THE BOOK CLUB OF CALIFORNIA uarterly News-Letter LXVII NUMBER 2 SPRING 2002 Bookmen on the Montana Frontier by Rick Newby The Center for Steinbeck Studies by Jack Douglas P'\. Serendipity Gifts X Acquisitions IN MEMORIAM: Gregor G. Peterson IN MEMORIAM: James Wishard Robertson A Bookman’s Farewell The Oscar Lewis Awards Exhibition Notes Elected to Membership THE BOOK CLUB OF CALIFORNIA, founded in 1912, is a non-profit organization of book lovers and collectors who have a special interest in Pacific Coast history, literature, and fine printing. Its chief aims are to further the interests of book collectors and to promote an understanding and appreciation of fine books. The Club is limited to 1,000 members, excluding Student members with proof of student status. When vacancies exist, membership is open to all who are in sympathy with its aims and whose applications are approved by the Board of Directors. Regular membership involves no responsibilities beyond payment of the annual dues. Dues date from the month of the mem- ber’s election. Regular membership is $55; Sustaining $75; Patron $150; and Student $25. All members receive the Quarterly News-Letter and, excepting Student members, the current Keepsake. All members have the privilege, but not the obligation, of buying Club publications, which are limited, as a rule, to one copy per member. All members may purchase extra copies of Keepsakes or News-Letters, when available. Membership dues (less $10 for Student members and $17.50 in the other membership categories) and donations, including books, are deductible in accordance with the Internal Revenue Code. DIRECTORS & OFFICERS J. Curtiss Taylor, President Jack Maclean, Vice-President Jeremy Cole, Secretary John W. Borden, Treasurer Ann Whipple, Executive Secretary James G. Nance, Membership Secretary Directors whose terms expire in 2002 Claudine Chalmers George K. Fox John Hawk Nancy Hoyt Curtiss Taylor Directors whose terms expire in 2003 John Crichton MargaretJohnson Kenneth Karmiole Gary Kurutz Roger Larson Directors whose terms expire in 2004 Janice Braun Kathleen Burch Jeremy Cole Wade Hughan Jack Maclean COMMITTEE CHAIRMEN Book Club Grants: John Crichton Exhibits: Jack Maclean House: Barbara Land, Sheila Mullen, Madeleine Rose The Albert Sperisen Library: Peter Hanff Membership: John Class, Vincent Lozito Personnel: Jeremy C. Cole Planning: Harry Goff Public Programs: Curtiss Taylor, Hugh Tolford Publications: Gary Kurutz Quarterly News-Letter: Robert Chandler Ann Whipple, Managing Editor The Oscar Lewis Award in Western History and Fine Printing: Jeremy Cole Copyright 2002 by The Book Club of California, 312 Sutter Street, Suite 510, San Francisco, Cal- ifornia 94108-4320. Hours: Monday 10 — 7, Tuesday through Friday 10 — 5. Telephone (415) 781-7532 or toll-free (800) 869-7656; Fax (415) 781-7537; email: [email protected] The Quarterly News-Letter is designed and composed in Scala with Quadraat Italic for display and printed letterpress by Peter Rutledge Koch with the assistance of Richard Seibert. visA and MasterCard accepted for all payments. Please provide card number, name of card- holder, and expiration date. Visit our web page: www.bccbooks.org RAILSBACK & COMPANY BOOKSELLERS AND STATIONaRS 54 NORTH MAIN HELENA, MONTANA Bookmen on the Montana Frontier Rick Newby presented to The Colophon Club, San Francisco, May 8, 2001 In THE OPENING MoMENTS oft he 1976 Arthur Penn film, Missouri Breaks, starring Marlon Brando as a bounty hunter and Jack Nicholson as a horse thief, screenwriter Thomas McGuane has David Braxton, the rancher who has hired Brando, proudly tell a visitor: “The first time we saw this country, it was buffalo grass and blue-joint up to the stirrups. By the second year we had eight-thousand Texas half-bred cattle and thirty-five hundred volumes of English literature in my library.” A few scenes later, after supervising the hanging of his visitor, who has turned out to be a horse rustler, Braxton — in need of relaxation after his grim work — asks his daughter, “Honey, pull down Tristram Shandy for me again, would you?” Is Braxton a wholly fabricated character, a product solely of McGuane’s book-infatuated imagination, or does this filmic bookman on the Montana frontier have some basis in the historical record? And if he did exist, what does his existence tell us about the character of the mining and ranching frontier on the endless prairies and in the min- eral-rich mountains of early Montana? Can we find him believable, or merely a magic realist touch in a postmodern Western, given the images we’ve come to cherish of rugged Montana, a place purely primitive, untouched by civilization’s curses and blessings? After all, 36 The Book Club of California as painter Sandra Dal Poggetto reminds us in a recent essay, urban collegians at the University of Chicago called students from the rural West, like Dal Poggetto’s great aunt Pearl, fresh from the high plains of Colorado, “barbs,” “their barbarian ways a source of amusement and ridicule for the civilized young ladies.” David Braxton is, in fact, modeled closely on ar eal-life barbarian by the name of Granville Stuart, a Scottish-American bibliophile, miner, rancher, vigilante, and dreamer sometimes called “Mr. Montana,” who claimed direct descent from Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. Stuart came to Montana early, with his brother James, after a less-than-successful foray into the California goldfields, and the two brothers, though they never achieved much material success in Montana, left an indelible mark on the place. Perhaps most importantly for those of us who love books, the broth- ers enacted the origin story of Montana book collecting. Granville Stu- art, in his classic text, Forty Years on the Frontier, remembered that, after spending the bitter winter of 1860 at Gold Creek “without so I can help with your cataloging needs DRO bernie eh er Or le OW slaNiGao fe Rovere. Cataloging of Books, Records, & Manuscripts for insurance, personal or bookselling purposes. BARBARA JANE LAND 770 El Camino Del Mar San Francisco, cA 94121 415 221-7707 References available Quarterly News-Letter 37 much as an almanac to look at,” he and James “were famished for something to read....” A party of Native Americans passing through told the Stuarts that a white man owning a trunk “full of books ... was camped with all that wealth, in Bitter Root Valley.” The Stuarts “start- ed for those books, a hundred and fifty miles away, without a house or anybody on the route, and with three dangerous rivers to cross...” The brothers, after protracted and delicate negotiations, were able to obtain “five books, for five dollars each,” half of all the money they possessed, but then, after all, they “had the blessed books.” The books included volumes of Shakespeare and Byron, “both fine illustrated editions;” a French Bible; a biography of Napoleon; and Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. At the time he wrote his memoir, Stuart still owned all the books he had purchased that spring except Wealth of Nations, which “being loose in the binding, has gradually disappeared, until only a few fragments remain.” As it happens, the Bitterroot Valley was the site of one of the first permanent white settlements in what has become Montana, and the trader there, Major John Owen (who humbly named Fort Owen after himself), proved to be another book fancier. “The literary taste of some frontiersmen was of a surprisingly high order,” writes George Weisel in Men and Trade on the Northwest Frontier, basing his opinion on the inventory of Neil McArthur’s trunk (McArthur owned the books the Stuarts happily purchased) and the contents of John Owen’s library at the fort, which included the works of Byron, Dickens, Mil- ton, Petrarch, Plutarch, Washington Irving, Sir Walter Scott, Darwin, and Thomas Jefferson (“many volumes”), together with histories, almanacs, and A Complete Dictionary of Poetical Quotations. Despite Owen’s labors as trader, Indian agent for the Flathead tribe, keeper of a daily journal, and tireless traveler (“twenty-three thousand miles throughout the country”), “there still remains the mental picture,” wrote Paul Phillips in his introduction to the major’s journals, of Owen sitting in his library at night, while the rest of the Fort peo- ple were deep in slumber. With his pipe in hand; his dog at his knee; his glass of grog at his elbow; and Lingard’s History of England 38 The Book Club of California propped on the table before him; he studied the story of a history that was past, oblivious of the mighty history that he himself was shaping. Though Owen and Granville Stuart were uncommonly bookish, they were not alone, on the Montana frontier, in being passionate about books and knowledge and the wider world. Take, for example, one of the first offspring of the European and aboriginal cultures in the region, Baptiste, son of Sacagawea and Toussaint Charbonneau, suides and interpreters for the Lewis and Clark expedition. Baptiste was educated by both Protestant and Catholic clergy at William Clark’s behest. In 1823, Prince Paul of Wiirtemberg met Baptiste at a trading village on the Kansas River and took the young man to Europe, where he toured extensively. In 1829, Baptiste returned to the West, working as a mountain man, guide, justice of the peace, and gold miner. “But in the early 1850’s,” writes John Ewers, [Baptiste] returned to his mother’s people, the Shoshonis ... where he lived until his death in 1885. This French-Indian man of the world spoke English,French, Italian, Spanish, several Indian languages, and could use the sign language. He could discuss — with equal ease — French philosophy, Spanish dances, the trapping of beaver, or the uses of Indian medicine bundles. This frontier erudition — rich in contrasts and improbabilities — was not so uncommon as we might think. In the introduction to his extraordinary long poem, Circling Back, about the “West of the Rock- ies,” Gary Holthaus notes that “Rocky Mountain College” is the name Jim Bridger, Osborne Russell, Joe Meek, and their friends gave their encampment near the Yellow- stone in the winter of 1835. There they passed the time reading aloud to one another and in argument and debate, and there, Russell report- ed, “Some of my comrades who considered themselves Classical scholars have had some little added to their wisdom.” Quarterly News-Letter 39 To SAY THAT BOOKMEN EXISTED on the Montana frontier is not to say that the emerging culture was always comfortable with or accept- ing of their presence. From the beginnings of a Euro-American pres- ence, certain Montanans — and many Americans elsewhere — have wanted to preserve their vision of the place as a rough-and-ready wilderness, with a barely literate populace, breathtakingly beautiful but even today the ultimate frontier. This self-imposed know-nothingism, a kind of censorship from within, has led literate Montanans — and Montana artists of all kinds — to mask their very real sophistication, allowing them to “pass” as authentic westerners, but all too often forcing them into contortions that should be unnecessary. Take, for example, the painter Charles M. Russell, who, writes Brian Dippie, [bjeneath the unchanging cowboy exterior ... was a serious artist. It was a side Russell rarely revealed. He set up smoke screens, shied away from artsy conversation as pretentious and maybe al ittle effete, mocked those who were disposed to ponder “tech neque.” A Califor- nia writer who interviewed Russell in 1926 ... wrote that “it is the hardest thing in the world to get him to talk about art, especially his art, except in a joking way, when he can cover reality with a film of ridicule.” Among painter friends with whom he was comfortable, Russell did reveal a few long hairs. He was curious about technique, composition, ways to prepare a palette and mix colors.... Here’s a dirty little secret: Early in the twentieth century, a Montana couple visiting Paris stumbled upon Charlie Russell in the galleries of the Louvre. Russell greeted them warmly, but begged them not to mention to anyone back home that they’d caught him shamelessly studying the works of the masters in the capital of the decadent and the effete. Granville Stuart had no shame about his passion for books, and the following story, told by cattleman Nick Bielenberg to A. J. Noyes, 40 The Book Club of California reveals the ambivalence Stuart’s fellow Montanans felt in the face of his unbridled bookishness (an undeniable hunger for books mixed with deep mistrust of the distraction from the work at hand that read- ing inevitably entailed): Quite a number of years ago I bought some cattle of Granville Stuart. We had to move them across the country to the railroad. Granville was along ... but as far as making a hand was concerned he was no good. He was always a great fellow to read. He thought it would be a good thing to take a whole lot of books for the cowpunchers’ enjoy- ment. Darned if I know how many he had, but anyway a sack full. The way those cowboys would tackle those books was a caution. They would come into camp and pick up a book and the cook would holler “Grub Pile” till he was red in the face and he could never get all those fellows to come at the same time. Just as soon as a fellow would drop a book some other galoot would grab it. The cook called me aside one day and told me he was going to quit as the boys thought more of Granville’s books than they did of his grub. It would never do to lose a good cook ... and I told him not to say anything and I would see that [the books] would cause him no more trouble. It was the next day that we arrived at the Yellowstone so I gathered up the books and threw them into the river, thus starting the first circu- lating library ever known in Montana. Perhaps the best rejoinder to the hard-headed, anti-book approach comes from Hans Peter Gyllembourg Koch, creator of one of the most remarkable private Montana libraries ever assembled. Peter, a highly educated Dane who had worked as a woodcutter and trader on the Montana frontier before becoming a successful banker, was a founder of Montana State University. He believed, wrote his son Elers Koch, “in a broad and liberal education. He emphasized the humanities as well as science, and I have often heard him say that he did a better job of cutting wood on the Missouri River because he knew Latin and Greek.” Of course, hard work was central to survival and financial success on the frontier, and as Granville Stuart sheepishly admitted, perhaps the fates were not so much against him as was his own penchant, Quarterly News-Letter 41 when he should have been working, to “read Byron and [indulge] in many reveries.” Granville Stuart’s missionary zeal for reading — and he did have a library of some 3,000 volumes on the DHS Ranch in the Judith Basin — was shared by his rancher neighbor, fifteen miles distant, James Fergus, another Scot who possessed his own “splendid library and the leading periodicals.” The reading materials in both ranchers’ libraries, wrote Granville, were “at the disposal of everybody.” Perhaps it is no fluke that Granville finished out his working life as head of the Butte, Montana, Public Library. IN ACTUAL FACT, neither Major Owen nor Granville Stuart nor even the anti-bibliophile Nick Bielenberg was oblivious to the history each was shaping, and they sought to record it. Some, like Owen, kept a journal, which was later turned into a book by editor Paul Phillips; oth- ers, like Bielenberg, told their folktales and anecdotes to scribes like A. J. Noyes, who then compiled them in books; and still others, Granville Stuart foremost among them, wrote their own books, mak- ing them progenitors of a Montana literature both unrepentantly bookish and steeped in experience of an uncommon place. As another Montana literary master, Norman Maclean, has written, “I have had the great fortune, then, of spending ... my life in the beauty of the woods and books.” Folklorist Lynn Rudloff writes, “People are story-telling animals. Cul- tures create identities through narratives.” Rudloff is speaking here of We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher by Granville Stu- art’s son-in-law, Edward Charles “Teddy Blue” Abbott (as told to Helena Huntington Smith). Granville Stuart himself launched his first effort to shape his new culture’s identity in 1865, when he wrote and published (with C. S. Westcott of New York), Montana As It Is, the “first printed account of Montana after the territory was organized.” Sadly, most of the edition was lost in transit to the West, and apparently only four copies remain in existence, one at the Montana Historical Society, one at the Library of Congress, and two in private hands. 42 The Book Club of California Though he wrote several more manuscripts (most published posthumously, under the editorship of the ubiquitous Paul Phillips, though the largest, a 314,000-word illustrated history of Montana, proved unpublishable), Granville Stuart failed to find worldly success in any of his endeavors, except perhaps in the improbable career of diplomacy. Even his promising time on the DHS Ranch, as cattle baron and leader of the band of vigilantes, Stuart’s Stranglers, ended in disaster with the dread winter 1886-87 and the death of some- where between two-thirds and three-quarters of his herd. He recov- ered from this bankruptcy (and the death of his first wife, Awbonnie Tookanka, a Shoshoni woman and mother of his eleven children), in 1894, when he found himself appointed by President Grover Cleve- land as U.S. Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Paraguay and Uruguay. Granville returned to Montana four years later when Republican William McKinley replaced Cleveland, a Democrat, but before heading home, always fascinated by South America, Granville toured the continent, acquiring trunkloads of books along the way. He spent his last years in Butte, working as city librarian and writing the memoirs that would establish his immortality. As William Kittredge and Steven Krauser have noted, he was not simply, at the end, “a kindly old gent, surrounded by the books he loved all his life and fondly ... recalling pioneer days;” instead he was a “more complex man, an often impractical visionary ... entrapped in contrary dreams, ... and deeply angered by the paucity of his rewards.” He died in 1918. What happened, then, to Granville Stuart’s marvelous collection of books? Speculation has it that Granville’s second wife, Allis Belle, who died in the Bitterroot Valley in 1947, most likely sold most, if not all, of it, in an unsuccessful effort to fend off poverty; she was forced, at the end, to accept public welfare assistance. We do know that Granville’s papers are at Yale and that bits of his library appear on the market from time to time; in 1997 and 1998, for example, “Granville Stuart’s copy” of three separate books, along with a number of his letters, became available, two through Pacific Book Auction Galleries, San