Emerson Hough, Heart’s Desire (1905)

This is a book about longing. It longs for a time past and a place on the frontier that was like a Garden of Eden. It longs for a kind of utopian community where there is order without the need for law. It’s also about the longing of men and women for each other.

Sentimental journey. It’s a sentimental book and much the product of a Victorian frame of mind. But the sentiment is well earned. It works as hard and as honestly to make a case for its imagined world as the hard-edged cynicism of our own time.

The central character in Hough’s book is a young lawyer in a “quasi mining camp that was two-thirds cow town” called Heart’s Desire in south-central New Mexico. Hamlet might be a better word, both for the town and the main character.

There may be 250 souls in Heart’s Desire. It is a single dusty street following the course of a crooked arroyo. Along it is a string of structures, mostly adobe, plus a few made of logs. The town is nestled in a mountain valley. Above it are mountain peaks, and above them is the pure, blue New Mexico sky. The town is, no doubt, the White Oaks, New Mexico, where Hough lawyered for a brief time in the early 1880s.

The central character is Dan Anderson, a young unmarried lawyer, who much like Hamlet is at loose ends and a shade melancholy. Heart’s Desire is a retreat for him from the heartless world of Yankee capitalism and politics as practiced back in “the States.” It’s also the refuge of a wounded soul rejected in his wooing of a girl, Constance Ellsworth. Her father, a captain of industry, has found Dan unqualified to be his son-in-law.

The heart of the matter. The longing – or heart’s desire – that is the central theme of the novel belongs first of all to Dan. He yearns for recognition of his worth as a man, and he yearns for Constance. But his is only part of a chorus of yearning in the novel. The town itself yearns for a kind of prosperity that would come with the building of a railroad. There are gold and coal in the surrounding hills, and the residents live in hope that they’ll win the interest of “Eastern Capital.”

The theme of yearning plays itself out in other ways, too. For contrast, the cowboy Curly sets his sights on a marriageable girl, whose family arrives in town, and is determined to marry her before even knowing her full name. In fact, she’s never known as anything but “the Littlest Girl from Kansas.” Self-confident in everything, Curly seems to succeed without effort. He becomes a married man in a gap between chapters.

Meanwhile, there are simple luxuries that the residents of Heart’s Desire mostly do without. The purchase of four cans of oysters, a bottle of champagne and a cake to complement a Christmas dinner is cause for great excitement among a small bunch of bachelor friends. The novelty of a new phonograph keeps them entertained for an entire night. On another day, they are attempting to master a recently imported lawn game called croquet.

The most poignant episode in the novel involves Tom Osby, a middle-aged man who seems to have lost track of how often he’s been married – often enough, he says, to be an authority on women. He falls in love with the voice of an operatic singer whose recording of “Annie Laurie” moves him to the depths of his soul.

Like Curly, he goes after what he wants. When he learns that the singer is with a touring opera company, he travels some distance by wagon to find her. Discovering that they are both natives of Georgia, they quickly establish a Southern rapport. And for an evening, she gives him a private concert.

Emerson Hough, again

Here's the last word about Emerson Hough before I move on to his fiction. Wrapping up my own notes on his book, The Story of the Cowboy (1897), I thought there might be interest in a subject he covers in one chapter - the range wars of the frontier - and two in particular, the Lincoln County War (c1880) and the Johnson County War (1892).

Lincoln County War. Having lived for a time in central New Mexico, Hough had heard plenty about the Lincoln County War. Little is really known for sure about that conflict, he admits. It took place in a time and place without modern news gathering as it existed in 1897. But he passes along what he’s heard and gives it his own spin. It was a time, he says, when the bravery of hardy and determined men confronted the savagery that lies at the heart of human nature

According to him, this “war” resulted in the deaths of 200-300 men. The villain at the center of it all was Billy the Kid, who gets painted by Hough as one mean desperado. Dead at the age of 23, he was credited with the killings of 23 men. He and his gang were said to have mercilessly shot seven Mexicans, “just to see them kick,” though it’s not clear whether Hough counts any of these among the 23.

This reign of terror developed into open warfare when Billy took on wealthy cattleman John Chisum, who defended himself and his property with a band of armed men of his own. Hostilities finally reached a flash point in the streets of Lincoln, where Billy eventually escaped from a burning house.

All of which is only somewhat accurate.

Hough makes no mention of the actual antagonists in the Lincoln County War. These were Lawrence Murphy and James Dolan on one side and John Tunstall and Alexander McSween on the other. We now know that Billy became directly involved in this conflict of interests when Tunstall, who had hired him, was murdered.

Hough provides his own version of events right up to Pat Garrett’s shooting of Billy. It is a scene told in detail that corresponds closely to the accounts of modern historians. It’s interesting that Billy’s final moments were known so well at the time, even while much of his story was the stuff of legend and hearsay.

There’s no mistaking where Hough’s sympathies lie. He portrays Billy as a scoundrel and a ruffian, who’d murdered his first man when he was only fourteen. Historical records show that he was actually sixteen at the time and he never killed more than nine men – maybe as few as four. He was also just 21 when he died.

Hough would surely have been appalled to know that Billy was to become a folk hero, still admired 130 years later. For him, the hero of the story is Pat Garrett, who as sheriff put an end to the young criminal. Pat Garrett, he reports, “is a respected ranchman, as pleasant a man as one would ask to meet” (p. 309).

The Round-Up, F.W. Schulz, 1907

Johnson County War. This range war had taken place more recently in Wyoming. Though only two lives were lost in the conflict between cattlemen and rustlers, it was covered extensively by the national press. Still, Hough chooses to put more confidence in the oral accounts given to him from individuals directly involved on both sides.

And both sides were in the wrong, he argues. The rustlers, with their own duly elected sheriff in Buffalo, were no better than a loosely organized form of organized crime. But the band of vigilantes with their death list of 125 names were more to be scorned, for their foolhardy and cowardly behavior.

For the most part wealthy men from the East, they knew nothing of the plains. The twenty cowpunchers from Texas they hired as mercenaries should have been in charge. Stupid mistakes would not have been made, and the vigilantes wouldn’t have ended up besieged in a ranch house and requiring rescue by the troops from a nearby Army post.

Worse yet, these men fled to the protection of the law, which they had so openly flouted. And with their money and influence were able to escape justice for the killing of the two “rustlers,” Nate Champion and Nick Ray. Hough even portrays these two men sympathetically. He reports the content of a letter found on Champion’s body, describing his last hours in the house where the vigilantes have held him under siege.

Hough points out that there were cowboys on both sides of this conflict, living by the code of the West. And only among those can be found men who acted honorably in this “unpleasant” matter – for such a man shows true courage: "Misguided and impulsive perhaps, he was always eager to be where the fighting was thickest, and there he conducted himself as a man according to the creed under which he had been reared” (p. 323).

Photo credit: Billy the Kid, wikimedia.org

Coming up: More cowboy memoirs and Emerson Hough's Heart's Delight (1905)

Emerson Hough, continued

I’m still reading Emerson Hough’s The Story of the Cowboy (1897), a book that is densely packed with information about the Old West. At first I thought much of the book was guesswork, since Hough spent so little time on the frontier, but in one way or another he seems to have done his homework. He might be wrong about some things, but much of what he writes has the ring of authenticity. It’s a great source book about the early West.

Looking for Rustlers, Illustration from the book by Charles Russell

Rustlers. Hough devotes a chapter to cattle rustlers that put a new twist on the subject for me. The term “rustler” began, he says, with a positive rather than pejorative meaning. In the early days of the open range, cowpunchers were rewarded as much as five dollars a head for finding and branding mavericks for the home ranch. Such a man “rustled” for this extra income in the way that a city dweller might “hustle” to make a better living for himself.

Many cowboys also became cattle owners in their own right, and a cowboy might well choose instead to put his own brand on a maverick to claim it for his own herd. As these “little guys” proliferated, they eventually earned the disapproval of the big cattle barons.

In Wyoming, the big ranchers formed an association to put a stop to this development, and they quit paying their cowboys for branding mavericks. Worse, they made it illegal for them to own their own brand. What they didn’t count on was the widespread resistance these new rules would ignite.

For one thing, they went dead against the code that the West had lived by until then. This code granted a man the freedom to live and thrive as he pleased – so long as he did not take unfair advantage of another man. The new rules of the range were clearly unfair and therefore unjust.

The Cattle Thieves, by F.W. Schulz, 1907

Another factor was that big ranchers were increasingly “outsiders” from the East or foreign countries. Often they were impersonal corporations and syndicates. Unlike the first cattlemen, they were faceless investors who never even came West. This made them unpopular with residents in general, and their efforts to enforce the new laws met with general lack of sympathy.

So, many folks cooperated with rustlers. A homesteader might receive the gift of a quarter of beef on one day and be asked to corral a small herd of calves or horses on another – no questions asked. A butcher in town might be a ready customer for a slaughtered cow. The large railroad crews laying track across the plains in these years provided another ready market for meat. The less known on all these occasions, the better.

The result of the association’s efforts was to greatly increase rather than decrease the loss of their stock. Their own cowpunchers, even the foreman, could look the other way as cattle disappeared. There was such a broad gray area between right and wrong during this time that a cowboy could easily be torn in either direction.

Hough is quick to distinguish honest “rustlers” from the truly bad men who infiltrated their number and were even the rule in places like Montana. These were the lawless men who had lived by thievery in remote areas from the earliest days. Or they were the buffalo hunters who had worked their trade on the plains before the arrival of the cattle herds.

Hough sides with the cowboys who still tried to live by the old rules. They may have broken the law, but they weren’t criminals. Rustlers were not outlaws, he argues, but the last holdouts of the original code of the West.

Coming up: Emerson Hough, Heart's Desire (1905) and more cowboy memoirs