Now hushed at last the murmur of his mirth,
Here he lies quiet in the quiet earth.
When the last trumpet sounds on land and sea
He will arise then, chatting cheerfully,
And, blandly interrupting Gabriel,
He will go sauntering down the road to hell.
He will pause loitering at the infernal gate,
Advising Satan on affairs of state,
Complaining loudly that the roads are bad
And bragging what a jolly grave he had!
--A Hired Man on Horseback by May Rhodes
The Life and Writings of Eugene Manlove Rhode
Story and photos by Karen Boehler
"Like so many other significant aspects of the real west, Gene Rhodes is virtually overlooked," says archeologist and historian Pete Eidenbach. "It's unfortunate that Gene is forgotten in his own land."
And that, say his fans, is a big loss.
Those who study Rhodes and his works--they call themselves "Rhodes scholars"--say the novelist's stories were about the west as it really was, not as it's portrayed today.
"The type of cowboy he wrote about is not the cowboy we're used to seeing in movies and on TV and all this sort of thing," says Dave Townsend, an historian and former state legislator from Las Cruces. "He wrote about the working cowboy. He wrote about the cowboy who probably went through his whole life never having fired his handgun in anger."
"Gene's old west was populated by ordinary people who generally engaged in the most ordinary of pursuits," Eidenbach says. "He lauded what he called, 'the hired man on horseback' and his beloved little people. He captured the real frontier experience."
And most of the experience Rhodes wrote about took place in what is today Otero County, where he lived from the age of 11 to 36 years.
Rhodes was born in Tecumseh, Nebraska in 1869 and came to New Mexico in 1881, the year Billy the Kid was shot to death, when his father, a Civil War vet, moved the family to Kansas and then to what is today White Sands Missile Range. The family settled east of Engle in the San Andreas Mountains where his father was appointed the Indian agent for Mescalero.
The teenaged Rhodes began working as a cowhand, gaining some notoriety as a bronc buster. He had very little public schooling but was never seen without a book in hand. His self-taught education is obvious in many of his own novels and stories: while his fiction is filled with the standard plots of classic western pulp fiction romance, his books are filled with allusions to classic, and sometimes obscure, literature. But what makes Rhodes' writing so worthwhile, his supporters say, are his descriptions of the New Mexico landscape and the people who populated that land.
"One of the least appreciated aspects of Gene Rhodes' work is his ability to very poetically provide almost photographic descriptions of all sorts of things," Eidenbach says.
"It's visually exciting to read his work," says Rhodes fan Bob LaRue of Lincoln, calling a Rhodes description of a cattle drive "one of the best things I've ever seen. Just as vivid as a movie, that's how good he was."
It's in one of those descriptive passages in Bransford in Arcadia or The Little Eohippus (published in book form in 1914) that Rhodes first used the phrase "land of enchantment."
Rhodes' heroine, Ellinor Hoffman, an eastern girl visiting Otero County, is introduced to the reader in Chapter One as she is hiking in the Sacramento Mountains (called Rainbow Range by Rhodes.) She stops to look west across the Tularosa Basin and Rhodes describes what she saw in vivid detail, including:
"Afar, through a narrow cleft in the gray westward hills, the explorer's eye leaped out over a bottomless gulf to a glimpse of shining leagues midway of the desert greatness -- an ever widening triangle that rose against the peaceful west to long foothill reaches, to a misty mountain parapet, far-beckoning, whispering of secrets, things dreamed of, unseen, beyond the framed and slender arc of vision. A land of enchantment and mystery, decked with strong barbaric colors, blue and red and yellow, brown and green and gray; whose changing ebb and flow, by some potent sorcery of atmosphere, distance and angle, altered, daily, hourly; deepening, fading, combining into new and fantastic lines and shapes to melt again as swiftly to others yet more bewildering."
Eidenbach calls that passage "an almost photographic description of what that view across the Tularosa Basin looks like," and says it is typical of Rhodes' poetic prose. Another typical part of Rhodes' writings are what Eidenbach calls digressions: short editorials dropped in the middle of a fictional narrative.
They covered subjects ranging from patent medicine to why cowboys were so well read. (The latter, Rhodes opined, was because the Bull Durham tobacco company offered coupons for paperback books, many classics of literature, which the cowboys redeemed and then read in the long, lonely hours along the trail.)
And while finding an editorial in the midst of a novel might seem jarring, Eidenbach says it's one of Rhodes' charms.
"That's one of the things that many of us prize about his fiction," he says. "Yeah, he has a relatively standard plot. Often they're romances of one sort or the other. ... But all of his books are filled with all of these little tidbits."
Rhodes' fiction is populated with thinly-disguised portraits of people he knew, including many famous names in New Mexico history such as Oliver Lee, Judge Albert Fountain and Senator Albert B. Fall of Teapot Dome infamy. He also focused the honor code of the west, which his "hired men on horseback" lived by.
"To him, that's what the cowman really was," Eidenbach says. "Simply a hired man on horseback. But one, for a variety of reasons, which he was willing to explain and elaborate on, who developed a code of conduct that was exceptional. But it was also a practical code of conduct."
That code, however, may be one of the reasons Rhodes fell out of popularity in recent years.
"Where I think he loses out in today's literary market is that he's sentimental and so wrapped up in his own belief that the people who lived this life were pure," LaRue says. "Experience has told us this simply isn't so. People aren't that good."
Rhodes may have romanticized the west because he wrote most of his fiction in what he called "self-imposed exile" in New York. He married May Davison, an eastern woman, in 1899, and May made it clear she didn't like the west. She tolerated living in Tularosa for a short time, but then returned to Apalachin, New York to live with her parents. Rhodes followed her in 1906 and worked as a farm laborer to support May, her two children by a previous marriage, his son with her and May's aging parents.
Although his first poem was published in 1896, Rhodes did the bulk of his writing during his time in New York. LaRue thinks homesickness contributed to Rhodes' romantic view of the west.
"Writing from New York, the New Mexico he's dreaming of is fantasy," LaRue says. "It's just a more naive approach in terms of his perception of the culture and the way the world was turning. But he's still very valuable in terms of his understanding of the cowboy and the way they lived."
And while Rhodes is not well known today -- none of his books are currently in print -- he was popular during his life. He published a dozen novels, most of which were first serialized in magazines such as Saturday Evening Post, Out West, McClure's, Redbook, Sunset and Cosmopolitan, more than a hundred short stories and several dozen poems.
And he was apparently more popular with his western readers than the eastern establishment critics. Another popular writer of the day, Charlotte P. Gilman, wrote a letter to the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature asking, "Can you tell me why the work of Eugene Manlove Rhodes is not better known? ... [A]s to literature, this man's writings have a variety of charms; in sensitive vivid descriptions; in clear characterization; in an easy, light-running style, warm with humor and brilliant with wit.
"In place, time and character he is American of the Americans; mainly of the west when it was west, wild if not woolly, strong, brave, and efficient."
Those who cherish Rhodes' work today agree with Gilman that he's an author sorely overlooked -- and well worth reading. "It's worth every minute you can spend with him, and particularly when you get with that language, he sings. It's just absolutely beautiful," Townsend says.
For More Information on Eugene Manlove Rhodes
There are three major collections of Rhodes' work:
- The Huntington Library in San Marino, California, where his works and the work of Hutchinson are collected
- The Alamogordo Public Library, where the Eugene Manlove Rhodes Room is dedicated to the history and literature of the Tularosa Basin and the Great Southwest (505-439-4148); and
- The Rio Grande Historical Collections in the New Mexico State University library in Las Cruces (505-646-3839).
Paso por Aqui was produced as Four Faces West in 1948. Rhodes' books are not in print but are readily available on the Internet.
