Canada

Baum

How did he meet your mother?

Martinez

That was in Ontario, Canada. He was getting farm machinery there.

Baum

He still must have been an exceedingly young man. In 1886 he came over and in 1888 he married Margaret Ann Vandecar.

Martinez

I think he said he was 21 when he married.

Baum

You haven't told me anything about your mother.

Martinez

She was a heroic little person and would go through hell and high water for my father, whom she adored, cheerfully and uncomplainingly. She backed him at the start of his writing career, facing future hardship without a qualm, with the certainty he would be a great man.

She came, through her father, Winchell Vandecar, from Pennsylvania Dutch stock, noted for its fidelity and vitality. On her mother's side they were Scotch, from Boston, which promised an integrity and devotion characteristic of the Scotch. Her mother's name was Christie Ann Davidson, the name of Rockefeller's mother. It was sometimes customary for sisters to name daughters who came

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close together the same name when born in the same period, so they might have been cousins.

My grandfather, a rigid Methodist, was troubled by the increasing laxness of the time in America and decided to join a Methodist group that had migrated to Canada. So they settled in Ontario to live according to the dictates of their strict and disciplined religion. My father wrote up some of the stories my mother used to tell us of the harsh treatment meted out to "sinners" with fanatical righteousness. Nothing of this fanaticism seemed to have touched my mother. She had a gentle and sunny disposition, a grand sense of humor that took any hardship in her stride, a real intelligence that developed under my father, and a big heart that embraced humanity. I was so much influenced by my father's ironical or satirical bent, I did not realize until many years later my mother had a delightful American sense of the ridiculous and often used pantomime the better to point up our failings. When father was writing stories of this narrow community, she would never let him stray from the truth and reality of their lives. He relied upon her knowledge of her people to keep him from exaggeration or taking out of character the life he was portraying. I remember their arguments over these problems of her people, and she always won.

What drew my father to her was her blonde prettiness — he was very dark, you know — my Uncle Percy told me their grandfather, a Captain Whitaker, an engineer in the British Army, was working on

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some bridge project in Spain and brought home with him a Spanish bride. From her father inherited his black hair, hazel eyes, and dark skin. When he wore a beard and was properly dressed for the part, he looked like a Moor. So, he was drawn to her blonde prettiness, her sunny disposition and her sense of humor that, later, could survive all hardships. And, coming of pioneer stock, she would be a good farmer's wife and fit into his plans.

Baum

Was your mother religious?

Martinez

Yes, until life with father. She so adored him she gave up Methodism without a qualm or a struggle. Besides, she said, it gave her a sense of relief and of freedom to be relieved of the terrors of strict Methodism that weighed upon her during her youth. Father, too, had drifted away from High Episcopalianism when he left England. Though his contact with socialism, natural philosophy, and science made it easier, he never lost his love for traditional liturgies and choirs and I remember, as a child, they so often sang hymns together. Science then was almost a religion and was opposed to the orthodox religions of the world. She accepted whatever father believed in wholeheartedly.

Baum

You were the second child then, born in 1890 when your father was about twenty-three.

Martinez

Yes, and my father was the midwife for the six of us, bringing us into the world. We were snowed in for four months in the winter in Manitoba, and as we all disconcertingly appeared in the wintertime, he would come down from the Hudson Bay Fur Post where he was working

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to bring us into the world, and then return north.

Walker

Do you know what post he was working at?

Martinez

I don't know the posts for which he worked because he did not give exact names, though one could trace them by the locations.

Walker

It wasn't too far away from where you were in Manitoba, though.

Martinez

Not more than two or three hundred miles. That took you up pretty far north, though.

Baum

So during the winter your mother was alone with the children most of the time.

Martinez

She did not mind and was too busy with the care of children to have time to be lonely.

Baum

Do you remember anything of your life up there?

Martinez

Not at all. I was five years old when we left Canada. I remember a vague whiteness, that's all. My first memories really begin in a Seattle hotel, a small hotel in which a strong smell of pea soup pervaded the place!

Baum

Did your father look back on that period as a good period?

Martinez

Well, it was a period to gather material for writing. It was a hard life.

Baum

He wasn't nostalgic about it.

Martinez

Never! He didn't like pioneering, it was only the means to an end—writing. That reminds me of the stark beginning of a friendship in the north.

Father had written what he thought was a commonplace story — an experience of many of the post factors. He picked the most

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familiar name in the north, Cameron, and left out the name of the post designating its location in the far north, where he had never been, so vaguely that he thought himself on safe ground. A year after the story appeared in Harper's Magazine, he received a letter from a factor named Cameron who accused father of revealing the story of his life, and so accurately, that everyone on the post recognized it. He threatened to kill father if he ever appeared in that part of the country.

Father was deeply disturbed — it was the old story of the lonely factor marrying an Indian girl and having a bright son and the inevitable failure of the boy to make good despite all the advantages and the good education given him—-tragic stories, usually with slight differences in the end — suicide, alcoholism, and even murder. Father unwittingly picked the end that fitted the factor's tragedy — murder. My father's heartfelt regrets, explanations, and apologies satisfied the factor and, in gratitude for a real friendship that resulted from their correspondence, sent father a Cree Indian dictionary compiled by a Jesuit priest who lived in the Arctic. The covers of the old book still smelled of campfires and recalled to father the many hours spent in the posts.

Baum

How did your family come to leave Manitoba?

Martinez

He left Manitoba for several reasons — the challenge that set him pioneering died of the defeats inflicted by an inhospitable nature; the monotony of the hard life; and the last and most pressing, the

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dangerous feud with the Indians which never gives out until satisfied, that worried the Sheriff.

It seems that an Indian boy, a guide was accused of killing a white man and, justly too, as it turned out later — in self-defense. Our homestead was the closest to the Indian Reservation. Father had picked it because a former settler had done quite a bit to the land, the former settler and his family having been scalped by the Crees who joined the last Indian uprising, the Riel Rebellion, just two years before. No one would settle on the land until father decided there was no longer any danger. My mother used to tell how, in the Fall, the Sheriff used to urge her to cover the windows of the cabin in the month of October when the Crees had their Ghost Dances, in which they invoked the shades of their great warriors and might go on the rampage.

To return to the Indian boy, the Sheriff confided to father that, if he took the boy he would lose the friendship and the confidence of the Indians and would no longer be able to protect the settlers and preserve the peace with the tribe that trusted him. So father rashly said, "I'll get him for you" and with the proper papers given him by the Sheriff in hand, he walked into the reservation and demanded that the boy be turned over to him. The Indians were so thunderstruck by father's dignity and courage, they gave the boy up and father took him into Winnipeg for trial. The day of the trial the whole tribe appeared in war paint and with their weapons and the judge, sufficiently intimidated, decided the evidence was in favor of the Indian boy.

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Soon we experienced the wrath of the Indians. No longer did the Indian girls come to work for mother and all Indians who had been so friendly studiously avoided us. The crops were in and only stubble covered the prairies. That was a dry summer and the settlers were warned to be careful of fires. It was the warning of our good friend, the Sheriff, that saved us from a holocaust that would have taken all of us. He directed father to set back-fires around the area enclosing the corrals, barns and cabin and to have a fire guard around the place a day or two before the Indians set fire to the prairie. The enmity of the Indians was the last straw. His enthusiasm for pioneer life slowly ebbed under the implacability of nature and the hard and unrewarding pioneer life in Manitoba becoming a struggle for survival. In turn it chilled his response to the vast spaces that enclosed the Hudson Bay fur posts he loved. The rebellion of a romantic nature set in and revived his dream of California and set him into action.

Noting the sheriff's anxieties on their behalf after the prairie fire, father decided it was time to go. Knowing that no settler could leave the country with debts unpaid because they didn't want to lose a settler, father secretly sold what machinery he could and was able only to raise three hundred dollars — sufficient to carry Margaret and the youngsters down to Bret Harte's country, Oakland. So the old sheriff turned a deaf ear to the gossip about father's plans and hoped he could reach his goal. Dutifully, with a warrant, he accompanied Margaret on the Canadian train to the border, and with relief found that father was not there.

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Father found that after eight years of pioneering one couldn't win, at that time, in Manitoba. There would be an average crop of wheat one year, followed by a year of drought and a crop failure, the third year there would be a good crop, yet none of the settlers could break even and get out of debt. Now knowing there was no hope in a country in which one's problem was to survive, at least he figured he had accumulated enough material for a book or two on pioneering that might pay for all the hard work and disappointments.

Reluctant to lose her settlers, Canada had a law that no debtor could leave the country, so the only way out was to skip over the border. So his brother-in-law took him by horse and buggy through the Badlands of the Dakotas while father took notes for future stories, down to the Great Northern train that carried him to Seattle to meet Margaret and the children.