Archdeacon Prettyman’s Animated Doll
In little Plymouth, Wisconsin, is an Episcopal church, St. Paul’s. The little brown church on the corner (as it is known locally) became a designated historical site in 1978 and has changed little since 1920. Although it is the oldest single-site church in Sheboygan County, it still has the same little bell to summon parishioners, the same pipe organ, the same cedar shingles. Built in 1858, in part with funds from New England, the myth grew up around the building that was propagated by the Easterners who moved into Plymouth and founded the parish. The folks up on Yankee Hill, still a well-to-do residential area with big houses and spacious lawns, perhaps believed that the structure was put together with pre-fabricated materials from back east; certainly the little boy inherited that belief. That was, of course, long ago, and times and surroundings are wholly changed. Plymouth is forty miles north of Milwaukee and just east of Sheboygan and Lake Michigan.
To those looking for stories of idyllic childhoods, that of Louis Thomas Hardin, Jr., later to be known as Moondog, would seem to qualify. His father was the priest resident at St. Paul’s, and little Louis was raised from ages three through five in the rectory, built in 1907 and also nearly unchanged. His mother, born Norma Bertha Alves, was the organist on Sundays. He had an older sister, Ruth Louise, a younger brother, Creighton, and maternal grandparents nearby.
Plymouth was a cheese town (cheese capital, by local reckoning) in the heart of the heart of the country. Next to the parsonage was the village firehouse, behind it a small mill stream, in front of it a tidy lawn. Across East Main Street was the library. For an artist as a young man, such a childhood might have become either the stuff of nostalgia or the tinder for rebellion. No self-respecting storyteller today would ask his readers to accept a fantasy of respectability so hackneyed. Nevertheless, the future Moondog, of all people, grew up here. Predictably, serpents lurked in the garden.
Louis was born in Marysville, Kansas, on May 26, 1916. The family moved to Clinton, North Carolina after his father had enlisted as an army chaplain for 1917 to 1919, just before the armistice. Plymouth was the family’s third ministry. For Louis, childhood was an odyssey through America’s middle with his itinerant preacher father for nearly three decades. After Plymouth and his earliest recollections, he lived in Wyoming (1922–1929), then back east in Missouri (1929–1933). After he became blind, he went north to be schooled in Iowa (1933–1936) before rejoining his family in Arkansas (1936–1943). A brief but productive ten months in Tennessee preceded his pilgrimage to New York at the end of 1943.
Seven states (ten towns), tragedy at sixteen, his parents’ divorce and remarriages, and ultimately losing touch with all but a few of those who influenced him early: all this shaped the man who had played on the rectory lawn near the dairy lands of Wisconsin. Louis’ later restiveness and drive to live in the middle of the action and noise, on the streets if necessary, are indubitably generated by his unsettled childhood. His mistrust of solid, middle-class values also probably reflects the ambiguities and vaguenesses of his boyhood. Despite its storybook settings and some memorable joys, his childhood was not happy. It was exciting and challenging, its pains illuminating as well as embittering, but (to oversimplify for a moment) the conflicts he would later have with the adult world are re-enactments of conflicts he inherited from the complex, enervated generations that generated him. Mom, to the boy, would always be mom, as a madrigal written fifty years later makes clear: “All at once my mother’s face appeared, the face I knew when I was two plus two makes four. Her hair a golden halo, two eyes of blue to see me, through and through.” Grandma apparently was weighty enough to barter with the Episcopal hierarchy at nearby Fond du Lac in planning the career of her son-in-law (and why not: Bertha Alves, born Meyer, claimed to be related to Meyer Amschel, founder of the Rothschild dynasty) and insistent enough to appropriate the youngest grandson, Creighton, to herself. Louis always felt that his brother was more a cousin, groomed in years to come for the medical profession, outside the range of his father’s lethal eccentricities.
His complex and compelling father was by far the most potent early influence, for better or worse, on the boy, who would one day become an even greater rebel and pariah than his sire. Louis Sr. was a minister who fell from grace, a man of wit and resource, an adaptive survivor with a hint of dangerousness. He had been born in 1886 in Lexington, Kentucky and raised on a farm in Indiana. Two weeks after his son’s birth, on June 11, 1916, he was ordained a deacon in Marysville, Kansas, at age thirty. He had attended Valparaiso University in Indiana and Hamilton College in New York, where he received an LL.B. in 1915 before graduating from the Kansas Theological School. On November 30, 1917, in Wilmington, North Carolina, he was ordained a priest. He entered the diocese of Fond du Lac on December 9, 1918 and became the curate of St. Paul’s on January 8, 1919 (earning $1,100 in 1920). His son’s description of him (“an Episcopal minister, merchant, rancher, real estate and insurance agent”) is tinged both with irony and respect. He gave his namesake and favorite child a healthy perspective on reality, for this student of Napoleon and Sousa marches, satirist of ministers on the make, and capricious yet loving parent was as surely out of place in his time as his son, who would grow up to be a living anachronism.
Louis’ birth certificate says that his mother, age twenty-five, was a housewife. She was far more than that, even when and where that would have been enough. She shared her husband’s irreverence and adventurousness, and together they would quarrel with the Episcopal Church through a satiric novel, the publication of which accelerated the family’s dispersal and disintegration. She was at home in Wisconsin, born and raised near Plymouth. She married her husband while they were students at Hamilton, in 1913.
Louis’ roots on both sides were Germanic. (In Chilton High School, German was still required in 1920.) Place names memorialize the first- and second-generation dairy farmers who had migrated in the 1800s from Northern Europe: New Holstein, Kiel, Pilsen, Kohler, Oostburg. The names of Louis’ neighbors do also: the printer on the corner across Division Street from St. Paul’s is still called Wandersleben and Schmidt, and next door was the family of Gustave Zerber.
Through his parents Louis inherited many of his later interests. Music, the primary one, came to him through his mother’s training and performance as well as his father’s fancy. (His sister Ruth also was musical, performing throughout her youth in song, dance, and band.) His parents gave him a love of literature, especially in the satiric vein, through their collaboration and in the glorious rhythms of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Louis’ devotion to percussion was born in his father’s marches; his love of the organ came from his early immersion in his mother’s playing; and his irreverent, jocular, rollicking verse, in some surprising ways, exemplifies the diction with which his parents celebrated the religion they were apparently ceasing to believe in. His devotion to folk music and to the counterculture he later symbolized might even have been sparked by the assertion on his paternal side that John Wesley Hardin, the famous outlaw, was a distant relation. Roughly sixty years later, Louis wrote a song about him.
From January 1919 until winter 1922, Louis grew in wide-eyed wonder as the world just beyond his perceptions began to constrict around him. Everything was gigantic, powerful, and obscurely meaningful. The mill stream was The Mighty Mullet, the firehouse a center of dynamism, urgency, and speed. The friendly fire chief showed him how the harnesses were kept suspended over the horses in their stalls, and the wagon waiting behind, ready to hitch up and gallop off. Some of his earliest memories were of local fires, one of them traumatic. One bright, hot summer day, playing with forbidden matches on the powder-dry lawn between the rectory and the church, Louis kindled a blaze that grew rapidly around him. The lawn, he notes, “that had been tan before was black,” and as he fled in panic the neighbors came running, trying to beat down and contain the flames until the fire engine, fortunately next door, arrived “to keep the church from burning down.” In retrospect, this might seem to be some kind of emblematic protest by a four-year-old unable to otherwise articulate his gripes, but this is both speculative and irrelevant. It remained curious, nonetheless, that he alone of the Hardin clan would continue to reveal himself through such symbolic situations.
Life swirled around, and Louis swept it in. As upon any child of four or five, the world of things fell upon him almost sacramentally, while his elders marked a mysterious perimeter to his activities. First, there was nature, and Louis from the beginning was a Wordsworthian who would always remain a flower-child. In the spring, with his mother, he would go in search of the wild violet, walking out of town up a slight hill into the woods. In the fall the two would again leave the beaten track to pick weeds with bulbous tops, which his mother would paint silver for decoration. Behind the parsonage was the parish hall, demolished in 1978 after it had fallen down, and a garden whose main attraction, in June, was a strawberry patch. Winter, with the deep freeze and monumental snows of the Great Lakes plains, was equally memorable. His earliest recollection was of the brutal cold outside tempered by his awareness of “the mystery and wonder of Christmas” and palliated by the variously shaped cookies his mother baked “in the manner Grandma taught her to.”
Plymouth was all news: kindergarten at five; his first parade, Memorial Day, 1921, in which he marched with a toy flag. His earliest attempts at absorbing the larger world outside the rectory’s protective shield occurred on his “funday” Sunday mornings, when he would spread the color comic strips on the parlor floor and then lie directly on the paper, moving his body from one picture to the next rather than moving the text before his eyes. He “sniffed” the ink from frame to frame, crying when he had finished all there was. One of the neighbors had an upright piano with the reticulated rolls that mesmerized him and Ruth. This, along with the church bell, the church organ as played by his mother, and his father’s phonograph records formed his earliest musical perceptions: not profound, but rich and unforgettable.
Although Louis felt singled out as daddy’s boy (or, as he put it, “a curled darling on display”), he was normal enough to be curious, mischievous, and more. His dabbling with petty crime and the inevitable stirrings of rebellion ripened into a pathetic attempt to run away from home. First he had dipped into the family money pot. Like Rousseau, who tried to steal the forbidden apples because he was hungry, he found his “borrowings” escalating. “Geld is guilt,” he was taught, so when his parents refused to give him some money, he was convinced that he must take it. There, atop the upright, one chair-boost away, was the kitty; unsurprisingly, if not commendably, his “profit motive grew.” With his “last and largest hand” from the money-pot that seemed “open-ended,” he decided to light out for good with a friend on the road to freedom. The scope of this, his first antisocial act, was small: it took him to a farm owned by his buddy’s uncle, down the road. The two boys thought they had reached the promised land and gladly lent a hand with the chores in exchange for supper. Their shock began to set in when the farmer told them that he would drive them back to town, since it was too late for them to walk. Dad was “hopping mad,” and with belt in hand he stood the quaking Louis on the kitchen table, making music enough, as his son wryly recalls, “to beat the band” on that rebellious hide.
Although strings might be pulled behind his back, the parsonage was his father’s domain. Louis was called “Bus,” short for Buster, until he was thirteen years old, at which time he claimed his given Christian name. The reason was the long locks that flowed over his forehead until his father took him, “unilaterally,” to a barber. Mom cried in anger, but dad’s “arbitrary” decision went uncontested.
Reverend Hardin was at the center of Louis’ world. When visitors came to the rectory on church business, Louis would stand behind the big chair in the office and try to repeat his eloquent father’s polysyllables (“parrot-like,” as he later punned). Not only did Reverend Hardin deliver arresting sermons, but he also wrote a book and was a “giggle-good” speller. Growing up in a world charged with words, many of them magic, Louis was bound to be a devotee. He was also bound to make the mistake that made his parents roar. Despite some evidence to the contrary, Louis thought his father had an equable disposition because of the society he was a member of: the Knight’s Templar.
His father played a dual role: irresistible beacon to his moth-like son, and omnipotent tyrant dominating a tender imagination. One Sunday morning, when the four-year-old was supposed to be tucked away fast asleep, Louis ran out of his house in his Dr. Denton pajamas, across the lawn to the front door of the church, where the early service was in progress. He marched down the middle aisle and climbed into the pulpit to daddy, who was preaching. Mom left her organ to lead the boy back home. But as father attracted, so could he repel. Louis’ first memorable scare came at Christmas, most likely in 1920, when a man dressed like Santa Claus (dad) came to the door at night, grabbed the child and started to leave, taking him back to the North Pole. The onlookers thought it hilarious, but the terrified child missed the humor. The high cost of insincerity, which became apparent early in their love-hate relationship, soon touched nearly every corner of Louis’ life. For the minister the world was filled with wonder and meaning. For instance, Louis loved to pore over the pictorial war books in dad’s library, entering “a world more fantastic than fiction could ever be.” Though a man of God, his father had Napoleon as his “second god” and was fascinated by all things military. His son was soon absorbed also in the battle scenes, which were not “something which had happened somewhere and somewhen” but fantasies, “ends” in and of themselves. Louis unsurprisingly struggled to reconcile the strict disciplinarian and military strategist (the preacher with a pipe and a book about Napoleon in his hands, as a later madrigal recalls him) and ecclesiastical pariah with the vocal altruist. This double standard (“my father asks, the people give—when I ask, he doesn’t give”) was the first of many contradictions the future iconoclast had to live with, and, like so much that was both attractive and off-putting, it also paralyzed and confused.
Family tensions grew despite Plymouth’s idyllism. Grandma Alves, who had practically adopted the youngest son, Creighton, was a quiet but assertive matriarch. If Louis was daddy’s boy and Ruth momma’s girl, Creighton was indisputably grandma’s. Louis was not only far from his younger brother for much of the time; he was also subtly excluded from conversations between grandma and mother in German. It would take him over fifty years to be reacquainted with the language and culture he would come to love.
Louis was afraid of his grandmother. Once, when the family visited Chilton, he accidentally knocked over a tub filled with clothes and soapy water and got his nose summarily pinched. He would, disguised as a thief, sneak into the cellar where the winter apples were stored and “pinch” one in return “when the coast was clear.” His mother, backed by grandma’s authority, could be as “unilaterally arbitrary” as his father, and perhaps more damaging to the marriage than any career manipulation was another secret Louis discovered years later. After Creighton was born, the two women decided that “mother must be sterilized at once.” Grandmother’s sister, Erna, had died in childbirth, so she was overcautious with her remaining child. Daddy was “unsuspecting,” back in Plymouth parsonage, “in the dark about the pact.”
The marriage, which was to last fifteen years more, was already showing signs of stress, mercifully invisible to the children then. Together mom and dad were working on a manuscript “they said would be a book,” and their lives changed dramatically when it was finally published. In retrospect, it would appear that the Plymouth years were dominated by Archdeacon Prettyman in Politics, by its creation and its repercussions. To the boy who would drive the adults to distraction with his toy car while they worked, the withering stare he got did little to allay the enchantment:
Dad was Dad and Mom was Mom. I never could
have understood that she
was beautiful and he was handsome, not until
the time I couldn’t see.
Although they were on their way to “semi-separation” even as they collaborated, they “couldn’t bear to say it,” and he could not see beyond the wall of solid domestic respectability that protected him.
These barriers began to fall in the coming years. First came the book. They celebrated its publication in April 1921. By the end of the year, however, when its open scorn for things clerical had alerted the inevitable enemies, the Reverend Mr. Hardin was on his way to do missionary work in Wyoming. Louis soon learned that its satire was not merely religious, but also topical, an obvious attack on the local brethren. The author on the title page was Norma B. Hardin, but Louis insists that the “lampoon” that turned into “a lead balloon” arose from his father’s animus and biases, that dad was the one for “stirring up a hornet’s nest.” Louis also credits his father with the four illustrations, caricatures. After all, Reverend Hardin was progenitor in spirit of the son who would later come to personify anti-establishmentism: beneath the mantle of the ministry was a rebel unable and unwilling to submit to the order, a Norseman under wraps. By becoming the Viking, Louis advanced the rebellion his father had initiated, though never conscious of cause and effect. He would reject not only the ritual but also the dogma; he inherited an itinerant lifestyle, emulated its protagonist, and tried to elevate it to art.
Prettyman attacks the rigid establishment in the church, with its quibbles and backstabbing infighting, its vitality squeezed out by bureaucracy. Since his father could not take direct credit for a satire so transparent and scathing, he and his wife hit upon an ironic solution. The dedication, dated April 1921 at “The Rectory, Plymouth, Wis.,” seems to offer an ingenious escape route for the man of God about to savage his fellows:
Whose Faith in the Final Triumph of Brotherly
Love over Bigotry and Ritualism in the Church
Has Won my Sympathy and Devotion, For
I Know it is Founded on a Rock
Norma B. Hardin
In hindsight the sentiments are sadly hyperbolic. Neither faith nor marriage survived the wake of the novel’s publication.
One of the four cartoons depicts the stiff, otherwise nondescript Prettyman approaching the “majestic towers of St. Mark’s,” barely discernible through the foliage that dominates the landscape, while another shows a more robust archdeacon exclaiming, upon seeing his beloved swimming in a pond: “What a water lily.” The bathing scene, complete with a menacing snake, is a mock-epic adaptation of the primal Garden of Eden scene. Unfortunately, the quality of reproduction is blurred and the printing sloppy. The novel itself looks rushed-out. It is incoherent, bombastic, wordy, often formulaic, and crude in its characterizations. As fiction Prettyman was little noticed and quickly forgotten, and as satire it was too dull to prick any but a few hierarchs (and grandma, probably). It is of interest only as an influence on Moondog and for what little light it sheds on the community it ridicules.
Despite the title, the Reverend Prettyman is not the novel’s protagonist. As it develops, in a “broken-backed” narrative, he dominates the political and amorous intrigues of the first half, but in the end becomes antagonist and buffoon. The real hero and heroine are the Reverend Fletcher Lamont and his bride-to-be, Julia Skinner. To realize their love, he must reject the hypocrisy of his colleagues and their Keystone Kops antics, and she must reject the fool’s proposal to live happily ever after with the true Christian minister. There are a host of pale Dickensian characters, meetings, trials, and letters that struggle feebly to hold the reader’s attention through predictable plot turns.
Percy Prettyman is appointed Episcopal Archdeacon of the “conservative diocese” of Smithfield. He is “high” church, the service he conducts “beautified with the assistance of red-headed servers, incense and gregorian music.” The bishop conveniently starts to die, and the ambitious prelate campaigns for the post, noting that instead of preaching the Gospel of Christ he gives the people what they like: “lectures, the ‘mass,’ lighter phases of church history and socialism.” Various fools get in on the crooked election, and as the prelate campaigns he also courts the daughter of Judge Skinner, “as artless as a roe, a full blown Miss, with all the subtle charm of the twentieth century.” (What are we to make of the fact that she is described early in the novel as one who looks like a “descendent of a Viking King”? Coincidence or foreshadowing?) After the first comic trial and a stolen letter fiasco, the good Reverend Lamont steals Julia from the crypto-Romanist Prettyman: “Lamont had been whipped to a finish in a wonderful game of ecclesiastical politics, a modern institution erected upon the ruins of a dying Christianity.”
Although the plots, sub-plots and counter-plots can be funny, there is a bitter residue: bribery, snitching, backbiting, theft, and character assassination appear to be the norm. The burlesque even extends to the dialogue of the lovers. Julia to Fletcher: “I’ll not quarrel with you again—until I feel like it.” The bishop dies, Prettyman and Lamont fight for the job, and Julia (like this novel depleted by its own ominous undertones) flags. Several trials, restorations, excommunications, and elegies later, Lamont wins. From the midpoint Prettyman hardly appears again, as the prejudice of the author(s) becomes more evident: at a convention, we find “the Ritualists sitting at tables reserved for them, while the Evangelicals sit with the people generally.” Wooing, Julia and Fletcher converse thus:
“I notice that the Archdeacon always calls the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion the ‘mass.’”
“The Prayer Book says that ‘the sacrifice of Masses, in which it was commonly said, that the priest did offer Christ for the quick and dead, to have remission of pain or guilt, were blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits,’” he answered.
“Do you know what I think about our Prayer Book, Fletcher?”
“It is the bulwark of the English Reformation.”
“You are correct my dear,” he replied.
At Lamont’s inauguration he attacks “Churchianity,” the “tendency to promote the interests of the Church or clergy, rather than the spiritual welfare of the people.” One can almost hear the Hardins laughing at their superiors. Only after Julia and Fletcher are safely married does Prettyman voluntarily leave for England, where there presumably are greener pastures for the old-fashioned ritualist scorned by the egalitarian American mob. The novel ends in cloying romance: “The deep river roared and plunged in the distance, in its mad race to the sea, while a man and a woman knelt in a certain garden in the city, and returned thanks to an invisible King.”
As Louis notes, dad “got into hot water with the bishop over it” and was transferred by year’s end to “episcopal Siberia,” Wyoming. In 1972, about fifty years after he left it, he returned to Plymouth as Moondog to hear the bell “that cast a spell” over him, “the first of all I could recall, the last of all I could forget.” The pastor’s little son was playing on the same lawn Louis had almost burned away that hot summer day. The rectory and the church were just as remembered. He was led into the church: “I played a few chords on the same pipe organ my mother played on. I stood in the pulpit and recited some of my couplets where he had delivered his sermons.” The reverently elliptical “he” is revealing. Here was Louis’ paradise lost, and its memories, torrential, ecstatic, and sad, lay at that moment too deep for tears.
WYOMING WAS A FAR CRY from the rolling pastures and stable town life of the Midwest. It was, to the Episcopal church at least, a frontier to which they forwarded their fallen angel: if the softer routines of a Wisconsin dairy town provided too much leisure for the cynical cleric, then perhaps the rougher frontier life would make him focus more attentively to his calling. The ordeal lasted seven years, and when the Hardin family came back east in spring 1929, Louis, Sr. found his position in the church precarious and his marriage, the one “built on a rock,” in its final stages of disintegration. Rather than strengthening his faith, the Wyoming ministry had weakened it; rather than pulling the family together through adversity, it had hastened their dispersal.
Louis was six when he set out with his father, leaving mother, Ruth, and Creighton to come later; he was just shy of thirteen when dad, Ruth, and he settled in Hurley, Missouri. Thus the revelations of these transitional years were darkened by a maturing sense of frustration, vacillation, and insecurity. The lifelong wanderings of the later Moondog, whose roots were shallow until he had to dig them out of a distant past, and whose office was always “portable,” continued into another dimension the western peregrinations of his father.
The trip out by father and son from Wisconsin to Wyoming was rough. Louis remembers the “rattletrap” with a whistle that sounded more like a moan, and the long and dreary “sleeping-waking-looking” routine of rail travel. But he remembers more vividly the awesome variety of wildlife in the great expanse of river and plain that awaited him like a revelation—the flowers, the fish, the camping expeditions in the near wilderness. Nothing in Wisconsin could prepare him for the monumental scope of the West: “I went wild over the riotous colors of the semi-desert flowers, especially the sand lily and the Indian paint brush,” Wyoming’s state flower, so “beautiful, exotic and arresting,” under “so clear a sky.” A collection of letters by Elinore Pruitt Stewart, a woman who settled in the same area as the Hardins (Burnt Fork) roughly a decade earlier (1909–1913), paints an equally exhilarating portrait:
I enjoy the memory of that drive through the short spring afternoon—the warm red sand of the desert; the Wind River Mountains wrapped in the blue veil of distance; the sparse gray-green sage, ugly in itself, but making complete a beautiful picture; the occasional glimpse we had of shy, beautiful wild creatures. (Letters of a Woman Homesteader, rep. 1961, Univ. Nebraska Press, 122-23.)
But even here, in the virtually unbounded freedom of open spaces, a conflict arose between some instinct in Louis and parental authority, especially his father’s. “Every new patch I would shout for Dad to stop,” but how was the boy to know “my parents and the flowers were annoyed”? Eventually, dad refused to stop any more, leaving Louis to cry, like every other child so abused, at the injustice. “He should have told me that the only way to pick a flower was to leave / it where it was, alive.”
Sounds, too, were lodged powerfully in the blind man’s retrospective memory of his sighted childhood, as we might expect. Some of the sensual energy was transferred from eye to ear: “The piping of the toads along the roads we traveled on into the night, / was stored away in memory of sound and not in memory of sight.”
The outdoors enthralled him, with energy and bounty and with its seemingly fiendish indifference to human comfort. In spring mother and Ruth joined them in Evanston, in the southwest corner of Wyoming, where they settled for a few months. Daddy, ostensibly a fisher of men, was also a skilled fisher of fish, especially the sacred trout. Even though little Louis attracted merciless hosts of mosquitoes, he observed in awe the preparations (netting, lantern, rods and reels, the tent, the smell of kerosene and tobacco) and worked hard to become bait-catcher. When dry flying was impossible, after a rain had muddied the waters, he was drafted for grasshopper duty and enjoyed catching them once he learned to strike before the creature jumped.
Late one evening, during one of their long missionary trips to the north and east, at Cokeville in Lincoln County, his parents put Louis and Ruth to bed on an army cot and then struggled onto a beaver dam by lantern, catching with the Royal Coachman fly all the trout they could carry. Later as his mother cooked the fish in butter “its tail would rise to meet its head in an arch.”
At Evanston the Hardins resumed normal family life. The Reverend, always off-center in his powers and passions, filled the air not with church music but with ragtime and military marches. As recorded on 78s, “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and “Sabres and Spurs” made a deep impression on the boy, who remained hooked on marches ever thereafter (though he did not compose any until 1978, when he wrote nineteen in the “contrapuntal, canonic style”). He also heard “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and, appropriately for a flower child, Mac Dowell’s “To A Wild Rose”—danced to by Ruth, then eight, in the local cinema, accompanied by her mother on piano. Music was a constant, if not an obsession, of his childhood from then on, yet few if any of his favorites are classical in any sense, and he received no rigorous training until after he became blind. Like his public persona, his preferences in music developed independently; more than the nature of the music, the quality and context of his experience of it formed his musical impulses. To Louis as a child, music was a natural backdrop for more momentous events. Only later what was once peripheral, ubiquitous, and ornamental became substantial, special, and central, but by then he was committed to creating music, not just consuming it.
To a child in 1922, technological wonders appeared like another form of magic, and the circus came to town. Never having seen so much magnificence in one place, Louis could only stare agape at “the antics of the clown” as the parade passed by. He saw the first of the “too few” motion pictures he would ever see in Evanston, the silent Ben Hur, for him a view into the modern age. One day, without warning, someone loaned the Hardin family a Model T, a Tin Lizzy, so that his father could make the long trips his ministry required, and so Louis’ first automobile ride also took place during the memorable month of resettlement. So did his first close call. He can still remember the face of the driver of the other car, “as cool as could be,” as he inched his way past in the opposite direction on the outside of a hairpin turn. Louis, whose car was safely tucked on the inside lane, perceived the two passing machines, an “inch” between them, “on the edge of Nothingness.” The new age didn’t merely emerge, it exploded upon him, with its miracles and threats.
Even as a churchman’s son, with friends and playmates who were children of the clergy, Louis learned a hard lesson boys usually learn, that those immediately over one in the pecking order are meaner than those at the top. In Evanston, some churchmen stayed with them for a few days, one of whom had a son who bullied Louis. Once in a while Louis would get upset enough to run into the house crying “Edwin hit me,” but with no redress from either parent. “Edwin hit me” became a household taunt for whenever he complained of bullying by other children. Such are the enduringly bitter moments of childhood. Instead of attention there were taunts; instead of warmth, distance.
I know I was never taught how to defend myself, either verbally or physically. I could have used a few lessons in boxing and wrestling, but had no one to teach me.
Although his father’s mission was religion, Louis thought his preparation for life strangely un-Christian. Many aspects of the preacher’s difficult, sometimes treacherous livelihood suggested a double standard that no civilization, let alone individual, could resolve. Traveling around southwest Wyoming, preaching in the boondocks, was, in retrospect, “seeing what was left of the pioneer era.” It was a far cry from Yankee Hill, “carrying the Gospel to the lorn,” baptizing cowboys in their boots, in trout streams: daddy fished men with “book and candle” through a series of “one-night stands, / in services by lantern-light, baptizing and the laying on of hands.” To Louis, this “high” church mission with an unexplained earthy dimension, at times exhilarating and at times insufferably boring, ultimately smacked of that hypocrisy most painful because most central, the minister’s (and his family’s by association). If the father-figure fails as father, if the magical bond of the family fails to hold, what of the avowed dogma? What of the converted when the converter has lapsed?
More troubling to Louis than the sins of mere church people was the rape of culture by culture, encouraged and empowered by organized religion. He would return as an adult to the plight of the American Indian; he would even try (and fail) to live among them about thirty years later. Their tragedy, he thought, was partly self-authored. (In 1949, though, when he attended a Blackfoot Sundance in Idaho, he was pleased that “their tradition of dancing three days and nights without food, water, or sleep” had persisted.) Yet through them he felt the sorrow of a civilization destroyed by the superimposition of another, by the “grubbers” who scooped out the “irrigation ditch” of the latest “happy hunting grounds.” With them he could resonate, with the percussive rhythms of his later music, especially that of the 1950s, a conscious reworking of something plaintive, primal, brutal, and elegiac. To their moral and religious qualities he likened those of the Northmen he believed Western history had tried to bury. To the six-year-old the first contact was awesome—the Treaty of the Wind River Reservation (in west-central Wyoming), the Arapahos, “glaucoma-ridden,” “reduced by gunpowder and seduced by whiskey.” To their noble but pitiful world came the Reverend Hardin, a stranger in a strange land. Once a squaw threw a nice fat puppy in the pot, “hair, guts and all,” in honor of the visit. When it was “done,” she cut it open and offered it to the Reverend, who declined it, feeling uncharacteristically unwell. There, to the later Moondog, another paleface crime was allowed in the name of good intentions:
While at the Arapaho reservation, during a convention of missionaries, bringing God and the blessings of Christianity to a people who had their own tribal beliefs as good or better than what we had to offer, I came in contact with a culture of a people utterly foreign yet fascinating. I did not know then that we were witnessing the dissolution of something fine and noble. What we called a reservation they must have called a concentration camp, captive audiences to our unwanted importunities and impositions. To the injury of being defeated was added the insult of forced indoctrination, with the sicknesses and diseases of the white man thrown in.
Perhaps the most memorable experience of his youth took place the day he had a lesson on the drums while sitting on “the leathered lap” of Chief Yellow Calf. Not only was this man unconvertible by the missionaries, but he also gave to Louis that most precious gift, an unforgettable moment that echoed down the years as the boy also grew up to be unconvertible, a one-man reservation in the middle of a progress-loving, hostile world. The chief was a noble, dignified reminder of the “recoverable” past; when Louis became Moondog and, later, the Viking, he, too, reclaimed a vanishing mode of perception, drumming along. Louis came out of the brief time he spent on the reservation with less to love about the cultural charge he had inherited and more to revere about the buried lives he would resurrect in the future. As his father created for him an itinerant life and modeled for him a rebellious stance, so from the Treaty of the Wind River Reservation he walked away with a new beat, a new instrument, and a new dimension to his world, including his music.
THE HARDIN FAMILY FINALLY settled near Burnt Fork in what a contemporary book called “the Godless Valley.” (The author, Mrs. Honore Wilsie Morrow, and the editor, Arthur H. Clark, protested that the story was true despite local resentment. To many, however, Judith of the Godless Valley, published in 1923, was a novel.) Into this wild place came the minister with a troubled vocation and family. Burnt Fork, so named because forest fires had denuded its banks, held the new mission. Stewart in her Letters notes how only a decade earlier there was “no minister in this whole country,” and when she was to be married there was, in her husband’s Scots, “no kirk to gang to.” (But the most complete local history of this entire period, Uinta County: Its Place in History, published by the same Arthur H. Clark in 1924 and written by Elizabeth Arnold Stone, notes that the Episcopal Church conducted “a prosperous Sunday school” at Burnt Fork.)
Legend and myth vied to vilify the place. Intermarriages between white and Indian thereabout are said to have produced excellent cowboys, some of whom became rodeo champions, while others became feared outlaws. Stories circulated that Butch Cassidy and his gang used the valley as a hideout, and in Uinta County he became the Robin Hood figure he remains in popular imagination. The idea that the place is evil persists even today. For the limited number of residents there is a high rate of violent crime, goes the superstition, and even where statistics prove otherwise, alluring falsehoods die hard. Late in summer 1922, though, after their travels through western Wyoming and peace-making with the Episcopal ecclesiarchy, Father Hardin started preaching to the “unconvertibles,” the “grubbers of the sage.” Wyoming became “a very nice place to live” despite his parents’ benevolent neglect. The settlers turned out to be friendly, the scenery lovely (it was in the foothills of the Rockies, after all), and the environment, ultimately, nourishing: he caught his first trout there, his mother was his teacher (in a log school house), and the family lived on the ground floor of a log community hall. The action was upstairs: church services, dinner-dances, conferences, and the special local gatherings called “blow-outs.” Once a Bishop Thomas came to Burnt Fork to inspect the mission and was treated to a feast at the house of a neighbor. Afterwards he was invited to visit the community hall. The distinguished visitor faced the only way up, a flimsy-looking exterior staircase. When asked if he wanted to go up to see where the preaching was done, the bishop declined, saying: “No, I have a vivid imagination.” This snub of their laboriously built and maintained worship place was “just the thing to turn them livid.”
Reverend Hardin, an irrepressible groundbreaker, tried to be not only a pillar of the community on Sundays but also a productive worker during the week. He made the downstairs front room into a store, selling candy, tobacco, groceries, and ammunition. The supplies were trucked from towns about fifty miles across a semi-desert on a snaking road, via Horse Shoe Bend: “impassable in winter by car, impassable in spring because of mud, impossible in summer because of dirt.” Louis recalls the “winding way to town” by the spectacular Twin Buttes.
Dad was not dismayed by logistics or by the warnings he got from his closest friends about how tricky going into business was for a preacher, and how inevitably the requests for credit would create painful dilemmas. His neighbor and confidante (and one of Louis’ adult heroes), “Uncle” George, was direct: don’t sell on “tick.” “If you do or don’t give credit, you will make enemies. Those who ask for and receive it, and are late in paying or won’t pay, will dislike being asked for the money. It is better to have full shelves and enemies than empty shelves and enemies.” Dad flourished until the credit gave out, defying not only sound economics but also pragmatic public relations. Forty years later, his son would be accused of infantile exhibitionism in playing like a child to the grownup world around him, adopting a stance grounded in history and formed by the dynamic, iconoclastic personality of his father. To twist the rules before finally abandoning them was a family tradition. Why shouldn’t an Episcopal priest run a country store? Why shouldn’t a blind musician make his living as a “beggar” on the streets of New York? When the children came in, climbing over the sacks of sugar for a peek at the candy display, and asked for some “ratbait,” gumdrops, or “Black Jack” gum on tick, he had to say, “Show me your penny.” When a certain Emma, the daughter of a rancher, brought a gift of bread and meat to the preacher, and then asked for credit, dad had to be guided by the profit motive. But not for long: after giving in and giving credit he eventually settled for payment in kind (once with a wagon and a team of horses), and left years later with many uncollected accounts. The dualism proved tedious in the long run. (As Louis put it: on Sunday you tell them it is more blessed to give than to receive and on Monday you tell them you can’t get something for nothing.) Some of the parishioners summed up their objections:
“The Hardins never should have got worked in merchandising,” some would say.
“While he was preaching, she was teaching.
Wasn’t that enough to pay their way?”
Louis recalls: “I caught on to the idea of double standards early.”
Louis’s Mother was the only teacher. With the brief exception of his days in a Plymouth kindergarten, Louis’s mother was his first and only for years, and of her pupils he thinks he may just have been “the worst,” getting into mischief as he did even though all assumed he would “know better.” She taught him the alphabet, how to read and write. She was—especially in the first and brightest Wyoming years—as much a constant in his life as his often absent father, and equally exemplary and demanding. Against such accomplished adults the boy felt inadequate and disappointing, a harsh chord in an otherwise harmonious symphony. Most of Louis’ early relationships with women, in a pattern reaching beyond his thirtieth birthday, were attempts to recapture his lost mother: romances with older women sometimes twice his age, steady, self-supporting, musically and intellectually accomplished. They were all teachers. Just as Louis repeated his father’s rebellion, he also searched for the anodyne to his mother’s rejection. Although “Mom was Mom,” Louis had few happy memories of her. Once a hay wagon “full of happy hearts” took off for a Lone-tree dance without him: Mom was there, Ruth was there, snuggled under blankets, but he was left behind. In revenge, though alone and unseen, he put on one of his sister’s dresses, indicating the attention he craved and appropriating an identity others might take seriously.
Near the end of Louis’s first year, in the spring of 1923, his mother directed the children to gather the winter’s trash and dispose of it in a bonfire. Unfortunately, the blaze was too close to the schoolhouse and carelessly supervised. After all of the other children had gone home, Louis, riding the family horse, noticed that the fire was still smoldering and that smoke was rising from behind the schoolhouse. Cords upon cords of stovewood had been ricked against the rear of the building. It was cedar, with its unusually inflammable bark, and a spark had blown over onto and ignited one of the pieces. Louis was paralyzed by two fears: a conditioned fear of fire and the fear of galloping the huge horse, which he knew he could neither control nor stay on top of. So instead of dousing the flames, he trotted after the cowboys he could find, in twos and threes, who hurried to the fire only to find it uncontrollable. This was not Plymouth, with its fire engine ready nearby; by the time the neighbors started to transport buckets of water uphill from the creek and little Louis pitched his cups in, his dad had seen that it was “no use.” A huge crowd had assembled. Helpless, they removed anything portable, crowbarred the desks from their moorings, and surrendered to a “festive mood.” Men then took the long poles that seemed to be everywhere and pushed in the walls; the blaze spoke with a roar, awesomely, especially to the child shuddering with guilt. Many years later Louis would be willing to share the responsibility with others, but the anguish of the moment was exclusively his. If mom had not built the fire so close, if the school board had not foolishly had the wood stacked next to the building, and if Louis had not panicked, then the structure might still be standing.
If I’d used the wood-pile as a platform,
both for getting off and on
the saddle, so’s to kick the burning stick,
the schoolhouse never would have gone.
But he had been too human.
A colorful and delightful neighbor in Burnt Fork, “Uncle” George, the “star of the piece,” lived two hundred yards down the road. It was he who fêted Bishop Thomas, cautioned the minister about going into business, fiddled at the blowouts. He came visiting some evenings to spin tales. As he started a story he would fill his pipe, light a match and hold it poised, then become so absorbed in what he was saying that he forgot it and burned his fingers. In the course of the tale this would happen repeatedly: he would fish out a new match from his vest and soon drop it with a yelp. His characteristic punctuation, for emphasis, but also to be sure his listeners were paying attention, was to say continually “Don’t you know.” In front of Uncle George’s ranch, out in the middle of the county road, was the biggest cottonwood tree Louis ever saw. Its commodious shade was a haven for many summer travelers. Moondog, in 1971, remembered it in a madrigal flashback, dreaming of how he showed a friend the great tree of his childhood: “See with me an unforgotten cottonwood standing where it stood, yonder?”
Another madrigal (from 1968) recalls the “big event” of the ranchers’ summer, hay-making. “On a summer’s day in ‘23, Uncle George was making hay, the western way, with pine-pole stackers, made by hand, in height about sixty feet or more. It seemed higher to me.” The farmer’s life, filled with “jack-pine runners-up” and “pine-pole pulverizers,” monstrous machines on enormous stretches of land in the burning heat of the summer, is the legend of the West as personified in Uncle George, part harsh reality, part myth, all magnified in recollection:
A study in geometry, the stacker stood its
groaning ground, a pair
of nine hypotenuses making no excuses
in the upper air.
Louis’ contradictory perception of childhood is nowhere more apparent than in this period: although Burnt Fork was a nice place to live in and the people were good, he was vexed by his family’s problems and his own insecurities. Years later he would become a living paradox, a conspicuous rebel, yet so conservative that the liberals who revered him were left aghast. His internal struggles gave rise to the temptation to become two people, two irreconcilable sets of attributes that comfortably accommodate both ends of the spectrum, that please both mom and dad, church and state, life and art. (Besides, he would point out to those who cared to know, he was a Gemini.) What to others was a maddening bafflement of contradictory impulses came to him through his nature and his nurture. And even if, upon reflection, the sun did shine often, the flowers bloomed, the taste buds watered, and the music played, the price was high.
The road to his home, as he recalls it in 1973, was alive with his favorite things: “Pussy willows pussying every branch along the road” and “flowers where the purple sage was growing,” hiding nasty ticks for the unsuspecting. “Let me sing the praise of water-cress, … of crystal clarity in motion,” he also notes, celebrating his “allegiance” to the plant he always loved: “let me pluck another sprig and revel in its tangy taste again,” or in its green color, “reflected in the icy pool below.” At home there was “Godless Valley ice cream,” the best he ever had, made from Hereford cream, vanilla, whole eggs and sugar or fruit, packed in ice and salt and churned inside the freezer: “Stoll’s delight,” as it was known locally, named after a neighboring family, was a memorable “ritual in the ranch-house.” (The Stolls had raised a huge Hereford bull from a calf and asked Louis if he wanted to sit between the enormous horns, which he did, amazed. He noted with amusement, in reference to the headgear he would sport in the Sixties and Seventies at the apex of his Viking uniform:
I never knew I’d have to wait threescore of
years before I heard it said,
“I never shall forget the day I sat between
the horns of such a head.”
Winter brought joys with its hardships, the teams of horses “jingle-jangling” through “trackless fields of newly-fallen snow.” He and Ruth would carve a snow house out of a large drift that had formed a foot-thick crust from the alternation of thawing and freezing; with door and roof and floor it was “the Whitest House you ever saw.” When the snow thawed and rolled down the hill “in haste,” Louis was there, “channeling the flood”: “Who cared about the wet and cold? I had an engineering job to do.” In the backyard was a Rocky Mountain peak, always capped with snow. A 1970 madrigal recalls: “Well, Old Baldie has himself a snowy rain. Down, down, down it came. Above the timberline the raindrops fell in the form of snowflakes.”
For a boy who loved to fish, the confluence of Burnt and Henry’s Forks was paradise, well stocked with trout.
In the twiggy branch behind the hall I hookt
a trout and yanked him out.
Be it e’er so small there’s ne’er a prong
of Henry’s Fork without a trout.
The colorful locals held exciting celebrations. For July 4th the ranchers carved out an island “in the middle of the purple sage” for a track and a picnic area. There the entire Godless Valley would go to sport, see the races, wave flags, and shoot fireworks. A 1970 madrigal describes “[f]lags in the meadow,” which he hoped were “standing there still, pale blue.” What would become a day with tragic connotations nine years after his first Wyoming Independence Day was then the pinnacle of childish ebullience. There were also those “blow-outs” right above his bedroom on the versatile second floor. The dances, usually held on Saturday night, included young and old, in winter and summer, fair weather or foul. Whole families came, even the babies, “generally in farm wagons full of warm hay and blankets in winter.” Stone’s book on Uinta County notes how the scattered settlers had “all-night parties to which they would gather from far and near to dance to the music of volunteer fiddlers.” When the little ones tired of the festivities, they were wrapped up and placed along the benches that ringed the room. During the whole long evening, until three in the morning or later, the horses were tied to the hitching post, out in the cold or heat, in ice or snow, “with nothing to eat or nothing to cover them.” Since “no one gave them a second thought,” they “had to take it, and did.” Inside, Louis, bigger than a child for the night, was an intimate part of the action:
By word of mouth it got around, “There’s
gonna be a blow-out Saturday
night, eight-thirty sharp. The preacher’s
wife, her son and Uncle George’ll play.”
Play he did, performing for the first time in his life, doing what he would do so often later: drumming in front of a live audience, accompanying mom’s piano and Uncle George’s fiddle. The primitive materials were presciently appropriate: half of his “set” was a steamer trunk, which he would straddle and kick; the other half was a snare drum, donated back east and kept through high school, which he struck with shoe-shapers. Throughout his long career Moondog invented new percussive instruments from odd materials in strange shapes, his own versions of found art, so his eccentric childhood was a prelude to his even more eccentric maturity. It is clear with hindsight that his “musical career,” however humble its inception, evolved in a warm environment, and the deep memory of it was more important than the quality of the music then produced.
He was a boy, too, experiencing the awkwardness and shock of coming of age. When the gelding Ethel Welch was riding spread his legs and urinated, the boys who had surrounded her, “chivalrous in front of blushing maidenhood,” pretended that nothing was happening. As they grew soggier, though, she turned crimson, yet horse, damsel, and knights rode out the moment to its conclusion. (Ethel’s father was so heavy, so “full of self-importance,” that the chairs of Burnt Fork were said to groan whenever he approached. One such seat in the Hardin household had held a treasured and ill-fated old 78.)
Along with awkward dismantling of naïveté and innocence were somber glimpses of gratuitousness and injustice. Not only did con artists and bullies beat and trick the unsuspecting preacher’s son; those he trusted betrayed him. Louis was shocked one evening in the upper room before a dance when a “friend” took him for a ride on the shoulders, then bent over suddenly and “floored” his unsuspecting passenger. Louis’ nose took the stunning force. Howling, with blood and mucus dangling from the wound, betrayed and in agony, he later wondered what his “mother must have thought, for she was there and saw it all.” In time he “came to expect it more and more” in order to deal with it. Cynics are forged by experiences such as these. If punished for something he had done, he was not informed about it; if he was unpopular, the reasons were never articulated; if he was being singled out as a target, no one explained the rules of the game or afforded him methods for settling grievances. He was a little like the horses who had to take the treatment they got.
Even the pleasanter memories were soiled by shameful acts. Yet his deviancies, no more serious than other children’s, were mainly cries for attention, arising from his need to be considered alive, vital, and flawed rather than merely an “animated doll.” He stole, items sentimental rather than exotic or opulent. He hid a part of himself as well as his loot, alienated and ashamed, feeling like a forgotten failure. Now and then, “but mostly now,” Jean-Jacques Hardin would help himself to his dad’s candy “on the sly,” without much guilt. Throughout his adult life, since possessions were morally tainted, he almost perversely did without them, traveling ever lighter and freer. The saddest memories are of his alienation, from his parents first and foremost, but also, through them, from the world that frustrated and excluded them. Louis was, it seemed to him, the “funny bunny” that didn’t quite make the grade, rather than the trusted companion growing in competence under loving guidance. No one told him “what was going on.” When he had gone down a row of potatoes picking all of the attractive blossoms and presented his bouquet to dad and Uncle George, they were irritated and told him not to do that again. He does not remember being told why. Louis was in awe of his father’s horse and seemed to be drawn to the animal that loomed as big as an elephant. There he was, tethered on a long rope out back, eating a disk into the long grass around him, making rings through the meadow until the autumn snow. One fateful day he noted that the horse was saddled and bridled, so he led it up to a platform in front of the community hall and mounted. The ensuing ride cross- country took him past corrals, sheds, pens, hills, yet he rode without stirrups (he couldn’t reach them anyway), relying on the horn of the western saddle for balance and support. A neighbor sent him home via a “short cut,” but forgot to tell him that a pole gate blocked one leg of the trip through Uncle George’s fields. Like the cowboys he imitated, he dropped a couple of the poles from the saddle, but he was too small to stretch down and put them back in place, nor could he hope to remount were he to dismount. Later that day a dejected Uncle George came to report that six of his milk cows had gotten into the alfalfa, bloated, and died. Uncle George, a “good tracker,” probably knew that whoever was on dad’s horse had left the gate open, but never directly accused Louis (who never confessed). Why wasn’t he told the consequences of his actions? “Even then I knew enough to know they knew / I didn’t know what I was doing,” he puts it, but responsibility somehow slipped through the net of circumstances, amorphous, as he slipped through the web of events, uninformed, unformed, and adrift.
Even though the natural wonders around him were his solace, the joy that sustained him through the turmoil of treacherous relationships, the inhabitants of the place remained strangers: if not hostile, at least indifferent. The local cowboys, whom he often imitated as any child might, in reality disappointed as much as appealed to him. The profanities they taught him drew laughter from adults. For such a little one, the son of you-know-who, to say such things! Everybody knew what was happening except his parents, who were unaware, always “wrapped up in their own activities.” So while a seedy element had him “on a string”—asking the seven-year-old, “Are you getting any?”—he went unsupervised and unwarned. When the riders coughed and spit they disgusted him; when they took the gumdrops they had just purchased in dad’s store and threw them into the air, waiting with gaping mouths to devour them on the fly, their pride of accomplishment turned his stomach. He felt, more strongly than necessary, that he undermined his father’s mission and that his parents simply allowed it to happen: he was a “sapper,” since it wasn’t piety but notoriety that began at home, and thus dad’s “impregnability” was eroded by his bad example. “Buster,” “Flopsy,” the “animated doll,” though well provided for in some ways, was left to his own devices, and often chose poorly. The Hardins, moreover, were never accepted except as visitors by most. In a land conspicuous for its lack of ministers, a godless valley, they were always on trial. If the inhabitants resented the holy man telling them “how to live the good life” in the first place, as Louis always felt they did, how cynically must they have viewed his son’s running with the wrong pack?
It is hard to explain the preacher’s seemingly arbitrary and offhandedly dismissive treatment of his son. But ultimately he measured his worth against his father, who dominated his moral perceptions, his (un)awareness of inequality, injustice, and disproportion. Perhaps he asked too many questions, so answers ceased; perhaps he was left to his own wits in accordance with some inscrutable philosophical principle; perhaps inaccessibility was both cause and effect—in other words, he was “delinquent” because he was ignored and pushed further away because he was different, not an integral part of a design he failed to construe. He got into hot water, but what child doesn’t? When he needed to be treated decently, however, he was inevitably disappointed. One day, while Louis was wandering around the old dirt track behind the schoolhouse he spotted a dull round thing on the ground, a muted silver dollar “corroded into gray.” He took the prize proudly to the preacher, who promptly pocketed it. No matter how hard the boy cried, he never saw the inexplicably confiscated coin again. He was “hurt terribly” and began to distrust. In his desperate adolescent search for models, he found a void he could not fill: he was neither the man of God’s son nor much like the female Hardins, and quite unlike the shiftless cowboys. What, then, could he become?
The Burnt Fork years ended abruptly when “transfer time” came again. Louis never got explanations, just the facts. There was no farewell party, for everybody was “busy saving everybody’s face.” So, be it self-imposed or not, they pulled up roots and drove Lilly-Vory’s team (a payment for groceries) out of Burnt Fork, heading north and west toward their new home, Fort Bridger.
Father Hardin’s career, according to the annual journals of the proceedings of the Wyoming Episcopal Missionary District, followed some strange ellipses. He is noted several times in the list of “non-parochial clergy,” the earliest on July 5, 1922, and the latest on July 8, 1929, as having arrived from the Diocese of Fond du Lac in March 1922. Bishop Nathaniel Seymour Thomas, S.T.D., entrusted him with the “Unorganized Missions” of Burnt Fork and Fort Bridger for several years, until 1925, when the prelate in charge of reporting on missions noted the following:
I have made two visits at Burnt Fork to consult with the missionary, the Rev. L.T. Hardin, and the mission committee on building plans for this mission. The progress and permanency of the work at Burnt Fork demands a proper plant and it is planned to build a log church and rectory and to repair the parish hall, an old two-story log structure of historic associations…. Mr. Hardin ministers also to Fort Bridger, where he is temporarily in residence.
In 1924 he even presented four candidates for confirmation in Evanston. But before he moved his family to Fort Bridger, he commuted regularly for several years, and by 1924 his affairs were clearly troubled. In the journal he is no longer listed in connection with a specific mission, and one Mr. Roeschlaub has apparently taken over for him at Burnt Fork, building a “comfortable four-room log rectory with some assistance… There was a good Confirrmation class at Burnt Fork. No services have been held at Lone Tree or Fort Bridger in this field.” Father Hardin mysteriously and cryptically has disappeared from the record, although he was there preaching, for his name doesn’t appear at all on the roster of the clergy. Moving to the rhythm of his own drummer once again, in a frontier fort, he was invisible to his church. In the 1929 journal, after a gap of four years, he appears on the list of Non-Parochial clergy once again, just before his departure for points east. The effect on the family of these climbs and falls, traumas, relocations, breaks, and reconciliations was profound.
FORT BRIDGER WAS ALREADY FAMOUS in 1924, when the Hardins settled there for a year, a living remnant of the romantic nineteenth-century exploration of the northwest. By 1929, when they left Wyoming, their acquaintances had begun to turn the property over to the public domain as an historical landmark. For Louis, fresh from the living West and its rural frankness, this brief immersion into history and dense public activity was when he was happiest.
If Burnt Fork was where the spirit of the wilderness spoke to a young boy, Fort Bridger awakened his consciousness of an immediate and thrilling past. There the Lincoln Highway “snaked itself around my psyche” (a telling metaphor in light of what he called some of his earliest rhythms: snaketime). Founded by Jim Bridger (1804–1881), one of the heroes of westward expansion along the Oregon Trail, the fort and its environs were well-preserved in 1924, and the town that had grown up around it was lively. Its history included much of the traffic that led to the early settlements in what later became Wyoming, Nevada, and Utah. Bridger was a mountain man whose knowledge of the stupendous, unexplored West, and its indigenous inhabitants (he had three successive Indian wives) was legendary. He was reputedly the first white man to see the Great Salt Lake (in 1824), for instance, guiding settlers and the military through the Rockies and beyond; a fossil-rich rock stratum in western Wyoming became known as the Bridger formation. He founded the eponymous fort in 1843 as a way station on the Oregon Trail and fur-trading post. After he left it in 1858, by then the famous old man of the mountains, the army ran it until 1890, after which it remained a stop on the Lincoln Road. An 1849 government report vividly describes it:
A drive of thirty miles during which we crossed Ham’s Fork three times and Black’s Fork once, brought us to Fort Bridger, an Indian trading post, situated on the latter stream, which here divides into three principal channels, forming several extensive islands, upon one of which the fort is placed. It is built in the usual form of pickets, with lodging apartments and offices opening into a hollow square, protected from without by a strong gate of timber. On the north and continuous with the walls is a strong, high picket fence enclosing a large yard, into which the animals belonging to the establishment are driven for protection from wild beasts and Indians.
As it grew and evolved it acquired striking and original additions: stone boulder storehouses and barracks, for instance, an impressive stone chimney, rows of trees along the creek and numerous outbuildings.
One Will (William A.) Carter (Jr.), son of “the distinguished pioneer Judge W.A. Carter,” sold Reverend Hardin a trading post made up of three stone buildings, a section of the original fort, possibly part of the estate later conveyed by Mr. Carter to the Historical Landmarks Commission of Wyoming, where it is preserved at the Museum. There, besides running the post office, for hot tourists in need of cold drinks and ice cream, arriving in Pick-wick buses “so long they had to swing out before they turned the corner by the monument,” or locals in need of supplies, the minister set up shop once again when “there wasn’t any mail to sort.” Louis watched the comings and goings from the square, across from the stile in the fence of Carter’s house. He would never see another. There, despite contrary signs and opposing impulses, his father decided to preach on Sundays in a small, empty store. Mrs. Hardin still taught school, her “normal” degree adequate enough to serve the community’s requirements.
Louis’ paradise was shattered briefly by a visit from the East. Grandma, Grandpa, and Creighton (who had never lived in Wyoming) came out, not on vacation but to build a home on Hardin land. It wasn’t too long, however, before they “missed Wisconsin” and headed back, leaving Creighton at last with his parents. Deeper problems evolved, incidents engraved upon the memory of the peculiar and hypocritical injustice done to Louis by his parents, whom the world regarded through different eyes than his. One stands out, vividly: his mother held an Easter egg hunt at the school and whoever discovered the designated lucky egg won a big basket of goodies. Louis, looking for something special, passed over a smashed, half-hidden egg which another boy retrieved. When it was announced that the reject was, of course, the winner, he could not be consoled, crying out that he had spotted it first. “But you didn’t bring it in,” his mother had replied, disclosing for him a lesson in pragmatic Christianity: then and forever the significance of the paradox “the first shall be last and the last shall be first” was made manifest. At any rate, the consolation that others might construe the contest as fixed should he have won did little to fill up the void. Though no one could say that “mama’s boy was privy to the prize,” a certain theme, a bitter taste, ran like a bass line beneath his growth to young adulthood. It seemed that he must be, because of who he was, somehow better. To his sorrow, as his scarred memory attests, he all too often came to see himself as somehow worse.
Buried at first by the onslaught of new and vital impressions, his awareness that the novelty had a destructive side developed gradually. Before he earned his own shotgun, he learned how to shoot by training his BB gun on “anything that flew.” To his regret, the carnage he left in his wake permitted him to glimpse a darker side of himself that Buster’s curls and Flopsy’s tail had disguised. “Following a farmer’s plow, that showed the other side of life, I saw / spent cartridges and worms come up together.”
Dad, meanwhile, was “trading more and more and preaching less and less.” One traumatic day in 1925, the Model T was reclaimed by the mission. With the car, it seemed to the boy, also went “the yen for preaching.” Behind the failing ministry, it became clearer to Louis, lurked the failing marriage. One reason Louis found out years later, when his dad admitted to making passes at a woman who took care of the Hardin children during summer when his mother went to Laramie. Although the advances were rejected, his mother probably found out, and there was a “blow-up” upon her return, “another cause for eventual separation.” Dad was looking to trade the store for a ranch soon. The pace accelerated: the Hardins moved twice during 1925 to 1927, neither move secured by an Episcopal sinecure.
First came the Workman ranch on Beaver Creek, near Lone Tree, not far from the land originally traded for the Bridger property. During the two years Reverend Hardin lived there, Louis was his only companion—mom, Ruth and Creighton stayed in Bridger, coming to the ranch on holidays, and otherwise rarely. In 1927 they came to the Hickey ranch on Henry’s Fork, closer yet to Burnt Fork and bigger, apparently another even trade. Mom and siblings returned for two academic terms while she taught in Lone Tree. During the second semester the four of them traveled from the ranch to the school in a covered wagon school bus. In 1928 Louis was again alone with his father, and life was “hard” but “good.” Dad hauled the mail halfway to Bridger, the distance being too great to be made with horses, especially in winter. He would meet the other driver at a noon rendezvous, lunch over a wood-burning stove, and then return, putting the letters in the ranchers’ mailbags hung at the side of the road, arriving home, if he was fortunate, by nightfall. In the meantime, before Louis could ride to school in Burnt Fork in the morning, he had to make breakfast for the two of them and run his trap line. Despite the demanding routine, the “sights and sounds of Beaver Creek and Henry’s Fork will always be a part / of me, no matter where I go, no matter what I do,” he later reminisced, celebrating further with a madrigal: “On a tributary of the Green, more specifically the rivulet of Henry’s Fork, my dad had his family. A cabin of pine was our humble home, but it was happy in spite of all….” He loved the “open range,” the “feeling of unlimited freedom” there, where he was his “own master, and comparatively independent.” It was picturesque despite some erosion, even if the old log bridge was waiting to be washed out in a spring flood. Reverend Hardin might have been taken in by shrewd bargainers who saw in him a soft touch, but he purchased for his son vivid and undiminished memories of labor polished into joy: “We had to get up so early that the pre-dawn sky was alight with the brightest stars I ever saw, and the air was so cold your nostrils stuck together. I had to take an ax and chop a hole in the thick ice in the stream to get a bucket of liquid ice for the horses and the cows to drink.” Throughout his life Louis could endure punishing hardships in primitive environments; he also survived in New York City as a blind man. The skills he developed on the frontier, and his insistent need to homestead, brought him solace when all else failed. Nature for him was like the magpie’s nest, improbable, and, like its call, unforgettable. Out of the crazy quilt of experience would always come the urge to make beautiful songs, and in moments that would test the patience of the hardest minds and bodies, he made some of his loveliest music.
By the time Louis was twelve he was old enough to see how the settlers’ attempts to domesticate the land made for both high romance and back-breaking labor. The high point of the year was haying, which he now joined for the first time. The enormous stacks were estimated for tonnage after a rancher tied stones to tape measures and threw them over the top in a crisscross pattern. The big sheep companies then bought the hay and drove their herds into the fields to winter there, sheltering in the willow groves and eating down the hay. One Ben Romero, from Taos, impressed the boys by living out of his covered wagon throughout the harsh winter, eating for the most part a “very, very hot” chili as sustenance. This demanding country, this “primitive” environment, often called forth inventive, explosive responses for survival. Thus Louis became a proficient trapper (beaver, muskrat, and mink) and sharpshooter: he shot mallards on the wing, rabbits from the hip, and once even a pair of rabbits with one bullet. Bill Luckey, a former hunter and trapper, taught him many techniques. He would also park his covered wagon between the willow groves and allow the boy to ride his mare, which could single-foot. Many years later Louis would recall the comfortable ride this gait gives in a tender madrigal. He was raised in what seems in retrospect like a Hollywood western.
His coming of age, or, rather, becoming twelve, also brought him size. He had been the little guy, the new boy who always changed schools, whose mother was often the teacher: in other words, the easiest to pick on. In 1928, in Burnt Fork, however, he was all of a sudden the biggest boy in school and his mother taught at Fort Bridger. Nevertheless, his troubles only went “from worse to bad,” because he still had not yet learned a valuable lesson about pushing little ones around: there are bigger ones waiting in the wings, brothers, cousins, who know how to fight.
With size and bruises came the first stirrings of romance. He worshipped his teacher, Jesse Chip, “the blue-eyed blond with turned-up nose,” who danced with him once and whose proximity induced his first ecstasy. His crush went unrequited, however, and he soon learned how dreams are dashed. One day in school she smelled skunk, and he had to admit that he had caught one that morning. He was “excused” for the day. His second crush, with a woman his own age, turned out to be even more painful. Her name was Madeline Smith, and it was she who spotted Louis with a friend’s sister in a haystack. The romance ended abruptly when she rushed off to tell his mother, at the ranch for a brief stay. That evening Louis got another memorable beating. Disbelief and disillusionment set in when disappointments struck, when cynicism about ideals took hold. Once a friend shocked him by telling him casually that there was no Santa Claus. Only a few years later, after his tragedy, the last delicate strands of his faith would be cut, and no firm beliefs would hold his imagination until decades later, when he became the Viking of Sixth Avenue. He would of course come to be suspicious about intimacy and dubious about absolutes. Among natural wonders, as he grew into young manhood, his world was falling apart.
As always, his interests and activities orbited his father. More and more as the years passed he lived apart from his brother and mother. Reverend Hardin, though, was always there, model and tyrant, hero and betrayer. He was flawed but always acted with panache, was memorable even in his failures, was nothing if not ambitious and controversial. How often was the boy trapped, unresolved, within his father’s paradoxes, and, what is worse, moving around with a man aimless but blessed with a preternaturally clever twelve-year-old? What was he to make of this man? Dad had encouraged Louis to save the money he made selling his pelts to the fur companies. In the Mountain View Bank was an account in his name with over a hundred dollars in it, of which he was rightly proud. One day dad asked him for a loan. Louis was reluctant, remembering his silver dollar, but ultimately surrendered his hard-earned savings. Shortly afterward the ranch was sold, and the family was heading back to Wisconsin. When Louis finally asked after his money, his father explained that he had spent thousands and that Louis really ought not to expect anything back. How about a bike, then, the boy countered, something he had always wanted? He never got the bike. With great understatement, the man looking back on his childhood noted how these “unhappy incidents … did not inspire confidence” down the road.
Reverend Hardin was a mark. The “country slickers” probably took him on the ranching deals, but more definitely they often traded “something for less than something” with him. One incident illustrates not only his father’s naïveté but also his ability to get the last laugh. Jody Pope offered to trade a strawberry roan, right for the boy (it was said), for the twenty-one-jewel pocket watch Hardin had had since a young man. As soon as Louis mounted, he was thrown, for the roan was a “no-good, worth about four dollars.” Months later guests were over to dinner at the Hardin home, some of whom had been amused at the roan transaction. The main course, enormous, juicy steaks, was delicious, if a bit sweet. To appreciative laughter, dad announced that they had just eaten the horse. He may have made a poor deal, but he certainly closed the circle with a touch of class.
On winter evenings dad read before the fire (Napoleon was still his favorite subject), pipe in hand. Louis sometimes asked for information, which his dad would give, usually correctly, a half-hour later, long after the question had been forgotten. But such endearing moments do not outweigh the traumas of arbitrary laws and harsh reckonings or the anxieties of separation and loss. There was no stable center for the boy’s growing needs, for in this family nothing was secure.
The final months the Hardin family spent in Wyoming, in spring 1929, proved to Louis, now edging closer to his thirteenth birthday, how little was left of the marriage founded on a rock. His mother, sister, and brother came only during the summer or on holidays. Although they did not divorce until 1937, the cycle of separation and reunion undermined confidence. Once Louis was dropped off early Monday morning at his school, two hours before class began, so that his mother could be on time for her students at Fort Bridger, and he remembers rolling on the ground as they pulled out, “crying and crying for the mother I didn’t see.” Everyone knew that she wanted to go back to Wisconsin, to be near her parents once again. Louis, however, loved his ranch, his freedom, his life. Then a shattering, illusory choice was presented to him so as to make it seem as if he held the balance of fate in his hands. One day he and his father were working in the meadow. Dad turned to his son and said that he had received an offer for the ranch and couldn’t decide whether to sell or not. “I will be relying on you more and more,” he observed. “It is your decision to make: shall we stay or sell?” Louis did not want to go, but he was old enough to realize that this move was inevitable. “Let’s sell,” he answered, not quite thirteen.
Father, mother, sister, brother, and Louis, together again, decided to make the trip back east leisurely. They bought a car in Salt Lake City, where Louis saw his first talking movie (Al Jolson sang “Sonny Boy”), and headed toward Chilton. Dad professed to look for a farm thereabout after they arrived, but found nothing. Louis and Creighton, innocent, spent the summer fishing and swimming at grandma’s little house on Spring Street, now filled to bursting. It was the year the stock market crashed, that Reverend Hardin left the ministry in deed if not yet in fact and set out again for new places, and that Louis returned briefly to the earliest memories of his childhood, wiser and sadder.