Education Of a Wandering Man (1990) (26 page)

A cynic might say that one of man's civilizing attributes has been his convenient memory, which allows him to discover new reasons for old practices, or simply to forget their origin. This is true of some aspects of his religion as well as customs in regard to birth, coming of age, marriage, and death.

Knowledge is like money: To be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.

Who remembers the millionaires of the past? Who even remembers the popular heroes? But we do remember a poor stonecutter in Athens named Socrates, a thief from the gutters of Paris named Francois Villon, an actor in London called Shakespeare, a poor farmer in Scotland named Robert Burns, and a weaver in Mayilapur who wrote the Kural.

Upon the shelves of our libraries, the world's greatest teachers await our questions.

Yet for those who have not been readers, my advice is to read what entertains you. Reading is fun. Reading is adventure. It is not important what you read at first, only that you read.

Many would advise the great books first, but often readers are not prepared for them. If you want to study the country from which you came, there are atlases with maps and there are good books on all countries, books of history, of travel, of current affairs.

Our libraries are not cloisters for an elite. They are for the people, and if they are not used, the fault belongs to those who do not take advantage of their wealth. If one does not move on from what merely amuses to what interests, the fault lies in the reader, for everything is there.

My ranch has proved as necessary as my library, and so it is, in a sense--a living library, which can be studied at all seasons.

I have added trees from other localities and shrubs as well, and study animal life of which there is a good bit: elk, deer, bear, mountain lion, badger, and much else.

Old rail fences have been added, and when I describe them in a story they are just what is before my eyes. Every "improvement" on the place is actually a turn toward making it a more efficient site for what I have to do.

My ranch is important to me, because by wandering over its many acres, I have a chance to renew my feeling for the country, and despite the fact that I can write anywhere, I write best in the atmosphere of the kind of country about which I am writing.

Above all the ranch is a place where I can go to be alone. I have no visitors there, and want none. It is a place for work, and when I am on the place I am working. Yet mountains are mountains, and a mountain in India or Tibet looks very little different from a mountain in Colorado or Nevada. The plant growth is somewhat different, but I know about that, so there is no problem.

Walking in the early hours, one must walk with care, for bears linger where the food is good. I often see where they have stripped a branch of chokecherries or serviceberries, or see mountain lion droppings often fresh from within the hour. It is a place where, in a matter of minutes, I can step from the log cabin where I live to the world of the last century.

Sometimes, with powerful glasses I keep at hand, I can see movement high on the ridge where bears are eating wild raspberries.

A couple of years ago I climbed that ridge, almost straight up through the forest at the end. It was a tough scramble, one I had not bargained for, but by the time I got where I wished to be, I was closer to the top than to the bottom and decided it would be easier to top out on the ridge than return the way I had come. I was wrong, but it did find me on a hillside matted with wild raspberries. As I always walk with a walkie-talkie, it was a simple matter to have myself picked up on the ridge, a private road built for four-wheel-drive vehicles.

Everything is grist for the mill, and someday that episode will find its place in a story.

Books are the building blocks of civilization, for without the written word, a man knows nothing beyond what occurs during his own brief years and, perhaps, in a few tales his parents tell him. Without books, we would never have known of Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, or Hannibal. George Washington would have been forgotten and Abraham Lincoln a vague memory.

When the Saxons landed in England and discovered Roman ruins, they believed them the work of giants. For without books there is no history; without books there would be no Greece, no Rome, no Babylon, and no Egypt. The pyramids would stand, and the Parthenon and many scattered ruins would slowly fall before the years. Not understanding what they were, man would make no effort to preserve them.

Without books we should very likely be a still-primitive people living in the shadow of traditions that faded with years until only a blur remained, and different memories would remember the past in different ways. A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.

Take, for example, your own family.

How much do you know of who they were, how they lived, and what they thought three or four generations ago? Usually one knows something of his grandparents, perhaps his great-grandparents, but beyond that, all that remains are names, dates, and perhaps a few places. Unless something has been written, nothing is remembered and all our past becomes a cloudy dream pierced by few rays of light--old tax or military records, details of land transfers and the like, but nothing of who these people were.

We are rich in materials from the past, and what one book offers often dovetails with another until a clear historical pattern emerges. The pattern may not be entirely correct but one can work from it to find what is true or seems to be so. Fortunately we have maps that enable us to see the areas controlled by the various tribes or powers, the trade routes by land or sea, and the ports that accepted cargo from foreign vessels.

Traveling anywhere, I am invariably drawn to displays of books, often in old shops or simply used for display in some restaurant or hotel lobby. Rarely do I find interesting titles; most of those I do find were popular books of fifty to seventy years ago, some of them good reading even now.

Nearly every western town antique shop has a few such books, and I cannot wait until I have examined them, as well as those in homes I visit. In one such store I found a copy of The Goncourt Journals, which I had recently read, and the Shirley Letters by Dame Shirley, in a later edition.

Once I was severely tempted to steal, and I have often regretted that I did not yield to the temptation. I had gone to an old chateau on the outskirts of Paris to pick up an American girl with whom I had a date.

She showed me a collection of eight or ten books of ancient maps, obviously bound by order of the owner, for they were from various places, on different grades of parchment, for example.

I was utterly fascinated, for they represented a very real treasure. The former owner of the chateau had obviously known what he was doing and had assembled some very rare stuff. She told me the property had been inherited by a nephew who was selling it all as quickly as possible. As I was making a change of station the following day, there was no time for me to make any calls or try to formulate a deal, and I discovered later that the books had been sold as old paper. I can only hope someone recognized their value and rescued them. The latest date on any of the maps was 1475.

Such finds are rare, and I have never found any of those maps in the archives of the many libraries and collections I have haunted. I would have given much to own the maps and just as much for a few hours with the man who collected them, a man of knowledge and discrimination who knew what he wanted and had the patience to search them out.

Often, ambitious young men or women write, wanting to work for me or assist me in my research. What they do not understand is that it is a labor of love, and I would relinquish no part of it at any price. I do not need help; I need time.

I am jealous of these things. I want to read the books, examine the archives, trace the routes upon maps or charts. As I trace the routes I relive the lives; I walk with the caravans; I handle canvas on the ships; I pull an oar in the galleys. I know the smells of the sea because I have been there, and a thousand years ago they would have been no different. I know how it feels to ride a horse or a camel, and I want to live again with the caravans and the seafarers.

Each book I write is an adventure in itself. It is many adventures, into strange lands, strange places. It can be on the land of my own ranch, among the forests there, along the rugged ridges. Suddenly, as I weave the story, they are no longer just as I see them but are as they would have been one hundred, five hundred years earlier. They are places of enchantment, places where stories are born.

I am not some mill that grinds out stories simply to make a living. I am a man who loves to tell stories, who loves to share what he has seen and where history has been.

I would like others to enjoy, as I have, the ancient towns and the old streets, the broken arches, the clock towers, the fallen walls where old smells linger, even after thousands of years.

I do not know if others feel as I do, nor do I care. I am a teller of stories with my own corner in the marketplace, and I speak of those long gone. In our country and elsewhere many men and women have added their dust to the earth and have been forgotten, but not by me. I have walked in their footsteps, seen the ruins of the houses they so carefully put together. I have seen their fingerprints in the clay, and sometimes in ancient caves I have seen a full hand-print on the wall, to show, perhaps, that they, too, had hands, that they, too, could shape the mortar of their lives into something more than it had been.

Beside every western trail lie buried the bodies of those who tried. In every western cemetery, Boot Hill or not, there are those who made it or almost did. I do not know their names, so I write my own stories and re-create their lives as I know they must have been. Briefly, they live again so their sons and grandsons can know how it was. I have never looked to critics for approval, only to those who knew, the men or women who can put a worn finger on a line and say, "That was how it was."

So much has been written of the individual that many have forgotten that our country was settled by families. The lone adventurer makes a good story, but the wagons west carried men, women, and children. The sod houses and the log cabins were lived in by families.

We writers, of course, stress the dramatic, and often readers forget the long periods of simply hard work that went to build the country. Gunfights were rare, raids by horse thieves rare, but hard work was every day.

Fencing land, plowing land, grubbing roots for firewood, all this was every day.

Long dry stretches occurred, where everybody looked hopefully at a cloudless sky, praying for rain while the grass was eaten to stubble and the water holes dried out and cattle grew gaunt and a man saw his years of struggle going down, until some gave up and pulled out for that land of promise, farther west.

The West was a hard land with rarely enough rain, and when the rain did come it came too much at one time, in gully washers and flash floods.

Many a farmer eked out a precarious living collecting bones of buffalo and other animals, as a wagonload of old bones would pay for a cartload of groceries. What other bones lay exposed on the plains we will never know, as all were gathered and disposed of in the same way.

The frontier was recognized at once as a fertile field for fiction. James Fenimore Cooper led off, followed by many others. Mayne Reid wrote The Rifle Rangers, The Lost Rancho, and The Scalp Hunters before 1883. James W. Steele had published his Frontier Army Sketches in 1872-73, Captain Charles King was writing, and Alfred Henry Lewis published his Wolfville stories in 1902, the same year Owen Wister's The Virginian appeared. In the meanwhile, several thousand dime novels had been circulated, touching upon all aspects of the West, real and unreal.

Eastern reporters had come west, returning with far-fetched stories or made-up interviews, quoting such people as Wild Bill Hickok with words he would never have spoken.

Western life was much more social than is realized by the average reader. Most western towns had bands made up of local citizens, and band concerts were frequent. Many frontier towns had baseball teams, often with imported pitchers. Footracing was a much bet-upon sport and it was not unknown for some gambler or group of gamblers to import a professional footracer from the East to match against some woodsman, cowboy, or Indian. Much money changed hands as a result of such races, and the Indians, being inveterate gamblers, often lost most of their ponies and tribal possessions.

Horse racing was the biggest gamble of all, and the Indian was ever ready to come forward with a fast horse he wished to back. The Indians, who knew horses well, were often the winners in these races, never being as gullible as the white men assumed they were.

Churches or schools held "literaries," where visiting lecturers appeared or local citizens debated anything that came to mind.

Bill Nye, the humorist, was a frequent visitor in many western towns, as was Mark Twain.

One of the amazing aspects of the frontier was the amount of classical research and writing that was going on. Quite often it was done by Army officers out of sheer boredom or pursuing interests of their own far from frontier guard duty or the pursuit of Indian war parties.

My educational efforts continued. I read The Mississippi Valley Frontier by John Anthony Caruso, English Life in the Middle Ages by Salzman, A Union Soldier's Diary by Albert W. Mosey, The Natchez by Antoine Simon Le Page du Pratz, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army by Donald W.