Chapter II: Barnstorming

As soon as I had recovered from my illness, I began hunting for a job. I had already decided on a newspaper career and I went to Chicago with the hope of finding employment as a reporter. Not one of the editors appeared eager to grab me. One offered me a job as office boy.

The only one who listened to me seriously was the venerable Wilbur F. Storey, one of the greatest editors of his day. He was proprietor of the liveliest and most enterprising newspaper in the West, the Chicago _Times_, then at the top notch of its popularity. The day I called on him, there had appeared in the _Times_ the most blatantly sensational headline that was ever printed in a respectable newspaper. It was the talk of the town. Over an account of a hanging, in big, black type, was: “JERKED TO JESUS.”

When I entered Mr. Storey’s sanctum he was tilted back in a big swivel chair, his long legs stretched across the top of his desk. I imagine that he was gloating over the sensation that shocking headline had created. He was chuckling and smiling and his bony fingers were clutching his snow-white whiskers.

No one was ever more gracious to me. I told him my story and of my ambition to become a reporter. He even read the clipping I showed him of _An Autobiography of a Hotel Office Chair_. He asked a lot of questions but in the end said that a boy of sixteen, no matter how bright he might be, was too young and inexperienced to undertake a reporter’s job in a big city.

“Go back to your home town or some other small city and get a few years of practical training,” he said, “and when you have done this come to me again. Don’t get discouraged. I am sure you have got good stuff in you and the grit to win success.”

And the editor who was threatened with tar and feathers at the time of the Civil War and who was once publicly horsewhipped by an irate burlesque actress, put his arm about me and walked with me to the elevator. It was the last time I ever spoke to him, though a few years later I was city editor of the great newspaper he created.

I went back to the town where my parents lived, determined to follow the advice Mr. Storey had given me, but I discovered that it was easier for him to tell me what to do than it was for me to do it. Neither of the grouchy old editors of the two daily newspapers in my home town were sufficiently impressed with my youthful enthusiasm to give me a chance to develop the talent that was screaming for an outlet. Even the news items I wrote for them didn’t mollify their crabbedness. I offered to work three months on trial without pay, but they were mercilessly unyielding to the eloquence of my appeals, gruffly telling me to go to school and wait until I was grown up before venturing to break into journalism.

Journalism! How I grew to detest that much abused word. Every brainless mutt I ever met in a newspaper office described himself as a “journalist.” The real men, the men who knew news, knew how to get it and knew how to write it, preferred to be known as newspaper men. One never hears a star reporter along Park Row speak of journalism.

In our town there had been one of those mushroom insurance companies that suddenly spring into existence, collect all the money in sight and then blow up. This particular company had gone into bankruptcy and the sheriff was selling at auction what was left of the wreck. Among its effects were a printing press and a fairly complete outfit. I happened along, chirped a low bid and down came the auctioneer’s hammer. It was mine. Nearly all of my savings went to pay for it. I got a dray to cart it to our home and mother gave me two large rooms on an upper floor in which to establish a printing office. I remember making myself unpopular with the rest of the family by scrubbing inky type in the bathtub.

I worked most of that night putting my print shop in shape and the next day I printed business cards and circulars, announcing that I was prepared to do all kinds of commercial printing at prices much lower than any competitor. I got as many orders as I could fill by soliciting among merchants and family friends and my printing business grew so fast that I had to work day and night to keep up. To gratify my ambition to write, I began publishing a monthly magazine for boys and girls which I called _Our Compliments_. I wrote nearly every line in it, set all of the type and did the presswork.

_Our Compliments_ became a flourishing publication, even if it did make a dent in the earnings of my printing business. Many of the budding geniuses of that period afterward entered the swelling ranks of professional newspaper writers and authors. We amateurs exchanged publications and got to know each other. I conceived the idea of forming an association of amateur editors, appointed myself secretary, issued elaborate invitations to a convention and the Western Amateur Press Association came into existence. We elected Alex Dingwall president, the same “Sandy” Dingwall who became famous and rich as a theatrical manager in New York, was much loved and died not long ago, leaving nearly a million dollars and almost as many mourners.

Now I made a false step; I became an actor. That is, my name was printed on playbills as an actor, but if there are any alive who ever saw me on the stage, I am sure they will back me up when I declare that I never was an actor.

At the time I was editing _Our Compliments_ and running a printing business on a small scale, I had a young friend who was sadly stage-struck. In appearance he was not unlike pictures of Edwin Booth in his younger days. Conscious of the resemblance, he wore his hair long and wavy, soaked it with oil and brushed it back so as to give prominence to his forehead. He affected a serious and thoughtful expression of countenance, like the famous tragedian he idolized, and looked the highbrow he fancied himself to be. He always wore a long frock coat and enormously high collar. I can picture him now as he paced solemnly through the streets of the town with corrugated brow and downcast eyes, one hand thrust into the opening of his coat, the other drawn behind his back, with fingers twitching convulsively.

A strange character was Rodney, though beneath his studied eccentricity was a heart of gold. He set about organizing an amateur dramatic club and invited me to join. I protested that I knew nothing about acting, that in all my life the only plays I had witnessed were _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ and _The Gypsy Queen_. He suggested a trip to Chicago to see Lawrence Barrett in _Richelieu_. We went and I fell. It was wonderful. Before reaching the end of our journey I had promised to take part in the performance Rodney was getting up of _Ten Nights in a Barroom_. I was to be Willie, who gets killed by a gambler. Rehearsals were soon under way, directed by the public librarian, once a professional actor. The performance was given for a popular charity and the opera house was packed. There was a storm of applause when the gambler killed me. I suspected that it was because I was such a bad actor, but I was flatteringly mentioned in the newspapers and some of my friends said I ought to go on the stage.

Rodney was so elated with the success of our performance that he decided to get up another. This was more pretentious, two professionals from Chicago playing the leading characters. They were the Lords--Louie and James--who traveled extensively through the Western states with a company of which Louie was the star and her husband the manager. She was a versatile actress who played every range of character from Lady Macbeth to Topsy. They were organizing for a tour of the West and invited Rodney and me to join them. Louie painted an alluring picture of the life of a traveling thespian, so we signed contracts for a tour of forty weeks and were enrolled as professional “barnstormers.”

And barnstorming it was in all that the word implies. The Lords were pioneers on what was then the Western frontier, playing in the principal towns of Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, and most of the mining camps of Colorado and Montana. In those days few of the Western towns boasted of a theater, so we carried our own scenery and gave many of our performances in courthouses, public schools, and vacant stores, borrowing lumber as we went along to build a raised platform on which we presented our plays. The reserved seats were chairs carried from the dining-room of hotels, but the ordinary seats were planks strung across cracker boxes and nail kegs. We actors built the stage, hung the scenery, arranged the seats and carried up the baggage. When this labor was done we distributed playbills throughout the town. In the evening we acted as ushers until time to go behind the curtain to make ourselves up for the performance.

We usually stayed a week in a town, for railway travel was expensive and trains uncertain. Sometimes we would get away from the railways and travel across country by team, we actors perched on a truckload of trunks and scenery, the ladies going ahead with the manager in carriages. The hotels were mostly primitive and often they were so crowded that eight actors would be compelled to sleep in four beds that had been crowded into one small room, standing on our beds to dress and performing our toilets in a public washroom.

Our repertoire was extensive, for we never gave a play twice in the same town. We did _Richard III_, _Lady of Lyons_, _East Lynne_, _Damon and Pythias_, _Lucretia Borgia_, _Macbeth_, _Rip Van Winkle_, _Hidden Hand_, _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ and many more. There was nothing in dramatic literature that our manager was too modest to attempt. The numerical strength of his company never stayed his ambition. If there were not enough actors to play the different characters, some of us had to play two or three. I have seen the armies of Richard and Richmond assault each other in terrific combat when both armies numbered seven men and a girl, the latter dressed in armor and wearing a bushy beard.

Once when sickness and desertion had reduced our company to seven, I played Uncle Tom and three white characters, blacking my face and washing back to white as occasion required. I wasn’t eighteen. Little Eva was nearly thirty and a mother. I met her years afterward in New York. She had become a star at a Broadway theater, but she didn’t look a year older than when she sat on my knee in a Colorado mining camp and lisped wistfully: “Uncle Tom, sing to me of the angels bright.”

After two seasons with the Lords I went with them to the Black Hills, where we played all winter in the opera house that had just been erected in Deadwood. It was then the liveliest mining town in the country. Fortune seekers were flocking from every direction. Vast wealth was being dug from the gold mines and enormous smelters were being worked day and night, converting the ore into bullion. Everybody had plenty of money and spent it freely. The miners patronized our theater to the limit of its seating capacity and were enthusiastic in their appreciation.

I recall the night “Calamity Jane,” a notorious female desperado, came to see us play _East Lynne_. She and “Arkansaw Bill,” equally famous as a bandit and stage robber, occupied front seats. Behind them sat Seth Bullock, afterward an intimate friend of Colonel Roosevelt. “Calamity” was dolled up for the occasion in corduroy suit and sombrero and appeared to be particularly vain of her green kid gloves. She was not a fascinating lady. As soon as she was comfortably settled in her seat she bit a chunk from a plug of tobacco and chewed as industriously as any miner throughout the evening.

She and her escort clapped their hands in noisy appreciation until Lady Isabel eloped with Sir Francis and then “Calamity” showed her disapproval of the erring wife’s conduct by marching down to the footlights and squirting a stream of tobacco juice over the front of Lady Isabel’s pink satin evening gown. There came very near being a rough-house when the curtain was lowered and Mr. Lord began to voice a protest over the indignity to his wife. Trouble was avoided by the lady desperado tossing a handful of gold coin over the footlights to pay for the gown she had so ruthlessly desecrated. Throughout the remainder of the performance she chewed her cud in courteous silence. “Arkansaw Bill” was killed a week afterward when he and his band of ruffians raided the little frontier town that is now the capital of South Dakota. I read not long ago that “Calamity” lived to be a very old woman. She raised enough deviltry to have deserved hanging a dozen times.

As the season drew to a close Johnny Rodgers, manager of the opera house, engaged me for another season. The Lords were not to remain. In the spring the manager started for Chicago to secure new talent, expecting to return in two weeks. At the end of that time he was still snow-bound at the end of the stage route, nearly two hundred miles to the eastward, waiting for the railway to be opened for traffic. The next we heard of him he had been drowned. Impatient to get to Chicago and complete his mission, he had ventured on a long voyage down the Missouri River in a frail skiff, hoping to reach Sioux City and get a train at that point for Chicago. His only companion was an Indian. The river was choked with ice and the skiff was crushed and sunk. The Indian alone escaped. There was a lot of speculation at the time as to whether the Indian might not have made ’way with the venturesome manager, who had a large amount of money in a belt around his waist. His body was never found.

When the news of the drowning came, I sat up all night with a hysterical widow and in the morning awoke to a realization of my own predicament, for I was a long way from home, with no opportunity to obtain theatrical employment and but few dollars in my pocket. The fare to Chicago was more than a hundred dollars and the walking was bad. The mayor met me that day and said he had been talking with some of the citizens and they were desirous of raising a purse to send me home. I declined the proffered charity and went to a newspaper office in search of work, got a job setting type and in ten minutes had my coat off and sleeves rolled up.

I didn’t have to earn my bread by setting type more than a couple of weeks, for the editor was summoned East by a death in his family and the publisher asked me to fill the chair until the editor returned. I held the job for six months, earning enough to take me to Chicago in the drawing-room of a Pullman, the only accommodation available when I reached a railroad, after traveling two days and nights across an alkali desert, riding the entire distance on top of a stagecoach under a blistering August sun. Never was anyone more cruelly sunburned. The journey was made in response to a telegram, offering me an engagement as leading man with a company that was organizing to support a woman star on a tour of the West. Why a manager should send to the far-away Black Hills for an actor, had me puzzled until I found my old friend Rodney was in the company and knew that it was through him that I had been called. That season I essayed such trivial roles as Romeo and Claude Melnotte and Armand Duval. Ye gods! as my mind flits back to those days when I was a trouper, I marvel how I ever escaped the hook.

Comes now the most important event in that period of my life. On the fourth day of November, 1879, I was married, six days after I became twenty-one. She was the sweetest, the truest, the most lovable woman I have ever known; full of fun and the joy of living; bright, witty, and entertaining. All who knew her loved her. She was a woman’s woman, a zealous champion of her sex, with none of the petty jealousies and envies with which some women are afflicted. I never once heard her speak unkindly of any of her associates. She was ever my best and most dependable friend, my comforter in disappointments and worries, patiently indulgent toward my weaknesses, proud of whatever success came to me and with an abiding faith in my ability. In all our thirty-nine years of married life she never wavered in her devotion, though many times I must have strained her love almost to the breaking.

When I did right she encouraged me; when I did wrong she forgave and kept on loving me.

We met in the parlor of a Chicago hotel. The card I sent to another was given to her by a careless bell boy. There were mutual explanations and she smilingly withdrew. We accidentally met again a week later. I was in a long line of ticket buyers that led to the box office of a theater. A lady in front of me dropped a purse and I picked it up and restored it. There was a smile of recognition when she saw that I was the one to whose card she had responded. Weeks went by and again we met, this time in the breakfast-room of a hotel in Iowa. I had arrived late the night before to join a theatrical company. When I went down to a late breakfast there was but one person in the room. It was the same lady. Fate!

She motioned me to a seat at her table. We were to be with the same company. It was her first season. She had been a teacher of elocution she told me, and had turned to the stage through advice of theatrical friends. She was afraid she wasn’t going to like it, for already there had been some things about stage life that grated harshly. We tarried long at our first meal. I made up my mind that she was a young woman of unusual refinement and intelligence and personally very attractive. She had received an excellent education and it was only an unexpected twist of fortune that had made it necessary for her to earn a livelihood.

That night I carried her bag to the theater and I carried it back to the hotel after the performance. In a little town in the West, some months later, I persuaded her to become my wife. She always claimed that I tricked her into marriage. She didn’t come down to breakfast one morning and I rapped on her door to ascertain the reason, thinking she might have overslept. She had been ill nearly all night, she told me, so I brought her some medicine and advised her to remain quiet for a few hours. That afternoon, while playing billiards with our manager, a strange impulse came to me and I put the cue back in the rack without finishing the game.

“What’s up?” asked the manager, surprised at my quitting so abruptly.

“I’m going to be married.”

There was an understanding between Nellie and me that we would get married at the close of our theatrical season, providing our affections didn’t wane. I was sure of myself, but I wasn’t of her.

Accompanied by the manager I went to the home of an Episcopal clergyman and arranged for a wedding in his house at five o’clock. It was then four and I hadn’t asked the bride. I arranged with the manager to be at the clergyman’s house with his wife to give the bride away and to act as witnesses. Then I called on the bride. She was feeling better and consented to go with me for a short walk. I walked her to the rectory and coaxed her to go in with me. Even then she didn’t suspect, but when she was in the house and found our manager and his wife there in their Sunday clothes and the clergyman in official robe, she saw the trap I had sprung, but she played her part of the game and came out with a marriage certificate tightly clutched in her hand. What seemed to bother her most was that she wore a black dress.

“Black is an evil omen for a bride,” she whispered to me on our way back to the hotel. The manager had ordered the wedding supper and we toasted my bride with the first champagne I ever drank.

The theatrical company had a disastrous tour and ended so ingloriously that we were left stranded a long way from home, our salaries far in arrears. My bride and I returned to Chicago on our trunks, the railroad company furnishing transportation and holding our baggage until redeemed. I borrowed the money to reclaim our trunks, settled my wife in a hotel and started out to look for work, all in one day.

My first thought was to try for a newspaper job and when I went home to dinner that evening I was a reporter on the Chicago _Tribune_. At the end of my first week I drew the smallest pay of any reporter on the staff; at the end of my last week, four years later, when I left to become city editor of the Chicago _Times_, I was the _Tribune’s_ highest salaried reporter.