Swinnerton

Jimmy Swinnerton's grandfather didn't believe in giving advice to children. Still, at the age of eight Jimmy seemed to be enough of a man to make good use of some serious guidance by his elders. So during one of the man-to-man talks in which they exchanged confidences, the old man promised that this first "don't" to the boy would also be the last: "Never trust a Piute!"

The elder Swinnerton was a Forty-Niner who found gold at Dutch Flat, California, and then went east to fetch his family. The mining property in the Sierra was eventually exchanged for Santa Clara Valley land so that his sons, James, Silas, and William, could attend the College of the Pacific.

While he went on to gain fame in the Valley with his pioneering in the prune-growing industry, the three sons wasted no time getting their careers under way, two of them as newspapermen. William was editor of a Santa Clara newspaper when he was eightteen years old, and James, at nineteen, went to Eureka and founded the Humboldt Star.

It was at Eureka, on November 13, 1875, that Jimmy was born. A few months later his mother died. His father went on to succeed as a lawyer, and to become a judge of the superior court in Stockton. Most of Jimmy's rearing was left to the grandparents.

Jimmy grew up sharing his grandfather's enthusiasms and glorying in endless tales of the Mother Lode and of the redskin-ridden plains to the east of the Sierras. Together they would inspect ore samples saved from the old Grass Valley claim, and secretly plot escape from unsympathetic Grandma to the magic mountains where untold bonanzas awaited them.

After the death of his grandmother, Jimmy went back to his father, who had re-married. Unable to get along with his stepmother, he ran away from home at the age of fourteen and went to San Francisco to make his own way. He became an apprentice harness-racing driver at the old Lucky Baldwin stables.

His worried father finally found him at the Bay District Track, and took him aside for a long and serious conference on his future. Judge Swinnerton, guided by his own experience, advised his son not to go to college, not to become a lawyer, and, above all, not to be a newspaperman.

Of three likely careers they considered-art, music, and writing-Jimmy chose art right then and there. His father put him in the California Art School in San Francisco.

In his classes, where Maynard Dixon was a fellow student, Jimmy took to caricaturing his instructors. Unpopular as his cartoons were with their subjects, they were regarded with an appreciative eye by young William Randolph Hearst, who was just starting the San Francisco Examiner. Hearst hired Swinnerton as a caricaturist and cartoonist at a time when a two-column cut was something extraordinary. That was fifty-nine years ago, and Jimmy has been with Hearst's King Features Syndicate ever since. Swinnerton's sport and news cartoons became so popular that more and more space was devoted to them. His little comic bears, in daily pantomine of the weather forecast, were the darlings of San Francisco-so much so, in fact, that in 1892 their daily capers were expanded into the first honest-to-goodness comic strip to appear in any newspaper. Hearst took Swinnerton east to help with the first Sunday supplement. It was in this new section of the growing chain of newspapers that the Katzenjammer Kids, Dick Outcault's Yellow Kid, and Swinnerton's Little Tigers and Little Jimmy first ap-peared.

A little boy approached the mail slot in a hallway of the Gould Hotel in Lakewood, New Jersey, with two or three letters to post. The clicking of balls and cues in the pool room across the way attracted his attention. He approached the doorway timidly. Fasci-nated, he stared wide-eyed at the goings-on in the smoky gloom, twisting and crum-pling the now-forgotten letters in his grimy hands. That was the inspiration for Little Jimmy, the boy who was always being sent on errands by his parents, and who always got sidetracked, never accomplishing his mission. Changing times have brought changes in this theme, but in the Hearst papers pub-lished east of the Mississippi, Little Jimmy is still going strong-the oldest comic page in existence that is still drawn by its originator.

It was tuberculosis that changed the course of Swinnerton's life. Three doctors gave him a month to live, but he outlived them all, and, at 75, is more active than many men half his age. He went to Palm Springs in 1903, when the resort was a cluster of tents and its white population totaled eleven. It was easy for him to love the desert that gave him life and health; his cartooning continued, but the serious artist in him was increasingly aware of the beauty of his new environment. He painted it.His canvases were called phony in the east because he dared to show green things in the despised wastes that were supposed to contain only sand and thorns.

Gradually his excursions took him farther east, into Arizona, New Mexico, and southern Utah. He found his most compelling subjects in the northern Arizona scenery. The Grand Canyon was a favorite headquarters (indeed, as an artist's subject it was later "willed" to Swinnerton by Thomas Moran at a banquet at El Tovar), and it pro-vided the substance for the series that has brought him more acclaim than anything elseCanyon Kiddies.

Swinnerton was concerned over the horror with which the society of the time regarded life in the outdoors, especially in the western deserts. Canyon (not Kanyon, thank heaven!) Kiddies was created to dispel the bogeys usually associated with the shunned country that he had found so friendly. The little Indians were the ideal illustra-tions of children's natural kinship with Nature, for from birth they are taught that the creatures of the wild are their brothers, and are not to be feared. Thus it was wholly logical for the Kiddies to meet and play with every kind of bird and beast that lived in their homeland, and to carry on their absorbing activities oblivious to the heat, cold, drought, and awful storms that their white cousins were conditioned to dread. Without preaching, Swinnerton caught up the enviable, enriching fatalism of the Hopis and, little by little, injected it into the lives of his millions of readers. Canyon Kiddies broughtthe happiness of the children of Nature into a world that took itself too seriously. The Swinnerton influence is strong in such recent animated cartoons as Walt Disney's production of Bambi.

It was at the Grand Canyon that Swinnerton first knew the Navajos. He recalls how they used to pass through Big Jim Canyon, near the South Rim, when taking hides to Supai for tanning. While waiting for the work to be done, they lived off the Havasupais, then paid for the tanning and promptly started gambling to win their pay back again. The Supais never seemed to realize that they were working for nothing.

It was dangerous for white men to travel in the Navajo country when Swinnerton first went there in 1907. The Indians under Hoskanini had covered up their silver mines to keep the whites away, and were hostile toward strangers, some of whom were killed. Several parties disappeared without a trace.

Swinnerton went on all kinds of expeditions with John Wetherill, discoverer of Mesa Verde and Betatakin, whom he regards as the greatest man in the known history of the region. Wetherill, who shared his discoveries of ruins and other prehistoric remains with Swinnerton, on several occasions saved the lives of armed groups that found themselves at the mercy of unfriendly Navajos. He did so just by talking. Swinnerton traveled with him for four years before discovering that he did not carry a gun. In explanation, Wetherill said that he thought any white man who could not out-talk an Indian deserved to be killed.

Swinnerton's recollections of his early days on the Navajo reservation are full of humorous incidents that reflect the character and background of The People. There was the time, for example, when he and Wetherill sat opposite Betatakin ruin with old Wind Singer, a tribal herb doctor. The Indian, using Navajo, English, and gestures, was doing the talking.He pointed at the ground. "Under us lie many peoples," he said. "They all gone." A wave of his arm took in the sweep of the great cave and the cliff dwellings across the canyon. "They go."

He sat for a while, saying nothing.

"I go," he went on. Another long pause.

"Then you go."

In ten words he had summed up the histories of all the world's civilizations, throwing in some safe prophecy for good measure. The three sat in silence for a while; then Wetherill spoke.

"Talk more," he said.

"No," Wind Singer replied, "No talk more. Not cold enough yet." He waited for this to sink in, no doubt amused at his companions' bewilderment.

"Little birds, bugs, and snakes still out. They listen. They say, 'Old Wind Singer talk too damn much."

Jimmy Swinnerton was a familiar figure at the early Flagstaff Pow Wow celebrations, having taken part in organizing the first one in which the Navajos and Hopis participated. Previously the Indians had avoided Flagstaff, taking their trade to Holbrook and Winslow because of rough treatment given one of them by a white man at a Flagstaff horse race.

On this occasion, old-timers Al Doyle and Rube sent out word that there would be meals served to all who would join in the festival. One thousand five hundred Indians showed up, creating a situation that threatened to put Flagstaff on the blacklist again by making it nearly impossible for the town to fulfill the promise. But local merchants pitched in with more food, and the Pow Wow was a big success. To avoid the possibility of unpleasant incidents, whites, Navajos, and Hopis performed in separate events.

At first the Navajo men were reluctant to take part in a parade, but the women liked the idea, so parade they did, in the first Navajo procession that was not part of their own ceremonials. Swinnerton remembers how they smiled back and waved as they left town in their wagons; that was something Flagstaff had not seen before.

Swinnerton's enchanted descriptions of the country and its people, along with the eloquent, sunshine-filled paintings he sent east, aroused the interest of his contemporaries. They came to northern Arizona, to see its wonders with Swinnerton as their guide. Among his guests were Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, Will Rogers and his sons, Lady Ravendale, daughter of Lord Curzon, and Sir Alma Baker, Australian governorgeneral of the Malay peninsula, and his wife and daughter. Swinnerton remembers the daughter in particular for her prowess with the Australian bull whip she carried.

Irvin S. Cobb came, because Swinnerton wanted him to write about the country, but his enthusiasm for it got the best of him; he just couldn't see enough. He wanted to go everywhere, to miss nothing-and didn't want to be bothered with writing..

At Keet Seel, Cobb blossomed out in a fancy purple robe. Swinnerton warned that such a get-up would bring out the terrible Yei-a Navajo evil spirit. Whether because this devil went into action or because the horse was frightened by the humorist's flapping green slicker, the next morning Cobb was bucked off his mount. Dazed but apparently rational, he was helped back into the saddle. Afterward he could remember nothing of the incident, so the party concluded that he had remained unconscious for some time after the fall, even while moving about.

Painting the Grand Canyon is, to Swinnerton, the toughest assignment of all. He has been at it for forty years, and is still far from finished with it as a subject. But one of his Canyon paintings brought him a cherished compliment.

At Gump's in San Francisco, where some of his works were on exhibit, he overheard a woman catch her breath and say, "Oh, I don't think I like that one!" He approached her and asked why.

"Because I'd be afraid I might fall down there."

"Madam," the artist beamed, "I'm too old to kiss you, but I'd like to shake your hand." A casual appraisal of the painting had given the observer the same sensation that he had felt as he stood on the brink of the chasm. As far as Swinnerton was concerned, that canvas had made the grade. It was art.

Not that he pretends to know what art is; he won't try to define it, but he believes that it can be measured by the interest reflected out of a work-not the artificial interest accorded a curiosity, or the dutiful homage paid to mastery of "accepted" technique, but the immediate and natural response of even the untrained eye.

He has remained purely in the realm of landscape, and his ideas on painting are concerned with landscapes. He does not put human forms, either white or Indian, in his scenes, although sometimes he does include man-made things like hogans, campfires, cliff dwellings. His subject is Nature; he makes no attempt to improve on it; it is all he needs and wants on his canvases. Nature, where man has not interfered, is always sublime, man's interference always crass and ugly. The ruins that appear in some of his work have been subject to Nature's softening and overgrowing for hundreds of years, and are once again almost a part of it.

Every minute spent painting strengthens his conviction that everything in Nature is in harmony and balance, even though we are not always artistically developed to the point where we are conscious of it.

His painting is done to record not only a place, but also conditions of light, weather, season, temperature, and cloud and plant arrangement that can never be exactly duplicated. To him, the idea of beginning a canvas one day and returning later to finish it on the site is unthinkable. He makes a quick sketch in oils, and sometimes a black-and-white photograph for foreground detail (to save pencil work); then, relying on these aids and his memory, does the final painting in his workshop.

He believes that art or painting "rules" are childish. He has advised youngsters in painting to paint what they see, adding nothing, leaving nothing out, and judge the success of each piece by the elusive and intangible "feeling" without which their work would be, to them, just artisanship.

Nature's perfect symphony of tones and arrangement-still often beyond our comprehension-is wasted on those painters who must over-simplify, he contends; they lose most of the fun of painting. In Swinnerton's opinion, detail is charming and useful, and Nature takes care of the balance between delicate and bright colors. He regards as nervy and conceited the practice of setting a pallette the night before starting to work and then trying to fit Nature to the pallette.

He is a man who might be expected to dismiss "move-ments" in art with a laugh, but he thinks that all of them have made worthwhile contributions that are likely to remain long after the school or movement itself is forgotten. With some relief, he observes that movements have never succeeded in revolutionizing art, and that many of them have ended up where they belonged in the first place-in furniture and in-dustrial design, and in architecture.

Growing public consciousness of color and its influence is something that pleases Swinnerton, something to which he has looked forward for a long time. He is convinced that businesses have actually failed or prospered because of their choice of color schemes. Let youngsters have freedom with color, he counsels; their interest will result in good work and bad, but the net outcome will be good. Only in the past few years, he thinks, has there been any widespread serious thought about education for the eyes.

He is enthusiastic over Indian art trends in the Southwest, glad they have a distinct Indian flavor and that they adapt the white man's tools without copying his styles. One of his Indian pupils was Roan Horse.

Jimmy Swinnerton, the hard-drinking consumptive who should have died fifty years ago, is today a hearty, husky, temperate man whose twinkling eyes and quick wit belie his age. Companion of men of a bygone generation, he has every right to dwell on the past, and in it, but he looks to the future instead. He is a raconteur nonpareil; nothing escapes him, and he is absolutely unaffected by the usual infirmities that come with the allotted threescore and ten. He paints more deftly and more prolifically than ever, planning the next landscape before finishing the one before him. With his wife Gretchen, who also paints, and sometimes with artist friends, he probes the desert for subjects, ever turning up new discoveries in the land he has traveled for half a century and knows better than any man alive. His biggest worry is keeping straight in his mind a record of the countless gifts he has received from his Navajo and Hopi friends. When in their company, he is careful to wear prominently the articles given him by anyone present, so that no person will be hurt.

Once, long ago, when he was camped with John Wetherill by the great spire of Agathla, they were none-too-willing hosts to Cosey and Posey, a pair of renegade Piutes. "We'd better not both sleep as long as these fellows are around," cautioned Wetherill, and Swinnerton took his turn at watch. This irony: he was following the advice his grandfather had given him when he was eight-counsel that had seemed utterly irrelevant at the time and that had been long forgotten. But his father's advice had gone for naught; although he does sell his landscapes, his paintings are done principally for his own satisfaction even if they are being added to numerous collections of nature loving purchasers.

What is he, then? That drawing board by the window-Little Jimmy beginning next week's adventures there beside the inkwell and pencils gives you your answer: a newspaperman.