Poems of the Week: The West

This week I thought we would talk about poems of the American (including Canadian!) West. To say the least, this is a field that owes little to the English models! Doesn't really have much to do with Wordsworth, or even Larkin, come to that. So far as California is concerned, the history really began in the middle of the nineteenth century: and one of the key people in the early days was Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835-1910).

Clemens was born in Hannibal, on the west bank of the Missouri, where at the age of 13 he became a full-time apprentice to a local printer. When his older brother Orion established the Hannibal Journal, Clemens became a compositor for the paper. After working for a period as an itinerant printer, he rejoined Orion in Keokuk, Iowa, and in 1856 he started wandering again with a commission to write some comic travel letters for the Keokuk Daily Post. However, right after this started, he signed up as an apprentice to a steamboat pilot, and for four years he plied the Mississippi river. In 1861, he joined Orion on a trip to the Nevada Territory, and became a writer for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, and there, on February 3rd, 1863, he created the pen name 'Mark Twain'. In 1864 he left Nevada for California, where he made regular trips between San Francisco and a small mountain cabin near the town of Angels Camp. The cabin is still there, or at least it was when I was last in the area a few years ago.

It was in the cabin that he wrote a short piece called The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County: the premise was that the story had been told to Twain by one Simon Wheeler:

"I found Simon Wheeler dozing comfortably by the bar-room stove of the dilapidated tavern in the decayed mining camp of Angel's, and I noticed that he was fat and bald-headed, and had an expression of winning gentleness and simplicity upon his tranquil countenance."

The story goes on to tell how a certain Jim Smiley, who was known for gambling on the (concealed) prowess of various animals - a racehorse, a fighting dog - had found a frog capable of remarkable jumps. He makes a wager with a stranger, who takes advantage of being left alone for a time with the frog by pouring buckshot down its throat so the weighed-down animal was unable to jump.

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County was first published in 1865 and it made him immediately famous. Even today, "The world-famous Calaveras County Fair & Jumping Frog Jubilee is held the third weekend in May of each year at the Calaveras County Fairgrounds, better known as Frogtown".

OK, so it isn't a poem. But it does convey the sort of atmosphere of the far West at that time. Another writer who moved to California at more or less the same time was Bret Harte (originally Francis Brett Harte) (1836 - 1902) who was born in Albany, New York. In 1854 he left New York for California, and went into the mining country on a brief trip which legend has expanded into a lengthy participation in, and intimate knowledge of, camp life. (As usual, I draw much of the biographical information in this piece from Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature.) In about 1860 he moved to San Francisco, where he edited the periodical Californian, for which he engaged Mark Twain to write weekly articles. In 1868, he was named editor of the Overland Monthly, and for it he wrote The Luck of Roaring Camp and The Outcasts of Poker Flat. In an earlier article in this series, I used a poem of his entitled Plain Language From Truthful James, which begins:

I reside at Table Mountain, and my name is Truthful James;
I am not up to small deceit, or any sinful games;

I said I would include the North West in this selection, and here the name of Robert William Service (1874 - 1958) comes to mind. Again, he migrated to the West when he was a young man, in 1894, from his birthplace in Preston, England. His first verse collection, Songs of a Sourdough, appeared in 1907, and this was soon followed by Ballads of a Cheechako, in 1909. These were both enormously popular. Once again, he is a poet who has appeared in these pages before, and I quoted his most famous poem, The Shooting of Dan McGrew. Although it is often said that he spent eight years in the Yukon, he was employed by the Canadian Bank of Commerce and stationed in Whitehorse, Yukon, somewhat different from the image in his poetry of the mining camp - just as in the case of Bret Harte! Actually, his travels in the west were rather different from those in the 'brief biographies', as I said in my earlier article, and in particular his actual stay in the Yukon appears to have been significantly briefer than generally supposed. Here is a chronology from the Robert W. Service home page of this period in his life:

1896 March 31: At the age of 22, he resigns from the bank (the Stobcross branch of the Commercial Bank of Scotland) to go to Canada with the idea of ranching. He departs on the SS Concordia a few months later and lands in Montreal with $5 and "the clothes he stands in."

1896 May: Takes a train to Winnipeg, then to Calgary, then to Vancouver Island, and Victoria. He becomes a farm laborer.

1897: Moves to a more remote farm nearer "the wilderness." He learns to play the banjo.

1897: Works on a dairy farm on the outskirts of Duncan. He becomes a "cow-juice jerker."

1897: Moves to Seattle, arrives with $50. Then to San Francisco where he spends one month. Then on to Los Angeles where he takes work digging a tunnel to the San Gabriel River.

1897: Works at various manual labor jobs; picking oranges, sandwich maker, dishwasher.

1897: Places an advertisement as a tutor and accepts a job in San Diego tutoring 3 "girls." It turns out the "girls" are in the employ of a high-class bordello.

1898-1900: Spends almost 2 years traveling throughout the American Southwest taking various jobs.

1903 October: Travels to Victoria. Works on roads. Studies at the university, but quits. Flat-broke and jobless in Vancouver, Service decides to try banking again. He applies rather diffidently to the Bank of Commerce and, to his astonishment, is hired immediately.

1905 Transferred to the Yukon bank branch at Whitehorse. Service revels in his new life in the Yukon. Although he participates in all the social activities of Whitehorse, he is happiest when he is alone, tramping through the woods, delighting in the vast solitude of the North.

1906-1907: One day, when he is asked to recite at a church concert, a friend suggests that Service write a poem himself - "something about our own bit of earth . . . There's a rich paystreak waiting for someone to work . . ." Intrigued, Service started thinking. Then came inspiration. "It was a Saturday night, and from the various bars I heard sounds of revelry. The line popped into my mind: 'A bunch of the boys were whooping it up' and it stuck there. Good enough for a start." Wanting a quiet place to work, Service went to his teller's cage at the bank. But he had forgotten the night guard. The startled man drew his revolver and fired. "Fortunately he was a poor shot or The Shooting of Dan McGrew might never have been written .... Anyhow, with the sensation of a bullet whizzing past my head, and a detonation ringing in my ears, the ballad was achieved ...."

My last poet for this week is Ernest Lawrence Thayer (1863 - 1940). He was the son of a prosperous mill owner. His family eventually moved to Worcester, Massachusetts where his father ran several wool mills.

Ernest graduated magna cum laude with a major in philosophy in 1885. At Harvard he edited the college humor magazine, the Harvard Lampoon. The eminent American philosopher William James was a teacher and friend. Other classmates included William Randolph Hearst and George Santayana.

After college, and typical of the sons of the well-to-do, Ernest went abroad and settled for a time in Paris. Despite his father's desire to have him work in the family business, Ernest took a job writing humor pieces for his college friend Hearst, who was now running the San Francisco Examiner newspaper. Returning to Worcester in 1888, Thayer wrote Casey at the Bat in May and Hearst published it in the June 3, 1888 edition of his newspaper. Thayer wrote his columns for the newspaper using the pseudonym "Phin" and it would be several years before the true authorship of "Casey" would be determined. In the newspaper, it follows a story about the Republican national convention, which would renominate President Grover Cleveland, and precedes an acerbic verse by Ambrose Bierce.

Here is a somewhat different spin on the story, by William Twombly in The Sporting News, July 5th, 1975:

"According to an old man's recollections, made more than half a century after he dropped out of the newspaper business, it was one of those idyllic days on the bay, with low clouds scudding off toward the mountains and gingerbread ferry boats passing each other on waters as yet undefiled by bridge pilings. It was unusually hot, and Ernest Thayer took a seat by an open window in the San Francisco Examiner's crowded city room.

This was that glorious year 1888, and William Randolph Hearst had come home from college in the East to rescue a mundane newspaper which his father considered to be the least of the family's holdings. He had brought with him several friends from Harvard, including Thayer, who was enjoying the life of a Western journalist before returning home to run his own father's woolen mills in Worcester, Mass. On the morning when he was to have his one brief contact with immortality, Thayer admitted that he was dull of mood and melancholy of spirit.

Under the slam-bang techniques of his friend Hearst, the once-sickly Examiner was quickly becoming San Francisco's leading newspaper. However, the fun was ending for Thayer. It was already in his mind that he ought to be going back to New England. He had indulged himself for three years, writing satirical verse and humorous sketches. Now it was time to turn to something serious, and he was resisting the inevitable with every sliver of his system.

Slowly he began to scribble with pen a snide item about the editor of the Lake County Avalanche, who had used coarse language to denounce the editor of the Sonoma Democrat for using, of all things, coarse language. That suited Thayer fine as a lead item. Usually, he followed it with a bit of verse, some bright and senseless doggerel."

"Throughout his life, as the poem was corrupted, altered, parodied and attributed to others, Thayer tried to ignore it.

'The poem has absolutely no basis in fact. The verses owe their existence to my enthusiasm for college baseball,' he finally wrote, five years before his death in 1940. 'In my brief connection with the Examiner, I put out large quantities of nonsense, both prose and verse. In general quality Casey is neither better nor worse than much of the other stuff. Its persistent vogue is simply unaccountable and it would be hard to say if it has given me more pleasure than annoyance.'"

So, anyway, I have chosen three poems for this week: Service's The Cremation of Sam McGee; Bret Harte's The Heathen Chinee; and last (but by no means least) Ernest Lawrence Thayer's Casey at the Bat.

Hope you enjoy them!

The Cremation of Sam McGee

The Heathen Chinee

Casey At The Bat