Book of the Day: From 1906, "strong hairy men doing strong hairy deeds."

Rex Beach, Pardners (A.L. Burt, 1905, reprint of the 1905 first edition with Doubleday, Page & Co). Hardcover, green cloth boards, no dust jacket. 278 pp with four pages of Burt title ads in the end papers. Two b&w illustrations in the text, on coated paper. The front hinge is solid, though the endpaper cover is broken. Overall, in excellent condition for a book of its age. HBB price: $20.


He grew up in Florida, became known as The Victor Hugo of the North, and- a wealthy bestseller- retired back to Florida to make another fortune in flower bulbs.

Beach, portrayed by The Arrow Shirt artist, J.C. Leydenbacher

A fan, Western author Ron Scheer reviewed the book for his blog:

The subject of two prospectors working together as partners is at the heart of Rex Beach’s Alaska stories in this collection. One pair, Big George Brace and Charlie Captain, are featured in three of them. Involved in daring adventures, usually saving the lives of others, they eventually must confront a life-threatening risk that may permanently separate them.

“Where Northern Lights Come Down o’ Nights:” In this story, Big George and Captain are up against a rogue priest, Father Orloff, a Russian who has a wide influence among the indigenous Eskimo tribes. Receiving a cold and threatening reception as the two partners arrive in one of their settlements, they claim sanctuary in the church. There they wait through a storm and make plans to escape before Father Orloff shows up with the certain intention of killing one or both of them.

“The Scourge:” This, the most disturbing of the Alaska stories, has death by scurvy as its subject. George and Captain come upon an encampment of 125 newly arrived prospectors who have dug in for the winter. Instead of putting up log cabins for shelter, they are living in dugouts, where Captain tells them that without air, light, exercise, and the right diet, they are certain to fall ill.

Unwilling to take anyone’s advice, they stay put, coming to dislike the industrious duo, who venture out daily to work in the snow and cold. Without preventatives like potatoes, lime juice, and citric acid, they begin to develop scurvy and start dying in numbers.

Short on rations themselves, George and Captain are also at risk and nervously watch for symptoms of the disease. When George falls ill, Captain and another man, Klusky, start off on a days-long journey for fresh grub.

The title story, however, concerns a big, rough bruiser, Bill Joyce, who tells of taking a young tenderfoot under his wing. They have mixed fortunes as prospectors, but the real drama involves the young man’s wife back home.

When she doesn’t answer his letters, he gets so heartsick the two men return to the States. In Seattle, they find her singing in a variety show. She considers the marriage over because of some unflattering photos she has seen of her husband in the newspaper. In doing a photo feature on life up north, a sensation-seeking journalist has made him out to be a carouser and womanizer.

“The Thaw at Slisco’s:” Billy Joyce narrates this story as well. Several prospectors gather during a fierce winter storm in Slisco’s roadhouse, where they are joined by Annie Black, a hard and bitter woman considered with some contempt as a claim jumper.

When a nearly frozen Eskimo stumbles in out of the storm, they learn that two Swedes are still out in the snow about to perish. Annie marshals a rescue, shaming the reluctant men into leaving the comfort and safety of the roadhouse. The two Swedes are brought back alive. When a pretty young woman arrives in search of her mother, the mother turns out to be Annie.

There’s a recurring theme in many of the stories that defines character as the willingness to make sacrifices for the sake of others in distress. That sacrifice usually involves a risk to one’s own life. It matters not whether a person in need is an adversary. You put past differences behind you and go to his aid.

Captain in “The Scourge” agrees to stay with the dying Klusky, even though the man has been hateful and the delayed return to camp puts the life of Captain’s partner at risk. Annie Black in “The Thaw at Slisco’s” goes out in the storm to rescue the Lund brothers, who have been trying to force her off her claim, which is next to theirs.

The stories are an unembarrassed celebration of male bonding and undying loyalty to a mate. At the opening of “Pardners,” Bill Joyce argues that “the guy that alluded to marriages germinating in heaven certainly got off on the wrong foot. He meant pardnerships.”

In their general isolation from women, the men are sometimes surprised to learn that their assumptions about them have been wrong. One example is the formidable Annie Black, who storms her way through “The Thaw at Slisco’s.” Bill Joyce describes her as “tall, slab-sided” with a “disposition uncertain as frozen dynamite.”

But when she is reunited with her daughter, the men see the brave, tenderhearted, and self-sacrificing woman behind her rough and tough exterior. Observing the two women embracing, the men stand mutely moved, their throats aching, “like it was Christmas or we’d got mail from home.”

The stories show a gift for setting up a situation somewhere under a northern or western sky and building an adventure where men have to live by muscle, fearlessness, and wits. In the Alaska tales, there is invariably a great deal at stake. Situations are dangerous and life-threatening. Beach is especially adept at building suspense.

There is a sharp precision to much of his description, especially in the opening paragraphs of a story:

They were skirting the coast, keeping to the glare ice, wind-swept and clean, that lay outside the jumbled shore pack. The team ran silently in the free gait of the grey wolf, romping in harness from pure joy of motion and the intoxication of perfect life, making the sled runners whine like the song of a cutlass.

His descriptions of adverse weather conditions are vivid, and he is adept at describing how they register on the body:

The spray whipped into his face like shot, and froze as it clung to his features. He strained at his paddle till the sweat soaked out of him and the cold air filled his aching lungs. Unceasingly the merciless frost cut his face like a keen blade, till he felt the numb paralysis which told him his features were hardening under the touch of the cold.

Some of the stories introduce humor and irony. Those with Bill Boyce as the first-person narrator remind one of the Old Cattleman of Alfred Henry Lewis’ Wolfville (1897). Taking colorful liberties with the English language, he is an unfailingly entertaining and lively yarn spinner.

Rex Ellingwood Beach (1877-1949) was an American novelist, playwright, and Olympic water polo player.

Beach, c. 1894, at Rollins

Rex Beach was born in Atwood, Michigan, but moved to Tampa, Florida, with his family where his father grew fruit trees. Beach was educated at Rollins College, Florida for two years, where focused on athletics and science. He was the president of the tennis club and worked on "The Sandspur", the Rollins student newspaper. The Kent Law School alumni association remembered him as a happy-go-lucky sort at the strapped Rollins College:

Though the dormitories had no running water and the school had little financial support with which to better itself, Beach found happiness swimming in clear spring water, diving from rocks, and spending hot afternoons “refresh[ing] the girls by allowing them to watch us cavort in the cool, clear depths.” He spent his monthly allowance on soda pop. “I indulged myself to the full and lurched back to the campus belching luxuriously in assorted flavors,” he wrote. At Rollins, Beach also had several disagreements with the college administration. In 1892, he was severely reprimanded by the college president for the “heinous” crime of sailing on a Sunday. The next week, he was suspended for attending a late night party in Orlando. 

Though he was eventually reinstated at Rollins, Beach was certain that his calling was to become a lawyer, and left the school a year early bound for Chicago, where his two older brothers practiced law. “I proposed to enter their office, rapidly make myself a partner in the firm, then become a Justice of the Supreme Court and live in Washington,” he wrote of his plans. “There being nine Justices and only one President it looked like a cinch. Furthermore I had always wanted to own a black lounging robe.”

He also attended Chicago College of Law (1896-7), and Kent College of Law, Chicago (1899-1900). In 1900 he was drawn to Alaska at the time of the Klondike Gold Rush. After five years of unsuccessful prospecting- some time as a Chicago Athletic Association pro football player, and a silver medal as a member of the 1904 US Olympic water polo team, he turned to writing.

Beach, undated, diving

Pardners (1905)- a collection of ten stories-  was his first publication. Serialized in the Frank Leslie/McClure’s magazines, the stories were an instant best-seller: so much so that Beach was not just a guest but a speaker at Mark Twain’s legendary 70th birthday party in December 1905.

He wrote a friend, ““I stuck till the bell and got the decision. . . They say I was the only one to make old Mark laugh, and gave me second place. He took first money with the greatest speech I ever heard. . .”

From the 12/23/1905 Harper' Weekly supplement covering the Twain birthday speeches

His second novel The Spoilers (1906) was based on a true story of corrupt government officials stealing gold mines from prospectors, which he witnessed while he was prospecting in Nome, Alaska. The Spoilers became one of the best selling novels of 1906, selling over 700,000 copies.

His adventure novels, influenced by Jack London, were immensely popular throughout the early 1900s. Beach was lionized as the "Victor Hugo of the North," but others found his novels formulaic and predictable. Critics described them as cut from the "he-man school" of literature: stories of "strong hairy men doing strong hairy deeds." Alaska historian Stephen Haycox has said that many of Beach's works are "mercifully forgotten today.”

After success in literature, many of his works were adapted into successful films; The Spoilers became a stage play, then was remade into movies five times from 1914 to 1955, with Gary Cooper and John Wayne each playing "Roy Glennister" in 1930 and 1942, respectively. Beach collected writing and producing fees every time, and among the uncredited players of the 1942 version (he was playing himself), was another Klondike-era writer, the Canadian poet Robert W. Service.

Marlene Dietrich and Robert Service on the set of The Spoilers #4, 1942

Beach retained most of his film rights (he called Hollywood ““eccentric, mildly mad…It runs a fever that infects most of the people in it”)  and occasionally produced his films and also wrote a number of plays to varying success.

In 1926 Beach was paid $25,000 to write a brochure entitled The Miracle of Coral Gables to promote the real estate development of Coral Gables, a planned city. Beach settled in Sebring, Florida, where he went into farming.  He owned 7,000 acres near Sebring and 5,000 acres near Indiantown.  He used scientific methods of raising cattle, and also produced two crops of celery a year on 70 acres between Sebring and Avon Park, and endorsed a line of cigars.

The raising of gladiolus bulbs made him a second fortune to rival the one he made as a famous Florida author. He tried for a third fortune with a bulb farm in Mexico, which failed.

His 1935 novel "Wild Pastures" is set in the cattle lands around Sebring. A decade earlier, Beach told a reporter, “Florida is the only pioneer state left in the Union. I hope the reformers don’t get here and spoil it all. We need some sort of sanity and tolerance. Today Florida is that center...I wish a Catholic could be elected President. The Protestants have failed miserably.”

In 1949, two years after the death of his wife, and in failing health, Beach committed suicide at the age of 72.

Though he lacked a degree, Beach was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1927 and a posthumous BA in 1997, and served as the first president of the Rollins College Alumni Association until 1940. He and his wife are buried in front of the Alumni House. His papers are at Rollins, which named a residence hall for him in 1958.