INTRODUCTION
BY WILLIAM W. SAVAGE, JR. AND JAMES H. LAZALIER
BAYARD TAYLOR (1825—1878) was surely the best-known traveler of his day. He preferred to think of himself as a poet and a novelist; and he expected to be remembered for the quality of his verse. But his travel writing initiated and sustained his literary career and became his only enduring legacy. In Colorado: A Summer trip, an account of his western travels during June and July of 1866, we have a small example of the best of it.
A Pennsylvania-born son of a farmer-cum-sheriff, Bayard Taylor decided early on to abandon the land to siblings and seek his fortune in proximity to a printing press. Journalism seemed to beckon, but he found the work irregular. Without money to further his education, he apprenticed himself to a printer and tried producing his own collections of poetry, available to patrons of the arts by subscription only. If that were not a clearly marked literary dead-end, it seemed close enough for fiscal discomfort; so Taylor bought up his apprenticeship and launched a new career that would bring him to national prominence in remarkably short order.
At the age of nineteen, Taylor managed to bankroll a trip to Europe by securing advances from such publications as Saturday Evening Post and Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune for a series of letters he proposed to send back recounting his adventures abroad. The experience was to be for Taylor the equivalent of a college education, albeit one acquired on a shoestring. His travels took him to England, Germany, Austria, Italy, and France, and through two years of his life. It was a walking tour; and it carried Taylor away from the beaten path, in search of affordable accommodations. Going the odd way to strange places allowed Taylor to report on matters that came as news to cognoscenti. His youth was an obvious asset (though at first it must not have seemed so to his editors), contributing both enthusiasm and a fresh perspective. The mixture worked: Taylor’s letters were enormously popular, and so was the book he made of them in 1846.1
During the next dozen years, Taylor journeyed to California at Greeley’s request (before he cribbed "Go west, young man" from John Babson Lane Soul) to view the gold rush; to central Africa and the region of the White Nile; to Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain; to China and thence, with Matthew C. Perry, to the opening of Japan; to the Scandinavian countries; to Crete, Greece, and Russia. Among the reading public, he became known as the "Great American Traveler," a cognomen he abhorred as unfit for a man of letters — especially for the man of letters he supposed himself to be. But the pattern of travel was firmly set, and Taylor would not be able to break it. Travel writing was his forte. Moreover, it was what his public expected; and, for his part, with bills to pay, Taylor could find no more lucrative literary pastime.
Taylor learned early in the game to exploit each trip at least three times. First, he sold the letters his travels spawned to newspapers and magazines. Later, he published the letters in book form. Finally, he sifted and refined the material for presentation on the lecture circuit. Taylor was a keen observer and a facile writer and thus could interest publishers and sustain an audience in the great age of the armchair traveler, when sedentary Americans preferred to let somebody else enjoy the infelicities of daily existence in remote and exotic locales. Over the years, Taylor’s travel writing proved to be his only reliable source of income (aside from occasional employment as a salaried journalist), and he used it to buy time for the pursuit of what he considered his substantial interests, including a long-term project — the translation of Goethe’s Faust.2 The desire for a revenue-producing holiday from this particular unpaid chore (he was trying for English rhymes with the meter of the German) took Taylor to Colorado in 1866.
Bayard Taylor would have preferred not to travel — or at least not to be obliged to write about it. Ideally he wanted a sinecure, a government post of some sort, to bring economic stability to his life and finance his serious work. In 1878, he received appointment as minister to Germany. Taylor was, of course, delighted. The post was perfect for a Germanophile with plans for a biography of Goethe; but as it happened, he would not live to enjoy it. Too much travel and too much writing — fifty books in his fifty-three years, together with hundreds if not thousands of periodical publications, to say nothing of better than twenty-thousand known letters — had taken their toll. And, to be candid about it, there had been entirely too much liquor along the way. Taylor drank like a fish, praising all the while the abundant virtues of alcohol for a man of letters. (It was also an essential item of the traveler’s baggage, a nostrum for the ills of the road.) In any event, his health was broken, and he died after only a few months in Germany. His obituary in the New York Times reported that his passing was "peaceful and painless," but in view of the important work he thought he was leaving unfinished, it could not have been.3
Modern biographers, perhaps drawn to Taylor initially by the phenomenon of his sudden rise to literary prominence, seem compelled to account for the equally meteoric decline in his popularity, a long slide toward literary oblivion to be curbed at last by neither the quality nor the quantity of his work. To Richmond Croom Beatty, Taylor was "laureate of the Gilded Age" only because he was a prisoner of the times, unable to reach beyond the shallow conventions of his day to speak meaningfully to us in ours.4 Others have suggested that Taylor was the eventual victim of his own bloated opinion of his writing. Editors seldom if ever rejected anything Taylor sent them because if he and they were not already close personal friends, each knew somebody who knew the other.5 Therefore, he received kid-glove treatment when his work deserved vigorous application of the blue pencil; and because of that, Taylor came to think of his literary efforts as uniformly good. According to this theory, Taylor may have been a posthumous victim of changing taste; but he was also laid even lower in the century after his death by a fraternity of critics recanting the overblown compliments of his pals, their predecessors.6 All of that may be true enough with regard to his poetry and fiction; but the same brush should not tar his travel writing. It is different stuff and deserves a different sort of consideration.
Bayard Taylor was a mediocre novelist and a worse poet, to whom the word saccharine cannot begin to do justice.7 As a translator, his greatest achievement was to turn Goethe’s Faust into fairly bad English verse, although he did it largely from memory, and that was impressive.8 In contrast, the travel narratives sparkle with verve and gusto, even when Taylor claimed to be thoroughly jaded by the experiences that yielded them. Frivolous and altogether ephemeral he may have thought them to be, the travel books were not without value beyond the immediate gratification of Taylor’s devoted following. They encapsulate place and time for the modern reader and thus they are history; but still they couch Taylor’s observations in a style so crisp and fresh that it hardly smacks of the nineteenth century at all. As the fate of Ozymandias demonstrated to Shelley’s satisfaction, a man may not know which of his works will survive; but in Taylor’s case, if anything calls to question his literary judgment, it must be his own denigration of the travel books and his apparent misunderstanding of the merits of his observations of diverse parts of the globe.
Colorado: A Summer Trip is casually dismissed by most of Taylor’s biographers as a minor work — not even a thing to be damned by faint praise.9 Specialists in Western Americana have not exactly ignored the book, but neither have they rushed forward to tout its utility.10 One modern critic has had the temerity to call it "a classic of American overland adventure," but similar assessments are few and far between.11 Nevertheless, there is much in Taylor’s little book to recommend it and certainly to justify its reconsideration.
First, Colorado: A Summer Trip offers insight into Taylor’s travel-narrative procedures. This book fits the classic Taylor mold. Its genesis is to be found in letters to Greeley’s Tribune; and although we have his wife’s testimony to the effect that recreation, not remuneration, provided the motive for the journey,12 it is clear that he approached the experience as an occasion for profit. Vacation or not, it led first to letters and then to the book; and Taylor admitted throughout the account to lecturing at every opportunity. That, together with his frequent comments upon the price of western food, lodging, and transportation, may indicate the extent to which money (or his lack of it) occupied his mind. Add to that the strenuous nature of his Colorado travels — something that could not fail to appeal to armchair adventurers —and we have a picture, not of a literary figure off to banish care with a bit of rustic relaxation, but of a professional travel writer plying his trade. The only respite Taylor found in Colorado was from his hard work on Faust and the contemplation of his next novel.
Then there are Taylor’s descriptions and asides. The land was explained, the people described, their economies limned; and relevant comparisons were made, drawn from Taylor’s extensive inventory of places previously considered. Beyond that, he touched upon any number of fascinating topics: the Great American Desert of Stephen Long’s imaginings, the persistence of the myth, and the need for a certificate of its death to verify what anyone could plainly see; the possible routes of the Union Pacific Railroad then under construction and what that marvel would mean to the development of the West; and Colorado’s impending designation as America’s Switzerland, with all that such a label implied. The book’s title suggests the mundane, but nothing refracted by the lens of Taylor’s practical eye could remain the slightest bit prosaic: A little girl before a dugout, claiming to need no doll since prairie dogs and horses were better playmates, becomes a figure to arrest attention — first Taylor’s, then ours; and owing to such magic we allow ourselves to follow where he goes.
Taylor’s account stands as a world-class observer’s first-class treatment of territory that few were competing to present to a literate and sophisticated constituency. He visited Colorado at a time when the mining industry was in hiatus. Lesser men might have bemoaned their bad luck, but Taylor took things as he found them; and here was a chance to see the place less cluttered with the distractions of economic boom than it might otherwise have been — cluttered by the miners, that is. Their earlier ravages upon the land were only too evident. Indeed, Taylor preferred a West without white men scrambling over every rock and splashing through each rill in search of precious metal or anything else. He supposed that Colorado would be open to "general travel" as early as 1868 and accessible by rail from New York City for any with the money and four days to invest in travel time. Civilization loomed just over the horizon, as it were. "Therefore, I am doubly glad that I have come now," he wrote, "while there are still buffaloes and danger of Indians on the Plains, camp-fires to build in the mountains, rivers to swim, and landscapes to enjoy, which have never yet been described."13 In effect, Taylor offered history before it was too late.
The frontier and the prospect of its passing were clearly of some interest to Taylor, who in his time had seen more wildernesses than one. The Great American Desert, comparison informed him, was hardly that at all; and comparison taught other lessons as well. In Colorado, Taylor saw something of the frontier as process, as suggested by this passage:
The degree of refinement which I have found in the remote mining districts of Colorado has been a great surprise. California, after ten years’ settlement, retained a proportion of the rough, original mining element; but Montana has acted as a social strainer to Colorado; or, rather, as a miner’s pan, shaking out a vast deal of dirt and leaving the gold behind. Mr. Leonhardy and his neighbors live in rude cabins, but they do not therefore relinquish the the graces of life. It is only the half-cultivated who, under such circumstances, relapse toward barbarism. Mountain life soon rubs off the veneering, and we know of what wood men are made.14
Here, by three decades, Bayard Taylor both anticipated and refuted some of the pronouncements of Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian who invented the frontier as an academic pastime. In his 1893 essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," Turner argued that "at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man," overwhelming the European colonist and reducing him to the level of the Indian (an animal, to Turner, an item of fauna), before allowing him back up the ladder of civilization, rung by rung, to emerge, not as the European he had been at the beginning of the process, but as "a new product that is American."15 Taylor, who had seen more of the world than Turner ever would, could not have accepted such a notion. In his experience, a gentleman remained a gentleman despite the frontier. Only one who was a rude fellow to start with would be adversely affected by frontier influence. Economic booms might lure a bum from one kind of frontier to another, but a bum he would remain, regardless of remote venue. It was Charles Darwin’s wisdom that an organism in any environment had but three choices: move, adapt, or die. Turner would judge adaptation to be the principal characteristic of the westering American, but in 1866 Taylor argued for the subversion of the entire process.16 Ruffians moved, feeling no compulsion to adapt — or to adapt further — to circumstances already so central to their status as riffraff. Gentlemen, in contrast, neither succumbed to Nature nor adapted to it, nor were they provoked to move. It was as if wilderness made way for gentlemen. Ruffians might make their own way, but to nobody’s great advantage and certainly not to civilization’s. Neither class contributed to the passing of the frontier, in Taylor’s view: not gentlemen, because they made no alteration of the environment; and not ruffians, because they always went quickly off in pursuit of the next thing. On the contrary, the railroad, steady and mechanical, would mark the end of the frontier, overwhelming it with sheer numbers of immigrants willing to make the trip.
Turner resided near the frontier during his formative years. It is perhaps worth noting that the tranquil, nearly genteel frontier Taylor saw during the summer of 1866 bore little resemblance to the boisterous and sometimes violent one observed that same summer by five-year-old Fred Turner, romping in the dusty streets of Portage, Wisconsin.17 Perhaps Taylor was too jaded to notice any real unpleasantness, or perhaps he did not care to offend his readers by remarking upon it. Whatever the case, not even a stagecoach ride with the notorious John M. Chivington, responsible for the Sand Creek Massacre of hundreds of Cheyenne men, women, and children in 1864, could move Taylor to a recitation of blood-and-thunder yarns about the West. If they discussed more than the railroad’s progress, Taylor did not report it. Nor did the Indians Taylor encountered afford many possibilities. As he told his wife, they were all friendly.18
Something should be said of Bayard Taylor’s principal companions during his weeks in Colorado. The "Mr. Beard" of the text was William Holbrook Beard (1824—1900), one of the noted artists of the day. He was, by all accounts, along to paint landscapes, although nobody nowadays seems to know whatever became of his Colorado pictures. They were not included in Taylor’s book, and while some claimed to have seen them (Taylor could hardly have missed them), their whereabouts remain a minor mystery.19
By 1866, Beard’s reputation rested largely on his talents as a painter of anthropomorphic animals, a line of work to which he had turned as a failed portraitist and in which he seemed inextricably mired whenever it came to making money.20 As an artist who wished to be known for something other than what he did best, he had much in common with the Great American Traveler. The two men were entirely different physical specimens, however. Nine months Taylor’s senior, Beard offered no match for the writer’s stamina; and the business of packing canvas and brushes on horseback through the wilderness appears to have worn him to a frazzle. "Poor Beard," Taylor wrote his wife after one of their adventures, "is used up — he can’t even sketch."21 Perhaps the contentious Arapaho mare, of which Taylor so often complained, had helped to rattle the artist, troubling his mind with visions of anthropomorphic demon-horses.
The expert mountaineer and the party’s guide through the Colorado outback was William Newton Byers (1831—1903), editor and publisher of the Rocky Mountain News.22 Byers had arrived in Denver from Omaha during the gold rush of 1859 with a wagonload of printing equipment; had established his shop on an upper floor of a saloon operated by legendary mountain man and Indian fighter Richens Lacy "Uncle Dick" Wootton; and had beaten the competition to produce the first newspaper in Colorado by just about twenty minutes. At a time when eastern papers sold for a penny or two or three, Byers had charged twenty-five cents for his sheet, owing to the expense of having national and international news reports brought by messenger from the Fort Laramie post office — the nearest one, but still some 225 miles away. Soon enough, Denver obtained its own post office; and in 1866 Byers was serving as the city’s postmaster. An indefatigable booster of Colorado’s political fortunes, he was also during that year involved in one of a continuing series of attempts by locals to attain statehood for the territory. Doubtless he told Bayard Taylor everything he needed to know about the bright and shining future of America’s Switzerland.
It was Byers the outdoorsman, not "poor Beard" or the stout and tippling Taylor, who was nearly drowned beneath the icy waters of the Blue River when his horse lost its footing and was swept downstream.23 Taylor counted himself fortunate to have avoided a similar mishap. The fact was that Taylor, who had circled the globe en route to visiting every place worth seeing and more than a few that were not, had never experienced greater difficulty in getting about than he had in Colorado. "I never knew what rough travel was, before," he confided in a letter to his wife.24 If Byers, with all his skill, had been lucky to survive the Blue River, then Taylor must have felt positively blessed to be able to make it back to Pennsylvania.
Bayard Taylor was a better travel writer than most of his contemporaries and his immediate heirs. If we eliminate Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) as something more — and less — than a travel book, we still find Taylor’s Western efforts superior to such items as Horace Greeley’s An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859 (1860), a useful volume for comparison, since Greeley, too, visited Colorado. Greeley’s newspaper background might excuse his tendency to pontificate — he wrote his own editorials, remember, and he had plenty of opinions, especially where the West was concerned. But we know that Taylor had a similar background. Indeed, he was often Greeley’s employee, and when he was, he wrote the Tribune editorials when Greeley was otherwise occupied.25 Yet, the drum Taylor beat in his book was a snare in counterpoint to Greeley’s timpani. Greeley, for example, held that there was no hope for the Indian, an impediment, after all, to the progress of white settlers whose homesteads were a favorite Greeley cause. Indeed, the development of the West, generally, seemed a Greeley obsession.26 Taylor hoped to see things and report them before development arrived; and he never met an Indian he could not tolerate.27
Colorado: A Summer Trip is far more insightful, thoughtful, and judicious (to say nothing of fair) than Richard Harding Davis’s The West from a Car-Window (1892), which is taken to be thoroughly representative of nineteenth-century journalistic travel writing. Davis affected a snobbish, condescending manner. An unrepentant eastern elitist, he believed — and frequently asserted — that any man would be better off as a peon in the poorest and lowliest of New York slums than he would be as a prince in some rowdy western backwater.28 For all he saw of the West, Davis might as well never have climbed off the train. For all that he understood of the West, some would argue that he never did.29 About Bayard Taylor, aboard his sore-footed Indian pony, we have considerably fewer doubts. Unlike Davis, who seldom if ever knew whereof he spoke, Taylor knew almost exactly, and him we gladly embrace as the reliable guide.
A hundred years ago, a Bayard Taylor travel book could be counted upon to provide a good read. That is no less true today. Colorado: A Summer Trip is a zesty morsel of history, and for the modern Coloradan a word-portrait of yesteryear, a useful reminder of the origins called heritage. It is worthwhile, as well, as an example from a rich tradition of travel literature, a forebear of the contributions of Burton Holmes, Lowell Thomas, Harry Franck, and Richard Halliburton — a form of diversion rendered quaint these days by the cavalier meanderings of television and sustained in print only by National Geographic and the occasional railroad opus of Paul Theroux. Because he was good at it, Taylor deserves an evening and the chance to take us elsewhere.
NOTES
The text of Colorado: A Summer Trip is reproduced from the edition published in New York edition published in New York by G. P. Putnam and Son in January 1867.
1. Bayard Taylor, Views Afoot; or Europe Seen with Knapsack and Staff (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1846). Much was made of the fact that young Taylor’s version of the Grand Tour was accomplished at a cost of only $500, when the high-falutin’ might reasonably expect to pay a minimum of $5,000. See also Sharon Ann Tumulty, "From Persia to Peoria: Bayard Taylor as Travel Writer," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Delaware, 1971.
2. William Charvat has referred to the "false dualism" of Taylor and other young writers of his day. It grew from "subsidizing their unprofitable’art’ by grinding out commercially successful work of which they were contemptuous." Indeed, Taylor was Charvat’s primary example: "Bayard Taylor was humiliated that on his lecture tours women swooned, and cried, ‘There he is! That’s him!’ And he complained that lecturing, which built him a fifteen-thousand-dollar country house, was destroying his poetry, which he never wrote for money." Charvat, ‘The People’s Patronage," in Robert E. Spiller, Willard Thorp, et al. (eds.), Literary History of the United States: History, 3d ed. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1963), p. 524.
3. New York Times, December 20, 1878, p. 1.
4. Richmond Croom Beatty, Bayard Taylor: Laureate of the Gilded Age (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1936).
5. When P. T. Barnum brought Jenny Lind to New York, there was the predictable ballyhoo of a contest to see who could write the best song for her to sing, and Bayard Taylor won it. Taylor "gave the number of disappointed entrants as 752; and he probably knew, for his publisher and his editorial associate on the Tribune were two of the three members of the Committee" that awarded the $200 prize. E. Douglas Branch, The Sentimental Years,1836—1860 (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1934), p. 187. Thus was Taylor accustomed to acceptance. This sort of thing only encouraged him.
6. See the discussion in Paul C. Wermuth, Bayard Taylor (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1973), pp. 177—79. See also Richard Cary, The Gen1eel Circle: Bayard Taylor and His New York Friends (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1952).
7. Any assertion about the quality of Taylor’s "serious" literary efforts need only be supported by a verse or two of his most famous ode, "Bedouin Song" (1853):
From the Desert I come to thee,
On a stallion shod with fire,
And the winds are left behind
In the speed of my desire.
Under thy window I stand,
And the midnight hears my cry.
I love thee, I love but thee,
With a love that never shall die,
Till the sun grows cold, And the stars are old,
And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold!
(Not that rotten poetry was contagious or anything, but on the occasion of Taylor’s death, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow really did write this:
Dead he lay among his books!
The peace of God was in his looks.)
Several critics have contended that Taylor’s inspiration for "Bedouin Song" was Percy Shelley’s ‘The Indian Serenade" (1822), the first verse of which reads this way:
I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright:
I arise from dreams of thee,
And a spirit in my feet
Hath led me — who knows how
To thy chamber window, Sweet!
Well, at least Taylor’s bedouin owned a horse. Charitably, Fred Lewis Pattee, in his Century Readings in American Literature (4th ed., New York: The Century Co., 1932), p. 709, explained the similarity with Shelley this way: "Taylor’s phenomenal memory was stocked with the poetry of all the world and he wrote, unconsciously doubtless, always from a recollection of this storehouse rather than from a driving creative impulse that sent him into fields new and strange." We conclude, then, that the very thing which embued his travel writing was entirely absent from his poetry, and that Taylor never knew it.)
8. Taylor was non-resident professor of German literature at Cornell University, 1870—1877, an appointment made on the basis of the appearance of the first volume of his Faust in 1870.
9. See Albert H. Smyth, Bayard Taylor (Boston: Houghton, Muffin and Company, 1896), p. 178, for a typical example. Beatty, Bayard Taylor, did not mention either the trip or the book, although he listed the book in Taylor’s bibliography.
10. Walter S. Campbell (Stanley Vestal), The Book Lover’s Southwest: A Guide to Good Reading (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955), p. 57, illustrates the point. Colorado: A Summer Trip must be "good reading" because it is included in the guide; but Campbell gave no idea of its content and could not therefore justify its inclusion. Some historians of the mining frontier have found Taylor’s descriptions of California and Colorado useful for providing touches of local color, e.g., William S. Greever, The Bonanza West: The Story of the Western Mining Rushes, 1848-1900 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963).
11. The phrase belongs to James A. Levernier, in Taylor’s entry in American Lilerature to 1900 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), p. 280; but Levernier also believed that Horace Greeley published the New York Times.
12. Marie Hansen Taylor, with Lilian Bayard Taylor Kiliani, On Two Continents: Memories of Half a Century (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1905), p. 165.
13. Below, p. 166.
14. Below, p. 131. The Colorado rush of 1859 followed a gold strike in 1858. Strikes in Montana occurred in 1862,1863, 1864,and 1865.
15. Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," in Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1920), p. 4.
16. Taylor read Darwin five years after his trip to Colorado. Turner read Darwin ten years before expounding his ideas on the form and function of frontiers. Smyth, Bayard Taylor, p. 231; Ray Allen Billington, Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 30—31.
17.Ibid.,p. 15.
18. Below, p. 174; Taylor, with Kiliani, On Two Continents, p. 169.
19. Robert Taft, Artists and Illustrators of the Old West, 1850—1900 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), p. 57.
20. Ibid., p. 295.
21. Taylor, with Kiliani, On Two Continents, op. cit
22. See Maxine Benson’s article on Byers in HowardR.Lamar (ed.), TheReader’sEncyclopedia of the American West (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1977), pp. 144—45.
23. And Byers was tough. See Greever, Bonanza West, p. 169.
24. Taylor, with Kiliani, On Two Continents, op. cit.
25.John Tebbel, The Media in America (New York: Thomas Y. Crowd Company, 1974), p. 173.
26. "Those people," Greeley wrote of the Indians in 1859, "must die out — there is no help for them. God has given this earth to those who will subdue and cultivate it, and it is vain to struggle against His righteous decree." He wrote worse things, too, in that same letter. He drafted it in Denver on June 16, 1859, and it was published in the Tribune under the title "Lo! The Poor Indian!" See Horace Greeley, An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859, ed. by Charles T. Duncan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964),
p. 120. Of course, Indian-thumping, satisfied Tribune subscribers and, as Taylor once noted, the Tribune followed only the Bible as favored reading matter in the West. In any case, Greeley’s remarks anticipated (though without the humor) Twain’s in Roughing It. See p. 146 of The Works of Mark Twain, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).
27. But there were some he did not meet. See below, p. 23.
28. When Davis visited Creede, Colorado, he heard of G. L. Smith’s refusal to take $1,250,000 for his share of the Holy Moses Mine. "After that my interest in him fell away," he wrote. "Any man who will live in a log house at the foot of a mountain, and drink melted snow any longer than he has to do so, or refuse that much money for anything, when he could live in the Knickerbocker Flats, and drive forth in a private hansom with rubber tires, is no longer an object of public interest." Later, in Oklahoma City, he expressed the opinion that "any man who can afford a hall bedroom and a gas-stove in New York City is better off than he would be as the owner of one hundred and sixty acres on the prairie, or in one of these small so-called cities." See Richard Harding Davis, The West from a Car- Window (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1892), pp. 68, 114. For an interesting Colorado contrast, compare Davis’s third chapter, "At a New Mining Camp," with Taylor’s ninth chapter, "Mining and Mining Processes," below.
29. One of the people Davis saw in action in Creede was William Barclay Masterson of Dodge, Tombstone, and other places. Masterson may or may not have been a peace officer in Creede in 1892, but Davis found him dealing cards in a saloon, heard he had killed some twenty-eight men, and then proceeded to write of him as "Bat Masterden." See Davis, West from a Car-Window, p. 85.