(In Good Men and True, Rhodes delineates the pioneer hero ...)
In Good Men and True, Rhodes delineates the pioneer hero at his core. Rancher Jeff Bransford becomes embroiled in the political machinations of Judge Thorpe against Captain Charles Tillotson. Thorpe has killed Tillotson, and Bransford is the only witness, so Thorpe kidnaps Bransford to keep his testimony out of the trial. Bransford, though, is clever, and when Thorpe lets him write to his wife, Bransford, through canny literary allusion, details Thorpe’s evil plans.
Eugene Manlove Rhodes was an American writer who had a nickname the "cowboy chronicler". Gene was a famous Western author who wrote 14 novels and 60 short stories. He wrote from his own experience in the W.
Background
Eugene Manlove Rhodes was born on January 19, 1869, in Tecumseh, Nebraska, United States. He was the son of Col. Hinman Rhodes, a state legislator, and Julie (Manlove) Rhodes. Rhodes' parents were landowners pioneering the new state of Nebraska; Hinman Rhodes served for several terms in the state legislature while co-owning a mercantile business.
His memories of his youth until he was eleven years old were of homesteading in Nebraska and later in Kansas, and of his father's attempts at bread-winning by running a general store and as a traveling agent trying to sell sewing-machines.
Education
From 1889 to 1890, Rhodes attended the University of the Pacific, San Jose, California. Although his early schooling had been meager, he was able to qualify for admission because he had read so widely and to such good purpose.
Rhodes bought his first saddle as a teenager with soap coupons his family had saved. Between 1884 and 1886 he worked on cattle ranches like the Bar Cross on the Jornada del Muerto in central New Mexico. It was around this time that his reputation in the Southwest as an expert horseman became somewhat legendary. By the time he was 16, Rhodes had become a skillful stonemason and road builder. He assisted in the construction of the road between Engle and Tularosa, New Mexico. When he returned to New Mexico in 1890 he taught school briefly, then built a ranch of about eighty acres with cattle and horses close to his family's original homestead near Rhodes Pass in the San Andres Mountains. Rhodes, inspired by his work as a cowhand and in ranching began to write about his experiences. In 1899 Rhodes married. A few years later the couple moved to New York after May's father, Louis Davison, became ill. There Rhodes farmed and began writing about his beloved New Mexico. His stories were first accepted by McClure's Magazine and later The Saturday Evening Post.
Of the many novels and short stories Rhodes penned, "Good Men and True" (1911), "Bransford in Arcadia Or, the Little Eohippus" (1913), "Desire of the Moth" (1916), "West is West" (1917), "The Come on" (1920), "Say Now Shibboleth" (1921), "Stepson of Light" (1921), "Copper Streak Trail" (1922), "Once in the Saddle" (1925), "Paso Por Aqui" (1926), "The Hired Man on Horseback" (1928) and "Beyond the Desert" (1934) were among his more popular. Even though his stories were well-liked by the public, he never achieved financial success. The majority of his works appeared in newspapers and magazines before they were released as books.
Rhodes and his wife returned to New Mexico in 1926, living first in Santa Fe, then Alamogordo and finally at White Mountain near Three Rivers in a house provided for them by former Senator Albert Bacon Fall. In 1930, ill health forced Rhodes to move to Pacific Beach, California. There he was accepted by the writer's colony that existed in those days near La Jolla.
Eugene Manlove Rhodes is best known as the author of novels, short stories, and poems about his experiences as a cowhand in the W. His writing is often praised for its highly detailed, almost photographic representation of frontier life; just as often, though, Rhodes's work is dismissed as merely accurate. His experience and strong, descriptive prose, however, make Rhodes' fiction an important touchstone for western writers. Rhodes' fiction has remained a guiding light for many western writers. If his experiences did not make him a great novelist, they did make him an informed chronicler. His novels and stories remain some of the most accurate renderings of the vanished west. He is still remembered in New Mexico, where he cowboyed and ranched for many years as a young man.
In 1958, he was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.
Quotations:
"I was there two years, the happiest of my life. Not one care, not one unhappy moment. I had attained my majority at thirteen. At least, I have done a man’s work ever since. 1 had never known any boys. Just rough men. I had my youth in one deep, priceless draught."
Personality
Rhodes was at ease with all kinds of people – a real old-fashioned American democrat – even if some of them were wanted by the law. He was apparently also one of those generous souls who'd give you the shirt off his back, even when he had only one – which may have been often the case. Sadly, in his last days, he was penniless, politely requesting an advance on a novel just to put food on the table.
Personally, Rhodes was a generous, lovable individual, though at times irascible. His view of life was tempered with a sense of humor. He was fond of children and of animals, and his friends found his companionship not only wholesome and delightful but stimulating as well.
Quotes from others about the person
"The fact remains that while Rhodes wrote better, and more truthfully than his contemporaries, as well as those who came later, about what he knew first-hand and had lived to the hilt, he stops short of greatness." - W. H. Hutchinson
"His knowledge was sharpened by the expatriate's longing, deepened by distance, enhanced by the frustrations of exile. His land and his people came out on paper as the remembered mellow haze of a coal-oil lamp seen shining through the cabin window when the man and his world were young." - W. H. Hutchinson
"Some critics fault his novels for implausible plots but most commentators claim that Rhodes's realistic portrayal of the cowboy milieu in the late-nineteenth-century secures his position among notable authors of western fiction."
"Rhodes did not excel at story-telling; nor, if the dialogue is excluded, in creating memorable characters; nor in coming to grips with significantly universal themes. What he did with distinction was to describe Western landscapes and to explicate the Western occupations of mining and ranching." - Edwin Gaston
"Rhodes reveals a conviction that, in order to be great, Western literature must be minutely faithful to place. Such fierce pride of the community that makes Rhodes and company promote actuality above all other literary virtue has blinded many defenders of Rhodes to a basic fallacy: one who has experienced occupation and place to the extent that Rhodes lived ranching and mining in New Mexico has difficulty transcending the actualities - the minutiae - and rising to the level of art. After all, art is not life. It orders life and transcends it. It fails when it achieves merely photographic rendition."
Connections
On August 9, 1899, Rhodes married May Louise (Davison) Purple of Apalachin, a widow with two sons, by whom Rhodes had a son and a daughter.
Father:
Hinman Rhodes
(June 1827 - 1907)
Mother:
Julie (Manlove) Rhodes
Spouse:
May Louise (Davison) Purple
(May 1871 - 20 March 1957)
Son:
Alan Hinman Rhodes
(12 June 1901 - November 1970)
Daughter:
Barbara Antoinette Rhodes
(18 February 1909 - 24 October 1910)
Brother:
Clarence Edgar Rhodes
(13 January 1874 - 14 May 1942)
Friend:
Oliver Lee
(8 November 1865 – 15 December 1941)
Oliver Milton Lee, commonly known as Oliver Lee was a part-time deputy U.S. marshal, rancher, and gunfighter.
References
Contemporary Authors New Revision Series
In response to the escalating need for up-to-date information on writers, Contemporary Authors New Revision Series (Volume ) brings researchers the most recent data on the world's most popular authors.
2010
Contemporary Literary Criticism
Each print volume in this long-standing series profiles approximately 6-8 novelists, poets, playwrights and other creative writers by providing full-text or excerpted criticism taken from books, magazines, literary reviews, newspapers and scholarly journals.
