I shared on Veterans Day a poem written by Clint Parkhurst who, from October of 1870 until the spring of 1871, was John V. Faith's business partner and co-publisher at The Chariton Democrat. The two images above, both from the Library of Congress collection, depict Clint as a very young man, then somewhat older. He was 26 when he arrived in Lucas County.
A brilliant observer and talented writer, Parkhurst had been employed as a newspaper reporter and editor along the Mississippi's Iowa coast since his discharge from the U.S. Army at the close of the Civil War in 1865. He had worked in Burlington just before embarking for Chariton.
It's hard to fathom, 150 years later, why these men thought they could work together. Although both were Democrats and both employed sharp tongues and sharper editorial pens to express their views, they had little else in common. Faith was a Copperhead who had avoided military service and in general was a post-war Confederate apologist. Parkhurst was a proud combat veteran of the Union cause and a former prisoner of war, having survived Andersonville.
It was a happy incident that The Palimpsest published in a recent number a few of Parkhurst's Martial Memories, in which the private of the Sixteenth Iowa Infantry tells the graphic details --- spiced with humor and some self-mockery --- of the terrific Battle of Shiloh where he received his first and lasting impressions of war, for by that publication the interest in the author has been revived.
Where Clinton Parkhurst is living --- at an age of 76 or 77 --- the present writer does not know. Neither has he much knowledge of his doings after he left the Iowa Soldiers' Home at Marshalltown, of which he is reported to have been an inmate since 1895. As a matter of fact he probably spent comparatively few years at the Home for during that time he was for a longer or shorter time in various parts of the country --- East, west and south. But of the earlier years much can be told and the following account is an attempt to contribute some of the missing fragments of the "biographical mosaic."
The village of Parkhurst in Scott County, where Clint was born in 1844, and the neighboring village of LeClaire, which in 1855 were consolidated under the name of LeClaire, have been centers of intellectual life from their earliest days, and Mr. and Mrs. Lemuel Parkhurst, the parents of Clinton, were prominent in that society. His mother early recognized the bright qualities of her son and granted him every advantage for their cultivation.
Clint had his early training in a select school in LeClaire, taught by Mrs. Mary Marks, a highly educated English lady, the wife of an Episcopal minister. In Davenport he first attended the public school, then Iowa College, and after its removal to Grinnell, the Griswold College. He is said --- and probably truthfully --- to have been full of harmless pranks. He had a peculiar way of translating phonetically some silly Latin sentences: for instance, "Pastor ridebit" he would give in English "Pastor ride a bit," and for "Puer juraverat" he would say "The poor jury 've a rat." This sort of linguistic sport, however, was not always appreciated by the teacher. From early youth he evinced a remarkable gift for beautiful prose writing and also for versification which augured a great future.
In February, 1862, at a little over seventeen years of age, he enlisted in Co. C of the Sixteenth Iowa Infantry and on March 20th was sent with his regiment to St. Louis. There the raw recruit was equipped with a glittering rifle and other paraphernalia and was sent a few days later to war, the horrors of which he immediately experienced in the bloody battle of Shiloh. Never shirking from duty, or avoiding the perils of battle, he participated in all the important events of the various campaigns up to the battles around Atlanta, when he with the greater portion of the gallant regiment was captured and held a prisoner by the Confederates.
From the beginning of his military service he kept a daily record of all he saw and participated in, continuing it till the war ended, not ceasing to write secretly in the deadly stockades of Andersonville, Millen, and Florence. Thus he accumulated much highly valuable material which was later elaborated in a large number of war sketches and also furnished a delicate coloring for his different epical works.
Parkhurst was mustered out of service in July, 1865, and became a reporter on the Davenport Democrat, but soon shifted to a paper in LeClaire, thence to Rock Island, Moline, Muscatine, Des Moines and other places. In one or two of these papers he had even acquired a pecuniary interest. He never stayed long in one position, nowhere finding an opportunity that would suit his particular ideals of journalism, and he quit. He turned to writing magazine articles and other forms of literary work. For, as he says of himself, "from his very boyhood days, fame has been his constant dream."
It is difficult, almost to the verge of impossibility, to follow Clint Parkhurst's much twisted meanderings. One month he might be in Chicago or New York and the next in San Francisco, St. Louis or Tacoma, doing for a short time some editorial or other literary work, or he would spend weeks and months in the Sierras to gather new inspirations. In 1874 and 1875 he was in Mexico and Nicaragua, and the fruit of this jaunt was an extensive epos entitled "Sun Worship Shores." In 1876 he came from California back to Davenport, where in December of that year he was admitted to the bar of Scott County.
The subjects of his writings were almost exclusively historical --- biblical or secular. Numerous sketches from the Civil War have been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago News, the Davenport Democrat, the Omaha Bee, the Galveston News, the Boston Investigator, the Marshalltown Register, etc., either over his real name or the nom de plume "Free Lance." Several of the above named papers printed also large extracts from his epics, "Shot and Shell," "Judith," "Voyage of Columbus," "In Custer's Honor," "Pauline," "Sun Worship Shores," "Death Speech of Robert Emmett" and others.
Several times Parkhurst lost large parts of his manuscripts, in two instances, a whole book. Portions of them he resurrected from newspaper files, and in filling the gaps he also improved these works. In the winter of 1904, in his old home city and with many of his literary notes and treasures around him, he again prepared his writings, including a new epos of about 1,200 lines entitled "Tamerlane Victorious or the World's Desolation" for a book. When competed it went up with other matter in flame and smoke.
Newspapers generally are not inclined to print much rhyme, or long poetry. They view original verse with disfavor. But they were generous to Clint Parkhurst, giving much space to extensive extracts from his works, and these, at least, could be lifted out of their graves.
With book publishers he was much less successful. Byron once gave his publisher a splendidly bound Bible, and the recipient was proud of it until he happened to discover that his friend donor had altered the last verse of the 18th chapter of St. John (Now Barabbas was a robber) so as to read, "Now Barabbas was a publisher." Parkhurst came to the conclusion that most of the American publishers were Barabbases.
The last and probably the greatest of his many literary misfortunes was blended with the one of the city of San Francisco. In Ddavenport he had gathered from many newspaper columns a large portion of his poetical writings, which he rearranged, carefully improved and incorporated in a manuscript ready for the printer. This manuscript he sent in 1905 to his daughter, Mabel, in San Francisco --- as usual without keeping a duplicate. On the 18th day of April, 1906, that beautiful city was visited by earthquake and conflagration. His daughter did well enough to save her life, but all her belongings and the manuscript of her father were destroyed.
Parkhurst outlived this shock as he had many previous minor ones. In January, 1908, a Davenport friend received from his a hopeful letter out of the Missouri mountains. He wrote that he had taken up the life of a literary hermit. "I came to the wilds of the Ozarks last summer," he wrote, "and the venture has been a success. I own an acre of ground, have a good house on it, have a library of 50 choice volumes, and several dozen magazines and daily papers, and have every want supplied. My pension has been increased to $12 per month." He was enthused over the "glorious sceneries" and the "incomparable climate." His health was good. But the solitude there could not suit him for any great length of time. He returned to the Iowa Soldiers' Home, where he was in company with his old commander, Col. Add. H. Sanders. From that place he disappeared in August, 1913, after having spent there, off and on, periods of various duration. Nothing has of late been heard of any more literary work of his.
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As it turned out, Clint was alive and well and living in Tulsa, Oklahoma, then Lincoln, Nebraska, when he was considered to be among the missing in Iowa --- and he resurfaced promptly.
He had worked for a time as an editor for The Oklahoma World, then bounced to Nebraska where his last major work, "Songs of a Man Who Failed: The Poetical Writings of Henry Clinton Parkhurst" was published during 1921 by the Woodruff Press.
Among other attributes, Clint also was a notable drunk, although a pleasant one whose health does not seem to have been unduly impacted by his affection for alcohol, and stories pop up here and there in Oklahoma, Nebraska, even Utah, newspapers about some of his inebriated escapades during this period. Nothing serious, but he was fairly consistent about identifying himself as the oldest working reporter in the West when asked to account for himself.
Upon resurfacing, Clint scolded the Iowa Soldiers' Home at Marshalltown for using the term "deserter" when describing his departure in 1913 and for implying that he had lived there for 18 years. He pointed out, quite rightly, that Solders' Home residents could leave at any time and added that he had been a resident of the home on four occasions, totaling less than a year, at various times between 1895 and 1913. But added that he'd never lived anywhere for as long as 18 years.
Actually, Clint had made frequent use of homes for Civil War veterans as he roamed the country. Nearly every state had at least one of these homes. He was a resident of the Veterans Home of California when the 1910 federal census was taken.
In addition, several federally funded National Homes for Volunteer Soldiers were scattered across the country. Their records are available online and show that Clint spent the winter of 1890-91 in the home at Dayton, Ohio; more than a year, 1897-98, in Hampton, Virginia; part of the winter of 1910-1911 in Leavenworth, Kansas; and July-November 1915 in Hot Springs, South Dakota.
Clint settled down in Nebraska for the remainder of the 1920s, then --- nearly blind and entering his late 80s --- he was brought home to Davenport where his brother, Alfred, and sister, Anna Eldridge, lived.
From there he was taken back to his old refuge at the Iowa Soldiers' Home in Mashalltown where he died on Nov. 16, 1933, of heart disease and complications of old age, at the age of 88 years, 11 months and 7 days. Following funeral services in the home's chapel, he was buried in the home's cemetery.
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Clint had one more surprise up his sleeve. At some point in his life, he had been married and that union produced a daughter, Mabel K. Trousdale, during 1933 a resident of San Francisco --- where she had been living at the time her father's manuscript was lost in the 1906 earthquake.
It was assumed in Davenport that Clint had died intestate and that an estate with an estimated value of $1,700 would go to her.
Then it was discovered that Clint had an additional $1,500 in a Nebraska bank --- and a will on deposit with an attorney, Henry Brower, in Fullerton, Nebraska. In that will Clint disinherited his daughter by leaving $1,500 plus the balance of his estate after two smaller bequests had been deducted to a young woman named Freda Maxine Ranz, daughter of Fred and Ila Ranz, who apparently had taken care of him as his health declined in Nebraska.
Daughter Mabel challenged the will, alleging that her father was mentally incompetent and had been unduly influenced by Miss Ranz. The difficulty here was that Clint was not mentally incompetent, just old and infirm.
Rather than drag the case through court, the two women compromised. Daughter Mabel settled for the assets of the estate in Iowa, valued at $1,700; and Miss Ranz was allowed the $1,500 on deposit in Nebraska.
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His papers are held in the Iowa City center of the State Historical Society of Iowa, described in its online catalog as follows: "Scope and content: This collection is of particular interest for its Civil War materials, items related to the author Joaquin Miller, and Parkhurst's accounts of life in an Iowa soldiers' home. The collection is made up almost entirely of scrapbooks which contain correspondence, photographs, published and unpublished writings, articles and clippings. The correspondence includes letters to and from several notable people including General Rosecrans, Joaquin Miller and his wife and Mark Twain. In addition to the correspondence the scrapbooks include: title pages from several of Parkhurst's literary works; accounts of travels to Cuba, London and Paris; manuscripts and articles on general interest topics such as American filibusters, the Civil War, World War I, Mormons, and Latin America; notes related to publishers and his publications; accounts of life at the Marshalltown Soldiers' Home (1912-1913); poems; and a series of reminiscences of LeClaire, Iowa, published in the Davenport Democrat in 1910. The collection also includes artifacts from the Civil War and Andersonville Prison; an autographed copy of the 1871 edition of Joaquin Miller's Songs of the Sierras; a copy of Parkhurst's 1898 historical novel based on the Black Hawk War, A Military Belle; a postscript to Parkhurst's Songs of a Man who Failed (published in 1921); and a copy of the 1879 book The San Francisco Chronicle and its history (which may have been co-authored by Parkhurst). Photographs in the collection include those of prominent Civil War soldiers and members of Parkhurst's regiment."
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