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                         MEMBERS OF THE FAMILY

                            [Illustration]

                         THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
                      NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
                             SAN FRANCISCO

                       MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
                      LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
                               MELBOURNE

                   THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
                                TORONTO

          [Illustration: “Pie like mother made,” said Scipio]




                         MEMBERS OF THE FAMILY

                                  BY
                              OWEN WISTER


                   WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY H. T. DUNN


                               New York
                         THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
                                 1911

                         _All rights reserved_


                           COPYRIGHT, 1901,
                     BY THE COSMOPOLITAN MAGAZINE.

                           COPYRIGHT, 1903,
                       BY P. F. COLLIER AND SON.

                  COPYRIGHT, 1902, 1908, 1909, 1911,
                   BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY.

                           COPYRIGHT, 1911,
                       BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.


             Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1911.


                             Norwood Press
                J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
                        Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.




                                  To

                         HORACE HOWARD FURNESS

                      OF LINDENSHADE, WALLINGFORD


                            _That is my home of love: if I have rang’d,
                            Like him that travels, I return again._
                                            --SONNET CIX.




PREFACE


When this October comes, twenty years will be sped since the author of
these Western tales sat down one evening to begin his first tale of the
West, and--will you forgive him a preamble of gossip, of retrospection?
Time steps in between the now that is and the then that was with a
vengeance; it blocks the way for us all; we cannot go back. When the old
corner, the old place, the old house, wear the remembered look, beckon
to the memory as if to say, No change here! then verily is the change
worst, the shell most empty, the cheat well-nigh too piercing. In a
certain garden I used to plunder in 1866, the smell to-day of warm,
dusty strawberries.... But did we admit to our companionship ghosts
only, what would living be? I continue to eat strawberries. As for
smells, they’re worse than old melodies, I think. Lately I was the sport
of one. My train was trundling over the plains--a true train of the
past, half freight, half passenger, cars of an obsolete build, big
smoke-stack on the archaic engine, stops for meals, inveterate news-boy
with bad candy, bad novels, bad bananas--a dear old horrible train, when
magic was suddenly wrought. It came in through the open window, its
wand touched me, and the evoked spirits rose. With closed eyes I saw
them once more, standing there out in the alkali, the antelope by scores
and hundreds, only a little way off, a sort of color between cinnamon
and amber in the morning sun, transparent and phantom-like, with pale
legs. Only a little way off. Eyes closed, I watched them, as in 1885
with open ones I beheld them first from the train. Now they were
running; I saw the bobbing dots of their white receding rears, and
through me passed the ghost of that first thrill at first seeing
antelope yesterday--it seemed yesterday: only a little way off. I opened
my eyes; there was the train as it ought to look, there were the plains,
the alkali, the dry gullies, the mounds, the flats, the enormous
sunlight, the virgin air like the first five measures of
_Lohengrin_--but where were the antelope? So natural did everything
continue to look, surely they must be just over that next rise! No; over
the one beyond that? No; only a little, little way off, but gone for
evermore! And magic smote me once again through the window. Thousands of
cattle were there, with horsemen. Were they not there? Not over the next
rise? No; gone for evermore. What was this magic that came in through
the window? The smell of the sage-brush. After several years it was
greeting me again. All day long it breathed a welcome and a sigh, as if
the desert whispered: Yes, I look as if I were here; but I am a ghost,
too, there’s no coming back. All day long the whiffs of sage-brush
conjured old sights before me, till my heart ran over with homesickness
for what was no more, and the desert seemed to whisper: It’s not I
you’re seeking, you’re straining your eyes to see yourself,--you as you
were in your early twenties, with your illusion that I, the happy
hunting-ground of your young irresponsibility, was going to be
permanent. You must shut your eyes to see yourself and me and the
antelope as we all used to be. Why, if Adam and Eve had evaded the angel
and got back into the garden, do you think they would have found it the
same after Cain and Abel? Thus moralized the desert, and I thought, How
many things we have to shut our eyes to see!

Permanent! Living men, not very old yet, have seen the Indian on the
war-path, the buffalo stopping the train, the cow-boy driving his
cattle, the herder watching his sheep, the government irrigation dam,
and the automobile--have seen every one of these slides which progress
puts for a moment into its magic-lantern and removes to replace with a
new one. The final tale in this book could not possibly have happened in
the day of the first tale, although scarcely twenty years separate the
new, present Wyoming from that cow-boy Wyoming which then flourished so
boisterously, and is now like the antelope. Steam and electricity make
short work of epochs. We don’t know how many centuries the Indian and
the buffalo enjoyed before the trapper and pioneer arrived. These latter
had fifty or sixty good years of it, pushing westward until no west was
left to push to; a little beyond Ogden in 1869, the driving of that
golden spike which riveted the rails between New York and San Francisco,
rang out the old, rang in the new, and progress began to work its
magic-lantern faster. The soldier of the frontier, the frontier
post--gone; the cattle-range--gone; the sheep episode just come, yet
going already, or at any rate already mixed, diluted, with the farm, the
truck garden, the poultry yard, the wife, the telephone, the summer
boarder, and the Victor playing the latest Broadway “records” in valleys
where the august wilderness reigned silent--yesterday. The nomadic,
bachelor West is over, the housed, married West is established. This
rush of change, this speed we live at everywhere (only faster in some
places than in others) has led some one to remark sententiously that
when a Western baby is born, it immediately makes its will, while when a
New York baby is born, it merely applies for a divorce.

But what changes can ever efface that early vision which began with the
antelope? Wyoming burst upon the tenderfoot resplendent, like all the
story-books, like Cooper and Irving and Parkman come true again; here,
actually going on, was that something which the boy runs away from
school to find, that land safe and far from Monday morning, nine
o’clock, and the spelling-book; here was Saturday eternal, where you
slept out-of-doors, hunted big animals, rode a horse, roped steers, and
wore deadly weapons. Make no mistake: fire-arms were at times practical
and imperative, but this was not the whole reason for sporting them on
your hip; you had escaped from civilization’s school-room, an air never
breathed before filled your lungs, and you were become one large shout
of joy. College-boy, farm-boy, street-boy, this West melted you all down
to the same first principles. Were you seeking fortune? Perhaps,
incidentally, but money was not the point; you had escaped from school.
This holiday was leavened by hard bodily work, manly deeds, and deeds
heroic, and beneath all the bright brave ripple moved the ground-swell
of tragedy. Something of promise, also, was in the air, promise of a
democracy which the East had missed:--

“With no spread-eagle brag do I gather conviction each year that we
Americans, judged not hastily, are sound at heart, kind, courageous,
often of the truest delicacy, and always ultimately of excellent good
sense. With such belief, or, rather, knowledge, it is sorrowful to see
our fatal complacence, our as yet undisciplined folly, in sending to our
State Legislatures and to that general business office of ours at
Washington, a herd of mismanagers that seems each year to grow more
inefficient and contemptible, whether branded Republican or Democrat.
But I take heart, because oftener and oftener I hear upon my journey the
citizens high and low muttering, ‘There’s too much politics in this
country’; and we shake hands.”

Such “insurgent” sentiments did I in 1895, some time before insurgency’s
day, speak out in the preface to my first book of Western tales; to-day
my faith begins to be justified. In the West, where the heart of our
country has been this long while, and where the head may be pretty soon,
the citizens are awakening to the fact that our first century of “self”
government merely substituted the divine right of corporations for the
divine right of Kings. Surprising it is not, that a people whose genius
for machinery has always been paramount should expect more from
constitutions and institutions than these mere mechanisms of government
can of themselves perform; the initiative, referendum, and recall are
excellent inventions, but if left to run alone, as all our other patent
devices have been, they will grind out nothing for us: By his very creed
is the American dedicated to eternal vigilance. This we forgot for so
long that learning it anew is both painful and slow. We have further to
remember that prosperity is something of a curse in disguise; it is the
poor governments in history that have always been the purest; where
there is much to steal, there will be many to steal it. We must
discern, too, the illusion of “natural rights,” once an inspiration, now
a shell from which life has passed on into new formulas. A “right” has
no existence, save in its potential exercise; it does not proceed from
within, it is permitted from without, and “natural rights” is a phrase
empty of other meaning than to denote whatever primitive or acquired
inclinations of man each individual is by common consent allowed to
realize. These permissions have varied, and will vary, with the ages.
Polygamy would be called a natural right now in some parts of the world;
to the criminal and the diseased one wife will presently be forbidden in
many places. Let this single illustration serve. No argument based upon
the dogmatic premise of natural rights can end anywhere save in drifting
fog. We see this whenever a meeting of anarchists leads a judge or an
editor into the trap of attempting to define the “right” of free speech.
In fact, all government, all liberty, reduces itself to one man saying
to another: You may do _this_; but if you do _that_, I will kill you.
This power Democracy vests in “the people,” and our final lesson to
learn is that in a Democracy there is no such separate thing as “the
people”; all of us are the people. Truly his creed compels the American
to eternal vigilance! Will he learn to live up to it?

From the West the tenderfoot took home with him the health he had
sought, and an enthusiasm his friends fled from; what was Wyoming to
them or they to Wyoming? In 1885 the Eastern notion of the West was
“Alkali Ike” and smoking pistols. No kind of serious art had presented
the frontier as yet. Fresh visits but served to deepen the tenderfoot’s
enthusiasm and whet his impatience that so much splendid indigenous
material should literally be wasting its sweetness on the desert air. It
is likely always to be true that in each hundred of mankind ninety-nine
can see nothing new until the hundredth shakes it in their faces--and he
must keep shaking it. No plan of shaking was yet in the tenderfoot’s
mind, he was dedicated to other calling; but he besieged the ears of our
great painter and our great novelist. He told the painter of the strong,
strange shapes of the buttes, the epic landscape, the color, the
marvellous light, the red men blanketed, the white men in chapareros,
the little bronze Indian children; particularly does he recall--in 1887
or 1888--an occasion about two o’clock in the morning in a certain
beloved club in Boston, when he had been preaching to the painter. A
lesser painter (he is long dead) sat by, unbelieving. No, he said, don’t
go. I’m sure it’s all crude, repulsive, no beauty. But John Sargent did
believe. Other work waited him; his path lay elsewhere, he said, but he
was sure the tenderfoot spoke truth. Other work awaited the novelist,
too; both painter and novelist were wiser than to leave what they knew
to be their own for unknown fields. But would no one, then, disperse
the Alkali Ikes and bring the West into American art and letters?

It was a happy day for the tenderfoot when he read the first sage-brush
story by Mary Hallock Foote. At last a voice was lifted to honor the
cattle country and not to libel it. Almost at the same moment Charles
King opened for us the door upon frontier military life. He brought
spirited army scenes to our ken, Mrs. Foote more generally clothed the
civilian frontier with serious and tender art. They (so far as I know)
were the first that ever burst into that silent sea. Next, Mr. Roosevelt
began to publish his vivid, robust accounts of Montana life. But words
alone, no matter how skilfully used, were not of themselves adequate to
present to the public a picture so strange and new. Another art was
needed, and most luckily the man with the seeing eye and shaping hand
arrived.

A monument to Frederic Remington will undoubtedly rise some day; the
artist who more than any one has gathered up in a grand grasp an entire
era of this country’s history, and handed it down visible, living,
picturesque, for coming generations to see--such man will have a
monument. But in the manner of commemorating national benefactors, I
would we resembled the French who celebrate their great ones--not
soldiers and statesmen alone, but all their great ones--by naming public
places in their honor: the Quai Voltaire, the Rue Bizet, the Rue
Auber--to mention the first that come to memory. Everywhere in France
you will meet with these instances of a good custom. In this country we
seem to value even third-rate politicians more than first-rate men of
art and letters. If Paris can by her streets perpetuate the memory of
the composers of _Carmen_ and _Fra Diavolo_, would it not be fitting
that Denver, Cheyenne, Tucson, and other western cities, should have a
Remington street? I am glad I did not wait until he was dead to pay my
tribute to him. The two opportunities that came to me in his life I
took, nor has my opinion of his work changed since then. If he never
quite found himself in color, he was an incomparable draftsman; best of
all, he was a great wholesome force making for independence, and he
taught to our over-imitative American painters the needed lesson that
their own country furnishes subjects as worthy as any that Delacroix or
Millet ever saw. I have lived to see what I did not expect, the desert
on canvas; for which I thank Fernand Lungren. Tributes to the dead seem
late to me, and I shall take this chance to acknowledge my debt to some
more of the living.

Four years after that night vigil with Sargent, the tenderfoot had still
written no word about the West. It was in 1891, after repeated
sojournings in camp, ranch, and military post, that his saturation with
the whole thing ran over, so to speak, in the form of fiction. Writing
had been a constant pastime since the school paper; in 1884 Mr. Howells
(how kind he was!) had felt my literary pulse and pronounced it
promising; a quickening came from the pages of Stevenson; a far stronger
shove next from the genius of _Plain Tales from the Hills_; during an
unusually long and broad wandering through the Platte valley, Powder
River, Buffalo, Cheyenne, Fort Washakie, Jackson’s Hole, and the Park,
the final push happened to be given by Prosper Mérimée; I had the volume
containing _Carmen_ with me. After reading it in the Park I straightway
invented a traveller’s tale. This was written down after I got home--I
left some good company at a club dinner table one night to go off to a
lonely library and begin it. A second followed, both were sent to
Franklin Square and accepted by Mr. Alden. Then I found my pretty
faithfully-kept Western diaries (they would now fill a shelf) to be a
reservoir of suggestion--and at times a source of despair; as, for
instance, when I unearthed the following abbreviations: Be sure to
remember Green-hides--perpendicular--sediment--Tuesdays as a rule.

Aware of Mérimée’snot highly expansive nature, I should hesitate, were
he alive, to disclose my debt to his _Carmen_--my favorite of all short
stories; but Mr. Howells and Mr. Kipling will be indulgent, and there is
another who will have to bear with my gratitude. In 1896 I sat with him
and he went over my first book, patiently, minutely pointing out many
things. Everything that he said I could repeat this moment, and his own
pages have continued to give me hints without end. That the pupil in one
or two matters ventures to disagree with his benefactor may be from much
lingering ignorance, or because no two ever think wholly alike: _tot
homines quot sententiæ_, as the Latin grammar used so incontrovertibly
to remark. It is significant to note how this master seems to be
teaching a numerous young generation. Often do I pick up some popular
magazine and read a story (one even of murder, it may be, in tropic seas
or city slums) where some canny bit of foreshortening, of presentation,
reveals the spreading influence, and I say, Ah, my friend, never would
you have found out how to do that if Henry James hadn’t set you
thinking!

It can happen, says Montesquieu, that the individual through pursuing
his own welfare contributes to the general good; Mr. Herbert Croly
admirably and sagaciously applies this thought to the case of the artist
and the writer. Their way to be worthy citizens and serve the State, he
says, is to see to it that their work be reverently thorough, for thus
they set high the standard of national excellence. To which I would add,
that a writer can easily take himself too seriously, but he can never
take his art too seriously. In our country, the painter and writer have
far outstripped the working-man in their ideal of honest work. This is
(partly) because painter and writer have to turn out a good product to
survive, while the working-man manages to survive with the least
possible of personal effort and skill. Did I offer my publisher such
work as the plumber and carpenter offer me, I should feel myself
disgraced. Are we to see the day when the slovenly, lazy poet shall
enact that the careful, industrious poet must work no longer and sell no
more than he?

Editors have at times lamented to me that good work isn’t distinguished
from bad by our multifarious millions. I have the happiness to know the
editors to be wrong. Let the subject of a piece of fiction contain a
simple, broad appeal, and the better its art, the greater its success;
although the noble army of readers will not suspect that their pleasure
is largely due to the skill. Such a book as _The Egoist_, where the
subject is rarefied and complex, of course no height of art will render
acceptable, save to the rehearsed few. Thanks to certain of our more
robust editors, the noble army grows daily more rehearsed, reads
“harder” books than it did, accepts plainer speech and wider range of
subject than the skittish spinster generation of a while ago. But mark
here an underlying principle. The plain speech in Richardson was in his
day nothing to start back from; to-day it is inhibited by a change in
our circumambient reticence. The circumambient reticence varies in
degree with each race, and almost with every generation of each race.
Something like a natural law, it sets the limits for what can be said
aloud in grown-up company--and Art is speaking aloud in grown-up
company; it consists no more of the professional secrets of the doctor
than it does of the prattle of the nursery. Its business is indeed to
take notice of everything in life, but always subject to the
circumambient reticence. Those gentlemen (and ladies) who utter that
gaseous shibboleth about Art for Art (as well cry Beefsteak for
Beefsteak) and would have our books and plays be foul because Ben Jonson
frequently was and Anatole France frequently is, are out of their
reckoning; and generally they may be suspected not so much of an
abstract passion for truth as of a concrete letch for animalism. Almost
the only advice for the beginner is, Clearly feel what you intend to
express, and then go ahead, listening to nobody, unless to one who also
perceives clearly your intention. Great and small things does this rule
fit. Once in an early tale I sought to make our poor alphabet express
the sound of cow-bells, and I wrote that they _tankled_ on the hillside.
In the margin I stated my spelling to be intentional. Back it came in
the galley, tinkled. A revised proof being necessary, I restored my word
with emphasis--and lo, tinkle was returned me again. I appealed to the
veteran and well-loved sage at the head of _Harper’s Magazine_. He
supported me. Well, in the new Oxford dictionary, behold Tankle and me,
two flies in amber, perpetuated by that Supreme Court; I have coined a
new acknowledged word for the English language. This should not be told,
but for its small moral, and if I could not render a final set of thanks
to the living. Countless blunders have been saved me by the watchful eye
of the printer and proofreader, those friends I never see, whose names I
do not know. For twenty years they have marked places where through
carelessness or fatigue I have slipped; may some of them know through
this page that I appreciate their service.

This book is three years late; the first tale designed for it was
published in 1901. Its follower should even now be ready. It is not yet
begun; it exists merely in notes and intentions. Give me health and a
day, sighs Emerson; and I am sorry for all who have to say that. When
you see the new moon over your left shoulder, wish always for health;
never mind all the other things. I own to an attachment for the members
of this family; I would fain follow their lives a little more, into
twentieth century Wyoming, which knows not the cow-boy, and where the
cow-boy feels at times more lost than ever he was on the range. Of all
the ills that harass writing, plans deferred seem at times the worst;
yet great pleasures offset them--the sight of one’s pages in a foreign
tongue, meeting horses in the Rocky Mountains named after the members
of one’s family, being asked from across