Recent reads

The Young Engineers in Arizona, or, Laying Tracks on the Man-Killer Quicksand, by H. Irving Hancock. From time to time I pick up rather unpromising ancient series fiction from the library's donations pile and find a piquant unknown treasure. This 1912 boys' adventure book wasn't one of them. At best, perhaps its musty, acid-pulp smell could be described as piquant. And there's good reason why it's unknown, except, perhaps, as a reminder of why the Ripping-Yarns school of writing is such an easy target for satire.

As the text makes clear on several occasions, it's part of The Young Engineers Series, apparently intended for young and impressionable schoolboys. The titles of previous and succeeding volumes are recited several times, apparently in hopes of inciting purchases of said titles.

The subtitle refers to the primary task facing Our Heroes, the Young Engineers, in this volume of the series: laying tracks for the "Arizona, Gulf, & New Mexico Railroad" over the "Man-Killer Quicksand", which apparently extends over a good proportion of the state of Arizona and is in the habit of maliciously and insatiably sucking men, horses, and inanimate objects toward the center of the earth. For some reason, there is an all-male town called Paloma on the edge of the Man-Killer Quicksand, which is inhabited by the usual assortment of cowboy-movie stereotypes except for The Saloon Girl and The Schoolmarm, whose charms the author evidently considers either unwholesome or uninteresting. The shady gamblers and rapacious saloon keepers of this town look forward to fleecing the railroad workers with intoxicating liquors and rigged games-o-chance. Imagine their shock and dismay when Our Hero Tom Reade, the Young Engineer, makes a wooden speech in which he righteously forbids the railroad workers to partake of such pleasures! What nerve!

In Chapter Three, entitled Tom Makes a Speech Against Gambling, he... oh, well, never mind. You already know what he does. Instead of spending money on drink and gambling, says Tom, the workers should all deposit their paychecks with a bank clerk of whom they know nothing, and whom he has had brought in by the railroad company in the same train that delivered the payroll. Most of them agree, and express awe and gratitude for the opportunity, like this worker:

"I've got forty dollars in bank," he continued in something of a tone of awe. "Forty friends of mine that I've put away to work and do good things for me! If I don't touch this money for some years then I'll find that this money has grown to be a lot more than forty dollars....

"The next time you find anything about a savings bank that has failed and left the people in the lurch for their money, you show it to me. Savings banks don't fail nowadays! No, sir!" (pp. 55-56)

One or two troublemakers object to Our Hero's subsequent edict forbidding workers from leaving the newly purified construction camp between work shifts, thus giving Our Hero a chance to reluctantly-but-righteously use his hammer-like fists to enforce their dismissal from their jobs.

Meanwhile, an undercover agent from the so-called "gloom department" of a rival construction company is in town and just happens to have a hefty bankroll with which to fund a disreputable gambler who wishes to disrupt the Young Engineers' work with dynamite and other amusing diversions as revenge for his lost opportunities. (And, as Our Hero makes clear, there is no such thing as an reputable gambler: they are a class of men wholly corrupt, entirely without redeeming virtues, whom all Honest Men must regard as beneath contempt.)

I was initially interested in the railroad angle of the story, but quickly became tired of the clumsy prose, the priggish attitudes of The Heroes, and the author's thinly disguised racism.

"You'll be with me, won't you?'' coaxed Tom. "You'll stand by us, shoulder to shoulder?"

"I certainly will, Mr. Reade!"

"And the foremen? You can depend upon them?"

"On every one of them," declared Hawkins promptly. "Even to the Mexican foreman, Mendoza. He's a greaser, but he's a brick, and a white man all the way through!" (p. 34)

How fortunate for the "greasers" that an proper White Man from the educated elite is on the scene to force them to make the right decisions. They're properly grateful, of course, as we saw in the excerpt above.

Our Heroes worry about disapproval from the people of Paloma no more than they fear, say, an outbreak of union organizers among their tracklayers. Anticipating Richard Nixon by half a century, Tom proclaims the doctrine of the Silent Majority:

"Whom do you men represent?" asked Tom.

"The citizens of Paloma," returned Duff.

"All of them?" Read insisted.

"All of them -- with few exceptions."

"I understand you, of course," Tom nodded. "Now, Mr. Duff, I'll tell you what I propose. I'm curious to know just how many there are on your side of the fence. Pardon me, but I really can't quite believe that the better citizens of this town are behind you. I know too many Arizona men, and I have too good an opinion of them. Your kind of crowd makes a lot of noise at times, and the other kind of Arizona crowd rarely makes any noise. I know, of course, the element in the town that your committee represents, but I don't believe that your element is by any means in the majority here...." (p. 62)

One of the most disturbing aspects of the story is the ambivalence which the author seems to feel toward lynchings. On p. 155, Our Hero gallantly dissuades the Silent Majority of Good Citizens from dispatching the Disreputable Gambler “by the Tree and Rope Short Line”, but we read in an authorial aside that “[a]n Arizona lynching can only follow an upheaval of public sentiment, when honest men are angered at having their fair fame sullied by the acts of blackguards.” Apparently the author simply cannot bring himself to categorically condemn lynching without simultaneously defending its practice, claiming that some kind of natural law prevents it from being used for improper purposes. And yet on at least two other occasions in the story, the villains plausibly threaten to lynch Our Heroes for reasons which, one presumes, the author does not consider honorable. I suppose the dramatic demands of his plot clashed with his expressed belief in the law that only “honest men” of “fair fame” made use of the legal expediencies of Judge Lynch.

Plot fought the law, and the plot won....

After sundry conflicts with the disreputable gambler Duff, his confederates, and various malcontents who fail to appreciate the good that's being done to them, plus a complaint to the Railroad President (which results in the Young Engineers' prompt vindication by that wise and avuncular eminence), plus a suitably dramatic dual rescue from Certain Death in the Man-Killer Quicksand while being shot at by an insane hotel manager galloping about on horseback, Our Heros finally succeed in Laying Tracks, etc., as promised by the subtitle. Somewhat to my surprise, the Young Engineers do actually use a plausible construction technique to stabilize the unstable ground. (Described on p. 84 and p. 124, in case anyone's curious.) That's about the only competence on display here. I suppose it gives the book a certain minimal educational value, but it's far overshadowed by the clumsily contrived plot, the clunky prose, and the kind of incipient moral fascism that pervades it.

A amusingly abhorrent period piece of juvenile pop culture, impossible to recommend for any other purpose than to demonstrate the kind of wretched prose and equally wretched attitudes that were abroad in the land and actively promoted to young boys circa 1912. If anyone wishes to dispute this conclusion, they are welcome to peruse the story themselves by way of Project Gutenberg.