Is This Young Howard Pyle?

Figure 1. Young man photographed by Emily Webb, Wilmington, Delaware, 1870s

Is this young Howard Pyle?

I don’t know. But I really, really wish I did - and I’m 99 percent convinced that it is Howard Pyle, somewhere in his early 20s. What throws me is the size of his hands, which seem too big (Pyle had smallish hands, apparently), and the shape of his ears. But these could be optical illusions. Also, I don’t know what color hair young Pyle had, or what his hairline was like before he started balding.

His eyes, though, look right, as does his nose, brows, and especially the shape and smallness of his mouth. In 1909, a reporter noted that Pyle had “eyes blue as a fog, a small mouth, bland, but massive and singularly youthful face.” And artist James Edward Kelly remembered that when Pyle arrived in New York in 1876, “he had a high, smooth forehead; a long, smooth nose; light blue eyes; long flat jaws; rosy cheeks; a long smooth chin; small pursed mouth.”

Fortunately, there is a bona fide early photo of Pyle - Figure 2 - taken about 1875 in Owings Mills, Maryland. Here he has longish, darkish hair, and a face very much in keeping with Kelly’s description. The slope and shape of the shoulders, nose, chin, mouth, etc., etc., are also very similar to Figure 1’s.

Figure 2. Howard Pyle at Owings Mills, Maryland, c.1875

Then again, the youngish Pyle in another early photo (Figure 3) appears to have brown or maybe even reddish hair, or at least something lighter than what we see in Figure 1 - but the darker tone there could be an illusion or from Macassar oil, or something...

Figure 3. Howard Pyle, by a Philadelphia photographer, c.1880-85

Still, there is indeed something reminiscent of Figure 1 in Figure 3. Not to mention in Frances Benjamin Johnston photos of Pyle, taken when he was in his early 40s. Pyle’s face has become rounder in Figure 4 and Figure 6, but his demeanor is similar, as are his mouth and eyes.

Figure 4. Howard Pyle photographed by Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1896

Curiously and coincidentally, the photographer of Figure 1, Emily Webb, was Howard Pyle’s first-cousin-once-removed: she had grandparents in common with Pyle’s father. Emily was born on February 23, 1830, died on April 24, 1914, and somewhere along the line - and at a time when female photographers were quite rare - she set up her “Union Gallery” on Market Street in Wilmington. Her sister Sarah, meanwhile, was the wife of the Saturday Evening Post’s Henry Peterson, who was also Pyle’s mother’s first publisher.

Perhaps another, identified copy of Webb’s photo - or the use of a facial recognition system of some kind - will solve the mystery. (Though, in laying out all these things, I think I'm now 99.9 percent sure.)

Figure 5. Closeup of young man photographed by Emily Webb, Wilmington, Delaware, 1870s

Figure 6. Closeup of Howard Pyle photographed by Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1896

Abbey and Pyle Entangled

Entangled - Drawn by E. A. Abbey, from a Sketch by H. Pyle (Harper’s Weekly, January 19, 1878)

In his memoir, A World Worth While: A Record of “Auld Acquaintance”, illustrator W. A. Rogers said:

In looking over an old file of Harper’s Weekly the other day I came across a picture of Colonial life under which was printed, “Drawn by E. A. Abbey from a sketch by Howard Pyle.” That was before Pyle’s wings were strong enough to enable him to fly alone. It was in the days when most of the work was drawn on wood, and Pyle never was successful in working on the block.

“Entangled” is the picture Rogers mentions. “This was redrawn by Abbey from my original drawing,” Pyle noted in his scrapbook. “My drawing was made before I left Wilmington and was accepted as an ‘idea’. I got, I think, twenty dollars for it.” After Edwin Austin Abbey tightened it up, Victor Bernstrom engraved it for the January 19, 1878, issue of Harper’s Weekly. An accompanying paragraph explained:

The costumes and accessories in our engraving on page 52 show that the artist designed to represent a scene in an American country house of the last century; but the story suggested suits all times and countries. The tell-tale chairs placed cozily side by side, the evident embarrassment of the young gentleman, in spite of his effort to look cool and unconcerned, and as if he had been leaning all the morning against the mantel-piece, are quite perceptible to the keen glance of the maiden’s father as he comes into the room. Likely enough he is a loyalist, while the suitor for his daughter’s heart and hand may be the son of a patriot. Out of this hint every reader may weave a romance for himself.

“Entangled” was published just when Pyle’s early career was turning a corner, when publishers - and fellow illustrators, like Abbey - were beginning to take him seriously.

And in looking at this picture again, I feel more and more convinced that in redrawing Pyle’s picture, Abbey used Pyle himself as the model for “the young gentleman.” There’s something about the height and body language and the shape of head and brow, the texture of the hair, the sideburns, the way the hands are tucked in the pockets... Not many photographs of a twenty-something Pyle have turned up, but take a look at these two - maybe you’ll see what I mean.

Photograph of Howard Pyle, c.1875

Photograph of Howard Pyle, c.1880-83

“I saw a many ‘gruesome’ sights”

“The stout little old gentleman who ate four fish-balls for breakfast on Sunday”

How better to charm a woman than by drawing an old man about to vomit? That was Howard Pyle’s tactic, at least, in a letter he wrote to Miss Alice Hannum Cresson on August 19, 1875:

Wilmington

Aug 19th 1875

Dear Miss Alice:

Now ma am the question is am I or am I not to be forgiven for my appearant neglect of your kind permission to write to you. Before the court decides let me be heard in a little excuse “iv it be plazen to yus mum [?]”. Now the fact is that immediately upon my return home I received orders to prepare myself ‘instanter’ for a business trip to the north so you can easily imagen that I must have been much hurried to get off in reasonable time.

I arrived home on Monday or rather Tuesday last at half past one o’clock at night, rather fagged out to tell the truth; having travelled about thirteen hundred miles (and all at night at that) the foregoing week. However I am now as you perceive in my normal state of vavicious brilliancy - “Richard’s himself again!” in fact.

Boston was the last city I visited before I returned home and from there I came to Philadelphia by ocean. Ah Miss Alice in two days of ocean travel I saw a many “gruesome” sights - old gentleman that would ever and anon dash frantically to the edge of the boat where they would stand with bodies that heaved and swayed with the force of some internal conflict between breakfast and stomach. The wail of little children and cries of suffering women whilst the stewardess ran hither and thither with a baisin in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other - no ma am I was not sea-sick.

This little sketch represents the stout little old gentleman who ate four fish-balls for breakfast on Sunday.

[drawing of man, 7/8 x 3/4" - see above]

But enough of this “fal-lal.”

I saw Spencer this evening. He tells me that he has received a letter from Miss Sallie inviting us both up to Consho. next Saturday. Most unfortunately I have sundry little engagements for that day; while Saturday week Spencer is engaged; however on Saturday two weeks weather permitting and provided it suits you we shall do ourselves the pleasure of visiting you.

I suppose Spencer has told you all about our departure from Maryland. How I scarcely had time to buy my segars and ticket and to dash off a few agonized lines of parting to Miss Smith and at the last moment to post your letters almost forgetting my valise in my hurry. We were both upon the platform of course to catch a last lingering look at our lady friends at Mansion Farm and were duly gratified.

I enclose an illustration of Shakspeare - “a poor thing but mine own” - applicable to this peach and watermelon season [enclosure missing]. Please give my respects to your father and mother and the rest of my Consho. friends and believe me as ever -

Very Respectfully Yours

Howard Pyle

May I hope to hear from you soon in answer to this my first letter since my return from Maryland?

I should note that although Pyle dated the letter “Aug 19th” sometimes he got his dates wrong, plus the envelope (see below) was postmarked 10 p.m. August 20th, so it’s possible he wrote it on that day.

I’ve posted a couple of things regarding “Miss Alice” already, but here’s a quick review:

When the 22-year-old Pyle wrote to Alice Hannum Cresson, 26, she was living with her parents, Walter and Alice (Hannum) Cresson, and sisters, Anna and Sarah (or Sallie), in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. She and Pyle were cousins by marriage - Alice’s maternal aunt, Hannah Hannum (1817-1896), was the widow of Pyle’s maternal uncle, John Painter (1824-1865) - so they may have known each other since childhood.

First, regarding “iv it be plazen to yus mum”: I’ve been squinting at that phrase for the last fifteen years. “It be” and “to” were clear, but the other parts I thought, at various times, were “played to your music” or “muse” and “plague to your name” and so on. All nonsense. But I think I’m on the right track now. It really can’t be anything but “plazen” - that’s Pyle’s “p” and “z,” etc. - and if we say it with an “Irish” accent, it translates to “it be pleasing to.” Since Pyle was familiar with Irish character songs and plays, this seems likely. I might be misreading the first word “iv” (or “if”), but Pyle also was apt to add extra bits to his letterforms and not dot his “i”s consistently. “To yus mum” - i.e. “to you, ma’am” - is iffy (or ivvy), but I don’t know what else it could be. Any takers?

But what else does this letter show us, apart from Pyle’s earthy sense of humor - and that he sometimes smoked “segars”?

Well, we see that Pyle was a mediocre speller, but he knew that: “I was never a good hand at spelling,” he admitted years later. He also knew his “Shakspeare” - sort of: “a poor thing but mine own” is a common misquotation of “an ill-favoured thing, sir, but mine own” from As You Like It (Act 5, Scene 4). Incidentally, Pyle also used the phrase to “modestly” describe his fairy-tales in an 1889 letter: “But you know what Touchstone says - ‘A poor thing, a poor thing, but mine own!’” Meanwhile, “Richard’s himself again!” comes from Act 5, Scene 3 of Colley Cibber’s Richard III.

“Spencer,” it turns out, was Willard Spenser, born July 7, 1852 (or later), in Cooperstown, New York. He moved to Wilmington in 1873 and in 1875 was living at 1229 Tatnall Street with his mother, Mary, and brother, Claude. All three taught music. Spenser had early musical talent and composed his first waltz at age 7. In 1886, “The Little Tycoon” - for which he wrote both the music and the libretto - premiered in Philadelphia and became the first successful light opera by an American composer. By then it seems that he and Pyle had drifted apart, though later they were fellow members of the Franklin Inn Club.

“Mansion Farm,” as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, was the Owings Mills, Maryland home of Pyle’s (and Alice’s) aunt and uncle, Sarah and Milton Painter. I recently learned, though, that the place - also known as ULM and built by Samuel Owings himself - was the focus of controversy some 15 years ago, when a developer sneakily demolished it. A more full, interesting, and illustrated history of it can be found here.

But perhaps the most intriguing thing about this letter is what it reveals about Pyle’s otherwise murky involvement in his father’s leather business. The 1875-76 Wilmington city directory (published in June 1875) lists William Pyle as a “leather dealer” and Howard Pyle as an “artist.” The latter description may have been wishful thinking at that point, but it’s plain that Howard’s duties went beyond clerking in an office and that he acted - well, once - as a sort of traveling salesman, going by train - and boat - to visit scattered customers. This is, at least, exactly what his father did, especially in the 1880s, after his younger sons, Clifford and Walter, had taken the reins of the family enterprise.

One more thing: chief among the Pyles’ products (eventually, but quite possibly in the 1870s, too) was leather for bookbinding. Their clients, naturally, would have included publishers. In fact, according to Alpheus Sherwin Cody - who interviewed Pyle in 1894 - Roswell Smith, President of Scribner & Company, “was a friend of [Pyle’s] father.” Why would a Delawarean leather dealer become friendly with a New York publisher?

I wonder, therefore, if this as-yet hypothetical connection to the publishing world was an “in” - or the “in” - that Pyle successfully exploited in 1876, after writing up his Chincoteague experiences...

Howard Pyle Slept Here, Part 1

Southwest corner of Seventh and West Streets, Wilmington, Delaware (1994)

Okay, Howard Pyle may have slept here.

I was going through some old files and came across this photo. It was taken by Paul Preston Davis one day in July 1994 when we were tracking down Pyle’s different residences in and around Wilmington, Delaware. Many - most - were gone, pulled down years earlier, but a couple still stood.

The poor old building shown here might be one of the survivors. That is, if it was erected more than 140 years ago: it looks it, to me, despite the more recent portico and newer structure added to the back. It may also have been a one-family dwelling divided into two, at some point. It sits (provided it hasn’t since been destroyed) on the southwest corner of Seventh and West Streets in Wilmington.

The Pyle family moved to this location from their second house in the country, called “Evergreen” or “Evergreens” on the Philadelphia Pike, in the late 1860s. Actually, the exact year may have been 1869, if we can trust Howard Pyle’s statement, “Nearly all of my life up to sixteen years was spent in the country.”

The Pyles’ time here corresponded with the three years that Howard spent studying art under F. A. Van der Wielen in Philadelphia. They may even have chosen to return to Wilmington proper to make Howard’s commute easier - unless, of course, he lived in Philadelphia when classes were in session, since he also said:

At the age of 16 I left home to be a student at a private art school in Philadelphia. The school was kept by a man who won a gold medal at Antwerp, the center, perhaps, of the most technical art in Europe. I remained three years in Philadelphia... [emphasis mine]

But young Howard would still have spent long periods at his parents’ place. In fact, we know for sure that he was there on July 11, 1870, when the Ninth U.S. Federal Census was taken. On that day, the household included the immediate Pyle family (William, Margaret, Howard, Clifford, Walter, and Katharine) plus some others:

• Frances Augustine Eyre (born 1848), Howard Pyle’s first cousin
• Hannah James Churchman (born 1794), Howard Pyle’s great-aunt
• Edward Churchman Painter (born 1846), another first cousin
• Catherine Ragan [sic], an Irish-born housemaid, aged 28

And it was probably here that the 18-year-old Howard drew the masthead for Every Evening, which first appeared in print on September 4, 1871.

In 1872, however, the family packed up and relocated yet again, to yet another house on Market Street - their third of four - and the sixth home Howard Pyle lived in before the age of 20.

William Henry Jackson and Howard Pyle

William Henry Jackson, circa 1873

In his autobiography, Time Exposure, the celebrated photographer and artist William Henry Jackson (1843-1942) said:

After our marriage [on October 8, 1873, in Cincinnati] Emilie and I went to New York for a few days.... Following our brief whirl in the metropolis we went on to Baltimore for another few days, where I had the pleasure of meeting many of Emilie's relatives and friends. Then we proceeded to Washington and a winter of work for me.

“Emilie” was Emilie Painter (1841-1918), and since the extended Painter family was a pretty tight-knit group in those days, I take it for granted that “many of Emilie's relatives” included her aunt Margaret Churchman (Painter) Pyle (1828-1885) - and Margaret’s then 20-year-old son, Howard.

Yes, that Howard. But damned if Jackson couldn’t mention his first-cousin-in-law by name! Especially since their connection was more than tangential: in a 1906 letter to Jackson, Pyle wrote, “I often think of you and how that it was you who gave me my first knowledge of how to do practical work. You have acted an important part in establishing me in a very happy life.”

Strong words, yet Pyle didn’t acknowledge his debt to Jackson anywhere else I’ve looked, and - so far, at least - Pyle’s biographers have been silent on the topic. The same goes for Jackson’s biographers. So, after reading Pyle’s intriguing comment and realizing his genealogical connection to Jackson - but otherwise making no real headway in putting the two men together - I tracked down one of Jackson’s great-granddaughters. In a 1995 letter to me she said:

I thought I would write and tell you the story of how Howard Pyle asked his Uncle [sic] - my great-grandfather - if it would be wise for him (Howard Pyle) to take a course in life that would lead to art. He asked that of my great-grandfather because he was older and although my great-grandfather did not take up painting and illustration so much until he was in his 90s still he was an excellent illustrator and famous for his photographs.

My great-grandfather, William Henry Jackson, sent him a reply in the affirmative. He did not see why Howard would not do well in this line of work. My Father told me this story many times...

That’s pretty vague, as were some follow-ups with her. Recently, however, I noticed this news item from the Detroit Free Press of November 13, 1911:

FAMOUS ARTIST WHO DIED ABROAD WAS RELATIVE OF DETROITERS

Howard Pyle, the American illustrator whose death occurred in Florence, Italy, last Thursday, was one of the country’s greatest magazine artists, and it was largely due to the encouragement given him as a young man by a Detroiter, W. H. Jackson, 55 Alger avenue, that Pyle decided to embark upon an artistic career, which later brought him fame and large financial returns.

Mrs. Jackson, who was a daughter of the late Dr. Painter, of Baltimore, Md., was first cousin to the dead artist, who was a son of her father’s sister. In 1873, Mrs. Jackson’s husband was connected with a well known government geological survey and his duties brought him to Wilmington, Delaware, the home of Pyle, on many occasions. Pyle at that time was 20 years old, and was seriously contemplating an artistic career.

“One day he brought a drawing to me and asked me what I thought of it,” said Mr. Jackson, who himself is an artist of ability, “I saw that young Pyle had great possibilities, and told him to continue his studies. I advised him to send the drawing to the Harpers in New York. He did so, but the drawing was not accepted. I continued to encourage him, however, and later his talent found for him a regular position on the Harpers’ staff....”

Still, Pyle stated that Jackson “gave” him “knowledge” - not mere “encouragement” - which would imply that Jackson had actually taught Pyle something. (Although it’s an obvious choice, I doubt Pyle meant “photography” - though he did take photos and use them in his work later on.) And as for the confounding term “practical work”, in a 1903 interview, Pyle tried to explain:

The hardest thing for a student to do after leaving an art school, is to adapt the knowledge there gained to practical use - to do creative work, for the work at an art school is imitative. That is why so many go into portrait painting. When I left the art school [c.1872] I discovered, like many others, that I could not easily train myself to creative work, which was the only practical way of earning a livelihood in art. Nor was there anything like the present field. Not discouraged, but being offered a position by my father in his leather business in Wilmington I availed myself of it and during my spare time created illustrations, stimulated my imagination and worked assiduously on drawings I never submitted.

He goes on to mention his Chincoteague article and that “on its publication I felt my art was of some practical use”. So while “practical work” has a dry, kind of technical ring, Pyle connoted “practical” with “creative”, and other uses or variants of the term in his (and his students’) writings indicate that it had more to do with illustration, or, to put it broadly, with making “useful” pictures that a publisher would pay for and “that shall interest the great world beyond [the artist’s] narrow ken” - i.e. fellow artists stuck in their insular studio-worlds, who know only art, not Nature, and who are wowed by artificial “tricks of technical facility”, etc.. (I’ll append below some other examples of what “practical” meant in Pylean vernacular which may help clarify things - or not!)

So maybe Jackson critiqued Pyle’s pictures, suggesting “practical” ways to make them more appealing to publishers and the general public, and more easily reproduced by the as-yet crude methods employed by printers. Or maybe his role was more like Pyle’s to his own students - and that it was not so much about technical instruction (which Pyle had already received, anyway), but about “encouraging” him to open up to and connect with the pictorial possibilities all around him. As Pyle described his course in “Practical Illustration” in 1895, “I can tell little or nothing as to how to do the work technically. That which I try to teach relates more to the qualities of imagination, of observation and of realization.” Or, as he put it more poetically a few years later, he tried “to show the student how to throw his mind and soul into the beauties of nature that surround him; how to understand and to sense and to sympathize with human passion”. I gather it was some kind of hybrid.

At any rate, the two had plenty of time to get to know each other. From about 1872 to 1876, Pyle was working for his father in Wilmington. Jackson, meanwhile, as photographer for the Hayden Survey, spent only his summer months out west, but was based in Washington from November 1873 to July 1874 and from October 1874 to July 1875. He was in Wilmington itself on October 17, 1874: the Wilmington Daily Tribune noted that he had “paid a short visit to this city on Saturday, returning to Washington on the midnight train, in the course of which he communicated many interesting particulars of the adventurous survey from which his party is the first to return.” In the fall of 1875 Jackson was east again, working throughout the winter on the Survey’s dioramas and displays to be shown at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, which opened in May 1876. And he was on duty at the Centennial during its run and returned to Washington when it closed that fall - by which time Pyle had embarked on his career in New York.

But when and where and how frequently and for how long young Pyle met and talked with Jackson is an open question. I once dreamt of finding evidence that Pyle had tagged along on one of Jackson’s westward journeys, or that Jackson had hired Pyle to help him construct the Centennial dioramas, but after rooting through various papers and archives, I came up short. And so we’re left with murky anecdotes and rumors of lost conversations. But maybe some new, hard data will come to light, soon.


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Some Notes on “Practical Work”

The very name of Pyle’s first class at the Drexel Institute in 1894 was “A Course in Practical Illustration in Black and White” in which his lectures would be “followed by systematic lessons in Compositon and Practical Illustration, including Technique, Drawing from the Costumed Model, the Elaboration of Groups, treatment of Historical and other subjects with reference to their use of Illustrations.” Indeed, at the very first lecture, the very first thing Bertha Corson Day recorded Pyle as saying was, “Accuracy of drawing must be learned in schools - freedom in practical work.”

“I think my lectures are useful, but I think they only give in theory that which I want here to render practical to all. There are in Europe classes similar to this that I suggest, but none, I think, that devote the attention of the students to accomplish such really practical results as those at which I aim.” (Pyle to Dr. James MacAlister, April 7, 1896)

“Without meaning to criticise Mr Hammitt’s methods, I do not think they are of a sort to advance you in any real or practical knowledge of illustrative art.” (Pyle to Stanley Arthurs, September 11, 1896)

“...being an illustrator, and dealing with a more practical side of art, I stand, as it were, with only one foot planted in the Israel of academic art, the other leg being implanted in the Philistia of the outside world.” (from “A Small School of Art” by Howard Pyle, 1897)

“In this Class [in Illustration] I choose some special composition, trying to make it as practical as possible, submitting it to some illustrated magazine or newspaper, obtaining for it an order and then setting my students to paint this composition into a picture. The best one of these pictures I find sells with never-failing success; and so the student learns not only how to render nature in full color, but also what are the points that make a picture practical and useful. ...whenever I see a composition that strikes me as practical I explain why it is practical and advise my student to submit it to this or that paper.... I find that even so far as I have gone that our students are the best, and that the Academic students from elsewhere have an enormous mass to unlearn before they can begin to learn real and practical methods of work.” (Pyle to Eric Pape, May 26, 1898)

“My first object shall be to teach them to paint the draped and costumed model so that it shall possess the essentials of a practical picture.... My experience is that within a year of such teaching the pupil will be sufficiently grounded in a practical knowledge of painting to be able to embark upon illustrative work.” (Pyle to Edward Penfield, March 17, 1900)

“From the standpoint of a practical worker, it would seem to be a very plain statement of fact, that, if a cobbler does not sell his shoes, it is because they do not fit the feet of other men, and it would seem an equally natural inference to suppose that the very general failure to sell American pictures is because they do not fit the ideals of American men and women.” (from “The Present Aspect of American Art from the Point of View of an Illustrator” by Howard Pyle - a paper read before the Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston, April 25, 1902)

“Not long ago we said good bye to one of the boys [Francis Newton] who is going to New York to start in on practical work.” (Allen Tupper True to his sister, June 27, 1902)

“He said he was very sorry that I did not come earlier for my work was very practical and looked promising...” (N. C. Wyeth to his mother, October 27, 1902)

Pyle “congratulated me upon my summer's work and told me that mine was the strongest - most practical and on the whole the best of all.” (N. C. Wyeth to his mother, October 19, 1903)

“...that which art students most need is the cultivation of their imagination and its direction into practical and useful channels of creation...” (Pyle to W. M. R. French, April 13, 1905)

“Cleverness seems to be substituted for exactitude, and the result is very unsatisfactory so far as any real and practical results are concerned. It is very discouraging to one who holds in view a real, material, and vital advancement in the practical uses of art to meet so many young artists, who, having passed from the schools, seek in vain for opportunities whereby they may earn a modest living...” (Pyle to James Hulme Canfield, April 17, 1905)

“It has been unfortunate that the fees charged for attendance at the League should have been so large as to have deterred many artists in practical lines of work from coming to me for help and advice.” (Pyle to Hugo Ballin, May 8, 1905)

“...the education given by the academies to the young artists who come to me for instruction has to be unlearned before I can impart the facts that are necessary to make their art of practical use in the world...” (Pyle to W. M. R. French, June 22, 1905)

“I am trying to push my work thro to a finish and get into practical work.” (Edwin Roscoe Shrader to Thomas Wood Stevens, February 11, 1906)

Master Pyle Goes to Washington

The United States Treasury Department at Washington, from a photograph by Alexander Gardner (1866)

“You aught to see the treasury bilding it’s steps are the queerest things I ever saw there is not any thing to hold them up yet hundreds of people walk on them ever day...

“Dr* says thers is more 3700 clearks and not more than 3 or 4 to each room The building takes up a hole squair much longer than any of ours...”

Howard Pyle, 13, to his father, William Pyle, June 16, 1866

* Dr. William Elder (1806-1885), physician, lecturer, political economist, biographer of Elisha Kent Kane, etc., etc., and longtime friend of the Pyle family.

Howard Pyle’s Early Turkey

In honor of Thanksgiving, I serve up Howard Pyle’s earliest known turkey.

It also happens to be his earliest known illustration for a national (as opposed to a local) publication: namely, St. Nicholas for November 1875. That honor used to belong to his two pictures for his poem, “The Magic Pill,” which appeared in Scribner’s Monthly for July 1876. (Of course, the poem itself remains the first-known nationally published bit of writing by Pyle.)

Somehow, though - and just like his 1871 drawing for Every Evening’s masthead - Pyle neglected to mention this piece when writing or being interviewed about his early life: perhaps because it had little impact on his nascent career (at least compared to “The Magic Pill” and his Chincoteague article) and perhaps because Pyle considered himself more a writer than an illustrator at that time.

When Paul Preston Davis (while compiling his exhaustive bibliography) first showed me the drawing in 2002, I didn’t think it was a bona fide Pyle. Why would St. Nicholas publish such a crude thing? Granted, it illustrated a poem, “The Reformer,” by Pyle’s own mother, but, still, I figured she probably wrote the poem for the picture, which was probably just a “recycled cut” - the kind which filled so many magazines in the 1870s and which accompanied the bulk of Pyle’s mother’s writings for children.

However, my skepticism gradually eroded: the drawing did, after all, resemble those for “The Magic Pill.” Even so, I wanted more proof. The drawing was unsigned and absent from the magazine’s bound volumes and indices, but, finally, when I inspected a copy of the November 1875 issue in its original wrappers, I was happy to see that Pyle was indeed credited in the table of contents.

So I gather mother and son submitted poem and picture as a package deal. And although within a year St. Nicholas was accepting Howard’s writings and illustrations, nothing by Margaret Pyle ever again appeared in that magazine. Sadly, too, she didn’t live to see their only other known collaboration, “Hugo Grotius and His Book Chest,” published in Harper’s Young People for March 15, 1887.

Incidentally, according to Every Evening, at the sixth-annual reunion picnic of the Friends’ Social Lyceum on June 26, 1875, “Mrs. M. C. Pyle read a very amusing poem, poking fun at fussy reformers” - no doubt the same poem her son illustrated.

The Sun Also Rises in Chincoteague

In researching my posts on Howard Pyle’s Chincoteague trip, I found two letters from a Baltimore Sun correspondent, who visited the island around the same time. The first was printed on Thursday, August 17, 1876 (two days after Pyle’s first Chincoteague article appeared in the Wilmington Daily Commercial), and the second on Monday, August 28, 1876. As would be expected, they cover similar ground, and they also confirm - and call into question - some of Pyle’s observations. The correspondent, who signed his pieces “N.E.F.,” turns out to have been Norval Emmet Foard (1837-1906), who was associated with The Sun for almost 40 years. Here is a little from his point of view:

The Sun, Baltimore, Thursday Morning. August 17, 1876.

CHINCOTEAGUE ISLAND, VA.

An Island World and its Inhabitants - Epicurean Living - Beach Ponies and their History - Interesting Sketches, &c.

[Correspondence of the Baltimore Sun.]

OCEAN CITY, WORCESTER COUNTY, MD. August 16, 1876.

Having heard so much about Chincoteague since coming to this part of “the Shore,” I concluded that Chincoteague, which is an island on the east coast of Accomac, Va., must be a sort of pony paradise. Eastern Shoremen had told me that Chincoteague was a world within itself, having the best things to eat that the air, the earth and the sea afforded. I found that the Delawarians made up excursions to the Mecca from Georgetown and even from Wilmington, and that several trains a week ran down to the island, and that the islanders were always getting up a pony penning, a pony sale, a camp-meeting or some other divertisement as an attraction to allure visitors. So I determined to go to Chincoteague....

Indeed, the Wilmington Daily Commercial had noted that Chincoteague’s annual sheep-shearing would be held June 7, and (in the July 24 issue) that excursion trains would run to the island during the camp-meeting (held, evidently, August 5-17) and also that “special” excursion trains would run on the day of the penning (which day was not specified, but it was supposed to occur during the camp-meeting). Clearly, the place was not a well-kept secret. Now back to Foard:

I chose Sunday for my trip knowing that although the camp-meeting on the island had been closed there would be Sunday services in the pine grove where the camp had been held. Hiring a country conveyance, with no back to the seats, I drove from Ocean City to Berlin, where at 9.30 A.M. an excursion train from Delaware, comprising four coaches, and freighted with peninsula belles and beaux [or about 150 travelers in all], came along, and by eleven o’clock had reached the jumping-off place, which is Franklin, on the Boundary line of Worcester and Accomac....

By “Sunday” does Foard mean August 6? Or August 13? I think August 6 as he goes on to say, “Last week there was a penning of some thirty [ponies].” Also, Foard’s dateline was Wednesday, August 16; Pyle’s was Saturday, August 12, and Pyle referred to “the occasional penning of the ponies, or driving them into corral, one of which took place during our visit last week.” I assume they both meant the same “last week” and attended the same penning. Since Foard arrived midday Sunday and, as Pyle noted, “it was quite early in the morning when the penning came off,” I’m inclined to think it occurred between Monday, August 7, and Friday, August 11.

Furthermore, Foard’s Sun letter of August 28, shows that although Pyle reported on a pony-penning that summer, it was not the annual pony-penning as has been suggested or stated by Pyle himself and by some biographers - several of whom (starting, I think, with Charles D. Abbott in 1925) have also said that Pyle’s visit was in Spring 1876. Foard, again:

The Chincoteague annual pony-penning, occurring this year on the 23d and 24th of August, attracted many excursionists from Delaware and some from Baltimore. The recent completion of the line of railway to Franklin, and the employment of steam in the navigation of Chincoteague sound, are progressive steps in opening up this hitherto but little frequented section, which possesses attractions for sportsmen as well as for business enterprise. Chincoteague is now within easy reach of Baltimore and Philadelphia in a day, and large excursion trains from Wilmington, Georgetown, or Harrington, Del., to Ocean City or Chincoteague Island have been of frequent occurrence nearly every week this summer.

Maybe the precise date of Pyle’s particular penning will be found in one record or another, someday. Adding to the confusion is Foard’s statement that “the camp-meeting on the island had been closed,” whereas the Commercial stated it would be held August 5-17. Pyle, meanwhile, didn’t mention the camp-meeting in the Commercial, but in Scribner’s Monthly:

Sharing the interest with the pony penning is an occasional camp-meeting in the woods, occurring once in a year or so. In among the great pines of Chincoteague is a noble place for such a gathering, when at night their huge trunks are illuminated by the light of the “pine chunk” bonfires, in the gleam of which the distant trees flash forth for a moment and then vanish into obscurity again, - and when the solemn measured chant of the Methodist hymns is heard and the congregation sways with the mighty religious passion that stirs them, while over all hang lurid wreathings of resinous smoke.

Pyle certainly sounds like an eyewitness here, so maybe Foard was mistaken, or maybe Pyle was describing Foard’s “Sunday services in the pine grove.” (Or, yes, there’s always the chance that Pyle made more than one visit, which would render moot much of all this hand-wringing.)

Foard’s second Sun letter does, at least, corroborate the presence of Otto Lugger (1844-1901), who later became State Entomologist of Minnesota. Pyle called him “Otto Leugger” in the Commercial, but he is an unnamed “learned naturalist from the Baltimore Academy of Natural Science” and “the professor” in Scribner’s Monthly. Foard says:

In addition to sportsmen several widely known scientific men have during the past few weeks made Chincoteague the scene of their investigations, with valuable and interesting results. Mr. Otto Lugger, curator of the Maryland Academy of Sciences, has spent two weeks pursuing scientific research under the direction of Prof. P. E. Uhler, president of the academy, who also spent five or six days in the interesting field offered to the enthusiastic naturalist. Capt. Caulk, a Chincateager, who is given to kindred pursuits, says Mr. Lugger is the quickest bug catcher he ever saw, and that he has an eye as sharp as a microscope.

Other parallels can be found, but, over all, Foard, the well-seasoned journalist, is more generous - or just objective - and less prone to comic exaggeration and condescension than Pyle. He introduces Kendall Jester, for example, but doesn’t touch on his drinking. And here is his take on a typical Chincoteague home:

As their houses were all open to enjoy the cool air from the water the interiors were fairly exposed. In a ramble that took in thirty or forty small dwellings there were none which did not reveal a family party comprising parents and three or four children, with here and there a single aged relative seated at the little family board, the mother busily ministering to the wants of the family. Each dwelling had but one large room on the ground floor, an attic overhead, a back building for cooking, a little meat-house, pantry or safe in the yard put up on one or two posts, and in many cases an arbor or small shade tree, under which the table was spread. All the exteriors of the dwellings and fences were neatly whitewashed. The front room, in which the large high post family bed, protected with mosquito netting, stood the conspicuous article of furniture, was invariably a model of cleanliness. The bed clothing was of snowy whiteness, and the housewife’s hands appeared in many bright specimens of patchwork, while the husband’s taste was apparent in colored prints of marine subjects or trophies from the bay associated with his calling.

But Foard’s style is also much less evocative: compare the dramatic sweep of Pyle’s prose with this brief, bland description of (presumably) the same event:

Last week there was a penning of some thirty head belonging to the estate of a deceased testator for sale. The herd were driven by mounted riders down the beach into the enclosure, where the squealing, kicking, biting and tumult was immense. In order to catch and reduce or break them, the lasso had to be used, and a fight, in which several men engaged with each pony, was the invariable result. Breaking is always a difficult matter, but when finally accomplished and the mastery secured the animal is always characterized by docility afterwards....

And, according to Foard, the annual penning held later that month was even more dull:

The pony-penning was not so interesting as former occurrences of the kind are represented to have been. The ponies, several hundred of which were driven up from the beach, showed the wildness of any unrestrained stock, though there were but few that appeared desirable, and these were held at very high rates. In catching the animals after they were driven to the corral, Kendall Jester, who is a large and powerful man, employed a slip-noose, which he put over the heads of the wild ponies, and a great deal of kicking, neighing and dust, but nothing exciting in the whole business.

Well, we know what Chincoteague did for Howard Pyle, but Norval Foard seems to have been relatively uninspired by the place. Still, a more thorough side-by-side comparison of their respective reports would be useful to chart out, one of these days.

Chincoteague, The Island of Ponies

The following article by Howard Pyle, born out of his letter published in the Wilmington Daily Commercial for August 15, 1876, was first published in Scribner’s Monthly for April 1877. The illustrations were redrawn from Pyle’s original pencil sketches by William Ludwell Sheppard (1833-1912), among others.

Chincoteague, The Island of Ponies
by Howard Pyle

Off the north-eastern shore of Virginia, and about five miles from the main-land, lies a small island known as Chincoteague - an island possessed of peculiarities shared by no other portion of the eastern United States; for here roams, in an entirely untamed state, a breed of horses, or rather ponies, as wild as the mustangs of Texas or the Pampas.

How these ponies first came upon the island is not known except through vague tradition, for when the first settlers came there, early in the eighteenth century, they found the animals already roaming wild about its piney meadows. The tradition received from the Indians of the main-land was that a vessel loaded with horses, sailing to one of the Elizabethan settlements of Virginia, was wrecked upon the southern point of the island, where the horses escaped, while the whites were rescued by the then friendly Indians and carried to the main-land, whence they found their way to some of the early settlements. The horses, left to themselves upon their new territory, became entirely wild, and, probably through hardships endured, degenerated into a peculiar breed of ponies.

In 1670 the island was first prospected; it was subsequently granted by King James II. to a person by whom it was sold in minor sections to various others. At present it is greatly subdivided, though one land-owner, Kendall Jester by name, holds over six hundred acres of marsh and pine land, and there are other holdings scarcely less in extent. Among the earliest settlers were the Thurstones, Taylors, and Mifflins; the head of the last-named family was a well-known Quaker, who, upon the introduction of slavery to the island, removed thence to the town of Camden, in the upper part of the province of Maryland, near Delaware.

It was long before Chincoteague was fairly settled, and even as late as 1838 there were but twenty-six houses there; now, however, many strangers, tempted by the exceptionally good fishing and oyster-dredging of the place, are pouring in from the main-land to settle there. To mere visitors the ponies are still a great, if not the main, attraction, and during the periods of “penning” - driving them into corral - numerous guests arrive daily from the coast.

When one puts foot aboard the puffing, wheezing little steamboat “Alice,” it is as though the narrow channel, across which he is ferried in about an hour, separates him from modern civilization, its rattling, dusty cars, its hurly-burly of business, its clatter and smoke of mills and factories, and lands him upon an enchanted island, cut loose from modern progress and left drifting some seventy-five years backward in the ocean of time. No smoke of manufactories pollutes the air of Chincoteague; no hissing steam-escape is heard except that of the “Alice;” no troublesome thought of politics, no religious dissension, no jealousy of other places, disturbs the minds of the Chincoteaguers, engrossed with whisky, their ponies and themselves.

Chincoteague is land-locked. Assateague Beach - a narrow strip of land, composed of pine woods, salt marshes and sand flats - lies between it and the ocean, separated from it by a channel about half a mile in width. Midway upon this beach stands Assateague light-house - a first-class light, and one of the finest on the coast. Between this beach or island upon the one side and the main-land on the other, in a calm, sleepy bay, lies lazy Chincoteague. There is but little agriculture; the inhabitants depend upon the sale of ponies and upon fishing for the necessaries of life, and mere necessaries suffice them. A little pork and bread, rank tobacco and whisky, in the proportion of Falstaff’s sack, and the acme of the Chincoteaguer’s happiness is attained.

Thick pine woods cover the island, in virgin growth, here and there opening into a glade of marshy flat, stretching off for a mile or more, called “the meadows,” where one occasionally catches a glimpse of a herd of ponies, peacefully browsing at a distance.

Tramping through the island, which is barely a mile in width, one emerges suddenly from the pine woods upon the western shore, where broad extended salt marshes, rank in growth, lie weltering in the hot sunlight the whole length of the island. A fence protects this marsh from the encroachments of the ponies, which are turned out here in the winter, and find a plentiful supply of fodder in the dead sedge underneath the snow.

“A son of the soil”

There are two distinct classes of inhabitants upon Chincoteague: the pony-owners - lords of the land - and the fishermen. Your pony-owner is a tough, bulbous, rough fellow, with a sponge-like capacity for absorbing liquor; bad or good, whisky, gin, or brandy, so that it have the titillating alcoholic twang, it is much the same to him. Coarse, heavy army shoes, a tattered felt hat, or a broad-brimmed straw that looks as if it had never been new; rough homespun or linen trowsers, innocent of soap and water, and patched with as many colors as Joseph’s coat; a blue or checked shirt, open at the throat, and disclosing a hairy chest, - these complete his costume. Your fisherman, now, though his costume is nearly similar, with the exception of shoes (which he does not wear), is in appearance quite different.. A lank body, shoulders round as the bowl of a spoon, far up which clamber his tightly strapped trowsers; a thin crane-like neck, poking out at right angles from somewhere immediately between the shoulder-blades; and, finally, a leathery, expressionless, peaked face, and wiry hair and beard complete his presentment. Hospitable in the extreme are these rough people. Any one visiting them at the time of their noonday meal will find some ingenuity necessary to parry their pressing solicitations to share those nodules of fat pork fried and floating in a dead sea of black molasses, fried potatoes, and chunks of bread - the last to he dipped in the molasses, and eaten with the pork. If sickness is pleaded in excuse, equal difficulty will be found in avoiding the administration of a dose of villainous whisky.

“The lady of the house”

In visiting their houses, you pick your way with some trouble through a flock of geese, over a pig, a dog, and probably a nearly naked baby rolling over the floor, and find yourself at last safely ensconced in a rickety chair. The good-woman of the house, who is smoking a very dirty pipe with a short stem, is profuse in the offices of hospitality, - spanking the rolling baby with one hand and handing a tin cup of water with the other. She may then, if you are a good listener and quiet enough, recount in much detail the ins and outs of her last attack of fever-’n’-ager, or how our Mariar married Jim Strand; in the meantime you can be making your own observations of an interior well calculated to repay the trouble. A rusty stove, a broken pitcher, a griddle, a skillet, two tin cups, a coffee-pot, and a dirty bucket, the smaller properties deposited in a rickety wash-tub in one corner of the room, which is mounted upon a crippled chair with a broken back; walls highly ornamented with cheap prints, labeled respectively “Ellen” or “Maggie,” circus bills and advertisements of patent soap; and, to crown all, a dozen or more bottles with little bits of red flannel in them hung here and there, enlivening the monotony like Turner’s daub of red in his gray sea picture. Then, lastly, the bed! We of the North have no conception of such beds - rising, a voluminous mountain of feathers, five feet in height, and bedecked with a gorgeous patch-work quilt, the valance slats at the top of the narrow spindle posts hung here and there with parti-colored worsted bobs. Let the family be ever so poor, the bed is the glory, the soul of their cottage. It is the pride of the good-woman’s heart, and in it she will swelter and suffocate in the hottest day of summer. Visiting, one day, a house where the woman was sick with bilious fever (quite a common complaint in Chincoteague), we saw nothing of her upon first entering, but a smell of tobacco-smoke stung our nostrils like vapor of oil of vitriol. Looking toward the bed, we saw a thin column of smoke ascending, and, approaching, saw the patient peacefully reposing and smoking in the midst of a feathery Yosemite.

“Uncle Ken”

Quaint and unique are the characters one meets. Kendal Jester, more popularly known as “Uncle Ken,” the beau-ideal of a Chincoteague pony-penner: one need have no fear of failing to make his acquaintance. An old fellow approaches, his face good-humored and redolent of innumerable potations of the favorite beverage. His daily life is comprised in three stages of existence: morning, when he is sober; noon, when if his thoughts are steady, his tongue is thick; night, when his thoughts are wool-gathering, and his stumbling tongue in vain tries to overtake them, - like a man pursuing one of his own ponies in the dark. He approaches with, “My name’s Kenneljester” (pronounced all in one word), “’s no harm in me.” We assure him we know that.

“I drink a little whisky now an’ then.”

We know that too.

“Doctor says got’s drink quart ’er whisky day - keep away bilious. Drink quart an’ pint - never have bilious.”

To do Uncle Ken justice, he implicitly follows the advice of his physician.

Should you imagine that when Uncle Ken is drunk he no longer has his wits about him, you will be vastly mistaken. A man who came over from the main-land to buy ponies from him thought that by making him drunk he could “skin him out of a bargain,” but his horror was unbounded when upon every drink that Uncle Ken took he increased his original price by ten dollars.

“Old Dan Tucker”

Here, too, is old Dan Tucker, boot-black and white-washer, with his pock-marked face and rich guttural “ki-he!” of a laugh. The artist wanted to make a sketch of this worthy, and ten cents were offered as an inducement for him to stand.

“See yeh, mars’! Guess I’se ugly ’nough ’out puttin’ on me on paper.”

“But we only want you as a - ah - memento, - a remembrance of our trip to Chincoteague.”

“Ke-he! Can’t fool me, wa - wat yo want me fo’?” (A sudden burst of righteous indignation.) “Go long, sketch some o’ de gals, dey’s heap puttier ’n me. Black yo’ boots fo’ ten cents. An’ I wants money, too. Money takes a man anyways - ’cept to Hebben.”

Nothing could induce him to be sketched, though we subsequently caught him on the fly, so to speak in front of the hotel.

“Uncle Benny”

Here, too is old Uncle Benny, ex-slave and now boot-black, freighted with glorious reminiscences of by-gone plantation days, possum and coon hunts, pumpkin pie and turkeys.

“Thankye, Mars’; sarvent:” says the poor old cripple, as he takes our ten cents, little knowing that we had made a hasty sketch of him as he bent over our shoes putting on the old-fashioned gloss he had acquired as a “boy” on the plantation.

Many more rise to memory: old Aunt Sally Jones, with her great scoop bonnet, her blue yarn stockings and her manifold complaints; old Mrs. Grant, who charms away cancers; and scores of others, the enumeration of whom would tire the patience of the reader.

Once or twice in a year the ponies of the island are driven together in a pen or corral for the purpose of branding the foals or for sale. Then is there excitement in Chincoteague. The natives are all agog. Rose and Hannah in the hotel kitchen are hard at work broiling, baking and stewing, preparing a brisk campaign against the appetites of the guests that assemble at such periods. Every now and then, above the frizzling of mutton-chops and frying of potatoes, arises a sudden burst of that rich minor hymn music heard only at its best among the southern plantation negroes - the wild music holding something half savage in its cadences - a music one might imagine their barbaric ancestors sang at some secret sacrificial feast.

And so on ad infinitum, now rising full and lusty, now sinking into the sputtering of the frying-pan.

It is a still morning and the broad white sand beach stretches far up the island. Here and there lies a pool of salt water glassily reflecting the clear sky.

Suddenly some one cries, “Here they come.” Down the beach come the ponies, pattering over the moist sand and dashing the placid salt pools into a myriad sparkling drops. Close behind ride the drivers, men and boys, gesticulating wildly. For saddles most of them have tanned sheep-skins, the woolly side out, strapped around the bodies of their ponies. Now a driver, bending almost level with his pony’s back, dashes on to head off some fractious animal. At length they approach the pen into which, after some trouble, they are headed, a tumultuous crowd, kicking, biting and squealing; then a rush and they are in! Now comes the tug of war, the lassoing and haltering; but that is left till the afternoon. It is well; for there goes the dinner-bell and we are ready for the summons.

Merciful Providence! What a crowd of hungry excursionists are coming from the main-land in the little steamer to attend the sales! From upper deck to lower the vessel is crowded with passengers. Can even Rose and Hannah’s labors suffice to stay the appetites of all these hungry wights? But to look at the face of Mr. English, the hotel-keeper, re-assures one. He is as calm and courageous as Napoleon at Austerlitz, or Nelson at Trafalgar. But we hasten into the dining-room and are seated by the time the boat touches the wharf and then the rush begins. Meal tickets are given, and Captain Caulk (pronounced Cork) stands at the door and collects them.

“Sir,” cries he to one old man, as the crowd pushes tumultuously against him, “for the love of Heaven do not tread on my cork foot!”

“Have you a cork foot, sir?”

“Two of ’em.”

“Tut, tut, tut! Well, I’m sorry! “ cries the sympathetic old gentleman from Snow Hill.

“The pony pen”

At length dinner is completed, and we start once more for the pony pen. The momentous time arrives for casting the lasso; not as they do in the West, but by hanging it on the end of a long pole, and then dropping it skillfully over the pony’s head. Uncle Ken takes the pole. Holding the noose well aloft on the top of it, so as not to frighten the intended prey upon which he has fixed his eye, he cautiously approaches the herd, around which the crowd has gathered. One of the ponies takes a sudden fright and a stampede follows, the spectators scattering right and left. For a moment the intended captive is wedged in the midst of the rest of the herd. Uncle Ken sees his advantage. He rushes forward, the noose is dropped and settles around the pony’s neck. Immediately six lusty negroes, with glistening teeth, perspiring faces and glittering eyes, are at the other end of the rope. The animal makes a gallant fight. This way and that he hauls his assailants, rearing and squealing. Now he makes a sudden side dash and sends them rolling over and over, plowing their heads through the shifting sand till their wool is fairly powdered; still, however, “the boys” hold on to the rope. At length the choking halter commences to tell; the pony, with rolling eyes and quivering flanks, wheezes audibly. Now is the moment! In rush the negroes, clutching the animal by legs and tail. A wrestle and a heave, a struggle on the pony’s part, a kick that sends Ned hopping with a barked shin like a crazy turkey, and Sambo plowing through the sand and stinkweed in among the spectators, and then over goes the pony with four or five lusty shouting negroes sprawling around him. The work is done: a running noose is slipped around the pony’s nose, his forelock is tied to this by a bit of string, and soon his tantrums cease as he realizes that he is indeed a captive.

“Catching a pony”

Many of the ponies are taken over the narrow channel that separates Chincoteague from Assateague, to run wild upon the latter island, which is largely unclaimed land. We were so fortunate as to witness the lively scene of the swimming of a number of ponies across this channel or inlet. For a mile we tramped through salt meadows rank with sedge, while everywhere from beneath our feet scattered innumerable ridiculous little fiddler-crabs about the size of a silver quarter of a dollar, one claw of enormous magnitude and conspicuousness and the other preposterously small and insignificant, like the candidates for President and Vice-President. At length we arrived at the edge of the channel, the ponies whickering as their nostrils fill with the salt air. One man enters the boat and poles it along, the channel being very shallow, while another with a rope in his hand drags at a pony. The pony is stubborn and will not enter. Kicks and blows rain freely upon him, the negroes running up to give him a kick and then rushing frantically away in mortal terror of the returning kick of the animal. Presently, with a splash the pony is in, and then all goes smoothly until his feet touch the sheltering bank on the other side, when the plunging recommences, and one poor wretch who has hold of the halter, and whose thoughts are wandering, awakes to find himself where he has not been for a long time - in cold water.

“Crossing to Assateague”

Among the visitors to the island we made some pleasant acquaintances, chief among whom was a learned naturalist from the Baltimore Academy of Natural Science. The professor was puzzling the natives greatly by his strange proceedings, his butterfly nets and insect-collecting, his seines, dredges, and deep-sea fishing. During a trip we took together through brake and thicket, - the professor wide-awake for specimens - we made, unknown to ourselves, some very unpleasant acquaintances. As we returned to the shore and seated ourselves leisurely upon a stranded boat to smoke and chat, we suddenly discovered that we were literally covered with seed-ticks, minute insects that burrow beneath the skin, causing a maddening irritation. After vain endeavors to pick them off; we started in haste for the hotel, there to scrub, in the secrecy of one’s chamber, in a tub of salt water.

Everything at Chincoteague seems conducted in unique and unconventional fashion. The only butcher-shop is no shop at all, but only a spot in the woods, where from two cross-pieces between the trees cattle are strung up by a block and tackle and slaughtered, after which their skins are stretched and dyed. It is a wild, gloomy place, surrounded by towering pines of a century’s growth, straight as arrows. The piney needles have sung to the wind many a dirge of slaughtered cattle.

The chief restaurant of Chincoteague is a piece of sail elegantly draped over a few upright posts, with a canvas streamer above it bearing conspicuously the sign, “Stewed Oysters.”

Upon the western side of the island is a bluff that overlooks the Atlantic toward the south. It is a barren, sandy spot; here and there a cactus crawls along half hidden in the shifting sand, or a clump of coarse grass shivers and whispers in the breeze. It is called the Old Grave-yard, and in this lonely, desolate, silent spot a few rounded stones and pieces of carved wood without letter or sign mark the last resting-places. There is something touching in the sentiment that impelled those rough, uncultured people to lay the weary, fever-burnt bones of their companions here in this lonely spot, facing the ocean they knew so well. Every year, as from the south the tumultuous waves of the Atlantic roll up the Shore, the bluff washes away, and the bones of the departed are brought to a premature resurrection. The burial-ground now in use is farther up the island and in the interior; a ridge dotted with head-stones runs up beneath the shelter of aged pines, with branches crooked as the cedars of Lebanon and draped with pall-like festoons of gray Florida moss.

Upon “Uncle Ken’s” estate of six hundred and sixty-five acres, valued at about four thousand dollars and called Wild-Cat Marsh, numerous flocks of domesticated wild geese are feeding. Every year numbers of those birds are shot in their passage south. The natives sink a barrel into the ground close to the beach in which they hide, and when the geese swimming far out at sea approach the beach to “gravel” they fall an easy prey to the gunners. Those that are only winged are saved and subsequently domesticated. One frequently hears the peculiar resonant “hank” of the wild geese, and, looking in the direction from which it came, sees the black head and neck of a bird stretching above the surrounding sedge. These birds cross freely with the ordinary domesticated geese, producing a hybrid which is called a “mule goose.”

The fishing and gunning of Chincoteague are excellent. Innumerable snipe are shot and sea-trout caught, some of the latter weighing as much as two pounds. The bathing would be excellent were it not for numerous neighboring sharks, some of them twenty or twenty-five feet long. When one sees a triangular fin cutting the glassy surface of the water near at hand, much of the pleasure of bathing is taken away.

Sharing the interest with the pony penning is an occasional camp-meeting in the woods, occurring once in a year or so. In among the great pines of Chincoteague is a noble place for such a gathering, when at night their huge trunks are illuminated by the light of the “pine chunk” bonfires, in the gleam of which the distant trees flash forth for a moment and then vanish into obscurity again, - and when the solemn measured chant of the Methodist hymns is heard and the congregation sways with the mighty religious passion that stirs them, while over all hang lurid wreathings of resinous smoke.

So far as one sees, geese, dogs, children and pigs compose the chief population of Chincoteague. The last thing to be heard in the evening and at intervals during the night is the cackling of geese, and when one wakes in the morning the geese are cackling still. Pigs are almost as much a feature of the place. The natural born Chincoteague porker is a thin, scrawny animal like his owner, the fisherman. He has a meditative air of curiosity and will watch a stranger askance, at the same time grunting in a low tone to himself, as though making his own observations. Quite a different character is the porcine nobleman from the main-land. He is regarded with affectionate reverence by his owner and grows fat upon fish and succulent mollusks, taking his siesta in undisturbed possession of the softest sand-bank.

It is difficult to say to what extent the law may be exercised in Chincoteague, for certainly there is not a place of confinement upon the whole island. We witnessed, however, what we imagine must have been a sample of the enforcement of the law. Two negro “boys” were fighting, rolling over the ground and biting at each other, when up rushed the magistrate of the island, seized a heavy barrel stave and delivered such blows right and left upon the heads of the belligerent blacks as would have stunned any ordinary white man.

“The majesty of the law”

Many traditions of the island are handed down from mouth to mouth by the natives, but few of them being able to read or write. It is thus we receive a full account of the great storm and accompanying tidal wave of the year 1821; telling how the black wrack gathered all one dreadful day to the southeast; how all night the breathless air, inky black, was full of strange moaning sounds, and pine needles quivered at the forecasting hurricane that lay in wait in the southward offing; how sea-mews and gulls hurtled screaming through the midnight air; how in the early morning the terrified inhabitants, looking from their windows facing the ocean, saw an awful sight: the waters had receded toward the southward, and where the Atlantic had rolled the night before, miles of sandbars lay bare to the gloomy light, as the bottom of the Red Sea to the Israelites; then how a dull roar came near and nearer, and suddenly a solid mass of wind and rain and salt spray leaped upon the devoted island with a scream. Great pines bent for a moment, and then, groaning and shrieking, were torn from their centuried growth like wisps of straw and hurled one against another; houses were cut from their foundations and thrown headlong, and then a deeper roar swelled the noise of the tempest, and a monstrous wall of inky waters rushed with the speed of lightning toward the island. It struck Assateague, and in a moment half the land was a waste of seething foam and tossing pine trunks; the next instant it struck Chincoteague, and in an unbroken mass swept across the low south marsh flats, carrying away men and ponies like insects; rushing up the island, tearing its way through the stricken pine woods.

“The storm of 1821”

Many a time by the side of his bright crackling fire, the aged Chincoteaguer, removing his pipe from the toothless gums where he has been sucking its bitter sweetness, will tell, as the winter wind roars up from the ocean, how Hickman, with his little grandson clinging to his neck, was swept by the great wave to King’s Bush marsh, far up on the main-land six miles away, and caught in the tough branches of its bushes; or how Andrews, with wife and family swept away in his sight, was borne up the island on the waters, and the next morning was discovered hanging in a pine-tree, by his waistband twenty feet from the ground.

“J. A. M. Whealton”

Chincoteague, united by no ties of interest to the rest of East Virginia, and dependent for its necessaries, its flour, tobacco, whisky, and calicoes, upon Philadelphia and New York, claims to have been during the war the only loyal portion of the eastern coast of Virginia. When the ratification of secession was returned to the votes of the people, only one man in Chincoteague, Joseph Hill by name, cast his vote for it - and then died. An immense Bell and Everett flag-pole, one hundred and twenty feet in height, was erected, - chiefly through the instrumentality of Mr. J. A. M. Whealton, one of the most prominent of the present inhabitants of Chincoteague, - and to the top of the pole were raised a great bell and a United States flag. It was distinctly seen from the main-land, and a deputation soon visited Mr. Whealton, demanding its removal.

“Gentlemen,” said the gallant little Unionist, “I erected that flag and bell, and when they go down, I go down with them; but so long as I have a dram of powder and an ounce of lead, and am able to use them, there they stay.” And there they staid.

But when the northern ports were closed to southern trade, Chincoteague suffered much. No flour, calico, or tobacco, and, what was worse, no whisky, could be obtained from the North. As to the South, it was more bitter against the so-called renegades than against the Yankees proper. A boat was loaded with oysters and sent to Philadelphia, only to be immediately captured. Another was started, and met with a similar fate. Then Mr. Whealton went himself, and, after much difficulty, secured the desired articles and conveyed them in triumph to Chincoteague. He then employed Dr. Snow of Snow Hill to plead the cause of the loyalists in Washington, and so well did the Doctor fulfill his mission, that the gun-boat “Louisiana” was sent to lie in Chincoteague Bay for the protection of the inhabitants. For two or three days the Secessionists, some two or three hundred in number, stood upon the main-land, about half a mile from the “Louisiana,” upon which they kept up a running fire, without, however, doing any damage. Soon General Lockwood was stationed upon the eastern shore, and then, with the protecting arm of the Federal Government around her, Chincoteague enjoyed her hominy-pots and whisky in unbroken felicity.