Rebel Souls

by Justin Martin

  Ludlow was now twenty-six years old. Recently, a brief newspaper item had run, listing some notable personages who had attended a gala event. Ludlow, spotted at the edge of the crowd, was mentioned in passing. In the item, he was cast as a curiosity and a has-been: “With his beautiful wife at his side, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, the author of the ‘Hasheesh Eater,’ a work of unrivaled eloquence and genius; his dark eyes have a somewhat remote and dreamy expression as if he were still haunted by the remembrance of its perilous glooms and glories.”

  Even The Hasheesh Eater had run its course. Following publication, the book rapidly went through four printings. But the most recent edition sold poorly, and it was no longer available.

  This was certainly not the life envisioned by Rosalie, that notably “beautiful wife.” Money was so tight that the couple had recently moved into a smaller apartment at an undesirable Manhattan address. The tension between them had grown unbearable. “Fitz did not come back til late. Rose nervous,” notes a diary entry by his sister Helen Ludlow, hinting at strife between the couple. Another entry reads, “Rose frightened and good cause—I went over to see about it—Oh Shame!—What will the end be[?]”

  Ludlow and his sister were especially close. As it happens, she was one of the few people aware of a deeper, more unsettling cause of marital discord. Flailing as a writer, Ludlow had developed a taste for something far stronger and far more dangerous than hashish. He was using opium.

  During his teenage drug forays at that Poughkeepsie apothecary shop, Ludlow had dabbled with opium (he’d tried almost everything). But it simply hadn’t spoken to him. As a narcotic, opium promised only numbness. Hallucinogenic hashish lit up his senses. Once he arrived in New York, however, his drug predilections reversed. The pressures of the literary life made escape the desired outcome. Where he’d been expansive about his hash reveries, he was furtive about his opium use. Probably, he was ashamed to be in the grip of a drug that he’d dismissed in his book for offering no adventure, no romance. According to Helen, her brother took opium simply “to goad wearied nerves.”

  Most likely, he was ingesting the drug in its laudanum form. Laudanum is a tincture, consisting of opium powder dissolved in alcohol. During the nineteenth century, it was widely used as a patent remedy to treat a variety of conditions: headaches, arthritis, anxiety, severe menstrual cramps—and also widely abused. Laudanum was swallowed like cough syrup. Fatal overdoses were shockingly common.

  In the evening, on the sly, Ludlow indulged his growing narcotic habit. By day, he worked his deadening job, poring over the manifests of ships docked in New York Harbor and adding up the value of their cargoes to determine how much duty was owed the city. During the Civil War, the Customs House became a kind of holding tank for frustrated litterateurs. After losing out to O’Brien on the military post, Aldrich had taken a job there, too. Ludlow and Aldrich—a pair of polymathic functionaries—whiled away their workdays with various diversions, such as a contest to see who could do the best and quickest translation of an Italian poem. One of their efforts has been preserved on a page of Customs House letterhead:

  Stanza of Italian poetry:

  Dall uno del mio cuore

  Lorse mia sol prece

  Che l’idol mio ammiuri

  Che io l’ammiori, e muoria

  Aldrich’s translation:

  Out from the depths of my heart

  Has arisen this single cry

  Let me behold my beloved

  Let me behold her & die

  Ludlow’s translation:

  From the bottom of my heart

  There broke one single cry

  Let me look on my idol

  Look on him & die!

  Then came this great opportunity, courtesy of one of America’s most celebrated painters. Albert Bierstadt was born in Germany and came to America while still an infant. Growing up in Massachusetts, he showed prodigious talent. In 1859, Bierstadt had made his first trip out West, setting out from his home in New Bedford. He got as far as a stretch of the Rocky Mountains in what would today be Wyoming. But the trip furnished the raw studies and inspiration for a series of landscapes. With these paintings, Bierstadt achieved his professional breakthrough.

  Eager to capitalize, Bierstadt moved to Manhattan and set up shop in the famous Tenth Street Studio Building. At the time, the building featured such notables as John LaFarge, Worthington Whittredge, and Frederic Church. Bierstadt—a self-promoter extraordinaire—filled his studio with curios gathered during that 1859 western expedition. Prospective buyers were conducted through a space that resembled a theatrical set, generously strewn with arrows, feathers, moccasins, and deerskins. Bierstadt regaled visitors with tales of nearly starving to death in the wilderness (in reality, he hadn’t even come close) and encounters with hostile Indians (more hyperbole). A newspaper reporter described Bierstadt’s studio as looking like “the depot of a fur trader.”

  With the advent of the Civil War, certain painters—other than those who enlisted, of course—were surprised to find that their prospects actually improved. This was especially true in large Northern cities, home to manufacturing firms that were churning out munitions, uniforms, blankets, everything necessary to support a massive war effort. The owners of some of these businesses got rich; a portion of them, in turn, used their newfound wealth to purchase paintings, and a boom that nobody could have anticipated was soon under way. The Boston Transcript reported that a “golden shower” was falling on New York City’s artists. No one was better positioned to benefit than Bierstadt.

  Bierstadt was a master at what were then known as “great pictures,” dramatic paintings executed on vast canvasses, requiring a command of lighting effects and an eye for composition. Bierstadt’s choice of subject matter also helped. Landscapes were his specialty: idyllic, inspiring, and most of all peaceful—perfect in a time of war. Like Adah Menken and Artemus Ward, Bierstadt had lit upon a successful formula, creating work that resonated just enough with grim current events, while at the same time offering a needed diversion. As an added attraction, his images were of the West. The United States, that grand experiment, was less than one hundred years old, and already it had fractured. Blood had been spilled, sullying the landscape of the East. But the West represented fresh territory, a place where what was true and best about the American spirit could one day take hold again.

  Bierstadt’s paintings were like dispatches from a promised land. By 1863, he was reaping the rewards due a top-tier artist. He was able actually to charge admission—as high as twenty-five cents per person—for members of the public to view his work. A man had recently arranged to do an engraving of what was to this point Bierstadt’s most famous painting, The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak. The engraving would make it possible for Bierstadt to sell reproductions of the work, a lot of them, providing a further revenue stream. He’d also just received an offer to buy the original Lander’s Peak for $10,000, a vast sum at the time. But he boldly turned down the offer, certain that he could get even more money for it in the future.

  Bierstadt was only thirty-three years old. He was a neatly groomed man with a trim beard and a bearing that exuded, in equal measure, both aloofness and confidence. His gaze, while extremely direct, was curiously unpenetrating, seeming to look past rather than through a person. In New York artistic circles, there were whispers that Bierstadt was poised to eclipse Frederic Church as the preeminent landscape painter. Several years had passed since Church had achieved his last major triumph, Heart of the Andes. Moreover, that was a South American rather than a native subject. The time was right, Bierstadt sensed, to take a second western journey, and this time he intended to travel beyond the Rockies, all the way to the Pacific Coast.

  It might seem strange that Bierstadt chose to hitch his star to Ludlow’s broke-down wagon. But Bierstadt had his reasons, some of them evident, some perhaps secrets that he was keeping to himself. One thing
was certain: he didn’t want to serve as his own chronicler again. During that first journey in 1859, he’d sent a series of letters from points West that were published in the New Bedford (MA) Mercury. He recognized that he wasn’t much of a writer. This time around, Bierstadt was intent on doing everything in a more polished and professional manner. Though Ludlow was currently foundering, he was still seen as a brilliant writer.

  The faith Bierstadt placed in him was immediately rewarded, as Ludlow arranged to publish his travel dispatches in a major publication, the New York Post. This guaranteed that the articles would draw a great deal of attention to both the painter and the writer. It appears that Edwin Booth played a role in brokering the partnership of Ludlow and Bierstadt. Booth—still in the grip of severe alcoholism at this time—remained close to Ludlow. He was also a good friend of Bierstadt and a frequent guest at receptions held at the Tenth Street Studio. “How I would rejoice if I could take the trip that Ludlow is to start on,” commented Booth.

  Bierstadt and Ludlow set off in May 1863. The eastern half of the transcontinental journey was the easy leg, so Ludlow’s wife, Rosalie, came along. They covered this ground quickly, by rail, recognizing that there was little novelty in documenting the wonders of Ohio or Illinois. Even so, Bierstadt managed to convince the presidents of several railroad companies to provide free passage. In exchange, Bierstadt promised that Ludlow would make favorable mention of their companies in his Post dispatches. The railroad presidents were anxious to promote the idea that trains remained a safe way to travel, even with a war raging. They were also pleased to tout the fact that the rails reached right to the West’s doorstep. One day soon, they hoped to offer service across the continent.

  Ludlow and Bierstadt planned to travel for roughly six months. Along their entire itinerary, they intended to stick to territory that was either decisively Union or where the war was a distant abstraction—with the lone exception of Missouri. That was the only place that held the possibility of war-related dangers. Missouri, like Maryland, was a border state that was forced to contend with fiercely divided loyalties among its citizens. During the Civil War, Missouri sent thousands of soldiers to both sides, Union and Confederate. In St. Louis, Ludlow overheard some secessionist grumblings, but that was about the extent of it.

  Rosalie’s cousin was president of the Platte Country Railroad. So she was able to arrange more free train passage, from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Atchison, Kansas—the end of the line. Here, Rosalie bid her farewells and split off from the expedition. It had taken only a matter of days for Ludlow and Bierstadt to arrive at this jumping-off point, and the real adventure was about to begin.

  The first big event of the trip was a buffalo hunt. Ludlow and Bierstadt rendezvoused with a party of experienced hunters and traveled to a promising spot on the border of Kansas and Nebraska Territory. Soon, the first buffalo were spotted. Through field glasses, Ludlow could make out maybe eight brown dots scattered in the distance. He was underwhelmed; for his first sighting, buffalo reminded him of nothing so much as New England dairy cows.

  The party camped for the night on the banks of the Republican River. They dined on antelope steak, which Ludlow found delicious. The next morning, he arose to a very different situation. Viewed through field glasses, a vast stretch of the surrounding plains had turned a kind of deep chocolate brown, now thick with buffalo.

  While Bierstadt hung back in camp, executing landscape studies, Ludlow joined in the hunt. Everyone was on horseback, and the plan was to use a kind of divide-and-conquer maneuver on the buffalo. The hunters intended to ride directly at different points along the flank of the herd, spooking the animals. By sparking multiple stampedes, going in all different directions, the cohesion of this massive buffalo herd would be broken, and individuals could be separated and picked off. It was a daring maneuver, reckless even, and one for which greenhorn Ludlow was in no way prepared. While Ludlow possessed many talents, riding on horseback directly at a solid wall of buffalo was not one of them. It didn’t take long before he made a mistake, and all at once, he was in the line of a stampede. Terrified, he was confronted by what he estimated to be a mile-wide column of “angry faces, a rolling surf of wind-blown hair,” with eyes that were like “a row of quivering lanterns, burning reddish-brown.”

  He whirled his horse around and set off running ahead of the buffalo. He could hear their hooves thundering and feared he was about to be “wiped out like a grease-spot.” In front of him, a low butte rose above the plains. Wisely, Ludlow rode up onto it. The herd simply split, like a river reaching a boulder, and passed to either side. In his saddle, on the crest of the butte, Ludlow was treated to an incredible sight that he described as a “great oscillating patch of hair and hide.” A full five minutes elapsed as the buffalo rampaged past. “I was safe,” Ludlow would recall. “I had such a view of buffaloes as I never could have expected, never would enjoy again.”

  By and by, one of the hunters shot a buffalo in such a way that it was gravely wounded, yet remained upright. For this, Bierstadt was summoned. The artist jumped into a little one-horse buggy that had been brought along on the hunt for just such an occasion and set out bouncing across the plains. On arriving at the site, Bierstadt set up in a hurry. He planted a large blue umbrella and sat beneath it on a camp stool. Resting his color box on his knees, palette in hand, he began a series of lightning-quick oil-paint studies of the wounded buffalo.

  Periodically, Ludlow and the hunters edged their horses toward the hulking beast, causing it to turn in various directions for Bierstadt’s benefit. This went on for a half hour. Finally, it was time to put the creature out of its misery. Ludlow and the hunters all took aim and fired in unison. The bullet-riddled buffalo made one final charge: “He rushed forward at his persecutors with all the elan of his first charges; but strength failed him half way. Ten feet from where we stood, he tumbled to his knees, made heroic effort to rise again, and came up on one leg; but the death-tremor possessed the other, and with a great panting groan, in which all of brute power and beauty went forth at once, he fell prone on the trampled turf.”

  After the hunt, Ludlow and Bierstadt continued westward, now traveling by overland stage. They relied on the familiar Concord wagon, little more than a box on wheels, painted red, laden with mail for stops along the way. It was designed to seat six comfortably, but drivers were never inclined to turn away passengers. The pace was arduous, about four miles an hour.

  Ludlow and Bierstadt traveled mostly at night; the painter required daylight to work. So the overland stage was also the overnight stage. Sleep was quite a challenge, though, while forced to remain upright and squeezed in tight on a hard wooden bench, jostling over rutted, uneven ground.

  Using clothing and blankets, Ludlow fashioned a kind of halter that suspended him above his fellow passengers. In this way, he was able to assume a normal horizontal sleeping position, though he swung a bit with each bump of the stage. He described himself as an “Overland Mazeppa.” The contraption quickly proved as uncomfortable as it was ridiculous, and he abandoned it. Soon, Ludlow fell instead into a pattern of foregoing sleep at night and sitting up front beside the drivers: “This was a place where legs were stretchable and faculties wide awake.” Drivers had to remain alert through the long night, and Ludlow kept them company with what must have been a unique brand of jittery, insomniacal banter. During the day, often at one of the godforsaken way stations where the stages stopped, Ludlow would slip off, lie down, and try to catch a short nap.

  Sleep became an obsession, and Ludlow filled his diary with references to it—or, rather, the lack of it. Very little about this hardship made it into the Post dispatches, however. Promotion-happy Bierstadt had once again cut a deal: free passage via overland stage all the way to California in exchange for a plug or two by Ludlow.

  Eastern Colorado Territory looked no different from western Nebraska Territory. The landscape remained unrelievedly flat, the plains st
retching endlessly in all directions, broken occasionally by a cottonwood tree or a lonely gravestone marking the final resting place of some unfortunate pioneer. But one day, just as dawn was breaking, a driver pointed into the distance and announced to Ludlow, “There are the Rocky Mountains.”

  Ludlow was puzzled. Looking in the direction the driver indicated, the writer saw absolutely nothing. It was simply more of the same: flat land, vast sky, puffs of cloud on the horizon. But then he realized that the mountains were the sky, what he had mistaken for clouds—their snowcaps. Ludlow burst into tears. Perhaps it was sleep deprivation, but he was seized by an overwhelming sense of wonder: “Nature has dipped her pencil in the faintest solution of ultra-marine, and drawn it once across the western sky, with a hand as tender as Love’s.”

  Using boomtown Denver as a base, Ludlow and Bierstadt made repeated day trips into the Rockies. Up close, Ludlow was able to get a sense of scale and could see how truly hulking and massive these mountains were. They dwarfed anything he’d seen back East in the Catskills or Adirondacks.

  For one Rockies foray, Ludlow and Bierstadt traveled to a location that offered an unusually striking view across a valley to a snow-peaked mountain in the distance. Ludlow estimated its elevation as “considerably” above fifteen thousand feet, making it taller than Mont Blanc, the mightiest Alp. Bierstadt said he required about fifteen minutes to do a study.

  While he painted, a storm began to gather, and an incredible natural drama—of light and shadow—began to play out. Thunderclouds, rolling in over the mountain, were shredded into indigo ribbons by ridges of rock. Shafts of sunlight stretched through the broken clouds, to the valley floor below. There, the calm, mirrored surface of a lake alternately reflected the black clouds and blue sky above. As Bierstadt worked, Ludlow meditated on the primordial quality of this scene. No one in human history, he was sure, had ever climbed very far up the face of the mountain that stood before them. The crisp air around them seemed virginal, as though it were “quite unbreathed before.” The mountain, this incredible mountain that they’d been contemplating, didn’t even have a name. Bierstadt christened it “Mount Rosalie” in honor of Ludlow’s wife, who had split off from the expedition back in Atchison.