I Pay for What I Break

W . H. H U T C H I N S O N Chico State College I Pay £or What I Break Fortunately it is possible to present testimony from others re­ garding Eugene Manlove Rhodes to cast an opening aura of respect­ ability around what follows. Bernard DeVoto, may he rest in Esau’s bosom, dubbed Rhodes “the novelist of the cattle kingdom.” Conrad Richter compared him to Joseph Conrad, which is no poor praise; J. Frank Dobie referred to him as “Eugene ’Gene Cyrano de Bergerac Manlove Rhodes; and Walter Prescott Webb, who will do to take along as an historian of the American West, had this to say. He was tempered hard enough to be admired, but a little too hard to be imitated. Hence men made legends of him while he lived. He once said that life is a disease, and that the only cure for it is death. He was impudent towards life and impudent towards death. He hated more passionately than he did a felon the literary school of filth, and he de­ plored the (literary) group which taught youth that the main end of man is the middle. And he believed above all else that the earth is a good place in which to spend a lifetime. . . . To write as ’Gene wrote one would have to live as ’Gene lived, and I know of no writer in this coun­ try, at Breadloaf or elsewhere, that has the guts to do that even if there was left a place to live that way.1 Then this sometime reviewer of Western Americana, reviewer mind you, not critic, came along like a green bronc with a tumble­ weed under its belly to note that Rhodes had captured the life and the land of six New Mexico counties, and thereby preserved one clean segment of the American experience in the clear amber of a 1 Saturday Review, Sept. 15, 1956. 92 Western American Literature joyous, dancing illuminated prose.2 His life and his place so coin­ cided that he was lifted out of the purely parochial, exalted beyond the merely provincial, to bespeak some universal qualities inherent in the segment of experience he preserved. In an officially sanctioned promotional publication New Mexico Mines and Minerals,3 you can find solid documentation for certain mines and persons and techniques that Rhodes incorporated from life into his stories. You may refer to that chapter in Bransford in Arcadia wherein the gallant cowboy-eee transforms himself into the epitome of the hardrock seeker after fortune. If you ever have known it from life, the commingled smells of quartz dust and blackpowder fumes will be acrid in your nostrils as you read. He saw Texas cattle trailing west into New Mexico and beyond, and he watched investment capital from California and the Com­ stock Lode, which are the same, acquire vast holdings in the blackgrama lands along the Rio Grande. George W. Saunders, he of the monumental and unindexed Trail Drivers of Texas, brought a thousand head of heifers from Toyah in that state and Rhodes saw them take the river below Socorro. Vicente Villareal, working a YL herd west from Uvalde towards the slaunchandicular country of the Mogollon Rim, watered his cattle in the railroad pens at Rincon at gunpoint. You will find this very incident in The Trusty Knaves. He saw the Kern County Land Company, using California and Comstock Lode capital, purchase the 7 TX at Engle, the Armendariz Grant outfit, and their latest financial statement (1965) shows that they still own it. This invasion of California capital, unrecorded in the histories of the West, produced the cattle train which ’Gene rode to Bakersfield as it became, perhaps, the feeder cattle capital of the Southwest. And in one of his short stories about El Mundo Chico, the triangle formed by Deming and Lordsburg and Las Cruces, he has Henry A. Jastro play in fiction and by name (Jastrow ) what he was in life, cow buyer for and manager of KCL’s vast grasslands empire in New Mexico and Arizona. He not only saw but participated in the change in New Mexi-. co’s politics that accompanied the influx of...