Through "Poverty's Vale": A Hardscrabble Boyhood in Upstate New York, 1832-1867 (review)

72CIVIL WAR HISTORY crude oil in Pennsylvania. Ultimately in 1881 he became for two years general manager of the Northern Pacific Railroad and did much to improve the administration and operation of that line. By the time of his death in 1905, Haupt had dabbled in a variety of enterprises apart from railroads: coal mines, a granite quarry, street cars run by compressed air, the raising of goats, plans to improve the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers; and a process for manufacturing powdered milk. Along the way, he had been fleeced by his partners half a dozen times. A man of talent at a time when professional engineers were rare, he seemed to lack the financial feel and the intensity of purpose of the more successful entrepreneurs of his era. Energetic, efficient and a times displaying touches of technological genius, he was at the same time brusque, pigheaded, and perhaps naive. Few viewed him neutrally, though here James Ward paints a sympathetic, but not one-sided portrait, in which from time to time even a bit of the scoundrel shows through. Soundly based on a broad array of sources, manuscript as well as printed, That Man Haupt is a worthwhile addition to the literature of the railroad era. Clakk C. Spence University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Through "Poverty's Vale": A Hardscrabble Boyhood in Upstate New York, 1832-1867. By Henry Conklin. Edited by Wendell Tripp. (Syracuse : Syracuse University Press, 1974. Pp. xxiii, 263. $8.50.) Through the long, cold Adirondack winter of 1891-1892, a caretaker watched over a hunting lodge on Hannedaga Lake in upstate Herkimer County, New York. The sometime farmer and trapper, Henry Conklin, determined to occupy the lonely winter hours by writing an autobiography. Filling page after page in a blank tax assessor's ledger, the caretaker appraised his own career. Whether he completed the task will remain unknown, for sometime after his death in 1915 most of Conklin's belongings were lost in a fire. Perhaps the latter half a winter's work perished with them, but what has survived, and now appears for the first time in print, is a remarkable memoir of Conklin's childhood and early manhood. As the editor carefully points out, the central theme of Conklin's narrative is poverty. It is not the class conscious poverty of an urban proletariet or the hopeless poverty found in the backwaters of twentieth century American industrial capitalism, but the individualistic, aspiring poverty of the nineteenth century's agrarian frontier. Far removed from burgeoning commercial centers and, even, from the fertile valleys of prosperous agriculture, Henry Conklin's family scratched a meagre living from the rocky and stingy soil. Their hopeful aspiration was reflected in a repetitive pattern of movement from farm to farm BOOK REVIEWS73 in quest of economic improvement. The poverty was, nonetheless, real and the aspiration led to repeated frustration. "We might have gone to the poor house," Conklin reflected, "but there was none to go to." Conklin's narrative concludes with a recollection of his service during the Civil War. Caught up in a moment by the patriotic appeal of martial music, he enlisted without thought of wife and children. Later, temptation whispered "Why don't you go to Canada?" But, despising the labels "coward" and "traitor," Conklin turned his back on the north star temptor and marched south to duty. His regiment, the 81st New York, fought in the Peninsular Campaign of 1862. Wounded at the battle of Seven Pines, Conklin was discharged several months later. There his narrative abruptly ends. A handsome volume, well edited and illustrated, Through "Poverty 's Vale" will prove useful in a number of ways. Students interested in the life-style of an ordinary mid-nineteenth century American will be drawn to its many enlightening vignettes. Regional historians may rely on it for illustrating social history. Military historians will find in it a Civil War journal greatly enriched by the foregoing biographical narrative . Perhaps, most importantly, in Henry Conklin's autobiography, historians of America's nineteenth century "inarticulate" will find one of them speaking out for himself. Careful use of the census data and county records to chart mobility studies can be...