A MAIN STREET BOOK
PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY
a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10103
MAIN STREET BOOK, DOUBLEDAY, and the portrayal of a building with a tree are trademarks of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
First published by Doubleday & Company, Inc., in 1958.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Taylor, Robert Lewis.
The travels of Jaimie McPheeters / Robert Lewis Taylor ; introduction by John Jakes.—
p. cm.
“Main Street books.”
I. Title.
PS3539.A9654T7 1993
813’.54—dc20 92-16490
eISBN: 978-0-307-76867-4
Copyright © 1958 by Robert Lewis Taylor
Introduction © 1992 by John Jakes
All Rights Reserved
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXXI
Chapter XXXII
Chapter XXXIII
Chapter XXXIV
Chapter XXXV
Chapter XXXVI
Chapter XXXVII
Chapter XXXVIII
Chapter XXXIX
Chapter XL
Chapter XLI
Chapter XLII
Chapter XLIII
Chapter XLIV
Chapter XLV
Chapter XLVI
Chapter XLVII
Acknowledgment
Principal Bibliography
INTRODUCTION
The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters is a work I rank right up there with Lonesome Dove. So did the Pulitzer juries, awarding the prize to each in its year of publication.
With that bit of background, I have a simple charge for you: Prepare yourself for a wonderful reading experience.
This is a novel that will entertain you royally. It will also—had I better whisper it?—teach you a lot about the mores, preoccupations, geography—and perils—of America at the time of the Gold Rush. The book is impeccably researched, but never pedantic. When you finish it, if you’re curious to learn more about those who made the great overland trek to El Dorado, Robert Lewis Taylor thoughtfully provided a bibliography.
But Jaimie McPheeters is, first and last, a bang-up story, stirring and funny by turns. It’s presented as a personal memoir; the reflections of a mature man recalling the supreme adventure of his life. This was a logical technique for Taylor to use, since Americans a hundred years ago loved to write accounts of personal experiences—an avocation which regrettably seems lost today.
Although based in part on the journal of a real gold-seeker, Taylor’s novel reminds me in many ways of Dickens. The tale is long; packed with exciting incident; and built around a gallery of memorable characters, the most important being the wryly reflective Jaimie and his father, Dr. Sardius McPheeters (diplomate in Systemic Surgery, University of Edinburgh). Sardius is one of those complex, funny, touching figures who linger in the mind long after you close a book. He’s a loving father but a poor provider; a man brought low by “gaming and tippling.” He is the quintessential American Argonaut, dreamily and desperately opting for a new start; the second chance. As Taylor puts it, Sardius is a believer in “the green pastures, the beacon on the hill.” You’ll long remember him, and his son, and others you’ll meet on this journey from Louisville, Kentucky, to “General Delivery, Upper California.”
Robert Lewis Taylor spent the early part of his writing career as a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Later he was a staff writer for The New Yorker. He authored three other novels, as well as highly successful biographies of Churchill, W. C. Fields, and Carrie Nation, He lives today in Connecticut. I think it’s fair to say that Jaimie is his masterwork.
In 1963, the novel became the basis for a series of one-hour television dramas produced by MGM for the ABC network. Dan O’Herlihy was a superb Sardius, and his son was winningly played by Kurt Russell, then aged twelve. The venerable and dependable bible of show business, Variety, cited the boy actor as “a highly promising personality,” but called the show a “doubtful” entry in the competitive arena of Sunday night broadcasting. This proved prophetic. The last episode aired in March 1964.
A life of only one season is not necessarily a reflection on the quality of the program, though. I remember watching it with our kids every week, and thinking it a pretty good show—though maybe I’ve always been a fan of film projects based on books. You can still catch episodes (in black and white) on cable.
Late in the morning, yesterday, I finished my rereading and closed the novel with a feeling of regret. I had left a long-ago world vividly realized by the author. I had parted from people for whom I’d developed a lot of affection and concern. I sat in the wind and sunshine, bundled under a Cunard robe in a chair on the upper deck of a famous liner making the Great Circle crossing, and I thought of journeys today. How little they require of us, beyond the money to pay for them. Unless there’s a mishap, or you hate the sea, or blanch when there’s nothing between you and the earth but 35,000 feet and the floor of a 747, contemporary journeys hardly call forth the best of a person’s character.
In the world of Jaimie McPheeters and his father, however, there were not so many safety nets, backup systems, and traveler conveniences of the kind we take for granted. Indeed, even though there were plenty of guidebooks describing the route to California, many of them were spurious, written by men who’d never seen the trail. The way West was largely unmapped, hazardous, and often cruelly hostile. Going to California demanded a lot of heart; a lot of intestinal fortitude. It also called for more optimism—more sheer sentimental faith in a dream—than most of us can muster in this cynical world.
Taylor brilliantly captured the innocence and bravery of the people who chased the dream of California gold. You will love meeting them in this novel, and you will love traveling with them, and you will hate to see your journey end.
—John Jakes
Queen Elizabeth 2,
en route Southampton,
August 25, 1991
Chapter I
On the day when I first learned of my father’s journey, I had come back with two companions from a satisfactory afternoon in the weeds near Kay’s Bell Foundry, shooting a slingshot at the new bells, which were lying out in the yard and strung up on rafters. Struck with rocks, they made a beautiful sound, although it seemed to upset Mr. William Kay, the proprietor. His sign, “Maker of Church, Steamboat, Tavern and other Bells,” hung over the doorway of his ba
rnlike shop and had a row of little brass bells swinging beneath, squat and burnished, but these were hard to hit, and if you missed them, you were apt to hit one of the men working inside, and this was what seemed to upset Mr, William Kay most of all. So toward the end of the afternoon he pranced out with a double-barreled shotgun loaded with pepper and blistered Herbert Swann’s seat as he zigzagged to safety through the high grass.
It was late—after suppertime—and I thought it wise to sneak up the kitchen stairs and avoid the genteel tongue-lashing and straightaway-to-bed that my mother favored for tardiness. But my baby sister Mary spied me from her pen in the back yard and set up a noisy clatter. Aunt Kitty, her darky nurse, was with her, scolding. In one leathery hand she held a leafy willow branch with which she was discouraging the early spring bugs. Bugs tormented her almost to distraction: gnats, deer flies, mosquitoes, midges, no-see-ems, things along that line.
This Aunt Kitty was so old she said she had come over from Africa, and she remembered how, as a girl in the slave ship, she had seen the urine run in green rivers over the between-decks planks where the rows of blacks were lashed to long poles. Once a week a man in a mask appeared with hand pump and hose and washed down the floor; otherwise there was no arrangement except two pails which were passed from one person to the next and were soon filled to overflowing.
My sister Mary wanted out of the pen, and Aunt Kitty wanted her in.
“I talking to old mister snake up in the bushes,” she told her through the wire. “Snake say if you didn’t hesh, he fixing to come down and bite. Said he wasn’t aiming to bite me, say he going to bite you, though.”
My sister made a squalling sound and shook the wire in her fists. She now had her eye on my billygoat, Sam, who was tethered to a tree near the woodshed.
Aunt Kitty put her face, all wrinkled like a monkey’s, up close to the mesh and said, “Goat butt, baby go ‘Yah-yah.’ ”
I asked, “Is Clara in the kitchen, Aunty?” Clara was the cook.
“Clara washed up and gone visiting to Miz Whitman’s free Thelma.”
“I was thinking I ought to have something to eat because I’m tired out from being late helping a sick man that got run over by a horse.”
“People miss supper, they generly stays hongry till breakfast.”
“Well,” I said, turning away, “it’s no more than I expected. That’s what I get for trying to be upright and help other people. The more you do, the less other people care whether that person lives or dies.”
As I walked through the twilight toward the kitchen, brooding on life’s injustices, she called out, “Might be I put by a plate of chicken along with grits and combread and salat in the warming oven—for the cat.”
Hurrying, I heard her jeweled African chuckle rise softly above Mary’s pleas to the goat.
I got the food out of the oven and crept upstairs and ate it, sitting on the side of my bed. I enjoyed the cornbread and the grits and the chicken, both the wishbone and thigh, and wrapped up the salad greens in a paper and burned them in the fireplace. Then I lay down on the floor on my stomach and opened the register, which was merely an iron grating fitted into the wood to let the heated air up from below and was connected to nothing at all. Downstairs, in the family sitting room next to the parlor, my father and mother were having a discussion. I could see them, framed in the grating like birds in a pie, my mother sitting prim and stiff in her black taffeta dress with the white collar, and my father now standing over her, now pacing back and forth, with his string tie undone and his face shiny and earnest.
“I tell you, Melissa,” he was saying, “this is the only way. I’ve gone into it painstakingly”—here my mother gave a little ladylike sniff of disbelief—“and I pledge you my solemn promise there’s nothing more to it than picking up arrowheads out by the Indian Mounds—less, if it comes to that After all, Indians were sprinkled around Louisville in limited numbers whereas nature in her blessed bounty has seen fit to strew gold over the Calif—”
“How does one convey oneself to these Elysian fields?” asked my mother in her dry, practical way.
“Why, that’s the joyful part, that’s the very thing I was hoping you’d ask,” cried my father, his expression dissolving into a perfect sunburst of triumph. “This fellow Ware—Joseph E. Ware—has written it all down in a book—I’ve got it right here. Old Captain Billy Givens of the City of Memphis brought it down from St. Louis, where they printed them up, you know, and sold it to me at the most unbelievable bargain—”
“How much?”
“Believe me, Melissa, these books are going like wildfire in St. Louis. The people up there are fighting for them in the streets—I stole this one for twenty-five dollars, and only fifteen of it in cash at that: for the remainder, I lanced a carbuncle on his engineer’s neck and gave them a partly used bottle of Blue Moss.”
She sniffed again, unconvinced.
“Joseph E. Ware’s Immigrant Guide to California” he went on briskly. “It’s all here—every blade of grass, every water hole from the borders of the Nebraskas to the Humboldt Sink and beyond. Or, if you prefer, there’s the Santa Fe Trail, a southerly desert route said to be salubrious for those with nasal stoppages—covered in full in the book—or yet, if you’ve a freakish distaste for oxcarts and donkeys, there’s the water passage via the Isthmus of Panama, a scenic holiday on such luxury vessels of the far Pacific as the New Orleans and the California.
“Now listen to this, on this page 54—by George, this is a wonderful book; it ought to be required reading up at the University—Upon your arrival at Chagres, take your baggage at once to the custom house, where you will experience but little delay. Then hurry out of the village, which is, ah, pestilential [no doubt a figure of speech]. Hire your canoe, which for expedition ought to be of small size. This is called a “piragua,” is about 25 feet long, and navigated by a steersman and two rowers. The cost of boat-hire and men to Cruces ought not to exceed $12, unless, indeed, an increased traffic may have had the effect of raising the prices—’
“Fancy that, now,” he said aside, shaking his head in wonder—“a mere twelve dollars for a canoe ride of fifty miles, and with your own rowers. This fellow Ware is an absolute trump.”
“May I see the book?”
For a moment he looked undecided, then he handed it over, and if he’d had any suspicions that she was going to run it down, he was dead-right. Holding Ware’s precious volume as if it had been plucked out of a garbage bin, she read a few passages aloud, but they were so tedious and uncomplimentary that nobody but a fool would have gone out of his yard, once he’d heard them. “It rains every day,” she noted. Then she added that, “ ‘Bilious, remittent, and congestive fevers, in their most malignant forms, seem to hover over Chagres, ever ready to pounce on the stranger.’ ”
I don’t mind acknowledging that when I opened the register, I was pretty excited, what with this prospect of gold-hunting, but my mother’s remarks put a damper over everything, and made me wonder if my father wasn’t possibly a little peculiar in the head. That was her style.
She was a good deal younger than him, beautiful, too—everyone in Louisville said so—but as far as I was concerned, he seemed like a child beside her, because of his bouncy spirits. Now that I think it over, he was one of the scatterbrainedest fellows that ever lived, and one of the nicest. He was a doctor, in very good standing, medically speaking, but he had a number of habits that appeared to give offense, though I failed to see that it was anybody’s business but his own. For instance, whenever he got some money ahead, he usually went down to the shantyboats and had an enjoyable evening playing cards.
I’ve heard it said my father was a bang-up poker player. But there wasn’t much chance of his winning, not with those cheats. Mostly, they were serious, hard-working professional men—thieves, forgers, cutthroats, small-time river pirates and a backslid preacher or two—as interesting-spoken a group as you would care to meet, but they could no more have gambled honest than t
hey would have been comfortable in church.
Along with Herbert Swann, I’d climbed up many’s the time and looked in the windows, which were punched out and had old raggedy pieces of burlap nailed over the holes. They’d be playing partners against my father, and such a lot of signs, winks, under-the-table kicks, bottom-deck dealing and aces flying out of sleeves you never saw anywhere. But if any hard-faced strangers were present, they would use the “sand tell,” which was a deck marked with sandpaper so as to know the cards from their feel. And if by chance one of these out-of-towners got away with money, being a bigger cheat than what they were, it was considered an obligation to relieve him of it before he got five miles past the city limits. It was done out of civic pride; there wasn’t any meanness in it.
My father beat them once in a while, through outrageous good luck, and then they were very polite and courteous, knowing perfectly well they’d get it back soon, with interest up to date. He recognized that they were cheating, of course, so he gouged them medically. For knife fights, blacked eyes and broken limbs, these shantyboaters, as civil as they might be in other ways, were in a class by themselves. And my father had all their custom. He was the only doctor they ever called. Mostly they’d send their cook, a big black man named Paddlefoot, up to the Marine Hospital with a note that gave the effect of having been labored over. One of these, rent down the middle, lies before me as I prepare this history. “Your esteemed old friend Jim Harbeson [it goes] has had the misfortune to lose the upper portion of his right ear through the medium of a bite at the hands of Ernie Caldwell, and would appreciate your professional opinion as to whether it can be sewed back or glued. He is bleeding freely but is not otherwise in distress since full of whiskey. Respectfully—” and signed by Ben Martin, the principal shantyboater of the district.
On these occasions, it was my father’s way to turn over his appointments to an associate and rattle cheerfully down in his carriage, after which he treated the sufferer with great flourish, and charged triple his usual fee. What’s more, he always collected it; then that night he came back and lost not only the fee but whatever other sum he had on him, along with his watch chain, or a ring, or a stickpin, or shirt, or some gewgaw of the sort. These articles he usually redeemed later. He got drunk, too, but not very often, and only because he didn’t like being a doctor.
The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) Page 1
