Books: Old Days

THEM WAS THE DAYS—Owen P. White—Minton, Balch ($3.00).

THE TAMING OF THE FRONTIER— Ten Authors, Edited by Duncan Aikman—Minton, Balch ($3.00).

These books are published in the name of municipal individualism. With spectacular adjectival vehemence, the authors shout into the thickening ears of young U. S. cities, loud reminders of the peculiar zest and color of their rambunctious settler days, laying special emphasis on downright iniquitous conduct that is calculated to cover the adipose priests of respectability with shame for their own vegetating passions. The books are part of a current crusade against standardization and the civic inferiority complex that leads Kansas to ape California, Montana to mimic Minnesota, in their timorous search for “the right thing.”

Author White, oldest living native of U. S. parentage in El Paso, Tex., pours gentle, drawling scorn upon the romanticism with which Zane Greys and Harold Bell Wrights have invested the early inhabitants of the Southwest, and upon the paunchy, pasty-faced commercialism of the present inhabitants. Mock modest, feignedly casual, like a hoary old hell-raiser talking to his grandchildren, he draws upon his indiscriminate youth for gory chunks of six-gun realism quite as studied as that of the Covered Wagon or U. P. Trails he so vigorously denies. He explains the Jehovah complex of a gunman like John Selman, who resented any one else killing men in “his” town. Author White’s complex is similar: let no one else tell the story of “his” El Paso. It is a reasonable demand and nothing tame rewards its granting. He averages about two corpses a paragraph. He presents whole regiments of unwashed, flannel-shirted, gun-hung bartenders. There is a rakish analogy of the Red man, the White man and the Blue law. There is the story of a Manhattan cocktail, mixed of ingredients ranging from maraschino to sheep-dip, that stretched a U. S. Colonel on the barroom floor with blue flames and smoke issuing from between his toes. The Colonel took the recipe to Washington, D. C., named it “the hot buttered bun” in deference to the late Mr. Bryan and made his fortune selling it to Senators.

Editor Duncan Aikman and the jounalists and novelists who compiled The Taming follow Mr. White’s lead in being ingenuously shocking and satirically humorous. Idwal Jones’ chapter on the guerilla artists of San Francisco’s old Barbary Coast is one of the best. There is Jacques, chef at the Tehama House, ladling out sea-gull-egg omelets. Banker Eugene Duprey washes down a 15-pound turkey with 20 bottles of claret and waddles into the street to be acclaimed for having won a great bet. Garibaldi the Magnificent furnishes Mark Hopkins’ palace on Nob Hill for a commission of $100,000, having chests of gold dragged to his cottage door each week and Neronic feasts of roast duck, bouillabaisse and champagne, while the coin is counted.

It is contended that St. Paul, one of a few U. S. cities never to develop the booster spirit, was founded by Swiss watchmakers who fled south from the Earl of Selkirk’s frigid Utopia on Hudson Bay and not by scrubby settlers at the slough called Pig’s Eye. Portland, Ore., is represented as a pilgrim’s progress, kept comparatively free from sin by an early religious tradition. Kansas City’s apologist attributes its growth to the Great Bend of the Missouri and to William Rockhill Nelson, “the erupter,” who for 35 years imposed the things of the spirit upon a trading community. Other cities chronicled: Ogden, Denver, Cheyenne, Los Angeles, San Antonio.