Preface

AT THE AGE of twelve John Cozad decided to be a gamblin’ man. He became one of the handsomest, most elegant, and violent, of his kind, so adept at faro that he was barred from many places and consequently traveled under various names and gave out varying stories of his life and loves. He had worked river boats, the plush palaces from San Francisco to Canfield’s in New York, the rudest smoking cars and the rough gold camps of the West. Union Pacific railroad land agents, old faro tramps homesteading in northwest Nebraska, and the cowboys of the lawless man who dominated the whole Cozad region of the Platte River spoke of him less as a man fabulous at faro—at bucking the tiger—than as a determined community builder. But not even they knew that he was also a very lucky father, and lived to see one of his sons grow into greatness as an artist, and a teacher and leader of artists, a son he condemned to live and die under a fictitious name and biography.

More than twenty years ago Dr. Robert Gatewood, nephew of John Cozad, the closest remaining relative of the gambler and his artist son, approached me to write the story of the two men. By 1942 I had completed enough research to go to the Cozad region to interview the old-timers. Several there must have known the town’s connection with the world-famous artist but they studiously avoided any mention of this.

If the story had been one of exploitation of the helpless, or appropriation of the nation’s lands and resources, I could not have hesitated, but in this I had to respect the community reluctance. I put the book aside until the story began to leak out. Van Wyck Brooks revealed the gist of it in his John Sloan in 1955 and the next year Harry B. Allen gave a brief account of it to the Cozad Local. So I felt free to tell the story that John Cozad, in letters to my father in 1903, characterized as “a most unusual one, and yearns for a Romantic Pen.” Unfortunately he left his trail too shadowed and confused for the complete clarification demanded by non-fiction. I have kept to the facts available and only filled in the few holes necessary to reconstruct something of the crucible in which the dross of the son’s youth was burned away and the gold of it freed to find itself.

MS