Photograph by Moffett, Chicago.
In 1895 he explored the Yellowstone Park in winter, going on skis, and an Act of Congress protecting the Park buffalo was due to this adventure. By speech and by his writings he did much all his life to aid the protection and study of wild life and to support the system of national parks. The America he had known in the flush of his youth was really a passion with him. One day after he had finished a series of short stories on the old trails for his out of doors department in the Saturday Evening Post the editor, George Horace Lorimer, suggested that he take either the Overland or the Oregon trail as the subject of a novel. The suggestion was in itself the most magnificent of trails to such a mind as Hough’s. He wrote, then, The Covered Wagon.
His first book, The Singing Mouse Stories, which had to do with out of doors, appeared when he was 38; he was forty when, in 1897, he married Charlotte A. Cheesbro, of Chicago, and published The Story of the Cowboy, praised by Theodore Roosevelt. His first novel came three years later, and with his second, The Mississippi Bubble (1902), he attracted nation-wide attention. It is amusing to recall that he made five copies of The Mississippi Bubble and despatched them simultaneously to five publishers, each of whom sent an acceptance.
When he died, Mr. Hough left several completed books. Three of them were novels and the first of these, Mother of Gold, has just been published. A story of the present day, woven around the old legend of the lost mine of Montezuma, it has to a curious degree the pioneer zest and spirit of Hough’s romances of earlier times.
Of his earlier novels, The Mississippi Bubble and Fifty-four Forty or Fight are the ones that seem likely to be read longest; of his later novels probably The Magnificent Adventure (1915), dealing with the Lewis and Clark expedition and with Aaron Burr’s daughter as its heroine, The Covered Wagon, and North of 36, the story of the Texas cattle trail, have the best chance of permanence—always premising that work as yet unpublished may take its place with these.
II. Joseph A. Altsheler
To Anne Carroll Moore, supervisor of work with children in the New York Public Library, I am indebted for the best picture of what Joseph A. Altsheler’s work signifies. Both at the time of his death and since, he was and has been and is the most popular author of books for boys in America. He is more popular than James Fenimore Cooper, to whose work his own is probably most closely allied. He wrote over again, as Miss Moore has pointed out, the tales of our pioneer life and struggle “with a fresh sense of their reality.” His “deep love of nature, the ability to select from historical sources subjects of strong human interest, a natural gift for storytelling, and great modesty” were other qualities which the youthful reader senses and appreciates. “Boys who clamor for Altsheler,” says Miss Moore, “read history and biography as a natural and necessary accompaniment. Nor do they neglect Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, or The Boys’ Life of Mark Twain. Never in the history of writing for boys has an author attained universal popularity on so broad a foundation of allied interests in reading.”[77]
Cooper wrote when American history was brief; another century and the breadth of a continent unrolled itself before Altsheler, who set about in quiet patience to make all that spaciousness and all those crowding events intelligible for the American boy. And because in modesty and patience he had gone far to achieve just that—taking the average boy into the wilderness, as Miss Moore says, “so that he may realize his heritage in the history of his country and take his place there more intelligently”—his death is a sharp loss. Miss Moore has told how, on 7 June 1919, boys came all day long to the New York Public Library, some with clippings from the newspapers telling of their favorite’s death. There they could look upon a full set of all his works, and his picture. Said a 17-year-old: