James Oliver Curwood, Disciple of the Wilds

by Hobart Donald Swiggett

“You cannot help but become successful if you put your whole heart into your writing.”

Perhaps the one thing which the youngster appreciated more than anything else about Janette was the fact that the grown man was careful not to treat him merely as a child.

From this very first meeting there arose between the two a friendship that was to last a lifetime. From that moment on, James Oliver Curwood never ceased writing. Every second that was available was spent with a pencil or pen in his hand, for writing had taken complete possession of him and it all but drove him frantic as his mind was continually upon the work that was destined to become his only life work. He had to eat and sleep, but he must also WRITE! WRITE! WRITE!

At last, though all too soon, summer had come to a close and school days were once more at hand. He enrolled in Central School the very first day, but he could not understand why he had come all the way from the farm in Ohio to go to school here in Owosso, and still find it so very uninteresting. The chances are, however, that the writing “bug” had become his first and only love, thus making it quite difficult for him to study. Perhaps one of the factors which seemed to make Jim Curwood’s schooling both uninteresting and hard was the class he was placed in when he entered school in Owosso. For he was put in the seventh grade because of his ungentlemanlike feats at Wakeman and his vulgar tactics under Mrs. Bacon. Obviously this was not the rating he deserved, but the teachers at Central School seemed to think it best. They did not know young Curwood was returning to school “to study.”

This of course was a very bad beginning when one has made up one’s mind that he really wants to be someone, and young Jim was indeed very much “burned up over this treatment.” Despite this barrier, he “muddled through somehow,” as he chose to put it, until he had finished the tenth grade.

Many times, according to authoritative sources, Jimmy Curwood was referred to as “a hopeless horror” in Algebra, by a Miss Curliss. A Miss Needles always maintained that Jim Curwood was hopelessly dumb and could never be any other way. Then there was a small man by the name of Chaffee who once remarked that the boy’s empty mind was the outstanding feature of the Owosso schools. The Miss Curliss was perhaps Jimmie’s greatest dread. Time and time again she embarrassed him before the entire class. On one particular occasion she called him an “unforgettable horror in her mind,” when Jim staunchly maintained that a “skipper” was a bug in cheese rather than the master of a ship.

There was but one bright spot in all of Jim’s schooling in Owosso, and that was a very pretty and charming teacher named Miss Boyce. Despite the many mistakes he would make in class she never lost patience with him and was always encouraging and cheerful. Years later when the “plague of Owosso” became a full grown man and an author in his own right, he remarked:

“To Miss Boyce and Miss Bartrem, who never lost interest in me, is due what little I actually did accomplish there.”

Then, too, there was the principal of the school, Professor Austin by name. He was a kind and understanding man and he sympathized with Jim in his goings and comings up and down the Shiawassee river, even though he did not approve of it during school hours. The principal once told him bluntly that if he ever heard of a prize for stupidity in the classroom, he would see that it was awarded to him. It was such things as these, trivial as they may seem to some of us, that made Jim Curwood’s early schooldays in Owosso ones of endless terror and seemingly hopeless failure.

When at last the fall season was over and the cold winter months were at hand when the snow would pile up as high as three and four feet deep, Jimmy would be up at the crack of dawn and out along the banks of the Shiawassee setting his traps for muskrat and mink. He would catch scores of them between the two bridges at Washington and Oliver streets. The two streets were a little over a quarter of a mile apart, and were in the very heart of the residential section, as they are even today.