I came to Denver in the spring of 1880, at the age of eleven, as mildly
inoffensive a small boy as ever left a farm--undersized and weakly, so
that at the age of seventeen I commonly passed as twelve, and so
unaccustomed to the sight of buildings that I thought the five-story
Windsor Hotel a miracle of height and magnificence. I had been living
with my maternal grandfather and aunt on a farm in Jackson, Tennessee,
where I had been born; and I had come with my younger brother to join
my parents, who had finally decided that Denver was to be their
permanent home. The conductors on the trains had taken care of us,
because my father was a railroad man, at the head of the telegraph
system; and we had been entertained on the way by the stories of an old
forty-niner with a gray moustache, who told us how he had shot buffalo
on those prairies where we now saw only antelope. I was not
precocious; his stories interested me more than anything else on the
journey; and I stared so hard at the old pioneer that I should
recognize him now, I believe, if I saw him on the street.
My schooling was not peculiar; there was nothing "holier than thou" in
my bringing up. My father, being a Roman Catholic convert from the
Episcopalian Church, sent me to Notre Dame, Indiana, to be educated;
and there, to be sure, I read the "Lives of the Saints," aspired to be
a saint, and put pebbles in my small shoes to "mortify the flesh,"
because I was told that a good priest, Father Hudson--whom I all but
worshipped--used to do so. But even at Notre Dame, and much more in
Denver, I was homesick for the farm; and at last I was allowed to
return to Jackson to be cared for by my Protestant relatives. They
sent me to a Baptist school till I was seventeen. And when I was
recalled to Denver, because of the failure of my father's health, I
went to work to help earn for the household, with no strong attachment
for any church and with no recognized membership in any.
I suppose there is no one who does not look back upon his past and
wonder what he should have become in life if this or that crucial event
had not occurred to set his destiny. It seems to me that if it had not
been for the sudden death of my father I, too, might have found our
jungle beast a domestic tabby, and have fed it its prey without
realizing what I was about. I should have been a lawyer, I know; for I
had had the ambition from my earliest boyhood, and I had been confirmed
in it by my success in debating at school. (Once, at Notre Dame, I
spoke for a full hour in successful defence of the proposition that
Colorado was the "greatest state in the Union," and proved at least
that I had a lawyer's "wind.") But I should probably have been a
lawyer who has learned his pleasant theories of life in the colleges.
And on the night that my father died, the crushing realities of poverty
put out an awful and compelling hand on me, and my struggle with them
began.
I was eighteen years old, the eldest of four children. I had been
"writing proofs" in the Denver land office, for claimants who had filed
on Government land; and I had saved $150 of my salary before my work
there ceased. I found, after my father's death, that this $150 was all
we had in the world, and $130 of it went for funeral expenses. His
life had been insured for $15,000, and we believed that the premiums
had all been paid, but we could not find the last receipt; the agent
denied having received the payment; the policy had lapsed on the day
before my father's death; and we got nothing. Our furniture had been
mortgaged; we were allowed only enough of it to furnish a little house
on Santa Fé Avenue; and later we moved to a cottage on lower West
Colfax Avenue, in which Negroes have since lived.
I went to work at a salary of $10 a month, in a real estate office--as
office boy--and carried a "route" of newspapers in the morning before
the office opened, and did janitor work at night when it closed. After
a month of that, I got a better place, as office boy, with a mining
company, at a salary of $25 a month. And finally, my younger brother
found work in a law office and I "swapped jobs" with him--because I
wished to study law!
It was the office of Mr. R. D. Thompson, who still practises in Denver;
and his example as an incorruptibly honest lawyer has been one of the
best and strongest influences of my life.
I had that one ambition--to be a lawyer. Associated with it I seem to
have had an unusual curiosity about politics. And where I got either
the ambition or the curiosity, I have no idea. My father's mother was
a Greenleaf,[1] and related to the author of "Greenleaf on Evidence,"
but my father himself had nothing of the legal mind. As a boy, living
in Mississippi, he had joined the Confederate army when he was
preparing for the University of Virginia, had attained the rank of
captain, had become General Forrest's private secretary, and had
written--or largely helped to write--General Forrest's autobiography.
He was idealistic, enthusiastic, of an inventive genius, with a really
remarkable command of English, and an absorbing love of books. My
mother's father was a Barr, from the north of Ireland, a Scotch-Irish
Presbyterian, her mother was a Woodfalk of Jackson County, Tennessee, a
Methodist. The members of the family were practical, strong-willed,
able men and women, but with no bent, that I know of, toward either law
or politics.
And yet, one of the most vivid memories of my childhood in Jackson is
of attending a political rally with my grandfather and hearing a Civil
War veteran declaim against Republicans who "waved the bloody shirt"--a
memory so strong that for years afterward I never saw a Republican
without expecting to see the gory shirt on his back, and wondering
vaguely why he was not in jail. When I came to Denver, where the
Republicans were dominant, I felt myself in the land of the enemy. And
when I "swapped" myself into Mr. Thompson's office, I was surprised to
find that my employer, though a Republican from Pittsburg, was so human
that one of the first things he did was to give me a suit of clothes.
If there is anything more ridiculously dangerous than to blind a
child's mind with such prejudices, I do not know what it is.
However, my own observations of what was going on about me were already
opening my eyes. I had read, in the newspapers, of how the Denver
Republicans won the elections by fraud--by ballot-box stuffing and what
not--and I had followed one "Soapy" Smith on the streets, from precinct
to precinct, with his gang of election thieves, and had seen them vote
not once but five times openly. I had seen a young man, whom I knew,
knocked down and arrested for "raising a disturbance" when he objected
to "Soapy" Smith's proceeding; and the policeman who arrested him did
it with a smile and a wink.
When I came to Mr. Thompson to ask him how he, a Republican, could
countenance such things, he assured me that much of what I had been
reading and hearing of election frauds was a lie--the mere "whine" of
the defeated party--and I saw that he believed what he said. I knew
that he was an honest, upright man; and I was puzzled. What puzzled me
still more was this: although the ministers in the churches and
"prominent citizens" in all walks of life denounced the "election
crooks" with the most laudable fervor, the election returns showed that
the best people in the churches joined the worst people in the dives to
vote the same ticket, and vote it "straight." And I was most of all
puzzled to find that when the elections were over, the opposition
newspaper ceased its scolding, the voice of ministerial denunciation
died away, and the crimes of the election thieves were condoned and
forgotten.
I was puzzled. I saw the jungle of vice and party prejudice, but I did
not yet see "the Cat." I saw its ears and its eyes there in the
underbrush, but I did not know what they were. I thought they were
connected with the Republican party.
And then I came upon some more of the brute's anatomy. Members of the
Legislature in Denver were accused of fraud in the purchase of state
supplies, and--some months later--members of the city government were
accused of committing similar frauds with the aid of civic officials
and prominent business men. It was proved in court, for example, that
bills for $3 had been raised to $300, that $200 had been paid for a
bundle of hay worth $2, and $50 for a yard of cheesecloth worth five
cents; barrels of ink had been bought for each legislator, though a
pint would have sufficed; and an official of the Police Department was
found guilty of conniving with a gambler named "Jim" Marshall to rob an
express train. I watched the cases in court. I applauded at the
meetings of leading citizens who denounced the grafters and passed
resolutions in support of the candidates of the opposition party. I
waited to see the criminals punished. And they were not punished.
Their crimes were not denied. They were publicly denounced by the
courts and by the investigating committees, but somehow, for reasons
not clear, they all went scot-free, on appeals. Some mysterious power
protected them, and I, in the boyish ardor of my ignorance, concluded
that they were protected by the Republican "bloody shirt"--and I rushed
into that (to me) great confederation of righteousness and all-decent
government, the Democratic party.