The Little Colorado River

THE OLD WEST PHOTOGRAPHY OF DANE COOLIDGE

Armed with a camera as well as a pen, author Dane Coolidge spent years trying to supplant the myth of the West that wasn't with the reality of the West that was. In a career spanning nearly half a century, he produced 40 novels, five nonfiction books, countless arti-cles, and an indeterminate number of pho-tographs portraying an Old West in which historic realism takes precedence over ro-mantic illusion.

His allegiance to the true West came as a by-product of personal experience. Born in Natick, Massachusetts, on March 24, 1873, Coolidge was four years old when his family relocated to Riverside, Califor-nia. The second son of a farmer and a third cousin of the future U.S. President Calvin Coolidge, he spent his boyhood working on the family's small citrus ranch. When his mother died in 1892, he became the family bookkeeper, leaving most of the manual labor to his father and older brother.

Coolidge's new duties left him time to cultivate such hobbies as reading (he was an avid connoisseur of Western "dime novels") and collecting specimens of flora and fauna. The latter experience provided, after he enrolled in Stanford University in 1894, a means for earning a livelihood. During leisure hours and summer vaca-tions, he collected mammal and reptile samples for the natural history collections at his alma mater, the British Museum, and the National Zoological Park. His travels took him to isolated reaches of southern California, Nevada, Arizona, and northern Mexico. In the process he developed other skills, among them photography.

Edward Maslin Hulme was both a fan of Coolidge's photographs and an early seer of the camera's ability to serve as a conduit for literary realism. The relationship between the two men was originally that of professor and student. Hulme, a renowned classical scholar and longtime chairman of the medieval and Renaissance history department at Stanford, taught Coolidge the historical value of lore and the importance of separating fact from fantasy in any research endeavor.After graduating in 1998, Coolidge accepted a contract to study and collect fauna indigenous to western Europe. But his London base soon proved stultifying to the young man weaned on the open hospitality of the Far West. He then entered graduate school at Harvard, where he studied biology for a year; but this too became stifling, and he packed up his belongings and camera and headed west.

In 1906, Coolidge married Mary Elizabeth Burroughs Roberts, whom he had known in college. At the time of their marriage, she was an associate professor in sociology at Stanford, and would later chair the sociology department at Mills College. Berkeley, California, served as home base for the Coolidges, but they also owned a home in Superior, Arizona. The couple had no children, but enjoyed a close personal and professional relationship.

Coolidge's exodus from the East marked the beginning of his career as a professional writer. For the next four decades, he averaged better than a book a year, all centered upon activities, events, and people peculiar to the frontier. The information he acquired during his travels as a naturalist gave him an edge in re-creating the physical aspects of his setting, but his characters at first seemed to lack flesh and blood. So Coolidge set out to fill the gaps in his knowledge and understanding of human nature and behavior, establishing a pattern that became his modus operandi as a writer: research through direct experience rather than secondary sources; compilation of objective facts instead of imaginative tales; and photography in advance of any attempt to recapture an experience in words. Arizona seemed a practical and intriguing place to start. After all, it was a traditional home of the cowboy, who epitomized (Coolidge felt) the traits and virtues that made the American West unique. He determined to share the cowboy's world. As a photographer, he joined roundups on

The massive Chiricahua Ranch along the Mexican border, the Diamond Bar Ranch to the north, the La Osa and Arivaca spreads southwest of Tucson, and several smaller outfits throughout the state. During the off-season, he journeyed to Payson, Prescott, and Tucson to watch stockmen demonstrate their skills at rodeos; along the way he talked to saddlemakers, frontier merchants, and ranchers. A large measure of Coolidge's impact rests upon the fact that there were no other photographers concentrating on cattlemen in the West prior to World War I. Alexander Forbes and a few itinerants around the turn of the century took pictures of drovers, but these images were little more than visual equivalents of the legendary heroes popularized by "gunsmoke" novels. Because Coolidge pursued the historic cowboy, his characters came in a variety of sizes, were proficient in a number of skills, and were not always glued to their gun belts. Their lives were inextricably tied to cattle, with boredom and isolation more common to their experience than dramatic adventures. What Coolidge captured through the lens of his camera spilled over into his

writing. Roughly three-quarters of his works center upon some aspect of the stockman's life. The plots in his novels are various-wars between cattlemen and sheepmen, ranchers fighting poachers, drovers on roundups, and rugged individuals suffering the ravages of nature to carve out a place in the wilderness. Men fight more with curses than gunfire, and the hero does not always emerge victorious. But Coolidge's interest in the cowboy did not deter him from studying other aspects of the West. During the early decades of this century, large-scale mining was replacing the individual prospector in laying claim to the earth's riches. Coolidge photographed mines in both Arizona and New Mexico, but his real focus was on prospectors. He traveled throughout the Southwest and braved Death Valley to record their faces and life-styles on film. The stories he heard, along with the photographs he captured, supplied material for three novels he penned lamenting the death of an old and worthy profession. Another subject that did not escape his notice was military life on the frontier. He carried his camera to Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to capture the daily routine of the soldier. Not surprisingly, the troopers, too, appeared in the pages of some of his novels. There were times when Coolidge simply took pictures. During the Mexican Revolution, he made a powerful series of photographs of troop movements, military units, and civilian supporters. During a visit to the 12th Infantry camp at Nogales in 1912, he achieved a unique set of candid shots of Pancho Villa. Throughout his career, Coolidge visited Indian reservations in both Arizona and Mexico. His photographs of Hopi snake dancers and priests, Navajo sheepherders, and Yaqui families are among his best. A number of Native Americans subsequently appeared in his novels, in situations different from prevailing stereotypes. During the 1930s, Coolidge collaborated with his wife, Mary, on in-depth studies of the Navajo and Seri tribes.

The scholarly side of his nature found expression in three other nonfiction books, this time about cowboys. Written during the last decade of his life, these works convey Coolidge's wealth of knowledge about his favorite subject and illustrate the extent to which he relied upon photog raphy to spur his memory. All of the photographs used for illustrations and many of the stories he recounted came from subject matter he had preserved on film 30 years before. At the time of his death in 1940, he was working on a similar account of the Mexican vaquero.

Coolidge was neither a literary genius nor a master photographer. He was an innovative realist who understood and appreciated the cultural components of the frontier West. With both words and pictures, he bequeathed an honest account of that West to posterity.

Editor's note: The Dane Coolidge Photographic Exhibition will be touring Arizona over the next 14 months. For information on dates and locations, telephone the Arizona Historical Foundation, (602) 966-8331.

Selected Reading Three of Dane Coolidge's books, Arizona Cowboys, California Cowboys, and Texas Cowboys, have been reprinted by and are available from the University of Arizona Press, Tucson.