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AMERICAN PROPHET
The Life & Work of Carey McWilliams
By PETER RICHARDSON
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2005
University of Michigan
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-472-11524-2
Chapter One
COLORADO
Dotted with glacier lakes and valleys cut fifteen thousand years ago, the Flat Top Mountains in northwestern Colorado form a majestic wilderness populated by mule deer, elk, black bears, mountain lions, and golden eagles. At their highest elevations, the mountains are nearly barren cliffs and rock outcrops; farther down, the forests mix spruce, Douglas fir, aspen, and stands of Lodgepole pine. In the spring, the melting snow pack drains into small tributary creeks that flow through grasslands teeming with Oregon grape, blueberry, thimbleberry, and a rich assortment of wildflowers. The creeks form the headwaters of the Yampa River, which meanders north through the wetlands and wide valleys of the Upper Yampa River Basin, where the native Ute Indians spent their summers as far back as the fourteenth century. From there, the Yampa River heads due west, traversing dry sagebrush ranges and canyons before joining the Green River in Utah.
The prehistory of the Upper Yampa ended in 1865, when French trappers heard a chugging sound resembling that of a steamboat. The noise was produced by natural hot springs, and the name Steamboat Springs was born. A decade later, the first white settler built a cabin in the area, and a few years after that, Indian agent Nathan Meeker tried to convert the Utes to farming. When that proved unsuccessful, he called in the U.S. Army in September 1879. The same month, the Utes killed Meeker and seven other agency members in what became known as the Meeker Massacre. They also attacked troops heading for the area, killing nine men. When reinforcements arrived, they subdued the Utes and moved them to a reservation in Utah. Following that forced departure, a trickle of whites began to settle the Upper Yampa. Trappers gave way to miners, who plumbed the area's rich mineral resources. When the veins played out, many of the miners turned to ranching, and by the late nineteenth century, the town of Steamboat Springs had several hundred residents.
Like many western towns, Steamboat Springs attracted Americans in search of dry air, better health, and economic opportunity. Jeremiah Newby McWilliams, a young man with lung trouble from Plattsburg, Missouri, was one such resident. Born in 1865, he had worked in a men's clothing store in nearby Kansas City before arriving in Steamboat Springs in 1886, just seven years after the Meeker Massacre. The town then consisted of a livery stable, a stagecoach inn, a blacksmith shop, four saloons, and a dry goods store called the New York Emporium (ECM, 29). With a five-thousand-dollar stake borrowed from wealthy relatives, the twenty-one-year-old Jerry McWilliams and two partners bought the dry goods store. The store also hosted the local post office, and most of the county's residents passed through its doors to purchase goods or to collect mail.
Tall, energetic, and enterprising, Jerry McWilliams became acquainted with the local landowners as well as the town's most recent arrivals. Soon he was also dealing in cattle and real estate and canvassing the small town for willing investors. According to local historian John Rolfe Burroughs, whose father was McWilliams's business partner, Jerry McWilliams was "the only man in the county who could be in two places at the same time: at either end of Lincoln Avenue (Steamboat Springs' Main Street), intercepting strangers who came to town from either direction, ascertaining how much money they had, and seeing to it that it was invested in such a manner that he earned a commission on the transaction" (Burroughs 1962, 252).
In the fall of 1894, Jerry met Harriet Casley, an Iowa native who grew up in Beloit, Kansas. A normal school graduate and the town's new schoolteacher, the twenty-one-year-old was "an exceedingly attractive brunette" who drew attention in the small frontier town (Burroughs 1962, 253). In February 1895, in her first year on the job, she married Jerry. Her family had little in common with his, apart from a generally conservative outlook. Catholic and Republican, the Casleys were first- and second-generation immigrants; Harriet's mother was from Hamburg, and her father was born in New York State of French-Canadian parents. The McWilliams clan, in contrast, consisted of Scotch-Irish Democrats, mostly native-born Protestants of prerevolutionary stock. Toward the end of his life, Carey McWilliams described his paternal grandfather, "Captain Sam" McWilliams, as a "Gothic American type": a cantankerous, hard-shell Baptist who led Confederate troops and married a woman with a slave. "I can imagine no two couples more dissimilar than my paternal and maternal grandparents," McWilliams observed in his memoir. "If they had ever met, I don't know what they would have had to talk about except the weather and the family connection" (ECM, 23).
Jerry's retail business folded, and he turned to cattle and real estate fulltime. With initial support from the Carey family of Wyoming, one of the largest cattle operators in the region, he began buying and selling livestock. Along with two partners, both southerners, he also opened a real estate office and sold ranches in and around the area. The real estate business picked up following the announcement that a rail line would connect Denver and Steamboat Springs. In 1900, Jerry sold forty-one ranches, including five in one week, and added oil speculation to his portfolio of investment opportunities. The next year, he opened a butcher shop and, according to the local newspaper, acquired "one of the swellest rubber-tired buggies ever to reach Routt County" (Burroughs 1962, 254).
In January 1902, Jerry began building a family home on a ranch outside Steamboat Springs. The next month, Harriet gave birth to their first son, Samuel Walter Casley McWilliams, known as Casley. On December 13, 1905, she had a second son, Edmund Carey McWilliams. The first name, never used, was that of Jerry's brother, who ran a small newspaper in Missouri and was active in Democratic politics there. Later, Jerry claimed that his son's middle name derived not from the Carey family in Wyoming but from the Cary family in Colorado, which owned a large ranch west of Steamboat Springs and eventually sponsored him in state politics. "The logic escapes me, but so it came to be," Carey McWilliams noted in his memoir (ECM, 30).
In 1908, the rail line from Denver to Steamboat Springs was completed. Jerry arranged for a rail stop on his property and busily bought and sold cattle by the carload. He also became more involved in Democratic Party politics. Along with other prominent citizens, he helped select the candidates and delegates for county and state offices. In 1914, local banker J. H. Burroughs, who served for many years as chair of the county's Republican Central Committee, bought out Jerry's real estate partners. The McWilliams & Burroughs office soon became a place for conducting political business as well as land transactions. Burroughs's son described the office as follows:
A third of the front room was enclosed by a railing behind which there were desks, a safe, a typewriter, and the paraphernalia customarily found in an active business office. The larger area, which might be likened to a foyer, contained ten or a dozen captain's chairs ranged along the wall, with a big brass cuspidor between every second chair, above which elk, deer, and antelope heads and a stuffed duck or two hung on the wall. In the big display windows, various prize-winning specimens of agricultural produce—barley, oats, wheat, and alfalfa tied in neat sheaves—testified to the richness of Routt County soil. (Burroughs 1962, 255)
Carey's recollection, inscribed in his diary at age twenty-four, was more impressionistic and less flattering. For him, the office of McWilliams & Burroughs was a place of "musty old gents, scratching their balls, farting at the stove and doing double-entry bookkeeping" (June 6, 1930).
With its game trophies and sheaves of grain, the real estate office also symbolized the local residents' intimate if somewhat instrumental relationship with the land. Many local enterprises and activities moved with the seasons. The ranchers drove their cattle from their winter feedlots to the open sagebrush range west of Steamboat Springs, where the calves were born. In early summer, they rounded up the cattle and drove them back to the Yampa Valley and up into the mountains, where they grazed on the lush grasses. In late summer, they rounded up the steers again, drove them down to the valley, and shipped them by rail to Denver. The Rocky Mountain setting for this routine soon gave rise to another seasonal industry: skiing. In 1913, a Norwegian ski instructor named Carl Howelsen visited the area and perceived its potential as a resort. The following year, Steamboat Springs staged its first Winter Carnival, which combined elements of a county fair with winter sports competitions. Under Howelsen's influence, Carey and other local youngsters were soon practicing jumps and downhill runs. Storm Mountain, whose steep slopes vexed Jerry because they were unsuitable for cattle, was perfect for skiing. The mountain was later renamed Mount Werner after Bud Werner, the first American skier to gain attention in Europe. The Werner family eventually bought the McWilliams's ranch just outside Steamboat Springs.
The natural splendor made a deep impression on Carey, who developed a lifelong love of geography. As a young man, he recalled the vistas of his boyhood in glowing terms in Westways, a magazine for Southern California automobile club members.
That was a splendid region: sunsets, venison, strawberries, grouse, great ranches of purple sage, valley reverberating in spring with the roar of cascading waters, real mountain streams that never dry up, chokecherries, timberline flowers, the ineffable charm of the Indian summer, mountainous snows, the best skiing in America.
Carey also learned early on to appreciate "the authority of the land"—the power of terrain and climate to shape society. It would become a recurrent theme in his published writings and an almost daily concern in his private ones. Throughout his adult life, even his sparest diary entries took regular note of the weather, air, light, and landscapes that he observed.
A deeply restless man, Jerry McWilliams rarely paused to take in the scenery. One of his partners recalled that 90 percent of their business "was transacted while McWilliams stood at the door, his hat on the back of his head and his hand on the door knob, with the toe of one foot twisting impatiently around the heel of the other" (Burroughs 1962, 257). The local barber also remarked that Jerry's baldness was a blessing, as he could not sit still long enough for a trim. When he purchased a car, Jerry drove it as he had always ridden his prize horses: as fast as it would go. His Hupmobile clocked forty to forty-five miles per hour on the unpaved road between his ranch and his Steamboat Springs office, making him something of a local menace.
Jerry also cut a curious figure on his ranch. The cowhands, who were "enormously style-conscious," found his appearance ludicrous, and Carey learned to see him through their eyes.
He wore flat-heeled boots, for example. Wouldn't use spurs. His saddle and his stirrups were those of a farmer, just impossible, you know. If he tried to rope, he'd get himself all tangled up in the rope. He wore a coat and a vest, collar and a black tie, and a flat-brimmed black hat that, you know, a Mormon bishop would have worn. (HAT, 21)
Jerry's limited taste for alcohol, which he kept locked up along with his firearms, also distinguished him from the ranch hands. Even so, he commanded the respect of his employees, largely because he was an "absolutely, astonishingly phenomenal judge of livestock" (HAT, 21). When the First World War drove up beef prices, he began buying thousands of yearling steers from New Mexico and Arizona. Upon their arrival in Steamboat Springs, he fattened them up for a year and sold them for beef in Denver. Appraising his father's enterprise, Carey later recalled that it was "a great market while it lasted; one season we ran seventeen thousand head of cattle on the open range" (ECM, 31). During that time, Jerry became Steamboat Spring's richest and most prominent citizen.
Toward the end of his life, Carey described his parents as "hard-working, practical, energetic, no-nonsense types." Harriet "was a warm, friendly, kindly person; my father was no less friendly but often self-absorbed and less responsive." Their devotion to their sons was real but mostly unexpressed. Indeed, "any audible or visible show of affection was regarded somehow as bad form." There was little time for leisure, and their daily routines did not include one-on-one time with their children: "Neither had time to 'play' with us or to keep a close eye on our activities," McWilliams noted (ECM, 33). Even so, he described his privileged, unsupervised boyhood in positive terms and idealized his parents' hands-off approach to child rearing.
My parents were ideal parents in an ideal setting in a way because they were both very busy, no-nonsense types ... And they let us roam pretty wild, do what we wanted to do. After all, what the hell? What could we do to harm ourselves? We might break a leg or something, you know, but there were no social menaces of any kind. (HAT, 11)
The boys were assigned chores that included haying, milking the cows, mending fences, and taking part in cattle drives and roundups. Both were given a string of ponies, and Carey shod and groomed the four in his charge: Tram, Navajo, Dick, and Buttons. He later recalled that he and Casley spent "more time in the company of cowhands than we did with our parents" (ECM, 34). By all accounts, the McWilliams household reinforced hard work, autonomy, and emotional self-sufficiency at every turn, and young Carey learned his lessons well.
In 1916, Jerry McWilliams succeeded John Cary as state senator, and the family began spending winters in Denver, where Jerry also had a seat on the local stock exchange. By that time, the family's frequent trips to the capital had sparked Carey's affinity for city life, complete with fine hotels and steak dinners. Wintering there added another layer of charm, he recalled later: "The Christmas glitter, the bright lights, the wintertime background, made Denver seem like a fairyland city" (ECM, 35). He was less enthusiastic about the school that he and Casley attended in Denver. Jerry's friends had recommended Wolfe Hall Military Academy, also known as the Collegiate Military School for Boys, a private school run by Episcopalians. Decades later, Carey described it in unflattering terms.
It was grotesque. So far as the boarding pupils were concerned, you might refer to it as a quite expensive, high-class reformatory, [laughter] because these were kids who were from Wyoming and New Mexico and all around whose parents had apparently had quite a bit of difficulty with them. (HAT, 17-18)
The two brothers did not object, however. "My brother and I couldn't bring ourselves to tell our parents that they had made quite a misjudgment about this place, so we made the best of it" (18). The lack of communication is telling; by this account, the boys preferred to attend a school they disliked rather than discuss the matter with their parents. Both boys eventually graduated from Steamboat Springs High School, but Carey had positive memories of one Wolfe Hall teacher, a graduate of Bowdoin and Harvard and "quite a literary kind of guy" (18).
Carey, too, was becoming quite a literary kind of guy. Ever the schoolteacher, Harriet read Twain, Scott, and Cooper to the boys, and the bookshelf at home included Dickens, George Eliot, and popular Westerns by Owen Wister and others. Carey would later indicate, however, that nothing in his home environment encouraged serious reading or study.
It is hardly necessary to say that I did not grow up in an intellectual household. My father glanced at local newspapers and occasionally read the Denver papers. But I have few memories of seeing him with a book in his hand. My mother, a high-school graduate, always subscribed to one or more popular magazines and liked to read but found little time for it. (ECM, 36)
Nor did Jerry encourage Carey's early dreams of becoming a writer. The plan was that Casley would take over the ranching operation and Carey would run the family's real estate business. Carey was more interested in his uncle's newspaper back in Missouri, but Jerry considered journalism an unpromising profession composed mostly of riffraff. As a young man, Carey noted in his writing journal that his father "viewed with the greatest disfavor my leanings toward the purple—the journalic [sic], literary life. The only composition of mine he ever read was a paper of mine on Theo. Roosevelt—(written when about 15)—which he praised rather guardedly—as he never liked Roosevelt."
Casley later recalled Carey's predilection for reading and the indoor life more generally.
My younger brother seemed to have his nose in a book most of the time. He had a fine string of cowhorses and made a good hand. However, he did not get the thrill and excitement I did out of being a cowboy. At one time he took piano lessons. They were discontinued for 2 reasons, he thought they were sissified and Harriet wanted him to get outdoors more. Later he regretted this action ... Books, music, politics and social life (girls) were far more entertaining and enjoyable.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from AMERICAN PROPHET by PETER RICHARDSON Copyright © 2005
by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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