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White provides a first-hand account of the cattle trail in his chapter on “The Drive,” from Arizona Nights (New York: McClure and The Outing Publishing Company, 1907), pages 90-107. This reminiscence provides a rich evocation of daily experience, and his writing is generally more literary and less vernacular than Charlie Siringo's A Texas Cowboy (1885), Andy Adams' Log of a Cowboy (1903), or Teddy Blue Abbot's We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher (1939). Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, when the great white pine forests were still standing, White admired those traits in his millionaire lumberman father that he later tried to exemplify in his fictional heroes: “energy, vitality, honesty, good judgment, and virility” (Alter, Stewart 6). As a young boy, he had no formal education until high school, learning from tutors at home or on the road. When he was eleven, the family moved to a California ranch for four years, where he learned to ride and began a life-long habit of keeping a journal of daily experiences. Returning to his home town for high school, he developed ornithology as a hobby, spending hours on field trips and stuffing specimens. He attended the University of Michigan with the goal of becoming a writer, but none of his fiction was published before graduating in 1895. He spent a year working in a Chicago meat-packing plant, serving as an accountant in his father’s office, and prospecting for gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota. In 1896, he attended Columbia University Law School, where he received some encouragement in a writing course. After a year, he quit school when he sold the serial rights of his first novel, The Westerners (1901), to Munsey’s Magazine for $500. Very much the work of a novice, this wagon-train adventure story is marred by coincidence as a plot device, “surprising brutality,” inconsistent viewpoint, and “philosophic digressions” (6-7, 12). What he did learn from this work, based loosely on his mining experience, was to rely on his own knowledge in his writing. In 1901, he spent the winter working as a lumberjack in the north woods of Michigan. Writing from four to eight in the morning before work, he turned this experience into The Blazed Trail (1902), “the classic novel of the logging industry” (Alter, Stewart 16) that became a best-seller. This work also presented the expertise that he put into practice from 1905 to 1909 as a federal Forest Reserves inspector (37). Besides exposing the dishonest ruthlessness of the industry in muckraking fashion, the novel describes the dangers and technical details of logging, balanced by “lyrical sections which evoke the forest as a living and mysterious entity” (18). After this novel, White felt himself fairly established as a writer, so he could wander in search of more adventures or settle, as he saw fit. In 1903, he visited his parents in Santa Barbara, and from there took trips to the Sierras and to Arizona. That same year he met and courted Elizabeth Calvert Grant, a wealthy city girl from Newport, Rhode Island. They were wed in 1904 and honeymooned by roughing it in the Sierras, where Betty rose to the challenge and proved her own New England endurance. They settled in Burlingame, where White was to live and write for nearly five decades, even though he was an inveterate traveler. Like Roosevelt, he embraced the “strenuous life,” making rugged treks in such frontiers as Alaska and even Africa. Much of this adventure was translated into his writing of both fiction and non-fiction. (7-9, 38-40). From his home base, in 1904 and 1905 he took two trips to Arizona to work as a cowboy on Captain W. H. McKittick’s ranch. His notebooks for this period are full of folklore, tall tales that he heard, and cowboy lingo (Alter, Stewart 27), which formed the basis for Arizona Nights (1907), a series of stories loosely connected by the narrative device of different speakers swapping yarns around the campfire at the end of each trail-riding day. There is a similar structure to Andy Adams’ The Log of a Cowboy (1903), although the latter Texas novel employs a more consistent narrator and seems to derive more from the personal experience of the author. While both books suffer from an anecdotal style—supplying vignettes of typical cowboy life, rather than a consistent and unified narrative—there are excellent individual chapters in each. Both may have taken their model from Charlie Siringo’s earlier and more realistic A Texas Cowboy (1885), which is more coherent in presenting a sequential, if episodic, biography of the author’s roving adventurous life, progressing from wrangler to foreman to rustler-hunter. While White’s own work is probably the least nitty-gritty in genuine details, “The Drive” chapter effectively evokes the psychological experience and rhythms of work in the outdoors. Living in California, White was engrossed with its history, and this fascination fed into sixteen fiction and non-fiction works of varying quality. Attempting to achieve historical accuracy in his stories, he did research at the Stanford University library. In 1913, he began publishing historical fiction set in his adopted state, but this activity was interrupted by World War I, when he served as a major in the artillery. His best novels did not come until the Andy Burnett series, beginning with The Long Rifle (1932). Set initially in 1822, Andy inherits Daniel Boone’s famous firearm through his grandfather, who had served as Boone’s scout. In this and the other three novels of the series, the rifle functions as “a symbol of the pioneer spirit which is Andy’s heritage and which dictates his character” (Alter, Stewart 33). This first story relates how the young man leaves the tyranny of his stepfather in Pennsylvania, learns the skills of the mountain man from two old-timers, helps to open the Santa Fe trail, explores the Rockies, and becomes a “white Indian” under the tutelage of a Blackfeet tribe. The second novel, Ranchero (1933) follows Andy through his transition to California rancher in the 1830s. Folded Hills (1934), probably the best novel in the series, continues the saga with a focus on cultural conflict, especially in the figure of Andy’s son Djo, who represents the tension between Anglo rationality and his Hispanic mother’s emotional nature. This story records the movement of California toward statehood and the achievement of manifest destiny as American expansion met the Pacific. The final and weakest novel of the series, Stampede (1942) presents Andy as a wise, conservative figure of the older generation, as he defends his hard-won lands against squatters. As in his earliest work, this novel uses coincidence to resolve the plot. Over all, The Saga of Andy Burnett (1947)—as the collected series is called—presents a historically realistic picture of the California setting, including its geographic, bicultural, and emotional meanings. Nonetheless, these works are limited by White’s depiction of adventure rather than exploring human nature in his characters (32-35, 44). In the last phase of his career White turned to writing philosophical works about psychic research and spiritual communication, as in his best-seller The Unobstructed Universe (1940). Beginning in 1919, he and his wife Betty first experimented with levitation and ouija boards; in Credo (1925), he transcribed a message received through Betty as a spiritual medium. White continued to write about their spiritual explorations through the 1940s (Alter, Stewart 9, 42-43). In his “gossipy” autobiography Speaking for Myself (1945), he provided an accessible context for these experiences when he explained why he enjoyed the writing profession: “I am just enough of a mystic to believe that the establishment of even unknown bonds of affinity is somehow strengthening to the soul” (qtd. in Tuska and Piekarski 354). Alter, Judy. Stewart Edward White. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1975. Tuska, Jon, and Vicki Piekarski, eds.
“Stewart Edward White.” Encyclopedia
of Frontier and Western Fiction. New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1983. 352-54 |