Part 7

In native houses one very rarely finds what we would even dignify by the name of library. Generally a fair-sized bookcase of ill-assorted volumes is regarded as such. There are, however, excellent legal and medical collections to be seen, and Doctor Moreno’s colonial quinta, with its well-filled shelves, chiefly volumes of South American exploration and development from the earliest times, forms a marked exception--an oasis in the desert. We once went to stay in the country with some Argentines, who seeing us arrive with books in our hands, proudly offered the use of their library, to which we had often heard their friends make reference. For some time we were greatly puzzled as to the location of this much-talked-of collection, and were fairly staggered on having a medium-sized bookcase, half of which was taken up by a set of excerpts from the “world’s great thinkers and speakers,” in French, pointed out as “the library.”

As a rule the first thing a family will part with is its books. There are two sorts of auctions--judicial and booksellers’. The latter class are held by dealers who are having bad times and hope to liquidate some of their stock, but there are always cappers in the crowd who keep bidding until a book is as high and often higher than its market price. The majority of the books are generally legal or medical; and there is always a good number of young students who hope to get reference books cheaply. Most of the books are in Spanish, but there is a sprinkling of French, and often a number of English, German, and Portuguese, though these last are no more common in Argentina than are Spanish books in Brazil. At one auction there were a number of Portuguese lots which went for far more than they would have brought in Rio or São Paulo. Translations from the Portuguese are infrequent; the only ones we can recall were of Camões and Eça de Queiroz. In Brazil the only translation from Spanish we met with was of _Don Quixote_.

English books generally go reasonably at auctions. We got a copy of Page’s _Paraguay and the River Plate_ for twenty-five cents, but on another occasion had some very sharp bidding for Wilcox’s _History of Our Colony in the River Plate_, London, 1807, written during the brief period when Buenos Ayres was an English possession. It was finally knocked down to us at twelve dollars; and after the auction our opponent offered us twice what he had let us have it for; we don’t yet know what it is worth. The question of values is a difficult one, for there is little or no data to go upon; in consequence, the element of chance is very considerable. From several sources in the book world, we heard a wild and most improbable tale of how Quaritch and several other London houses had many years ago sent a consignment of books to be auctioned in the Argentine; and that the night of the auction was so cold and disagreeable that the exceedingly problematical buyers were still further reduced. The auction was held in spite of conditions, and rare incunabula are reported to have gone at a dollar apiece.

There was one judicial auction that lasted for the best part of a week--the entire stock of a large bookstore that had failed. They were mostly new books, and such old ones as were of any interest were interspersed in lots of ten or more of no value. The attendance was large and bidding was high. To get the few books we wanted we had also to buy a lot of waste material; but when we took this to a small and heretofore barren bookstore to exchange, we found a first edition of the three first volumes of _Kosmos_, for which, with a number of Portuguese and Spanish books thrown in, we made the exchange. We searched long and without success for the fourth volume, but as the volumes were published at long intervals, it is probable that the former owner had only possessed the three.

Our best finds were made not at auctions but in bookstores--often in little combination book, cigar, and stationery shops. We happened upon one of these latter one Saturday noon on our way to lunch at a little Italian restaurant, where you watched your chicken being most deliciously roasted on a spit before you. Chickens were forgotten, and during two hours’ breathless hunting we found many good things, among them a battered old copy of Byron’s poems, which had long since lost its binding. Pasted in it was the following original letter of Byron’s, which as far as we know has never before been published:[3]

A MONSIEUR, MONSIEUR GALIGNANI, 18 Rue Vivienne, Paris.

SIR: In various numbers of your journal I have seen mentioned a work entitled _The Vampire_, with the addition of my name as that of the author. I am not the author, and never heard of the work in question until now. In a more recent paper I perceive a formal annunciation of _The Vampire_, with the addition of an account of my “residence in the Island of Mitylane,” an island which I have occasionally sailed by in the course of travelling some years ago through the Levant--and where I should have no objection to reside--but where I have never yet resided. Neither of these performances are mine--and I presume that it is neither unjust nor ungracious to request that you will favour me by contradicting the advertisement to which I allude. If the book is clever, it would be base to deprive the real writer--whoever he may be--of his honours--and if stupid I desire the responsibility of nobody’s dulness but my own. You will excuse the trouble I give you--the imputation is of no great importance--and as long as it was confined to surmises and reports--I should have received it as I have received many others--in silence. But the formality of a public advertisement of a book I never wrote, and a residence where I never resided--is a little too much--particularly as I have no notion of the contents of the one--nor the incidents of the other. I have besides a personal dislike to “vampires,” and the little acquaintance I have with them would by no means induce me to divulge their secrets. You did me a much less injury by your paragraphs about “my devotion” and “abandonment of society for the sake of religion”--which appeared in your _Messenger_ during last Lent--all of which are not founded on fact--but you see I do not contradict them, because they are merely personal, whereas the others in some degree concern the reader....

You will oblige me by complying with my request for contradiction. I assure you that I know nothing of the work or works in question--and have the honour to be (as the correspondents to magazines say) “your constant reader” and very

obedt humble Servt, BYRON.

To the editor of _Galignani’s Messenger_. Etc., etc., etc. Venice, April 27, 1819.

Curiously enough, the book itself had been published by Galignani in 1828. The cost of our total purchases, a goodly heap, amounted to but five dollars.

The balance in quantity if not in quality in old books is held in Buenos Ayres by three brothers named Palumbo--Italians. The eldest is a surly old man who must be treated with severity from the very beginning. How he manages to support himself we do not know, for whenever we were in his store we were sure to hear him assail some customer most abusively. In a small subsidiary store of his, among a heap of old pamphlets, we came upon the original folios of Humboldt’s account of the fauna and flora of South America. Upon asking the price, the man said thirty-five apiece--we thought he meant pesos, and our surprise was genuine when we found he meant centavos--about fifteen cents. From him we got the first edition of Kendall’s _Santa Fé Expedition_. One of his brothers was very pleasant and probably, in consequence, the most prosperous of the three. The third was reputed crazy, and certainly acted so, but after an initial encounter we became friends and got on famously. All three had a very fair idea of the value of Argentine books, but knew little or nothing about English.

Another dealer who has probably a better stock than any of the Palumbos is a man named Real y Taylor. His grandmother was English, and his father spent his life dealing in books. At his death the store was closed and the son started speculating in land with the money his father had left him. Prices soared and he bought, but when the crash came he was caught with many others. Bethinking himself of his father’s books, he took them out of storage and opened a small booth. The stock was large and a good part of it has not yet been unpacked. Taylor has only a superficial knowledge of what he deals in. He shears folios, strips off original boards and old leathers to bind in new pasteboard, and raises the price five or ten dollars after the process. In this he is no different from the rest, for after a fairly comprehensive experience in Buenos Ayres we may give it as our opinion that there is not a single dealer who knows the “rules” as they are observed by scores of dealers in America and England. Taylor had only one idea, and that was that if any one were interested in a book, that book must be of great value; he would name a ridiculous price, and it was a question of weeks and months before he would reduce it to anything within the bounds of reason. We never really got very much from him, the best things being several old French books of early voyages to South America and a first edition of Anson’s _Voyage Around the World_. Just before we left he decided to auction off his stock, putting up five hundred lots a month. The first auction lasted three nights. The catalogue was amusing, giving a description of each book in bombastic fashion--all were “unique in interest,” and about every third was the “only copy extant outside the museums.” He had put base prices on most, and for the rest had arranged with cappers. The attendance was very small and nearly everything was bid in. It was curious to see how to the last he held that any book that any one was interested in must be of unusual worth. There was put up a French translation of Azara’s _Quadrupeds of Paraguay_. The introduction was by Cuvier, but it was not of great interest to us, for a friend had given us the valuable original Spanish edition. Taylor had asked fifteen dollars, which we had regarded as out of the question; he then took off the original binding, cut and colored the pages, and rebound it, asking twenty dollars. At the auction we thought we would get it, if it went for very little; but when we bid, Taylor got up and told the auctioneer to say that as it was a work of unique value he had put as base price fifteen dollars each for the two volumes. The auction was a failure, and as it had been widely and expensively advertised, the loss must have been considerable.

As a whole, we found the booksellers of a disagreeable temperament. In one case we almost came to blows; luckily not until we had looked over the store thoroughly and bought all we really wanted, among them a first edition of Howells’s _Italian Journeys_, in perfect condition, for twenty-five cents. There were, of course, agreeable exceptions, such as the old French-Italian from whom, after many months’ intermittent bargaining, we bought Le Vaillant’s _Voyage en Afrique_, the first edition, with most delightful steel-engravings. He at first told us he was selling it at a set price on commission, which is what we found they often said when they thought you wanted a book and wished to preclude bargaining. This old man had Amsterdam catalogues that he consulted in regard to prices when, as could not have been often the case, he found in them references to books he had in stock. We know of no Argentine old bookstore that prints a catalogue.

In the larger provincial cities of Argentina we met with singularly little success. In Cordoba the only reward of an eager search was a battered paper-covered copy of _All on the Irish Shore_, with which we were glad to renew an acquaintance that had lapsed for several years. We had had such high hopes of Cordoba, as being the old university town and early centre of learning! There was indeed one trail that seemed to promise well, and we diligently pursued vague stories of a “viejo” who had trunks of old books in every language, but when we eventually found his rooms, opening off a dirty little patio, they were empty and bereft; and we learned from a grimy brood of children that he had gone to the hospital in Buenos Ayres and died there, and that his boxes had been taken away by they knew not whom.

As in Argentina, the best-known Chilian writers are historians or lawyers; and in our book-hunts in Santiago we encountered more or less the same conditions that held in Buenos Ayres--shelf upon shelf of legal or medical reference books and technical treatises. The works of certain well-known historians, such as Vicuña Mackenna and Amonategui, consistently command relatively high prices; but, as a whole, books are far cheaper on the west side of the Andes. One long afternoon in the Calle San Diego stands out. It was a rich find, but we feel that the possibilities of that store are still unexhausted. That afternoon’s trove included the first edition of Mungo Park’s _Travels_, with the delightful original etchings; a _History of Guatemala_, written by the Dominican missionaries, published in 1619, an old leather-bound folio, in excellent shape; a first edition of Holmes’s _Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_ and three of the eight volumes of _State Papers and Publick Documents of the United States_. In these last there was James Monroe’s book-plate, and it was curious to imagine how these volumes from his library had found their way to a country where his “doctrine” has been the subject of such bitter discussion and so much misinterpretation. The value of the original covers was no more understood in Chile than in Argentina, and we got a complete set of Vicuña Mackenna’s _Campaña de Tacna_ in the original pamphlets, as published, for but half what was currently asked for bound and mutilated copies.

Valparaiso proved a barren field, and although one of the chief delights in book-hunting lies in the fact that you can never feel that you have completely exhausted the possibilities of a place, we came nearer to feeling that way about Valparaiso than we ever had about a town before. We found but one store that gave any promise, and from it all we got were the first seven volumes of Dickens’s _Household Words_ in perfect condition, and the _Campaign of the Rapidan_.

The little coast towns of Chile and Peru are almost as barren as the desert rocks and sand-hills that surround them; but even here we had occasional surprises, as when we picked up for fifty cents, at Antofogasta, a desolate, thriving little mining-port in the north of Chile, Vicuña Mackenna’s _Life of O’Higgins_, for which the current price is from ten to fifteen dollars. Another time, in Coquimbo, we saw a man passing along the street with a hammered-copper bowl that we coveted, and following, we found him the owner of a junk-shop filled with a heterogeneous collection of old clothes, broken and battered furniture, horse-trappings, and a hundred and one odds and ends, among which were scattered some fifty or sixty books. One of these was a first edition of Hawthorne’s _Twice-Told Tales_ in the familiar old brown boards of Ticknor & Company.

Our South American book-hunting ended in Lima, the entrancing old city of the kings, once the capital of the New World, and not yet robbed by this commercial age of all its glamour and backwardness. We expected much, knowing that when the Chilians occupied the city in 1880 they sacked the national library of fifty thousand volumes that their own liberator, San Martin, had founded in 1822, and although many of the books were carried off to Chile, the greater part was scattered around Lima or sold by weight on the streets. We shall always feel that with more time, much patience, and good luck we could have unearthed many treasures; although at first sight the field is not a promising one, and, as elsewhere, one’s acquaintances assure one that there is nothing to be found. In spite of this, however, we came upon a store that appeared teeming with possibilities. Without the “flaire” or much luck it might be passed by many times without exciting interest. Over the dingy grated window of a dilapidated colonial house is the legend “Encuadernacion y Imprenta” (“Binding and Printing.”) Through the grimy window-panes may be seen a row of dull law-books; but if you open the big gate and cross the patio, with its ancient hand-well in the centre, on the opposite side are four or five rooms with shelves of books along the walls and tottering and fallen piles of books scattered over the floor. Here we picked up among others an amusing little old vellum-covered edition of Horace, printed in England in 1606, which must have early found its way to South America, to judge from the Spanish scrawls on the title-page. We also got many of the works of Ricardo Palma, Peru’s most famous writer, who built up the ruined national library, which now possesses some sixty thousand volumes, of which a twelfth part were donated by our own Smithsonian Institution. One of the volumes we bought had been given by Palma to a friend, and had an autograph dedication which in other countries would have greatly enhanced its value, but which, curiously enough, seems to make no difference in South America. In Buenos Ayres we got a copy of the _Letters from Europe_ of Campos Salles, Brazil’s greatest president, which had been inscribed by him to the Argentine translator. Once in São Paulo we picked up an autographed copy of Gomes de Amorim, and in neither case did the autograph enter into the question of determining the price.

We had heard rumors of possibilities in store for us in Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela, but Lima was our “farthest north,” for there our ramblings in South America were reluctantly brought to a close. We feel, however, that such as they were, and in spite of the fact that the names of many of the authors and places will be strange to our brethren who have confined their explorations to the northern hemisphere, these notes may awaken interest in a little-known field, which, if small in comparison with America or the Old World, offers at times unsuspected prizes and rewards.

VI

Seth Bullock--

Sheriff of the Black Hills Country

VI

SETH BULLOCK--SHERIFF OF THE BLACK HILLS COUNTRY

With the death of Captain Seth Bullock, of Deadwood, South Dakota, there came to us who were his friends not only a deep sense of personal loss, but also the realization that one of the very last of the old school of frontiersmen had gone, one of those whom Lowell characterized as “stern men with empires in their brains.” The hard hand of circumstance called forth and developed the type, and for a number of generations the battle with the wilderness continued in bitter force, and a race was brought forth trained to push on far beyond the “edge of cultivation,” and contend in his remote fastnesses with the Red Indian, and eke out a hard-earned existence from the grim and resentful wilds. In the wake of the vanguard came the settler and after him the merchant, and busy towns sprang up where the lonely camp-fire of the pioneer had flared to the silent forest. The restless blood of the frontiers pressed ever onward; the Indian melted away like “snow upon the desert’s dusty face”; the great herds of game that formerly blackened the plains left the mute testimony of their passing in the scattered piles of whitened skulls and bleached bones. At last the time came when there was no further frontier to conquer. The restless race of empire-makers had staring them in the face the same fate as the Indian. Their rough-and-ready justice administered out of hand had to give way before the judge with his court-house and his jury. The majority of the old Indian fighters were shouldered aside and left to end their days as best they could, forgotten by those for whom they had won the country. They could not adapt themselves to the new existence; their day had passed and they went to join the Indian and the buffalo.

Captain Seth Bullock, however, belonged to the minority, for no turn of the wheel could destroy his usefulness to the community, and his large philosophy of the plains enabled him to fit into and hold his place through every shift of surroundings. The Captain’s family came from Virginia, but he was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1849. Before he was twenty he had found his way to Montana, and built for himself a reputation for justice which at that day and in that community could only be established by cold and dauntless courage.

One of the feats of his early days of which he was justly proud was when he had himself hung the first man to be hung by law in Montana. The crowd of prospectors and cow-punchers did not approve of such an unusual, unorthodox method of procedure as the hanging of a man by a public hangman after he had been duly tried and sentenced. They wished to take the prisoner and string him up to the nearest tree or telegraph-pole, with the readiness and despatch to which they were accustomed. To evidence their disapproval they started to shoot at the hangman; he fled, but before the crowd could secure their victim, the Captain had the mastery of the situation, and, quieting his turbulent fellow citizens with a cold eye and relentless six-shooter, he himself performed the task that the hangman had left unfinished. The incident inspired the mob with a salutary respect for the law and its ability to carry out its sentences. I do not remember whether the Captain was mayor or sheriff at the time. He was trusted and admired as well as feared, and when he was barely twenty-two he was elected State senator from Helena, the largest town in the then territory of Montana.

It was in 1876 that the Captain first went to the Black Hills, that lovely group of mountains in the southwestern corner of South Dakota. He came with the first rush of prospectors when the famous Hidden Treasure Mine was discovered. On the site of what is at present the town of Deadwood he set up a store for miners’ supplies, and soon had established himself as the arm of the law in that very lawless community. That was the Captain’s rôle all through his life. In the early years he would spend day and night in the saddle in pursuit of rustlers and road-agents. When he once started on the trail nothing could make him relinquish it; and when he reached the end, his quarry would better surrender without drawing. He had a long arm and his district was known throughout the West as an unhealthy place for bad men. Starting as federal peace officer of the Black Hills, he later became marshal and sheriff of the district, and eventually marshal of South Dakota, which position he held until 1914. As years passed and civilization advanced, his bag of malefactors became less simple in character, although maintaining some of the old elements. In 1908 he wrote me:

I have been very busy lately; pulled two horse thieves from Montana last week for stealing horses from the Pine Ridge Indians. I leave to-day for Leavenworth with a bank cashier for mulling a bank. He may turn up on Wall Street when his term expires, to take a post graduate course.