Recent reads

The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, by Robert Lewis Taylor. I first picked up a dirty, battered secondhand copy of this book after hearing it praised on the Fiction-L discussion list. For several years I hauled it around with me from one apartment to the next as one of those books that I “planned to read someday”. Last weekend, someday finally arrived. It was worth it.

The year is 1850 (give or take a bit). Jaimie McPheeters is 14 years old, living a rather Tom-Sawyerish life in the river-trading town of Louisville, Kentucky, the child of what we would today call a dysfunctional family. His father is a physician, whose financial prospects and idealistically ebullient personality are blighted by a recurring fondness for whiskey and gambling, not to mention the failure of his disreputable customers to pay their bills. His mother disapproves. So do their creditors.

And so a grand scheme is hatched. To pay off the family’s bills and elude their creditors, Dr. Sardius McPheeters and his son Jaimie will emigrate to the great gold fields of California, become wealthy in that great bonanza and thereby redeem their family’s tattered fortunes.

Simple, huh?

Well, as one might suspect, it’s anything but simple. The trip to California turns into an epic adventure, all the more so because we see it through the eyes of a fourteen year old boy to whom a great many things, not just the unfamiliar landscape, are new and strange. Being an adventurous boy in the care of a lovable but careless father, he frequently gets separated from the latter and has to shift for himself. Along the way, Jaimie and his father encounter murderous thugs, stolid farmers, hopeful settlers, thieving scoundrels, and, sometimes, surprising nobility where they least expect it . They encounter human beings of every stripe, and it’s one of the novel’s strengths that no class or type of people is portrayed as being uniformly good or bad. Some Indians are shiftless, filthy, and sadistic; others are fiercely honorable. Some frontiersmen are rough-hewn examples of courage and competence; others are bullying buffoons. Some Mormons are genuinely trying to build the most perfect society they can; others are vicious hypocrites who prey upon “mere Gentiles”.

And, as Jaimie learns, girls are a whole new world of trouble.

Once reached, the West proves to be something less than than the promised El Dorado, forcing the McPheeters and their trailmates to look to other means of survival and prosperity. Many of the scams and deceptions perpetuated on the settlers, such as “salted” mines, extortionately overpriced provisions, etc., are documented parts of western history.

The narrative shifts occasionally from Jaimie’s commentary to entries from his father’s journals, highlighting not only the difference between their perspectives as youth and adult, but the differences in their personalities. Jaimie, plainspoken and colloquial, is naïve at first, but quickly learns to be skeptical about the human potential for deception and skullduggery. His father, full of flowery words and rhetoric, is gradually revealed to be, perhaps, too idealistic for his own good, too prone to lose sight of the main chance at hand while dreaming of a Utopian future.

Some surprising and improbable coincidences occur in the plot, but they are not, perhaps, so surprising if one considers all the characters involved to be part of the same cohort of emigrants making their way across the country in the same year, all heading toward the famous gold fields of California. And besides, documented western history is full of strange coincidences and improbable meetings. Who's to say that fiction can't do the same?

The book won a Pulitzer prize in 1959, so I’m not exactly the first to notice it. But it seems to have become difficult to find in some libraries lately, so I’ll put in a plug for it. If you enjoyed Mark Twain’s tales of Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, if you enjoy picaresque tales, if you enjoy realistic historical fiction with both grit and humor, check it out.