The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana)

The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters
is a work I rank right up there with
Lonesome Dove.
So did the Pulitzer juries, awarding the prize to each in its year of publication.

With that bit of background, I have a simple charge for you: Prepare yourself for a wonderful reading experience.

This is a novel that will entertain you royally. It will also—had I better whisper it?—teach you a lot about the mores, preoccupations, geography—and perils—of America at the time of the Gold Rush. The book is impeccably researched, but never pedantic. When you finish it, if you’re curious to learn more about those who made the great overland trek to El Dorado, Robert Lewis Taylor thoughtfully provided a bibliography.

But
Jaimie McPheeters
is, first and last, a bang-up story, stirring and funny by turns. It’s presented as a personal memoir; the reflections of a mature man recalling the supreme adventure of his life. This was a logical technique for Taylor to use, since Americans a hundred years ago loved to write accounts of personal experiences—an avocation which regrettably seems lost today.

Although based in part on the journal of a real gold-seeker, Taylor’s novel reminds me in many ways of Dickens. The tale is long; packed with exciting incident; and built around a gallery of memorable characters, the most important being the wryly reflective Jaimie and his father, Dr. Sardius McPheeters (diplomate in Systemic Surgery, University of Edinburgh). Sardius is one of those complex, funny, touching figures who linger in the mind long after you close a book. He’s a loving father but a poor provider; a man brought low by “gaming and tippling.” He is the quintessential American Argonaut, dreamily and desperately opting for a new start; the second chance. As Taylor puts it, Sardius is a believer in “the green pastures, the beacon on the hill.” You’ll long remember him, and his son, and others you’ll meet on this journey from Louisville, Kentucky, to “General Delivery, Upper California.”

Robert Lewis Taylor spent the early part of his writing career as a reporter for the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch.
Later he was a staff writer for
The New Yorker.
He authored three other novels, as well as highly successful biographies of Churchill, W. C. Fields, and Carrie Nation, He lives today in Connecticut. I think it’s fair to say that
Jaimie
is his masterwork.

In 1963, the novel became the basis for a series of one-hour television dramas produced by MGM for the ABC network. Dan O’Herlihy was a superb Sardius, and his son was winningly played by Kurt Russell, then aged twelve. The venerable and dependable bible of show business,
Variety
, cited the boy actor as “a highly promising personality,” but called the show a “doubtful” entry in the competitive arena of Sunday night broadcasting. This proved prophetic. The last episode aired in March 1964.

A life of only one season is not necessarily a reflection on the quality of the program, though. I remember watching it with our kids every week, and thinking it a pretty good show—though maybe I’ve always been a fan of film projects based on books. You can still catch episodes (in black and white) on cable.

Late in the morning, yesterday, I finished my rereading and closed the novel with a feeling of regret. I had left a long-ago world vividly realized by the author. I had parted from people for whom I’d developed a lot of affection and concern. I sat in the wind and sunshine, bundled under a Cunard robe in a chair on the upper deck of a famous liner making the Great Circle crossing, and I thought of journeys today. How little they require of us, beyond the money to pay for them. Unless there’s a mishap, or you hate the sea, or blanch when there’s nothing between you and the earth but 35,000 feet and the floor of a 747, contemporary journeys hardly call forth the best of a person’s character.

In the world of Jaimie McPheeters and his father, however, there were not so many safety nets, backup systems, and traveler conveniences of the kind we take for granted. Indeed, even though there were plenty of guidebooks describing the route to California, many of them were spurious, written by men who’d never seen the trail. The way West was largely unmapped, hazardous, and often cruelly hostile. Going to California demanded a lot of heart; a lot of intestinal fortitude. It also called for more optimism—more sheer sentimental faith in a dream—than most of us can muster in this cynical world.

Taylor brilliantly captured the innocence and bravery of the people who chased the dream of California gold. You will love meeting them in this novel, and you will love traveling with them, and you will hate to see your journey end.

—John Jakes

Queen Elizabeth 2
,
en route Southampton,
August 25, 1991

On the day when I first learned of my father’s journey, I had come back with two companions from a satisfactory afternoon in the weeds near Kay’s Bell Foundry, shooting a slingshot at the new bells, which were lying out in the yard and strung up on rafters. Struck with rocks, they made a beautiful sound, although it seemed to upset Mr. William Kay, the proprietor. His sign, “Maker of Church, Steamboat, Tavern and other Bells,” hung over the doorway of his barnlike shop and had a row of little brass bells swinging beneath, squat and burnished, but these were hard to hit, and if you missed them, you were apt to hit one of the men working inside, and this was what seemed to upset Mr, William Kay most of all. So toward the end of the afternoon he pranced out with a double-barreled shotgun loaded with pepper and blistered Herbert Swann’s seat as he zigzagged to safety through the high grass.

It was late—after suppertime—and I thought it wise to sneak up the kitchen stairs and avoid the genteel tongue-lashing and straightaway-to-bed that my mother favored for tardiness. But my baby sister Mary spied me from her pen in the back yard and set up a noisy clatter. Aunt Kitty, her darky nurse, was with her, scolding. In one leathery hand she held a leafy willow branch with which she was discouraging the early spring bugs. Bugs tormented her almost to distraction: gnats, deer flies, mosquitoes, midges, no-see-ems, things along that line.

This Aunt Kitty was so old she said she had come over from Africa, and she remembered how, as a girl in the slave ship, she had seen the urine run in green rivers over the between-decks planks
where the rows of blacks were lashed to long poles. Once a week a man in a mask appeared with hand pump and hose and washed down the floor; otherwise there was no arrangement except two pails which were passed from one person to the next and were soon filled to overflowing.

My sister Mary wanted out of the pen, and Aunt Kitty wanted her in.

“I talking to old mister snake up in the bushes,” she told her through the wire. “Snake say if you didn’t hesh, he fixing to come down and bite. Said he wasn’t aiming to bite me, say he going to bite you, though.”

My sister made a squalling sound and shook the wire in her fists. She now had her eye on my billygoat, Sam, who was tethered to a tree near the woodshed.

Aunt Kitty put her face, all wrinkled like a monkey’s, up close to the mesh and said, “Goat butt, baby go ‘Yah-yah.’ ”

I asked, “Is Clara in the kitchen, Aunty?” Clara was the cook.

“Clara washed up and gone visiting to Miz Whitman’s free Thelma.”

“I was thinking I ought to have something to eat because I’m tired out from being late helping a sick man that got run over by a horse.”

“People miss supper, they generly stays hongry till breakfast.”

“Well,” I said, turning away, “it’s no more than I expected. That’s what I get for trying to be upright and help other people. The more you do, the less other people care whether that person lives or dies.”

As I walked through the twilight toward the kitchen, brooding on life’s injustices, she called out, “Might be I put by a plate of chicken along with grits and combread and salat in the warming oven—for the cat.”

Hurrying, I heard her jeweled African chuckle rise softly above Mary’s pleas to the goat.

I got the food out of the oven and crept upstairs and ate it, sitting on the side of my bed. I enjoyed the cornbread and the grits and the
chicken, both the wishbone and thigh, and wrapped up the salad greens in a paper and burned them in the fireplace. Then I lay down on the floor on my stomach and opened the register, which was merely an iron grating fitted into the wood to let the heated air up from below and was connected to nothing at all. Downstairs, in the family sitting room next to the parlor, my father and mother were having a discussion. I could see them, framed in the grating like birds in a pie, my mother sitting prim and stiff in her black taffeta dress with the white collar, and my father now standing over her, now pacing back and forth, with his string tie undone and his face shiny and earnest.

“I tell you, Melissa,” he was saying, “this is the only way. I’ve gone into it painstakingly”—here my mother gave a little ladylike sniff of disbelief—“and I pledge you my solemn promise there’s nothing more to it than picking up arrowheads out by the Indian Mounds—less, if it comes to that After all, Indians were sprinkled around Louisville in limited numbers whereas nature in her blessed bounty has seen fit to strew gold over the Calif—”