ready to do so.
The greatest of all Missouri writers is Samuel L. Clemens,
known as Mark Twain. He is, indeed, one of the major writers
101
this country has produced. The whole civilized world knows
his books, and the whole world knows that he lived in a little
river-bank town on the Missouri side of the Mississippi. His.
literary fame came quickly in his lifetime and promises to
continue indefinitely. In the tiny village of Florida,
Missouri, which is his birthplace, a bust of Mark Twain stands
where a short street crosses the road. In Hannibal, where he
grew up, a statue of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn stands
at the head of a street. The Clemens home is preserved as a
museum, houses connected with his life and with the lives of
characters in his books are marked with bronze tablets, and a
statue of Mark Twain stands on a bluff overlooking the
Mississippi. Tours are arranged for visitors through an
intricate and extensive cave where young Samuel Clemens played
and where some of the characters in his books had adventures.
The facts of Mark Twain’s life— his boyhood in Missouri,
his piloting steamboats on the great river, his friendships
with great and illustrious people at home and abroad, his
lectures, his inability to manage the great fortune he was
able to make, his generosities— these are too well known to
require repetition. From the time of his first books, The
Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867) and Innocents Abroad
(1 8 6 9), people have been perceiving that he is more than a
mere jester, and questioning themselves about how to account
IMfaSrsfCy of Southern California Lib rarj
102
25
for his personality and his mind.
It is now generally recognized that though Mark Twain
is often called "an American humorist," his writing has many
deeply serious purposes. He satirized foolishness and evil
in his own time and in history. In Pudd1 nhead Wilson (189**)
for example, he dissents from the tradition that the small
town is the home of wisdom and virtue. In The Mysterious
Stranger (written in 1898 though not published until 1916)
the nephew of Satan appears superior to the inhabitants of
Eselburg, Austria, which is a probable disguise for Hannibal,
Missouri. And in other books he attacks stupidity, privi
lege, and avarice. In 4 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur1 s
Court (18 89) he satirizes the cruelty and ignorance of times
which had long been romantically glorified. It would be easy
to support the contention that Mark Twain did not himself
regard the humor of his writing as its most important ingredi
ent. According to his own statement he considered his Joan of
27
Arc ( 18 9 6) the finest of all his books. He has created many
merry tales and many imperishable characters; and he has
M. M. Brashear, Mark Twain. Son of Missouri (193^ )9
pp. 3 ff. This book is an excellent study of the scholarship
on Mark Twain.
pZ
Thomas Gates, Social Criticism in Writers of the
West, pp. 60 ff*
Stuart P. Sherman, "Mark Twain," A Short History of
American Literature, p. 26 0.
103
offered a great deal of serious comment on a world which during
much of his life he regarded with a profound melancholy.
A great deal of biographic, and literary scholarship has
been expended on Mark Twain. It has been sought to show that
he never realized his true genius, 'because of the repressive
influence of his mother, his wife, and his friend and literary
28
adviser, William Dean Howells; and other attempts at explan
ation of his underlying melancholy have been made. These
matters are beside the present purpose. He remains a delight
ful figure, when he is delightful, among American writers, and
in a small portion of his work by far the most delightful of
all Missouri writers.
It is in only part of his work that he can be regarded
as a Missouri writer. Most of his mature life he spent not in
his native state but in the East, and it was long after he left
Missouri that in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (18 7 6) and The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (188M-) he wrote about the home
and the people he had known in his boyhood and youth. The
tone of these books is one of delighted reminiscence rather
than the nostalgic melancholy with which writers often remember
their childhood, and the purpose as Mark Twain stated it was
to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they
once were themselves, and of how they felt and
thought and talked, and what queer enterprises
28
Van Wyck>Brooks, The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920).
10b
29
they sometimes engaged in.
He must have succeeded in that purpose; few books, if any,
are better known or more generally loved than these two.
Identification of the St, Petersburg of the stories
with Hannibal, Missouri, or of characters in the stories with
people Mark Twain had known, is not dependent upon inference
or research. The author himself so identifies them. He says
in the preface to Tom Sawyer:
Most of the adventures in this book really
occurred; one or two were experiences of my own,
the rest those of boys who were schoolmates of
mine. Huck Finn is drawn from life; Tom Sawyer
also, but not from an individual--he is a com-
bina-cion of the characteristics of three boys
whom I knew, and therefore belongs to the com
posite order of architecture,3°
And in his Autobiography he gives information about other
characters, and about places where.the events of the stories
occur. Huckleberry Finn was Tom Blankenship, and his father
31
was the town drunk. Injun Joe was a half-breed Indian who
lived in Hannibal, and whom Samuel Clemens’s father once
32
tried to break of the habit of drink. The attempt was
unsuccessful, to the satisfaction at least of Sam. He found
Samuel L. Clemens, "Preface,” The Adventures of
Tom Sawyer, p. iii.
Loc. cit.
^ Mark Twain* s Autobiography. II, p. V?b*
32 Ibid.. II, p. 175.
105
33
the Indian more interesting drunk than sober, Sam's mother,
"fitted out with a dialect," was the original Aunt Polly of
3^
Tom Sawyer. Tom Sawyer's cave was a well-known limestone
35
cave three miles south of Hannibal. But there is no purpose
in multiplying details. It has long been known that Tom Sawyer
and Huckleberry Finn are largely tales drawn from the boyhood
of Samuel Clemens in Hannibal.
Life on the Mississippi ( 18 83) also belongs to the part
of Mark Twain's life while he was still a Missourian. It is
drawn from the period of approximately three years just before
the Civil War when the young man was a pilot on the steamboats
that plied the romantic river. It, too, was reminiscent,
written long after the events of what was probably the gaudi
est if not the most satisfactory part of his life. The river
has always been large in the consciousness of Eastern
Missourians, and never more so than in the great days of
steamboating, the period when Samuel Clemens was piloting.
Every element of society, from the roughest to the most ele
gant, went up and down the river and contributed to the adven
ture, the variety, and the romance of the boatman* s life. And
the pilot who took a boatman's cry, "Mark Twain!" for his
33 Loc. cit.
Ibid.. I, p. 102.
Ibid.. II, p. 215.
106
pen-name had almost as keen an eye for character as had an
earlier traveler who is the father of English humor. He put
to good use the people he saw on the river and those who dwelt
along its banks.
The three books which have been mentioned constitute
Mark Twain’s major contribution to the literature of Missouri
and the West. Pudd1nhead Wilson (189*0 also has its setting
in Missouri, at a fictitious town called Dawson’s Landing,
half a day's journey by steamboat below St. Louis. It is
inferior to the others, though it adds one or two characters
to the gallery of memorable actors in Mark Twain’s stories and
provides an exhibition of the institution of slavery in
Missouri. And again it pictures some of the diverse elements
in a small Western town.
Mark Twain wrote other books; but it is probable that
most readers would agree in the estimate of these four as con
stituting his most distinctive contribution to literature. In
these books, as Professor Walter C. Bronson put it,
he is master of his subject and handles it with
originality and truth; he sketches scenery, cus
toms, social conditions, and human nature (includ
ing boy nature) with a large, free hand, his humor
is fresh and powerful, and his style has the ease
and sweep of the great river itself.3°
In his Autobiography, also, Mark Twain naturally has a
Walter C. Bronson, A Short History of American Litera
ture. p. 29 0.
107
good deal to say about his boyhood and youth in Missouri,
Again one sees what many other writers have shown, not only
the bustle and activity and variety of a small river town, but
the violence and tragedy that were a common element in the
life of even a settled and established small town in the early
part of the century. He mentions some of the things he saw
as a boy in Hannibal: a drunken tramp who was burned to death
37
in the village jail, a poor old man named Smarr who was shot
down in the main street at noonday and who lay gasping and
dying with the weight of a family Bible rising and falling
on his chest, where some pious person had put it for the sake
of the old man*s soul, 33 a young Californian emigrant stabbed
39
with a bowie knife by a drunken comrade, a harmless old
uncle whom his two nephews tried to kill, one of them holding
the old man down while the other repeatedly tried to shoot
l ^G
him with a revolver which did not fire, another Californian
emigrant, intoxicated, who proposed to raid the home of a
respectable widow and her daughter, advanced with ribald and
1*1
obscene shouts, and was shot to death by the widow. These
37 Samuel L. Clemens, Mark Twain1s Autobiography. I,
p. 130,
38
39 Ibid.. I, p. 132,
Ibid.. I, p. 131.
1 + 0
Loc. cit.
Loc. cit.
108
things entered into the dreams of the young Samuel Clemens,
for they were things he saw in what he once described as a
sleepy village. But they are an old story to anybody who has
read the accounts of life in any part of this country while
it was in the path of westward migration. And, to be sure,
there is violence and brutality in the stablest and most per
manently established societies. The difference is in degree.
By no means all the fiction which has grown in Missouri
is the fruit of St. Louis or the other Mississippi River towns.
It has come from many other places. A novel generally asso
ciated with another state but to which Missouri has at least
some claim is E. W. Howe's The Story of a Country Town (1882).
It is a departure from the conventions of village stories
which show the small town as a romantic place, the scene of
contentment and homely virtue with only occasional discordant
elements of evil and poverty. Howe shows the small town as a
place of crabbed, sickly, commonplace men and pale and fretful
women. Most readers probably assume that Atchison, Kansas, is
the town of this story, for Howe was a widely known newspaper
editor associated with that town for many years; but there is
good reason for believing that Bethany, Missouri, where Howe
lived when he was a boy, is the real scene of the action and
that it furnished some, at least, of the models from which
the characters are drawn. There are striking similarities
between personages in the story and some of the people he had
109
b2
known during his Missouri boyhood. It is difficult to
determine how far the depressing treatment of the small town
is uncompromising realism and how far it is merely the hypo
chondria of the author, but certainly Howe's small town is an
unwholesome place*
A very different interest gave rise to two novels by
Hathan Kouns of Jefferson City. Kouns was born in Pulton,
Missouri, in 1 8 3 3, a descendant of people who had come over
with Lord Baltimore. He was educated at home and in a
Methodist college at St. Charles, Missouri, where he was
graduated in 18^2. He became a lawyer, but interrupted his
practice to serve in the Confederate army. After the war he
returned to the practice of law, and in 1886 or 1887 he became
State Librarian at Jefferson City. He had already given his
mind to literature. The two novels, on historical subjects,
are his principal literary achievement.
Of these novels the earlier, Arius the Libyan (1883).
described on the title page as r , a romance of the primitive
church," deals with the life and character of that Arius,
lxp
Thomas Gates, Social Criticism in Writers of the
Middle West, pp. 39 ff. Cf. also Clarice Stout, "A Study of
the Portrayal of the Small Middle Western Town by Edgar Watson
Howe and William Allen White," (Unpublished thesis, The Uni
versity of Southern California), p. ^5*
i f 3
Edwin Wiley, "Biographical Note," prefacing Arius
the Libyan.
\
110
Presbyter of Alexandria, whose name is given to the Arian
controversy— Arius against the Trinitarians. In Book I this
sixteen-year-old Egyptian youth rescues from the sea a mother
and her daughter, pagans of a noble Egyptian family. He con
verts them to Christianity, loves the girl, and plans to
marry her upon the completion of his education for the minis
try. But before that time comes, the girl is martyred in a
fire which destroys also the original manuscript of the Gospel
of John. A copy which she has been making for Arius escapes
destruction and is now in the British Museum, known to
Christendom as the Codex Alexandrinus.
Book II deals with the career of Arius after the death
of Theckla, and with Constantine's seduction of the church
away from its primitive Christianity to the estate of an
established church. The story is partly historical and
biographical, though since the facts of Ariusfs life are not
well known much of the narrative must be regarded as fiction.
Certainly the concern with doctrine and the history of doc
trine is not a fictional matter, but the talk in which much
of the development is accomplished is. A good deal of the
action is accomplished in discussion of philosophical and
theological conceptions, such abstractions as the dual sex-
hood of divinity, the separateness of the Trinity, the
priority of God the Father and of the Holy Ghost before the
Son. Nothing could sound more undramatie, and yet any
Ill
conception has drama in it when it becomes an article of burn
ing faith. There is more of drama in the story than one
would expect.
The second of these novels is Dorcas the Daughter of
Faustina (l88*+) , a tale of fourth-century Rome. It was sug
gested by an ancient tomb in the Catacombs, with an inscrip
tion in Greek which signifies ' ‘ Here lies Faustina, in peace.“
The characters on one side of the slab indicate that Faustina
died a martyr. Like Arius the Libyan. Dorcas exhibits a deep
acquaintance with the history and the thought of the place
and the period represented.
These books are a far cry from the contemporary and
local interests of Missouri life in the nineteenth century;
and no matter how expert the scholarship, they can appeal
chiefly to none but the scholarly and antiquarian taste.
John R. Musick (182+9-1901), a popular author, politician, and
journalist, attempted fictional treatment of historical mate
rial much nearer to the interests of most contemporary readers.
And his works flourished, though they now appear extremely
dull. He was a native of the state, born in St. Louis County.
From 1877 to 1882 he practiced law in Kirksville. After that
period he devoted himself to journalism and popular literature,
which he produced in quantity. His chief works consist of a
series of novels, a series of historical works, and another
succession of books combining the interests of the first two,
112
fiction and history, in the Columbian Historical Hovels. The
first series begins with The Banker of Bedford ( 1 8 8 3) and
ends sixteen years later with Crutches for Sale (1899)* The
fourth of his novels, Brother against Brother (1885), is a
story of the Civil Mar, but an insignificant one.
A. N. DeMenil said of Musick in connection with Nature1s
Noblemen (1897) that the writer’s own horizon was too limited
and his insight too shallow for successful analysis of charac-
ter, and the judgment is probably applicable to all his
work. Stories of Missouri (1897), though included in the
series of novels, is in reality a collection of tales con
cerning the history of the state, selected for the reading
of children, with a purpose of stimulating r , his young readers
to learn more of the great state in which they live,” and
includes, according to Mustek’s own assertion, only tales
which are “typical of the time, characteristics of the people,
and unquestionably true.”1 *'* And at the risk of seeming pedan
tic, one would say that his literary style is well indicated
by the false series in that statement.
He was, nevertheless, a copious and ambitious writer.
A. N. DeMenil, “A Century of Missouri Literature,”
Missouri Historical Review. XV, pp. 110 f.
John R. Musick, Stories of Missouri, p. 6.
113
The Columbian Historical Hovels consist of twelve books, pub
lished in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and con
stitute an attempt to represent the life of America from the
discovery to the Civil War. Musick told DeMenil that he
spent ten years in research for the series and two years in
1 + 6
writing it, a statement which, if accurate, indicates an
incredible speed in composition even for books in which the
workmanship is not too successful.
In Braddock (1893) there is little of General Braddoek,
but there is a routine history of the French and Indian wars
with a scanty addition of fiction having to do with two or
three love affairs. One of these is the story of an Acadian
youth who was separated from his betrothed by the English
eviction of the Acadians. The boy wandered about for three
years, and was at last reunited with his Adrianne through the
assistance of an American cousin. Musick doubtless knew
Longfellow* s Evangeline. but except in the general theme
there seems to be no connection between the two stories. But
even this tale is not Musick* s own fiction. He states that a
similar tale is told in Lossing*s Qur Country.
The historical and romantic elements of Braddock are
not blended or unified. After long stretches of history
having no apparent connection with the romance, one or two
1+6
DeMenil, ojd. cit., p. 111.
of the characters of the love story will appear briefly and
disappear again without much affecting the historical part
of the book. The author says in the preface, indeed, that
he has taken care to keep fact and fiction separate from each
other. It is an odd experiment for a book that purports to
be a historical novel, and the result is dull.
A Century Too Soon (1893) is a story of Bacon*s
Rebellion. Like Braddock and others of the Columbian Hovels
it uses both history and fiction, but it is not a blend of
the two. Large sections of the book deal with the history
of Virginia prior to and during Bacon’s Rebellion (1676).
Other sections deal with the story of John Stevens, who was
married to a beautiful but foolish and extravagant woman.
Stevens goes to England to improve his fortunes, but is cast
away on an uninhabited island with Blanche Holmes, the only
other survivor of the shipwreck. ~0n the island the two live
in chastity for fifteen years. Then Blanche dies.
A few years after the woman's death a Spanish galleon
is stranded in John Stevens's cove, without a crew. All the
men of the ship have been killed or captured by pirates, but
there is still great treasure aboard. Mhen at last Stevens
is rescued and returns to Jamestown, he finds that his wife
has married a Royalist. He does not make his presence known,
but watches over his family and saves them from disaster as
occasion offers. In the end he and his wife are killed
115
while he is taking her ashore from his own ship, the Despair,
through dangerous ice floes. Bacon has died, the rebellion
has failed, Governor Berkeley has killed many rebels; and
John Stevens has left his fortune to his son and daughter,
with the advice that his son keep out of political troubles
and attend to his estates. Musick used other generations of
the Stevens’ family in others of the Columbian Novels.
Musick*s work has to do with matters which are of con
cern to American readers. For the most part it is not regional
literature, though in the Stories of Missouri the concern is
with Musick* s own native state. And whatever, may have been
the esteem in which his novels were held at the time of their
publication, they are now not much more than rather dull
curiosities. There were many of them, and they must have
been received with favor, to be so numerous. Some men have
many an ill book in them; others write one or two good books
and desist.
Thomas Manning Page was one of these. He was born in
St, Louis in 18^1. Mien the Civil War began, he was studying
at Princeton, but he left the university to enter the
Confederate army, and before the end of the war he had begun
his journalistic career with fifteen articles on "Northern
Prison Life" contributed under the pseudonym of Sidney
Harrington to the St* Louis Constitution. After the war he
returned to St. Louis and engaged in manufacturing, but for
116
many years he contributed to several periodicals. He wrote
war sketches for a magazine called the Confederate Veteran.
and beginning in 1867 he contributed frequently to the
St. Louis Times. He also wrote for the Hornet. a humorous
St. Louis publication. His one book was Bohemian Life: or
the Autobiography of a Tramp. It was well received, two
editions being published in St. Louis in 1881 * - , and two further
b?
editions in 1 8 8 6.
And another man who should be better remembered than
he is for one delightful book is the Reverend John B. Monteith.
He was born in Ohio in 1 8 3 3, but came to St. Louis in 1866 to
organize the Pilgrim Congregational Church, and lived in
Missouri until his death in 1918. In 1 8 7 0, because of ill
health, he gave up his pastoral duties and bought a farm of
125 acres at Iron Mountain, Missouri, and lived there long
enough to acquire the knowledge of southern Missouri which
later went into his novel. In 1871 he was appointed to fill
an unexpired term as State Superintendent of Public Schools
of Missouri. In 1879 he became Secretary of the State Board
of Agriculture, and served in that office for two years.
Later he developed Montesano Springs, near St. Louis, and
still later he made his.home in Webster Groves. It was there
that he wrote his novel, Parson Brooks, a Plumb Powerful
^ W. C. Breckenridge, in J. M. Breckenridge. op. cit.T
p. 222.
117
Hardshell, published in St. Louis in 188H-, in an edition of
two thousand copies. All but six copies are said to have
k-8
been sold within three months.
Parson Brooks is one of the most entertaining of all
books on the Ozarks people of southern Missouri. Colonel
Payne, who had been an officer in the Union army, buys
Brookdale, a farm in the region to which Montieth himself has
gone in search of health. In a two-room log cabin at the
foot of the colonel’s estate live Parson Brooks, his wife,
thirteen children, two grandchildren, and Jim Lane, who is not
a member of the family. The parson farms, preaches, and
fights against the disruption of his family*s simple life by
the incursion of city ideas. He rents forty acres of the
colonel’s land for corn, but he will sign no paper; perhaps
he cannot sign his name, though he will give no such reason
for his refusal. He lives up absolutely to the letter of
his agreement, and maintains sternly every right that is his.
He delivers his full rent— a third of the grain— to his land
lord’s bin, but maintains that all the ’ ’roughness,” or fodder,
is his own, since it cannot be delivered in the crib. And
he is asserting a right that any farm renter will assert to
this day, in that region, unless the landlord has specifically
stipulated in the rent contract that not only a third of the
if-8
Ibid., p. 212.
118
grain but also a share of the fodder is part of the rental.
The understanding is as conventional and commonly as tacit as
that the tail goes with the hide.
Mien city friends of the colonel attempt to hunt quail
in the field farmed by Parson Brooks, assuming that it is a
part of their host's land, the parson sternly ejects them,
asserting that while he rents the field it is his property.
And he is ready to protect his title to it with his own gun.
He regards city ways as tricks of the devil, and will have no
contamination of the sort where his authority extends.
One of the parson's firmest convictions is that educa
tion produces sin and unhappiness. Mien somebody proposes
that the school district maintain a school for six months of
the year, he moves in the school meeting to restrict the term
to four months, the minimum then permitted by state law.
When some brash preachers from ‘ 'foreign’ ' parts come into the
community and attempt to organize a Sunday school in the
region, he disliked their pamphlets and their methods. On
the next Sunday he preaches a sermon on the theme, "Yo're
Gwine Tew Faist"— good mountain dialect— and illustrates his
warning with homely metaphors of flood and danger. He
delivers his discourse in an alternation of an earnest natural
voice and a sing-song eloquence that quite wins his Ozarks
audience back to his own hardshell ways.
The parson is sensitive to any slight, or any suggestion
119
of inequality. He allows his daughter, Missouri Brooks, to
work for Colonel and Mrs. Payne on the basis that she is to
"assist” a neighbor. But she is to eat with the Paynes and
not with their servants. When this daughter attracts a
Kentucky lawyer who is visiting the colonel, the parson sees
to it that the girl is disillusioned and that she marries Jim
Lane, who is of the Brooks sort.
Copies of this novel are not easy to find, unfortunately;
but it is one of the best stories of Ozarks character and dia
lect yet written. Monteith drew his characters on living
models, people whom he knew. The original of Parson Brooks
was a man named Campbell Sizemore, and except for Long Jim Lane
the other characters were Iron Mountain people. Jim was not a
man of that village but a man who lived in Glenwood and worked
1+9
on the Iron Mountain Railroad. And Monteith had the talent
that makes living characters from live ones.
The book is more than half a century old, but anybody
who knows the Ozarks native will recognize in this story both
the native and his dialect. One will not meet in the region
at present so many reminders of the Civil War as one meets in
the story; but one will still encounter the conviction that
one is as one was "bawn and raised." Parson Brooks was "bawn
and raised" a "Dimocrat" as well as a hardshell Baptist; and
^9 Loc. cit.
120
such he remains* He is convinced that nobody can grow up
honest and reliable unless he is Mbawn and raised so*M People
still hold that opinion in the Ozarks.
Toward the end of the century two Missouri women
entered upon literary careers of some note. The first of
these is Mrs. Kate Chopin (l85l-1901 4 - ) , born in St. Louis, the
daughter of Captain Thomas 0 1Flaherty, a wealthy merchant.
Her mother was descended from some of the old French families
of that city. After Kate 0*Flaherty was graduated from the
Sacred Heart Convent school, she married Oscar Chopin of
Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, and lived on his plantation
50
there until his death in 1882. Later she became a dis
tinguished writer of Creole tales. Not much of her work
belongs, however, to the development of literature in Missouri.
Her first novel, At Fault (1890), is a St. Louis imprint, and
her mother is drawn as the central character. But it is an
amateurish novel and of little consequence in her own history.
Her later books, Bayou Folk (I891 *) and A Night iji Acadie (18 9 7) ,
for example, which have been much admired, excellent Creole
stories, belong to the history of Louisiana rather than that
of Missouri.
The second of the women mentioned, Mary Alicia Owen,
50
Dorothy Dendore, in Dictionary of American Biography.
IV, pp. 90 f.
121
was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1858, and made her home
51
in that city until her death in 1935* She became a dis
tinguished student of Indian and Gypsy folklore, and was the
author of several books of tales besides other works on folk
lore. But her stories belong primarily not in the category
of fiction but in that of ethnological study, and her work
will be examined in another chapter. More pertinent here is
the work of a man who had a peculiarly intimate acquaintance
with a phase of Western life which has attracted a wide variety
of writers; namely, the steamboat life on the Mississippi.
John Henton Carter was at one time a pastry cook on
the river boats. Later he became a writer of dialect verse
and stories, and for twenty-five or thirty years after about
i860 he published Commodore Rollingnin1s Almanac, appealing
by whimsical and humorous sayings to a large circulation.
Toward the end of the century about a dozen of his books
52
were published in St. Louis. They are not addressed to a
critically exacting audience, but they have at least the
merit of well drawn characters and of language homely and
to the point.
Of these books The Man at the Wheel (18 98) is a good
specimen. It is a collection of short sketches and narratives,
^ Who Was Who in America. I, p. 925-
DeMenil, op. cit., pp. 100 f.
122
some of them humorous, some of them tales of the violence and
excitement and strange experiences of life on the river. The
title character and the narrator of most of the stories is an
old Mississippi River steamboat pilot. In one story he speaks
of Mark Twain, who, he says, was never much of a pilot and was
always running over something and getting the boat into trou
ble. He would go miles out of his way to hit a snag. He was
always racing other boats and getting off the river into some
other stream in the attempt to take a short cut through a
chute. Once he took a steamboat twenty miles up the Vfhite
River before the mate came up and told him where he was. The
captain was asleep, and Mark Twain was able to turn the boat
about and get back to the Mississippi before the blunder was
53
discovered.
One of the humorous sketches, “Timely Aid,” tells of a
mild-eyed, depressed-looking man who sat on a St. Louis land
ing and looked so thoroughly miserable that a kind-hearted
preacher gave him some money and inquired into the nature of
his distress. The man said that he was well, that he was not
grieving over the loss of loved ones, but that he had been
wishing all day to try his strength on a weight-lifting
5H-
machine. The preacher’s gullibility had relieved his misery,
53 John Henton Garter, The Man behind the Hheel. pp. 11 ff.
^ Ibid., pp. l*+7 ff.
123
and soon he was the center of an admiring crowd around the
machine for which he had been languishing.
The Ozark Post Office (1899) is a more ambitious book
than The Man behind the Mieel. It is a story with its setting
in a small country town and on an Ozarks valley farm. It is
no such tale as Parson Brooks, but like others of Carter's
stories it exhibits the author's interest in the region and
its picturesque people. These books seem to reflect also the
personal eccentricity which led Carter to appear at times
elegantly dressed and at other times as disreputable as a
tramp.55 There is not much depth in his stories but there is
a kind of gusto which gives them liveliness. Men with
greater learning and perhaps more earnestness of purpose have
done worse.
One of them was James Newton Baskett, born in Kentucky
in 18^-9, brought to Missouri when he was about eight years
old. He was graduated from the University of Missouri, became
a surveyor and engineer, and later achieved some distinction
in the study of vertebrate anatomy. In addition to various
scientific works he wrote three novels, At You-All1s House
(1 8 9 8), As the Light Led (1900), and Sweetbriar and Thistle
down (1 9 0 2)•^
55 DeMenil, op. cit., p. 101.
5^ Loc. cit.
12k-
In At You-All1s House Baskett undertakes to do for
Missouri 'what other -writers of regional literature had already
done for New England, California, and other sections of the
country. On the thread of a sentimental love story he strung
many bits of information concerning the habits of Missouri
birds and animals, the methods and practices of Missouri
farmers, and the attractions of Missouri landscapes and
seasons. His knowledge of such matters is intimate, even
subtle 5 he knows the behavior of a farmer1s hunting dog, and
he knows the behavior of a mule colt that attempts to leave
its mother and follow another horse. The purpose was commend
able, and the author had made a good deal of minute and
accurate observation of the things he wished to weave into
his story. But he lacked skill in the art of fiction. Pas
sages of scientific ornithological lore and of philosophical
learning come unconvincingly from the mouths of Missouri rus
tics. Baskett*s representation of the dialect, moreover,
suggests either an incomplete acquaintance with the vernacular
of the region or an unsuccessful attempt at phonetic reproduc
tion.
As the Light Led attempts less of instruction in matters
of farm life, but exhibits something of the distress which not
only in Missouri but doubtless in all sections of the country
was once the consequence of differences in religion, i&iile
faith was still belief and communicants knew the contents of
125
their creeds, it was a double sorrow for a husband and a wife
each to know that the other was doomed for mistaken tenets.
The degree of vagueness which has come upon Protestantism has
at least made it since Baskett*s day more comfortable for the
Presbyterian to kiss the Baptist and the Methodist to lie down
by the Campbellite.
Sweetbriar and Thistledown exhibits the possible uplift
ing and improving influences of simple rural life upon a girl
reared among the artificialities and complexities of the
57
city. It is a theme which in a time when people had been
reared on the Victorian sentimentality was certain to be
treated sentimentally. And all Baskett*s fiction is senti
mental. Distinction in science is no assurance of excellence
in artistic writing.
Nor is success in the insurance business, as Henry M.
Blossom, Jr., of St. Louis adequately demonstrated. Litera
ture was with him an avocation. He was the author of a con
siderable number of„plays and comic operas, none of which con
tribute to the literature of the region. His novel, Checkers
(1 8 9 6), which was also made into a play, is a light, rather
melodramatic story of a race-track habitue and professional
gambler who derives his nickname from a suit of gaudy clothes.
"Checkers** befriends an intoxicated stranger in a New Orleans
^ Ibid.. p. 122
gambling house, sobers him up in a hotel, prevents him from
losing his money, takes him home to Clarksville, Arkansas, and
goes to work in his father’s store. Then Checkers inherits
money, marries the sweetheart of the man he had befriended,
and settles down to a respectable life. His idyll is destroyed
by the death of his wife and the avarice of her father, 1*10
takes advantage of Arkansas law to get possession of Checkers'
fruit farm. Checkers returns to his old life of gambling; but
when his father-in-law writes that he has not much longer to
live and is ready to give up the fruit farm, Checkers returns
to Arkansas; he is weary of the life he has been leading, and
the better elements of his character are at last called forth
by the memory of his wife. It is a more or less absurd story,
and, of course, is not regional literature farther north than
Arkansas. Its chief merits are a glib style and some realistic
race-track scenes.
One of the most prolific of Missouri novelists was
John Breckenridge Ellis of Plattsburg. He was born near
Hannibal, Missouri, in 1870; he was educated at Plattsburg
College, and for some years was a teacher of English litera
ture in that institution and in Christian College at Albany,
Missouri. His first novel, In the Days of Jehu, was published
at St. Louis in 1 8 9 8. In 1902, already the author ,of half a
dozen or more published books, he gave up teaching and turned
127
58
to writing as a profession. He prosecuted that occupation
so successfully that besides various travel books, a biogra
phy or two, several songs of which he composed both words and
music, and miscellaneous other works, he is the author of a
score or more of novels and romances. He knows few limita
tions in range of character or setting; action, mystery, danger,
and intrigue are his ingredients, and sentimentality and well-
worn moral!zings are his spice.
Something Else. for example, is a melodramatic romance
with New York City for its scene. Its characters are almost
innumerable and quite incredible.
In The Little Fiddler of the Ozarks (1913) Ellis util
izes a regional lure that has attracted many writers; but the
result is a combination of Victorian sentimentality and melo
drama reminiscent of the Marie Corelli tradition. In spite
of the title and the setting it suggests, he has imported
some of his principal characters from the wicked outer world.
Giles Gradley has deserted his wife for his secretary; his
wife has gone insane. The paramour, known about the country
side as Beautiful Woman— a preposterous bit of Ozarks nomen
clature— is cruel to Giles's daughter, making her sleep in
the barn and addressing her as "Servant," but this pious
daughter stays near and bears her sorrows in order to win her
^ Who1s Who in America. XX, p. 8 3 2.
128
father back to his better self, and to his insane wife. The
tale ends spectacularly with Beautiful Woman dead in an under
ground stream, one lovely arm protruding through a crevice in
the rocks and waving about in the flowing water. Giles is
converted and his soul reclaimed, his wife has recovered her
sanity, and their daughter is married.
The narrative exhibits no familiarity with the scene it
purports to represent, except the knowledge that in the Ozarks
there are hills and streams and the people are quaint. It
even improves upon their quaintness with a dialect such as
never was on sea or land, and with a procedure intended to
drill an oil well but which would infallibly have resulted
in the digging of a mine.
Lahoma. another novel of the same year, is a tale of
the outlaw days in the Indian Territory. Even in that rough
place the touch of a little child can regenerate a murderous
outlaw. In Fran (1912) another daughter saves her father
from another secretary and restores him to his better self
after he has been absent from it for about twenty years.
These novels are not the literary fare for readers who
are exacting in their demands upon motivation or critical in
matters of literary art. But for readers who like excitement
seasoned with pure daughters, wicked secretaries, strong men
gone astray, and miscellaneous disasters which only Providence
can avert, here is gratification in quantity.
129
Winston Churchill (1871-19^-7) was a native of St. Louis
who became one of the country's most popular novelists. But
he did not remain a resident of Missouri, and little of his
work has any connection with the literature of the region.
Such claim as the state has in his long and honorable literary
career rests upon one novel, The Crisis (1901). Like its
predecessor, Richard Carvel (1899)> The Crisis was a histori
cal story with a war background. The former dealt with the
American Revolution, the latter with the Civil War. The set
ting for much of the action of The Crisis is St. Louis, and
the fine descriptive passages retain their interest better
than the somewhat inane love story which motivates the action.
Churchill wrote other novels which were well received;
for examples, The Celebrity ( 18 9 8), Mr. Crewe's Career (1908),
A Far Country (1915), and, to go back a bit, The Crossing
(190*0. The last named was also a historical novel, covering,
a period of about fifteen or twenty years before the Revolution
and dealing with somewhat less familiar events than those of
the war stories. This is a story of those characters who
crossed unsettled territory, as if it were an uncharted sea,
in the movement westward toward Kentucky. But these are the
stories of the life of America, not of Missouri, and they are
the work of a man who was no longer a Missourian.
Churchill was a popular novelist rather than a great
one, and his work is likely now to seem somewhat old-fashioned
130
and not very exciting. There are matters of interest in them,
historical figures that ought not to be forgotten, places of
which the names once evoked strong memories and emotions, bits
of description— in The Crisis, for example, the river-bank area
of St. Louis, and the herd of mules thundering down the muddy
street; but Churchill’s name is not likely ever again to be an
important one among American story-tellers.
Another native of St. Louis who once had greater popu
larity than he has retained was Roswell Martin Field (1851-
1919)9 the brother of Eugene Field. He is in reality derived
more from New England than from Missouri, for both his parents
were of New England ancestry and when his mother died in 1856
he and Eugene were sent to live with relatives in Vermont and
Massachusetts. He was educated in Phillips Exeter Academy and
the University of Missouri, and studied law in the office of
an uncle in Vermont. Upon the death of his father in 1869 he
inherited an assured income, and soon put an end to his formal
education. Then he went into journalism. He worked, generally
in an editorial capacity, in San Francisco, St. Louis, and
Kansas City. Later he worked for papers in New York and
Chicago. For about fourteen years he conducted a column
called “Lights and Shadows” in the Chicago Post.
His chief works of fiction were several novelettes pub
lished in the early years of the twentieth century. As might
be expected from the diversity of Field’s experience, much of
131
his work was not regional literature of the West. Some of it,
like The Romance of an Old Fool (1902) is New England in set
ting and in the characterization. Some of it is indeterminate
in setting. The Passing of Mother * s Portrait (1901), for
example, is concerned with the theme of a family’s loss of
its family life, along with its sincerity and its appreciation
of true values, as it becomes more successful, more fashion
able, and more strongly convinced of the importance of wealth.
The Bondage of Ballinger (1903) and Little Miss Dee (190*+) are
conventional stories which show how young love goes hand in
hand with antique virtue. Madeline (1906) is a little allegor
ical tale on the joys of the bibliophile. The setting is rela
tively unimportant in such stories. But an earlier book, In
Sunflower Land. Stories of God’s Own Country (1892) consists
of sketches of farm and village life in Kansas and Missouri,
generally sentimental little tales but exhibiting touches of
humor and realism. And these tales constitute his real con
tribution to the literature of the region.
Roswell Field was overshadowed by his more famous
brother, and doubtless rightly so. He was a pleasant and
skillful writer, however, a good deal more serious in tempera
ment than Eugene— whom he reproached for always trying to be
EjQ
humorous— and his brief novelettes still hold charm for
^ Dictionary of American Biography. VI, p. 371*
132
the mildly sentimental and leisurely reader*
Another newspaper man who, like Roswell Field, spent a
part of his professional life in Missouri and wrote one book
that belongs in the tale of Missouri novels was Eugene P.
Lyle, Jr. He was born in Texas in 1 8 7 3, but was brought to
Kansas City when he was six years old. He was educated in
the Kansas City schools and in the University of Michigan.
After his graduation he was for about three years a member
of the editorial staff for the Kansas City Times. Later his
journalistic life led him to a varied career in his own coun
try and in Mexico and Europe. He is the author of a consider
able number of novels and short stories published in magazines
60
or written for the motion pictures.
The first of these, The Missourian (1905), is the only
part of his work which is pertinent to the present study.
This novel is a swiftly moving and romantic historical tale
of Mexico and Maximilian's attempts at empire. The chief
character is Din Driscoll, a Missourian in the army of General
Joseph Shelby, that command which at the end of the Civil War
could not desist from fighting and would not surrender.
Instead, they went to Mexico with an offer of support for
Maximilian in return for an opportunity to make homes for
themselves outside the United States. The world knows, of
Who1s Mho in America. XX, p. 1582.
133
course, the outcome of Maximilian's unhappy enterprise. The
novel gives a picture of the incompetence of Maximilian him
self and of the intrigue and treachery among many factions in
the Mexican struggle. The next most lasting impression from
the story is that of the hard and reckless gallantry charac
terizing several Missourians in Shelby's army. It is a vigor
ous story and skillfully written.
Among those writers who were transiently Missourians in
the early part of the twentieth century and who contributed
something to this state's literary legend, perhaps Harold Bell
Wright should not be forgotten. His name was once one to con
jure with among the readers of popular books. He was not a
Westerner but a native of New York who from 1897 to 1907 held
pastorates in several Kansas and Missouri churches. His first
novel, That Printer of Udell* s (1903), was published while he
was stationed in Pittsburg, Kansas $ the seconds The Shepherd
of the Hills (1907) , while he was at Lebanon, Missouri.
They were tremendously popular at the time, but today they
are almost unbearably sentimental and moralistic. If any
thing in them retains interest now, it is the description of
certain picturesque scenes and perhaps some of the earthy
secondary characters.
But to this day the region of southern Missouri which
61 Ibid., XX, p. 2736.
13^
is the setting of one of Wright’s novels is designated by
the name of that book— the "Shepherd of the Hills Country."
Newspapers occasionally report the death of somebody said to
have been the original of a character in the novel, or the
destruction of an old log house in which some such character
lived. When a moving picture was based on the story some
years ago, great indignation arose in certain parts of
Missouri because of what had been done to character and
setting. These occurrences are echoes of an esteem which
the story once had rather than evidence that it is held in
any great regard among many current readers, but they are
echoes of a very considerable local esteem.
In 1907 Harold Bell Wright left Missouri to become
pastor of a church in Redlands, California. About a year
later he retired from the ministry and devoted himself to
fiction, adding enough books to his list to bring the total
62
to nearly a score, but those published after The Shepherd
of the Hills are not relevant to the literary development
of Missouri. And that book, among the discerning, does
little for her intellectual self-respect.
Several novelists of current national reputation have
spent portions of their lives in this state, sometimes leav
ing it for more cosmopolitan surroundings, without finding in
^ Loc. cit.
135
it much of the material for their fiction, Fannie Hurst, for
instance, is a native of St. Louis and a graduate of Washington
University, but except for occasional unimportant bits— such
as a few scenes in Anitra1s Dance (193*0 , showing a discon
tented woman living in St. Louis— she has not made literary
use of her native state. Most of her mature life has been
spent elsewhere. Rupert Hughes, likewise, is a native of
Missouri, but he was educated in Western Reserve University
and Yale, and not much of his work has to do with Missouri.
It is possible that The Old Home Town (1926) is somewhat
influenced by his boyhood experiences there, but the setting
might equally be any anonymous small town in any Middle-Western
state.
The case of Homer Croy is different. He was born in
1883 near Maryville, Missouri, and grew up in that region.
After his graduation from the Maryville high school, he
attended the University of Missouri and developed something
of a literary reputation among the students there. He had
ambitions to become a humorist, and succeeded in selling some
contributions to Judge, and the old Life. J After a period
of working on newspapers, country and city, he made a trip
around the world, taking motion pictures. Then he entered
^3 jean Elsie Taylor, Main Currents of Regional Litera
ture in the Lower Middle West from l870 to 1927. pp. 231 ff#
^ Who1 s Who in America. XX, p. 668.
136
upon a career as a writer of realistic novels, drawing his
material largely from his own early impressions of Maryville
and its vicinity. He has had considerable popularity, and
though his work has not attained the highest excellence, it
has some effectiveness, particularly in the representation of
the spirit of village life and in the treatment of village
types.
Boone Stop (1918), Croy’s first novel, was the precur-
ser of a long series which work the same vein. They may
depart from the village setting; a man of the Middle West who
has visited Paris is likely to want to write about that city,
and Croy yielded to the temptation to do so in They Had to See
Paris (1927)? which became Will Rogers's first talking picture.
And a man who has seen Hollywood sometimes desires to put that
fact on paper. But wherever Homer Croy’s stories go, they
are likely to take with them a small-town woman who feels
that she has married beneath herself; and they will take a
rough but noble husband who does not share his wife's ambi
tions and who goes into a dress suit only through a loading
chute. Perhaps Homer Croy knew these people in Maryville;
even so, they are not his best Missouriana.
He has done better in West of the Water Tower (1923),
which is probably as well known as any of his novels and is
typical of his methods. The scene is Junction City, Missouri,
a thin disguise for Maryville. Several characters are of
137
interest; Guy Plummer, a callow youth; his father, a stern
and bigoted old preacher; ”Bee” Chew, the high-school belle;
and Bee’s father, the town’s leading lawyer and free-thinker.
Guy Plummer distinguishes himself on the night of his high-
school graduation by making an oration which is incredibly
impressive to the townspeople. In spite of his pious father’s
orders, he associates with the family of the infidel Chew, and
has a love affair with Bee. In desperation, then, he robs an
office to provide money for Bee’s trip to Kansas City, where
she intends to visit an aunt and have an abortion. But Bee
stays in Kansas City and bears her baby, and then returns with
it to Junction City. Guy becomes anathema in the town for
seducing the girl, and serves a term in jail for robbery. His
father, stricken by conscience, confesses to his congregation
that he once ruined a girl and that, therefore, Guy’s sin is
his. He loses his church, becomes a house painter, and in
time becomes a more human personality than his sternness had
permitted him to be.
After Guy’s release from jail he is repeatedly dismissed
from employment, through persecution by moral women, but at
last he settles down in the office of the Poland-China Breeders’
Association, ironically recording breeding data on boars and
sows. Dessie Arnhalt, older than Guy, pious, and moustached,
takes him up, craftily works for his rehabilitation in the
town, and is about to marry him. But Bee returns, after an
138
absence of some years, and Guy jilts Dessie, again bringing
the wrath of the town upon himself. But Dessie marries
another man, the town remembers Guy’s oratorical skill when
it needs a persuasive man to influence a political board which
may route a road through Junction City, and Guy at last wins
a place in the respect of his neighbors* Both he and Bee Chew
have matured somewhat, and they are growing toward a more
intelligent companionship than they might have known without
suffering.
A good deal of the character drawing in this story is
not too profound, but there is considerable realism in the
small-town life shown here, at least in superficial aspects
of the pettiness which has been somewhat fashionable in novels
dealing with the American small town. Small towns have their
pettinesses and futilities and moralities; much of mankind
possesses these defects. But they are not the whole story of
small or other towns, and it is not true realism that sees so
little else as Homer Croy perceives in his villagers. It may
well be that the treatment of such aspects of village life
has been a salutary thing in American literature, and yet
when an unruly horse has been beaten to death, little is to
be gained by continued flogging.
Croy has continued the flogging. R. F. D. No. 3 (192^)
is a somewhat similar treatment of folly and vanity. Jessie
Decker, the silly daughter of a silly mother, makes somewhat
more than a fool of herself before she perceives the true
merit of her unpretentious father and of a strong, coarse,
vital farmer who is willing to marry her without even an objec
tion to the illegitimate child she is going to bear* The
nobility of such men, and the social aspirations of silly
women, are among the most recurrent themes in Croy’s work.
It is a vein which can be frequently worked, and it provides
the material for a good deal of humor, particularly the
unwholesome humor tinged with contempt, Homer Croy has
worked it with some diligence*
One other novelist deserves attention in the history
of Missouri fiction* Rose Wilder Lane was born in Dakotah
Territory in 1 8 8 7, but came to the Ozarks with her parents
when she was seven years old. She has traveled widely and
has spent several years in Europe, but has made her home much
of the time on a farm near Mansfield, Missouri. She has
written many short stories and novels, sometimes utilizing
the Ozarks for her settings. ^ Of her novels, Hill-Billy
(1925), Cindy (1928), and The Old Home Town (1935) belong to
the category of Ozarks fiction, though it is doubtful that
the sophisticated Mrs. Lane has succeeded in grasping pro
foundly the nature of the Missouri mountain people.
Hill-Billy is a good representative of this part of
65
J Vance Randolph, £n Ozark Anthology, p. 2 3.
l*+0
Mrs. Laners work. It is the romantic story of a mountain boy,
Abimelech Noah Baird, who becomes a lawyer and advances
against the political power and trickery of the unscrupulous
Haswells of the comity seat. He becomes a member of the legis
lature and develops a reputation far and wide for his polished
oratory, though he retains the homely language of the hills
for his family and for use on informal occasions. He is
shrewd, and his principles are high and honorable, though he
sometimes makes trickery and perjury serve the purposes of
justice. The paradox is the author’s, fefhen Baird is a young
man, he sympathizes with the distress and admires the valiance
of a girl whom some other man has seduced; he is about to
marry her, but is saved from this self-sacrifice when one of
the Haswells marries her to spite Baird. One suspects that
in arranging this marriage for the Haswell Mrs* Lane is dis
charging the obligation of the romanticist to preserve from
serious harm her magnanimous hero.
A gallantry somewhat similar to Noah Baird's motivates
66
Myel (short for Ishmael) in the short story, "Paid in Full."
Myel allows himself to be sentenced to the penitentiary in
the stead of another member of his family because he does
not wish to rake up an old scandal.
^ Ibid.< pp. 25 ff. Reprinted from the Country
Gentleman. May. 1931*
lJ+l
It is difficult to determine, sometimes, whether a
writer who grows romantic about the mountaineers of the Ozarks-
or of other mountains— has actually known these people well
and felt their charm, or whether he has known them only super
ficially and felt the charm of stories written about them.
One suspects that in stories like those of Mrs, Lane the
noble savage has reappeared in the literature about these
backward people, somewhat to the detriment of realism, and
that the evil characters are possibly truer to fact than are
the admirable ones. Such a suspicion is, of course, debatable,
and one need not settle the question. In any case, Mrs, Lane
has had a considerable reputation among readers whose literary
tastes are not altogether frivolous.
It is not the purpose of this study to trace the his
tory of Missouri literature beyond the year 1930* To a con
siderable extent, of course, such distinctive traits as the
people and the literature of the state may once have had— and
they were doubtless real— have long been assimilated into the
larger pattern of life and literature of the Middle West and
of the whole country.
But in the eighty years which come within the purview
of the present chapter, a great deal of fiction has been
written by Missourians, and much of it has been published
within the state. It is natural that St. Louis should hold a
predominant position in this literary production, since it is
Ib2
the largest and the oldest city in the state, and since the
character of its settlement was favorable to the cultivation
of intellectual interests. But other cities and towns and
villages all over the state have had their part in contribut
ing to the growth of fiction in Missouri.
Much of the fiction written by Missouri authors in the
period had its genesis not in the life of the state but in the
general literary traditions of the English language, particu
larly in the Victorian literature of England. Such derivation
was to be expected; it was the case of much American litera
ture. But a great part of this fiction found its material in
Missouri and the people of Missouri. There were tall tales of
pioneer life, stories of town and country people, stories of
the Civil War— these so numerous that they have been left for
examination in another chapter. The most distinctively
Missourian themes are probably those of the Ozarks stories and
of the tales about the Mississippi River, and about the people
who live along its banks. And if one were to choose the three
or four most delightful novels written by Missourians, they
would probably be books on the Ozarks and on the life along
the Mississippi: specifically, Monteith's Parson Brooks and
Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer. Huckleberry Finn, and Life on the
Mississippi. Unfortunately the first, Monteith's Ozarks story,
is available to few readers. Mark Twain's works are known to
everybody who reads the fiction of the English language.
I*f3
Much, of the fiction written in Missouri has fallen
below the level of enduring literature. So have many of the
stories written by any people. The fact is not to be too much
lamented. It is wholesome that the imagination should stir
and look about, even if it should see not too clearly and not
too far below the surface. Missouri has had, in fact, a varie
gated and exciting history, and it is wholesome that Missourians
should be moved to tell its story.
CHAPTER IV
POETRY IN THE MISSOURI HINTERLAND: 1850-1900
In the latter half of the nineteenth century Missouri
writers composed an astonishing number of books of verse* If
the rough and uncouth frontiersman was the typical Missourian
somewhat earlier, he was so no longer. A list of the books
of verse written in the state might suggest to the casual
reader, indeed, that in the second half of the century
Missourians were a singularly literary and even poetic people.
This impulse to rhyme sprang up in many parts of the state;
and poetry was not only written but published in numerous
small towns. The present chapter will deal with poetry
which appears during this period in what.may.be termed the
hinterland of Missouri.
It is to be remembered that in Missouri as in other
parts of the American West the new settlers were not all
Daniel Boones, Jim Bridgers, and Mike Finks, and that from
the earliest days of the westward migration people of educa
tion and of some literary taste accompanied the cruder pio
neers. By the middle of the century the population was by
no means illiterate or unread. And it is to be remembered
that in any literate society the books produced far outnumber
those which will be remembered a few years after their publi
cation.
lW
1^5
Much of the copious verse written in Missouri is not
poetry of a high order* The state had one native son of the
period whose poems won, and have retained, general recogni
tion. He was Eugene Field. Other writers were not without
merit. But in general the Missouri poets were like the
unknown versifiers everywhere, amateurs, people..who leered or
simpered at the muse in their spare time, earnest souls with
familiar moral lessons to teach,.patriots or partisans of this
cause or that, persons who admired the poems of Longfellow,
Poe, or Scott, and who imitated such.models. 1 One does not
know whether he is a poet, after all, until he has blunted a
pen. Sometimes one never knows.
Patriotism, religion, and the conduct of life are,
naturally, frequent themes. The Civil War inspired consider
able composition which is to be examined in another chapter.
Occasional historical events with emotional implications have
their historians and their spokesmen. The agitation for local
option in 1 8 8 7, for example, is responsible for a good deal
of temperance verse, of which the following lines are perhaps
a fair sample:
1 M. M. Brashear, ’ ’ Missouri Verse and Verse Writers, ’1
Missouri Historical Review. XVIII, pp. 335 ff» Miss Brashear
quotes numerous unmistakably imitative passages. Innumerable
others could be collected.
Ik6
0 Whiskey, whiskey— *Tis a curseI
Both to the health and to the purse;
For nothing is or can be worse
Than whiskey,2
But no classification of subjects can be exhaustive; Missourians
wrote in this period, for better or worse, on practically every
matter known to man. And except for treatment of historical
subjects, there is no discernible difference between the verse
of the first part of the period and that of the last. It is
a convenience to classify writers and their work more or less
chronologically, but only for the sake of order, not for any
real significance as to literary style or development.
It is a convenience, also, to classify them according
to the section of the state in which writers lived and wrote.
Some attempt has been made, indeed, to show that numerous
cities and towns were intellectual and literary centers of
the population,^ but that conclusion is open to serious doubt.
Perhaps such cities as St. Joseph and St. Louis are properly
so regarded; but the presence of Martin Bice, writing long
poems about old settlers’ reunions, does not make the village
of Lone Jack an intellectual center. Bor does the presence
of a newspaper editor in Higginsville, writing great quantities
of doggerel, printing and binding it in his own shop, signify
2 Ibid., p. 33?•
3 Ibid.. p. 317.
]J+7
that Higginsville is more literary than another town in which
the editor wrote no doggerel. Except in the southern part of
the state, where the creative impulse appears to have remained
fairly quiescent, the desire to write poetry is, in fact,
sporadic and unpredictable except when it is related to the
presence of one of the small colleges and academies which
existed at the time. These institutions were doubtless in
some degree intellectual centers, and from them comes some
part of our verse— but by no means all or even most of it.
The popular ballad has in Missouri, as in all America,
an unbroken tradition coming from the English and Scotch
ballads. In addition to those ancestral songs, a considerable
number of ballads have been collected in Missouri dealing with
events of the country at large— on the Revolution, on the War
of 1 8 1 2, on the gold rush of l8*+ 9, on the life of the cowboy—
and others dealing with indigenous subjects. Of these latter,
some have to do with Missouri*s part in the Civil War, some
with the outlaw, Jesse James, who was probably next to
Mark Twain the most famous son of Missouri, and others with
crimes or disasters which were of note in their day. "The
Meeks Family Murder,” for example, celebrates a crime which
occurred in 189^, and for which one of the murderers was
hanged in 1 8 9 6. ' ’ Maxwell’s Doom" has to do with a murder
which occurred in St. Louis in 1885* "The Iron Mountain Baby"
tells the story of an infant.which was thrown from a train near
3A8
Irondale in 1902, and found and reared by a fanner in the
neighborhood. The "Brush Creek Wreck" deals with the wreck
of a railroad train in Macon County in lS8l. "The Burning of
the Bayou Sara" recounts the story of a steamboat disaster
which happened at New Madrid in 1885. There are also ballads
of social satire, such as "Bill Stafford" and "Texan Boys."
Of all the ballads belonging to the Missouri tradition,
the one which was probably most widely known appears not to
have been composed in Missouri but somewhere in the Par West.
This is the "Joe Bowers" ballad, the song of the "Pike," as
the Missouri emigrant especially was called. Other travelers
to the Far West in the middle of the nineteenth century were
often given the same nickname, probably because there were
Pike counties in Illinois and Indiana as well as in Missouri,
and many of the migrants, when asked where they came from,
would reply, "Pike County." The term, "Pike," came to mean
both a Missourian and an uncouth,, rough, poverty-stricken
person whose appearance and habits were the jest and the dis
gust of those who applied the title.
The authorship of the "Joe Bowers" ballad has been
attributed to various writers. Prominent among them are
if
H. B. Belden, editor, "Ballads and Songs," University
of Missouri Studies. Vol. XV, No. 1, January 1, I9H0 , pp. *+01 ff.
This is a fine collection of ballads which have been gathered
in the state by the Missouri Folk-Lore Society.
l*+9
Mark Twain, though he did not go west soon enough to be its
author, a man known to the miners as "Squibob,** and a variety
actor and singer, named John ¥oodward. The fact appears to be
that its original authorship cannot be determined. It has
variant versions like the true folk ballad, and was probably
composed by some unknown Pike who sang it up and down the
mining camps of California in the gold-rush days— it existed
at least as early as the early fifties— and it probably went
through the folk process of alteration by numerous unknown
5
singers*
The ballad tells the tale of a Pike who left his girl,
Sally Black, back in Pike County when he went, to California,
and who in time received a letter from his brother Ike inform
ing him that Sally had married a red-haired, butcher and had a
red-haired baby* Though the ballad did not originate in
Missouri, it is distinctly a Missouri ballad.. The following
version is probably as good as any:
Joe Bowers
My name, it is Joe Bowers,
And I* ve got a brother Ike 5
I came from Old Missouri,
And all the way from Pike.
1*11 tell you why I left there,
And why I came to roam,
And leave my poor old mammy,
So far away from home.
^ W. E- ConnellyT Doniphan*s Expedition* pp. 7 ff.
I used to court a gal there—
Her name was Sally Black;
I axed her if she'd marry me;
. She said it was a whack*
Says she to me, "Joe Bowers,
Before we hitch for life,
You ought to get a little home
To keep your little wife. 1 1
“0 Sally, dearest Sally,
0 Sally, for your sake,
1*11 go to California
And try to make a stake*"
Says she to me, "Joe Bowers,
You are the man to win;
Here's a kiss to bind the bargain"
And she hove a dozen in*
When X got to that country
1 hadn't nary red;
I had such wolfish feelings,
I wished myself 'most dead;
But the thoughts of my dear Sally
Soon made those feelings git,
And whispered hopes to Bowers—
I wish I had 'em yit.
At length I went to mining,
Put in my biggest licks;
Went down upon the boulders
Just like a thousand bricks.
I worked both late and early,
In rain, in sun, in snow;
I was working for my Sally—
It was all the same to Joe.
At length I got a letter
From my dear brother Ike;
It came from Old Missouri,
And all the way from Pike;
It brought to me the darndest news
That ever you did hear—
My heart is almost bursting,
So pray excuse this tear*
It said that Sal was false to me,
Her love for me had fled;
She'd got married to a butcher,—
And the butcher's hair was red;
151
And more than that, the letter said—
It's enough to make me swear—
That Sally has a baby, 5
And the baby has red hair!
But the popular ballad, by its nature, cannot be
assigned to a place or a writer* It is almost completely
divorced from the intellectual and written traditions of a
people or a region; it does not depend on literacy for its
perpetuation* _ Verse which is written to be published, how
ever, no matter how inferior to its models, reflects fairly
definitely the literary culture and the philosophy of its
writer and to some degree the culture of the people among
whom it comes into being and by idiom it is read. And it is
in that verse, therefore, that one looks for his intellectual
and artistic record.
The place from which a poet will come is never predict
able. The University of Missouri was established by law in
1 8 3 9,^ at Columbia, and instruction actually began in the new
institution in lfft-l. One or two other colleges have somewhat
later added their influence to that of the university, and
Columbia might, therefore, have been expected to be a center
of interest in the arts. But no poets of major consequence
• 6
Ibid., pp. 10 f. A practically identical version is
printed also in The University of Missouri Studies. XV,
pp. 3^2 f.
? Jonas Viles, The University of Missouri, p. 22.
have appeared.
The university has had its student poets, as have all
colleges and universities. In 1901 President R. H. Jesse and
Dr. E. A. Allen published an anthology of Missouri prose and
verse, containing a considerable number of student poems. And
a few years earlier, in the last decade of the nineteenth cen
tury, Mrs. Glara Ward Watson and Mrs. Rosa Ingels had them-
8
selves published pamphlets of poems. If neither this nor
the other student verse to be found In old files of univer
sity and other publications seems greatly to reward the read
ing, it is to be remembered that student verse is generally
apprentice work. And it is to be remembered that of all
craftsmen and artists, only a few are long remembered.
One of the poems from the pamphlets of Mrs. Watson and
Mrs. Ingels represents well enough a sea of verse by the minor
voices of the nineteenth century:
A little case the dust now covers;
A worn-out clasp, a broken hinge,
Some velvet of a faded tinge—
While memory round it sweetly hovers.
Within there is a gentle face—
The soft brown eyes, the glossy hair,
The peaceful brow serene and fair,
Are all within the old-time case.
M. M. Brashear, "Missouri Verse and Verse Writers,*'
Missouri Historical Review. XVIII, pp. 328 ff.
153
With sweet simplicity so rare,
A soul so pure, a heart so gay,
The picture shows in girlhood's day q
Our mother's face so young and fair.*
The first "normal school" west of the Mississippi
except one in St. Louis, was established in Kirksville, in
northeast Missouri. It contributed something of intellectual
zeal to its region from the time of the sixties onward.
Miss Mary Prewitt of Fayette taught literature in the school.
After she married a Kirksville attorney, she is said to have
edited a magazine in which she encouraged versifiers of the
region. For many years she wrote poems for publication or
for circulation in manuscript among her friends. Death and
nature were typical subjects. Thus in one poem she questions:
Miat art thou, Grave? a sea
Between my love and me?
Thy waves though high and deep
Hot us apart can keep.l°
And to the blue bird she addressed the plaintive words:
Ay, my blue-bird, sing to mel
Other lovers long have ceased,
Valentines come not my way,
For my hair is turning gray
And the wrinkles have increased.
Ay, my blue-bird, sing to me.H
9 Ibid.. pp. 329 f*
10 Ibid., pp. 325 f*
11 Ibid.. p. 326.
15^
Another Kirksville poet was Grace Hewitt Sharp, the
daughter of a pioneer Presbyterian minister. Her verses,
expressing such conventional sentiments as that life holds
12
both joy and sorrow, had considerable magazine publication.
If Kirksville and its college could point only to such
poets as these for support of a claim to intellectual and
artistic distinction, its case would be weak. But it is to
be remembered that in the nineteenth century the state’s
maturity was still somewhat unripe, and Kirksville*s normal
school was still young. The town can offer a larger number
of writers in the twentieth century— a fact which may indi
cate that a genuine literary tradition was, during
Mary Prewitt Doneghy’s time, still in gestation. These
writers will be discussed later.
Other towns of Missouri, without universities and
normal schools, made their contributions, to the literature
of the state. At Boonville, for example, Horace A. Hutchison
published his own volume of poems, Old Mick Abroad and Other Poems
(1895). The contents are doggerel moralizing verses concern
ing the experiences of Satan when he made an expedition to
the earth. In truly impish whimsy Satan took the _form of a
man and appeared at church, at the court-house, with a, mob,
at a meeting with Father Time in a field, and at a gospel
12 Ibid., p. 327
155 ‘
tent meeting. At the last of these places he preached a long
sermon to the terror of some Christians, though he gave them
salutary doctrines# On the 'whole the fanciful narrative is
conventionally moralizing and dull. Other poems in the book
carry on the moralizing strain, and. many of them work veins
which have been often explored. "Found in the Street"1^ tells
the story of a rich and beautiful young woman who finds a
poor maiden freezing in the street. This rich girl is one of
the benevolent wealthy; she has the waif brought into the
house. The unfortunate girl believes herself in heaven, and
dies quietly. The beautiful golden-haired benefactress raises
a headstone over the poor girl1s.grave and has.it inscribed
simply, "Unknown,” with expectation that she and the waif
will walk together in heaven.
"Independence Day" was written for the Centennial Fourth
_ , . Tk
of July, and was recited on that day (in 18 76) in Boonville.
"De Watermilyun" is a poem in negro dialect, praising
the watermelon and offering the plausible theory that it was
really the fruit which tempted Eve, and that.like the serpent
it was condemned for its part in the sin to creep on the ground
instead of growing on a tree.
^ Horace A. Hutchison, Old Hick Abroad and Other Poems,
pp. 79 ff.
llf
Ibid.T pp. 109 ft*
Such poetry has, of course, no regional significance,
Hutchison might have lived in almost any other state of the
Union and still have written exactly the verses he wrote in
Boonville, Missouri, Boonville stands on the banks of the
Missouri River, but there is no evidence in his verse that
Hutchison saw anything of that tawny stream or of the steam
boats that went by, or that he knew anything of the lush
overflow lands of the river bottom or of the wooded hills
and bluffs of the region back from, the river. Except for
the whimsicality of l l De Watermilyun,n he seems to have found
his models and his inspiration in the works of other inferior
writers.
The town of Lamar, in southwest Missouri, has had at
least one writer to its credit. He was George Henry Walser,
a lawyer, who was not a native of the state but who spent the
greater part of his life in Barton County, Missouri, of which
Lamar is the county seat. He was born in Indiana in 183^,
moved to Illinois at an early age, was admitted to the bar
in 1857, and moved to Barton County in 1 8 6 6, He became the
leading criminal lawyer of the region,and in 1880 founded
the town of Liberal, inviting men of liberal opinions to
settle there, but intending Jto have neither saloons nor
churches. The churches came, however, and the town did not
escape its share of ecclesiastical squabbling. Later Walser
himself became a convert.
157
Walser1s first book was a volume of poems published in
St, Louis in 1 8 7 9, his last The Life and Teaching of Christ.
Boston, 1909, Between these volumes he published at least
three other works— Poems of Leisure (1890), The Bouquet (1897).
and Orthopaedic or Atomic Solution (I8 9 8).1" * The titles sug
gest what appears to have been the case— the successful busi
ness man whose means enabled him in his later years to turn
dilettante, and the convert turned theologian. He suggests,
indeed, that the publication of his poems was a gratification
of his own desires at a time when material success or failure
from the venture into authorship was unimportant. In the
preface to Poems of Leisure, published by himself and printed
in Lamar, he explains his positions
Mine has been a busy life, devoted to the first
duty of providing for my family and the winters of
old age. Through industry I am now able to think
that I have enough to keep the wolf from the door
of myself and wife (my family now) provided we act
with prudence and economy. All persons at the age
of fifty should have that; to have less is a mis
take, to have more is a sin.
I am sure that the public does not know me as a
rhymester, much less as a poet, the honor.of which
I can scarcely hope of receiving. Poetry consists
of clothing elevated thoughts in chaste and rhythmic
language. If I have succeeded in doing that, the
presentation of this volume is not presumptuous. If
I have failed . . . I will have enough left fox our
family.
Whatever the success of this volume, it is pleasant to
“Necrology. “ Missouri_Historical Review. . IV. p. 333*
158
know that so judicious a poet was not so badly disappointed
with it as to forego the next.
Poems of Leisure consists of miscellaneous poems with
a leaning toward the philosophical, and they are by no means
the mere conventional moralizing philosophical expressions
often repeated by amateur versifiers. “Hester and Philo— A
Trance" deals with the duality of man and the ability of the
spirit in a "trans-condition" to go vast journeys and to retain
impressions of the experience. It is a narrative in four can
tos, detailing such a spirit journey and suggesting the deep
mysteries encountered. In the preface to the poem he explains:
"Some of the narrative is imaginative and some is drawn from
the Buddhistic religion and some from the Philosophy of
Spiritualism," some of the facts which are the basis of the
narrative being provided, indeed, by "a person who experienced
the journey to the great abyss of chaos while he was in a
trance.
"Phantasmagoria of the Gods," like "Hester and Philo—
a Trance," is a long philosophical poem, and provided with a
preface and notes for the reader's assistance. The purpose
here is to show the phantasmagoria that religion has been,
with its numerous gods, cruel, sensual, and vindictive. He
speaks of the "fierce and sable reign" of Javeh, and says of
^ G. H. Walser, Poems of Leisure. p. 9*
159
that Deity:
His is the reign of dark superstition
Not becoming man or his condition,1'
and concludes that the true religion should 1 1 serve and pro-
18
mote the needs of mankind*1 1
The volume contains also some homely narratives, such
19
as “A Lawyer's story,” which is colloquial and Resting. But
most of the book has a strong tendency to lean on the classi
cal and on the conventional rather than colloquial language*
The Bouquet (1897) is composed of poems of a very
different sort* Nearly all these verses are named for flowers.
Under each title is an indication of its significance in the
/
“language of flowers,” and the poem is based on the theme of
that mystic significance* Thus the apple receives the com
mendation which, no doubt, it deserves:
“The Apple”
Language:— Temptation
Luscious fruit how much I prize thee,
Hanging on the fabl'd tree;
*Twas no wonder Eve was tempted,
Itfhen her eyes first fell on thee*
Good for food and rich in flavor;
Tempting to the woman's eyes,
Though she fell by thy temptation,
Yet she made the nations wise*
Ibid* * p. 119*
^ Loc* cit*
Ibid., pp. 68 ff*
160
Had she not from that forbidden,
Pluck1d the fruit so rich and rare.
The Jews would not been God*s own chos'n,—
We would have no clothes to wear.
Oh, the apple ripe and mellow;
What a debt we owe to theei
Though you caused the fall of Adam,
You blest all his posterity.20
The garden anemone means, in the language of flowers,
"forsaken,1 * and is interpreted in the following lines:
Hush my bleeding heart, stir not a throb of thine—
Shut out the stars and let the sun not shine,
For all is gloom, no joy or light I see—
Since love has flown, what is the world to me?
The wind and storm delights [sic] the anemone
But my poor heart is moved by grief alone,
So let it be, my spring has come and gone,
And I a wither*d leaf must die alone.21
This toying with flowers is dilettante poetry; still,
a retired business man, turning poet, might have done much
worse. And on the parlor tables of Walser*s day lay many
volumes of elegant verses quite as devoid of vitality as
Walser*s own. They exhibit at least a taste for such niceties
of life as the language of flowers.
At Higginsville, in Lafayette County, the newspaper
editor, Will Ward Mitchell, wrote quantities of verse and
published privately a considerable number of books of his own
works, both verse and prose. He began this production early
G. H. Walser, The Bouquet, pp. 160 f.
21 Ibid.. p. ^6.
161
in the nineties and continued to augment the series until at
least well into the first decade of the twentieth century.
These were small books, printed on inferior paper, bound in
paper covers, usually without dates or pagination, and uncopy-
22
righted. The preface of Since Forrest Bled. however, is
dated December 1, 1895, and states that this is the first
book of poems published by Mitchell. It contains a part of
the **one hundred said more” poems he had written. Whether sub
sequent books included others of these early poems or were
devoted exclusively to later compositions is unknown. That
he was engaged in their composition as early as 1893 is cer
tain, and it is certain that by this date he had developed
the predilection for ingenuity, rather than for more poetic
qualities, which characterizes some of his later verses. For
in that year he published on stiff cards the poem entitled
Y. P. Jg. C. E., in honor of the Young Peoplef s Society of
Christian Endeavor. It consists of five stanzas beginning
respectively with the words contained in the name of the
society, and a footnote asks critics to remember that the
poem was never written but was composed at the “ease11; that
is, it was composed as the printer-author set the type for
22
In this preface Mitchell mentions among friends who
have encouraged him a Dr. Edward Lee Arnold of Odessa. Missouri,
Ma poet of no little reputation.H Whether Dr. Arnold's poems
were published is uncertain; it has been impossible to discover
them.
162
its printing.
Mitchell*s poems have wide range in type and in subject.
Many of them deal with friendship. Some have to do with local
geography, some with the Spanish-Ameriean War. Frequently
they recommend virtue; often they present homely and common
place pleasures. Potpourri: a Reflection, for example, is a
poem of thirteen eight-line stanzas published separately as a
tribute "to a Friend on His Birthday,1 1 and consists of advice
to be moral and religious. Jack ( 18 98) is a narrative poem
concerning a young man who had been a gambler and a drunkard
but who on the day of his entraining for Cuba promised his
mother that he would "be true." In the course of the war
Jack's mother received word that her son had been killed; but
later he came home, having been recovered from the_battle
field and cured of his wounds, and continued to be true for
the rest of his life, so true, indeed, that he never again
left his mother but brought a maiden to her home and reared
a tribe of children to gladden their grandmother's heart.
ln Jael and Other Rhymes« "Jael" is a blank-verse
narrative of love, villainy, heroism, and the war in Cuba.
Two girls love the same man; one of them takes on herself the
guilt of a murder in order to free her lover from suspicion.
To this sacrifice she adds another, perhaps more noble; she
lies, denying that she loves him, because he is betrothed to
the other girl. The second.girl, also, is both devoted and
163
heroic. She follows him to the war and there finds opportun
ity to spring before her lover and receive a fatal wound from
a Cuban machete which would otherwise have killed the man.
The villain of the piece is prevented from killing the surviv
ing sweetheart— not by the hero, who required rather excessive
protection from the women who loved him, but by the arrival
of Providence with a thunderbolt, andonly in the nick of time.
This volume contains several other poems having to do
with the war: for example, "The Boys of Company K" (of the
Fifth Regiment, First Missouri), written at the departure of
that company for Cuba, There are poems on music and on hunt
ing the four-leaf clover; one on "An Old Shoe" strikes a truly
homely note. One somewhat jocular poem, "Napoleon— Wellington—
Waterloo," deals with three towns of Lafayette County and the
fact that in Missouri as in European history Waterloo is mid
way be tire en Napoleon and Wellington,
In another volume. Elk Hill. Mitchell again interests
himself in local geography. He praises a view near the town
of Odessa, and commemorates the merits of Elk Hill, Lexington,
and other places of the region.
In Sonnets (ca. 1 8 98) he undertakes some rather start
ling intricacies of verse. Most of the poems are written in
memory of people whose names appear in them, and they express
such sentiments as that if we knew a certain meeting with a
friend to be the last, we should not part so casually as we
I6*f
commonly do* Such merits as the poems have lie principally
not in the originality of their substance but in the ingenuity
of the acrostics which characterize them* One of these sonnets,
for example, in praise of a Mr* Homer T* Phillips spells his
name with the first letters of the lines, reading from top to
bottom* Again it spells the same-name with the first letter
of the first line, the second letter of the second line, the
third letter of the third line, and so on to the end* A fur
ther pleasure for the reader lies in the fact that the man1s
first name, Homer, is concealed within each of the fourteen
lines. The poem is, indeed, not very poetic; but even genius
has its limitations*
Ih 4 Voice That Is Still (ca. 1899) Mitchell again
indulges his fondness for acrostics.
In Autumn (1903), according to a statement on the inside
cover, is one of a series published by the boys of the Franklin
Institute of Arts and Crafts, where Mitchell taught the boys
the art of printing. This Institute had for its purpose the
making of good citizens from boys and girls of the streets.
In pursuance of this purpose Mitchell.proposed to issue one
book each month in the Ward series, so named in honor of his
mother. In Autumn is the first. How far the series went is
uncertain.
All Mitchell*s books are now rare. The inferior paper
on which they were printed, their flimsy paper covers, and the
copious doggerel of their contents .have not been conducive to
165
their preservation* Their existence in such number probably
attests to the esteem in which the people of Lafayette County
held the author, and to their interest in persons and places
familiar to them rather than to any exaggerated opinion of
the literary excellence of the books. There is a genial
friendliness which infuses many of the verses, and in the
preface to Harry Lisle and Other Poems Mitchell summarizes
his own attitude:
Should this little book of mine wander out
into the great world, I hope that it will not
reflect discredit on my loved home town, or her
sister city, my birthplace, fair old Lexington,
beside the great Missouri. . . . I have found
the world better than many claim it is, and
people kindly, brave, and true. ... I have
little sympathy with pessimists. Hope is a
dandy thing to keep about the chambers of the
2^
J Quoted by M. M. Brashear in "Missouri Verse and
Verse Writers,1 ' Missouri Historical Review. XVIII, p. 320.
Miss Brashear attributes this book to the "early nineties,"
though the preface to Since Forrest Died would indicate that
it was not published before 189^. She provides other dates
as follows: Harry B. Leary; a Life Picture. 1895 (according
to A. N. DeMenil, 1B 9 6): JaelT TS9B 5 Voice That Is Still. n.d.
Authority for other dates of Mitchell's works which are hot
themselves dated is such as may be attributed to undocumented
notes in the collection of the late R. M. Snyder, now in
possession of the University of Kansas City.
In the summer of 19*4-2, Ray Lefman, then a student in
Central Missouri State Teachers College, purchased at a public
auction in Higginsville, Missouri, a miscellaneous lot of books
including several by Will Ward Mitchell, some of them evidently
unknown to Snyder, DeMenil, or Miss Brashear. These included
Since Forrest Died. Jack. Potpourri: a Reflection, and the
card, Y. P. £i. C. E.; also the prose narratives. My Two Friends.
4 Summer's JuneT and Harry. Lisle: or His .Loyal Friend. This is
not the verse ^Harry Lisle", from, which Miss. Brashear quotes,
Nothing in this statement, of course, promised a high
order of literary accomplishment; it promises, rather, a sort
of supplement to the ordinary sort of small-town journalism.
And Mitchell*s ephemeral works fulfill the promise. Very
possibly he expected no more.
Any claim to literary eminence in,Lafayette County
must rest with Lexington rather than with Higginsville. At
Lexington, Central Female College was a popular seminary
which cultivated literary tastes and a literary atmosphere
plf
before the Civil War. Elisabeth Cobb, who was educated
here, is the author of the first poem in J. S. Snoddy*s collec
tion, A Little Book of Missouri Verse. This poem, "A Star in
the West,'* written in 1856, praised the attractions of
Missouri and expressed patriotic sentiments.^ Miss Cobb
was born near the village of Columbus, in Johnson County,
Missouri. After her education in Lexington, she was a teacher
until her death in l859> in Pleasant Hill, of Cass County.
Shortly before her death she began collecting her verses,
26
intending to publish them in one book.
(Continued)
but a rather silly, melodramatic love story in prose.
These books had belonged to Mr. Harry Leary,.a friend
of Will Ward Mitchell, possibly the original of Harry Lisle
who appears and reappears in Mitchellis.writing.
oL
Brashear, loc. cit.
J. S. Snoddy, A Little Book of Missouri Verse, pp. 17
26 Ibid.T p. 178.
167
Mrs. Sarah Austin Arnold McCausiand, a Virginia woman
related to Thomas Arnold of Rugby, was married in Lexington
in i860, and thereafter lived in that town. She describes a
Missouri August:
......... the quivering heat-haze
Through whose shimmer the brown quail wades,
A-list to the moist corn voices
Speaking from wind-moved blades
• • *....................................... 27
0 slumbrous month, thou art prone and a-dream.
Walter McCausiand, who was born in Lafayette County in
1859j also celebrates a Missouri season:
The clouds hang low in the winter sky,
The beasts in the barn-yard low and cry,
The cold wind sighs through the dead, brown leaves,
The ice hangs thick from gable and eaves.2®
He had probably read both Whittier and James Thomson.
The most important of the Lexington poets was probably
Mary Bryant, a teacher of English in Central Female College.
She had lived in Virginia before coming to Missouri, and her
poems do not make use of the Missouri scene. When she used
nature, social customs, and. identifiable .backgrounds, they
are Southern, and sometimes, as in “Marcella,” specifically
Virginian.
27
Brashear, “Missouri Verse and Verse Writers,*1
Missouri Historical Review. XVIII, pp. 319 ff. Miss Brashear
quotes these lines from Snoddy. on. cit.. p. lOU-.
28
Ibid. t p. 320. Quoted from J. S. Snoddy, oj>. cit.,
p. 23*
168
29
Her poem, "Fantasma,1 1 is a fairy tale, dramatie in
form, chiefly in the heroic couplet. The setting is in the
Hew World. The story is a tale of black magic defeated by
innocence and virtue, with the aid of good fairies. It is an
inane narrative, but Miss Bryant shows some skill in handling
a rather flexible couplet. Perhaps the most interesting aspect
of the poem is the presence of a comic negro slave speaking in
dialect among the sensibilities and pieties of the other char
acters.
• jq
"The Light-Bringer"-' is a narrative poem in ottava rima.
In this poem a young man tells an old friend of his father the
tale of his pursuit of Liberty. He entered a secret society,
was taken to the Orient, and was there induced by some Oriental
magic to have visions of splendor and mystery, visions in which
a glittering serpent suggests to him his own half-formed, skep
tical, and irreligious ideas in the guise of true knowledge.
The spell is interrupted by the spirit of the young man's
29
Mary Bryant, Fantasma and Other Poems, pp. 5 ff* The
one copy procured lacks a title page. Miss Brashear asserts
that Fantasma was published anonymously in 1879; in Kansas City,
and that Sampson's Bibliography lists it among the works of
G. W. Warder. She agrees with J. S. Snoddy that it is
Miss Bryant's work. Miss Lucy A, Ball,..who.knew Miss Bryant,
says that Fantasma was first published alone; this edition,
then, with other poems, may be somewhat later. But though
some of the poems are dated, none of them are given dates
later than 1879•
30 Ibid., pp. m-5 ff.
169
mother, who points her son toward heaven.
The poem appears to be an attempt to show the evil in
Shelley*s philosophical poems, particularly in Prometheus
Unbound. It is left incomplete, however, in this volume;
whether or not Part II was ever actually written, only the
first of two projected parts is published.
31 32
“Marcella" is, according to the author*s statement,
the story of a certain Adelaide Lovelace, who died in Florence,
Italy, in 1 8 7 6. She had been a wealthy widow, but had shunned
society and spent herself in doing good to the poor. When
her body was being prepared for burial, it was discovered
that she wore a curious bracelet of yellow hair, marred by
suggestive dark stains.
Adelaide and her cousin Blanche Aubray, both orphaned,
were reared by their grandmother In Park Aubray, Virginia.
Each was beautiful, but Adelaide was jealous of spirit. When
the two girls were grown Adelaide wronged Blanche, by spreading
a report that she was both an abolitionist and a thief.
Blanche disappeared, but disguised herself as a return
ing negro slave, Marcella, who had escaped to Canada and then
returned to become a personal maid to Adelaide. During the
Civil Mar a cousin of Adelaide, Romaine Linn of the Union army,
31 Ibid., pp. 201 ff.
32 Ibid.. p. 203.
170
appeared behind the Confederate line wearing the gray uniform,
and was in danger of being shot as a spy. Marcella, for
Adelaide's peace of mind, conducted Romaine to safety in a
secret room, where he recuperated from his weakness, and
where he fell in love with Blanche' s portrait •
The news that Adelaide's jealous husband was coming
home necessitated getting the Northern spy out of the house.
Marcella at last revealed her true identity to the terrified
Adelaide, induced Romaine to leave, took his place in the
secret room, and was killed by Adelaide's husband. The
remorseful Adelaide subsequently betook herself to Florence
to expiate her sins in charitable labors.
These poems are, of course, sentimental; as was mueh
of the poetry of the time. They are impregnated with the
Victorian fondness for moralizing. Whatever their deficien
cies, they are conceived on a scale of some magnitude and
they exhibit considerable skill in versification.
Some verse comes also from Ray County, adjoining
Lafayette, and from Clinton County, adjoining Ray. In
Richmond, of Clay County, M. L. Hoffman was a teacher of
mathematics in Woodson Institute. His St. Helena and Other
Poems, privately printed in 1 8 9 6, contains a tribute to the
State of Missouri. In the closing lines he says that she
........................ stands in her place,
And with confidence turns to the future her face;
And the circle of states, as they watch her move on
171
With her head in the sky, like a mountain at dawn,
Her motto will catch, and respond tp_her call,—
"United we stand, divided we fall•”’3
Another teacher at Woodson Institute, J. S* Snoddy, if
he was not a poet was a collector of verse* In 1897 he pub
lished A Little Book of Missouri Verse, an anthology which he
says in,an "Editor's Note" grew out of studies which he and
his students had made of the verse of Missouri* But the con
tents are chiefly mild sentimental or moralizing conventional
pieces and of little interest*
At Plattsburg, in Clinton County, John William Ellis
(1839-1910) was for many years the president of Plattsburg
College. In the last quarter of the century he published
three now forgotten booklets of poems* These were Life
Mission (18 7 6), A Metrical Translation of the Antigone of
Sophocles ( 1 8 7 9), and Song of Songs (1897)* The first two
31*
were published in St* Louis, the last in Columbia, Missouri*
John Breekenridge Ellis, the son of John William Ellis,
was educated in Plattsburg College. He is better known for a
large number of once popular novels than for his poetry, but
he wrote both verse and fiction from the early nineties* For
several years he was head of the department of English in
^ Brashear, "Missouri Verse and Verse Writers,"
Missouri Historical Review. XVIII, p. 321*
Who* s Who in America. VI, p. 593»
172
Plattsburg College. Unhappily the poetry written by profes
sors of English is commonly not so good as the poetry they
teach. A specimen of Ellis's lyric verse is his “Another
Birthday":
A few more years— a few more years,
My past will lie behind;
Sweet in the shroud of purest hopes,
Dear to my inmost mind.
I think 'twill haunt my after life,
That spirit young and bold
Taking me back to the Ipng ago,
Ere I was growing old.^-?
Hot much can be said for such confusion of thought and
figure. One is tempted to conclude that as far as the evi
dence of John Breckenridge Ellis goes, Clinton County and
Plattsburg constituted something other than an intellectual
and literary center. The same conclusion would be bolstered
by examination of Ellis's novels. Yet the latter works once
had a considerable popularity, and the verse was at least
known outside the state of its origin. "Another Birthday,"
for instance, was published in the Louisville Courier-Journal.
Platte County, also in northwestern Missouri, was not
without its literary men. John Mood, a school teacher in
that county for many years, had a fondness for acrostics.
Over a period of at least eighteen years he wrote acrostics
before school in the morning, after the children had gone
° Loc. cit.
173
home in the evening, and while they played during the noon
reeess, honoring the children under his instruction. In
i
1868 he published 106 of these poems at Leavenworth, Kansas,
I11 Acrostics. Mostly for Children. These verses did not
represent the whole fruit of his genius. He says in his
preface that he has composed several hundred, and promises
to publish more if the reception of this book is sufficiently
encouraging. The remainder, however, appear to be lost to
posterity.
Each poem in the volume is followed by a note giving
the date and place of its composition. Some of them were
written in Kansas, and Missouri has no desire to rob that
state of its equity in these verses. Most of them, however,
belong to the literary tradition of Missouri; they came into
being in Platte County, and specifically in schools with such
names as Huckleberry and Fancy Bottom.
The nature of the poems is sufficiently indicated by
Wood’s statement of his poetic theory. He gives it as his
J Even this volume is extremely rare. R. M. Snyder
says, in a note on the copy in his collection, now in posses
sion of the University of Kansas City, that as.far as he
could ascertain no other copy exists. It was printed on cheap
paper and bound in paper covers, and was, therefore, perish
able. The poems were not such as to induce great care for
their preservation, except perhaps hi the homes of those chil
dren named in the acrostics.
l?b
opinion that “what is regarded as fulsome and disgusting
flattery, if expressed in prose, is, we believe, allowable
37
when expressed in measure and rhyme.,v
William M. Paxton, a lawyer, lived in Platte City from
1839 until his death. He collected a library of Missouri
authors, prepared a historical volume. Annals of Platte Comity.
Missouri. (1 8 9 7), and was the author of at least three volumes
of poetry. These are A Century Hence and Other Poems (1879);
Poems (1 8 8 7)> and Vision of Narva: a Legend of Parkville
38
(1891). In the preface to Poems he refers, also, to what
appears to be another small volume which he had printed for
free distribution in 1 8 8 1.
In Poems. the purpose is to ' ‘promote temperance, virtue,
and religion.** Twelve years earlier Paxton had lost his hear
ing— by the mercy of God, he thinks— to such an extent that
he began devoting himself to leisure and poetry. Now, if
there is efficacy in prayer, his verses are to do good in
39
the world.
IfO
“Laura*s Dream of Naiad-Land,“ is one of the poems
^ John Wood, “Preface,” Acrostics. Mostly for Children.
^ Brashear, “Missouri Verse and Verse Writers,1 *
Missouri Historical Review. XVIIZ, p. 322. Miss Brashear does
not mention the Annals of Platte County or any publication of
1881. It is possible that Paxton mis-stated the date, and
that he.referred to A Century Hence.
39 w. m . Paxton, Poems. “Preface.*1
^ Ibid.. pp. 2 ff.
175
Intended to teach a salutary lesson. The theme is that wealth
is not sufficient to satisfy the human soul or to destroy the
soul’s longing after heaven*
ifl
“Sara and Henri, or the Weird Wedding” is a narrative
of the Irishman, McDowell, and the Italian, Arnault, both of
whom came to America to escape religious persecution* Each
distrusts the other, assuming on the ground of nationality
that the other is a Catholic* When Arnault's son and McDowell’s
daughter fall in love, the fathers forbid the marriage. Happily
each discovers that he has been hasty; not all Irish and
Italians are Catholic.
In this poem Paxton thus manages the patriotic theme
of American freedom of religion and at the same time implies
a warning against the Catholics* He suggests also that one
should not be too hasty in judgment, and, perhaps without
intending to do so, indicates the danger of exposing one’s
children of the romantic age in a country where there may be
also children of all sorts of refugees from persecution*
1 +2
“The Sacred Story” turns to sacred history for its
material* It is a narrative in verse of the temptation,
arrest, trial, and crucifixion of Christ,
One section of the book is devoted to poems on
Ibid., pp. 31 ff.
Ibid., pp. 53 If.
176
temperance* Typical of these compositions are “John Bibber*s
lo ¥+
Spree'* and “How to Stop Mad-dogs*“ The former is a story
of a drunken man quarreling at himself in the mirror* The
latter advises cropping the mad-dogs* tails just behind the
ears. As mad-dogs are identified allegorically to signify
whiskey-holes, the reader will interpret the advice, doubtless,
in his own terms.
There are also miscellaneous poems on such themes as
k-5
those suggested in the titles of “Remember the Poor* 1 and
h6
“The Heart Is the Greatest Treasure.1 *
In Vision of Narva. Paxton turns to social and ethnolog
ical matters, such as the rights of women.and the results of
intermarriage between white men and Indians* In “Woman*s
Sphere,1 ' taking the side of the minority, he says:
Men give her no voice in exacting the laws,
But tax her as much as they choose;
And then as the jurors they sit in_her cause,
And frequently justice refuse• '
And if the verse is not remarkably to the credit of a retired
lawyer, the sentiment is creditable enough.
^3 Ibid* * pp. 311 ff.
^ Ibid.. pp. 315 ff.
^ Ibid., pp. 385 ff.
^ Ibid.. pp. 393 ff.
K <7
‘ Brashear, “Missouri Verse and Verse Writers,'*
Missouri Historical Review. XVIII, p. 322.
177
Of the improvement of the •white race by the admixture
of a stronger and more primitive strain he prophesies;
The union of the White and Indian
Will make a new and nobler race;
And back to us the great and worthy 1*8
With pride their pedigree shall trace.
One section of this book, consisting of twenty-nine
tributes to the dead, is entitled "Platte City Cemetery,M
But this is no Spoon Hiver Anthology. These poems are
tributes. For example, he says of J. V. Cockrill:
I knew him when in manhood*s pride,
And always found him just and brave.
I stood beside him when he died
And helped to lay him in the grave.
He was a man of sterling sense
And managed well his house and farm;
Was slow to give or take offense, 1*9
and to his friends was kind and warm.
All this, of course, is not very good poetry. It is
the poetry of a lawyer who turned to the cultivation of verse
as he turned away from his legal practice. It is utilitarian.
It is often doggerel, and never very far above that level. Per-
5 0
haps it represents a natural stage, as has been suggested,
1*8
Brashear, loc. cit.
ko
hoc, cit.
Ibid.. pp. 322 f. Miss Brashear thinks the Spoon
River Anthology may be intended as satire on this sort of
poetry, Edgar Lee Masters being further from the pioneer stage
and being of a generation in which less exacting physical labor
has turned energy into a "brooding, ingrowing pessimism." One
may accept verses like those of Paxton as a stage in the
development of the Middle West without accepting that explana
tion for the pessimism of Masters* generation.
in the development of the Middle West* Certainly many people
■were writing verse in the Middle West at about this level of
artistic excellence, and not many poets of a high order were
writing at the time in Missouri* The pioneer days were not
more than a generation or two in the past. On the other hand,
it is to be remembered that good poetry was being written in
the world, and that literate people had ample access to it,
even in Missouri. Perhaps it, too, was utilitarian} in one
sense or another all good art is utilitarian, though much of
it does not directly through exposition inculcate the most
commonplace virtues. And the proximity of the pioneer condi
tions can be easily overestimated; people might live among
primitive conditions and still be the descendants of many gen
erations of cultivated ancestors. It is easy to go too far
in generalizing about the people of a given time or place. If
the multiplicity of sentimental and inartistic books of poems
is to be regarded as evidence concerning the development of
the region, it probably signifies more nearly the taste of
the readers than any necessary limitations imposed on the
poets. Such readers still exist, and the writers to satisfy
them.
Several writers of verse have come from Chillicothe or
have lived in that town. Two young men, both of whom were
later lawyers in Chillicothe and both of vdiom published pamph
lets of verse while in college, came at different times from
179
Chillicothe to the University of Missouri, George W. Warder
51
during the Civil War, and L. A. Martin in the eighties.
In 1 8 7 3, while practicing law in Chillicothe, Warder
published in St. Louis Poetic Fragments: or College Poems.
containing immature verses on miscellaneous subjects, such as
“Our Loved and Lost,“ “Sleep, Death, and Oblivion,“ “Woman,“
and “A Soldier* s Epitaph.** An excellent specimen of these
poems is “To Ettie, the Rosebud of the Hillside**:
Yes, she is a fair young blossom
That is blooming on the hill,
Her young heart with joy so fulsome
That ’twould make your being thrill.
She is very gay and sprightly,
And she looks so trim and neat,
And she trips along so lightly,
And bows and smiles to those she greet [.sic]
Then search the world so wild,
You*11 find none more fair and pretty,
With more lovely name than Ettie,
The rosebud of the hillside.52
But Ettie, like too many, alas, of the fair and admir
able ladies of minor poets, is not robust. The title of
53
another poem announces “Ettie, the Rosebud, Has Perished.'*^J
Warder left Chillicothe for Kansas City., founded the
Warder Opera House, served as mayor,^ and made and lost a
^ Ibid.. pp. 323 f.
- * 2 George W. Warder, Poetic Fragments, pp. ^3 f*
^ Ibid., pp. *+6 ff.
cAx.
y Brashear, loc. cit.
180
55
fortune in real estate. There, in addition to several mis
cellaneous books, he produced two considerable books of verse,
Eden Dell and Other Poems (1878) and Utopian Dreams and Lotus
Leaves (1885). The latter contains approximately four hundred
pages of verses on miscellaneous subjects, divided into five
sections: ‘ ‘ Utopian Dreams'1; "Lotus Leaves"; and "Footprints
and Shadows"; "Eden Dells or, Love's Wanderings"; and "Heart
Drops." One of the heart drops, entitled "Kiss Our Darling
and Come Away," begins
56
Deadi Our darling is dead, dear wife.
Another is entitled "I Turn Another Leaf of Time." The two
sufficiently indicate the nature of "Heart Drops."
Many of the poems are derived from literary sources
rather than from personal experience of emotion, and some of
them celebrate prominent contemporary or historical personages.
There are poems, for example, on Longfellow, Dickens, Shakespeare,
Grant, Garfield, Cleveland's inauguration, Governor Crittenden’s
silver wedding, Mrs. Langtry, and Ellen Terry. Others, such
as "Two Lovers Strolled by the River-side," are romantic; some,
such as "The Pen and the Sword," are philosophical. To the
modern reader the most interesting are likely to be poems
dealing with events now nearly or quite forgotten. Among
these historical poems "The Pocasset Sacrifice" recounts a
9
^ A. N. DeMenil. "A Century of Missouri Literature,"
Missouri Historical Review, p. 18.
Geo. W. Warder, Utopian Dreams and Lotus Leaves.
P. 393.
181
tale of the murder of little Edith Freeman of Pocasset, an
event which occurred about two years before the composition of
the poem. The father, who committed the murder, and the
mother, who consented to it, were acting under the crazed com
pulsion to make a religious sacrifice. "The Mountain Meadow
Massacre’ 1 has to do also with a religious slaughter, the
Mormon massacre of "Gentiles” which is commonly known by the
Kn
name used as a title for the poem.
Warder was for a good many years a prominent citizen
of Kansas City, and his fame was, indeed, not merely local.
His Utopian Dreams was issued by a London publisher. In the
last decade of the century he found Hew York publishers for
58
three philosophical works. If the general reader has for
gotten his poems, and the general public remembers nothing
of his opera house, his acts as mayor, or his real-estate
transactions, his fate is one which befalls most prominent
men.
Chillicothe has a better claim on L. A. Martin than on
Warder; unlike Warder, Martin did not seek a larger field of
operations. After his graduation from the state university
he returned to Chillicothe and remained in that city, prac
ticing law and publishing numerous pamphlets of verse which
^ Ibid., pp. 5+5 ff.
58
J DeMenil, loc. cit.
182
give his impressions of current events and celebrate the
natural charms of rural central Missouri, The State Historical
59
Society has bound these pamphlets in one large volume.
Chillicothe has also another interest in Martin's work;
his Hallowe'en and Other Poems (1893) and Huxter Puck and Other
Poems (1895) were published there. Huxter Puck. His Buie was
written, however, while Martin was a student in the university.
It is a tale of a mid-nineteenth century boy, born in
Livingston County, Missouri, and it is intended to emphasize
the poetic nature of that region. . Martin says in his preface;
For why should not Missouri be the land
Of inspired song or happy minstrelsy,
When every heart is but a smouldering brand
Of burning passion, throbbing wild and free
To burst in song, and breathe with words of,fire
A strain immortal from her minstrel's lyre.GU
The same city has had a few other writers of verse. At
about the time when L. A. Martin was practicing law and writing
poetry, publishers of Chillicothe issued Marie Richter Nelson's
61
Elleine. ^ Leaf from the Life of Today. And Lulu Spears's
Lost Chords (1900), also published there, voices what has been
called the "record of an eager soul." ^
59 Brashear, "Missouri Verse and Verse Writers,"
Missouri Historical Review. XVIII, pp. 323 f.
60 Loc. cit.
61 Ibid., p. 32l+.
^ Loc. cit.
183
Oh that we had not ambitions [sic]
If 'his not to be satisfied;
This straining to attain
To our Ideal ; ------------
--- -----— we but know we're human,
Endowed, it seems, with a power
To endure, that is infinite.63
In the eastern part of the state, Troy, in Lincoln
County, has produced a writer or two. George E. Trescott's
Chiros was published there in 1895* Its verses contain rather
commonplace and homely wisdom than high poetry:
Woulds*1 thou be useful, learn the charm
Of doing good by shunning harm.
Blest is the man whose pathway gleams
A fitting mean between extremes.
In the wicked I've found virtue,
In the righteous I * ve found sin;
If I had this world to judge o'eg
Where, oh where should I begin?64-
More sprightly, are some youthful verses of Hattie E.
Battson, born near Troy in 1865; educated at Edwards High
School, Troy, and in St. Charles College of St. Charles,
Missouri; and the author of Dust or Diamonds. published at
Dayton, Ohio, in 1886. One of the poems, “Aglaia,“ tells in
two cantos of blank verse a story somewhat reminiscent of
Enoch Arden. Another, “An Old Maid's Soliloquy,” contains
observations on the vanities of fashionable society:
3 Loc. cit. Miss Brashear provides both the text and
the interpretation of the eager heart.
6b
Ibid., p. 327.
l8*f
Do maidens there
With anxious care
Use peroxide to bleach their hair;
With lips of red vermilion
Are trained to smile
Or pout the While,
And the unthinking to beguile.
While lisping of the red cotillion?
Do young men smoke,
Talk slang and joke,
And young mustaches fondly stroke?
Though the book was published in 1886, the poem itself
is ascribed to the year 1880. If that is the correct date,
the author was fifteen at the time of its composition. What
ever its other merits, this poem reminds the modern reader, as
he needs occasionally to be reminded, not to be too complacent
about modern improvements, in the art of living, such as perox
ide for rectifying the hair. The peroxide blonde is evidently
no twentieth-century development.
C. L* Phifer was for about thirteen years a newspaper
man in Missouri. He was editor of the Pacifie Transcript, in
Franklin County, and for about a dozen issues he published the
Franklin Quarterly, a literary magazine. In addition to his
work published in periodicals, he was the author of four books
of verse: Love and Law (1889); Two Volumes of Verse (1889);
66
Weather and Wisdom (1889)> Annals _of the Earth (18 9 0).
A. N* DeMenil characterizes the last as a wretched attempt at
^ Ibid., p. 3 2 8. From Dust and Diamonds, p. 7 7.
66 '
Ibid.. p. 332.. Annals.of the Earth was published in
Chicago, the other three volumes in California, Missouri. Two
185
blank verse. Phifer was not wholly contemptible, however, as
a poet. In 189*+ he celebrated in the Franklin Quarterly the
hawthorn, which has since that time been adopted as the offi
cial state tree. He called the poem "Under the Shadows.**
Walnut trees and sarvus bloom
Sweetly showing, richly growing;
Hawthorne in the forest*s gloom
Sweetly, richly growing.
Often in my dreams I stray
Down and through a flowery way
Where a brook talks all the day
Flowing through the shadows.
So our days are hurrying on;
As they sparkle they are gone;
Sliding through the gloom they run,
Flowing through the shadows.
By the breathing flowers of spring,
Where the birds in rapture sing,
Where dry leaves in winter cling,
Flowing through the shadows.
66
(Continued)
Volumes of Verse seems an improbable title for one volume of
verse, though both Miss Brashear and A. N. DeMenil cite it.
As none of these four (or three) books has been available for
examination, it has been necessary to rely on secondary testi
mony; but in the absence of better knowledge, it is difficult
to avoid the suspicion that, whether Miss Brashear got her data
from DeMenil or whether both copied unwittingly some other per
son* s error, the phrase, "two volumes of verse," should be
merely an introduction to the other titles. Because DeMenil
was a pioneer writer on the subject of Missouri literature,
some inaccuracy in his work should doubtless be condoned; and
some inaccuracies are to be found in his work. His judgment,
also appears at times to be prejudiced and dogmatic; his
condemnation of Annals of the Earth may be justified, but
should be taken with caution because of his disapproval of
Phifer*s radical political views.
186
Budding trees and meads abloom
Sweetly showing, richly growing;
Hawthorne in the forest gloom
Sweetly, richly growing.
In another poem, ' ‘ Heart House," Phifer uses a free-
verse form for the expression of an important, though familiar,
psychological principle:
Each heart is a house,
And we furnish it day by day
Some fill the rooms with things useful,
And beautiful images of great thoughts;
Others with sodden and sensual things
That as the years grow turn to hideous forms;
And each must live, not in the world outside,
Not in the house that others have builded,
But in his heart-house.
And what, when God the holy,
Shall come to visit us?
In every heart-house there are hidden chambers;
And the dead are there,
But they are not dead,
Sometimes we visit them,
Even in dreams,
And the past and-the dead live again in the
heart-house.
Phifer was not a native of Missouri, but was born and
educated in Illinois. And he did not finish his journalistic
career in Missouri. He was later an associate editor on the
Appeal to Reason, a fanatical socialist paper published in
Girard, Kansas, suppressed at about the time of the World War.
Subsequently he is said to have lived in Rosedale, Kansas, and
to have published a small periodical of socialist, anarchist,
67 Ibid.. pp. 332 f.
68 Ibid.. p. 333.
18?
69
and spiritualist tendencies*
One interesting book of variegated contents has come
from Lone Jack, a tiny village of Johnson County— or, more
accurately, from the farming country near that village. This
is Martin Rice's Rural Rhymesf and Talks and Tales of Olden
Times, first published in 1 8 7 7, revised, enlarged, and
reissued in 1 8 8 2. It contains both prose and verse, written
at various times over a long period. There are prose tales
and description of the region from the time of Rice’s arrival
in 1 8 3 3, sketches of early inhabitants of the region, tales of
the Civil War, and discussion of such matters as whether the
world is growing worse. The poems comprise Biblical narratives,
moralizing verses, poems in praise of one person or another,
Civil War poems, and numerous long narratives.
Of these a favorite theme is the good old days, with
some accounting for the people of the region over a period of
nearly half a century. Several such poems were written to be
read at old settlers' reunions5 and they called the roll, as
old men's talk is prone to do, of many people dead and gone.
70
"An Old Settler's Talk"' is such a poem; it was read by the
author at such a meeting at Harrisonville in Cass County on
69
DeMenil, op. cit., p. 116.
Martin Rice, Rural Rhymes, and Talks and „ Tales of
Olden Times. pp. V+5 rf.
188
September 30, 1880. It consists of seventy-seven stanzas of
four lines each, comparing the rude conditions of the region
as it existed half a century earlier with those of the date
' of the reunion, reciting the tale of changes in industrial
methods, enumerating names of the pioneer families, and remind
ing the old men that they had but few years to live.
In the autumn of life, in the evening’s decline,
- As the shadows are lengthening fast,
We meet here together, old friends of lang syne,
To recall, and to speak of the past.
'Tis forty-odd years--near fifty, I trow—
(No doubt you remember it well)
Since some of the men that I see here now,
First came to the county to dwell.
Where are those cabins, those rude dwellings gone?
We look for them now all in vain;
The roof made of clapboards, with poles weighted down—
We never shall see them again.
We pass by the spot, but the cabin is not,
And solitude silently reigns;
A mound where the chimney stood, points out the spot,
And that is all now that remains.
Perhaps it was there that our children had birth
Or sported around us in glee;
Those children have wandered away from the hearth— ■
No cabin, no children we see.
A host of those worthies, even now, while I speak,
Are passing the mind's eye before;
There's Butterfield, Dunnaway, Riddle, and Creek,
And Warden, and Butler, and Moore;
189
We are old and gray-headed old fogies, they say;
Young America*s left us behind;
The world has grown wiser in this latter day,
And swifter the march of the mind.
The reaper, the thresher, corn-planter, and drill,
And such labor-saving machines
Were unknown; but their work, by the hand, with a will
Was performed, and by much safer means.
To the flint and the steel, or the sun-glass, you know,
We resorted when fires were out;
But those old-fogy ways, so tedious and slow,
Our boys know nothing about.
Hot long will it be until that time will come,
Our reason admonishes us;
Death's messenger soon will summon us home—
In nature *tis evermore thus.71
"The Old Captain of 1838 and the Roll-Call at Pleasant
72
Hill, Mo., in l88l" is a similar poem— -fifty-nine stanzas
of a dream in which the narrator sees Captain Bill Gallbuster
calling the roll of his men; some of them answer faintly,
"Here.*1 Some are gone to Texas; some are dead in Oregon; one
73
is "Confined at home with cancer"; most of them are dead.
Several other poems of the same nature suggest that Rice may
have developed a sort of vogue for the settlers’ gatherings
in two or three counties during his later years.
71 hoc. cit.
72 Ibid.. pp. 164- ff.
73 Ibid.t p. 168.
190
Among the other poems are several on the evils of
7h
alcohol, of which “Liquid Stuff and Its Doings” contains
75
seventy-one stanzas of seven lines each, and “Intemperance”
contains sixty-six four-line stanzas# Rice was a pious man,
and he versified several Biblical narratives, such as the tale
76
of David and Goliath, which gp.ve scope to his fondness for
long poems* But he worked also in shorter forms, sharing in
the fashion for acrostics, for example; in one, the first ten
lines use the initials of his own name as their initial letters,
and the last ten lines use them again in reverse order.
The section of Missouri in which Rice lived suffered
severely during the Civil War, not only from the activities of
regular forces but from those of guerrillas on both sides, and
from the ruffians who took advantage of the confusion to rob
and murder for their own profit or pleasure. Jackson County
was a part of the area depopulated in 1863 by the famous
“Order No. 11,” and Rice saw many of the horrors of that and
other passages of the struggle. It is not surprising, there
fore, that a considerable number of his poems should deal with
the Civil War. Most of these verses treat rather obvious
themes, such as the homesickness of young soldiers, the last
7lf Ibid.. pp. 178 ff.
Ibid., pp. 229 ££*
76 Ibid.. pp. 285 ff.
191
words of the dying, and the horrors of war. One of the war
poems, however, is in a humorous strain, a sort of narrative
which Rice has not elsewhere attempted; and it is for most
readers probably the most interesting of all these verses,
77
This is "Dorr Morrison’s Ride; or, John Gilpin the II.U The
story is the sort of thing which is told in village blacksmith
shops and on street corners to the accompaniment of laughter
and slapping of thighs, the yarn of a boaster who is frightened
by a prank and who runs his horse to death escaping from a
danger that does not exist.
Specifically, Tom Thompson was the captain of a force
of pro-slavery men, and Dorr Morrison, was his son-in-law. In
a small army of boasters, none boasted more loudly than Dorr
Morrison of what would happen to the Yankees if he could but
meet them. But when the company made an expedition into
Kansas and learned that Reid had burned Qsawatamie, they
feared that the Kansans would seek revenge on them for the
burning; so they decided to retreat hastily back to Missouri.
The baggage train was sent off in advance— the baggage train
consisted of a wagon drawn by a span of mules— and the men
were waiting the word to mount their horses and fall into
column. But two mischievous youngsters slipped out of sight
in the fog and shot off their guns; and the whole command
77 Ibid., pp. 2^-3 ff.
192
stampeded, every man whipping and spurring frantically, the
captain’s son-in-law outrunning all others.
They soon o’ertook the baggage train—
The driver whipping too,
For he had heard the din behind,
And knew not what to do.
"Save, save younself!" Dorr Morris cried—
For he was now before—
"A thousand Yankees just behind!
A thousand, if no more.”
The driver took him at his word—
He cut the hamestring square,
And mounting on the nearest ©»le,
He left the other there. ' 0
When the fleeing men came to a certain Dashman’s farm,
on which lived a widowed squaw, some of their horses were
failing. Thompson called his men to halt, and they decided to
make a stand in the squaw’s smokehouse. In a footnote, Rice
states that some of the men denied leaving all the guns out
side; but with or without the guns they crowded into the
smokehouse. Dorr Morrison, meanwhile, had outdistanced the
others and was well on his way back to Missouri.
The two youths who had fired the shots in the fog had
not been able to overtake their companions to explain the joke.
But when they came to the baggage wagon and the mule abandoned
by the driver, they hitched one of their horses with the mule
and followed the plain trail left by their fleeing comrades.
78 Ibid.. p. 2^+6
193
After a time the fog had cleared away; the men in the smoke
house saw the two whom they had given up for dead coming with
the wagon; and soon the nature of the joke was explained*
Captain Thompson was furious, but a count showed that nobody
was killed or wounded, and only his son-in-law was missing.
This son-in-law, Dorr Morrison, plied whip and spur
without a pause for breath until he crossed the Missouri line.
Then, after a brief rest, he started for Pleasant Hill, thirty
miles away, giving the alarm at every farmhouse, shouting that
the Yankees had all the others surrounded at Dashman’s farm
and that he alone had escaped to spread the tidings, calling
on the brave Missourians to arise, to go to the rescue. And
Missourians responded. Thompson and his gallant men, leaving
their smokehouse and proceeding toward Missouri with their
tailfeathers dragging the ground, met reinforcements every
mile, hurrying to check the Kansans. But Dorr Morrison was
not among them. He had reached Pleasant Hill; and whether or
not he could have carried the retreat further, his horse
could not. And so there the story ends.
Martin Rice was not a native of Missouri. He was born
in Tennessee in 181%. According to his own statement his
schooling was irregular and somewhat neglected, though his
teacher had pronounced him, at six, "the best reader of his
age in all the country.” At the age of fourteen he left
school.altogether• But his f ather .pr ocured a.copy of Murray * s
19b
grammar, and the hoy studied without a teacher.
In 1833 the family moved to Jackson, County, Missouri,
and built a log cabin near Lone Jack. The father had traded
for a cheap set of surveying instruments, and Martin spent
the winter evenings studying an old treatise on the science
of surveying. And during the years of his life as a farmer
he pursued various studies for the improvement of the mind.
In his old age he was said to excel “many collegiate profes
sors” in mathematics. “Some things, too, he claims to have
discovered in mathematics, not known before, or at least not
79
laid down in the books.”
Martin Rice had, of course, no remarkable poetic gifts.
He is still remembered by men who were boys when he was near
the end of his life, as a garrulous old man whose friends
tried to prevent him from getting started on a speech in
80
church. But he was a man of intelligence and of intellec
tual curiosity, largely self-educated, an example of a superior
type of pioneer. His book is the record of nearly half a cen
tury in a new country's development, told by a man who had had
an active part in what he recounted. It is a valuable source
of information for the region with which it deals. And though
79 -
Log, cit. The biographical sketch (pp. 9 ff.) is
written in the third person. It is presumably,by Rice, however,
or by some other person utilizing information provided by Rice.
80
Reminiscence by C. F. Martin,. Warr.ensburg, Missouri.
195
the verse is inartistic and the prose sketches lack something
of polish, the book has one important literary merit. It is
interesting.
Much the same artlessness, of course, may be observed
in most of the Missouri poetry thus far considered— the pro
duction of people who did not live in the larger cities of
the state. And most of it has much the same merit, whatever
its intrinsic literary worth may be. For it holds to the
light the things which provincial Missourians.were thinking
and feeling, about which they were impelled to write their
verses. It may be rather thin poetry, but it is nevertheless
revealing. And it speaks for more people.than the writers;
books are not published to be read by the authors alone.
CHAPTER V
POETRY IN THE MISSOURI CITIES: 1850-1900
It might be assumed that the composition of poetry in
the cities of Missouri during the second half of the nineteenth
century would be more copious than in the rural areas or in
the small towns, and it might be expected that the urban verse
would exhibit a higher degree of artistic excellence. Missouri
has few cities, and it would be natural for the abler minds of
the state to move in their direction. The matter is worth
examining.
Kansas City, though the second largest city in the
state, has produced relatively few published volumes of poetry.
The collection of Missouri verse made by J. S. Snoddy repre
sents this eity chiefly by poems quoted from newspapers* And
the journalistic tradition here in at least the last quarter
of the nineteenth century was an excellent one, as it has con
tinued to be in the present century. These newspapers have
been hospitable to many writers of miscellaneous verse as
well as to their own staffs. For a time Eugene Field worked
*
in Kansas City5 and Major John N. Edwards was one of the
founders of the Kansas City Times. Kansas City has not an
undisputed title to either of these men. Field worked in both
St. Joseph and St. Louis; Edwards served his journalistic
apprenticeship in Lexington, and he, too, went from Kansas City
196
197
to a St. Louis newspaper.
Edwards was the author of a few poems and exhibited
considerable skill in versification. His ‘ ‘ Carrier's Address
1
of the Missouri Expositor" is dated January 1, 1861, and
belongs to his Lexington period. It expressed foreboding, of
the death and destruction about to be wrought by the Civil War,
and suggests that one tired of foreign faces, courts, struggles,
and distresses should come to the delights of Lexington in
Lafayette County, Missouri. His “Murder Done; or, the Gypsy's
Story" belongs to the period of his association with the
Kansas City Times, specifically to the year 1 8 7 0.
"Murder Done" is a melodramatic narrative in the first
person, told by a Gypsy maiden with whom Evelyn Clare had
trifled and whom he had discarded for another, a girl named
Isabel Lorn. The Gypsy, having stabbed the false lover, is
haunted by the specters of Isabel and Evelyns
The old owl up in the aspen tree,
Spoke last night and glared at me.
Spoke in a dreary undertone:
"The dead— the .dead'— can the dead make moan?"
All last night I lay awake,
The grass, moon-flecked as a spotted snake,
Wove pallid hands that grasped in strife,
A deathly dripping dagger-knife.
And a luminous star from the midnight's crown,
Suddenly shimmered and settled down,
Half on the low grave under the hill,
And half on the tinkling, tremulous rill.
^ Jennie Edwards, John N. Edwards, p p . 168 ff.
198
The dead came forth and tarried there,
Isabel Lorn and Evelyn Clare*
One arm lifted high above her,
And one about her spectral lover.
"Make moan!" said the owl, cursed fate and death,
'Twas a love that lived after fleeting breath.
Here and there the lovers strayed.
And laughed aloud at the Gypsy maid.
I strangled his voice, but oh, GodI
I would I could strangle the moan
That rushed up from the silent sod 2
When I walk with the midnight alone!
Both in versification and in echoes of phrasing the poem sug
gests a debt to Coleridge's "Christabel."
There were, however, a few books of verse published in
Kansas City or written by Kansas City people and published
elsewhere. The two chief volumes of verse by George W. Warder,
already considered, belong to his Kansas City period rather
than to his Chillicothe period. In 1893 William Cotter Wilson
published in Kansas City Poems of Two Worlds. containing a
variety of the "curiosities of literature" such as acrostics
and double acrostics. Wilson thinks himself the first to treat
if
"The Birth and Adventures of Santa Claus," but hopes that his
efforts will bring pleasure not only to children but to their
parents also. The book contains two Indian tales which purport
to be founded on history and tradition, and verses on many
^ Ibid., pp. 171 ff•
3 William C. Wilson, Poems of Two Worlds. . "Preface,"
p. vi.
k Ibid.. pp. W,ff.
199
other subjects
ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime, from
the grave to the gay. and it is kindly believed
that their perusal will serve not only to brighten
many an hour, but will also tend to create in the
reader the habit spoken of by Coleridge “of wishing
to discover the good and the beautiful In all that
surrounds them, "5
A less pretentious but more copious writer of verse is
J. T. Fetterman. His Street Musings (1895), published under
the obvious pseudonym of Joe Sephus, is a book of doggerel
narratives ostensibly by a countryman come to town, specific
ally to Kansas City. They describe the city scenes, with the
conventional countryman's wonder at the bustle and confusion,
and voice trite reflections on the hard lot of the poor, the
pride of wealth, the wisdom of avoiding the city gamblers, and
other matters which have long been associated with the rustic
in town. There are frequent references to Jane, ?*a stockman's
daughter," to whom Joe Sephus vows his intention of fidelity.
Included in the same volume is a sequel, Romantic
Ballads: or. Joe and.Jane in St. Louis. Joe has.been true to
Jane. He has married her and taken her to see St. Louis.
There are more poems on the theme of the rustic (with his wife)
in the city. There are also some narratives of tragedy, includ
ing a suicide or two.
Fetterman does not confine his essays at poetry to the
^ Ibid., “Preface," p. vi.
200
farcial or the bucolic. A third collection of verse bound
with Street Musings is Poems of Passion and Despair. These
poems deal characteristically with such lugubrious themes as
are suggested by the titles, “Found Dead,“^ “My Loved and
7 8 9
Lost,1 1 “Friendless,0 and “My Sister's Grave*1,7 And on the
title page he lists several others of his own books: John
Worthing: Ethel Brand: Temperance Sketches; City Sketches:
Saturday Nights: Character Sketches: School Criticisms: Poems:
“etc*, etc." In still another book. Tragedies and Comedies
of the Great City, or Joe and Jane1s Adventures in Kansas City.
St. Louis, and Chicago. Fetterman works the same vein which he
opened in Street Musings. with the addition of another large
city to the range of Joe and Jane. He includes also some prose
sketches dealing, like the narrative verses, with comedies and
tragedies of the big city.
All this is crude and dreary stuff. The humor relies
almost entirely upon the ignorance of the bumpkin, an exagger
ated and incredible figure, for whom, there is in this author
neither understanding nor sympathy. The tragedy is mere
recitation of horror. The books are scarce,.probably because
^ J. T. Fetterman, Street Musings. p. 152.
7 Ibid.. p. 15*+.
8 Ibid., p. 158.
^ Ibid., p. l6l.
2G1
nobody would care to preserve what he could not read without
feeling a loss in human dignity*
St, Joseph is commonly said in Missouri to be more
“literary*1 than Kansas City, its nearest metropolitan neigh--
bor. Whatever may now be the truth of that estimate, a few
St, Joseph writers have had, at least temporarily, somewhat
more than local repute. Among the versifiers, for example,
Jessie L, Gaynor has been widely associated with children’s
songs. And during the last quarter of the nineteenth century,
Edwin Arthur Welty wrote a considerable number of ballads for
which he was once in some circles well regarded. The first of
them, “The Trapper at Bay,” was published in 1 8 7 6, according
to Miss Brashear, in an Eastern magazine and included twenty
years later in a volume of Welty's balads-— Ballads of the
Bivouac and the Border.10 Though it is now generally for-
11
gotten, it was once highly praised.
"The Trapper at Bay" is a narrative, told by an Indian
brave, of an attack on two white trappers. The band of
Indians killed one of the white men; the other came to bay at
the mouth of a cave. The Indian tells his story in melodrama
tic eight-foot couplets:
10 « ,
Buffalo, 1 8 9 6.
^1 M.'M. Brashear, "Missouri Vers© and Verse Writers,"
Missouri Historical ReviewT XVIII, p. 317*
202
I was under fierce old Red-knife at the crossing
of the Loop,
When that brave and gallant warrior fought
Kit Carson and his troop;
All these scenes of blood and carnage I would
gladly meet again,
Sooner than to face that trapper in his ghostly
mountain den, I2
Welty lived most of his life at Oregon, Missouri, not
far from St. Joseph. He wrote this first of his ballads in
1873 shortly after his graduation from the St. Joseph high
school. Miss Brashear thinks it the best of his ballads.
Another St. Joseph poet, Mrs. Constance Faunt Leroy Runcie,
in her Poems. Dramatic and Lvric (1888), offers verse of quite
another sort, possessing at least a lyric quality not to be
found in the doggerel of Welty. The introductory poem is
"Two Gifts, Poetry and Song."
A star came falling from the sky,
I caught the lovely thing;
It was a song sent from on high
Flashed from an angel's wing.
Who sang— who wrote— I do not know,
Nor how they lost their way;
I only caught them to my heart
And whispered to them "Stay.m13
And in "First Love" Mrs. Runcie exhibits, if not the
wistful subtlety of a Sara Teasdale, at least, as Miss Brashear
12 Ibid., p. 318
13 Loc. bit.
203
suggests, something of the feeling of an earlier and minor
Sara Teasdale:
0 youthi G loveI 0 souli
Never again to be the samel Hast thou
Laid this thy gift, thy gift unspeakable.
Here at my feet? For this, 0 friend, I thank thee,
Thou erownst me queen indeed; I am more fair
Because I wear the jewel of thy first love,
I will arise and purify myself,
Will kneel and say unto my God: f , My Father,
Hold, hold me closer to thy heart for I
Would learn of Thee how I may keep
This noble treasure of a first great love.1 1
It is never possible to reconstruct completely the
pattern of the intellectual and artistic life of any community.
Nearly every person, in his secret moments, tries his hand at
poetry; some people keep their verses concealed; some read
them to their friends, or give away manuscript copies; some
ornament their speeches in public gatherings with, extracts
from their own works, A little of all this verse gets into
print, lost in the pages of obscure newspapers and magazines
or circulated as chance and the taste of readers may dictate
in books. It is not always the best, of course, that is to be
found in books, though in general it is likely to reflect the
interests and the artistic standards of the time and place.
The reader should bear in mind, however, that the recoverable
writing is by no means the whole story.
The work of the St. Joseph writers already examined
llf Ibid., p. 319*
exhibits two literary tendencies which might well have been
expected to appear in a town situated as St. Joseph was, on or
near the course of westward travel which came up the Missouri
River and thence toward Hew Mexico, California, and Oregon.
The pioneer days were far enough in the past to have acquired
somewhat more of romance than they possessed for many culti
vated people of an earlier day who found themselves surrounded
by pioneers, as Timothy Flint had been at St. Charles. The
wild Indians had vanished from the St. Joseph scene, as had the
trappers and hunters; but the wild Indians had not vanished
from the national consciousness, or from the expanses of terri
tory in the West where life for white men was still in a degree
strenuous and perilous. Other American writers, in Missouri
and elsewhere, had found romantic interest in the pioneer,
the trapper, and the Indian. Arthur Welty* s narrative poems
strike not a new note but one which had long been, and which
has continued to be, touched by better American writers than he.
When one considers the hunters, trappers, fur-traders,
and bee-hunters of the early days in Missouri, and the crudity
of life in the log cabins of isolated settlers remote from
centers of civilization, it is easy to exaggerate the ignor
ance and uncouthness of the population which settled in • ■
Missouri. The fact is that people of all classes from many
parts of the country came to this territory, and that every
town and city had its educated people and'its professional men.
They established schools— the Missouri Gazette carries announce
ments of the opening of nineteen private schools between Janu-
15
ary, 1809, and April, 1820 — and they owned books. By the
middle of the second half of the nineteenth century, Missourians
were probably as familiar as other Americans with the sentimen-r
talities of Victorian'literature. Mrs. Runcie of St. Joseph,
when she wrote lyrics of love and youth, of falling stars,
songs, and angel1 s wings, was writing in a vein familiar enough
to the readers of both major and minor poets of the century.
There is, of course, nothing of local color in such poetry;
and Welty*s work, though it has to do with the Western scene,
is conventionalized and literary treatment of the Indian and
the pioneer rather than the record of Welty*s own experience.
Many circumstances have made it almost inevitable that
St. Louis should excel all other Missouri cities in literary
and intellectual achievement. St. Louis is not the oldest
settlement of white men in this state— St. Genevieve was a
large settlement before Pierre Laclede blazed the trees which
16
marked the site he had chosen for the future city. But this
site, near the junction of the Missouri and the Mississippi,
is peculiarly situated to be the focal point for the trade and
F. L. Billon, Annals of St. Louis in Its Territorial
Da vs from ISO1 * to 1821. pp. 78 ff •
^ G. W. Crear, Commercial and Architectural St. Louis.
P* 5.
206
travel of enormous territories, particularly in the days when
the important highways were the great rivers. St. Louis,
moreover, like New Orleans, existed tinder the dominion of
both France and Spain, before coming into the possession of
an English-speaking country. To the French, Spanish, and
English elements of its culture it has added many elements
from a large German population. It was, without doubt, one
of the most cosmopolitan American cities during the nineteenth
century.
As has been noted, there was considerable development
of writing and publication in St. Louis before the middle of
the century. The Intellectual tradition has continued. Pub
lishers of this city have brought out the works of many
writers of other Missouri towns; and St. Louis people have
contributed in large volume to the literature written or pub
lished in the state. Much of it is undistinguished literature,
of course; many of the saints in paradise are doubtless not in
i ___
the highest tradition. Sometimes for minor writers biographi
cal information Is unavailable. But, for better or worse, in
the second half of the nineteenth century St. Louis was the
intellectual center of the state, and its contribution, in
poetry as in other types of literature, is worth examination.
As has been noted in an earlier chapter, several books
of verse were published in St. Louis before 1850. Some of
this poetry dealt with Missouri themes; examples are several
20 7
of Umphraville's poems and John Russel's Mournful Elegy for
the people who died of cholera at the Gravois Coal Diggings.
Others, such as Lewis Foulk Thomas's Inda. were concerned
with the West if not with Missouri. George Thompson's The
Prison Bard contains much of piety and moralistic reflection,
intensified no doubt by his unhappiness in the State Peniten
tiary. Moralizing and sentimental reflection was, indeed, a
staple resource for minor versifiers. They praised the con
ventional virtues, they spoke of the pleasures of heaven,
they advised the reader that all men must die. They belonged
to the time which produced Dickens’ tales of dying children.
They sang popular songs beginning
"I should like to die," said Willie
"If my papa could die too,"
or,
My little darling used to stand
Just by the cottage door.
Waiting to kiss me when I same
At evening from the store.1/
Such things are not poetry of a high order. Hone of
the books of poetry written by Missourians before 1850 were
very high poetry? nor were any for a considerable while after
that date. But the composition of considerable quantities of
verse did indicate interest in poetry itself, and in the
themes which were occupying the attention of cultivated people.
17
' Authors unknown. Known by family tradition.
208
We have observed something of the extent of that interest in
the state at large* It was more fruitful in St. Louis than
elsewhere.
Edward Stagg, whose Poems was published in 1852, belongs
fairly distinctly to the ”1 should like to die said Willie'1
class. His poems are commonplace enough, moralistic and sen
timental with an almost morbid interest in the death of chil
dren. In "The Bed of Snow,"^ Lord Elton is full of scorn; he
ignores appeals of the distressed. Later, his daughter dies—
an orphan in a bed of snow. "The Burial of My Brother’s
19
Child," ' according to an explanatory line, was "written at
St. Louis, January 13, 1852, while the funeral was taking
place, as had been announced, by telegraph, it would."
Of the less melancholy poems the themes are still
commonplace. "Twelve Years Ago," for example, celebrates a
wedding anniversary:
Twelve years ago, this day, my wife,
We joined our humble barks together,
To sail adown the stream of Life,
And meet, as one, Life's changeful weather.
Twelve years are gonel Now to our freight
We’ve added three elysian flowers,
That, while they give our bark more weight,
Bo deck the eare-brow of the hours. 20
^ Edward Stagg, Poems. pp. X2h ff
19 Ibid.. p. 37.
20 Ibid., pp. 13 ff.
209
21
"The Stars" celebrates a theme that poets have not generally
overlooked. Perhaps as fresh a subject as Stagg attacks is
that of the poem in which he proclaims:
0, sweet fresh airI
Nought can compare
With it, for health?
So free to all,
To great and small o?
The poor, as them of wealth.
This is doggerel, of course. If it has any merit, it
is merely in its praise of some of the mild pleasure of common
life; wedding anniversaries may be occasions of gratified
reflection; the stars shine the heavens; fresh air is salu
tary. One approves of them. They are useful to the poet of
good intentions and little art.
Stagg was by no means the only St. Louis poet of the
fifties concerned with death and. religion. Ethel Gray, indeed,
was more intent upon such matters even than he, at least in
her one discoverable volume of poems. This is Sunset Gleams
from the City of the Mounds. published in 1852, the same year
as Stagg*s Poems. These poems are concerned almost exclusively
with moral or religious excellence and with death. In the
foreword Miss Grey expressed the hope that her book may teach
"The Savior’s truth," and she dedicates the volume to all
Ibid., pp. 65 ff.
22 Ibid., p. 72.
210
dwellers on the earth, with a prayer for each of these people*
For the purpose of such teaching, and for the improve
ment of the dwellers on the earth, it would be difficult to
compose a more lugubrious sequence of poems. The titles are
revealing: fair specimens are “The Charnel House, 1 1 “The
Little Orphan's Dream," “The Centurion's Grief," "The Aged
Woman's Farewell," "The Memory of the Dead," "Farewell Jennie,"
and "Blind, Blind, Blind*" A typical example of the poems is
in the following lines from "The Charnel House":
Full of dead men's bones is the Charnel House;
Full of sin is the human heart;
A whited veil is flung o'er both
To hide each hideous part.
Heaven save our dust from the Charnel House,
Heaven free our souls from sin;
Unlike them both, may we keep our hearts
Spotless and pure within.23
Such poems have, obviously, little connection with the
local interests of St. Louis or the Western themes of a young
state, except perhaps as the roughness and sinfulness of the
population in such a state, and the lack of sufficient oppor
tunities for amusement and employment of the mind, may con
tribute to religious and missionary fervor. The fact is,
however, that the subjects of death, and .the immortality of
23 g^hel Grey, Sunset Gleams from the City of the
Mounds. p. 150*
211
the soul were frequent themes in the English poetry of the
time; it is not surprising if such subjects preoccupy minor
American versifiers either in Missouri or in other parts of
the country. They continued for a long time to do so.
John Mortimer Roe in his Poems (1857), published
before he was nineteen years of age, exhibits the familiar
tendency to reflect on righteousness, death, and the benevo
lence of God, but he goes far enough afield to pay conven
tional tribute to nature, to virtue, to beautiful young
women, and to miscellaneous other themes of which no reader
could be ignorant. In "The Author*' he laments that America
has as yet had no Homers, Shakespeares, or Byrons, but prophe-
2b
sies that she will have them. In "Gertrude1 1 he narrates the
sad story of an orphan who was adopted and reared by kindly
people. She grew into a lovely woman, but became infatuated
with a titled foreigner and disappeared. In time, she returned
to her friends, neither, as they feared, wife nor maid; and
25
despite their love and attentions, she drooped and died.
"A Simple Story" is the tale of a four-year-old child
in a laborer's family, a relative, doubtless, of Mark Twain's
precocious six-year-old who supported his widowed mother by
digging wells. This infant wanders from home, as laborers'
^ John M. Roe, Poems, pp. 9 ££•
Ibid., pp. 6*f ff.
212
children do, and finds an apparently lifeless man lying on
the ground. The little girl brings water from a stream and
revives the stranger. He proves to be a wealthy man, and
in gratitude he rewards the child * s family, so that they shall
26
never be in want again.
These poems are, of course, the work of an immature
man. He says in the preface, indeed, that many of them were
written during his sixteenth and seventeenth years— this
statement by way of asking excuse for "inaccuracies" of which
he would not be guilty in the maturity of his nineteenth year.
They suggest familiarity with the pious and sentimental litera
ture of his time, but no originality in theme. The versifi
cation is conventionally varied, without the gross crudities
of some writers of doggerel, and with touches of a somewhat
thin early-Victorian prettiness.
There is somewhat more of imagination and more of
poetry in John Asbury Willis's The Bard and Other Poems (1858).
, f The Bard" is a long narrative of a bard who sits by a stream,
sweeps his fingers across his harp, and sings songs about such
subjects as spring, the girl whom he loved and lost, the winds,
starlight, and an ancient legendary kingdom which was happy
and innocent and peaceful until it fell under the sway of an
evil tyrant; then it ceased being happy, innocent, or peaceful.
26 Ibid.. pp. 83 ff.
213
There is a good deal of the lyrical in these poems, marred
somewhat by conventionalized personifications and "poetic"
phrases— "mountain*s brow," "verdure-covered hill," "realms
above." The following lines illustrate the style:
He heard no note which did not wake
Within his breast some answering strain;
And now he raised his silent Harp,
He struck its chords and sang "The Rain!"—
"0,er the vale— on mountain's brow,
Stilly silence reigneth now,
Whilst the shadow of her wing
Hesteth o’er each living thing!
"Folded to the flow* ret*s breast
Wearied Zephyr sinks to rest,
Dreaming dreams the embrace of love,
Alone may woo from realms above."27
In addition to this idyllic series of songs— the narra
tive of "The Bard" is primarily a mere framework for the lyrics-
the book contains a considerable number of the short poems one
grows to expect, sentimental and moral verses on such subjects
as "Love," "The Dead Babe," "Repentance," "Dreaming," "Lillie,"
"Fannie Lee," "To Mary," "Oh, Let Me Adore Thee," and "Is This
28
Life All."
It will be observed that in the fifties the poets of
St. Louis are writing largely from literary models and from
literary themes rather than from any enthusiasm for the actual
John A. Willis, The Bard, and Other Poems, pp. 57
28 Ibid.. pp. 107 ff.
214
Missouri scenes about them and generally that their models are
not the more vigorous poets of the early part of their century.
In Willis, as in the others already examined, are to be heard
the pietistic and moralizing tones that are endlessly repeated,
indeed, in the voices of minor poets all down the second half
of the century. The poems of Willis contain echoes also of
tones that come from the earlier romantic poets. It is not
possible, always, to say whether a writer imitates Byron or
Shelley or the imitators of Byron and Shelley. For example,
many bards have sat by the riverside and plucked their harps
and sung and wept, and it may be that no single one of them
all is the progenitor of Willis’s Bard. Not only Collins and
Shelley but many another poet has made lyric use of personi
fied zephyrs and dreams and silences. Uncounted poets have
written uncounted poems to innumerable Marys. Perhaps none
of Willis’s personifications derive from specific personifica
tions in other romantic poets, or his love poems from other
specific love poems. But the influence of the earlier romantic
poets of the nineteenth century is more evident in his verses
than is the spirit of the more sentimental early Victorians.
Most twentieth-century readers would probably say that the
poems gain in vigor and imagination by this fact.
A. considerable number of poems came from the St. Louis
presses in the sixties. One curious book of these verses is
The National Lvrics (1865), compiled and edited by
215
J. M. Campbell. These are not the national lyrics of America,
however, but come, according to the title page, ‘ ‘ from the
whole range of Irish poetry. 1 1 Some of the poems were written
expressly for this book, but for the most part the work is a
compilation. Campbell prefaces the collection with an address
to the Fenian Brotherhood, a revolutionary Irish society,
explaining that the purpose is to purify and exalt the taste
of the Irish in America for genuine poetry, to stimulate their
patriotism for Ireland, and to revive their souls and arms to
performance of the duty "which the coming crisis of Ireland’s
destiny imposes upon all.of.her.sons.” There Is, naturally,
no connection with the local scene or local inspiration.
But there were books of the period which had to do with
the American scene. A poem, for example,--..which is extremely
interesting, both for its substance and for the circumstances
of its composition, is Myron Coloney’s Manomin. subtitled
4 Rhythmical Romance of Minnesota, the Great Rebellion, and
the Minnesota Massacres. It has a very real historical and
geographical background, and at least one of the characters
in it was an acquaintance of Goloney. Others of the charac
ters may have been equally historical, though some of the
good Indians suggest that Goloney relied partly, at least,
upon his invention for the material.
In l85S Coloney and his wife migrated to Douglas
County, Minnesota, in part, the scene of the. action of the
216
story. One of his neighbors, a hardy and capable man named
Andreas Darling, reached his claim at about the same time,
said the Coloneys came to think highly of him.
At the time of the Sioux massacre -which forms a part
of the story of Manomin. Coloney was away. He did not return,
but bought a plantation of a thousand acres near Rolla,
Missouri, and named it “Union Farm.” Darling came to Missouri
and took charge of this plantation as overseer. In l86*t he
was killed by “Dick” Kitchen1s band of bushwackers.
Mrs. Darling returned to Minnesota.
Coloney was financially unable to disinter Darling's
body, provide it with a coffin, and send it to the widow, and
he invited public contributions for that purpose. He wrote
Manomin and published it himself in the hope that the proceeds
29
would supply a fund for Mrs. Darling. Up to this time he
had not been a poet; he was the commercial editor of the
St. Louis Evening Hews. He asserts that this is his first
literary venture, and that it will undoubtedly be his last.^
The poem is a narrative of the Thornton family, who
settled in Minnesota and who were murdered in the Sioux massa
cre. Only Harry Thornton, who was in the Union Army at the
29
Myron Coloney, Manomin. ”In Memoriam,” pp. iii ff.
Ibid.. “Preface,” pp. xiii ff.
217
time survived. Before going to the army Harry Thornton had
fallen in love with Manomin. a half-breed 0jibway girl. She
was wounded in the massacre, but was saved by a noble 0jibway
chief, Pewaubec, and after the war Harry and Manomin were
reunited and married, but not until they had suffered consider
able mental agonies— each in the belief that the other was
dead. Pewaubec, meanwhile, loved Manomin with an unrequited
passion. Happily, when it became clear that fate was denying
him Manomin, he was able to fall in love with her white
cousin, Melissa Leffingwell.
Andreas Darling appears in the story as a backwoods
marksman. The villain, Robert King, has for years pursued the
Thorntons, seeking vengeance because Mrs. Thornton once scorned
his love. Darling's part in the tale is to shoot King. A
woman bom to be murdered by the Sioux is not to fall prema
turely by the hand of an unsuccessful suitor.
It is natural that a poem written as this one was, in
the spare time of six months and by a commercial editor rather
than by one who had cultivated his style in the hope of suc
cess as a poet, should appear imitative. This poem, according
to the author's own statement, was composed from commercial
and charitable motives; and many writers, after all, actuated
by more purely literary ambitions, have allowed the accents of
their masters to sound in their own voices. At any rate
Coloney is obviously under the influence of Tennyson and Poe;
218
more specifically, there are in Manomin reminiscences in meter
and phrasing of "Locksley Hall*1 and of “The Raven. 1 1
The style of the verse can best be indicated by quota
tion. The following passage records the first meeting of
Harry Thornton and Manomin:
Harry Thornton*s heart is leaping with a throb
he'll ne'er forget,
Through his soul there flows a longingI Young
love's tide has fairly set!
"Sir, good morning, 1 1 spoke the maiden, frankly
giving him her hand,
"Father lives away up yonder, just behind that
point of land.
All last night we saw your fires, and this morn
your white tents shine,
So I come to bid you welcome to this lovely lake
of mine!"
Father trades with the Ojibways, mother is
0jibway, too,
And my name, sir, is MANOMIN; pray, sir, tell me,
who are you?"31
Harry Thornton, a private in the Union Army, writes to
his mother in the following vein:
With the drums of victory sounding and the woods with
shouts resounding,
Mingled with the mournful patter of the black and
dismal rain,
I am sitting here, all weary, in this stormy
midnight dreary,
Writing home to you, dear mother, and Manomin
once again.
Oh, my brain is wild with battle, still my senses
seem to rattle
With the volleys of the rifles, and the tumult
of the fray,
31 Ibid.. p. 22
219
And the cannons' awful thunder, rending heaven
and earth asunder.
Peace! be still my ruffled being, calm, my inward
sense of seeing,
laihile I tell two souls expectant of the glories
we have w o n . 3 2
In the part of the story -which recounts events of the
massacre, details are most gruesome;
Poor Thornton, mangled, cut and slashed, lay stripped
and swimming in his gore,
And Esther, stabbed and scalped anddiot, lay dead
and naked on the floor!
And Esther's father! oh, my God! how must these
horrid deeds appall
His head was severed from its trunk and grimly
nailed against the wall!
Sweet little Jessie, angel child, sure demons
would have spared her life,
But these vile murderers cut her throat, and
stabbed her with a scalping knife.33
.............. what tongue can tell the dreadful
sights that met their eyes?
Young children1s heads cut off and turned all
ghastly glaring to the skies!
Bodies cut up and trees festooned with all their
horrid fragments there,
Girls disembowelled and on thumbs hung tied together
by the hair.
Great stalwart men shot down and scalped, their
heads oft skinned completely o'er,
While their young wives in agony were nailed
stark naked to the floor!
Small children's eyes dug out while each dark
socket held a musket ball,
And unborn babes ripped out, and spiked alive and
writhing to the wall.3^
32 ibid., pp. 1I +3 f.
33 Ibid.. pp. 212 f.
3lf Ibid., pp. 216 f.
220
It will be observed that in this description of the
Indian outrages the imitation of Tennyson and Poe has been
abandoned* Perhaps the horror of the scenes overcame Coloney* s
feeling for these models; certainly neither “Locksley Hall1 *
nor “The Raven* 1 is a likely pattern for such description. The
influence of those poems is, indeed, most evident in the
earlier part of Manomin: in the latter part, whether because
Coloney has been drawn out of his desire to imitate by the
nature of his material or because the imitation is too diffi
cult to sustain, it disappears. In part of the poem a ten-
foot line supplants the eight-foot line with which it begins,
but the style is clumsy and turgid. Sometimes the lines do
not conform to pattern in scansion; figure of speech are often
incongruously confused. The desolation of the 0jibway,
Pewaubec, in the throes of an unrequited love for Manomin, is
represented in these lines:
And lacking oil whereon its flame to feed, his lamp
of love was shorn of its bright beams,
Which left his heart a charnel house indeed, strewn
with the ashes of his early dreams.3?
It is to be remembered that Pewaubec was able, happily, to
replenish the oil for his lamp of love and to clear the ashes
from the charnel house of his heart when he made the acquaint
ance of another girl.
Ibid., p. 290
221
In a considerable part of the poem, particularly the
more romantic portions, there is an unreality of characteriza
tion and expression that suggests Coloney’s own invention;
the massacre scenes, however, are quite probably based on a
report from eye-witnesses. The Coloneys, it is true, were
not present at the time of the tragedy but the Darlings were;
it is quite certain that the Darlings must have recounted the
things they had seen, and there is a horrible realism of
detail which hardly comes from the inventor of the love story.
It is perhaps of mild incidental interest to observe
that Sauk Center did not wait for Sinclair Lewis and Main
Street to find its place in literature. On the way to the
Minnesota claim the Thornton family
.......... travelled up the valley— slowly
journeyed day by day,
Passed Sauk Center and Kandotta, paper cities,
on their way.
Those were days when speculation’s wild and crazy
tide rein high—
Fools mapped cities by the thousands, luring
other fools to buy.-*4 5
Nobody would call Manomin great poetry. It is, indeed,
pretty crude poetry. But it has its merits. It is no mere
reflection of pale sentimentalities or moralities derived
from other minor poets. It is regional literature and his
torical literature; it springs directly from the life and the
36 Ibid., p. 18.
222
circumstances of the westward expansion of the white man*
Several other writers of verse were active in St* Louis
at this period* Thomas Manning Page, the author of Bohemian
Life, began in August of 1867 writing poems on the Civil War
for the St* Louis Times* In the early eighties also he con-
37
tributed poems to the Hornet. a St* Louis humorous magazine.
Jacob L* Bowman included humorous, sentimental, and pathetic
poems with the humorous prose sketches of his You and Me: or
Sketches for Both of Us (1 8 6 7). He explains in the preface
38
that such poems as ' ’ Pocahontas,” "The Land of the Shamrock
39 ij-o
Forever,” and "Health to the Brave and the True” are juve
nile poems, written many years before, but he evidently
thought well enough of them to justify their inclusion among
such burlesque stories as that of a man thrown from a horse
l+l
because somebody had placed a bramble under the animal’s tail,
and that of a man’s misadventure with a sleigh which upset
1*2
and threw a red-haired woman into a snowdrift. And
^ W. C. Breckenridge, "Bibliography of Early Missouri
Imprints," in James M. Breckenridge, William Clark Breckenridge.
His Life. Lineage and Writings, p. 322*
^ Jacob L* Bowman, You and Me: or. Sketches for Both
of Us, pp. 2*+3 ff.
39 Ibid*, p. 2l+ 8.
Ibid., p. 2 6 7.
^ Ibid., p. 179.
Ibid., pp. 12*+ ff.
223
Alexander N. DeMenil, later well known for his researches in
matters pertaining to the State of Missouri, was as early as
1867 writing some of the poems for his Songs in Minority.
Two of these youthful poems he repeats many years later in
1+3
Forest and Town (1911). These are "The Blue Bird,'1 a poem
of greeting and praise for the blue bird, and "The Song of
I j - l f , ,
Ixus," from the French of Hegesippe Moreau. DeMenil gives
for the former the specific date of October 8, 1867* The
chief work of this man belongs, however, to a later date, and
will be considered in another place.
Irwin Russell deserves a place in the story of Missouri
letters because he lived for a part of his lifetime in Missouri,
and because he introduced an important new note into American
literature. But Missouri must share her claim to him with
Mississippi. He belongs, indeed, more distinctly to the
latter state than to the former.
Russell was born in Port Gibson, Mississippi, in 1853.
Part of his boyhood he spent in that town, part of it in
St. Louis. At the beginning of the Civil War his family was
living in St. Louis, but they returned to Port Gibson and
lived there for the duration of the war. For the next four
years they lived again in St. Louis, while Irwin attended
^ A. N. DeMenil, Forest and Town, p. *+56.
^ Ibid., pp. b7 ff.
22b
classes in St. Louis University. After his graduation in
1869 he went to Port Gibson and studied law in the office of
Judge L. N. Baldwin. By special act of the Mississippi Legis
lature he was admitted to the bar at the age of nineteen; in
1877 he became Judge Baldwin's assistant.
In 1878 Port Gibson.suffered an epidemic of yellow
fever. More than half the population left the city. Irwin
Russell remained and helped his father, Dr. William Mclab Wilson,
tend the sick, toiling night and day. The girl he is said to
have loved died in the epidemic.
In December of this year, when his labors in the fever
epidemic had ended, Irwin Russell went to lew York and received
a welcome from literary men such as Henry Cuyler Burner,
Richard Watson Gilder, and Robert Johnson Underwood. He did
not find the city conducive to writing. His father died in
May, 1879; his own health failed. He was a sick man when he
slipped away from his friends and worked his way to lew Orleans
on a river boat. He found a position on the lew Orleans Times,
but did not recover his health and died December 23, 1879? in
a cheap boarding house.
Though Russell followed the profession of law, he was
always more interested in literature. His first poem, pub
lished in 1 8 6 9, was a juvenile piece on the origin of the
Chinese practice of foot-binding. But his historical signifi
cance lies in the fact that he was the first to appreciate the
225
literary possibilities of the negro character and to make
extensive use of the negro dialect. One of the earliest of
his poems in this dialect, "Uncle Cap Interviewed,” was pub
lished in Scribner1s Monthly for January, 1 8 7 6. Much of his
work was published anonymously or under various pseudonyms.
He probably felt that death was approaching in New Orleans;
his poem, “The Cemetery,” was published in the Times a few
days before his death.
Russell's only volume of verse was compiled after his
death and published in 1888 under the title, Poems by Irwin
Russell. Joel Chandler Harris wrote a preface for it. In
1917 a new edition was issued, with additional poems, under
^5
the title, Christmas Night in the Quarters.
These representations of negro life and character are
often sympathetic and touching. One of the most interesting
of the poems is the longest, "Christmas Night in the Quarters.”
It describes the gathering of the darkies from the country
side, passes over the feasting as beyond the power of descrip
tion, and recounts the dancing and story telling.
J Henry Leffert, "Irwin Russell,” Dictionary of
American Biography. XVI, pp. 2**2 f. See also William G. Nott,
"Irwin Russell, First Dialect Author,” Southern Literary
Messenger. December, 1939*
Sidney Lanier, in fact, made some use of Negro dialect
before Russell. See Dr. Garland Greever's "Introduction” to
Lanier's Tiger Lilies and Southern Prose (Centennial edition
of the works of Sidney Lanier, vol. V), p. xxxi.
226
When merry Christmas-day Is done,
And Christmas-night is just begun;
While clouds In slow procession drift,
To wish the moon-man "Christmas gift, 1 1
Yet linger overhead to know
What causes all the stir below;
At Uncle Johnny Booker's ball
The darkies hold high carnival.
From all the country-side they throng,
With laughter, shouts, and scraps of song,—
Their whole deportment plainly showing
That to the Frolic they are going,
Some take the path with shoes in hand,
To traverse muddy bottom-land;
Aristocrats their steeds bestride—
Four on a mule, behold them ridel
And ten great oxen draw apace
The wagon from "de Oder place,"
With forty guests, whose conversation
Betokens glad anticipation.
Not so with him who drives: old Jim
Is sagely solemn, hard, and grim,
And frolics have no joys for him.
He seldom speaks but to condemn—
Or utter some wise apothegm—
Or else, some crabbed thought pursuing,
' Talk to his team, as now he's doing:
Come up heah, Star! Yee-baweel
You alluz is a-laggin*—
Mus1 be you think I's dead,
An’ dis de huss you's draggin*—
You's mos* too lazy to draw yo1 bref;
Let 'lone drawin' de waggin.
Dis team— quit bel'rin sah!
De ladies don't submit 'at—
Dis team-— you ol' fool ox,
You heah me tell you quit 'at?
Dis team's des like de 'nited States;
Dat's what I's tryin* to git at!
Go 'way, fiddlel folks is tired o' hearin* you
a-squawkin'•
Keep silence fur yo' betters!— don't you heah de
banjo talkin'?
About de' 'possum's tail she's gwine to lecter—
ladies, listen!—
227
About de ha'r whut isn't dar, an' why de ha'r is
missin*:
"Dar's gwine to be a' oberflow," said Noah, lookin'
solemn—
Fur Noah tuk the "Herald," an* he read the ribber
column—
An* so he sot his hands to wuk a-cl'arin* timber-
pat ches,
An* 'lowed he's gwine to build a boat to beat the
steamer Natchez.
01' Noah kep' a-nailin' an' a-chippin' an' a-sawin';
An' all de wicked neighbors kep' a-laughin' an*
a-pshawin';
But Noah didn't min* 'em, knowin* whut wuz gwine
to happen:
An' forty days an' forty nights de rain it kep*
a-drappin*.
Now, Noah had done cotched a lot ob ebry sort o*
beas'es—
Ob all de shows a-trabbelin*, it beat 'em all to piecesi
He had a Morgan colt an' sebral head o' Jarsey cattle—
An' druv 'em board de Ark as soon's he heered de
thunder rattle.
Den sech anoder fall ob rain!— it come so awful hebby,
De ribber riz immejitly, an* busted troo de lebbee;
De people all wuz drownded out--'cep' Noah an* de
critters,
An' men he'd hired to work do boat— an' one to mix
de bitters.
De Ark'she kep' a-sailin' an' a-sailin* an* a-sailin';
De lion got his dander up, an' like to bruk de palin';
De sarpints hissed; de painters yelled; tell, whut
wid all de fussin*•
You c'u'dn't hardly heah de mate a-bossin' 'round* an'
cussin'.
Now, Ham, de only nigger whut wuz runnin* on de
packet,
Got lonesome in de barber-shop, an* c'u'dn't stan* de
racket;
An' so, fur to amuse he-self, he steamed some wood
an' bent it,
An' soon he had a banjo made— de fust dat wuz invented.
228
He wet de ledder, stretched it on; made bridge an'
screws an* aprin;
An* fitted in a proper neck— 'twuz berry long an1
taprin*;
He tuk some tin, an* twisted him a thinble fur to ring it;
An den de mighty question riz: how wuz he gwine to
string it?
De ’possum had as fine a tail as dis dat I's a-singin';
De ha'r’s so long an* thick an* strong,— des fit fur
banjo-stringin*;
Dat nigger shaved ’em off as short as wash-day-dinner
graces;
An* sorted ob 'em by de size, f'om little E*s to basses*
He strung her, tuned her, struck a jig,— 'twas "Nebber
min' de wedder,"—
She soun* like forty-lebben bands a-playin* all togedder;
Some went to pattin*; some to dancin*; Noah called de
figgers,
An Ham he sot an* knocked de tune, de happiest ob
niggers!
Now, sence dat time— it's might strange— dere's
not de slightes1 showin'
Ob any ha'r at all upon se 'possum's a-growin';
An* curi's, too, dat nigger's ways: his people nebber
los1 e * em—
Fur whar you^finds de nigger— dar's de banjo an' de
possum!4-0
Other poems exhibit the negro in the now familiar guise
of simple, naiveupeople, childlike in their transparent guilt,
as when one of them tries to sell a bale of cotton to a store
keeper, trying at the same time to persuade the purchaser not
to compare the sample of cotton with the bale, or to probe the
1 + 7
bale for the rocks concealed within it. '
1+6
Irwin Russell, Poems by Irwin Russell, pp* 1 ff.
Ibid., pp. 19 ff.
229
It is easy to agree -with Joel Chandler Harris that
Bussell possessed the poetical temperament* One who is not
himself familiar with the character or the dialect of the
negro, may discern the humor, the human sympathy, and the
vividness of characterization; but judgment concerning
validity of treatment must rely upon other testimony. Harris
supplies such judgments
It seems to me that some of IRWIN RUSSELL'S
negro-character studies rise to the level of what,
in a large way, we term literature. His negro
operetta, "Christmas-Night in the Quarters," is
inimitable. It combines the features of a charac
ter study with a series of bold and striking plan
tation pictures that have never been surpassed. In
this remarkable group— if I may so term it,— the
old life before the war is reproduced with a fidel
ity that is marvelous.
But the most wonderful thing about the dialect
poetry of IRWIN RUSSELL is his accurate conception
of the negro character. The dialect is not always
the best,— it is often carelessly written,— but
the negro is there, the old-fashioned, unadulterated
negro, who is still dear to the Southern heart.
There is no straining after effect— indeed, the
poems produce their result by indirection; but I do
not know where could be found to-day a happier or a
more perfect representation of negro character."'®
Denton Jacques Snider, (18^-1-1925) whose works of fic
tion have been mentioned in another chapter, was born in
Mount Gilead, Ohio, in 18^1. In the sixties he was a teacher
in the Christian Brother College of St. Louis and in the
St. Louis High School. In that decade and the next he became
^ Ibid.. "Introduction," pp. ix ff.
230
a member of various literary and philosophical societies,
and was a frequent contributor to the Journal of Speculative
Philosophy, the Western, and other such magazines. He taught
classes in Greek and Roman history, in the works of classical
writers, and in Shakespeare and Goethe. He was, indeed, one
of the greatest contributors to the intellectual life of
St. Louis. Between 1880 and 1920 he published nearly fifty
books, nearly all of them in St. Louis— fiction, poetry, and
critical and philosophical works. Much of his poetry deals
with the classical scene. Such appeal as it possesses is not
for the general reader but for educated people who know some
thing— perhaps not too much— of the classics. Some of the
best of his poetry is said not to have been printed but to
h-9
have been privately distributed among his friends. About
such poems one cannot now form a judgment; the published
poems on classical subjects are somewhat disappointing.
Of these early books of verse, Delphic Days (1880) is
°in poetic form . . . the attempt of modern consciousness to
50
recreate the old Greek idyllic life.*' An Epigrammatic
Voyage (1886) is a book of poetical musings, a sort of log
^■9
A. N. DeMenil, HA Century of Missouri Literature,”
Missouri Historical Review. XV, p. 102.
H. H. Morgan, in J. T. Scharf, History of St. Louis
City and County. II, p. 16 0 3.
231
51
book of his voyages among classic authors. Agamemnon1 s
Daughter (1885) is a version of the Iphigenia story.
Agamemnon1 s Daughter is an example of the poetry of a
man who is more scholar than poet. The story is told in four
cantos of ottava rima. but the workmanship is faulty. Occa
sional lines are hexameters, not, apparently, because of any
intention to adapt the verse to some aspect of the meaning,
but rather by accident— that is, by unskillful versifying.
Other evidence of Snider*s imperfect mastery of his verse is
plentiful— awkward lines, inversions for the sake of rhyme or
meter, extra syllables that disrupt the meter, and a sort of
poetic diction which gives a highly artificial effect. A
single stanza will serve for illustration:
Then Palamedes spoke, the rightful man:
1 1 1 too have learned the lesson of this day,
And a new glimpse have had into the plan
Of Zeus who over all doth bear the sway;
In pride of right I spurned the castaway,
I thought myself so good, her not t*endure;
I change, I go to Troy for Helen, and pray, « r 2
For the distained may there I die the pure.**
"Rightful man" means, of course, the man of righteousness.
This Palamedes is a character added by Snider to the story.
Many readers would regard as a further defect Snider's
tendency to make his classical poem teach a moral, even a
^ DeMenil, loc. cit.
D. J. Snider, Agamemnon* s Daughter. Canto II, Stanza
cxix, p. 91 **
232
Christian, lesson. He says in a discussion of the legend, at
the end of the books
The great fact which gives to the Iphigenia legend
its deathless charm and interest, as well as its
infinite suggestiveness, is its similarity to the
story of Christ, There is in both the innocent
sacrifice for another’s guilt; the sinless one must
give himself that the sinful one be redeemed and
restored, and the act must be voluntary. An awful
thought it is, not to be entertained without a
shudder. There is, then, another law besides jus
tice in the government of this universe.53
Such moralizing appears rather forced, but it is common, of
course, to many writers of the time.
Not all Snider's verse deals with classical subjects.
In Johnny Anoleseed (189**) he celebrates a quaint pioneer who
preceded the flow of population to the west, and who planted
apple trees in many places for the white men who were to come
later. And in Clarence. a three-act play in bombastic blank
verse, he treats another American theme, namely, the Civil
War. Snider’s genius was not for the dramatic. The play has
neither good character development nor much action, although
the final scene is a battle with a good deal of killing. In
fact, when one considers Snider’s reputation as scholar and
teacher, and his copious production of books, one is prepared
for a higher performance than he finds. Both the prose and
the verse are disappointing. They suggest a wide, though
perhaps diffuse, scholarship rather than creative genius.
53 Ibid., p. 196
233
Another scholarly man who gave expression to his
scholarly and literary interests in several books of verse
was William Vincent Byars. He was born in Tennessee in 1857,
but lived nearly all his life after 1879 in St. Louis or its
suburb, Kirkwood. He is the author of The Tempting of the
King (1890), Tannhauser (1892), Studies in Verse (n.d.),
Babble of Green Fields (n.d.), New Songs to Old Tunes (1897),
5 1+
etc. DeMenil gives him credit for an unusually accurate
knowledge of the rules of metrical composition, but even such
erudition leaves his verse somewhat barren.
The Tempting of the King, will serve for a specimen of
Byars*s verse. This is a narrative poem on the story of David,
Bathsheba, and Uriah. It begins with David in a mood of
depression shortly before his first glimpse of Bathsheba in
her bath, and represents him at his first interview with her
as being somewhat stern with the lady. But she looks at him,
confesses that she is already in love with him, and sings an
answer to his psalm; and the king cannot withstand her sor
cery. Uriah is characterized as a harsh warrior, stern in
speaking to his wife, perhaps with some justification.
The verse is a mixture of pentameter and hexameter
lines, unrhymed, with no discernible relation between the
5 1+
A. N. DeMenil, l , A Century of Missouri Literature,1 1
Missouri Historical Review. XV, p. 117. Sampson* s Bibliography
gives the date of New Songs to Old Tunes.
substance and the variations in movement, A few lyrics inter
rupt the narrative. Thus, when Bathsheba has heard David’s
harping she sings;
By Chebar’s stream, the lily flower,
Longs for her love at evening hour,
As o'er the rippling tide she stoops,
Her head in silent sorrow droops.
For though her star shine in the sky,
She is so low, it is so high!
The lily flower by Chebar's side
Has sought her star within its tide;
It seems so near, it shines so fair!
Alas, 'tis but a shadow there!
Yet, still the lily loves the star,
Though lowly she, and it so far!55
The effect of the whole is moralizing and rather dull.
King David is somehow not very impressive, and the description
of Bathsheba naked is not more than mildly seductive. Like
Snider, Byars is more the scholar than the poet.
A versifier much more concerned with his own time and
place is the former Mississippi-River pastry cook, John Henton
Carter, “Colonel Rollingpin.“ In such books as Duck Creek
Ballads (ca. 189*+), Log Cabin Poems (1897) , and Out Here in
01* Missourv (1900) he celebrates such themes as the virtues
and the lives of plain people, the excellence of the Louisiana
Territory, and the charms of the days gone by. Some of these
poems are in dignified English, but more of them are in a not
wholly convincing dialect, a dialect that sounds rather more
^ W. V. Byars, The Tempting of the King, p. 8.
235
like James Whitcomb Riley than like Missouri. In the "Foreword*1
to the first of these books, and in a poem to James Whitcomb
Riley in the last, he expressed approval of common subjects
for poetry, and one might infer the influence of Riley from
many of his poems if he had not himself indicated it. "The Old
Log Cabin" is a case in point. The first of its seven stanzas
is as follows:
The ol' log cabin's lef* alone, deserted now an* still;
Nobody 'pears to care for it, an' reckon never will;
An* so I keep it for my se'f, same way it wuz when we
Moved over into our brand new house, like fine sassiety.
An' here I come an* set an* think about the days at's
past
Till ol'-time frien's. jes seem to take thar seats agin
and ast
About the news; an' then Melindy, she jes comes in, too
And all the chil'en romp an' talk the way they ust to do.
An* all at onct the fire at's bin put out this twenty
year
Sta'ts up agin, an' other things begin to reappear—
The dog-ir'ns, an' the crane an* hooks, an* skillet an*
co'n-pone
A-bakin' on the boa'd the way it did in days 'at's gone;
An* purty soon thar comes a knock upon the ha'If closed
door,
An* Uncle Abe with saddle-bags is here agin
for shore—
The same tall fo'm, the hones' face, an' voice 'at
ust to say:—
"Jes drapt in, Jim,_^to get a snack ah' pass the
time o' day."
Other poems of a similar nature are "Old Uncle Ike,'*y'
58 tjQ
"The Old Farm," "The Old House on the Creek.t,py "Missouri
J John Henton Carter, Out Here in 01* Missoury. pp. 27 ff.
^ Ibid., pp. ^3 ttm
^ Ibid., pp. ff.
Ibid., pp. 82 ff.
236
60
Nightingales*1 expresses exasperation with the croaking of
frogs, which are the Missouri nightingales. There are also a
few poems on Spanish War subjects* One of the most ambitious
poems in dignified English is "The Rhyme of Louisiana,”
apparently inspired by °The Song of the Chattahoochee.” . King
Canebrake speaks of creation to the canebrake-jungle creatures,
cures their wounds, and exists in their background as an ele
mental deity. "The Dream City" celebrates the coming World
Fair.
Carter was not a very skillful poet, and his verses were
not in general designed for exacting readers. Whatever the
shortcomings of his poetry, however, most readers would
probably consider it more vigorous than much of the pale
reflection of ancient life to be found in the works of many
more scholarly writers.
An exhaustive account of all the poetry written in
Missouri during the latter part of the nineteenth century and
published there or elsewhere, if it could all be ferreted out,
would include, of course, numerous books that have not been
mentioned in this study. Many of them are of no literary
significance, and many more are of no regional concern. It
was a common practice for people of literary tastes to turn
to classical themes or to familiar Victorian models and write
60
Ibid.. pp. 105 f.
in familiar patterns on familiar subjects. Dr, Conde Benoist
Pallen, for example, was the author of several books of verses
published between 1885 and 1915. Dr. Pallen was a native of
St. Louis and descended on both sides from old St. Louis
families. He was a man of learning, editor after 1887 of
The Catholic World and The Church Progress. and later managing
editor of the Catholic Encyclopedia. His literary interests
are suggested by such titles as The New Bubaiyat (1889),
Carmine (1885), The Feast of Thalarchus (1901), and The Death
of Sir Launcelot (1902). Similarly, K. E. Lee Gibson, a
native of Steelville, Missouri, who lived in St. Louis nearly
all his life from 1877 until his death in 1918, was the,author
of half a dozen books of poems, published between 1883 and
1909, including works on such subjects as Mineral Blossoms
(1897), A Miracle of St. Cuthbert (1909), exhibiting an
^ 2
enthusiasm for the delights of nature. And in 1895 Florida
Watts published in St. Louis a book of poems illustrated by
photographs of her travels, chiefly in the Old World but
giving attention to Yellowstone Park in such lines as the
following:
61
DeMenil, “A Century of Missouri Literature,1 1 Missouri
Historical Review. XV. p. 115.
62
Ibid., pp. Ill f.
238
The Geysers roar, and spout, and splash
From mouths of depths unknown;
Around about, the hot waves dash,
The earth gives many a groan.
One or two other sporadic versifiers may be mentioned.
In l88l the Reverend George A. Watson published St. Casimir* s
Hvmn to the Blessed Virgin, including with that poem a trans
lation of Stabat Mater and other miscellaneous religious and
moralizing poems as well as various prose discussions of such
matters as Sunday laws, amusements, and the art of poetry.
And the next year he gave to the world St. Louis, the Future
Great, an absurd poem prophesying the future glories of the
city on the Mississippi. The title of this book embodies what
appears to have been a current slogan or boast, for Rebecca
Morrow Reavis also composed a poem on the subject, and her
6*4-
husband is the author of a prose work with the same title.
Mrs. Reavis was born in Galway, Ireland, the daughter
of a tradesman. She came to the United States in 1876 and to
the West in 1882. In 1883 she was married to L. U. Reavis of
St. Louis. She had not long been a Missourian, therefore,
when her Consider the Lilies and Other Poems was published in
1883. But she had been sufficiently acclimated to foretell
6^
Florida Watts, The Varied Grace of Nature * s Face.
p. 7b,
Cf. Rebecca Morrow Reavis, "Sketch of the Author,"
in Consider the Lilies and Other Poems.
239
the magnificence which was to come to her adopted home in
“The Future Great City of the World, and to pay tribute
66
to a civic benefactor in “Our Temple of Art, 1 1 This latter
poem is dedicated to Wayman Crow, Esq., who has given the city
a museum. A few lines are worth quoting as a sample of the
verse:
Ah, who can tell, if from their bounty free
Men raise such monuments as this Museum,
In Learning*s cause, so worthy, so supreme,
And aid the giften ones to still progress,
Promoting thus their knowledge and success!
Posterity will view it and exclaim5
“This bust of Wayman Crow we owe to her;
“May the name long live of Harriet Hosmer:-
“He's not unworthy of this honored place
“Among the gods, who benefits his race.“
Other contents of the book are pale, ladylike, not too
skillful verses, moralizing, in general, on ladylike subjects.
“Consider the Lilies”^ observes that of all creation only
mankind complains, doubts, fears, and sighs, and that instead
68
we should do our duty as the lilies do theirs. r , God“ asks
“Who is God?” and concludes that He is just and wonderful.
69
“Alone” expresses the desire to avoid the trivial merriment
6*?
J Rebecca Morrow Reavis, Consider the Lilies and Other
Poems, pp. 36 ff.
66 Ibid.. pp. 31 ff.
67 Ibid.. pp. 1 ff.
68 hoo, cit.
^ Ibid., pp. 28 ff.
2kO
"that gilds the multitude," and to be alone with the pleasures
of books and the imagination. The themes are neither very-
original nor very freshly handled in the poems of Mrs. Reavis.
It is not a matter for wonder if in the first seventy
or eighty years of a state’s existence no poet of distinction
arises to do it honor. A state which in that period produces
its Mark Twain has had its share of distinction if it produce
no poet at all. But Missouri had, as we have seen, a surpris
ingly large number of poets, ranging from the homespun to the
scholarly, and writing on everything between classical Greece
and heaven, without neglecting that intermediate point, Missouri.
Most of those poets are now forgotten, it is true, but their
works are nevertheless testimony to the range of literary
interest and hunger— if not taste and genius— in the state.
But in the last two decades of the century a Missouri
journalist attained national reputation as a poet. Eugene Field,
(1850-1895) of New England ancestry, was born in Missouri, and
though he spent a part of his boyhood with relatives in New
England, completed his education in the University of Missouri.
He established his journalistic reputation in three Missouri
cities— Kansas City, St. Joseph, and St. Louis. His poems of
childhood are still too generally known to require discussion
in a study such as this; and to a somewhat lesser extent his
humorous poems also are familiar.
In these his range is very wide— from classic Greece
and the American West through English food and drink to Field’s
own dyspepsia. Like Mark Twain and Bret Harte he found sources
of humor in the rough and violent life of the mining towns of
the West, though his verses on such subjects are journalistic
tall tales rather than a record of life as it might have been
observed in the mining towns of Colorado. Examples are ’ ’The
70
Conversazzhyony,** a story of Three-Fingered Hoover’s defeat
71
in an election, and "Prof. Vere de Blaw," the tale of a sui
cide. In the former, the educated wife of Sorry Tom, owner
of the Gosh-All-Hemloek mine, undertakes such a party as the
crude miners have never seen. And when Three-Fingered Hoover,
who has lived in New Orleans, asks for "Oon peety morso, see
voo play, de la cette Charlotte Rooze," his hearers believe him
to be speaking lightly of some unknown woman named Charlotte;
for this unchivalrous conduct he is defeated in an election
for marshal of the camp. In the latter of these poems, a
stranger who has wandered eighteen hundred miles to escape
from the tune on which girls practice two hours a day while
learning to play the piano, having entered "Casey’s Table
d'Hote," hears Professor Vere de Blaw playing the same familiar
tune. He can bear no mores
70
Eugene Field, The Poems of Eugene Field, pp. ff.
71 Ibid., pp. 7 .
2b2
Then, like a man whose mind wuz sot on yieldin’ to his
fate,
He waltzed up to the counter and demanded whiskey
straight,
Wich havin’ got outside uv,— both the likker and the
door,—
We never seen that stranger in the bloom uv health
no morei
But some months later, what the birds had left uv him
wuz found
Associated with a tree, some distance from the ground5
And Husky Sam, the coroner, that set upon him, said
That two things wuz apparent, namelyj first, deceast
wuz deads
And, second, previously had got involved beyond all
hope 72
In a knotty complication with a yard or two uv ropej'
A few of Field's poems deal specifically with the
Missouri scene* “Lover’s Lane, Saint Jo” represents the
speaker as sitting in a hotel room in London with his wife
and wishing they could return to their time of courtship, when
they “snailed along” behind a proper horse—-a slow horse—
7-5
under the maple trees in “Saint Jo, Buchanan County.“ ■ “The
7k
’St* Jo Gazette•“ is reminiscent of a young man’s early
newspaper days, recalling places like Milton Tootle’s opera
house and the Pacific House hotel, and mentioning numerous
persons of local note— the sources of a newspaper’s "local”
75
news. "With Brutus in St. Jo" recalls the time when
72 Ibid., p. 10.
73 Ibid.T p. 75.
7lf Ibid., pp. 112 ff.
7^ Ibid., pp. 168 ff.
2^3
Julius Caesar came to Milton Tootle*s opera house and the
speaker made his dramatic debut by constituting one-third of
a Homan army.
Perhaps the most interesting of Field’s poems -which
deal -with his native state is the "Plaint--of the Missouri
76
’Coon in the Berlin Zoological Gardens." It is a monologue
spoken by the ’coon to a visiting American, and expresses
(1) the animal’s pride in his descent from the grandfather
whose skin was used to piece a coat for Tom Patterson of
Denver, (2) his recollection of life in Cole County, Missouri,
where he had lived in a hole in a cottonwood, and (3) his dis
satisfaction with life in Germany, where instead of grubbing
for "worms and things" he has to eat onion tarts and sausages
steeped in beer. He would rather be a Missouri ’coon than a
Teuton, for he once tasted liberty and the German never has
done so. There speaks, of course, not only the Missourian
but the American— like Saint Paul, a citizen of no mean city.
Field is the author of serious poems, of course, in
addition to his numerous verses on children; but they are not
regional literature and need not be considered here. In his
humorous poems, though he sometimes looks at his native state,
he is more frequently the poet of the West or of America as a
whole than of his native state. Missouri has a right -to some
76 Ibid.T pp. 101 ff.
pride in Field's career, but it is easily possible to exag
gerate both the state's part in the formation of that career
and the contribution of the state to Field* s poetry. Even in
those poems which deal with Missouri, Missouri is not the pri
mary concern. "Saint Jo" may have its Lover's Lane, but that
shaded avenue is merely the setting for a courtship upon which
the poet looks fondly back. Milton Tootle's opera house is
simply the scene of a young man* s first experience as an
actor. Cole County is the ancestral home of a nostalgic
raccoon in the Berlin Zoological Garden, and the animal pre
fers its old free life, grubbing for worms in Cole County, to
its German diet in a cage* But Missouri is a secondary theme,
a background in all these poems; nothing in them is distinctly
Missouri. Lover's Lane, or Milton Tootle's opera house or the
sycamore in which the raccoon lived might equally well have
been in Illinois or Indiana.
Hhen one looks back upon the second half of the nine
teenth century, the most surprising aspect of the poetry
written by Missourians both in the cities and in the small
towns is its quantity. A good deal of it is regional litera
ture, concerned with the local scene and its backwoods aspects,
its history, or its romantic excellence. But much more of it
is neither occasional nor regional; it deals with love, nature,
religion,— with the themes, in short, with which people of
literary tastes were familiar. It is written by retired river-
boat men, by students, by lawyers and business men, by
journalists in cities and small towns, by teachers, by farmers,
by almost every kind of person who could lift a pen. Much of
it was imitative; much of it is commonplace. As a whole it
suggests the great gap between the perception of whatever is
poetic and the expression of that perception in poetry. But,
let the imperfections of this poetry be what they may, it is
copious in quantity. The impulse to write verse seems to have
been an almost ubiquitous trait among Missourians.
CHAPTER VI
POETRY IN MISSOURI: 1900-1930
As one contemplates the first thirty years of the
twentieth century, no diminution of the flow of verse in
Missouri is discernible. Certain inducements seem indeed
calculated to increase it. In the absence of statistics it
is possible to believe that relatively fewer books of verse
are published, though that belief may be erroneous. But the
growth of student societies and the offer of prizes for stu
dent competition encourage the writing of verse by college
and university students. Off the campuses, writers1 guilds,
quill clubs, associations of penwomen— organizations for the
mutual admiration and encouragement of members with literary
yearnings— prevent unpublished authors from too readily
loosening the strings on their lyres. Newspapers in Kansas
City and St. Louis as well as in many smaller cities afford
opportunity for the publication which never gets into books.
And twentieth-century experiments in versification stimulate
not only those who see new possibilities in the new poetry
but also those who see in what appears to be formlessness an
emancipation from the exactions of rhyme and meter. And what
ever additional stimuli exist, the old reasons for writing
verse continue to operate. The muse of poetry, in fact, by
becoming more promiscuous seems to have become more-fecund*
21+6
Tills situation, of course, is not peculiar to Missouri,
or even especially characteristic of that state* One of the
most curious literary phenomena of the first three decades
of the present century is the appearance of a swarm of
‘ 'poetry1 * magazines and anthologies* The magazines are perhaps
the offspring, legitimate or illegitimate, of Harriet Monroe's
respectable Poetry Magazine. Some of them have had high liter
ary standards and have published verse of good quality; many
more have apparently been designed to appeal to frustrated
people who would like to see their names in print* They have
published reams of the most wretched doggerel composed by
their subscribers. Usually their lives have been short, and
as well as casual observation can determine, their birth rate
has fallen to the merest fraction of what once it was. But
the anthologies, perhaps because publishers require their
contributors to buy enough copies to make the publication
profitable, are still surprisingly numerous. They openly
appeal to the pathetic vanity of writers whose works have not
brought them success, and they find their contributors every
where. One may have doubts about the dignity of such publica
tions and perhaps of the ethics of the promoters, but they
signify, at any rate, the suspicion in nearly every man's
heart that he is a writer.
That suspicion has long been prevalent. An anthology
published in 1902, Poetry of Nebraska, gives about twenty-three
2f c8
pages to "poetry of Missouri." In this space there are
twenty-seven poems by twenty-seven poets. A fair specimen
is Jacob E. Cowdery’s "To a Friend on His Eightieth Birthday"?
Your ladder of life has eighty rounds,
And eighty stars your banner,
And eighty milestones, little mounds,
Marking the way and manner.1
And the October, 1929, issue of Troubadour, a verse magazine,
is given over to "A Garden of Living Missouri Poets and Their
¥ork." There are forty-two of these poets— not professional
poets but such people as teachers and their wives, and others
who follow poetry only as diversion or avocation.
Mhen writers of verse are numerous, it is to be expected
that events of historical significance or of local importance
will be celebrated in rhyme. Such an event in the early part
of the century was the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, and it
inspired at least one writer to extensive composition.
Fred V. Byersdorff, a graduate of the Warrensburg Normal School
and at the time a resident of Krakow, Franklin County, Missouri,
wrote a versified history of the state, Historical Chins of
2
Missouri, in which he gives particular attention to the flora
and fauna of the state. A few lines of it will suffices
1 Poetry of Nebraska, p. 195.
2 M. M. Brashear, "A Century of Missouri Verse," Part II,
Missouri Historical Review. XIX, p. 37* Miss Brashear provides
the lines quoted.
2b9
Mien the squirrels raised their chattering
When the bison smelt the salt-lick
Mien the cow went in the cornfield
And the wild-eat roamed for yield—
But the World War was a much more profoundly moving
experience than anything else in the knowledge of its genera
tion, Its impact upon Missouri writers resulted not only in
poetry from such accomplished writers as Rose O’Neill and
Sara Teasdale but also in verse from less mature and gifted
people. One cannot read without emotion Rose O'Neill’s lines:
All the roads lead back to France
Where young men used to go to dance;
But now they go in other wise,
There is no dancing in their eyes.
Or ^ m l * - U r «|r Or ab
^ ^ rp rp rp ^ rp P
Their singing will not sound the same,
Their hope will wear a sterner name,
For gentle lads, as they advance,
Are fearful on the roads to France,
And fearful are the young, young eyes
That war shall make so fiercely wise;
When lads shall such a lore attain,
They will not play at games again.
They do not tremble as they go,
Life's flower to the dream they throw,
Youth's lily turned to be a lance, ^
When all the roads lead back to France.
And of Sara Teasdale one expects the tenderness and melancholy
of her "Spring in War Time":
The sun turns north, the days grow long,
Later the evening star grows bright—
How can the daylight linger on
For men to fight,
Still fight?
^ Rose O'Neill, The Master-Mistress. p. lMf.
250
Under the boughs where lovers walked
The apple blooms will shed their breath—
But what of all the lovers now
Parted by death,
Gray death?^
But less sophisticated writers also wrote of the war with
strength and sincerity. Miss M. M. Brashear of the University
of Missouri furnished a poem by Lawrence Webster, a young man
who had returned from France and was a student in the univer
sity in 1919* Nothing could be more direct and vivid than
the first stanza:
I crept last night
Through No Man’s Land;
The Star shell's glare
Beat down on me,
The clacking bullets hunted me.
I slept last night
In No Man's land [sic].
The distant stars
Shone down on me 5
And took me by the handl
Other students in the university also wrote poems on
the war theme. Caroline Pickard, for example, in “The Drill1 1
spoke for the women who found woman's passivity hard to bear:
Across a level stretch of sward
The men march by,
And with the wind comes, keen and clear,
The bugle's cry.
k
Sara Teasdale, Rivers to the Sea, p. 98.
5 Brashear, loc. cit.
251
I do not turn aside to see,
I go my way;
I have not stopped to watch them drill
This many a day.
A woman, mine own country1s war
Is not for me.
I may not reach the trenches there
Beyond the sea.
And so, by windows tightly closed,
Knitting I sit.
Who would be fighting, for they say
It helps to knit.
Yet down the level stretch of sward
I know the men march by,
And the whole aching heart of me
Answers the bugle’s cry.®
And in a book of verse published by Gamma Phi Psi of Sigma
Upsilon at Columbia, Missouri, in 1923* are poems of World War
themes by several students in the university. These include
Miriam Thurman's "A Dream of the Maid” (Walter S. Dickey prize,
1918); Katherine Foster Smith’s three poems, ’ ’ Paean," "A Ballad
to France,” and "Gloria Mortuis” (Walter S. Dickey prize, 1917);
7
and Ida Judith Johnson’s ''Unbound’ ’ (Sigma Upsilon prize, 1923).
Of course the university, and other institutions of
higher learning in the state, continued to foster the composi
tion of verse. Much of such poetry is derived from literary
models or expresses the self-communion of immature souls, and
need not come within the scope of this study. Occasionally,
6 Ibid.. p. kO.
^ Ibid., pp. 37 f*
252
however, it is regional literature. An example is Roy Ivan
Johnson’s Fair Missouri and Other Poems (1912), credit for
•which should perhaps, be divided between the University of
Missouri and William Jewell College, since Mr. Johnson was a
graduate of the former and a teacher in the latter institution.
The pamphlet contains seven sentimental and doggerel poems
celebrating the excellence of Mr. Johnson’s native state. A
few lines will sufficiently indicate the quality of these
verses;
Missouri Fair, thy beauty rare
Is ample theme for praise
And we to thee in Loyalty g
Our hearts and voices raise.
Perhaps these poems should be regarded as the follies
of Mr. Johnson’s youth. Since their publication he has con
tinued the cultivation of his talents by study in the Univer
sity of Chicago, and has returned to Columbia, to the teaching
faculties of Stevens College and the University of Missouri.
He has written other books of verse which have, at least, not
fallen below the promise of Fair Missouri.
Ho doubt each college in the state, like the university,
impelled some of its students to attempt the writing of verse.
Miss Brashear mentions several people who made such experiments
9
under the shadow of the Normal School in Kirksville. But
Q
Roy Ivan Johnson, Fair Missouri and Other Poems. no
pagination. These lines are from the second poem in the
pamphlet•
9 Brashear, op. eit., pp. ^ ff.
253
it has often happened that people t^o achieved at least local
celebrity as poets have done so without such academic impul
sion. Nelson J. Scurlock, of Kirksville, for example, had no
college training5 but for many years he was well known in
northeastern Missouri as a paragrapher and poet on the
Kirksville Graphic. Another newspaper man, Edgar %/hite, of
10
Macon, Missouri, declared him the poet laureate of the state.
Scurlock was born in 1859 in Glenwood, Schuyler County,
and spent the early part of his life on his father’s farm. His
first compositions appeared in the "paper” of the neighborhood
“literary.” Soon he became a country correspondent for the
local papers, and then a regular contributor under pseudonyms
that suggest a bucolic humor-— Paul T. Godfrey and Peleg Scaggs.
Soon he became a member of the Kirksville Graphic. and until
his death in 1902 his verses were published in the columns of
that paper and of other papers of northeast Missouri. After
his death his friend' Charles N. Wood, a Methodist minister,
collected his poems and published them in one volume, Fishin*
Long Old Ellum Creek (1903) . 11
These verses are written chiefly in a sort of rustic
dialect, though in some of them Scurlock employs conventional
^ Ibid., p. 55*
Charles N. Wood, "Biographical Sketch” in Nelson J.
Scurlock, Fishin1 Long Old Ellum Creek, pp. 6 f.
25^
English with touches of the ornate. They deal with a wide
variety of subjects, suggesting their journalistic genesis in
both style and content. They contain something of a not too
subtle humor, a good deal of moralistic reflection, praise of
religion and the simple virtues, fondness for rustic life and
commonplace people, and related sentiments. In several of
the poems Scurlock hails the charms of his native Missouri.
Thus "Spring in Missouri":
The bloom is on the peach tree,
The cherry and the crab,
The hens are on the cackle,
And gossips on the gab,
The cows are in the pasture,
And the hogs are in the lot;
The cabbage plants are growing
And the greens are in the pot.
The orchards are a-bloomin',
The currant and the rose
Are sheddin* sweet aroma
On every breeze that blows;
The maidens are a-blushin*
And the grass is gettin* green,
The lambs of February
Are big enough to wean.
0, it's nice to be a poet
And tune your harp and sing
Of Bonny Old Missouri
When it's just a-cominf spring.
In another poem, "October in Missouri,"^ Scurlock
names the delights of the autumn season he knows. In "Right
Here in Old Missoury" he presents Jim Rigley, a Missourian not
12 Helson J. Scurlock, Fishin* Long Old Ellum Creek, p. 89
^ Ibid., pp. 27
2 55
too precipitate in his approach to the joys of heaven;
He had religion's blessed hope of mansions in the sky?
But it so happened that one day Jim took his bed to dxe;
uUp yanderi" whispered he, just as the preacher
closed his prayer, 2. 1 +
"But, goin' from Missoury, I may get homsesick there.
And in "Fair Time in Mizzoury" Scurlock describes -what in this
state and in many others is one of the most interesting and
exciting of rural and small-town festivals;
In the buggy or the wagon
People turn out neatly dressed,
With that most convincin* braggin*—
An abundance of the best.
Merry-go-round, banjo, fiddle,
All swear on a stack of dimes,
Old Mizzoury's in the middle
Of a patch of prosp'rous times.
Fancy work to daze your fancy,
Woman's touches through the hall—
Call her Jane or call her Nancy—
She's a daisy now, that's alii
Hogs an* cattle for a nation,
Horses graceful as a hymn—
Tell your friends an' your relation
Old Mizzoury's in the swimi
Fair time in grand old Mizzoury—
It's 0. K., I must insist;
Let Lucullus wake in fury,
Thinkin1 of the fun he's missed!
How or where I yit may wander,
Let my fare be coarse or fine,
So I find the Fair Up Yonder, - . c r
With Mizzoury all in line!
But it is not in such specific praises alone that
lIf Ibid., p. *+ 8.
^ Ibid., p. 129.
256
Scurlock celebrates his native state. He was, as has been
said, a writer for the readers of northeast Missouri news
papers, and he dealt with scenes and people familiar to those
readers. He praised the things of which they approved. He
spoke of the things which made up their lives, if not in their
idiom at least in an idiom that they understood and that they
evidently found suitable for poetry. Judged by exacting
literary standards his verse is hardly exalted poetry, but
among his readers it gave him a considerable reputation.
Charles N. Wood, the editor of Nelson Scurlock*s
collected poems, was himself a writer of verse as well as a
Methodist minister. In 1911, upon the completion of fifteen
years of service in the Kirksville district, he published a
small volume of his own poems. This book. Wayside Musings.
contains miscellaneous poems embodying sentiments congruous
with a pleasant and harmless nature. Some of them are in
dialect, others in conventional English; they praise the con
ventional virtues, they admire the spring robin, they look
wistfully back toward boyhood. Two of the poems are “Decora
tion Day1 * odes. None of them are distinguished poems, but
they express a pleasant enough kindliness and tolerance.
Jefferson City has not, like Kirksville, the intellec
tual advantages of a normal school, or, as more recently it has
been called, a state teachers college. Its principal literary
influences a1*® the state legislature and the state penitentiary.
The latter institution is represented by one pre-Civil War
volume of poems, George Thompson's Prison Bard: the former
has been less fruitful. Yet even so Jefferson City has not
been without its contribution to the poetry of the state, for
in 1921 * Dr. John Joseph Gaines published there The Water Witch
and Other Rhymes in Missouri Language. Actually the language
is such as probably never was on sea or land, a sort of mule
dialect, out of the genuine rustie speech of the Middle West
by the distorted jargon of some of the nineteenth-century
humorists, not entirely untainted by strains of literary influ
ence. It relies somewhat on real dialect pronunciations phonet
ically indicated, somewhat on pronunciations that are of highly
doubtful Missouri authenticity, and somewhat on misspellings
for regular pronunciations.
The verses deal with rural subjects and exhibit some
genuine acquaintance with rural life. But they are the verses
of a city man glorifying country life, having some knowledge
of it but not having its point of view. They deal with such
subjects as the location of a good well in time of "drowth,"
by means of old Jehu Sifer's "witching." There is even a
photograph of Jehu and his peach switch. Other poems tell of
l6
the country school, discuss the inadvisability of a farmer's
^ "Deestrick Number Pour," p. 16.
258
17
retiring to live in town, discuss the improvement of country
■ j Q
roads, or present the pleasures of such rustic sport as
19
pitching horse-shoes. And whatever may be said of the
language in which Dr* Gaines versifies these themes, they are,
of course, matters of concern in rural Missouri.
But while in the small towns of the state books of
verse appear from time to time, they become in the twentieth
century rather infrequent phenomena. One may conjecture that
some of the writers have eased their ambitions by publication
in local papers or even by contributions to the hospitable
columns of the St. Louis and Kansas City papers which, with
the development of rural mail delivery and of rapid transpor
tation to all sections of the state, have furnished a greatly
increased proportion of what Missourians read. The require
ments for acceptance in such columns are not exacting; and an
Ozarks school teacher may present her doggerel to a much
larger number of possible readers through this medium than
through the publication of a book, without the expense of pub
lication. In any case the greater part of the literary produc
tion of this period is associated with the larger cities of
the state rather than with the smaller towns. Of the two
"Transformation," pp. 17 ff.
"Road Deestrick Number One," p. 35*
^9 Hpitchin* Hoss-Shoes," pp. 6l ff.
largest cities, Kansas City is still relatively sterile. It
is reputed in the state to be generally less concerned with
intellectual and artistic matters than is St. Louis; whether
or not that reputation is deserved, it is true that through
the period under consideration Kansas City has had no impor
tant college or university. It has for many years had a high
journalistic tradition, and its newspapers, particularly the
Kansas City Star, have published a great deal of verse, both
that written by professional journalists of the newspaper
staff and that written by casual contributors. Kansas City
has also had for many years such literary associations as
the Quill Club, and the members have contributed verses both
to the Kansas City papers and to other periodicals. Eugene
Field was once editor of the Kansas City Times, and less
illustrious names, such as those of Lee Shippey and
Clara Virginia Townsend have been familiar to people of the
region as Kansas City writers of verse. But few boohs of
poetry, relatively, have had their origin here. One or two,
however, deserve mention.
Of these perhaps the least worthy is Leroy H. Kelsey’s
Poems of Optimism (1920). These verses are concerned with
asserting the merits of well established virtues such as per
severance, industry, kindness; for some of the poems familiar
platitudes furnish the texts— such, indeed, as “Be a booster,
260
20
not a knocker I1 ’
Somewhat more respectable verse is that of Henry Polk
Lowenstein, for many years a lawyer in Kansas City. Lowenstein
was born in Tennessee but came to Kansas City in 1892. He
wrote no poems until the outbreak of the World War. Then in
answer to Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae’s "In Flanders Fields'*
Mr. Lowenstein composed a poem to which he gave the same title,
and for it he received "favorable acknowledgment*^ from George V
of England, Albert of Belgium, President Poincare of France,
21
and many notable persons in this country." For Memorial
Poems (1921) he composed a considerable number of additional
verses concerned with the war, as well as occasional and mis
cellaneous verses on other subjects. He has been fond of the
rondeau, though he has also employed other forms.
22
The best known of these poems, "In Flanders Fields,"
is an assurance to Colonel McCrae that we Americans have kept
the faith, that we have caught the torch and held it high.
21
Another, "If God Be with the Kaiser," concludes that God
is not with the Kaiser. Others which suggest their themes
20
Leroy H. Kelsey, Poems of Optimism, p. 21.
^ Henry Polk Lowenstein, "Biographical Sketch of the
Author," Memorial Poems, pp. 30 f.
22 Ibid.. p. 12.
23 Ibid.. pp. 22 f.
261
2k-
by their titles are "My Buddie on the Marne," "0 Let Me
Sleep Bight VJhere I Fell,"2' * "Welcome to Our Soldiers,"2^ and
27
"How to Win the War." Not all the poems, however, are so
martial in spirit. In "An Autobiography of a Missourian"
Lowenstein declares that it is better to be a Missourian than
2i
to be king, prince, or duke. And "The Rainbow and the Rose"
asserts that when one contemplates the rainbow, the rose, and
certain other natural phenomena, one perceives God and no
longer doubts His existence!
A more accomplished writer than Mr. Lowenstein is
Marshall Louis Mertins, now a resident of California, but a
native of Jackson County, Missouri, educated in Missouri, for
many years a pastor of Missouri churches and a lecturer of
lyceum and Chautauqua circuits. He is the author of numer
ous books as well as of numerous contributions to newspapers,
29
magazines, and anthologies. Perhaps the best book of
regional poetry coming from Kansas City in the period under
examination is his Tales from Kettle1s Shop (1923)•
Ibid., pp. 18 ff.
Ibid., p. 19.
26 Ibid.. p. 8 f.
27 Ibid., pp. 15 f.
28 Ibid.. p. 27.
2^ Who1 s Who in America. XXI (19l H-l fr2) , pp. 1807 f •
262
Kettle was a blacksmith of Jackson County, Missouri,
and his shop was a meeting place and recruiting place for the
guerrilla Quantrell and his men. The Tales consist of a series
of narratives in fluent blank verse, told chiefly by a youth
known as “Will o* the Pipes." They have to do with events of
the Civil War and particularly with Quantrell, seen from the
point of view of a Southerner— or from the Missouri side of
the Border Warfare. Mertins shows the guerrilla as a sort
of Robin Hood, with parallels between one or two of his men
and certain followers of the legendary English outlaw. Some
of the stories celebrate places in western Missouri which are
associated with the more or less romantic days of the Border
Wars, places such as Pleasant Hill, Lexington, Independence,
Sni-A-Bar, Lone Jack and the solitary tree which gave that
village its name; some of them are memorials to persons of
regional fame such as John Kroger, Will Gregg, and Martin Hice
30
of Lone Jack.
There is a good deal of interest in these poems. The
ballads— some of which had been previously published in the
Kansas City Star— are spirited, and the narrative poems, though
sometimes amateurish in diction, are lively. It is to be
regretted that such material as this, combining regional his
tory and folk lore growing out of events within the memory of
30 Suura. pp. 187 ff.
263
men still living, should not be more frequently treated by
competent -writers.
As has been already said St. Joseph has long been
reputed within the state to be more highly literary in spirit
than Kansas City. Such generalizations are at the best only
doubtfully demonstrable, but in any case St. Joseph has had
its writers. One of the most illustrious of them, Mary Alicia
Owen (l85B~193?), developed her national reputation by her
31
work in folk lore, but she was a writer of poetry also, some
of which concerns itself primarily or incidentally with
Missouri and the delights of Missouri. Two of these poems
deserve repetition for their expression of the poet’s feeling
for her native state:
"The Last Request"
Choose not for me a sepulcher
Nor tomb ’neath sculptured urn,
Nor in a purifying flame
My dust to ashes turn,
But lay me in the quickening earth,
The dear, dear earth
That in some new and lovely form
My dust may have rebirth.
The beauty I have loved
In form and face
Was never mine to wear,
Nor motion’s grace.
But they may come to me
In leaf and flower,
Up springing from the grave
My withheld dower.
^ Supra, pp. 120 f
26* *
Violets I may be
Or daffodils
Or lilies white and eglantine
If heaven wills'
Or else some stately tree
Missouri grown,
Native to this dear land
That is my own*
"On the Sea"
It's a long way to Missouri
When you're out upon the sea,
A long way and a sad way
For there is home to me,
The sky is bright above me
The waves a silver sheen.
The prairies of Missouri
Are now so very green.
I was told that foreign travel
Would give me breadth of mind.
With my back to old Missouri
I'm shrunk with grief, I find.
The world of sweeping waters
Is bearing me awayi
If wishes could be wings to me
I'd be at home today.32
But Mary Alicia Owen's principal literary distinction
derives from her writing on folk lore, not from her verse.
And neither her native St. Joseph nor the single larger city
of the western side of her state, Kansas Gity, can lay claim
to the principal Missouri poets. St. Louis, the largest city
of Missouri, almost the oldest, situated where the currents of
^ Brashear, op. cit., pp. *+0 ff. Miss Brashear pro
vides the text of these poems, and is authority for the state
ment that Miss Owen had written a considerable quantity of
verse which (1921 *) she planned to publish. Apparently, how
ever, she did not do so.
265
the nation from all directions were predestined to flow, is
the most cosmopolitan city between Chicago and New Orleans,
between New York and San Francisco, There is no occasion for
surprise in the fact that St, Louis has produced more poets
than any other part of Missouri, or that, judged by her more
distinguished poets, her literary tradition should be higher
than that of any other city in the state.
The classical tradition lingered in St, Louis, of
course, in the presence of certain writers whose work belongs
chiefly to the nineteenth century— such men, for example, as
33 3*f
William Vincent Byars and Denton Jaques Snider, Though
their period of productivity was for the most part past, they
continued to exercise an intellectual influence and to con
tribute to a literary tradition. Snider lived until 1925?
and in 1 9 1 8, at the age of seventy-seven published a book of
verse, The House of Dreams. There were also numerous amateur
poets who attained various degrees of local success, publish
ing occasional books of verse or contributing to St, Louis
periodicals. Miss Leah H. Brown, for example, who lived in
that city and was educated there, had published several books
of verse before her death in 1908 at the age of twenty-six,
books with such titles as Golden Rod. Mistletoe, and The
^ Supra, pp. 233 £•
3lf Supra, pp. 229 ff.
266
35
Ivy. Miss Brashear speaks of two such poets whose principal
attention was given to other matters hut who wrote verse as
diversion. John Rothensteiner was a preacher who found time
to compose a book, Heliotrope. and in it to commend such
36
commendable things as books and children. Frederick Oakes
Sylvester wrote sonnets and other lyrics suggestive of the
Wordsworthian interest in nature, and in The Great River (1913)
37
expressed appreciation of the Mississippi.
One of the most important influences in the cultivation
of poetry in St. Louis was the famous editor, William Marion
Reedy, and his Reedy*s Mirror. Reedy was born in St. Louis
in 1 8 6 2. He was on the staffs of various St. Louis newspapers
from 1880 until 1 8 9 3. After 1893 he was the editor, and after
1896 until his death in 1920, he was the proprietor of Reedy* s
38
Mirror. In this magazine he gave encouragement to many
young writers, some of whom subsequently have attained con
siderable eminence. He is said to have been one of the first
to recognize the merits of Edgar Lee Masters, and both
39
Fannie Hurst and Zoe Akins have testified to his assistance.
35 ••necrology,'* Missouri Historical Review. II, p. 2*f9.
J Brashear, op. cit.. pp. ?b f.
37 Ibid.. pp. 71 t.
■3 o
Who*s Who in America. XI (1920-21), p. 2352.
^ Brashear, op. cit., XIX, p. 75*
267
Though he wrote some verse himself, his importance is chiefly
that of a journalist who recognized the promise in other
writers.
But the chief reason for St* Louis to feel pride in the
poetic history of this period probably lies in that city*s
claims upon people who have not spent their entire careers
there. Louis Dodge, for example, was born in Iowa in 1870,
began as a reporter in Texas in 1893, and worked as reporter,
critic, and editorial writer on St. Louis newspapers from 1901
to 1916. He is the author of several books published between
1916 and 1 9 3 5, beginning, that is, about the time when his
hO
connection with St. Louis journalism ceased. Meanwhile he
had contributed verse to various magazines, and like many of
the St. Louis writers was attracted by the Mississippi.
I shall not mind— not when the sun rides high
And men too busy are to love or weep;
I think I shall not miss the unsinging sky
As in the sunlit grave I lie asleep.
But oh. the earth shall throb above my heart
In that soft hour, after the day is done,
When from some river nook, serene, apart,
The stars rise thick against the setting sun.
Orrick Johns is another of the poets who have begun
their careers in St. Louis and then gone elsewhere to live.
)i A
Whof s Who in America. XXI (19^K)-^1), p. 782.
1 + 1 Louis Dodge, "Evening." Text furnished by Brashear,
Ci^# j p* 71*
268
He was born in St, Louis, the son of a newspaper editor, and
studied architecture in Washington University. Later he became
a dramatic critic and literary reviewer for Reedy* s Mirror,
In 1912 he won a national poetry prize. In 1915 he engaged
in advertising, but continued to publish poems and stories in
various magazines and newspapers. In 1917 he published two
books of verse, Asphalt and Other Poems and Black Branches.
if 2
He is the author also of plays and novels.
The poems of Johns are variegated in form and subject.
In Asphalt and Other Poems there are fourteen poems in what
purports to be dialect, of which the most conspicuous charac
teristic is the use of d or t for th and the omission of final
£ of the present participle. This speech is represented as the
jargon of the streets, spoken by newsboys, prostitutes, tramps,
and other persons who see society from underneath, and is used
as the vehicle for not very impressive social criticism.
"Mobilization,1 * for example, says in thirty lines that the boys
with hair on their chests are going out for glory, but it will
not do for us to know what they are really going for. Others
criticize the motives of politicians, the merits of religion,
or the validity of other social institutions in a somewhat
less than startling fashion. "Marriage a la Mode" is a fair
IlO
Loc. cit. Miss Brashear quotes an article on the work
of Orrick Johns in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. January 6, 192*+.
269
specimens
Gee, de papers makes a show
Of a gal dat marries dough—
An* wot’s de use of advertisin1 dat!
If ya gotta make yer bed
Wid de same guy till yer dead—
Say! it seems ta me ya'd wanta keep it
underneat yer hat!
Marryin’ an' marryin1—
Wot’s de big idee?
Fer mine I travels private
Wid a guy dat knows I’m free!
Marryin’ an' marryin', .
Tyin1 up fer life—
Say, bo! I hopesta Gawd you never
Treat me like a wife!
Opinion may differ concerning the verisimilitude of
this sort of thing to either life or character, and tastes may
differ as to the delight or edification which it may afford.
At any rate it belongs to a sort of verse for which the demand
is not now especially avid.
In other parts of the volume not in dialect, particu
larly in ’ ’ Country Rhymes” and ’ ’The City,” there are lyrics
worth reading for understanding of emotion and for suggestive
and restrained expression. Some of them, however, lean a bit
toward what has been called the cult of unintelligibility. In
the section called ’ ’ Country Rhymes,” are lines one likes to
quote, such as those concerning ’ ’ The River Man,” who will some
times stop his work— ■
1 * 3
Orrick Johns, Asphalt and Other Poems, p. 31.
270
He’ll stop clean off, and Lordjknows why,
Listen and look up at the sky.4" 4 -
And ’ ’ The Home Fire” compresses a good deal of suggestion into
eight lines:
The home fire’s a lazy fire
And wood it should be,
And the thoughts said about it
Begin with we.
The home fire1s a cold fire
Time may come, and dead;
Then there’s the road to go,^
And the stranger’s bed.4-- *
“The Answer*1 in the section of the book called “Old
Youth,” has an intensity somewhat beyond most of the lyrics in
the work of Johns.
“Crying cranes and wheeling crows...
I’ll remember them,” she said;
"And I will be your own, God knows,
And the sin be on my head.
”1 will be your own, and glad
Lovers would be fools to care
How a thing is good or bad,
When the sky is everywhere...
"I will be your own,” she said,
"Because your voice is like the rain,
And your kiss is wine and bread
Better than my father’s grain."
So I took her where she spoke,
Breasts of snow and burning mouth...
Crying cranes and drifting smoke w
And the blackbirds wheeling south.
),i.
Ibid., p. 55.
^ Ibid., p. hi.
1+6 Ibid., p. 95.
271
One may believe or not in the speech of the maiden, and
one will find nothing startlingly new in the description of
the breasts of snow or the burning mouth, but a country man
who knows Missouri autumns will always feel a nostalgic
response to the
Crying cranes and drifting smoke
And the blackbirds wheeling south.
Johns was interested in Missouri, as the "Country
Rhymes," belonging to the Meramec valley, plainly show* And
the third stanza of "To a Dead Classmate" contains a descrip
tion of the landmarks on the University of Missouri campus:
I remember hazy nights
And the colums white and high.
The columns so beautifully futile
Left from the old burned hall;
Like the white arms of a girl they held us
Who had known no love at all.
We lay and sent our hopes with smoke
Into the summer sky.*•
Do you hear me when I send to you
A question or a cry?4"'
The columns are not, as a matter of fact, white; but they are
gray, and perhaps the poet is justified in whitening them for
the sake of the comparison with a girl's arms.
A man more intimately associated with Missouri and the
literature of Missouri than either Louis Dodge or Orrick Johns
was Alexander N. DeMenil (l81 +9-1928); but though he was a
writer of some quantity of verse, his real importance lay
^ Ibid., p. 59*
272
rather in his interest in the work of other Missouri writers,
and in all aspects of Missouri history, than in his original
contributions to the literature of his state. For many years
he contributed discussions of literary matters to periodicals
kS
published in St. Louis and elsewhere. If his knowledge of
the history and literature of Missouri seems to the current
reader of his comments somewhat fragmentary and superficial,
it is, nevertheless, remarkably extensive.
DeMenil is the author of two books of verse, namely,
Songs in Minority (1905) and Forest and Town (1910). It is
somewhat surprising that his interest in the history of
Missouri did not impel him to celebrate the state in his own
poetry. But he chose in general fairly conventional subjects.
Thus in Forest and Town he divided the table of contents into
groups of poems on nature, love, friendship, death, and mis
cellaneous matters. For the most part they are correctly
written expressions of more or less correct and conventional
feelings and opinions. For example:
Ah better for a cycle of God*s solitude
Than one day of man*s brutal empire. This
Green earth, these lordly trees were here when
he was not; they
Will be when he will be forgotten save by Him
Who gave him a brief span of breath and futile lifei
^ Who * s Who in America. XIV (1926-27), pp. 583 f.
^ Alexander N. DeMenil, Forest and Town, p. 15.
273
This volume contains poems written during a period of
approximately forty years. According to the author's state
ment in the preface, about one-third of the poems were composed
when DeMenil was writing for St. Louis magazines and St. Louis
Sunday papers between 1870 and 1 8 8 7. Others were written
later, some of them between 190*f and 1910. Little change, if
50
any, is discernible. One poem of the later years is “Fame,"
which asks that praise be given before death rather than after.
51
Another is “The Night Walker," which describes a drunken
harlot reeling through a storm. The poem concludes:
But men are vile, and women viler stillI
52
DeMenil deals with the conditions of his own day in "How Long"
53
and “The Socialists." In the former he deplores the tyranny
of the labor unions over employers— the poem was suggested by
a union’s order to him to reinstate a printer discharged by
drunkenness or to be boycotted. In the latter he laments the
evils of the socialists, inquiring plaintively
0 Lord, how long must decency
Such brutes endure?
None of this is poetry of an important character.
DeMenil's principal contribution to the literature of his
5° Ibid.. p. 120.
51
' Loc. cit.
Ibid., pp. 122 f.
^ Ibid.. pp. 132 f.
native state, it has been noted, is in his interest in other
writers, and in his working for many years with the Missouri
State Historical Society.
The historian of a state's literature is likely to
feel some temptation to magnify his state's claim on the work
of widely known writers who have lived in his state or done a
part of their work there. But a sound estimate of the
regional importance of cosmopolitan writers, such, for example,
as Rose O'Neill and Zoe Akins, and a valid judgment of the
poetry that may properly be called Missouri literature, must
not be misled by the place of a poet's residence to overesti
mate the regional significance of his work. Rose O’Neill,
though born in Pennsylvania, has spent much of her life in
Missouri. She has achieved considerable success as an illus
trator and a writer of prose fiction? and she has written
poetry of distinction. But it is not regional poetry.
Zoe Akins, though she was born in Missouri, and received early
encouragement from William Marion Reedy of St. Louis, who pub
lished her verses in his Reedy* s Mirror, hardly belongs more
definitely in anything that might be called a Missouri tradi
tion than does Rose O'Neill.
The state has a much better claim on Sara Teasdale, who
has been one of the most distinguished American lyric poets
of the twentieth century. She was born in St. Louis in 188* 1 -,
and lived in that city with her parents, except for two or
275
three winters in New York, until her marriage to Ernst B.
Filsinger in 191l +. Then she went to live in New York, where
she made her home until her death in 19 3 3*
Sara Teasdale is another of the poets whom William
Marion Reedy recognized and encouraged in the early days of
their careers. Upon her return in 1907 from her first trip
to Europe, he introduced her to the public with the printing
of her blank-verse monologue, "Guenevere." And her first two
books of poetry, Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems (1907) and
Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911) were published before
5*f
she left St. Louis for New York.
It is neither Reedy's part in her success nor the poems
given to the world while she lived in St. Louis on which
Missouri is to base a claim to Sara Teasdale. Her mature work,
indeed, begins with Rivers to the Sea (1915)> published at the
end of her residence in the state. Yet she had a deep feeling
for Missouri, which appears chiefly in a book published still
later, namely, Flame and Shadow (1920). In an interview she
said:
I really think I've never seen anything lovelier
than the Ozarks. I used to go down on the Frisco
road to Sulphur Springs, and from the station^I
would go to the farm house of a Mrs. Saxton.??
^ Dictionary of American Biography. XVIII, pp. 357 £•
55
JJ Brashear, oja. cit.. p. 83.
276
Of the Saxton farm she speaks in “Places”i
Places I love come back to me like music,
Hush me and heal me when I am very tired;
I see the oak woods at Saxton's flaming
In a flare of crimson by the frost newly fired;
And I am thirsty for the spring in the valley
As for a kiss ungiven and long desired.
And again in “Redbirds":
Redbirds, redbirds,
Long and long ago,
What a honey-call you had
In hills I used to knows
Redbud, buckberry,
Wild plum-tree
And proud river sweeping
Southward to the sea,
Brown and gold in the sun
Sparkling far below.
Trailing stately round her bluffs
Where the poplars grow—
Redbirds, redbirds,
Are you singing still
As you sang one May_,day
On Saxton's Hill?57
In numerous poems Miss Teasdale appears to be remember
ing the Missouri she knew in her early years, though it is
often impossible to be certain that she is not speaking of
similar places or phenomena which she has discovered elsewhere.
In “Sunset: St. Louis'* she gives avowed tribute to her native
city:
Sara Teasdale, Flame and Shadow, p. 15*
^ Ibid., pp. 20 f.
277
Hushed in the smoky haze of summer sunset
When I came home again from far-off places,
How many times I saw my western city
Dream by her river.
Then for an hour the water wore a mantle
Of tawny gold and mauve and misted turquoise
Under the tall and darkened arches bearing
Gay, high-flung bridges.
Against the sunset, water-towers and steeples
Flickered with fire up the slope to westward,
And old warehouses poured their purple shadows
Across the levee.
High over them the black train swept with thunder,
Cleaving the city, leaving far beneath it
Wharf-boats moored beside the old side-wheelers
Resting in twilight.
Nobody would maintain, of course, that Sara Teasdale*s
poetry is bounded by any sort of regional interest. She has
written of many places, and the pre-eminent theme in her
verse is love, which has no geography. She is, nevertheless,
a Missouri poet, perhaps the most distinguished of her period.
Conde Benoist Pallen, (1858-1929)* another native of
St. Louis, should perhaps be mentioned in an account of the
poets of Missouri in the twentieth century, for he is the
author of three volumes of poetry among voluminous other
works. These are The Feast of Thalarchus (1901), a dramatic
poem; The Death of Sir Launcelot and Other Poems (1902); and
Collected Poems (1915)• His verse is not regional literature,
however, and it is not his chief claim to distinction. After
58
Ibid., pp. 22 f
extensive training in Georgetown University and St. Louis
University he pursued his studies in Rome, where he was a
classmate of the man who, as Pius XI, later conferred on him
the Knighthood of St. Gregory. He returned to St. Louis and
for ten years, from 1887 to 1897 was editor of Church Progress.
He was Roman Catholic advisory editor of the Hew International
Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia Americana, and was instru
mental in the creation of the Catholic Encyclopedia. In these
and many other activities he gained fame, particularly in
Catholic circles. His concern was not with Missouri or
Missouri literature, hut the luster of his Catholic scholar-
59
ship brought credit to his native state and city.
This account of the poets of Missouri may well close
with a poet who belongs perhaps more to Nebraska than to
Missouri, but who is truly the poet of a more extensive area
than either state by virtue of his cycle of narrative poems
on the epic period which saw the Ayran conquest of the great
territory west of the Missouri River. John G. Weihardt was
born in Illinois in l88l but educated in Nebraska. In the
period from 1901 to 1907 he lived among the Omaha Indians in
order to study their character, and later associated with the
Ogalala Sioux Indians. In 1921 he was appointed by act of the
state legislature Poet Laureate of Nebraska, and in 1923 he
^ Dictionary of American Biography. XIV, pp. 171
279
was appointed Professor of Poetry in the University of Nebraska.
He has made his home in Missouri for some years, however, and
from 1926 to 1938 he served as literary editor of the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch. He is the author of many volumes of poetry,
for which he has received numerous complimentary awards. Of
these books the ones of chief interest to Missouri are the
four in his cycle of the West: The Song of Hugh Glass (1915):
The Song of Three Friends -(1919), which was adjudged the best .
volume of poetry for its year by the Poetry Society of America;
The Song of The Indian Wars (1925)5 and The Song of the Messiah
60
(1935). The last two, indeed, do not properly belong to the
literature of Missouri, except as a part of the sequence
beginning with the first two. But The Song of Hugh Glass and
The Song of Three Friends are tales of those hardy, disreput
able, heroic men of the fur trade which at St. Louis made its
contact with the civilized part of the United States.
The latter of these books, though second in publication,
is the first in sequence. The story comes from reports of two
expeditions that ascended the Missouri River under the leader
ship of Ashley and Henry of St. Louis in 1822 and 1823*
Printed versions are in files of The Western Souvenir and in
the Western Monthly Review for July, 1929. The tale is also
60
Who1s Who in America. XXI, p. 1917.
280
contained in The Missouri Intelligencer for September k, 1829,
6l
and in Howe1s Historical Collections of the Great West.
It is, in fact, the tale of the last part of Mike Fink’s
life. Frank Talbeau, Mike Fink, and Will Carpenter are the
three friends, rough and violent but inseparable. Fink and
Carpenter frequently demonstrate their attachment to each
other by shooting a whiskey cup from each other’s head, an
exploit that figures in practically all the tales of Fink and
that appears in every account of the death of the young
Carpenter and the subsequent death of Fink. Neihardt has
motivated the killing of Carpenter by Jealousy over a half-
breed girl whom Fink loves and who prefers Carpenter. Talbeau,
troubled by the estrangement between the other two friends
undertakes to renew their old amity. Fink, to show that he
holds no rancor, is to shoot the whiskey cup from Carpenter’s
head but purposely shoots the younger man between the eyes.
Talbeau then takes Carpenter’s gun and pursues Fink, shooting
at him, never hitting him but always firing so close as to
make Fink keep moving on until at last he dies of thirst and
exhaustion. Toward the end of the pursuit Talbeau relents;
he tries to overtake Fink to get him to rest and slake his
thirst, but when at last he actually catches up with the fugi
tive, Fink is dead and the crows have picked out his eyes.
61 John G. Heihardt, ’ ’Preface,” The Song of Three
Friends, p. xxi.
281
The Song of Hugh Glass is another story of the fur
trade. In 1823 Hugh Glass is engaged as a hunter to accompany
Major Andrew Henry’s expedition up the Missouri to the Yellow
stone. In a fight with some Indians he suffers a hip wound
while rescuing a "rakehell lad1 ’ called Jamie, and after that
he loves Jamie as a mother might have done. Subsequently
while Hugh is hunting one day, he was nearly killed by a bear.
Jamie finds him, kills the bear, and discovers that Hugh is
alive though horribly mutilated. Henry and his trappers move
on, all but Hugh, Jamie, and Jules Le Bon, who consents to
remain only because he is paid to do so. But Hugh does not
die so quickly as has been expected; Jules tells so many tales
of peril and death and talks so much of the danger from Indians
that he terrifies the boy. Then he digs a grave, but as Hugh
is still alive, they do not put him into it. But they take
his gun and knife and leave. When they overtake the other
members of the expedition, they report that Hugh is dead and
buried, supposing, indeed, that he is dead by this time.
After a time Hugh’s senses clear, he realizes that he is
deserted, and his affection for Jamie changes to a tremendous
lust for vengeance. One leg is useless because of his wound,
but he crawls through incredible pain and difficulty to Fort
Kiowa, subsisting chiefly on wild fruit, berries, and roots.
Once he frightens wolves and buzzards away from a dead bison
and eats of its flesh. Later he finds a deserted camp with
282
the embers of a dying fire still hot, and near it a worn knife
dropped by some hunter. With this weapon he manages to kill
two straggling dogs for food, and to carve out a pair of crude
crutches. From that time on he is able with a flint and the
knife to kindle fires. As he gains strength he is able to
lay aside his crutches and to search for Jamie— up to Henry's
Post at the Junction of the Big Horn and the Yellowstone, down
to Fort Atkinson, back up the Missouri River, always hearing
that Jamie has been there and moved on; and hearing after his
arrival at Fort Atkinson that Jamie is looking for Hugh because
he has done a great wrong. At last Hugh finds the youth in a
Piegan Indian lodge, sick and blinded by the bursting of
Hugh's old rifle. Hugh comes in disguised as a priest, but
Jamie recognizes his voice, and the long pursuit for vengeance
ends in a reconciliation.
The Song of the Indian Wars deals with the wars of the
Sioux and the plains Indians who tried to maintain their rights
to the great bison pastures and to their own way of life. It
is written with sympathy for the Indians and understanding of
them. The material comes from printed sources, from talk with
survivors of the wars, both white and Indian, and from inti
mate personal acquaintance with the Indians, especially the
Omahas, a Siouan people, while the old generation was still
62
numerous.
^ Neihardt, "Preface," The Song of the Indian Wars,
pp. 7 ff.
283
The Song of the Messiah is a narrative of the mystic
religious movement among the Indians of the West in which the
Messiah was reported to have appeared, in 1889 and continuing
into the nineties. Certain Sioux warriors were sent to inves
tigate this rumor, and returned with reports that they had had
mystical experience of the Christ.t Then followed a period of
religious excitement and anticipation, sacred dancing to the
neglect of cultivating the Indians' corn, drouth, dissension,
cold, and distress. The tale ends with the soldiers’ killing
of old Sitands and the massacre of his Indian followers at
Wounded Knee.
Such summaries as have been given fail to suggest the
reality which these poems recreate— the great stretches of
river and forest and plain, the vast distances inhabited only
by wild animals and savage, nomadic Indians, the adventures
and the labors of white pioneers in whose life danger was a
steady diet. Neihardt has been absorbed by the heroic charac
ter of the period, which he thinks not essentially different
from other heroic periods of the Aryan race. He has used
for these narratives a flexible heroic couplet which serves
the purpose well, though some readers have thought his phras
ing somewhat too classical for the material with which he
works. Whatever may be the ultimate judgment concerning his
style, he has told excellent tales of hero-moulded men, men
whose exploits ought not to be forgotten. His impulse is
28* *
sound; the epic life of the white man's advance into the
Indian's West deserves its epic record.^3
•When one looks back over slightly more than a century
of the composition of verse in Missouri, he can hardly avoid
astonishment at the quantity of that verse and at its diver
sity. Almost from the beginning Missourians have written
their poems, and they have been abashed before no subject;
but from Umphraville to Neihardt many of them have written
about Missouri. These poets, moreover, have come from
almost every imaginable class of people, from the retired
steamboat pastry-cook and the aging farmer to the eminent
scholar and the man whose profession is letters.
Perhaps other states have similar histories. If so,
one enlarges the boundaries within which he hesitates, whether
to rejoice that aspiration should be so nearly common to the
race or to lament that salvation is by election and that
where so many are called so few are chosen. For of all those
who have dabbled in rhymes and cadences, few are remembered
except as some antiquarian brings them momentarily to the
light. Such is the lot of man.
He perceives, even though dimly, the features of truth
Because of their length, Neihardt's poems do not
lend themselves well to brief quotation. And considerations
of space have dictated that the works of well-known authors
whose writings are readily available should be quoted at less
length than on merit they deserve.
285
and beauty, and he feels the world moving about him; he would
like to say somehow what he deems important to say. He would
like to paint the moment, to keep the hour in his hand, per
haps to cheat the oblivion that constantly takes the passing
delight and waits not far off for himself. And art, which is
the only hope for perpetuating the inconstant, looks decep
tively easy. He utters syllables that ring in his ears like
syllables he has heard before, he arranges words in patterns
that look familiar, he carves figures in soap. And the beauty
that he saw is somehow tarnished, the bells he heard are
cracked. Perhaps it was a distorted beauty anyhow, a false
harmony, and his senses were too dull to perceive the false
ness; perhaps what he accepted for symmetry was after all not
what his sons’ world, or even his own, took for grace. Or
perhaps it was that his tongue faltered and his fingers were
clumsy, and he never revealed at all what he had in his heart.
Not many of us can see and judge truly, or speak with grace
and certainty. ' Not many.
CHAPTER VII
THE LITERATURE OF THE CIVIL MAR IN MISSOURI
The Civil War earne to Missouri as a strange and scari
fying phenomenon5 it was unlike the war known to the other
states. Geographically Missouri was a sort of appendage to
the solid slave-holding South, thrust northward into free
territory, with free states on three sides; and along the two-
hundred-mile border of one of those states the animus was
peculiarly bitter. The population of Missouri was miscella
neous in origin, heterogeneous in character, and divided in
sympathies. The question of slavery had generated strife,
and the question of secession generated an intensified bitter
ness. To this day Missourians differ, often with some heat,
over whether secession in the state was actually accomplished.
The war on the Kansas Border was peculiarly villainous, marked
by fanaticism and vengefulness of which the memory has not yet
disappeared, after three quarters of a century. Missourians
still differ over whether General Ewing*s Order No. 11 was a
necessary though harsh military measure or an infamous cruelty
to people of Southern sympathies. And they disagree with
occasional vehemence over the part played in that border war
fare by men whose names were at the time names of terror. The
Guerrilla Quantrell, for example, is either an unspeakable
murderer and pillager, or a hero, a patriot, and an
286
287
1
avenger*
Any such four-year-agony as the Civil War will have its
literature. The returned warrior will have his tales to tell;
the spy and the secret agent will .divulge their mysteries, or
will boast of their perils and their prowess* The eyewitness
and the innocent bystander, men who might otherwise never have
written a book, will be impelled to transcribe the things they
have seen. The poet, the romancer, the historian, and the
novelist will find in war and its conditions the. substance of
their craft or their art. And for how long? Men still write
about the Trojan war.
One might properly associate with the Missouri record
of the War between the States numerous documents which ante
date that struggle but which have to do with the.question of
slavery out of which it grew. Such a document is Beverly
2
Tucker*s The Partisan Leader, if it actually was written in
1 Some years ago the late Br. J. K. Anderson, then one
of the two oldest living natives of Warrensburg, Missouri,
told me an anecdote concerning a Missourian_and a . Kansan who
fell into conversation.
The Kansan said: 1 1 It is an odd thing that whenever I
cross the line into Missouri I feel an impulse to get drunk. 1 1
The Missourian replied: ' ‘ That*s strange• And I*ve
had a queer experience. Whenever I go over into Kansas, I
always feel that I want to steal something.1 '
A few days later Dr. Anderson saw me again, -and;
explained that Kansas had originally, been settled largely by
ruffians and thieves. He knew I had lived in Kansas, and was
afraid I had not understood the joke.
H . L * J .
2 Beverly Tucker, The Partisan Leader. 1856.
288
Missouri, a novel which led the South toward secession and
which was a counterpieee to Uncle Tom * s Cabin# But though
Tucker once lived in Missouri, the book was almost certainly
3
not written here.
Other documents which have a relation, to the war that
was readying are certain tracts on the slavery issue; for
example, B. F. Stringfallow* s Negro Slavery No Evil, published
at St. Louis in 185**- by the Platte County Self-Defensive
Association. This pamphlet undertakes to prove that the Negro
slave is better, healthier, and happier than either the savage
Negro in Africa or the freed slave in this country, and that
slavery ennobles both the slave and the master. The institu
tion is particularly valuable, moreover, as a shield to the
white woman1s virtue:
So long as man is lewd, woman will be his victim.
Those who are forced to occupy a menial position,
have ever been, will ever be most tempted, least
protected: this is one of the evils of slavery; it
attends all who are in that abject condition, from
the beautiful Circassian to the sable daughter of
Africa. While we admit the selfishness of the sen
timent, we are free to declare, we love the white
woman so much, we would save her even at the sacri
fice of the negro; would throw around her every
shield, keep her out of the way of temptation.^
This tract elicited an answer not from Missouri but
from North Carolina, in Daniel R. Goodloe*s Is It Expedient
^ See Chapter II, supra, p. 67.
k • >
B. F. Stringfellow* Negro Slavery No Evil, p. 27.
289
to Introduce Slavery into Kansas? The latter pamphlet was
published at Boston in 1855 by the New England Emigrant Aid
Society.
One might find some kinship, also, between Civil War
literature proper and such verse as part of that in George
Thompson's The Prison Bard: except for slavery and the war
that was building, The Prison Bard would never have come into
being.
But the intention of this chapter is not to trace move
ments of political or controversial doctrine which led to
secession and war, or to ferret out secondary uses of war
themes in innumerable books written since the conflict. It
is rather to show something of the variety of Missouri books
and documents inspired by the war and constituting a part of
its record.
Such writing does not wait for the end of a war. In
1862 appeared a novel by Dr. J. H. Robinson. Mountain Max: or.
Nick Whiffles on the Border. This is a melodramatic tale of
a family with Union sympathies, living in Missouri, on the
west bank of the Missouri river. The year is 1861. The
Kinmouth family is harassed by bushwhackers. But Mrs. Kinmouth,
the only secession member of the family, is secretly giving aid
and information to these outlaws. After the bushwhackers have
pursued a stranger, Mountain Max, to the Kinmouth door, a
series of intricate intrigues and adventures ensues. But an
old mountain manj Kick Whiffles, drawn on the pattern of Natty
Bumppo, comes in and takes charge. He and his sons exterminate
the bushwhackers and even succeed in convincing Mrs, Kinmouth
of the error of her secessionist ways.
Such fiction is not memorable literature, of course,
but this novel was a document not only of its time but for its
time. It was published while the war was still in progress
and while the bushwhackers were still a genuine peril. It
illustrated to its contemporary readers the dangers of
division within the family in a time of danger— and, of course,
the rightness of the Union position in the controversy.
In the next year another tale of the war in Missouri
made its appearance. This is The Border Spy: or. the Beautiful
Captive of the Rebel Camp ( 1 8 6 3). It is attributed to a
Lieutenant Colonel Hazeltine— without first name or initial—
who had been a captain in Fremont’s Body Guard.
The events of this story occur at the time when Price's
army is in camp at Warsaw, Missouri, on the heights by the
Osage, with Fremont’s Body Guard and other Union forces
menacing them from across the river. A maiden named Alibamo
is held captive by one of the Rebel officers, a Captain Branch.
The narrative deals with the efforts of spies, intrigues among
the soldiers, and the villainy of Captain Branch. The captain
is about to compel Alibamo to marry him, but her brother and
some of his friends, including an Indian named .Fall-Leaf,
291
exert themselves craftily and heroically to rescue her. The
murderous Captain Branch attempts to hang a Union officer who
is among these rescuers, but is thwarted and killed by the
Indian, Thus right prevails.
The story opens with a quite incredible scene between
General Price and a man named.Johnson whom Price believes to
be a Confederate spy but who is really a Union sympathizer.
In this scene Johnson accuses the General, of lying, and
General Price draws his. sword. But Johnson levels his rifle
at Price; Price mutterss
Curse him. But for policy’s sake I must
restrain myself. He shall act the spy this once—
it is necessary— or I would dash him from this
rock into the depths. below.
Then he tells Johnson;
We are here facing a powerful army— an army
of fanatics— of devotees— who will fight to
the death, ,-while many of my soldiers are dis
contented. ?
No doubt an officer of the Union forces would like to
believe General Price a man so easily intimidated and so
distrustful of his own soldiers. But it is the author’s par
tisanship which deprives Price of dignity and makes him a
petulant and spiteful man. The same partisanship appears in
characterization of the Union officers as generally more noble
than the Confederates, and in the advice given by a Confederate
* 5
Lieutenant Colonel Hazeltine, The Border Spy, p. 3.
292
soldier to Captain Branch— that to insure the safety of
Alibamo and of Mamie Hayward he had better take them back to
6
Springfield, for “the Federals willmot harm females.”
Still another tale of melodrama having a good deal in
common with Mountain Max and The Border Spy is a novel by
Sergeant J. Winston, Cora 0 1 Kane. : or the Doom of the. Rebel
Guard. published after the war, however, in 1868. Its sympa
thies, like those of the other two books, lie with the Union.
Like the other two, it is filled with the uncertainties and
intrigues which arise from the fact that armies are in terri
tory where sympathies are divided and where every man may be
suspicious of his neighbor. And as in.the other two, the
Rebels and their partisans are evil people.
Cora Q'Kane is a story of war, love, and a wicked
uncle, an uncle who wishes to compel his niece to marry his
son, because the niece is heiress to a large fortune. The
uncle is a Rebel, and he becomes a tyrannic colonel in the
Confederate Army. He persecutes his niece and tries to murder
her lover, a Union officer. But in time the uncle is killed,
and his son is killed; and Cora.0'Kane and.Marvin Wilson, her
lover, after many trials, are happily married.
This story contains another of the sons of Leather
Stocking, a hunter and trapper named Archie Carter. Carter is
6 Ihid., p. 38.
293
a Tennesseean who has gone westward and has entered the war on
the Union side. In time of need he is always at hand. He
rescues Marvin Wilson from 0 * Kane * s flogging and again from
O'Kane's attempt to hang him. And at the death of O'Kane,
Carter is present, with a knife.
A good specimen of. the style is the interview in which
O'Kane attempts to induce Cora to marry her cousin. She
refuses. He advises her:
Taunt me not, madam, for you cannot elude me.
I have you fast, and there are none to scrutinize
or ask the cause of my conduct. I tell, you again
that you shall wed my son or you shall never wed.
I am not the man to jest. I am one who resolves
and executes.7
But the maiden is firm. She replies:
It is not my poor person that your son covets. . • 5
it is my property. I feel confident that my fortune
would satisfy him, and I am willing this night to
convey it all, every farthing, to him provided his
father will never again bring up the subject of my
union with him. Take the whole; I give it freely,
rejoicingly.®
It is formal and unnatural in dialogue, but it belongs
to a time when more accomplishedwriters than Sergeant Winston
wrote stiff and unnatural dialogue. It belongs to the class
of stories known as thrillers, and in its handling of action
it is often swift and succinct.
7
Sergeant J. Winston, Cora Q'Kane. pp. 11 f.
8 Ibid., p. 12.
29b
A somewhat better story than any or these is The Stars
and Bars (18 63), by Isaac Kelso of Platte City. It is a com
bination of fiction and local history, concerning itself
largely with events of the war in the region about Platte City,
and was published while the material was fresh and hot. Kelso
was a Union man and regarded the Rebels as traitors and gener
ally as villains. There are scenes of violence and murder,
slaves escaping to Kansas, parsons turning rebels and murderers,
or common men becoming, patriots and heroes. The narrative ends
with news of the burning of Lawrence, Kansas, by the Missouri
guerrilla Quantrell, and of vengeance on some of the traitors
by the Kansas Red Leg, Jim Lane.
The tale is somewhat disorganized, with its continuity
interrupted by the device of handling parallel lines of action
in alternating divisions of the story. It is, naturally,
strongly colored by the views of the writer, who is intensely
partisan. Its most impressive quality is the vividness of its
scenes of violence and the sinister air of its conspiracies.
In some degree it is a reference book for forgotten minor
incidents of local Civil War history; and it illustrates the
sources of animosities which died slowly after the war ended.
Missourians of Southern sympathies were not prolific in
fiction during the war or in the years immediately after it.
Sally Rochester Ford of St. Louis In Raids. and Romance of
Morgan and His . Men ( 1 8 6 3) deals with many exploits of the
295
Confederate raider John H. Morgan, spicing them with a series
of love stories, and treats Morgan as a hero and patriot. Her
point of view is Southern; to her no Abolition administration
ever was or ever could be the constitutional government of
9
the United States, But she does not use the characters or
the events of the war.in Missouri for her story.
Two later women have done so in historical novels,
Caroline Abbot Stanley* s Order No. 11 (1901 *) is a novel of
Civil War days in Jackson County of western Missouri. The
title is from an order of General Ewing, issued after
Quantrell’s raid on. Lawrence, expelling from Jackson County
all residents who could not establish their loyalty to the
Union, By means of a sentimental love story concerning a man
in the Union army and a girl of Southern antecedents
Mrs. Stanley has been able to utilize many real episodes of
the border warfare, material which would have been available
to her from the recollections of many people of the region,
in her own family or in many others. This historical matter
is the valuable part of the book.
Mrs. Stanley is a Missourian, and her sympathies in
treatment of the border warfare are plainly with the Missouri
rather than the Kansas partisans. But by the time of this book
^ Sally Rochester Ford, Raids and Romance of Morgan
and His Men, p. 160.
296
the heat of conflict had cooled. Two or three of the Kansans
in Order No. 11 are neither Red Legs nor border ruffians.
Dagmar Doneghy,10 in The Border (1931), also casts her
story in Kansas City and rural Jackson County and deals with
the history of the years from i860 to 1865* The style is
somewhat less flowery than that of Mrs. Stanley and the
characters are better balanced. Miss Donaghy spent her girl
hood in Missouri and got her early knowledge of the Civil War
days in the border country from her father. But she has
something of the attitude expressed by Long Jim Landis in
John Monteith's Parson Brooks: "Hit's all ovah now; blue
11
or gray, erry one's all the same to me now.1 1
No doubt there were other tales of the Civil War in
Missouri written and published either during the war or in
the years following. Such ephemeral works disappear, for
good reason; some of them turn up in the hands of collectors
when the passage of time has given them a bibliographical
interest. Those already discussed show the peculiarly bitter
nature of civil war in a region where to the usual hatreds of
such a struggle are added the suspicions and hatreds of
divided loyalties. Perhaps they show also that whatever may
Mrs. Joseph Warren Beach, wife of Dr. Joseph Warren
Beach, professor of English in the University of Minnesota.
^ John Monteith, Parson Brooks, p. 37*
297
be the relative potency of the sword, and the pen, the former
always stimulates the latter to activity which otherwise it
might have foregone. Every man believes that in his own more
exciting experiences lies a story. And if he does not turn to
fiction, he turns to reminiscence and what he believes to be
history.
A good many books of reminiscences which have more or
less of historical value or biographical interest have come
out of Missouri's part in the Civil War. They are variously
motivated. Sometimes the narrator believes that by participa
tion in a momentous occurrence one is peculiarly qualified to
be its historian. Sometimes he merely yields to the human
impulse to make his own boast. In either case the result may
be of interest, though not always of the sort of interest
intended.
One of the first of these more or less historical books
was Jessie Benton Fremont's The Story of the Guard ( 1863),
written while the war was still fairly young and published
In St. Louis in 18 6 3. It is an account of an organization
known as The Guard, organized at St. Louis and commanded by
General John C. Fremont. The general attacked a Hebei army
at Springfield, Missouri, and drove it out of Springfield, if
not out of the state. Fifteen members of The Guard were
killed in the action. But the organization was regarded as
an irregular force and on orders from General McClellan was
298
disbanded. The history was written by Mrs. Fremont with the
object of raising money for support of dependents of these
fifteen casualties, and derives its material from statements
made orally by Major Zozoni and from letters written by
General Fremont and others.
An intensely personal reeord of a woman*s war experi
ences is Mrs. James M* Loughborough* s My Cave Life in
Vicksburg (186*+). Mrs. Loughborough was a native of
Carondelet, Missouri. Her husband became a Confederate
general and was one of the defenders of Vicksburg* She accom
panied him in the campaign, and the book is an account of her
own experiences.
During the siege of Vicksburg the inhabitants lived in
caves in back yards or in hillsides to avoid some of the
danger from flying missiles. Mrs. Loughborough had seen
people killed and wounded; she had seen cannon balls falling
in the streets and passing through the walls of houses. She
spent a considerable part of the time of the siege in a hill
side cave, which had its own dangers. On one occasion her
husband killed a six-foot snake there. On another, a stranger
came into the cave asking for shelter. While he was there,
a Parrott shell entered the cave; George, a negro servant,
looked to the stranger to throw the shell outside, but the
man did not do so. The negro himself removed it. Then the
fuse went out and the shell did not explode, but George had
299
acquired his own reminiscence of the Civil War and was soon
12
observed acting out his heroic deed for his friends.
Another narrative of personal experience written while
the war was still in progress is Camp Fire and Cotton Field
(l86*f), by Thomas W. Knox. Knox was a Union soldier from
Missouri. Some of his earlier chapters have to do with the
early stages of the war in Missouri; later ones deal with the
army in Arkansas and other parts of the South. The book is
a series of tales of the things Knox saw in the war, vivid
and gruesome narratives, such as the account of Albert Pike*s
Indian scalping the living and the dead without distinction.1^
The horrors recounted by Knox and Mrs. Loughborough
are the horrors of war as conducted by regular armies.
Sergeant Thomas A. Goodman has a tale to tell of massacre of
twenty-three people taken from a train at Centralia, Missouri,
and murdered by Bill Anderson's Bushwhackers. Twenty-two of
the murdered men were Federal soldiers; the other was a
civilian who was wearing a blue blouse. Sergeant Goodman
was the only one of the Union soldiers aboard the train who
was not killed; he was taken to exchange for one of Anderson's
sergeants who had been captured, and escaped before the
12
Mrs. James M. Loughborough, My; Cave Life in Vicksburg.
pp. 73 ff.
^ Thomas W. Knox, Camp Fire and Cotton Field, p. 138*
300
lif
exchange could be accomplished*
In none of the foregoing accounts of war experience is
there occasion for surprise* People had had experience that
seemed worth recording, and they set themselves to telling
their stories. But in the career of John McCorkle of Howard'
County, Missouri, there is something of the paradox that
after all must exist in any peaceful man who discards his
normal moralities for the savageries of war* Most men of
conscience who make this transformation do so under the
authority of regularly organized armies, and perhaps relieve
their consciences of responsibility for actions not in charac
ter with their normal standards by submitting to authority
and thus giving up their self-direction. But McCorkle was a
guerrilla; he was a member of Quantrell*s irregulars, and
participated in some of the most violent exploits of those
lawless men. After the war he was one of the leading citizens
of Howard County and was known as a Christian gentleman* Yet
the purpose of his reminiscences in Three Years with Quantrell
15
as told to 0. S. Barton is to justify vengeance and murder.
The history of Quantrell contains considerable
uncertainty. According to McCorkle, Quantrell was wounded
Sergt. Thomas M. Goodman, A True narrative, ed. by
Captain Harvey A. Houston, Des Koine's, Iowa, 186o. The manu
script is in possession of the University of Kansas City.
^ John McCorkle, Three Years with Quantrell. p.
301
(and his brother was killed) about ten miles from Fort
Leavenworth, Kansas, by a band of Kansas Hed Legs, After he
recovered from his wounds he joined Lane and Jemnison with
the purpose of getting revenge, and went with them on some
of their raids, killing as opportunity offered, some of their
men, who had been involved in the murder of his brother.
After he left the Kansans and took up his organization of
guerrillas in Missouri, some women of the Southern faction
were killed and others were injured in the collapse of a
building in Kansas City where they were imprisoned. Accord
ing to McCorkle this apparent accident had been caused by
deliberate undermining of the building, and the Lawrence
massacre was an act of vengeance.
Quantrell remained in Lawrence about two hours
and when he left, the town was in ashes and 175
Jayhawkers were dead. Lane and Jennison had made
desolate the border counties of Missouri, pillaged
and burned homes, murdered Southern men, insulted,
outraged and murdered the wives and sisters of
these men. Quantrell and his command had come to
Lawrence to be avenged, _and they were. In this
raid, a few innocent men may have been killed, but
this was not intentional.-1 - 6
All men, of course, endeavor to justify themselves; it
may be that his explanation of Quantrell's conduct and his
own left John McCorkle with the easy conscience of a Christian
and a gentleman. It is perhaps not to be wished that a man
16 Ibid., pp. 76 ff.
302
should live in despair, knowing that under any circumstances
he had been able to abandon the decencies of justice and
mercy. Perhaps, after all, gallantry has no place in any
war, and guerrilla warfare is not more an abandonment of
decency than other warfare; but those who have not been
guerrillas are reluctant to think so.
Whatever may have been the case of John McCorkle,
Samuel Hildebrand was neither a Christian nor a gentleman,
and was not tender of conscience. He was a notorious bush
whacker who asserted that he had killed more than a hundred
men. In his Autobiography (1870) he blames the injustice of
neighbors whose sympathies were with the Union and with whom
he and his relatives had fights and lawsuits for driving him
from peaceful pursuits to acts of vengeance; and having made
this genuflection to conscience, he proceeds without further
impediment to recount a long series of blood-chilling exploits
in which he plainly takes considerable pride. He eould not
read or write, but the f l Preface,, , signed by James W. Evans
and A. Wendell Keith, M. D., asserts that the confession was
given to them from his own lips and was faithfully written
* down. These amanuenses attribute their activity, in publish
ing this genuine autobiography to the fact that several spur
ious autobiographies have already been issued. Hildebrand
belongs to the ancient tribe of bad men whose exploits make
legends; he boasts that
303
never perhaps since the world began have such
efforts been put forth for the suppression of one
man alone as have been used for my capture, both
during the war and since its termination,1'
At the time of this confession the war was about five
years past, and Hildebrand was concealing himself somewhere
3LS
in “the dreary lowlands of the South1 1 to escape capture.
The style of the book is literary, and not that of the
illiterate Hildebrand himself. References to such matters as
the exploits of Don Quixote are doubtless provided by Evans
and Keith; numerous grim jests about the murders may well
come from the callous outlaw.
After the introductory explanation of the manner in
which Hildebrand entered upon his bushwhacking career, the
Autobiography consists chiefly of a series of episodes
recounting murders, robberies of stores, thefts of horses,
encounters with Federal troops, and other crimes. The first
murder, the killing of George Cornecious on June Ik-, 1862,
sets the key for many others:
After searching two days and two nights I suc
ceeded in shooting him; he was the first man I
ever killed; a little notch cut in the stock of my
gun was made to commemorate the deed.1^
The second murder, the killing of Firman Mellvaine, was
Samuel S. Hildebrand, Autobiography. p. 25»
18 Ibid.. p. 312.
19 Ibid.. pp. 58 ff.
similarly accomplished after two days of larking about, wait
ing for a chance to ambush the man. At last he succeeded in
getting a shot at Mellvaine as the latter rested in the har
vest field, leaning on the handle of his cradle.
I fired, and he fell dead.
Nothing but a series of wrongs long continued
could ever have induced me to take the life of
that highly accomplished young man.20
These murders were coldly accomplished, but they were
apprentice work, and the artistic touch comes with practice.
Of a later accomplishment Hildebrand reports:
I wounded him severely on purpose to let him
see me, but he yelled so loud that I had to kill
him with my knife, for I wanted “peace" about that
time.21
Some, no doubt, of the guerrilla activities of the
Civil War were inspired by patriotism for the cause the
guerrillas served, though much more of it was probably mere
outlawry under the cover of patriotism. It is doubtful that
Sam Hildebrand was a devotee of any causej certainly he was
a depraved and conscienceless murderer, and many of his
murders were acts of personal vengeance and hatred. After
the war he left Missouri and wandered through the Southern
states with a price on his head. But he concludes, boastfully
20 Ibid.. p. 63.
23* Ibid., p. 119*
305
If the strange hallucination should ever enter
the mind of a man that I could be captured, let him
immediately send for a physician, have his head
emptied and filled up with clabber to give him a
better set of brains. . . .
As several proclamations have been issued
against me, without ever eliciting one in return,
I shall now swing my hat and proclaim: "Peace
and good will to all men; a general amnesty toward
the United States and to 'Uncle Sam*— so long as
he shall behave himself. 22
There were other biographies of Missourians whose part
in the Civil War was in some degree extraordinary but who were
not themselves writers. One such was a pamphlet of ninety-
seven pages by George S. Johns, Philip Henson, the Southern
Union Spy ( 1887). Johns explains in an explanatory foreword
that the material was gathered and the book was written in
the leisure time of four days. Such journalism does not pro
duce biography of long interest, but it does illustrate the
continuing interest twenty years after the war of such phenom
ena as men of Southern antecedents whose sympathies with the
North led them to serve as Union spies* The most remarkable
part of the book is a photograph of Philip Henson with a
beard somewhat more than six feet long, said to have been
23
grown in ten years*
Another of these autobiographies written by amanuenses
22 Ibid., p. 312.
^ George S. Johns, Philip Henson, the Southern Union
SEZ> p. 1 3.
306
is Absalom Grimes. Confederate Mail Runner (1926). Grimes was
born in Kentucky but came to Missouri while he was very young.
His reminiscences of the war are those of a man who lived a
perilous life carrying mail from Missouri to Southern sol
diers. He had some experience of prison and of the brutality
which the war entailed. His story derives some interest from
the fact that he was a Mississippi River pilot and a friend
of Mark Twain, and that he recounts certain ludicrous mis
adventures of that noted pilot.
Reminiscence and biography merge into works which the
authors considered histories, though often these histories
are little more than the record of personal experience,
observation, and opinion. Thus the title page of the
Reverend W. M. Leftwich’s Martyrdom in Missouri (1870)
describes the book as * ‘ A History of Religious Proscription,
the Seizure of Churches, and the Persecution of Ministers of
the Gospel in the State of Missouri.n The author is a minis
ter, and is incensed against the Methodist Church, North, as
well as against the Union officers and officials whom he
charges with many crimes, during the Civil War period, against
the Southern Methodists. He cites many harrowing instances
of good and pious people abused or even murdered because of
their Southern sympathies, and believes that the Northern
Methodists had an important hand in the persecution. It is
passionate denunciation rather than history.
307
Martin Rice's "What I Saw of Order Number Eleven" in
his miscellaneous volume of prose and verse, Rural Rhymes,
2k
and Talks and Tales of Olden Times is a record of a single
person's observations and inquiries, but it has something of
the dispassionate quality that history should possess* Rice
had come from Tennessee to Missouri in 1833 and had lived for
many years near Lone Jack in Jackson County* His sympathies
were with the Union, and his loyalty was well established;
he was not one of those who were expelled from the county*
But many of them, though they were Southern in their feelings,
were his friends and neighbors. The danger from bushwhackers,
moreover, was so great in the confusion of the execution of
the order that he regarded it as prudent to go along with
those who had no choice. He endured many of the tribulations
visited upon the others. Rice was an intelligent, curious,
and tolerant man; and under the limitations of individual
observation he has written an excellent historical account
of this phase of the war on the Kansas border.
Many of the books written by Missourians concerning
the Civil War and purporting to be histories are, indeed,
subject in considerable degree to those limitations. Thus a
volume by Willisan Monks entitled History of Southern Missouri
and Northern Arkansas (1907) proves to be in fact almost
Pp. 107 tt.
nothing but reminiscence, four decades after the occurrences,
of the author*s experiences in the Civil War. It illustrates
the guerrilla nature of much of the warfare in this border
land region, and it illustrates the partisanship of the
writer* It contains episode after episode of murder and
robbery committed upon Union people by Confederate soldiers
or by bushwhackers and lawless men* According to Monks, Union
men were often simply called out and shot; none of the
Southerners were so treated. Neighbors became merciless
enemies, and the whole region was full of treachery, rapine,
and death. The testimony to lawlessness and violence is, of
course, easy to believe. Monks had lived in this region
25
before the war, and had served in the Union army there
during the war. But it Is testimony that has been given over
and over by partisans on both sides and need not be endlessly
repeated.
A curious embellishment of the book is its illustra
tions for some of the more gruesome episodes. Shortly after
the battle of Wilson Creek a force of about 350 men came into
Ozark County, Missouri, and found two men cutting sawlogs.
These men were one interestingly named Jesse James, about
fifty-five or sixty years old, and a man named Brown, both
^ William Monks. History of Southern Missouri and
Northern Arkansas. p. J>8l*
309
Union men but not in the army* The captors hanged the two
men and left them swinging* The next day, as there were no
Union men left in the neighborhood, the wives of James and
Brown came and buried them*
They dug graves underneath the swinging bodies,
laid bed clothing in the graves and cut them
loose. The bodies fell into,the coffinless graves,
and the earth was replaced. 25
The photograph illustrating this passage shows several
men with gray beards crouching or seated on the ground; back
of them are posed nine or ten men, standing, with two men in
the center representing James and Brown. Those not holding
27
ropes are holding conspicuously bayoneted rifles.
About two weeks after the hanging of James and Brown,
about twenty-five men organized themselves and called on an
old man named Rhodes, one of General Jackson*s old soldiers
and eighty years of age. Over the protest of his aged wife
they took him away from his house, ushot him, cut his ears
off and his heart out.'* Dr. Nunly, one of the leaders of
the murderers, said that he would pickle the heart Hso people
28
could see how a Black Republecan's [sic] heart looked.1 *
There is a photograph, obviously posed, to illustrate
this episode. Rhodes lies on his back, with the surgeon in
^ Ibid., pp. 8l f.
27 Ibid.. p. 82.
28 Ibid.. p. 83 f.
310
position to cut out his heart; Rhodes's eyes are fixed on the
29
camera.
Perhaps the most bizarre of the illustrations is the
30
picture of r t Mrs. Monks and Children Being Driven from Home.1 1
A woman and four children are in the foreground, with a house
in the background. Between the woman and children and the
house stand thirteen men, ranged in a photographer1 s row. Two
elderly men in civilian clothes stand on the porch of the
house and look calmly on, spectators of the photographing
rather than of the expulsion of the undisturbed Mrs. Monks.
Such is the History of Southern Missouri and Northern
Arkansas.
Occasional other writers attempted histories as the
war receded into the past, but they generally relied upon
observation and report rather than upon painstaking research.
In 1898 the Reverend George Miller published at Columbia,
Missouri, a thin book— *175 pages— entitled Missouri1s Memorable
Decade, which in the preface the author says “is not a history
but only historical.1 1 It is partly an account of political and
military occurrences from i860 to 1 8 7 0, including the border
bushwhacking and actions by regular soldiers, and partly an
account of the author’s life and experience during those years.
29 Ibid., p. 85.
30 Ibid., p. 89.
311
Miller was a minister born and reared in the South but Northern
in his convictions. He undertakes to show that in such a con
troversy people are as passionately convinced and as honest on
one side as on the other, and that much of the horror of the
border warfare came from prejudices already strong. He also
makes an assertion not often met in accounts of the border
warfare and not too often at this day encountered among the
descendants of those who lived through the periods namely,
that not all Missourians of Southern sympathies regarded
Quantrell as a hero. He quotes Colonel Wiley Britton of the
Sixth Kansas Cavalry as of the opinion that Missouri State
troops had more persistently followed Quantrell and had killed
more of his men than had the Kansas troops stationed along
the border.
W. L. Webb’s Battles and Biographies of Missourians
(1900) gives accounts, often minutely detailed, of many of the
battles fought in Missouri. He does not succeed in making
the history of battles exhaustive; he asserts that there were
*+87 engagements within the state. But for those he discusses,
sueh as the battles of Lone Jack and Lexington, he provides
such information as would appeal to the curiosity and local
pride of persons living in the vicinity, not interpretation
of the significance such actions might have in larger campaigns.
^ George Miller, Missouri * s Memorable Decade, p. 103,
312
The "book contains also brief biographies of such lead
ers in the Missouri warfare as Price, Shelby, Bledsoe, and
Upton Hays; chiefly they are men of Confederate sympathies.
The ebullient Denton J. Snider of St. Louis, who would
ride his pen at any barrier, who would tackle prose or poetry,
ancient, medieval, or modern themes, history, fiction, or
drama with equal confidence, also provided a history of the
period, The American Ten Years1 War. 1855-1865 (1906). Part I
deals with “The Border War"; Part II with "The Union Dis
united"; Part III with "The Union Reunited." As in other
historical and biographical work he tends to devote a good
part of his space to confident interpretation of the signifi
cance of facts rather than to objective presentation of fact.
A book somewhat similar to Miller1s Missouri*s Memor
able Decade is Galusha Anderson's The Story of a Border City
During the Civil War (1908). Anderson was pastor of the
Second Baptist Church of St. Louis from 1858 to 1 8 6 6.^ On
the title page he also describes himself as a professor in
the University of Chicago. His sympathies were Northern, and
he regarded the secessionists as disloyal; yet his treatment
of fact undertakes to be impartial. But when he deals with
such matters as his own controversies with his congregation
Galusha Anderson, The Story of a Border City During
the Civil War, p. 122*
over whether he shall pray for President Lincoln, he does not
33
succeed in viewing the situation dispassionately. He may
be historically accurate when he deals with military and
political actions.
The chief value of the book is probably in its personal
record of the controversies of the time, and of the conditions
in St. Louis. He shows some interesting facts of the condi
tions obtaining among slaves and refugees in the city, of the
attitudes toward each other of the German and American popula
tions in St. Louis, and of civilian views of the conduct of
military matters in St. Louis. It is primarily a book of
recollections by an intelligent and observant man who lived
in St. Louis during the Civil War period.
Perhaps the most personally interesting of all the men
who have made Missouri history and written it was the romantic
John H. Edwards. He was born in Virginia in 1839 and came to
Missouri about l85^« He lived in Lexington until the outbreak
of the Civil War, and gained his first experience with news
papers as a printer for the Lexington Expositor. Early in
the war he joined the command of General Joseph 0. Shelby, and
became a brilliant officer, unselfish and kind (though fiery),
devoted to his commander, and loved by his men. He was
intrepid and reckless but was wounded only once (at Springfield,
33 Ibid., pp. 12*f f
31*+
Missouri). Once he was taken prisoner, but was exchanged
and rejoined his regiment. After Lee‘s surrender he went
with Shelby to Mexico and remained there for two years,
returning to Missouri in 1 8 6 7, after the execution of
Maximilian.
In Missouri Edwards had a distinguished career in
journalism; he was one of the founders of the Kansas City
Times, and was for many years one of the most prominent news
paper editors in St. Louis. For men of his volatile tempera
ment the editorial career was a strenuous one. He took the
Keeley cure for alcoholism repeatedly, until Keeley gave up
the attempt to cure him. He exchanged vituperations with
other editors, and fought one of the last pistol-duels with
which editors of the Middle West enlivened the profession.
Happily each of the editor-duelists missed his target. He
35
died in 1889 of heart disease. The State Senate adjourned
■ jL.
J Paul Wellman, in Angel With Spurs, describes another
style of fighting as the “Missouri duel.1 1 In this style of
dueling a knot is tied in diagonally opposite corners of a
bandanna handkerchief; each duelist takes a knot between his
teeth and keeps it there. Thus their faces are about eighteen
inches apart. They fight with Bowie knives. If such duels
actually were fought in Missouri, it seems a pity that Edwards
did not add one more touch of the picturesque to his gaudy
career by electing to fight in the Missouri manner. Such a
duel would be an undeniable test of the editorial courage and
stamina.
35
After the death of Edwards, his wife, Jennie
Edwards, published in John N. Edwards a compilation including
a biography by the Reverend""George Plattenburg, a kinsman of
315
as a mark of lionor to him.
John N. Edwards's Shelby and His Men (1867) is a
spirited account of the career of General Joseph 0. Shelby
and his cavalry in the Civil War. Edwards was Brigade-
Adjutant and then Division-Adjutant under Shelby. The account
includes a detailed narrative of many of the actions in which
Shelby's cavalry engaged, a narrative that is still of great
interest to the modern reader for whom these are the minutiae
of campaigns long gone. Edwards disclaims the historian’s
cold analysis and exhaustive research, for which, in fact,
he was probably not fitted. This is the narrative of a par
ticipant, and written while the events were recent and of
deep importance. The book was published in the year of his
return from Mexico, and it was devotion to Shelby and to his
comrades which impelled him to record their exploits.
Shelby and His Men is a source book for much of the
fighting in Missouri. There were about four hundred engage
ments within the borders of the state, but they constituted
not so much a systematic campaign as a series of more or less
aimless and sporadic battles. For those actions with which
Edwards was concerned, this book gives an excellent report.
And the impression of personal, almost foolhardy, daring is in
35 (Continued)
Jennie Edwards; tributes to Edwards published by newspapers of
several states; miscellaneous writings in prose and verse;
and a reprint of his Shelby's Expedition to Mexico.
316
all these pages*
Shelby* s Expedition to Mexico ( 1872) is a narrative of
a campaign outside the United States after the close of the
Civil War. A force of Confederates, unable to reconcile
themselves immediately to life in the United States, once
their cause had been lost, went to Mexico planning eventually
to establish there a colony where Southerners could pursue
their own way of life. The project ended with the execution
of Maximilian by a firing squad. Edwards is impressed with
the cruelty and the perfidy of both the French and the Spanish.
He is moved, also, by the pathos of Maximilian, whom he con
siders a good but impractical manj and he responds to the
romantic appeal of Carlotta, wife of Maximilian.
The book has the reality of first-hand observation by
a keen and experienced man, the liveliness characteristic of
all Edwards's writing, and the romance of the exotic country
in which its scenes are laid. Edwards's style is somewhat
flowery in a Victorian fashion, as might be expected, but it
has rapidity and vigor. Few of the Missourians who have
written prose concerning the part taken by their state in the
Civil War can approach him.
It was inevitable, of course, that the war should pro
duce verse in Missouri as in all other states. A good deal of
3^ Edwards also wrote a book on the irregulars of the
Civil War— Uoted Guerrillas (1 8 6 7). But it is not a record of
his own observation of the war, and is of less interest than
his other works.
3X7
Missouri verse having to do with the Civil War is extant,
though perhaps less than one would expect in comparison with
the prose on the same subjects, and doubtless a great deal
less than was actually composed.
Some attention has been given to Denton J. Snider*s
37
three-act play in blank verse, Clarence. This tragedy,
published seven years after the war, is the work of a man who
enjoyed a considerable literary reputation at least in
St. Louis. But it has little to commend it. The action is
motivated by Northern desire to free the slaves, a dead issue
in 1 8 7 2, and by Southern contempt for the Yankees, which was
not even then a very fresh motif. The development exhibits
no great inventive capacity; a Northern band of idealists lands
in a Southern state with the intention of freeing slaves by
force, and in the ensuing battle nearly everybody is killed.
There is a somewhat involved love story in which the princi
pals are a Yankee and a Southern girl, but the characteriza
tion and the development of this well-worn theme lack both
freshness and probability.
Martin Rice’s "Dorr Morrison’s Ride” also has been
,0
examined. Among Rice’s many verses, several other poems
37
Chapter >Y, supra, p. 232. Copies of this play are
extremely rare. The University of Kansas City has a copy in
the Snyder Collection which the donor of the collection
believed possibly unique in its condition— with the paper
covers intact.
^ Chapter IV, supra, pp. 191 ff.
318
have to do with the Civil War, and particularly with the
frightful consequences of General Ewing*s “Order No* 11.“
39
“The Exodus of Eighteen Sixty-three; or Order Number Eleven’ *
is a long narrative poem recounting the consequences of that
order, and giving incidents of the exodus which came under
Eice*s observation.
The needful preparations then
By night and day were hurried on—
No Sabbath rest, no Sabbath when
All peace, all quietude had gone;
Sleep from the eyelids fled away,
The mind, in tossing to and fro,
Still asked the question night and day,
“Oh whither, whither, shall I go?"^
They walked the dusty, crowded road,
With faltering steps and feeble gait;
That road with weary steps they tread,
Their feet now bare and worn and sore—
A cow perhaps behind them led,
Or driven slowly on before;
A bundle small— *tis all they now
Have strength to bear away from hence—
Another bound upon the cow,
Their choice effects the small contents.
A band of soldiers came and bade
Those men to march with them away,
A little way, scarce out of sight—
Their place of execution found;
39 Martin Rice, Rural Rhymes, pp. 370 ff.
Ibid., p. 375.
^ Ibid.. p. 379.
319
Six of the eight we re killed outright,
And left upon the bloody ground.^2
3 ^! 9 |* 3 ^ 3 ^
Time passed; she lived, but reason fled--
A harmless maniac was she;
From place to place she went, ’twas said,
To seek her long-lost children three;
She went, she came without debar,
And strangers oftentimes would meet
Poor Crazy Jane, of Sni-a-bar,
On public road or village street.
i|c sfc ?$C ^ jj; jj|t ^
We may not say, for human ken
Can never see within the shade,
And tell what evils might have been,
Had that stern order ne1er been made;
But those who witnessed those events,
Those thousand hearts with sorrow riven,
All viewed them as the consequence ^
Of Ewing’s ’ ’ Order Number Eleven.”
Whatever may be said concerning the faults of this
poem, it has its merits; if it is not written with the eye
on the object, it is written with the eye of memory thereon,
and the substance is no trivial thing. No man can read it
unmoved, and no man can read it without respect for the
author. Let it be compared with the blank verse of Clarence,
and the reader must conclude that here, at any rate, the
farmer of Lone Jack came considerably nearer to poetry than
L.p _
Ibid., p. 380. Rice documents this execution and
gives its date, September 6, 1 8 6 3.
^ ibid., p. 3 8 9.
^ Ibid., p. 392.
320
the professor in St. Louis was able to do.
So much cannot be said for the other poems in which
Rice concerns himself with the Civil War. They are numerous—
one considerable section of his book is entitled “Poems,
Descriptive and Military1 1 — but they are doggerel, and noth
ing in their contents or their feeling can disguise the
banality of the verse. Sometimes he wanders farther afield
than Jackson County, but again and again he comes back to
Order No. 11 and to the guerrilla warfare of the region where
he lived.
It is natural that other versifiers should also give
attention to this region, for it was here on the Kansas
border that the ferocity of the struggle was more concentrated
and more constant than anywhere else in the state. It was
here that Louis Mertins centered his attention in the Tales
If6
from Kettle * s Shop. And it was this part of the state that
Thomas Brower Peacock used as the setting for a historical
h7
poem of ten cantos, The Rhyme of the Border War.
The characters of this narrative poem include many
**5
Ibid.. pp. 311 ff.
k-6
Chapter VI, supra, pp. 261 ff.
L1. 7
f The facts that can be learned about Peacock place
his residence in Kansas about 1880; whether he ever lived in
Missouri or not, he was familiar with the region, and atti
tudes expressed in the poem suggest that his sentiments were
those of a Missourian.
names familiar in the history of Missouri— Jennison, Jim Lane,
Quantrell, Cole Younger, General Ewing, General Price, General
Shelby, Major John N. Edwards— and the action includes such
events as the burning of Lawrence and the battles of Westport,
Lee's Summit, and Lone Jack, and the development of several
love affairs, notably one in which Quantrell becomes the
bereaved lover* Peacock accounts for Quantrell's turning
guerrilla, in fact, on the ground that Jennison'„s men killed
not only some of Quantrell*s relatives but also Lucy Earle,
his sweetheart. Quantrell was a member of Jennison's Red Legs
and had no affection for the Southern cause; it was only a
desire for vengeance, in this account, that made him a rene
gade from the Jennison command.
Yet Quantrell, with a conscience keen,
Knew if he could he'd rather been
A soldier on the Northern side. 4-0
As poetry, not much can be said for The Rhyme of the
Border War. Doubtless some credit is due any man who labors
through the writing of ten cantos in order to preserve the
memory of events which should not be forgotten. In this case
it is the labor that deserves praise rather than the result.
The verse is unskillful, adapting not only meter but grammar
to the necessities of the rhyme. Nor is there much of judg
ment or art in dealing with character. Perhaps the best
^ Thomas Brower Peacock, The Rhyme of the Border War,
p. 96.
quality of the poem is the support it gives to morality, for
it gives extravagant praise to the four or five brides and
virgins who appear in the story. A good specimen is the
occasion of Quantrell's first meeting with Lucy Earle; a
Missouri maiden who had no underwear:
She comesi that gushing glory glides
T'ward him, and near him now abides.
The wanton wind has opened rude
Her dress, and laid her bosom nude,
Unknown to her, for she was pure, 1*9
And could not such a thing endure.
They fell instantly in love.
Here and there are to be found occasional poems by
authors of whom nothing is known but -who concerned themselves
with some matter of the Civil War in Missouri. Among the
large number of ballads that have been collected in the state
two dozen or more are ballads of that war, and several are
songs of Missouri or Missourians. Examples are "The Call of
Quantrell," "Sterling Price," and "The War in Missouri in
50
*61." A fair specimen of the type is "Old Jo Shelby's Mule
of which Paul Wellman quotes four stanzas as a song of Shelby
men on the expedition to Mexico:
1 ^ 9
Ibid.T p. 39.
50
H. M. Belden, ed., Ballads and Songs, pp. 353 ff.
323
The Union folks away up nawth was one time much afraid
•Bout somethin* cornin' from the South— they said it
was a raid;
How I will tell ye whut it was if ye will jest keep
cool,
It had long ears an* a long slick tail, an* was
called Jo Shelby's mulei
Shout boys, an' make a noise: the Yankees is afraid!
They's somethin' up an' hell's to pay when Shelby's
on a raid.
This mule, he ain't so very big, but then he's got
the grit,
An* every time he gives a snort he makes them blue-
coats git.
Sometimes he'll jump into their fields an' eat both
cawn an' oats,
An* when he's nawthin* else to do, he'll drive away
their shoats.
Once this hyar mule went on a spree up dost to
Lexington
An every time he give a jump he'd make the Yankees
run;
An* cornin' back through ole Saline he got into a trap,
Kicked up his heels, scairt ole man Brown, an come
back safe to Pap.
Ole Rosey got a long deespatch, which come from 'way
down east,
1 1 Say, ye take thutty thousan' men an' try to ketch
that beast."
To obey awdehs he was bound, but said Abe was a fool,
An* hadn't halter strong enough to hold Jo Shelby's
mule!
References to events of the war would be plain, of
course, to singers of the ballad. The last stanza refers to
the Westport raid of 18M+ and to the failure of General
Rosecrans of the Union army to capture Shelby. In the pre
ceding stanza "Pap" would be readily identified as
^ Paul I», Wellman, Angel with Spurs, pp. 272 f•
32^
General Sterling Price, and the "spree up dost to Lexington"
is the Boonville raid of 18 63, when Shelby eluded Union forces
and returned to Price*s Confederate army. Whoever the original
composer may have been, other men doubtless added stanzas as
they were impelled to celebrate other incidents or invent new
taunts for the Yankees.
As one surveys the work of Missouri writers which grew
out of the Civil War, he cannot escape the feeling that it is
a record of passion and suffering, expressed piecemeal and
often unskillfully, inadequately, by people ungifted in
letters. Doubtless much has been lost; artless attempts at
art are ephemeral. But enough remains to convey something of
the upheaval which the war produced in the life of the state,
a dislocation which was not diminished by the fact that
Missouri was on the fringe of the struggle and that no major
battles occurred here. Going back to those forgotten books
is going back to uncertainty and fear and desperation and
flaming devotion; it is going back to brigandage and con
spiracy and rapine, and to mercy and exaltation. The writers
may be unskilled and uncritical, as many of them are, but
their ineptitude is not proof against the drama with which
they deal. Their material gives to their aggregate report a
life and force which by their own power they could not
command.
CHAPTER VIII
DRAMATIC COMPOSITION IN MISSOURI: 1850-1930
The history of Missouri drama is a relatively short
story, not because the drama has been of little interest to
Missourians or because the stage has not flourished, particu
larly in St. Louis, but because the -writers for the stage have
not chosen extensively for their subjects the themes presented
by the drama of Missouri life. Between 1760 and 1 8 3 0, a
period of somewhat scanty literary record for the state, there
was a fine culture among men of leisure in St. Louis, a cul
ture of which only glimpses are now visible because it was not
very productive of literature. Cultivated tastes were such as
led people to prefer reading European literature rather than
writing about the American scene. 1 And little or nothing is
known about plays presented in St. Louis during much of this
period.
It is known, however, that a good many plays in English
or German were acted in St. Louis during the first half of the
nineteenth century, and that a play in English, Wetmore's
The Pedlar, was written in St. Louis as early as 1821, the
2
year in which Missouri was admitted to the Union. But though
J. T. Scharf, History of St. Louis City and County.
II, p. 1528.
2
Chapter II, supra♦ p. 19.
325
326
The Germanist Club and various Turnvereins staged many German
plays and at least a few were written in English in St, Louis,
it is not until about the middle of the century that any of
the plays that are preserved made use of the Missouri scene.
For even fragmentary knowledge of much that pertains
to the theater in St. Louis a century ago the current student
must be greatly indebted to the memory, and to the passion for
collecting information, of William Clark Breckenridge. He
was born in St. Louis in 1862; he was educated in that city
and spent practically all his life there. In addition to his
own memory he had access to resources in his library and
materials in the possession of other people which are not now
available, and he became probably the best authority on many
phases of Missouri life and history that the state has known.
His testimony on many such matters is, therefore, of the
highest interest.
It is of interest, also, that the earliest imprint of
the German drama in St. Louis, though many other German plays
are known to have preceded it in composition and performance,
is a play with its setting in St. Louis, Leonhard’s
Das Jueneste Gericht in St. Louis, which has been examined.
^ J, M. Breckenridge, William Clark Breckenridge. His
Life. Lineage and Writings, pp. 70 f•
* * ■ Chapter II, supra, pp. 25 f.
It is not eertain that this play was ever produced. Other
plays, in English, of about the same time are known to have
been written by Joseph M. Field and Edmund Flagg, but as far
as can be ascertained they belong to the history of Missouri
drama only in having been written by St. Louis men, and not
in any handling of Missouri themes. Of Field's comedy Native
and Foreign no copy is known; of his Such As It Is, one copy
5
was formerly in the Boston Public Library. Flagg's plays
Blanche of Valois and The Howard Queen are obviously not the
drama of Missouri.
But there was a German Jew in St. Louis who added con
siderably to the ferment of life in that city in the middle
part of the nineteenth century. This man was Heinrich
Boernstein, a man of atheistic philosophy and of energetic and
aggressive temperament. He had been manager of theaters in
Austria, Germany, and Paris before he came to this country.
He became manager of the Varieties Theater in St. Louis. He
liked the limelight, and established a paper— Freie Blatter
6
[sic]— to air his irreligious opinions. He wrote a novel,
Die Geheimnisse von St. Louis. containing the most virulent
attacks on the Jesuits of St. Louis, and published it in both
7
German and English. He wrote or adapted from the French or
K
' W. C. Breckenridge, “Bibliography of Early Missouri
Imprints," in Breckenridge, ojd. eit., p. 216.
6 Ibid.. p. 21*+•
^ Chapter III, sunra. pp. 80 ff.
328
German many plays for his theater; and during the Civil War
he wrote a play on Abraham Lincoln which was an attack upon
/the Federal government. As a consequence the provost-marshal
arrested him, closed his theater, and suppressed the play.
And about 1869 or 1 8 7 0, somebody dramatized Boernstein’s
novel, The Mysteries of St. Louis, for performance in the
8
Apollo Theater. This should have provided entertainment
for those who liked villainy and intrigue in a home-town
setting.
Though few Missouri writers were utilizing their own
state for dramatic themes in the second half of the nineteenth
century, interest in the drama must have been continuous, at
least in the largest and most cosmopolitan city of the state.
A considerable number of Missourians wrote plays, sometimes
using American themes, perhaps more frequently using more
conventional European matter. An enumeration of some of the
plays recorded as having been written here and acted in
St. Louis or elsewhere will indicate the attention given to
this kind of literature.
Hugh A. Garland, author of the Life of John Randolph
of Roanoke. is also the author of a five-act tragedy,
0pachancanoueh (1853), on the massacre of Jamestown, Virginia,
Q
W. C. Breckenridge, loc. cit. The Mysteries of
St. Louis is, of course, the English version of Die
Geheimnisse von St. Louis.
329
in 1622. But Garland -was not a great poet, and his lines are
often harsh and clumsy. Whether or not the Indian was the
material for a good tragic character, the play would probably
better have been written in prose. The following are speci
men lines:
Will grace each town in Powhattan1s great Empire,
and
The expedition that your wisdom has planned.
Any literary reputation of Hugh Garland must rest on his life
9
of John Randolph.
Denton J. Snider’s three-act play in verse, Clarence,
10
has been examined. It is American though not Missouri in
its setting and characters and in its dealing with the
slavery issue. And the playwright was a man of reputation
for learning.
William Busch, a St. Louis attorney, admitted to the
bar in that city In 186M-, was steeped in German drama and was
himself the author of many plays, some of them performed in
this country and some abroad. Breckenridge lists twenty-nine
titles of plays by Busch, a few of them on American themes, one
of them, The Commandant of La Tour, relating to the Louisiana
Purchase. Hone of them are concerned with St. Louis or
^ DeMenil, o p . cit.. p. 8*f.
10 Chapter V, supra, p. 232, and Chapter VH, supra.
P* 317.
330
Missouri.1^ "
Near the end of the century Roswell Field published
The Muses Up to Date (1897)> a book of six plays, intended,
however, not for the adult stage but for children. Field's
wife also had a hand in the preparation of the plays, which
were intended, according to the preface, to provide "plenty
to do and little to say."
Several St. Louis writers of this period were also the
authors of plays in German. Among them J. Eyser published a
book of the variegated contents suggested by its title,
Farrago ( 1876), which included a comedy. E. A. Zundt's
Dramatische une Lvrische Dichtungen (18 79) contained several
plays of which two, Rienzi and Die Genus Jager, were performed
12
on the stage. A certain Judge Gottschalk's Die Emigranten
(1882), further described as Deutsch-Amerikanisches Lebensbild
in funf Akten. and Bernard Dierkes’s Maria Theresa (n.d.) are
13
said to have been played at the Olympic Theater. Friedrich
Schnake, once city editor of the Westliche Post, published a
play, Montezuma (n.d.), in both English and German, of which
the German version was performed at the Apollo Theater, and
wrote two other plays, Christus and Abraham Lincoln, of which
^ J. M. Breckenridge, 033. cit.. p. 215*
12 Ibid., p. 217.
13 Ibid.. p. 216.
331
lif
neither was published or performed* And Judge J. Gabriel
Woerner, a native of Germany but a resident of St. Louis from
1837 until his death in 1 9 0 0, and for many years a judge of
the St. Louis Probate Court, was the author of a play first
written in German (1873) as Die Schlavin. It was first per
formed in St. Louis at the Apollo, which was then the St. Louis
German theater, and held the German stage in this country for
several years. Some years afterward Woerner made an English
version, and it was performed under the title, Amanda the
V ?
Slave.
The plays in English and German which have been ©numer
ated constitute a large dramatic production for any provin
cial city, or for any single state. No matter how inexpert
many of the writers may have been or how inartistie many of
the plays, only a strong and constant interest in the theater
would move so many writers to work in the dramatic medium, or
impel so many men of professions other than letters to turn
to play-writing. But the demand was not for provincial
literature or for provincial drama; the City of St. Louis
and the State of Missouri figure, consequently, hardly at all
in the plays written in St. Louis and Missouri.
Toward the end of the century, however, Augustus Thomas
llf Ibid., p. 217.
1? Loc. cit.
332
wrote a play, In Mlzzoura. with Its setting in Pike County,
Missouri, Such a setting and such a title might have sug
gested a yokel comedy with profuse use of the uncouth attri
butes generally suggested by the epithet, Pike, The Pike was
the coarse and unlovely wanderer toward the West, conspicuous
among coarse and unlovely travelers for his superiority in
coarseness and unloveliness. Among uncouth men, his speech
and his manners were the most uncouth, his ignorance of the
amenities the profoundest. He was the man with the tattered
garb on the bony frame. His were the baling-wire galluses.
His chin dripped tobacco juice, and the back of his hand was
his napkin. The Pike was the grandfather of the Okie and the
great-uncle to Jeeter Lester on the somewhat more moral side
of the family. Perhaps he should have been the object of
sympathy; he was in fact the butt of derision.
What did Augustus Thomas do with Pike County and the
Pike? The year 1893 'was perhaps no time for a Tobacco Road;
Thomas was not the man to write one. In Mizzoura is no such
thing. The principal male character, Jim Radburn, is a rough
man with a heart of gold, and he loves Kate Vernon, the
daughter of a blacksmith. But Kate, the blacksmith’s daughter,
is no female Pike, Jim has expended six hundred dollars for
l6
her education in Lindenwood College. And in the culture
^ Lindenwood College is a highly reputable Missouri
college for girls, but it cannot guarantee good judgment in
all its graduates.
333
there acquired, Kate has come to feel superior to her own
somewhat uncouth family and to Jim. She falls in love with
a dapper train robber, who appears to love her in return.
To this villain, Travers, when he is wanted for murder,
Jim lends a horse; though Jim has been a sheriff he is not one
now, and Kate loves the man. Travers is killed, and, on
account of the horse, suspicion falls upon the unselfish Jim.
In the last act the real nobility of his character appears,
and everybody rejoices.
This is not in any genuine sense indigenous Missouri
drama. The setting might equally well have been Indiana,
where rough exteriors and manly spirits are commonplace, or
in any one of many other places.
The play was first produced in Chicago in 1893• In
1916 the reading version was revised and republished, evidence
of the revision appearing in such details as references to
"local option" and in modernized slang phrases such as "shake
it up," meaning "hurry." But neither the local option phase
of the prohibition movement nor the slang of 1916 was par
ticularly Missourian.
Thomas became a well-known professional dramatist, but
except for this spurious bit of local color he did not use the
theme of his state for the purpose of his plays. Nor has it
been much used by other dramatists since his time, though
several professional writers have gone from Missouri to
33^
successful careers as playwrights. One St. Louis man who was
an engineer rather than a writer wrote a play with a St. Louis
theme and a St. Louis setting. This play was William G. Block's
John Carver (1902), which was acted twice in St. Louis in the
year of its publication. Its setting was a second-hand book
store in St. Louis, and its purpose was an attack on municipal
17
graft. But other writers, such as Fannie Hurst, Rupert
Hughes, and Zoe Akins, who are in some degree, at least,
Missourians, have found the material for dramaturgy elsewhere
than in Missouri.
That such should be the case is, of course, no cause
for wonder. The twentieth century is not a time of a flourish
ing provincial theater. Professional dramatists tend to go
east from the Mississippi region and to write for a larger
audience than any state of the Middle West can provide; or
they find an outlet for their writing in motion pictures.
There may be themes in Missouri which would repay their atten
tion, but the world is wide and easy to reach, and it is
filled with the dramatic.
In any case, it has usually been the amateur playwright
who has written plays about Missouri. He has been engineer or
lawyer or editor or something other than dramatist, and he has
turned dramatist with an eye on the theater in one Missouri
^ J. M. Breckenridge, op. cit., p. 215*
city, namely, St, Louis. Doubtless there have been other
plays written for local presentation, but the performance in
the county seat makes no echo beyond the neighboring county.
St. Louis has had a much stronger interest in drama than any
other city of the state5 and even St. Louis gets its plays
by rail.
CHAPTER IX
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY IN MISSOURI: 1850-1930
In the years after the Louisiana Purchase, when immigra
tion from east of the Mississippi was flowing into and through
the territory which became the State of Missouri, there were
many exciting things to do; there were strange and fascinat
ing people of various eolors and languages swirling through
the St* Louis gateway to adventure and settlement in the new
West; there were color and movement and struggle to see and to
record* It is not strange that as men grew older and looked
back upon that momentous time they should be fruitful of
reminiscence and should write books on the men they had
encountered and the events they had witnessed, or upon their
own parts in the drama of those times. The buffalo and the
Indians were being displaced; the bee-hunter and the bear-
hunter were finding the way for the farmer and the merchant;
the Mormons were following their visions, and encountering
the Gentiles; from the Mississippi to the Kansas border,
slave, slave-owner, and abolitionist were preparing for
Armageddon; and up and down the great rivers went the keel-
boats and flatboats and the magic river steamboats. The crews
roistered ashore; shiftless settlers, criminals, fugitives,
adventurous boys took to the river. There was much to
remember.
336
337
Timothy Flint was only fleetingly a Missourian, for he
lived in the territory only a few years and never found it a
place to his liking, though he found much in it that interested
1
him. The region left a strong impress on his mind. His
History and Geography of the Mississippi Valley. published
years after he had left the-territory, contains (besides infor
mation to be had from other sources) the record of much that
came under his own observation. He comments, for example, on
2
the nature of the aborigines as he had observed them, on the
3
prehistoric tumuli of the Mound-Builders, and on the charac-
ter of the population in the early nineteenth century, which
he found rough and brutal and uncouth.
A man of a culture perhaps equal to that of Timothy
Flint, but a man who found a greater fascination in the
Louisiana Territory, than Flint discovered, was
H. M. Brackenridge, who tells of some of his experiences in
that new country in his Recollections of Persons and Places
5
in the West. Flint had been saddened by the cost in pain
1 Chapter II, supra, pp. 53 ff.
^ Timothy Flint, History and Geography of the
Mississippi Valley. I, pp. 103
3 Ibid., I, pp. 126 ff.
** Ibid.. I, pp. 130 ff*
First published in I831 *; second edition, enlarged,
1868.
338
and in life of the westward migration. Brackenridge gives an
account of a duel he witnessed in Missouri, and voices
strictures on the barbarity of that code that held among
gentlemen which impelled an offended man, or an innocent man
when challenged, to fight a duel or be disgraced. But when
an Indian stabbed his faithless wife to death on a street in
St. Louis, Brackenridge defended him. And he won an acquittal
on the ground that an Indian is subject in his dealings with
6
other Indians not to the white man's law but to the Indian's.
And Brackenridge believes an earlier publication from
his hand to have had an influence on a far more famous writer
than himself, and to have given at least a Missouri tinge to
a poem better known than anything he ever wrote. He refers
to a passage in his Views of Louisiana:
I may perhaps be pardoned for saying that this
youthful production was favorably mentioned by the
London Quarterly and the Edinburgh Review, and that
an extract from it in one of them, relating to
Colonel Boon and his companions settled around him
in the Missouri wilderness, gave the hint to a 7
beautiful passage in the Don Juan of Lord Byron.
If Brackenridge is right, both Missouri and Daniel
Boone are, of course, in exotic company; if he is deluded, it
H. M. Brackenridge, Recollections of Persons and
Places in the West. 2nd ed*, pp. 2*+2 ff.
? Ibid., p. 253• The passage of Don Juan having to
do with Daniel Boone is in Canto VIII, stanzas 61-66, inclu
sive.
339
8
is a harmless vanity.
Massacres, Indian outrages, and spectacular sufferings
are always, of course, grist to the mill of reminiscence in
speech or in print, and it is to be expected that occasional
early Missouri publications should deal with such occurrences.
One or two such narratives have been mentioned: examples are
the anonymous McDaniel and Joseph Brown, which is the account
8
Brackenridge may well be deluded, although it is
possible that he had unstipulated reasons for believing his
own work to be that from which Byron drew. But in 1821 a
young American visited Byron in Ravenna, and, according to
his own account of the meeting, told the poet many stories
about America. Two of these tales had to do with educated
Indians who reverted to the primitive life* hut the conversa
tions included “many other Indian tales** or which the details
are not specified. And the American evidently did not restrict
himself to the aborigines, for he says of Byron:
He appeared surprised when I informed him that
Boon’s adventures had been the subject of a long
poem in America, and expressed a strong desire to
see that and Boon’s life, both which I promised to
send him from America* To this conversation
probably we owe several stanzas of “Don Juan,” in
which Boon and his savage life are lauded with
great earnestness.
The traveler gave an account of this meeting with Byron
in an unsigned article, “Conversations of an American with
Lord Byron,” in the Hew Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal. XLV
(October, 1835), pp. 193
Elizabeth French Boyd tells us in Bvron* s Don Juan
(pp. 79 ff.) that the visitor was “a young American named
Coolidge.” She says in a footnote (p, l6o) that whether or not
the promised books were ever sent, Byron owned two books on the
American wilderness— Birkbeck’s Hotes on a Journey in America,
and Cobbett' s Year * s Residence in AmerlcaT The poet could have
learned about Daniel Boone froinThese.
3 kO
9
of a murder on the "Santa Fe Trace," and William Beschke's
Dreadful Sufferings.10
The latter promises a story of the dreadful suffering
and the thrilling adventure of a party going overland to
California, but the narrative performs less than it promises.
The expedition was organized in 18^-9, at a time when stories
of gold in California filled the newspapers and the tales of
travelers. The emigrants proceeded up the Missouri River to
Independence, where they bought mules for riding and pack
animals. At Fort Leavenworth they bought six oxen for future
food. And they set out across the plains. From that point
nearly half the short book is devoted to the life story of a
Sioux Indian who is one of the party, and a useful member,
though he has a strange disinclination to killing and scalping.
Some of the other men in the party marry Sioux squaws of great
charm while the journey is under way, and there are a few mild
adventures with Indians and Mexicans. But the story ends with
the party in a fort at the mouth of the South Fork of the
Platte River, waiting while three of the men return to St. Louis.
Perhaps the dreadful sufferings would have materialized in the
sequel, if it had been written, which would have covered the
remainder of the journey.
9
Chapter II, supra, pp. 60 f
10 Ibid., p. 60.
3 M
The historical value of the book is very scanty? even
if it had completed the tale of the journey, it would perhaps
have been nothing more than a repetition of what many other
persons have told concerning the dangers and the pains of
crossing the plains overland. And one has little reason for
believing in the authenticity of the gentle Indian.
A book of genuine historical interest and value, pro
duced in a hard if scholarly manner, is John T. Hughes's
Doniphan's Expedition (18^-8), This is the work of a man
whose death at the battle of Independence, Missouri, in 1862,
was a loss to Missouri scholarship of his period,
John Taylor Hughes was born in Kentucky in 1817, the
son of Samuel Hughes, who moved with his family, to Howard
County, Missouri in 1820 and settled on a farm near Payette,
John Hughes was graduated from Bonne Femme College, a Baptist
institution near Columbia, in 18M+. He became a school teacher
and a writer for Missouri newspapers. At the outbreak of the
Mexican War he enlisted in a company of the First Regiment
Missouri Mounted Volunteers, commanded by Colonel Alexander W.
Doniphan. The expedition led through Hew Mexico— Santa Fe,
Albuquerque, El Paso— and into Mexico, and Hughes made notes
industriously in order to write a history of the expedition.
His company was mustered out at New Orleans, June 21, l8if7,
and he evidently began work immediately upon his history, for
he dates the preface from Liberty, Missouri, September 25» IS1 *-?*
3*+2
and the book was published in Cincinnati in 18^-8, It has been
an important authority on the Doniphan expedition.^
Another historical work, perhaps not more scholarly in
purpose or execution but much greater in scope and magnitude,
is the Thirty Years1 View (Vol. I, 185^; Vol. II, i860) of
Thomas Hart Benton. It contains a compilation of speeches,
documents, letters, and Benton*s own recollections of the con
duct of government in the United States Senate during the
period from 1820 to 1850. It gives an inside view of many
matters long obscured in the haze of elapsed time, and adds
personality to many historic names. It treats as wide a
W. E. Connelley, Doniphan* s Expedition (1907),
pp. b-6 ff.
Connelley reprints a portion of the old diary of
John T. Hughes, compiled while Hughes was on the expedition
to Mexico. The diary occupies pp. 59-111 of Connelley*s book,
and is followed by a reprint of the book which Hughes wrote
from the diary. This reprint constitutes the major part of
Connelley* s Doniphan* s Expedition, though he amplifies the
information it contains with notes from other sources.
Hughes's account of the expedition has the interest and
importance of first-hand testimony by a competent observer,
who was himself a member of the army of which he writes.
Though Hughes was against secession, he became an officer in
Price's army and was killed in the battle of Independence, in
1862.
The title on the title page of Hughes's history is a
long one: Doniphan* s Expedition: Containing an Account of the
Connuest of Hew Mexico: General Kearney* s Overland Expedition
to California: Doniphan's Campaign against the Hava.los: His
Unparalleled March upon Chihuahua and Durango: and the Opera
tions of General Price at Santa Fe: with a Sketch of the
Life of Col. Doniphan. Illustrated with Plans of Battlefields
and Fine Engravings. By John T. Hughes, A. B., of the First
Regiment of Missouri Cavalry.
3^3
variety of matters as the Senate had to consider in this vital
period of the country’s history, such, for example, as the
machinations involved in the removal of the Creek Indians
12 13
from Georgia, and the admission of California to the Union;
and such personal matters as the duel between Henry Clay and
l*f
John Randolph, or the exchanges of personalities on the
Senate floor.
These years constituted a period in which many policies
of the government were to be determined: policies of finance,
relations among the states, relations between the states and
the Federal government— many basic things in which precedent
and experience were still lacking. The United States was
still a highly experimental adventure in government, and the
book is an extraordinarily valuable source for the study of
such history.
Its importance derives not only from the author’s wide
experience but largely from his remarkable character and
ability. He was born in North Carolina in 1782, served as
aide-de-camp to General Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812,
and came to St. Louis in 1815. When Missouri was admitted to
the Union in 1821, he became United States Senator, and for
12 Thomas Hart Benton, Thirty Years’ View. I, pp. 58 ff.
13 Ibid.. II, pp. 769 ff.
^ Ibid.. I, pp. 70 ff.
3 W
the next thirty years, in the period of Webster, Clay, and
Calhoun, he was one of the prominent and important figures
in the national life. He was one of the greatest statesmen
Missouri has had; there are many Missourians who believe him
15
the greatest.
But no state can expect or desire that its historians
should all be Bentons, or that they should all be statesmen
and scholars. Perhaps it is as useful for some of them to
be storytellers and jesters and not too exacting in matters
of truth or completeness as long as what they say is in some
degree true and for the rest, entertaining. If so, John S.
Robb’s Streaks of Squatter Life and Far West Scenes (18^-7)
deserves inclusion in the tale of Missouri history. The book
contains a series of short humorous narratives, showing aspects
of life in the crude West, particularly in Missouri. Their
merriment is the broad humor of discomfiture and of the ludi
crous, as, for example, in r , A Spiritual Sister,” a tale of the
misadventure of a man named Smith, mistaken while on a steamboat
Something of the national esteem in which Benton was
held is indicated by the demand for his greatest book; the
Thirty-Years * View is said to have sold 65,000 copies within
thirty days of publication. He wrote other works, such as
An Historical and Legal Examination of that Part of the
Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the Dred
Scott Case (1857) and An Abridgment of the Debates of Congress
from 1789 to 1856 (18577, the latter in sixteen volumes. None
of his work is regional history, but it is national history of
considerable significance.
3^5
for the Prophet Joseph Smith* The Mormon woman who fell into
this error was a determined worshipper, and a steamboat is an
excellent place for cornering a reluctant prophet*16
Another book which also belongs among those of at
least a semi-historical nature having to do with early Missouri
times is M. Hopewell's Legends of the Missouri and Mississippi.
It does not rely for its interest, as Robb's work largely does,
upon the humorous, though it contains some humorous tales*
Hopewell says that for years he collected legends from Indian
tribes on the borders of civilization, from old hunters and
trappers, and from early chroniclers idiom he does not name*
And in order to make the legends more interesting he has "hung
17
them upon, or incorporated them with, historical incidents."
The tales have to do with white men, Indians, and Negroes
associated with St. Louis, Carondelet, and other places on
the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. Some of the characters
are probably historic, and some of the episodes associated
with them may well be, as in the tales of Frenchmen who
associated with Indians of the region and to all intents and
purposes became Indians. Possibly historic is the tale of
1 6
John S. Robb, Streaks of Squatter Life and Far West
Scenes, pp. 67 ff* This book was republished in l8£8, by
T. B. Peterson of Philadelphia, in The Library of Humorous
Works. In this paper-backed edition the title is Western
Scenes: or. Life on the Prairie.
M. Hopewell, Legends of the Missouri and Mississippi*
"Preface," p* vi*
3^
the murderous mulatto -who was punished for his crimes by
being appointed public executioner. He was kept in a dungeon
except on the days when he had to perform his official duties,
and died in terror, haunted by the ghosts of the men he had
murdered. Many of the legends are only legend: for example,
the tale of the Indian who dropped from a tree and left his
footprints in the rock where he landed; and the story of the
origin of the Osages, descended from a snail, and a beaver and
transformed into men.
And some of the tales are of the sort that collected
around the river men and the bullies. One of them tells of
Jack Pierce, the only man who ever overcame Mike Fink the
keelboatman. Jack Pierce was a flatboatman, and between the
crews of the flatboats and the keelboats a general rivalry
and hostility existed. When Jack Pierce and Mike Fink met,
they had a terrific battle which ended when Pierce butted his
head against Fink*s forehead and left the cock of the river
insensible. But Pierce came to his death through his practice
of exhibiting his own dexterity and the hardness of his skull.
It was an interesting story.
After the victory over Mike Fink, which gave Pierce a
gratifying reputation up and down the river, he encountered a
vicious ram, met it on all fours, and at the instant of its
charge lowered his own head suddenly and as suddenly brought
it up under the chin of the ram, breaking the animal's neck.
3^7
No other man would attempt so dangerous an exploit, and people
began finding other rams to pit against Jack Pierce. He
defeated them all until in such an encounter he had the bad
luck to strike his nose on a stubble when he lowered his head.
He raised his head an instant too soon, and the ram butted
his brains out.
Hopewell was the author also of one or two other books,
including The. Great West and a. History of St. Louis (i860)
This is a volume, of little interest, composed principally of
biographical sketches and portraits of business men and more
or less prominent citizens. It belongs to a type of publica
tion that somewhat later in the century appeared not only in
Missouri but in other states as the "county history.*1 They
were thick and expensive volumes, published by subscription,
and containing chiefly such accounts of the subscribers and
their families as they chose to pay for. Such historical
matter as they contained was concerned with insignificant
local affairs. The History of St. Louis is of this category,
illustrated with pictures of prominent citizens, each of whom
doubtless took pleasure in his own section of the book. But
it is hardly a work of scholarship.
18 Ibid., pp. 370 ff.
^ Published in one volume, at the office of Richard
Edwards’s Monthly. Journal of Progress. Edwards may have had
a hand in preparing some of the material.
3*f8
Among the writers on Missouri historical matters who
deserve mention among the scholars of the nineteenth century,
Judge Wilson Primm of St, Louis should be remembered although
he published no books. He was instrumental in organizing the
Missouri Historical Society in 1866, and to that society he
delivered many addresses on_St, Louis history. And for fifty
years or more he contributed to several Missouri newspapers
such as the Missouri Republican, the St. Louis Reveille. and
the Carondelet Review sketches and articles on early days and
on incidents of life in early St. Louis and Carondelet, This
material is lost or buried in old newspaper files, for though
Judge Primm planned a comprehensive history of St. Louis and
collected a good deal of material, he died before he had
20
accomplished the book.
But in the period following the Civil War various his
tories of Missouri or of sections of Missouri appeared, some
of them quick and opportunistic publications, others of more
respectable character. One of the former is Nathan H. Parker's
Missouri as It Is in 1867. It is a sort of illustrated
gazetteer of the state, containing a variety of historical,
topographical, archeological, and miscellaneous information
about the state and about certain counties and towns within
the state. The statements it makes are documented by
J. M. Breckenridge, ojd. eit•, pp. 188 ff.
3^9
apparently authentic government publications; but it gives
Missouri a plenitude of natural resources so astounding as to
be incredible. For example, it gives the state 26,000 square
miles of coal beds with the workable thickness of fifteen feet
in many places and at the lowest possible estimate an average
workable thickness of five feet for the whole area, providing
a certainty of a possible production not less than 100,000,000 tons
per annum for 1 ,3 0 0 years, with enough remaining to supply
21
several succeeding generations. Another example of Missouri*s
resources is a mountain (Iron Mountain) of specular iron ore in
22
its purest form.
Some of the information is interesting, in spite of the
obvious errors of fact which throw doubt on much of what the
book contains. But Parker had written.similar publications
for half a dozen other states and territories before he turned
to Missouri, and his work resembles the prospectus of a real-
estate dealer more than a history or a discriminating analysis
of fact.
A book of similar interest in topographical and geologi
cal matters but devoting more attention to the history of
Missouri, and published almost a decade later, is the produc
tion of Walter Bickford Davis and Daniel S. Durrie, History of
^ Nathan H. Parker, Missouri as It Is in 1867. pp. l*+0 f.
22 Ibid., p. ibl.
Missouri ( 18 76). It begins with the French and Spanish dis
coveries and gives an account of the early record of the terri
tory as well as civil, political, and military history. It,
too, has something of the character of the subscription “his
tories" later associated with many counties; all sorts of
information find place here. It has sketches of religious
denominations and of schools and colleges; it contains narra
tives of pioneer life in several counties, and biographical
sketches of prominent men in those counties; and it surveys
the soils and climatic conditions and the commercial, agricul
tural, and educational advantages of the state. Like the
county histories which it resembles in make-up, it was sold
by subscription.
Other such histories appeared, thick, expensive, form
less in plan and heterogeneous in contents, even miscellaneous
in authorship, containing articles on one subject or another
by unremembered writers, and of little historical or other
importance. It is a pleasure to turn from them to a book
like W. V. N. Bay's Reminiscences of the Bench and Bar of
Missouri ( 18 7 8) or to John Fletcher Darby's Personal Recollec
tions (1880). The former concerns itself with men and actions
of some significance in the formation of the State of Missouri,
men such as the statesman Thomas Hart Benton, for example. The
latter book is a delightful series of episodes in the early
life of Missouri, and especially of St. Louis, written by a man
351
with a quick eye for the impressive, the ludicrous, and the
humorous.
John F. Darby came to St. Louis as a boy in 1818. He
became an eminent lawyer, and lived a long and useful life.
He saw much that was of importance and much that was enter
taining, and his book of reminiscences is a fitting epilogue
to his career. It contains stories of governmental affairs
and of statesmen like David Barton and Thomas Hart Benton,
whom he knew. It contains likewise records of court trials,
trivial and ludicrous affairs, humorous and eccentric persons—
fascinating as a cross-section view of the conditions and
manners of life in the territorial days and the days of early
statehood.
There are, for example, episodes of the justice adminis
tered in the somewhat lawless but resourceful pioneer days.
In 1827 a prisoner who had been convicted of pig-stealing
jumped a fence and tried to escape into a corn field. About
a hundred men ran and caught him, and he was given thirty-nine
lashes on the bare back with a eartwhip, blood coming at nearly
every stroke. Several men chanted the strokes as they fell.
Women came from their kitchens to watch the spectacle. Many
of the approximately two hundred spectators appeared to relish
23
the performance.
23 John F. Darby, Personal Recollections. pp. 158 ff«
352
Another culprit, in the Gasconade circuit court, was
fined $200 and sentenced to two hours imprisonment for con
tempt of court. But the sheriff had no jail. He took an
empty crate, made the prisoner squat down inside it, and had
some fat men sit on the lid for two hours, until the sentence
2*f
had been served.
On March 16, l825» Palemon H. Winchester was tried for
the murder of Daniel H. Smith, known as Rarefied Smith.
Winchester's attorney, Felix Grundy came from Tennessee. He
succeeded in getting a jury of Tennesseeans, and at the trial
he had all the defendant's relatives, including Governor
Ninian Edwards, sitting in a row beside the defendant. Grundy
attacked and denounced the Yankees; he wept, and made the
Winchester family weep with him. The jury cried, the court
room cried, and in three days Winchester was acquitted. ^
Justice of the Peace, Joseph V. Garnier, was a small
man with a very large nose. Once a stranger, a Frenchman,
also with a huge nose, met the justice at a point where the
St. Louis sidewalk was narrow. They stopped and looked at
each other. The stranger, with admirable French courtesy,
put his hand to his nose, pulled it aside, and said to Garnier
in French that he should pass. With the obstruction thus
2h Ibid., pp. 160 ff.
25 Ibid.. pp. 106 ff.
353
26
removed, the two men were easily able to proceed.
Dueling was frequent in the early days of the state,
and Bloody Island in the Mississippi was so named because of
the many duels that were fought there. It was there that
Thomas Hart Benton, though he disapproved of dueling, killed
Charles Lucas in an encounter. Darby tells of one of the
more amusing of these gentlemanly affairs, a duel between
Captain Thomas F. Smith and Captain Bennett Riley, later
General Riley of the Mexican War, and one of the first mili
tary governors of California.
The two officers, sitting together on the deck of a
keelboat, disputed over whether a dead tree in the river was
a snag or a sawyer. (A sawyer is a tree that has fallen into
the water and remains with its trunk submerged, its branches
rising and falling with movements of the water.) As they
could not come to agreement, the boats carrying the companies
commanded by the two captains landed, the captains went ashore,
and each had a shot at the other. Fortunately each of the men
had been drinking, and the dueling pistol is an erratic weapon
for a man with an unsteady hand. Neither of the two was hit
27
in the exchange.
A man whose dueling was more fruitful'was the celebrated
26 Ibid., p. 121.
2^ Ibid., pp. 290 f.
35^
John Smith T. He added the capital letter to his name in
order to distinguish himself from all other men named John
Smith, and to signify that he came from Tennessee, He was a
man of polished manners, and a frequent and deadly duelist.
In 1829 he went to Nashville and challenged General Sam Houston
to a duel, but the general declined the honor. Darby says of
him:
John Smith T killed most of the men he shot In
fair and open duels, where his own life was at
stake; in what, in his day and time, was considered
honorable, open, manly warfare. And when he killed
any man in any sudden quarrel of broil, he always
stood his trial, and was always honorably acquitted
by a jury of his country. He was as polished and
courteous a gentleman as ever lived in the state of
Missouri, and as *mild a mannered man as ever put a
bullet into the human body.120
There were giants in those days.
Other writers looked back on the early days of
St. Louis and found them fair or found them exciting.
Mrs. Jessie Benton Fremont, daughter of Thomas Hart Benton
and wife of General Fremont, in Souvenirs of My Time (1881)
recalls the life In old St. Louis before the decay of that
prestige which the early French families once enjoyed. The
ubiquitous Heinrich Boernstein gives the world Funfundsiebzig
Jahre in der Alten und Neuer Welt (188^), which Clark
Breckenridge advises the reader to take with a grain of
28
Ibid.. p. 97.
355
29
salt, advice which could hardly have been required by those
familiar with many of Boernstein*s works. And Breckenridge
knew another German annalist, E. D. Kargan, whose J>t. Louis in
Frueheren Jahren ( 1 8 9 3) furnished clues to the history of the
30
German theater in St. Louis.
Perhaps the most devoted of all the early historians
of St. Louis was Frederic L. Billon. He was born in
Philadelphia in 1801, and arrived in St. Louis in I8l8. Almost
immediately he began thinking of getting together materials
for a portrait of the picturesque old town, and he devoted
much of his long life to antiquarian research in the history
of the city. He was in business or in city offices for many
years. In 1863 he resigned his position as secretary and
treasurer of the Missouri Pacific Railroad, and gave his atten
tion thenceforth to collection of material for his two large
volumes on the early history of St. Louis.3^
These admirable works deal, only with the period before
Missouri became a state. The first is Annals of St. Louis in
Its Early Days under the French and Spanish Dominations (1,886) s
the second, Annals of St. Louis in Its Territorial Days, from
^ J. M. Breckenridge, oja. cit.. p. 215*
30 Ibid.. p. 21h.
3-** J. T. Scharf, op. cit., II, p. 159^* These volumes
were not yet published when ScKarf wrote, In 1 8 8 3. Billon
lived until 1895*
356
l8o*+ to 1821 (1888)• These books are not subscription publi
cations embellished with portraits of ordinary business men
who would pay for their space* Genuine inquiry into history
provides their substance* There are biographical sketches of
men of importance, dead long before preparation of the books*
There is recording of movements and occurrences that consti
tute the growth of one of the more cosmopolitan cities of
the Mississippi Valley* Billon’s work is still probably the
best history of its epoch.
It is natural that a preponderance of the historical
writing in Missouri should have been concerned with the City
of St. Louis. Other parts of the state had neither so long
nor so variegated a past in the annals of white men and of
English-speaking men; St. Louis was not only the largest city
in the state but the one with the greatest interest in the
arts and in scholarship. Some works, however, which deal
with other regions have been noted, and others appeared here
and there. Willis P. King’s Stories of a Country Doctor
(1890), published in Kansas City, is an example from western
Missouri of much the sort of reminiscence that was in John P.
Darby’s Personal Recollections. King gives little information
about himself. He lived in several western Missouri towns
near the Kansas border, and practiced medicine for many years.
His book contains a wide range of anecdote and observation,
humorous, amusing, sometimes with serious reflections on the
kind of life implied by the experiences of a physician in
the days when small regions were largely self-contained. He
has chapters on such subjects as "Old Time Dances and Parties
"Superstitions, Traditions, and Foolish Ideas," "The Braneh-
Water Man," "Death-Bed Repentance and Confessions," "Sham
Suicides," "Lives and Their Lies," "Did He Kill His Wife"—
narratives and sketches on the observations of human behavior
somewhat pathological, as a doctor sees it.
Another book published near the end of the century and
concerning itself with various parts of Missouri outside
St. Louis is a collection of short stories, Stories of
Missouri ( 1 8 9 7), by John R. Musick, the voluminous writer
of the semi-historical Columbian Historical Hovels. Stories
of Missouri is prepared for the purpose of illustrating
various periods of Missouri development— the French and
Spanish period, the period of early statehood, the Civil War
period, and the "present" period. It contains one of the
numerous stories inspired by General Ewing’s Order Ho. 11, of
the Civil War time. But Musick, in spite of the volume of
his work, is a somewhat dull writer.
And no type of writing that purported to be history
was more nearly ubiquitous in the last decade or two of the
century than the so-called "county history," published by
subscription and generally without scholarship and without
art. They were large volumes, impressive to uncritical
358
tastes, and certainly motivated largely by the desire for
profits and appealing to vanity* Many examples are to be
found* A few will suffice to illustrate the class*
The History of Johnson County (1881) acknowledges no
author and no editor. Its sections are contributed by numer
ous writers, possibly of local reputation. It contains a map
of the county, a condensed and sketchy history of the state,
and the state Constitution. The remainder of its 989 pages
contain, for the most part, biographical sketches of members
of Johnson County families, with a few photographs to accom
pany some of these biographies. It has no index; doubtless
each subscriber could search until he found his own record,
which would be the part of the book of chief interest to him*
The History of Lafayette County, Missouri (l88l), is a
similar book, a miscellany of state history and government,
state and national-constitutions,.local, legend and record, and
sketches concerning people and families living in Lafayette
County.
A more ambitious book is a History of Franklin.
Jefferson. Washington. Crawford. and Gasconade Counties.
Missouri (1888). This volume of 1,131 pages, after its regu
lar section of perfunctory "history,1 1 state and local, turns
to the biographical portion in a business-like fashion. This
Is the part for which the subscribers pay: this is the object
of the publication. And by printing this principal division
359
in small type, the now unknown promoters were enabled to
include a very large number of respected citizens of the five
counties. No writer or editor is named, on the title page or
elsewhere, perhaps for the reason that none had occasion for
pride in anything but the profits of the work.
The list of such histories could be prolonged. They
have been published well into the twentieth century. A second
such book has, indeed, been published sometimes for a county
which had already been so memorialized. The first one for
Johnson County appeared in 1881. Another, prepared by
Judge Ewing Cockrell of Warrensburg, was published in 1918
in the familiar pattern, demonstrating perhaps that the genera
tion represented in the former book is gone and a new genera
tion is ready to have its names in the book.
Such local histories might have had greater value than
most of them have if they had been prepared by writers with
real concern for history of the county or region. Most of
them were not so prepared. Occasionally, however, one such
appears. J. Thomas Scharf1s History of St. Louis City and
County ( 18 83) is externally much like many of the others,
though it is more bulky than most of them. It contains 1,9^3
pages in two volumes, of which Scharf is in part the writer
and in part the editor. And Scharf is a genuine historian.
He has provided copious material, well documented, on the
history of the region from the earliest days. He gives, for
360
example, a detailed history of the early newspapers in
St. Louis, beginning with the first such paper established,
while Missouri was still a part of the Louisiana Territory,
32
in 1808. He prints biographies of numerous persons, but
only of those who were of consequence in their time. Scharf* s
history is an excellent supplement to the work of Frederic
Billon.
A somewhat similarly interesting and valuable county
history of western Missouri is W. M. Paxton's Annals of
Platte County. Missouri (1897)* Much of the volume is
filled with the names and antecedents of families living in
Platte County, but much of it is also occupied with the
reminiscences of a man seventy-nine years old who has lived
33
for sixty years in the county of which he writes the annals.
He is not so much the historical scholar as was Scharf; he
depended largely on memory for anecdotes of such matters as
• 3 k
"the Jarvis murder, the overflow of the Platte and Missouri
3*3
Rivers of l8Mt, J and episodes of the border struggle in the
36 37
Civil War, but he asserts that he "consulted the records"
3^ Scharf, op. cit.. I, Ch. xxiii, pp. 902 ff.
33 w. M. Paxton, Annals of Platte County. Missouri.
pp. 1100 f.
3^ ibid., p. 61.
35 Loc. cit.
36 Ibid.T p. 213.
37 Ibid., p. 1101.
361
also. But he does not eite those records.
The twentieth century has seen no diminution of
interest in the romantic history of Missouri. The Louisiana
Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 190** naturally stimulated
study of the preceding century in the region, not always pro
found study, perhaps, but at least a wider curiosity concern
ing the variegated parts played by diverse elements in what
has become a state with probably as distinctive character as
any. The State Historical Society has consistently conducted
study of numerous phases of the state's history. And the
scholar who lives in the old French section of Missouri is
prone, like Louis Houck of Cape Girardeau, to find that no
matter what other writers have done with the French and
Spanish past he must in turn collect the materials of those
distant days.
Houck was a native of Illinois, born in St. Clair
County in IS1 **}, who came to Missouri, engaged in farming and
in the practice of law, and was for many years president of
the board of regents of the State Teachers' College at Cape
33
Girardeau. He lived to the age of seventy-eight. Ten
years before his death he published in three volumes the
result of prolonged research in The History of Missouri.
Colonial and Territorial (1908), a scholarly, well documented,
«^Q
Who Was Who in America, p. 590.
and slightly illustrated history of the state from the earli
est times to the admission to the Union, Like others from
the time of Timothy Flint on, he was attracted by the mysteri
ous remains of the Moundbuilders, and he gives what is probably
as good an account of them and of the archaeology of the
region as is to be found. His second work of scholarly
importance is The Spanish Regime in Missouri (1909)> in two
volumes, a collection of papers and documents relating prin
cipally to what is now. the State of Missouri, during the
dominion of Spain. Many of them are from the archives at
Seville, and are translated into English. Some papers have
to do with the supposed grant to Colonel George Morgan at
the mouth of the Ohio.
The Louisiana Purchase Exposition had somewhat earlier
called forth A. N* DeMenil*s The Literature of the Louisiana
Territory (190^), which, though it has not the scholarship
of Houck’s history, provides considerable information not
otherwise easily accessible. The book contains less than
the title might suggest, but it gives some data concerning
a large number of writers of the Louisiana. Territory, not
merely of Missouri. It contains specimens of the writings
of these authors, and, when biographical facts could be ascer
tained, brief biographies. But such data could not always
be found; though Angus Umphraville1s ’ ’The Birth of Missouri”
is here reprinted, few of the facts of Umphraville’s life were
363
known then or are known today.
DeMenil later did good service to the study of Missouri
by his services as secretary for the State Historical Society,
as numerous other students have done in that or other connec
tions with the Society. One of the most illustrious educators
and writers in Missouri during the twentieth century, Walter
Williams, founder of the School of Journalism, at the Univer
sity of Missouri, assisted in founding the Society, and wrote
or collaborated in writing several books on the subjects to
which it devoted its attention, including The State of Missouri
(190^), The History of Missouri (1908), Missouri Since the
Civil War (1909) , The History of Northeast Missouri (1911 *)*
Ihe History of Northwest Missouri (1915)*
Williams had a remarkable career. He was born in
Boonville in l86*f. As a young man he learned the printer's
trade. He became a newspaper writer and editor, established
the teaching of journalism in the state university, and with
out having attended any college became for many years dean of
the School of Journalism and eventually president of the
university, at a time when the university required not only
•39
skillful but trusted guidance. From the founding of the
State Historical Society until his death in 1935, he was
* *
^ Emmet Ellis, "Walter Williams," Dictionary of
American Biography. XXI, p. 709
361+
active in its management and generous in its support*
Still another Missouri journalist whose interests led
into study of the state’s past was Walter B. Stevens* He
was born in Connecticut in 18U-8. He passed his youth in
Illinois, and was graduated from the University of Michigan*
But after his graduation from the university he became
connected with St. Louis newspapers, and maintained that
lfO
connection for many years* He had a long life— he died in
1939— and was the author of many books of which several had
to do with the history of St. Louis or that of Missouri.
These include The Forest City (190^), The Building of
St. Louis (1908), The History of St. Louis. in two volumes
(1911), Missouri, the Center State, also in two volumes
(191s *) , Grant in St. Louis (1915) > and Missourians One
Hundred Years Ago (1917). He was regarded as able and
accurate in research, and was highly esteemed among intellec
tual circles in St. Louis. Like DeMenil and Williams he was
interested in the work of the State Historical Society, and
*fl
served for some years after 1917 as its president.
But it is doubtful that any of these men has done so
much for the study of Missouri history as William Clark
Breckenridge, who was not a professional writer or scholar
^ Who Was Who in America. I, p. H 8 3.
A. N. DeMenil, “A Century of Missouri Literature,”
Missouri Historical Review. XV, pp. 119
365
and who is the author of no published book* He was born in
St. Louis in 1862, the oldest of eight children. He was
educated in that city and spent most of his life there. In
1883 he and his brother James entered their father’s planing
mill, and except for a period of about six months spent in
the West he remained with that business until it ceased
operating in 1912. From that time forward he devoted himself
7 1+2
to book-collecting and historical research. In 1901 he
was elected a trustee of the State Historical Society, and
came into the acquaintance of Hamline E. Robinson, owner and
editor of the Maryville Republican, and the possessor of a
"notable collection of books on the occult, the Civil War,
1+3
and the political history of the state." By 1921+ he said
in a letter to a friend that his own library contained more
than fifteen thousand items, most of them relating to
1+1+
Missouri. Eventually he became probably the best authority
on Missourians.
Breckenridge’s published works are not voluminous.
They consist chiefly of contributions to historical magazines,
principally the Missouri Historical Review. Judge Walter B.
Douglas prevailed upon him to contribute to Volume IV of the
^ J. M. Breckenridge, oj>. cit.. pp. 21 ff.
^ Ibid.T p. 73*
Uh
Ibid., p. 93*
366
Missouri Historical Society Collections (1913 and 191*+) his
“Biographical Sketch of Judge Wilson Primm1 “ and his “History
*+5
of the Chanson de l'Annee du Coup.” And he wrote other
articles for the publications of the State Historical Society.
But his chief contribution to the study of Missouri history
probably lay not in his own writing but in the wealth of his
information and in his generosity with help for all those
h6
who sought assistance from him.
Many of the historical works already considered are
also in greater or less degree biographical in purpose. Other
books which are primarily biographical are in considerable
number the product of Missouri writers. Attention has been
directed, for example, to the Life of Daniel Boone by the
*+7
prolific Timothy Flint. Neither this biographer nor the
subject of his biography is in the permanent sense a
Missourian, but Flint lived in the territory for a time,
and Boone spent the latter part of his life with his son
Nathan on the Missouri River, following his old Kentucky mode
of living— farming a little, felling trees for wood, going
*+*>
Reprinted in J. M. Breckenridge, pp. cit.. “Judge
Wilson Primm,'* pp. 171 ff., “Chanson de l'Annee du Coup,"
pp. 192 ff.
hA .
J. M. Breckenridge, pp. cit., p. lOp.
hn
■ Chapter II, supra, p. $8. According to Sabin's
Dictionary of Books Relating to America, this biography went
through fourteen editions under different titles in the years
from 1833 to 1868. See E. K. Kirkpatrick, Timothy Flint.
p. 311.
367
off to trap beaver in the fall, and putting bits of paper
on the sights of his rifle to aid his old eyes when on occa-
H - 8
sion he had a chance to shoot a wild turkey.
It was natural that in the first half of the nineteenth
century much of the biographical writing in Missouri should
deal with persons of other places. Writers were for the most
part, like Hugh Garland of St. Louis, men who had grown up
and been educated in other places. Missouri was young. The
natives of the state about whom Missourians were to write were
still, chiefly, to develop their claim to the biographers'
attention. Garland had a distinguished career as lawyer and
legislator in Virginia before he came to St. Louis, about ten
years before his death in 185*4-, to take up the practice of
law.^ His Life of John Randolph of Roanoke (1850) was pub
lished during his residence in Missouri, as was his
Qpachancanough (1 8 5 3), a five-act tragedy in verse on the
Jamestown Massacre; and his Life of Thomas Jefferson (185**-)
was in process of publication at the time of his death. But
they all belong, obviously, to the interests of his life in
Virginia, which was much longer than the period he lived west
of the Mississippi.
But the conflicts of the pre-Civil War period and the
Timothy Flint, Life of Daniel Boone, p. 2* 4- 8.
^ Appleton* s Cyclopaedia of American Biography. II,
p. 605.
368
war Itself produced figures who sufficiently touched the
imagination, and as time went on the current generation was
not a generation of emigrants or refugees but a race whose
home was Missouri, a race with fathers and even grandfathers
who had been Missourians, Missouri had its heroes and its
outlaws, and their stories called for the telling. Many of
those stories have been examined in connection with the
literature of the Civil War, Others are to be noted.
An interesting and valuable compilation of regional
genealogy is the Pioneer Families of Missouri (18 76) by
William Smith Bryan and Robert Rose. When Bryan was an old
man, W. W. Elwang talked with him in his home at Nevada about
the gathering of material for this work. According to
Bryan,Robert Rose had been accustomed to roving about on
horseback, talking to old-timers about their families, and
putting scribbled notes into his saddle-bags. He interested
Bryan in preparing a book of Missouri genealogy, and got him
to sift and arrange the inchoate mass of notes Rose had
collected. But the publication was still-born. About two
hundred copies of the projected five hundred were bound and
sold or given away. The other sheets were disposed of as
50
waste paper. The book is now prized, however, as a
w. W. Elwang, l f The Authors of Pioneer Families of
Missouri, ' 1 Missouri Historical Review. XXVIII, pp. 255 ff-
369
collector's Item.
It contains, in addition to the histories of many
families in St. Charles, Warren, Montgomery, Callaway, and
Audrain counties, a miscellany of other things. There is,
for example, a biography of the Indian chief, Black Hawk,
dictated to Antoine Leclair, United States interpreter for
5-
the Sacs and Foxes and certified for correctness by Leclair.
There are also anecdotes and accounts of adventure, humorous
or otherwise; interesting tall tales; and stories of danger
ous exploits from the pioneer days of the Territory and the
52
early days of statehood. And there are short historical
treatises on such easily forgotten minor episodes in the
state's development as the "Slicker War" and the German
53
immigration. It is somewhat to be regretted that demand
for the volumes upon their publication was not sufficient to
make possible the distribution of a larger number, for though
it is a gossipy and no doubt often inaccurate record, it has
considerable value for the regional antiquarian. But it is
now difficult to procure.
The Civil War produced its natural crop of men of
^ W. S. Bryan and Robert Rose, Pioneer Families of
Missouri, pp. *+57 ff*
^ Ibid., pp. ^98 ff.
53 Ibid.. pp. ff.
370
violence, whose lives have been copiously celebrated. It is
probable that the great villain has a stronger attraction for
the tellers of tales and for their heroes than has the great
hero, possibly because the majority of men have in them more
of the suppressed villain than of the hero. At any rate, the
desperadoes of the West are one of its most cherished tradi
tions; and Missouri has had at least its share of the more
celebrated desperadoes, to whom it has given at least their
just proportion of Its literary attention at the hands of
obscure and otherwise unknown writers and at the hands of
accomplished and professional men of letters.
A writer of the former sort is Augustus G. Appier,
editor some years after the war of the Osceola Democrat. In
The Guerrillas of the West (18 7 6) he gives a sketch of the
infamous Younger brothers, and develops the thesis that the
Youngers and Jameses were accused of many crimes which they
did not commit, and that their criminal careers were forced
upon them by the animosities of the border warfare. It is a
weak defense for bandits and murderers, but one which Appier
has not been alone in suggesting. And it is not astonishing
that a man of Osceola, Missouri, ten years after the war,
should still admire the planning and execution of the sack
of Lawrence, Kansas, believing it a direct retaliation for
Jim Lane's Redlegs* burning of Osceola. For many Missourians
^ A. C. Appier, The Guerrillas of the West, p. 101.
371
of those days, outrages performed upon Kansans bore a close
resemblance to meritorious works.
The same defence for these outlaws is offered by
James W. Buel in The Border Outlaws. published at about the
same time as the Guerrillas of the West. ^ Buel was a news
paper writer who worked for Kansas City and St. Louis daily
56
newspapers. His The Border Outlaws and The Border Bandits
(1881), bound in one volume, constitute in effect a single
work containing journalistic, episodic biographies of several
of the familiar criminals. The first part deals chiefly with
the Youngers; the second part with the Jameses and their
associates. It is to be remembered that these outlaws— some
of them— were still living when Appier and Buel were writing
about them, and their characters and exploits were still sub
jects of debate. Buel is uncertain about whether Jesse James
is alive. A former comrade of James claims to have shot him
to death, but other persons say they have seen the bandit since
the shooting and assert "that the bullet . . . coursed around
57
the skull partially paralyzing the brain and spine." Buel
^ The fourth edition was published in l88l.
56
Who Was Who in America. I, p. 162.
57
James W. Buel, The Border Bandits, pp. 108 f. A
shooting of Jesse James is among those collected by John A.
Lomax and published in the 1910 edition of Cowboy Songs and
Other Frontier Ballads. See Louis Wann, The Rise of Realism.
pV 269. :
372
expresses in an appendix to The Border Bandits the belief
that Frank James, Ed Miller, Jim Cummings, and Dick Little
were among a gang which robbed a train at Winston, Missouri,
July 15, 1881, but that Jesse James was not with them because
he had become a helpless and demented paralytic from George
Shepherd’s shot.
This is close to sensation-mongering. Buel was a news
paper man, and his biographical method was not calculated to
satisfy and finish a popular interest in men who were still
news. The Youngers were in the Minnesota penitentiary when
he was compiling the book, and he consulted them for informa
tion— without much satisfaction* He admired them as courageous
men gone astray, and his treatment of them was not designed to
impair whatever good opinion a reader might hold concerning
them. Cole Younger furnished photographs from which the
frontispiece for the fourth edition was engraved.
As has been indicated, Jesse James was one of the most
noted sons of Missouri. Possibly more people would be able
to identify Mark Twain with the state, but the supposition is
by no means a certainty. It would be impossible to call the
roll of the.books and stories and magazine articles which have
been written about this outlaw, and that continue to be
written. It is suitable to conclude the representatives of
that roll with a biography written by Jesse James, Jr., son
of the outlaw.
373
The younger Jesse James was for many years an attorney
in Kansas City. He asserts in the preface of Jesse James. My
Father (1899) that hundreds of books have been written about
Jesse James and the James band, ‘ ’ many of them false from
cover to cover,'* some with a grain or two of truth and whole
chapters of fabrication, and all cruelly unjust to Jesse James
and his family. The son himself was once tried and acquitted
for a train robbery at Leeds, Missouri, in a case evidently
the outgrowth of a conspiracy by certain detectives who may
have imagined th*at the father’s reputation would have weight
with the son’s jury.
One object of the book is to correct what the writer
designates as false impressions about the character of Jesse
James, the elder. No such attempt, of course, can be suc
cessful: no son is a good character witness for his father,
particularly when his testimony is opposed to that of a
host of willing and eager adverse witnesses, no matter how
incompetent or how forsworn the latter may be. And it is
not of much service to deny some of the crimes laid to a
notorious bandit unless all can be denied, or to provide
motives for actions which no motive justifies. In any case,
one may doubt whether the old guerrilla would exchange his
place in legend for any impeccable character supplied by his
descendants or by the omniscience of a biographer able to
sift the truth from the falsehood in the saga of Jesse James.
371 * -
Other wild men of the West continue to fascinate his
torical and biographical writers, in and out of the State of
Missouri. Buel wrote concerning several men such as Wild Bill
the Scout, Buffalo Bill, and Kit Carson, whose stories belong
to the country beyond Missouri. Marion Hughes, the author
of a once widely known book of yokel humor, Three Years in
Arkansaw. also wrote in Oklahoma Charley (1910) what purports
to be the life of a scoundrel and adventurer known variously
as Oklahoma Charley and the Missouri Kid. And it is highly
possible that many other such ephemeral "lives" of picturesque
characters have appeared and been lost, for to the journalis
tic eye with a sensitivity to the bizarre there is never a
paucity of picturesque characters, particularly in a society
where unstable elements are still being attracted by some
thing that yet resembles the opportunities of the frontier.
It is to be remembered that the westward movement of popula
tion had not ceased even in the early years of the twentieth
century.
Scholarly biography has not been a notable Missouri
product of the twentieth century, perhaps because scholars in
that as in other states are by this time not so much pre
occupied with their own regional affairs as once they were.
If scholars and professional writers do not betake themselves
to greater metropolitan centers, they nevertheless find the
resources of scholarship at home, and Missourians write the
375
biographies of Italians or Englishmen or whom they will, as
irrepressible Denton J. Snider of St. Louis wrote of Dante
or of Shakespeare with equal readiness, perhaps with equal
irre sponsibility.
A few Missourians, however, have attracted the study
of scholarly Missourians in the period. William Vincent
Byars, in An American Commoner: the Life and Times of
Richard Parks Bland (1900) offers not only a personal
biography of a distinguished Missouri lawyer and member of
Congress but also an analysis of many developments in the
last quarter of the nineteenth century, showing the growth
of trusts and the corrupting influence on government whieh
* proceeds from the greed for money and the development of
big business. Byars considered, as did Bland, that corporate
bond-issuing was a sinister mode of controlling the govern
ment and the lives of people by controlling the currency;
that speculation in stocks and commodities is parasitic;
that the national banking system was a dishonest inflation
of money; and that the demonetizing of silver was a crime
against the producing people of the country accomplished by
the international bankers and others who wished to gain power
over the lives of less favored classes by getting control of
the currency. Though he was doubtless mistaken on many
matters of economics or politics, the book is a valuable
one to the student of the period after the Civil War and
376
before the trust-busting days of Theodore Roosevelt.
A student of the journalism of that period, and of the
influence exercised by journalism on the thinking and behavior
of many people, would do well also to consider the history of
William Rockhill Kelson of Kansas City. Perhaps nothing of
his own writing would give him a place in a history of litera
ture in Missouri; but he had a vital connection with the read
ing of many thousands of Missourians over a period of thirty-
five years, beginning in 1880. He has been the subject of
two biographies, William Rockhill Kelson (1915)> by members
of the staff of the Kansas City Star, and William Rockhill
Kelson and the Kansas Citv Star (193^)> by Ieie F. Johnson
of Warrensburg, Missouri. The former is eulogistic, of
course, with emphasis on Kelson's honesty, independence, and
passion for serving his readers and improving Kansas City.
It traces his life from his birth in lB^l to his death in
1915 j and provides a considerable part of the factual basis
for the second biography.
Miss Johnson, a native of Warrensburg with a varied
experience as journalist and college teacher of journalism
and English, undertakes to show a selfishness and arrogance
of character in Kelson whieh many people who know his career
will accept, but which could hardly be emphasized in the
former biography. But arrogant or not, he was a dominant
figure in the newspaper development of this country. He
377
professed to be independent in opinion and in political judg
ment, and probably came as near to being so as a forceful and
positive man is likely to do. He established one of the most
reliable and one of the most useful of metropolitan newspapers.
He fought corruption in government. He tried to interest
readers in art and to improve their taste, and bequeathed a
magnificent art gallery to Kansas City. He imported shorthorn
cattle and bred them at his Sni-A-Bar farms to improve the
cattle-breeding of the region. He reprinted the works of
great writers. And he provided newspaper experience to many
writers who became prominent in American journalism, a partial
roll of whom would include the names of Alfred Henry Lewis,
Roswell Field, William Allen White, Henry J. Allen, Courtney
Riley Cooper, Ernest Hemingway, Jerome Beatty, Raymond Clapper,
and Fairfax Downey. Probably the member of his staff of illus
trators who subsequently became the most famous is Walt
58
Disney.
If the writing of regional literature in Missouri seems
in current times somewhat more scanty than might be expected,
perhaps consideration of the list of men who once worked for
Nelson’s Kansas City Star and then became distinguished in
letters elsewhere should be suggestive. For regional differ
ences are less pronounced and perhaps less important than they
^ Icie F. Johnson. William Rockhill Nelson and the
Kansas City Star, pp. 181 ff.
378
once were, and capable writers explore wider fields, If
St. Louis is no longer an important publishing eenter for
Missouri, Missourians have easy access to publishers else
where. And Missourians themselves are likely to go with
their pens to New York, to Chicago, to Hollywood; and when
they reach those destinations, they are likely to concern
themselves with characters from any time or place. But some
times they remember some interesting person of their earlier
acquaintance or of their relatives* conversation, Carry Nation,
perhaps, or an unfortunate loose woman who was the town’s jest.
Herbert Asbury was born in Farmington, Missouri, in
1891, and he was educated in Missouri, but he long ago left
the state and went to live in Canada Lake, New York. He is
the author of many books; most of them have no place in an
account of Missouri literature. Perhaps the unfortunate
woman nicknamed Hatrack, whose frustrated attempts at salva
tion of her soul he sketched in The American Mercury for
April, 1926, belongs to his memories of Farmington and to
Missouri biography. His biography of a relative. A Methodist
Saint (1927), does not; it is merely a biography of a bishop
who was not a Missourian by a man who is no longer one. But
Carry Nation (1929) is a part of the biography of the
state.
This is the story of a redoubtable woman who is
commonly associated with the extravagances of behavior on the
379
Kansas side of the border, and, in fact, her most remarkable
exploits were accomplished in that state or with it as a base.
But it is fair to say that she made in Missouri much of the
preparation for her later spectacular career elsewhere.
She was not a native of the state. She was born in
Kentucky, but her parents brought her to Missouri while she
was a girl, and she finished her growing up in western Missouri.
Her first husband was Dr. Charles Gloyd of Holden, Missouri,
by whom she had one child, a daughter in whom a strain of
insanity inherited from the mother’s side of the family came
out. Gloyd died the death of a drunkard; and the widow went
to the normal school at Warrensburg for a year and prepared
to support herself by teaching school. After teaching in
Holden for about four years, she engaged in a controversy
with her school board, and was dismissed for insisting on
teaching a pronunciation which the board disapproved. The
niece of a member of the board filled her position.
Bitter and unhappy, Mrs. Gloyd married David Nation of
Warrensburg, a lawyer, preacher, and newspaper editor. But
they were not in love, and not happy. Nation was not a
successful man in any of his professions, and his wife’s
bitterness and religious fanaticism deepened. When, after
some years of moving from place to place, they were living in
Medicine Lodge, Kansas, she began smashing saloons, going to
jail, traveling, lecturing in many places of the United States
380
and. in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Though her personality
repelled many people, she was influential in stirring up senti
ment for prohibition.
After about ten years of this campaigning, she. died in
1911 and was buried beside her mother at Belton, Missouri.
The last decade of her life belongs to Kansas.
The name of Carry Nation is still, of course, spoken
with derision; but here was a desperately unhappy woman,
married first to a neglectful and drunken husband and then
to an ineffectual one who constantly exasperated her. Human
understanding might temper scorn with pity; and Asbury's life
of this unlovely woman contributes something to a reader's
compassion for her. That it should inculcate a liking for
Carry Nation would be asking too much, but it has sympathy,
an excellent quality in biography.
It might have been expected that the first World War
would be productive of some historical or biographical fruit
in Missouri, but it brought nothing like the literary stirring
occasioned by the Civil War. One book, perhaps, should be men
tioned, since it purports to be autobiographical and is in part
the record of a Missouri soldier and the events which brought
him a decoration for high military achievement. This is
John Lewis Barkley's No Hard Feelings (1930).
It is a rather crude narrative, such as one might
expect from a half-educated farm boy turned soldier, with
381
considerable description of the war as Barkley saw it, focus
ing upon the occurrences of a few hours. Partly by alert
attention to duty, partly by chance, Barkley was able to
conceal himself in a disabled and abandoned tank at a time
when German columns were crossing an exposed place within
machine-gun range, and from that point was able to conduct
an admirable holocaust, with the Germans unable in time to
determine the point from which the fire was coming* The
number of the dead was undetermined, but they lay in some
thing like a windrow before an artillery shell came near
enough to the tank to leave Barkley unconscious. In the
circumstances of modern warfare the individual soldier is
seldom privileged to know that his is the finger which presses
a trigger and destroys large numbers of men plainly within
sight.
This is the action which is the real object of the
book. It required the soldierly qualities of courage, stamina,
and a degree of insensitivity. It was what, under the circum
stances, the man should have done. It was duty. It brought
the Congressional Medal of Honor. It was the climax of a
soldier's part in the war, the hour through which most men
never live and through which none would expect to pass again.
It ought to be put in a book. Or so, perhaps, the man thought.
But Barkley was a farmer before he was a soldier, and
he returned to a farm near Holden when the war was over. One
382
does not expect too much literary skill from the farmer who
becomes for the moment an author.
There are obvious reasons why the World War should
not stimulate -writing in Missouri as the Givil War had done.
This time the war was fought far away. There were no skir
mishes, expeditions, pitched battles in Missouri, no Order
Wo. 11. There was no border warfare, no division within
counties and towns and families into Yankees and Rebels,
There were no bushwhackers. Missourians went away and they
came back, or they did not come back, but it was not a fight
over issues with local colorings.
And in any case Missouri has, like other states of
the Union, lost with age something of the differences which
once rendered her a place unlike Illinois or Iowa or Kansas
or any one of many other states. The name is a geographical
designation, not for most of the people who write books a
designation of a political ideal or a state of mind. This
is no longer a new place, where one peers down upon a grassy
valley with a wild surmise; it is not an outpost of slavery
or the promised land where the Danites smite the Gentiles.
It is merely a part of the Middle West, where one might
wake and suppose himself in Indiana or Ohio. Perhaps in
the Ozarks people will continue to be Missourians as dis
tinct from Kansans and Oklahomans, but if so they will
continue to be different from other Missourians. But even
383
in the Ozarks radios, roads, and summer tourists are reducing
the difference.
It may be, that is to say, that life in Missouri will
not again have the exhilaration and the excitement that it
has had. That life has not been uniformly gracious, but it
has had its spice. And the story has been worth the telling.
CHAPTER X
MISCELLANEOUS LITERATURE IN MISSOURI
It is the purpose of this study to examine Missouri
writers in their relations to Missouri, rather than to trace
the concern of men living in the state with the religious,
philosophical, or other intellectual matters which are the
concern of all thoughtful men wherever they happen to reside.
Yet if one is to have an adequate conception of the intellec
tual milieu in which Missourians lived and thought and wrote,
it is useful to give a degree of attention to a considerable
number of writers who are divines or philosophers, or who
believe for whatever reason that they have something to say
to their state or to the world. This chapter, therefore, will
survey writings which do not fall too readily in the categories
already examined.
Chiefly the writers belong to the intellectual history
of St. Louis, for that city has been if it is not still more
fortunate in its artistic and intellectual,resources than any
other part of the state. As Scharf pointed out in 1 8 8 3,
St. Louis developed in the nineteenth century numerous
libraries, both those of several schools and universities and
others supported by various institutions. The notice of a
meeting for planning the founding of a public library was
given as early as 1811. The Library, of the St. Louis Lyceum
38^
385
was established in 1831, the Library of the Western Academy of
Natural Sciences in 1837? the St. Louis Law Library in 18 38,
the St. Louis Turnverein Library in 1855? the Library of the
St. Louis Academy of Science in.1856, the Public School
1
Library in 1865? and there were others.
H. H. Morgan for the same year (1883) lists fifty-seven
publishers in the city, and 27^ authors, and other “writers for
2
the Press, Secular and Religious.'* The works of these authors
include almost every imaginable variety of scientific, literary,
and religious treatise, chiefly in English, of course, but not
infrequently in German. St. Louis University had many fine
scholars, such, for example, as Professor Rudolph Leonard Tafel
who came from Germany in . 18^7 and became Professor of Modern
Languages and Comparative Philology, and as Professor Walter H.
Hill, S. J., who occupied the chair of Moral Philosophy.
Tafel's works included a treatise on. Swedenborg; Hill's,
treatises on general metaphysics and moral philosophy.3 And
numerous others gave intellectual lustre to this Catholic
university.
It is purposeless, however, to attempt classification
J. T. Scharf, History of St. Louis City and County.
I, pp. 886 ff.
2
H. H. Morgan, “Culture and Literary Growth in
St. Louis," in Scharf, op. cit., Ch. 3 6, II? pp. 1587 ff.
3 Ibid.. pp. 1598 f.
386
of St. Louis scholars of the period hy their adherence to
St. Louis University or Washington University or to other
institutions of learning. Many of them were teachers, many
of them were clerics or learned men of other callings. They
wrote books and magazine articles on iron manufacture in
Missouri and on the cultivation of jute in the United States,
on grammar and on mechanical and civil engineering, and on
almost every thing tinder the sun. And copiously they wrote
on speculative philosophy.
In 18^7 William Torrey Harris, born in Connecticut in
1835» came to St. Louis. He had. had a little more than two
years of study at Yale, but was not a graduate. Later he was
given honorary degrees by Yale, Brown, and Princeton and by
b
the Universities of Missouri and Pennsylvania. He formed
the acquaintance of Governor Broekmeyer, and out of the
association of these men grew the Philosophical Society,
embracing in its membership during the sixth and seventh
decades of the century numerous intellectual men, whose work
attracted visits from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott,
Julia Ward Howe, and other Eastern intellectuals. From the
Society grew The Journal of Speculative Philosophy (in 1867),
the first St. Louis— perhaps the first Western— periodical of
A. N. DeMenil, "A Century of Missouri Literature,1 1
Missouri Historical Review. XV, pp. 98 ff.
greater than local reputation or influence: from the Society
grew also a little later (in 1875) The Western, a magazine of
5
miscellaneous contents. The earlier of these was the first
journal in the English language devoted entirely to philosophy
and in it appeared the first philosophical essays of Charles
6
Peirce, William James, Josiah Royce, and John Dewey.
Harris was probably one of the country*s most learned
men. He wrote on many philosophical and psychological sub
jects, contributing about forty articles to Johnson*s
Cyclopedia. He lived until 1909, but did not finish his
career in St. Louis. Attracted by the Concord philosophers,
7
he left the West and went to live in Concord. But he had
•given a powerful stimulus to philosophical and historical
study in St. Louis. Men and women, lawyers, business men,
and clerics, they were scholars, philosophers, and teachers.
Mrs. Ella S. Morgan, one of the. first learned, ladies of
St. Louis, translated German metaphysics, for the Journal of
Speculative Philosophy during a period of some years In the
last third of the century, beginning in 1869 with “Winckelmann
Remarks on the Laokobn,*' and also wrote reviews of books for
5 Scharf, op. cit., II, p. 1599*
6
Van Wyck Brooks, New England: Indian Summer.' p. 333*
? DeMenil, loc. cit.
388
8
other periodicals, especially for The Western. Miss Annie
Wall of Washington University wrote an Outline of English
9
History (1888) as well as contributions to The Western.
Miss Charlotte Smith established and conducted a magazine in
this period, The Inland Monthly (1872-78), which was intended
to be only local but received wider support than had been
10
anticipated.
This magazine appealed to a less austere taste than
its more philosophical contemporaries in the same city. The
issue for January, 1873, contains a miscellany including a
biography of Colonel Lewis V. Bogy, a St. Louis lawyer and
politician; an article on the death of Horace Greeley;
several poems; an account of an enraged divorcee's attack
in Hew Orleans on her husband's second wife, with the warn
ing that if women are allowed to do with impunity what would
cost a man his life, other cities can expect the occurrence
of similar outrages; an article on child-rearing, with advice
against whipping; an article on the reading and the book
sellers of St. Louis; several other miscellaneous articles;
and a chapter of a continued story. The advice on child-rearing
^ Scharf, op. cit.. II,.p. 1603; Journal of Speculative
Philosophy. II, pp. 213 .
9 Scharf, o p . cit.. II, p. 1612.
10 Ibid., p. 1608.
389
is perhaps the sort of counsel that enlisted the support of
first-class citizens;
I took my little man a shotgun tonight, and
handing it over the gate, I said: "Now will
you mind your mamma, and stay inside when she
ealls you?" I am sure the "Me will" was very
sincere; hut if they forget, bear with them. If
childhood days cannot be free from sorrow, surely
none ever-may."11
It is truly a city of detached philosophers where the fathers
inculcate obedience to the mothers by putting shotguns into
the hands of children at the age when they still say, "Me
will."
Catholic clerics and Protestant ministers write on the
separate and combined interests of religion and philosophy in
such number and quantity that even to list their works would
be tedious and certainly unprofitable. Many of them are
learned as well as pious men. Occasionally a curious and
passionate work appears, like that of the eminent Mormon,
P. P. Pratt, "The Regeneration and Eternal Duration of
Matter," (iS^fO) a prose treatise included in a volume of
verse, an attempt to demonstrate by revelations of Holy Writ
that not only spirit but matter is eternal, with neither
12
beginning nor end of existence. Pratt says in his preface
that it was written while he was in prison in Missouri, to
^ "Donft Whip Them," Inland Monthly. January 1873, p. 32.
i ?
P. P. Pratt, The Millenium and Other Poems, pp. 105 ff«
console himself and his friends when death stared him in the
face.
Lawyers, teachers, doctors, and miscellaneous scholars
also devoted themselves to studies in such fields as criti
cism and philosophy. It is an astonishingly copious period
in a provincial American region.
Adolph E. Kroeger, for example, born in Schleswig in
1837} the son of a Lutheran priest, came to the United States
in 184-8 and to St. Louis in l859» During the Civil War he
was an adjutant on the staff of General Fremont. Later he
was treasurer of the City of St. Louis, and after about 1870
was able to devote much of his life to scholarly pursuits.
He published a variety of books on such subjects as the
minnesingers of Germany, the philosophy of the German Fichte,
our forms of government, and the future of the American repub-
13
lie. Nathaniel Holmes, a New Englander and a graduate of
Harvard, practiced law in St, Louis from 184-1 to 1865 and
was a member of the Missouri Supreme Court from 1865 until
he resigned in 1868 to accept a professorship in the Harvard
School of Law. He was one of the founders of the St, Louis
Academy of Science, and had time among his other activities
to produce two volumes (1866) in support of Bacon’s authorship
14-
of Shakespeare’s works. And John H. Tice, for many years a
• * • 3 DeMenil, op. cit.. p. 75*
llf Ifeid* j PP* 91 f.
391
teacher in the St. Louis public schools not only prepared a
treatise on the relations between matter and force but pub-
15
lished in the seventies a series of works on meteorology.
Perhaps the most astonishing of what may be called
the sporadic or fortuitous philosophical works of this period
in St. Louis is Ukase (1880), the product of Dr. J. H. McLean
and Myron Coloney. The latter will be remembered as the
editor who devoted his spare time for some months to writing
16
the narrative poem Manomin in order to raise funds for the
relief of a widow. McLean was born in Scotland in l829»
went to Nova Scotia with his parents when he was a small boy,
and left home at the age of thirteen. Whatever the history
of his next few years, he was educated for medicine and sur
gery in the St. Louis Medical College, and he prospered. He
boasts that his
Strengthening Cordial and Blood Purifier with
his other prepared medicines can now be found in
drug stores in nearly every village, hamlet and
home in the Western and Southern States— in fact,
in many places in Europe as well as the United
States--accessible to the poor as well as the
rich. '
The Ukase is a curious book which purports to show that
war can be made so terrible as to prevent any nation’s entering
^ Ibid., pp. 97 f.
^ Chapter Y, supra T pp. 215 ff.
J. H. McLean and Myron Coloney, Ukase, p. 15.
392
upon hostilities, and all through the inventions of
J. H. McLean* He professes to have invented cannon with
screw-on barrels, forty-eight-shot revolvers, and torpedoes
that unerringly find the ships they are aimed at and cling
by means of horseshoe magnets to the targets until they
explode* He has corrected the defects in all known guns and
missiles, and has devised shells that never explode prema
turely. And in addition to these and other weapons, he has
invented hinged iron forms which link together to form an
impregnable breastwork, indestructible, presumably, even by
his own irresistible forms of artillery. None of these weapons
or fortifications have been manufactured, but the inventor is
ready to negotiate with any nation for their production.
It is, of course, a preposterous book, so unremitting
in praise of the genius of McLean and. in praise of his "peace
makers'1 that one can hardly believe in its seriousness of
purpose. What Coloney*.s part in it was, nobody can discern.
The book appears to be the work of McLean. It appears to be
earnestly intended. And one hesitates to assume that the
maker of patent medicines will write a book, no matter how
absurd, with his tongue in his cheek. He might be convinced
of the merits of both his remedies and his fortifications.
Perhaps one ought not to dismiss the philosophical
writers of St. Louis without once again adverting to the
inexhaustible Denton J. Snider, who falters before no
393
artistic or critical form, who writes everything and writes
it exuberantly. In his Homer* s Odyssey (1895) he provides
commentary on the Odyssey and critical interpretation of it,
and concludes triumphantly that the Odyssey and the Iliad
are fundamentally one poem. The book was reprinted in a third
edition as late as 1922.
St. Louis, it is evident, was a welter of intellectual
activity in the second half of the nineteenth century, and has
continued in the state to be regarded as more strongly inter
ested in learning and in the arts than any other part of
Missouri. As has already been developed, however, St. Louis
had no monopoly on the writing and publishing of books, and
it had no monopoly on philosophical speculation. Kansas City,
for example, has also had at least an occasional man willing
to devote his talents to the instruction of mankind and the
amelioration of the human fate.
Thus Samuel Crocker, in That Island (1892)T published
tinder the pseudonym of Theodore Oceanic Islet, develops an
ideal system of government as observed by a castaway on an
imaginary island. The purpose is to show the evil state of
affairs in America, and to exemplify certain methods of
reform, such as were advocated by the Farmer’s Alliance and
the People’s Party of the time. The book was bound in cheap
paper backs, perhaps in recognition of its political and
occasional, and consequently ephemeral, appeal to a campaign
conscious audience. Political documents have a way of passing
39*+
with their arguments.
A more ambitions Kansas City philosopher, a man of
boundless energy and limitless horizons, was George W. Warder.
Kansas City was his workshop, but the universe was his field.
He was a native Missourian, born in Richmond in I8*f8, admitted
to the Missouri bar in 1866, and for most of the remainder of
his life busy in Kansas City as lawyer, real estate dealer,
and builder. He built many houses, besides three hotels and
the Warder Grand Opera House. He served a term as mayor of
Kansas City. And he found time and energy to write several
books of poetry, a novel, and a series of books expounding
a new conception of the cosmogony. These included The Hew
Cosmogony (1898)> Invisible.Light. or Electric Theory of
Creation (1899), The Cities of the Sun (1901). The Stairway
to the Stars (1902), and the capsheaf of the sequence, The
18
Universe % Vast Electric Organism (1903).
In the introduction to the last of these books he
expresses his conception of the nature of Creation, a concep
tion which, ..if...not in entire accord with the most advanced
scientific opinion of later decades, is possibly nearer to
it than most scientists or philosophers of his own day would
have suspected:
The new heavens and the new earth as I see it
through scientific facts and analogies is a
^ Who Was Who in America. 1897-19^2, p. 1299*
395
perfect electric machine, a vast electro-magnetic
organism of marvelous power and perfection* This
stupendous mass of matter and force we call the
universe is a complete whole, a perfect unity,
creating its own light, heat, and life, bound
together byninvisible electric ties of measure
less power*
He conceived of the sun as not a generator of heat but
a cold planet, possibly inhabited. Light, heat, and organic
life, he thought, existed only in the magnetic belt surround
ing the earth, the suns, and the planets* He rejected Hewton's
law of gravity, saying that not size or weight but electrical
conditions govern attraction of one object for another.
Perhaps because he was a poet he thought of electricity
as "the right hand of Deity * . . and the creative machinery
of the universe," functioning thus:
At the divine fiat, electric energy seized
all atoms and space, it shook the ether into
nebula [sic]. the nebula into worlds, the worlds
into constellations, and the constellations into
a universe. It shaped planets and rounded suns
and hurled them forth to circle in the chorus of
the singing spheres. It gave form and functions
to all matter, from the rounded pebble to the
stars, from the chirping cricket to the sporting
leviathan— it is the messenger and the executive
of the creative will.20
It is inaccurate, of course, to regard this sort of
expression as forecasting revisions of scientific calculation.
It may actually come to little more than.a hazy belief that
J. P. G. (John P. Gilday), "A Kansas Citian of the
Boom Days Forecast Einstein's Fifth Dimension," the Kansas
City Star. May 2, 1939, p. 18.
Loc. cit.
396
the wonders of electricity have more to do with physics than
is the common belief; one does not derive from poetic fancy
or inspiration much that requires intricate calculation. No
doubt such fancy has its merits, but they are probably chiefly
the merits of imagination rather than those of science.
If it were possible to trace all the springs of the
intellectual life and the culture of a state, the newspaper
editors would occupy an important place in the telling of that
story. In Missouri it is easy to see something of the influ
ence of a man like William Rockhill Nelson of the Kansas City
Star, or one like William Marion Reedy who worked on the
staffs of various St. Louis newspapers and was from 1893 until
his death in 1920 editor or proprietor and editor of Reedy* s
21
Mirror. These men wrote no books, but they befriended and
encouraged many writers, and they had. a part in the. daily
reading of great numbers of people. Some editors, of course,
wrote books as well as editorials; men like John N. Edwards
of Kansas City and St. Louis, and men like Logan Uriah Reavis
of St. Louis, who became imbued with the idea that St. Louis
would become the greatest city in the world and advocated
removing the seat of the United States Government to that
22
metropolis. But editors are innumerable, and their
^ Who Was Who in America. l897-19l +2, p. 1018.
22
Logan U. Reavis, The Future Great City of the
World (1875).
397
influence flows in streams that are shallow and that dry with
their ink. Comparatively few of them leave books as memorials
to their own names. For most of the others, their spirits
may be pervasive, but their names are written in water.
A woman who attained international recognition in the
study of American folk-lore was Mary Alicia Gwen, who was
born in St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1858, and who lived in that
23
city until her death in 1935*
By 1888 she had acquired important knowledge of Voodoo
magic among the Negroes. In 1892 she became an adopted member
2k-
of the Sac tribe of Indians. After her Voodoo Tales, as
Told among the Negroes of the Southwest she published a
series of books on the folk-lore of the Indians of America,
particularly of the Sacs and the Musquakies or Fox Indians.
She got many of her folk tales from Indians and Negroes,
especially her knowledge of Voodoo from old King Alexander,
half Indian and half Negro, who not only taught her some of
the secrets and the chants of his magic but gave her a Voodoo
stone. She visited the camp of a gypsy queen in Kansas and
gained some acquaintance of the gypsy lore, but had less
25
interest in it than in that of the Indians and Negroes. '
^ Who Was Who in America. l897-191 +2, p. 925*
oL.
hoc, cit.
Mary Ann Bodine, “Wide Recognition as a Folklorist
Won by a Retiring Missouri Woman," the Kansas City Star.
January 27, 1911*
It was at the suggestion of Godfrey Leland, author of
Algonquin Legends of New England. that she wrote her first
volume of folk tales dealing with the Negroes. She went with
the Lelands to Europe, read a paper before a congress of folk
lorists, and made so great an impression that she not only
was able to find a publisher for her book on Voodooism but
was included in the British Who*s Who before she attained
26
that recognition in the American publication. Her Folk-
Lore of the Musauakie- Indians of North America (190^) , pub
lished in London, as eleven years earlier her Voodoo Tales
had been, contains not only a collection of the tales of
these Indians but a catalogue of their beadwork and other
objects in the collection of the Folk-Lore Society then in
the University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Cambridge.
Though Miss Owen lived alh her life in Missouri, her
study was concerned with a much wider area than her own native
state. Another Missourian has devoted considerable attention
to more distinctly native material-which.has. received less
study than the lore of the Indians and which is probably not
much less elusive. This scholar is Ward Allison Dorrance, a
professor of French in the University of Missouri, and his
research has been directed toward the white people in south
eastern Missouri who antedate the English-speaking Americans.
Bodine, loc. cit.
There are still Creoles in Missouri whose native
language is French. They did not come to Missouri by way of
Louisiana; they stem from Canada, and their ties of language
and of folk-lore are with the latter place rather than with
the former. They possess a folk literature which is still
the possession of the conteur or of the old crone who remem
bers the ballads. For the proper Creole audience they tell
their tales and sing their songs, but the casual inquirer into
such lore is likely to fare poorly among them. The young ones
do not know much of it, and the old ones who do are likely
to be timid or suspicious and not to perform for the stranger.
Dr. Dorrance, however, has lived in Ste. Genevieve and has
collected some of this material. He has transcribed enough
to show the existence of a considerable variety— (1) ghost
stories, (2) prose narratives interspersed with songs like
the medieval chantefable, such as Aucassin et Nicollette.
(3) animal stories, (*+) salacious tales, (5) fairy tales, and
also (6) folk songs of several types. The songs include
those for special occasions (of which the Guignole or Gaie-
annee is the sole remaining type), ballads, religious songs,
amorous songs, humorous songs, children’s songs, and miscella-
27
neous others. This is folk-lore which is dying out, of
Ward Allison Dorrance, The Survival of French in the
Old District of Sainte Genevieve. pp. 102 ff.
koo
course, though it has persisted as the French language has
persisted with surprising tenacity in a relatively small area
surrounded by persons whose language is not French. It is to
be regretted that this area of Missouri has not received more
attention from students capable of capturing the ways of its
folk.
There remain to be considered, among works that do not
lend themselves readily to classification with categories
already examined, several books of sketches, personal, social,
or humorous. The earliest of these is Prison Life and Reflec
tions (18^7)> by George Thompson, the poet known as the Prison
28
Bard for his verses written during his imprisonment in the
Missouri penitentiary. Thompson and two companions, Work and
Burr, had crossed the river from Illinois with the intention
of inducing Negro slaves to run away to freedom, but had been
betrayed by the slaves and sentenced to twelve years in
prison. Their residence in the state was involuntary but
real; willy-nilly they were Missourians. And they were kindly,
devout men, who prayed, sang, preached, and endeavored to
spread the gospel of Abolition even in the penitentiary.
Thompson1s description of life in prison is in some details
shocking, in others ludicrous. It is written from notes
recorded day by day as things of interest occurred— punishments
28
Chapter II, supra, p. M+.
koi
of prisoners, work, deaths, songs, floggings, penalties for a
religious man’s refusal to shave on Sunday. It is not pleasant
reading.
Another book dealing with the somber side of Missouri
life is The Mysteries of St. Louis (n.d.), by "members of the
St. Louis Press." The title would suggest that the authors
had in mind Heinrich Boernstein’s melodramatic novelj of whieh
the mysteries were fictitious. The sketches provided by the
newspapermen for this volume deal with "mysteries" of whieh
the existence is not imaginary— various aspects of crime,
poverty, and bad social conditions in St. Louis.
A merrier book is Jacob L. Bowman's You and Me (1867),
a collection of sketches and poems. Some of the sketches are
humorous, in the style that made frequent, use of puns, bad
spelling, exaggerated colloquial expressions, and grotesque
exaggerations. Some are satirical} satirizing a miscellany
such as hoop skirts, political oratory, and female agitators
for women's rights. Some of the poems are humorous, some are
light lyrics, some are love poems. They exhibit a thin talent
which is more easily borne in prose than in verse.
Willis P. King's Stories of a Country Doctor (I89O)
contains a series of sketches of pioneer life in Missouri,
observed in the period shortly after the Civil War through the
eyes of a young doctor. They are simple, genuine, sympathetic,
and amusing without scorn or venom.
i f 02
The last of the sketch-books is ¥. McK. Prattsman’s
t
Autumn Leaves (iS^). It is the work of a minister, and is
interesting as an exhibit of the pabulum upon which piety fed
half a century ago, Prattsman shows that we shall recognize
29
one another in heaven, that early piety should be encour-
30
aged, and other principles of life and religion. He
recounts some pathetic passages in the life of the poor, in
31
such narratives as "Death in the Negro Quarters," and "The
Orphan Boy That Died." 32
All this is rather dreary. But Prattsman can be
entertaining, especially when he is disapproving. He dis
approves of the vulgarity and unrestraint characteristic of
the old-time camp meeting Tatfiich was still at least an occa
sional excitement for the pious rustics of Prattsman*s day.
And he tells a tale of a camp meeting that compensates for
much that is somewhat less than exciting in other parts of
his book.
This is the story of the young man in a buckskin suit
who accidentally stepped on the outer end of a stick in a
campfire and scattered sparks and coals about a woman’s
2^ W. McK. Prattsman, Autumn Leaves, pp. 23 ff.
30 Ibid., pp. 127 ff.
31 Ibid., pp. 38 ff.
32 Ibid., pp. bO ff.
b03
cooking vessels. Later in the evening, when the sermon of
the evangelist had reached a pitch of considerable fervor,
the angry woman observed the man in the buckskin suit sitting
on a stump in front of her fire, sitting and leaning forward
as he listened to the sermon. Now a buckskin suit consists
of a pair of trousers and a short jacket. When the wearer
bends forward, the jacket will pull up and reveal the 1 1 pucker"
of the trousers, a place at the band that in such a posture
stands out from the skin and leaves a space between the
trousers and the wearer, a funnel that to an angry woman can
be irresistible.
The woman acted impulsively. She seized a tin cup,
filled it with hot water from her kettle, and poured the
contents down the pucker. The startled young man, knowing
that he had been sitting with his back to a campfire and
feeling a sudden intense heat acted naturally enough. He
sprang to his feet with a yell and raced in the direction in
which he happened to be facing, shouting, "I'm on firej I'm
on firei"
His course took him toward the mourner's bench, and
the pious spectators of his behavior assumed that he was on
fire with the spirit. He was the spark that set off the
conflagration; a procession of twenty-five sinners also on
fire, though with a different flame, followed him to conver-
33
sion and to the mourner's bench.
33 Ibid., pp. 50 ff.
bob
Such ms Missouri. The buckskin suit and the camp
meeting are gone, now, but they were here. And if life was
sometimes laborious and manners were impetuous, at least the
pious women who would pour scalding water down the pucker of
«
a man1s buckskin breeches must have done their part to keep
life from becoming too unremittingly dull.
A study of Missouri literature should not be concluded
without a glance at certain books of travel and exploration.
Several such books published early in the life of the state,
written by men who were hardly Missourians and intended for
readers other than Missourians, can lay only a tenuous claim
to classification with the literature of the state; and yet
they have considerable interest for the readers of that
literature.
The first of these is Gottfried Duden* s Report. Duden
came from Germany to Missouri in 182^, bought a farm about
fifty miles west of the junction of the Missouri and
Mississippi rivers, lived on it for three years, and sent
his Report back to Germany. It was published in 1829 > at a
time of unrest and dissatisfaction, and was so enthusiastic
over the advantages of America, and Missouri in particular,
that it caused many Germans to emigrate to Missouri in the
next two decades, some of them to the region where Duden had
lived. The account of the region was somewhat rose-colored,
but the book went through three editions and was read by
bo5
thousands of Germans, to the advantage of the region which
V*
received immigrants of high quality.
Another European who came to America, looked upon the
West, and found it interesting though perhaps not so fair as
Duden found it, was Louis Richard Cortambert, a brother of
Eugene Cortambert, the French geographer. He was born in
France in l808 but came to the United States in early life
and lived for a time in St. Louis, where he edited a French-
35
language weekly review. He published numerous books in
Paris, one of whieh was an account of a journey through
Missouri and into Kansas. He speaks of the curious ways of
Presbyterian preachers and worshipers at Independence, of
the extraordinary fertility of the Missouri soil, of the
Harmony Mission, and of the hospitality of occasional isolated
farms, where in the month of July he slept on a featherbed.
For the Frenchman it was a journey into the wilderness:
Ces petites colonies isolees au milieu des
deserts se composeant ordinairement d'un homme,
d*une femme et d'une douzaine d*enfants. L’Anglo-
Americaine, dans cet etat demi-souvage, n^ublie
pas qu'il est citoyen de la Republique, et il . . .
reqoit-le voyageur avec^autant de d^gnite que
pourrait le faire le president des Etats-Unis.
3^ William G. Bek, "Introduction, 1 1 Gottfried Duden1 s
“Report." 1827-18^. pp. 1 ff.
DeMenil, op. cit., pp. 82 f.
Louis R. Cortambert, Voyage au Pays des Osages. p. 22.
bo6
Cortambert was received by one of these citizens of
the Republic:
Nous,prenons place a table, ^e pere de famille
fait preceder le repos d*une priere a haute voix.
Le pain de mais, le lard, les pommes de terre et
quelque patisserie improvisee recoivent les assauts
de notre appetit. Un cafe detestable est line boisson
peu rafraichissante apresune journee de march sous
un soleil brulante. Quelque tasses de lait nous
conviendraint mieux$ mais on ne peut supposer que
nous ayons un gout si absurde. Une bqrraque de bois,
a un seul compartiment, sert d'asile a tout la
famille et aux hotes qui peuvent survenir: le jour,
c*est fort bien, mais pour la nuit c’est un pele-mele
peu agreable. Les Amerieains ont la mauvaise habitude
de coucher sur la plume. Jraurais voulu coucher sur
le plancher; mais non, on m*infligeait un matelas
de plume, au mois de juillet, et souvent il me fallait
subir la compagnie d'un coucheur incommode, et ses
coups de poing et coups de pied.37
The pioneer diet which this Frenchman viewed with
amiable dismay was, of course, nothing peculiar to Missouri
in its half-settled state. Much of America has been developed
by somewhat uncouth families subsisting largely on corn bread
and sow-belly or some close equivalent. Another French
traveler, Victor Tixier, following somewhat the same route
two or three years after Cortambert, observed something of
the same crudity and with much the same amused tolerance
records in. Voyage aux Prairies Qsages. Louisiana et Missouri.
1832-^0 (l8Mf) a meal of roast salt pork and some objects
which, he thought were called biscuits by way of jest. It is
quite possible that Cortambert was more fortunate than he knew.
37 Ibid.. p. 22.
bo?
Cortambert and Tixier were transients in Missouri.
Father Peter John de Smet, though born in Belgium in 1801,
made his home in St. Louis after his ordination in 18 28, and
died there in 1872. He was a famous Catholic missionary,
and wrote many books in his native language concerning the
Indians, the missions, and his travels in North America if
not in Missouri.*5
It is natural enough that the travel books by Missouri
writers, after the time of Cortambert and Tixier, should be
concerned with other parts of America or of the world rather
than with their own state. Whatever may have seemed the
semi-savage state of this area to traveling Europeans, there
was no adventure to a Missourian in journeying about a state
that was fairly well filled with people tilling their farms
and carrying on their business in established towns. Travel
books had to do with strange and far places. C. T. Paynter’s
Notes of Voyages to the Black Sea and the Sea of Azoff (1852)
is the sort of travel book for a Missourian, with its infor
mation on the odd business practices of the honest Turks who
will nail the ear of a Jew, Greek, or Armenian to the door if
39
his weights are short. And so is Kate Field’s humorous and
3^ DeMenil, op. cit., pp. 79 f•
39 The single known copy of this book is in the Snyder
collection of the University of Kansas City.
lf 08
sprightly account of an American woman’s visit to the English
Parliament, in her Hap-Hazard (1873), and Denton J. Snider's
returned traveler's report on Greece in 4 Walk in Hellas (l88l).
James Buel, almost as prolific as Snider, wrote numerous books
on foreign lands* Jacob T. Child, who was United States
Minister at Bangkok embodies his observations concerning the
people, the customs, and the ruins which he observed in Asia
in The Pearl of Asia ( 1892)• And those who did not go abroad
found excitement in the American West} as did the Kansas City
doctor, A. N. Cordier, who reported on his adventures in
A Wyoming Big Game Hunt (ca. 1907)•
Perhaps there is little travel literature left to be .
written about Missouri; if any is to come, it will probably
have to do with the great river which flows across the state,
or even more probably with the delightful rivers of the
Ozarks. John G* Neihardt, in The River and I (1910), gives
an account of a youthful adventure on the Missouri River, a
journey by boat over a distance which he estimates at two
thousand miles. This narrative was written before The Song
of Hugh Glass, the first of Neihardt's Western cycle of poems.
But the journey ended at Sioux City, Iowa, and it belongs to
Missouri only by virtue of the Missourian's conviction that
whatever comes down this most tremendous and important river
in the world belongs to Missouri.
The title to another pleasant book, however, is
*K>9
unquestionable. This is Ward Allison Dorrance1s Three Ozark
Streams (1937). Dorrance is a Missourian with a poetic and
passionate sensitivity to the exotic and picturesque in the
mountainous scenery of southern Missouri. His narrative is
the log of trips down three Ozark streams, the Black River,
Jack*s Fork, and the Current River, beautiful and somewhat
inaccessible streams running through country peopled by a
population with its own folkways. And now that the northern
two-thirds of the state with its long-established farms, its
industries, its transcontinental roads, and its airports is
hardly less commonplace than such prairie regions as Iowa
and Illinois, the exotic in Missouri is to be found chiefly
where Dorrance found it.
CHAPTER XI
CONCLUSION
To speak of the pioneer days in the development of the
West is to call up images of rough and uncouth men, restless
and lawless but resolute— the Daniel Boones and the Jim
Bridgers and all the lesser ones of the same uncropped breed,
those nameless trappers and hunters and inhabitants of squalid
and lonely cabins who were themselves indifferent to letters
and the graces of life but who trampled down the rough growths
of the new country and made a fit place for their more civil
ized followers to lie in. Those men were in Missouri in the
early days; they may even have been the most characteristic
of early Missourians.. But to think of them as constituting
the population of Missouri when the name signified a part of
the Louisiana Territory, or in the beginning of statehood, is
to err grossly. For at the same time when these graceless
ruffians were roistering in the saloons, prowling the back
woods, fighting and brawling and moving westward, that some
what austere New England missionary, Timothy Flint, was
looking sadly on and sorrowing for the waste and pain entailed
by the movement of population. And the Reverend Salmon Giddings
was writing to the Missionary Society letters concerning the
Reverend Timothy Flint. Newspapers were springing up in
St. Louis and St. Charles and elsewhere. Angus Umphraville
**•10
*H1
was writing verses— not only about the barmaid of the Dancing
Bear and the old maid of St, Louis but about the loveliness
of those two mounds known as the Mamelles, and about the
majesty of the great Missouri River, Alphonso V/etmore was
writing a farcical play which exhibited some of the crudities
of the West, a play to be acted by seven amateur men—
Thespians, Wetmore called them— and by three feminine “regu
lar performers.'* And the play was acted "to great applause,"
having an audience which doubtless recognized the crudities
represented, and laughed.
In short, Missouri received from the beginning the most
diverse elements of the older states. Southerners brought
their, slaves and transported their goods up the river, and
built magnificent houses overlooking the bends of the Missouri.
Yankees and Ohioans and New Yorkers came and established them
selves on farms and in villages. Slaves laid up stone fences
and tilled the fields of large estates; on the other side of
those fences anti-slavery farmers cared for their own crops.
Daniel Boone spent his last years in Missouri. Adventurous
men risked the dangers of the plains and drove their oxen from
Independence to Santa Fe. Mike Fink left the Ohio and the
Mississippi, and traveled up toward the Yellowstone. The
Frenchman Cortembert journeyed in western Missouri and slept
on a featherbed in a farmer's log house. The Frenchman Tixier
disembarked at Independence and had a dinner of roast salt pork
hl2
and something called biscuits— by way of jest, he supposed.
Hegroes were sold standing on a block of stone that may yet
be seen at Arrow Rock.
Meanwhile people were building churches and navigating
the Mississippi and sending Thomas Hart Benton to Congress,
and reading books and working toward the Civil War. And they
were writing. Sometimes they wrote about unrefined
Missourians, as John Robb and Alphonso Wetmore did in
St. Louis. Sometimes they wrote about the Mississippi and
Missouri Rivers, as Angus Umphraville did. Sometimes they
wrote about Indians, or about English lords and American
ladies. But they wrote.
That was in St. Louis, at first. But as time went by,
poems came from little towns as well as from cities. They
came from lawyers and real-estate dealers, from school
teachers, from farmers, from housewives, from a steamboat
pastry cook, from a prisoner in the state penitentiary.
Often they were pallid imitations of conventional models.
Often they were written with more passion than art. But in
the century and a half after Jacques Trudeau wrote his ballad
about the surprise attack on St. Louis, there was an astonish
ing quantity of verse composed in Missouri, and published, and
doubtless read.
And it should not be too surprising after all that
this outpouring happened. It was not for nothing that the
Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Missouri funneled the migrant
population into or through St, Louis and Missouri on the way
westward. Men of breeding and scholarship and religious zeal
came, as has been said, through this portal to the vast new
territory, and for many of them nothing in the plains beyond
Missouri had a voice to call them on. St. Louis became a
center of intellectual stirring probably unmatched by more
than half a dozen cities in the entire country. Other
Missouri cities— Kirksville, St. Joseph, Columbia— have
intellectual traditions that command respect, but St. Louis
was the place where the minds as well as the trails of the
nineteenth century came together. If neither that city nor
the state has maintained sueh eminence as they once possessed,
the reason may be that the same uneasy spirit which once
brought men of talents to Missouri has also taken men of
talents away.
Meanwhile there was new ground to be plowed. The
settlement of new territory is a fever and an excitement— a
slow-burning excitement, perhaps, but a pervasive and insist
ent stimulus which one may not live with and not be touched
by it. One may respond by chronicling the events which go on
about him, or by singing new doggerel in old keys. But that
people should feel and respond is a wholesome thing. And how
else can one account for the widespread impulse to break into
rhyme and meter while Missouri was growing up?
It was a voluminous outpouring. The unskillful verses
U - l H -
of Angus Umphraville are followed by a long procession of
poets* Most of the verse is undistinguished imitation of the
literary models current during the nineteenth century, deal
ing with such themes as love and death and religion and the
beauties of nature. Some poets, however, write on themes
which were of concern to Missourians as Missourians— the life
of the West, the Indians, the Civil War, and, later, the
first World War. One will recall Myron Coloney*s Manomin.
based upon an Indian massacre, and the prison poems of the
Abolitionist George Thompson, and Rose O'Neill’s
All the roads lead back to France,
and Sara Teasdale's
The sun turns north, the days grow long,
Later the evening star grows bright—
How can the daylight linger on
For men to fight,
Still fight?
In the twentieth century, though publication of verse
in Missouri may have declined in volume, some distinguished
names have a place in the roll of Missouri poets. In addi
tion to those of Rose O'Neill and Sara Teasdale, the reader
will recall the names of Eugene Field and Orrick Johns and
Louis Mertins, and if he has come upon some excellent narra
tive poems on the epic of the Missouri Valley he will
remember the name of John G. Neihardt. The verse of Missouri
writers includes a great deal that can be well forgotten, but
it includes also some that is worth knowing.
And so in other forms of literature. Numerous writers,
like the newspaper men Joseph Field and John Robb, practiced
the tall tale in the first half of the century and later,
Heinrich Boernstein*s bitter novel attacked what he regarded
as sinister forces in mid-century St. Louis, Mark Twain and
other less eminent writers wrote stories of the Mississippi.
John Monteith utilized the local color of the Ozarks before
that theme attracted much attention from other writers. The
Civil War provided the substance for many stories, among them
novels by Caroline Abbot Stanley, Dagmar Done.ghy, and Eugene P.
Lyle. In the twentieth century Homer Croy is conspicuous for
his disillusioned treatment of small-town life. Like the
writers of verse, many novelists in Missouri were imitative
and undistinguished, but a considerable number of them have
written regional fiction worth remembering.
There is little of the drama in Missouri which is
regional literature. Perhaps the most interesting play deal
ing with the state is the earliest— Alphonso Wetmore * s The
Pedlar. The one best known is probably Augustus Thomas*
In Mizzoura.
In history and biography, again, the work of Missourians
is voluminous. Much of it is hasty and journalistic work— the
county histories, for example, and occasional biographies put
together from the reminiscences of some old soldier. But
there is much respectable and valuable material for the
1*16
student in the works of such men as Thomas Hart Benton,
Henry M. Brackenridge, John N. Edwards, Frederic L. Billon,
J. T. Scharf, Ward Allison Dorrance, and others.
In addition, the student of Missouri writing will find
interest in numerous miscellaneous works, such as the travel-
books written by the Frenchmen, Louis Cortambert and Victor
Tixier; or the comments on the state of society in the latter
part of the nineteenth century to be found in W. McK. Prattsman*s
Autumn Leaves. The list is a long one.
Reading such lists is a dull business, and it veils the
dramatic spectacle which the better of Missouri writers have
revealed when they let their gaze fall upon what was about
them and could not resist what they saw. They wrote of the
Mississippi, it should be remembered, and of the people who
moved upon it or by it; they wrote of the Ozarks and of the
quaint ways of the people who lived there; they wrote of good
manners and true religion; they wrote of farm and village
and city.
They also wrote of knave and hero and patriot, for they
wrote of the Civil War. Here was a more acute and passionate
excitement, both in its preparation and in its working out.
This was a more bitter conflict in Missouri than in many
other places. Missouri had Quantrell, and had also from time
to time the Kansas Red Legs, besides an ample share of less
celebrated bushwhackers. Missouri had Order No. 11. Though
b V ?
the tide of reminiscence concerning those days may now have
run out, Missouri still has the sons of Union men and of
Rebels, and the issues that set them upon one another are not
even yet entirely forgotten. Agony being pleasanter to have
had than to have, and the recollection of bitter experience a
dear memory, it is not likely that all the books have been
written to tell the story of that passage in Missouri,
But time smooths out inequalities, and the sons of the
Hatfield marry the daughters of the McCoy, New concerns over
lay old ones. The twentieth century is in many respects not
what the nineteenth was, either in Missouri or in the rest of
the world. Changes in the ways of education, of amusement, of
economic circumstance, of transportation and communication,
of religious and philosophic thought, have made the first
third of the present century what would seem a fantastic and
incredible time to the first third of the last, in Missouri
as elsewhere. The great-grandfather might find his great-
grandson effeminate and degenerate, or he might discover
proof for what in his own day he had believed, namely that
his race was a race of giants, for only heroic ancestors
could sire such posterity. In any case, he would find much
that he had never dreamed of. And he would discover that
many vital controversies had become no more than dim memories
and distant echoes.
It is not that man has been reduced to uniformity.
J +18
la/hat is evil to one may still be to another innocent and
blessed* What is to one man a sacred observance before the
Lord may still be to another a sinister and obscene rite. But
these are differences between man and man, not between region
and region. Even regional disparities doubtless still exist,
but local prepossessions and loyalties, in the main, have
tended to disappear. Missouri writers are likely to concern
themselves with much the same matters which attract the atten
tion of writers in Oklahoma or Ohio. A Missourian is hardly
likely to be distinguishable from an Iowan or even a Kansan—
and all authors, for better or for worse, look alternately
towards New York and Hollywood.
The calumny still persists, in some quarters outside
Missouri, that Missouri biscuits are something of the jest one
expects in too impulsive cookery. But it is a calumny. What
ever may once have been the peculiar properties of Missouri
food have long faded into the light of common day, and one
finds in roadside taverns here very much the same fare that
he finds in a thousand roadside taverns by the same highway
elsewhere. Much of it is indigestible, of course, as has
always been true everywhere, for the ingenuity and zeal of
cooks are infinitely various; but ingenuity and zeal do not
vary by states. It is a matter of taste whether the fact Is
to be lamented.
And so with letters. It would be tedious and unprofit
able to recount again the rise and flourishing of ah
astonishingly copious literary production in a state not
generally so much celebrated for literacy as for hunting dogs,
or for poets as for mules. But Missouri has been fecund in
writers. Many of them have written badly, although even in
their faults there has been the record of thought and feeling
in a state with a peculiarly exciting history. If the strands
of that history have been drawn into a more intimate unity
with the web of the country than onee they possessed, perhaps
the fact is reason for gratulation. No doubt there is still
sufficient diversity, both as between Missourian and
Missourian and as between Missourian and Arkansan or Iowan;
doubtless it is a subtler diversity than once marked the
distinction between Unionist and Hebe1, or between the
expatriate Virginian in the river town and the Yankee farmer
in the inland county, but diversity nevertheless. It is not
likely that ample substance for regional literature in
Missouri is lacking, or will be.
In any case, the record of a century and a half is
written, and it is no mean record.
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