April 27, 1819.
Curiously enough, the book itself had been published by Galignani in
1828. The cost of our total purchases, a goodly heap, amounted to but
five dollars.
The balance in quantity if not in quality in old books is held in
Buenos Ayres by three brothers named Palumbo--Italians. The eldest
is a surly old man who must be treated with severity from the very
beginning. How he manages to support himself we do not know, for
whenever we were in his store we were sure to hear him assail some
customer most abusively. In a small subsidiary store of his, among a
heap of old pamphlets, we came upon the original folios of Humboldt’s
account of the fauna and flora of South America. Upon asking the
price, the man said thirty-five apiece--we thought he meant pesos,
and our surprise was genuine when we found he meant centavos--about
fifteen cents. From him we got the first edition of Kendall’s _Santa
Fé Expedition_. One of his brothers was very pleasant and probably,
in consequence, the most prosperous of the three. The third was
reputed crazy, and certainly acted so, but after an initial encounter
we became friends and got on famously. All three had a very fair idea
of the value of Argentine books, but knew little or nothing about
English.
Another dealer who has probably a better stock than any of the
Palumbos is a man named Real y Taylor. His grandmother was English,
and his father spent his life dealing in books. At his death the
store was closed and the son started speculating in land with the
money his father had left him. Prices soared and he bought, but when
the crash came he was caught with many others. Bethinking himself of
his father’s books, he took them out of storage and opened a small
booth. The stock was large and a good part of it has not yet been
unpacked. Taylor has only a superficial knowledge of what he deals
in. He shears folios, strips off original boards and old leathers
to bind in new pasteboard, and raises the price five or ten dollars
after the process. In this he is no different from the rest, for
after a fairly comprehensive experience in Buenos Ayres we may give
it as our opinion that there is not a single dealer who knows the
“rules” as they are observed by scores of dealers in America and
England. Taylor had only one idea, and that was that if any one were
interested in a book, that book must be of great value; he would
name a ridiculous price, and it was a question of weeks and months
before he would reduce it to anything within the bounds of reason. We
never really got very much from him, the best things being several
old French books of early voyages to South America and a first
edition of Anson’s _Voyage Around the World_. Just before we left
he decided to auction off his stock, putting up five hundred lots
a month. The first auction lasted three nights. The catalogue was
amusing, giving a description of each book in bombastic fashion--all
were “unique in interest,” and about every third was the “only copy
extant outside the museums.” He had put base prices on most, and for
the rest had arranged with cappers. The attendance was very small
and nearly everything was bid in. It was curious to see how to the
last he held that any book that any one was interested in must be
of unusual worth. There was put up a French translation of Azara’s
_Quadrupeds of Paraguay_. The introduction was by Cuvier, but it was
not of great interest to us, for a friend had given us the valuable
original Spanish edition. Taylor had asked fifteen dollars, which we
had regarded as out of the question; he then took off the original
binding, cut and colored the pages, and rebound it, asking twenty
dollars. At the auction we thought we would get it, if it went for
very little; but when we bid, Taylor got up and told the auctioneer
to say that as it was a work of unique value he had put as base price
fifteen dollars each for the two volumes. The auction was a failure,
and as it had been widely and expensively advertised, the loss must
have been considerable.
As a whole, we found the booksellers of a disagreeable temperament.
In one case we almost came to blows; luckily not until we had looked
over the store thoroughly and bought all we really wanted, among
them a first edition of Howells’s _Italian Journeys_, in perfect
condition, for twenty-five cents. There were, of course, agreeable
exceptions, such as the old French-Italian from whom, after many
months’ intermittent bargaining, we bought Le Vaillant’s _Voyage en
Afrique_, the first edition, with most delightful steel-engravings.
He at first told us he was selling it at a set price on commission,
which is what we found they often said when they thought you wanted
a book and wished to preclude bargaining. This old man had Amsterdam
catalogues that he consulted in regard to prices when, as could not
have been often the case, he found in them references to books he
had in stock. We know of no Argentine old bookstore that prints a
catalogue.
In the larger provincial cities of Argentina we met with singularly
little success. In Cordoba the only reward of an eager search was a
battered paper-covered copy of _All on the Irish Shore_, with which
we were glad to renew an acquaintance that had lapsed for several
years. We had had such high hopes of Cordoba, as being the old
university town and early centre of learning! There was indeed one
trail that seemed to promise well, and we diligently pursued vague
stories of a “viejo” who had trunks of old books in every language,
but when we eventually found his rooms, opening off a dirty little
patio, they were empty and bereft; and we learned from a grimy brood
of children that he had gone to the hospital in Buenos Ayres and died
there, and that his boxes had been taken away by they knew not whom.
As in Argentina, the best-known Chilian writers are historians or
lawyers; and in our book-hunts in Santiago we encountered more or
less the same conditions that held in Buenos Ayres--shelf upon shelf
of legal or medical reference books and technical treatises. The
works of certain well-known historians, such as Vicuña Mackenna and
Amonategui, consistently command relatively high prices; but, as a
whole, books are far cheaper on the west side of the Andes. One long
afternoon in the Calle San Diego stands out. It was a rich find, but
we feel that the possibilities of that store are still unexhausted.
That afternoon’s trove included the first edition of Mungo Park’s
_Travels_, with the delightful original etchings; a _History of
Guatemala_, written by the Dominican missionaries, published in 1619,
an old leather-bound folio, in excellent shape; a first edition of
Holmes’s _Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_ and three of the eight
volumes of _State Papers and Publick Documents of the United States_.
In these last there was James Monroe’s book-plate, and it was curious
to imagine how these volumes from his library had found their way to
a country where his “doctrine” has been the subject of such bitter
discussion and so much misinterpretation. The value of the original
covers was no more understood in Chile than in Argentina, and we
got a complete set of Vicuña Mackenna’s _Campaña de Tacna_ in the
original pamphlets, as published, for but half what was currently
asked for bound and mutilated copies.
Valparaiso proved a barren field, and although one of the chief
delights in book-hunting lies in the fact that you can never feel
that you have completely exhausted the possibilities of a place, we
came nearer to feeling that way about Valparaiso than we ever had
about a town before. We found but one store that gave any promise,
and from it all we got were the first seven volumes of Dickens’s
_Household Words_ in perfect condition, and the _Campaign of the
Rapidan_.
The little coast towns of Chile and Peru are almost as barren as the
desert rocks and sand-hills that surround them; but even here we
had occasional surprises, as when we picked up for fifty cents, at
Antofogasta, a desolate, thriving little mining-port in the north of
Chile, Vicuña Mackenna’s _Life of O’Higgins_, for which the current
price is from ten to fifteen dollars. Another time, in Coquimbo, we
saw a man passing along the street with a hammered-copper bowl that
we coveted, and following, we found him the owner of a junk-shop
filled with a heterogeneous collection of old clothes, broken and
battered furniture, horse-trappings, and a hundred and one odds and
ends, among which were scattered some fifty or sixty books. One of
these was a first edition of Hawthorne’s _Twice-Told Tales_ in the
familiar old brown boards of Ticknor & Company.
Our South American book-hunting ended in Lima, the entrancing old
city of the kings, once the capital of the New World, and not yet
robbed by this commercial age of all its glamour and backwardness.
We expected much, knowing that when the Chilians occupied the city
in 1880 they sacked the national library of fifty thousand volumes
that their own liberator, San Martin, had founded in 1822, and
although many of the books were carried off to Chile, the greater
part was scattered around Lima or sold by weight on the streets.
We shall always feel that with more time, much patience, and good
luck we could have unearthed many treasures; although at first
sight the field is not a promising one, and, as elsewhere, one’s
acquaintances assure one that there is nothing to be found. In spite
of this, however, we came upon a store that appeared teeming with
possibilities. Without the “flaire” or much luck it might be passed
by many times without exciting interest. Over the dingy grated window
of a dilapidated colonial house is the legend “Encuadernacion y
Imprenta” (“Binding and Printing.”) Through the grimy window-panes
may be seen a row of dull law-books; but if you open the big gate
and cross the patio, with its ancient hand-well in the centre, on
the opposite side are four or five rooms with shelves of books
along the walls and tottering and fallen piles of books scattered
over the floor. Here we picked up among others an amusing little
old vellum-covered edition of Horace, printed in England in 1606,
which must have early found its way to South America, to judge from
the Spanish scrawls on the title-page. We also got many of the
works of Ricardo Palma, Peru’s most famous writer, who built up the
ruined national library, which now possesses some sixty thousand
volumes, of which a twelfth part were donated by our own Smithsonian
Institution. One of the volumes we bought had been given by Palma to
a friend, and had an autograph dedication which in other countries
would have greatly enhanced its value, but which, curiously enough,
seems to make no difference in South America. In Buenos Ayres we
got a copy of the _Letters from Europe_ of Campos Salles, Brazil’s
greatest president, which had been inscribed by him to the Argentine
translator. Once in São Paulo we picked up an autographed copy of
Gomes de Amorim, and in neither case did the autograph enter into
the question of determining the price.
We had heard rumors of possibilities in store for us in Ecuador,
Colombia, and Venezuela, but Lima was our “farthest north,” for there
our ramblings in South America were reluctantly brought to a close.
We feel, however, that such as they were, and in spite of the fact
that the names of many of the authors and places will be strange to
our brethren who have confined their explorations to the northern
hemisphere, these notes may awaken interest in a little-known field,
which, if small in comparison with America or the Old World, offers
at times unsuspected prizes and rewards.
VI
Seth Bullock--
Sheriff of the Black Hills Country
VI
SETH BULLOCK--SHERIFF OF THE BLACK HILLS COUNTRY
With the death of Captain Seth Bullock, of Deadwood, South Dakota,
there came to us who were his friends not only a deep sense of
personal loss, but also the realization that one of the very last of
the old school of frontiersmen had gone, one of those whom Lowell
characterized as “stern men with empires in their brains.” The hard
hand of circumstance called forth and developed the type, and for
a number of generations the battle with the wilderness continued
in bitter force, and a race was brought forth trained to push on
far beyond the “edge of cultivation,” and contend in his remote
fastnesses with the Red Indian, and eke out a hard-earned existence
from the grim and resentful wilds. In the wake of the vanguard came
the settler and after him the merchant, and busy towns sprang up
where the lonely camp-fire of the pioneer had flared to the silent
forest. The restless blood of the frontiers pressed ever onward; the
Indian melted away like “snow upon the desert’s dusty face”; the
great herds of game that formerly blackened the plains left the mute
testimony of their passing in the scattered piles of whitened skulls
and bleached bones. At last the time came when there was no further
frontier to conquer. The restless race of empire-makers had staring
them in the face the same fate as the Indian. Their rough-and-ready
justice administered out of hand had to give way before the judge
with his court-house and his jury. The majority of the old Indian
fighters were shouldered aside and left to end their days as best
they could, forgotten by those for whom they had won the country.
They could not adapt themselves to the new existence; their day had
passed and they went to join the Indian and the buffalo.
[Illustration: The Captain makes advances to a little Indian girl]
Captain Seth Bullock, however, belonged to the minority, for no turn
of the wheel could destroy his usefulness to the community, and his
large philosophy of the plains enabled him to fit into and hold his
place through every shift of surroundings. The Captain’s family came
from Virginia, but he was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1849.
Before he was twenty he had found his way to Montana, and built
for himself a reputation for justice which at that day and in that
community could only be established by cold and dauntless courage.
One of the feats of his early days of which he was justly proud was
when he had himself hung the first man to be hung by law in Montana.
The crowd of prospectors and cow-punchers did not approve of such an
unusual, unorthodox method of procedure as the hanging of a man by
a public hangman after he had been duly tried and sentenced. They
wished to take the prisoner and string him up to the nearest tree or
telegraph-pole, with the readiness and despatch to which they were
accustomed. To evidence their disapproval they started to shoot at
the hangman; he fled, but before the crowd could secure their victim,
the Captain had the mastery of the situation, and, quieting his
turbulent fellow citizens with a cold eye and relentless six-shooter,
he himself performed the task that the hangman had left unfinished.
The incident inspired the mob with a salutary respect for the law and
its ability to carry out its sentences. I do not remember whether the
Captain was mayor or sheriff at the time. He was trusted and admired
as well as feared, and when he was barely twenty-two he was elected
State senator from Helena, the largest town in the then territory of
Montana.
It was in 1876 that the Captain first went to the Black Hills, that
lovely group of mountains in the southwestern corner of South Dakota.
He came with the first rush of prospectors when the famous Hidden
Treasure Mine was discovered. On the site of what is at present the
town of Deadwood he set up a store for miners’ supplies, and soon
had established himself as the arm of the law in that very lawless
community. That was the Captain’s rôle all through his life. In the
early years he would spend day and night in the saddle in pursuit of
rustlers and road-agents. When he once started on the trail nothing
could make him relinquish it; and when he reached the end, his quarry
would better surrender without drawing. He had a long arm and his
district was known throughout the West as an unhealthy place for bad
men. Starting as federal peace officer of the Black Hills, he later
became marshal and sheriff of the district, and eventually marshal of
South Dakota, which position he held until 1914. As years passed and
civilization advanced, his bag of malefactors became less simple in
character, although maintaining some of the old elements. In 1908 he
wrote me:
I have been very busy lately; pulled two horse thieves from Montana
last week for stealing horses from the Pine Ridge Indians. I leave
to-day for Leavenworth with a bank cashier for mulling a bank. He
may turn up on Wall Street when his term expires, to take a post
graduate course.
In 1907 he told me that he was going off among the Ute Indians, and
I asked him to get me some of their pipes. He answered: “The Utes
are not pipe-makers; they spend all their time rustling and eating
government grub. We had six horse-thieves for the pen after the
past term of court, and should get four more at the June term in
Pierre. This will keep them quiet for a while. I am now giving my
attention to higher finance, and have one of the Napoleons--a bank
president--in jail here. He only got away with $106,000--he did not
have time to become eligible for the Wall Street class.”
It was when the Captain was sheriff of the Black Hills that father
first met him. A horse-thief that was “wanted” in the Deadwood
district managed to slip out of the Captain’s clutches and was
captured by father, who was deputy sheriff in a country three or
four hundred miles north. A little while later father had to go to
Deadwood on business. Fording a river some miles out of town he
ran into the Captain. Father had often heard of Seth Bullock, for
his record and character were known far and wide, and he had no
difficulty in identifying the tall, slim, hawk-featured Westerner
sitting his horse like a centaur. Seth Bullock, however, did not
know so much about father, and was very suspicious of the rough,
unkempt group just in from two weeks’ sleeping out in the gumbo and
sage-brush. He made up his mind that it was a tin-horn gambling
outfit and would bear close watching. He was not sure but what it
would be best to turn them right back, and let them walk around his
district “like it was a swamp.” After settling father’s identity
the Captain’s suspicions vanished. That was the beginning of their
lifelong friendship.
After father had returned to the East to live, Seth Bullock would
come on to see him every so often, and whenever my father’s
campaigning took him West the Captain would join the train and stay
with him until the trip was finished. These tours were rarely without
incident, and in his autobiography father has told of the part Seth
Bullock played on one of them.
When, in 1900, I was nominated for Vice-President, I was sent by
the National Committee on a trip into the States of the high plains
and the Rocky Mountains. These had all gone overwhelmingly for Mr.
Bryan on the free-silver issue four years previously, and it was
thought that I, because of my knowledge of and acquaintanceship
with the people, might accomplish something toward bringing them
back into line. It was an interesting trip, and the monotony
usually attendant upon such a campaign of political speaking was
diversified in vivid fashion by occasional hostile audiences. One
or two of the meetings ended in riots. One meeting was finally
broken up by a mob; everybody fought so that the speaking had
to stop. Soon after this we reached another town where we were
told there might be trouble. Here the local committee included an
old and valued friend, a “two-gun” man of repute, who was not in
the least quarrelsome, but who always kept his word. We marched
round to the local opera-house, which was packed with a mass of
men, many of them rather rough-looking. My friend the two-gun man
sat immediately behind me, a gun on each hip, his arms folded,
looking at the audience; fixing his gaze with instant intentness
on any section of the house from which there came so much as a
whisper. The audience listened to me with rapt attention. At the
end, with a pride in my rhetorical powers which proceeded from a
misunderstanding of the situation, I remarked to the chairman: “I
held that audience well; there wasn’t an interruption.” To which
the chairman replied: “Interruption? Well, I guess not! Seth had
sent round word that if any son of a gun peeped he’d kill him.”
(_Autobiography_, p. 141.)
Father had the greatest admiration and affection for the Captain. It
was to him that he was referring in his autobiography when he wrote:
I have sometimes been asked if Wister’s _Virginian_ is not
overdrawn; why, one of the men I have mentioned in this chapter was
in all essentials the “Virginian” in real life, not only in his
force but in his charm.
When we were hunting in Africa father decided that he would try to
get Seth Bullock to meet us in Europe at the end of the trip. I
remember father describing him to some of our English friends in
Khartoum, and saying: “Seth Bullock is a true Westerner, the finest
type of frontiersman. He could handle himself in any situation, and
if I felt that I did not wish him to meet any particular person, the
reflection would be entirely on the latter.”
The Captain wrote me that he was afraid he could not meet us in
London because of the illness of one of his daughters, but matters
eventually worked out in such a way that he was able to go over to
England, and when he met father there he said he felt like hanging
his Stetson on the dome of Saint Paul’s and shooting it off, to show
his exhilaration at the reunion. He thoroughly enjoyed himself in
England, and while at bottom he was genuinely appreciative of the
Britisher, he could not help poking sly fun at him. I remember riding
on a bus with him and hearing him ask the conductor where this famous
Picalilly Street was. The conductor said: “You must mean Piccadilly,
sir.” The Captain entered into a lengthy conversation with him, and
with an unmoved stolidity of facial expression that no Red Indian
could have bettered, referred each time to “Picalilly,” and each time
the little bus conductor would interpose a “You mean Piccadilly,
sir,” with the dogged persistency of his race.
The major-domos and lackeys at the Guildhall and other receptions and
the “beefeaters” at the Tower were a never-failing source of delight;
he would try to picture them on a bad pony in the cow country, and
explain that their costume would “make them the envy of every Sioux
brave at an Indian dog-dance.”
When my sister and I were in Edinburgh, the local guide who took us
through the Castle showed us an ancient gun, which instead of being
merely double-barrelled, possessed a cluster of five or six barrels.
With great amusement he told us how an American to whom he had been
showing the piece a few days previously had remarked that to be shot
at with that gun must be like taking a shower-bath. A few questions
served to justify the conclusion we had immediately formed as to
identity of our predecessor.