The Wildcat Trail
HAVE you ever invested in a company to get amber out of the Aral Sea, or were you one of the enthusiastic victims of the ‘Salt-Water Gold-Extract’ swindle, managed some twenty years ago by a Baptist clergyman at Narragansett Pier? Do you happen to own, as I do, single shares in the trust that is going to put a dumb-waiter to the top of Mont Blanc, in the SeattleHonolulu Aeroplane Projected Company, Limited, or in the Tunis and Timbuctoo Wireless Telegraph, with the right to send one thousand words, yourself, free of charge? If you are concerned in any of these great enterprises, you will have experienced that peculiar thrill of high adventure and old romance which alone inspires a man to participate (more than once) in the glorious deeds of our friend, the wildcat. But if you have never gone in for anything nobler than a steel bond, or if you have at most herded with the bulls and the bears and the shorn lambs, and have not followed the wildcat trail into the grander parts of the jungle, then I have a message for you.
But should there be a moral to my tale, I must beg you to add that for yourself; or else go to those steady financiers who never speculate, who only buy and sell securities: they can point the moral for you. And after hearing their fable of sugar and tobacco and oil and coal and beef, you may take your choice between becoming rich and buying another government bond. I can’t help you there, for I am no more interested in becoming rich, or buying a government bond, or pointing a moral, than is the wildcat himself. Like the wildcat, I am interested only in adventure and in philosophy; hence I wall have nothing to do with morals and securities. They are dull and unenlightening affairs. My message is the delight of a good honest risk. Now you have my point of view about both money and life, if you are one of those who distinguish between them.
But, you say, this is so impractical, so absurdly romantic! Are you sure? Take your wife and children, for instance: were they not once a good honest risk? What are you trying to make of them now, — securities! My dear sir, that is just what accounts for your present domestic malaise. You have been applying a financial system to romance. The trouble is not that your financial system did not apply; the real trouble has been all along that your financial system itself is thoroughly unsound. Of course, the very fact that it did not apply to romance should settle that point. It is only a fear that you have forgotten what romance really is that bids me continue.
What the romanticist is always looking for is a good honest risk. Sometimes they come in the mail. You very likely know how that is yourself, but you probably throw them all into the wastebasket. I have learned, however, to distinguish between the specious and hypocritical prospectus, that argues, on grounds of plausibility, the honesty of its intentions, and the circular which merely announces to you the existence of a bona fide risk, offering, at the most, a few entirely extraneous inducements to join in.
I got one of the latter sort this morning. It came in a perfectly plain, unpretentious envelope from Portland, Maine. The heading was, ‘THE LATINAMERICAN PEANUT COMPANY.’ I always know these things instinctively, and as I read these first fine words, ‘THE LATIN-AMERICAN PEANUT COMPANY, OPERATING THE BONGO RIVER
PLANTATIONS IN YUCATAN,’ with every syllable my enthusiasm rose. The romance of the thing! ‘Capital, so and so,’ — these little details are always unimportant. ‘Directors, so and so,’ — mysterious and alluring as figures at a masked ball. ‘COME IN NOW BEFORE WE GO up!'—this in red ink, rather ominous. ‘ONE DOLLAR MAKES YOU A SHAREHOLDER. ONE HUNDRED SHARES PURCHASED NOW may mean a fortune WITHIN A YEAR! HAVE YOU CONSIDERED THAT PEANUTS ARE THE GREAT AMERICAN FOOD? NAME ANOTHER GROCERY AS COMMON! COMMON, BUT NOT COMMONPLACE! (Read The Romance of the Peanut, sent free to every subscriber for one share of our stock.) REMEMBER! NO CLIMATE FOR PEANUTS LIKE YUCATAN — NO CLIMATE IN YUCATAN LIKE THE BONGO BASIN—WE OWN THE BONGO — ALL WE NEED IS DEVELOPMENT!! ’
Is not the art of advertising the great American art? Does this not itself show that we are really more interested in mind than in matter, if we only knew it? Like a good American, then, I was about to tear off the coupon, and invest — one dollar, — when my wife came in. ,
‘Here is the milk-bill,’ she said, ‘it’s eight dollars.’
‘Wait!’ I cried. ‘We are about to make our fortune, we can pay it then. Listen to this.’
My wife listened, and as usual at once proceeded to moralize the matter. Of course, she concluded, if I only wanted to invest in a little financial dissipation, there was certainly as small a chance here as anywhere of getting anything else back; but the baby had to have milk, fifteen-cent milk.
‘Let him be brought up on peanuts!’ I cried, beginning to fill out the yellow blank. ‘You always miss the point; who wants anything back? Is n’t it enough to be operating on the Bongo! Is n’t it more than enough to have such a circular to read aloud every morning before breakfast, like a collect for eternal hope! Ah, glorious peanuts! National food! What whiffs of memory you bring! The pathos of the streetcorner, the glamour of the grand-stand! And besides all these practical inducements,’ I continued, ‘listen to this: — “ WE INVITE all original holders of five hundred shares of our stock to make the voyage from New Orleans to Bongo AS OUR GUESTS, in the new steamshipyacht Filopena, to inspect for themselves these PROMISING PEANUT PLANTATIONS."'
The alliteration here seemed to me so fine that I looked up for applause.
My wife held out the milk-bill. ‘The man is waiting,’ she said.
Of course, if we are bound to be prosaic creatures bringing up a lot of milk-fed children, who will in turn settle down to a life of sheer health and success, put their money into sugar or pig-iron, and die softly on a fat bank account, we may feel that there is a fundamental fallacy in all the projects of the wildcat. I admit that, judged by our standards of success and pigiron, the wildcat often appears to be a trifle eccentric. In fact, he sometimes will not measure up at all. But that is largely because our point of view ignores the fact that, without some original wildcat, long ago, we should have no pig-iron and no consequent, success to judge him by to-day. The wildcat’s habits are adapted to his own peculiar aims; we must judge him and them together.
Let us look a little closer, then, at this creature. In the first place, he never herds; he is alone in the jungle. To the rest of us herded animals, therefore, he looks fearsome and fanatical. Yet, after he has blazed out the wild strange trails, and we have seen his eye, aglow with their wonders, gleaming with possibility, do not we, dull minions of success, follow cautiously after, when the danger and the glamour are passed, and the heroic wildcat, the pioneer, has roamed further, alone? Without him, the epic hero and true Titan of modern progress, should not the rest of us poor miserable tenderfeet still be hiding our talents in the proverbial napkin, and would not Calumet and Trinity be only as valuable as so many unburrowed rabbit-holes?
The wildcat has always been a lonely being, ‘a lonely thinker.’ From the day when Hercules set out to gather the golden apples in the Garden of the Hesperides, to the day when Sandy Nugget tramped over the Yukon Trail, he has wandered the wildernesses alone. No sociable three per cent comforts for him! With gigantic conceptions of possibility, he strides a continent for a shovelful of sand, he dives into the deeps for an oyster-shell. And what if, occasionally scattering his sand in our faces, he swears that it glitters like gold; and what if, rising with his oyster-shell, he cries, ‘Behold my pearl without price! ’ — what sort of success have we to prove the contrary?
The true wildcat appeals to the heroic side of all of us; for he fascinates us, not with fraudulent plausibility, but with the lure of the barely possible. He talks little of the security, much of the risk; and, as he speaks, it is not the flush of success but the gleam of the venture that lights his eye. So did Raleigh fascinate the court of Elizabeth, he who began by risking his cloak in the mire for the golden favor of her smile. What did he know of El Dorado? What did any of them know? They were not looking for a security, — those were the days when a bit of gossip about a painted Indian and a name like Orinoco could launch a fleet. Those wild days, you say, are well passed; if you heard of a venture like that to-day, you would buy another steel bond and hurriedly take out more life insurance. ‘Think of our wives and children!’ Think, says the wildcat, of getting your dividends in Spanish doubloons and pieces of eight! Think, you careful ones, who bury your dollars in the dust of Pittsburg and float them in the gas of Barreltown, think of the sensations of the man with a share in those old ventures on the Spanish Main!
The speculative philosophy of the wildcat is not to be dismissed too quickly. Three per cent is prosaic, not because it is small, but because it is certain. This was the motto of Dick Whittington’s fine animal, and he handed it down to all his progeny. Was it certainty that made a Dutch burgher, in the year 1634, pay fiftyfive hundred florins for a single tulip bulb, and watch its growth and its color as a gambler watches the red and the black at Monte Carlo? When it was perfect, a child broke the stem. What would your memory be if Barreltown burned to-morrow?
Occasionally, some one still understands this matter; and, though you say romance has vanished, it was scarcely yesterday that we proved the contrary. Up from the Caribbean to Wall Street there came a deep-sea diver, a man with a vision of gold scattered on a coral-reef, a man with an old story of the sea, such as you will always listen to, a story of treasureships, buccaneers of Tortuga, laden with the plunder of Mexican mines, and wrecked sometime in the days of Captain Teach on the Banner Reef off Jamaica. All this is history, of a sort; and the diver, having found the reef, came to New York to flash doubloons and pieces of eight, picked up on the sea-floor, in the eyes of respectable brokers and other philanthropists.
The reason he had not pocketed the whole treasure himself was twofold: first, he was a true wildcat; and, secondly, he had a theory that the enormous bulk of the treasure, in barsilver, had become imbedded in the coral, which in two hundred and fifty years had grown over it. But with a small vessel, a daring crew, some dynamite, and a grand-stand of awe-struck stockholders, the matter might be exploited. Thirty thousand dollars, say, as against a possible three millions; one to a hundred; and about as many chances of success. Still, bar-silver from Tortuga buccaneers, and Spanish doubloons! Security? — not a mite; but possibility — unlimited! There were still men enough on Wall Street to see such a venture through. And, just to enhance the affair, they bought the old cup-defender, Mayflower; for though she herself might be as rotten as the ark, her name and fame were part of the romance of the sea. Also the name of the commander, Guy Scull, — now by the bones of Captain Kidd, could it have been better! No wonder they took their money out of leather, and soap, and glue, and storage beef, and put it into this venture, — their one venture untarnished by thoughts of dross and calculations of plausibility.
To add a special zest to the expedition, it started in the hurricane season, since, between hurricanes, the sea is of all times the quietest and most favorable for diving. Before long came the first reports, accompanied by a photograph. The photograph was taken from the main hatch of the Mayflower. and it showed Commander Scull gripping with his legs the ten-foot stump of the foremast, the highest thing above decks, while he signaled for help with his shirt. Behind him, an enormous sea, which had left the deck awash, rolled to the top of the picture. That was off Hatteras. But just before she sank, they were saved by a Swede, and in Savannah they fitted out again, — this time in a brigantine. ‘A brigantine!' cried the awe-struck stockholders, ‘we should never have thought of that!’ And so, by February, they had passed Florida Straits and the Windward Passage into the blue Caribbean.
The Caribbean! with its trackless memories of ancient navigators: Columbus and Cortez; Pizarro, De Soto, and Ponce de Leon; Drake, Raleigh, and Granville; explorers and filibusters; the buccaneering crews of Morgan and Montbar, of Blackbeard Teach and Captain Kidd, whose flags, flying from St. Kitts and Tortuga, terrorized the Spanish Main from the Orinoco to Darien. The great commanders and their ships: Nelson in the Victory, Rodney in the Formidable, Tom Truxton in the unconquerable Constellation; discoverers, pirates, admirals; men of vision and action. So who cared how it all ended?
Yes, you say, the thing sounds well enough written up, and in a book it would — and so forth. That is just the trouble. You think of romance only as something unreal, or at least unsafe, except in books, in the past, in history. You do not perceive that it is the vitalizing part of progress which you look askance at in this spirit of romance, — but very likely you are regarded as a pillar of society for your solid, blind opinions. Your social fortune was dug out of Calumet, after the wildcat had broken the sod; it blossomed with the sugar-cane, after Raleigh and the rest of them died poor. A hundred years ago, or more, you were a part of history. To-day you are what? — a success.
You still feel, however, do you not, that there is something very unsound in all this, — unless, perchance, it is all only meant for laughter? Well, I admit it. There is something wrong with the wildcat. You see, his romantic philosophy, being the quintessence of all philosophy, could not well be like your financial system. Philosophy, heaven knows, has got nowhere as yet, compared with money. You can’t count on philosophy; it assumes no civic burdens; it has no reality.
Toward the end of the last century, a romanticist, one born out of due time, came to this country on an emigrant ship. He had seen Americans before; in fact, he was coming to marry an American woman in California. On the ship he met a man who appeared to him like a symbol, a personification, of something that had long been looming up with horrible ominousness. All the romanticist said about him was that, ‘His eyes were sealed by a cheap school-book materialism. He could see nothing in the world but money and steam-engines. He believed in production, that useful figment of economy, as if it had been real, like laughter.’
You may imagine that the romanticist did not accomplish very much in America with these ideas. He laughed a great deal, and wept, too, and before long he disappeared over the edge of the known world in his yacht, Casco. He was not one of us; he belonged to history. From out the past his philosophy sounds more and more like laughter.