Nowadays Biographers Have Fun
Lord Timothy Dexter,* like Cleon of Athens, was a humble tanner. He bought Continentals when they were becoming a curse. Alexander Hamilton funded the nation and Tanner Dexter moved into the show house of Newburyport, Mass., the Hub of that day. There was madness in the fellow, and method. Jibes and second sight pricked him to ship warming-pans and mittens to the Indies, coal cargoes to Newcastle. His profits startled. When he feigned dunce and cornered whalebone, the corset-makers "swarmed like hell-houns." He spelled worse than Chaucer, published oftener, drank constantly, crowned "a haddock-hawker his private laureate with a wreath of parsley.
He was most famed for his self-conferred title and his lordly mansion. Bristling with minarets, crowned with an eagle, this latter was approached through a triumphal arch surmounted and surrounded by regiments of heroes carved in wood, from Adam to Timothy Dexter. Long dead, he kept the world gaping.
Appended to Author Marquand's account is Lord Timothy's own opus, A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, admonishing: "Now I toald the all the sekrett Now be still let me A lone Dont wonder Noe more. . . ."†
Mormon Joseph Smith, Patriot Ethan Allen, Painter James M. Whistler, Mother-of-Faith Mary B. G. Eddy and Pioneer David Crockett are not such unfamiliar uncommon Americans** as:
Peter Cartwright, man of might and faith from Virginia. He tongue-lashed the backwoods yokelry until they jumped up, tore hair, foamed at mouth, shrieked remorse, fought Belial, collapsed exhausted but good Methodists.
John S. Mosby, "the Mad Anthony Wayne of the Confederacy." His flitting guerilla cavalry swooped up 6,000 Federal prisoners. He cut a lock of his hair and sent it to Lincoln, who laughed. He invented the phrase, "the solid South."
Susan B. Anthony. Snubbed by a male at a temperance ballyhoo in 1852, she mounted the Chautauqua platform, wore Turk-cut trousers, for Women's Rights.
George Francis Train. Boston-bred, he rode gold booms to great wealth; was offered the presidency of Australia. He introduced streetcars to Europe, projected the Union Pacific railway, owned half Omaha. He built a hotel in 60 days, circled the globe in 80, again in 62. He spent $2,000 a week, then proved he could live on $3. Never criminal, he went to jail 15 times, being president of "murderers' row" in the Tombs, Manhattan. He liked peanuts, squirrels, speed and free argument. Aged 74, he dictated a 100,000-word autobiography in 35 hours.
Martin Scott, of Vermont, was such a prodigious marksman that a raccoon made the immortal remark: "Capt. Martin Scott? Oh, then, I may just as well come down for I'm a gone coon!"
The Significance. Our biographers have fun these days. It is always time for sober-sided tomes about the orthodox great, but now is an hour when the public, jaded perhaps by its own mass, particularly relishes hearing about noted nonconformists, exotics, eccentrics. Lately we have had P. T. Barnum, Brigham Young, John L. Sullivan, Joseph Pulitzer, Paul Bunyan, buccaneers, hoboes, gypsies, jazz-boes.