Arts and Letters

Stewart Edward White was born at Grand Rapids, Michigan, on March 12th, 1873. His father was a lumber magnate who controlled large tracts of the Michigan forest, and there the writer of the future ran wild as a boy and lived with the "breakers of the wilderness" who appeared in his novels. At home with the rivermen, the lumberjacks and loggers, he was also an eager ornithologist, and before he entered the University of Michigan he had made a collection of fourteen hundred bird-skins. He had also written a pamphlet on the birds of Mackinaw Island that was published by the American Ornithologists' Union, together with a number of articles on birds that appeared in scientific journals. The years from eleven to fifteen he spent in California, where he lived largely in the saddle, witnessing the wild life of the old ranches in the back country; then he followed the gold-rush to the Black Hills, sailed all over the Great Lakes and even visited Hudson's Bay, the scene of his novel The Silent Places. During these years he became what Theodore Roosevelt called him, "the best man with both pistol and rifle who ever shot" at Sagamore Hill; and before he came East and entered Columbia, where he studied writing with Brander Matthews, he had roamed over as much of the West as any wandering cowboy. In his loosely organized novels and stories, in his essays and handbooks of outdoor life, in his histories of the Forty-Niners and Daniel Boone, White presented, first or last, a vast range of frontier life, from Arizona Nights to California and the Canadian forest. He was to be known best perhaps for his stories of the lumberjacks, as Bret Harte was known for his stories of the miners of the Sierras.

Strangely enough, between Bret Harte's day and the day of White and Owen Wister, the so-called "Western" story had never developed, though Bret Harte established the pattern for it and most of the types that figured in it, the cowboy, the schoolmistress, the bad man, the sheriff, and his posse. Owen Wister's romance The Virginian, published in 1902, was the first book of a kind that was frequent later, foreshadowing the generally debased "Westerns" of the movies, but no one has yet appeared who has done for the cowboys and the cattle country what Melville did for the old New England whalers. It is likely that Lomax's Cowboy Songs and the writings of certain reporters and diarists such as Andy Adams' Log of a Cowboy, for instance, will outlast all the existing stories of the plains, while the Argentine pampas, so like our plains in setting, life, and characters, are the scenes of two or three enduring epics and romances. Why is it that nothing in American writing compares with the poem of Martín Fierro, the gaucho of the pampas who resembles the cowboy of the plains, or the story of Don Segundo Sombra, the noble old plainsman of Argentina, who has something at least in common with Natty Bumppo? Is it partly because the romantic tradition survived in the Latin-American mind with a depth and good faith that were lost in the mind of the North by the time the cowboy entered the literary picture? Or because the day of the writers of "Westerns" corresponded with the rapid appearance and growth of the all-too-seductive popular magazines and movies? In Stewart Edward White's youth, Frederick Jackson Turner was proving that the frontier determined the character of the country, that the West was the center of the typical American mind, as Emerson, Whitman, and Melville had prophesied it would be. But what native story pictured the cowboy like Don Segundo Sombra? And what pictured pioneering like Rölvaag's Giants in the Earth?

Yet much could be said for Owen Wister's taciturn "Virginian," the engaging, masterful, saturnine, lonely plainsman who had some of the strength and skill of the old wilderness hunters, together with the wisdom of the plains and its wonder as well, and as much could be said for some of the stories of Stewart Edward White, the first writer about the West from its own point of view. (For so he has often been called with a show of reason.) Beginning with The Westerners in 1901, he dealt in the decades that followed with virtually every phase of Western life, acquiring a measure of popularity that was partly a protest against urban life and expressed a wish to return to the woods and the wild. Theodore Roosevelt's western legend and Frederick Remington's illustrations had prepared the minds of a multitude of readers for White, for his tales of the cattle-rustler, the round-up, the branding, of the tenderfoot, the remittance-man, the forest-ranger, the road-agent, the old frontiersman with his faith in the axe and the rifle. Now and again his descriptive writing recalled John Muir's, especially perhaps in the stories in Arizona Nights, which rivalled Mary Austin's in their feeling for "lost borders," for the broad mesas, the candle-like stars, the ranges of mountains that constantly changed, the grass-land, the brush-land, the flower-land, the Arizona desert. He left in one's mind a marked impression of the Mexican border of the earlier days, a no-man's-land of monstrous cactus growths where gathered all the desperate characters of two republics, as he conveyed in The Silent Places the atmosphere of the northern fur-country, the trackless woods and unmapped forest lakes. He may have been best in The Riverman, a tale of the Michigan lumberjacks, extolling their skill and their pride in a dangerous trade, as Mark Twain delighted in the Mississippi pilots and Bret Harte delighted in the driving of Yuba Bill. But White was happier still perhaps in a few short stories like The Killer and The Ranch, which had so much of the flavor of the old Southwest. The Killer, the tale of Old Man Hooper who worked in the dark with hidden hands, evoked the murderous days of the Arizona border, and The Ranch was a permanent picture of one of the old California homesteads that had so much in common with the plantations of the South.