Chapter 25
Toronto, Prince Edward Island, and New York City
The Ford family of Toronto had a talent for ending up on the losing side of American disputes.
Noah Ford - and his vocal loyalties to George III - lost his Vermont farm when King George lost the American colonies. The Fords ended up surviving but not thriving in York, Ontario when in 1812 an American force captured and burned the town and its fort.
In retaliation, Noah's son Liam joined with a force of British and Canadians under Major General Robert Ross on the Chesapeake Campaign. Liam Ford witnessed the capture of Washington and the burning of the White House. Then Liam was captured himself during the attack on Fort McHenry.
The Americans who captured Liam smiled and laughed. Upon hearing Liam declare himself a Canadian, their captain said, "You'll be a Yankee soon enough."
Liam did not become a Yankee. Released by the Americans after the Treaty of Ghent, Liam returned to his family in York. Within 20 years, York became Toronto.
Liam's son Bruce married a daughter of Simon Girty. Girty's name was mud to the Americans in Pittsburgh and in all of Pennsylvania and Ohio. During the 1812 War, Girty had fled to Detroit, and then after Detroit's capture by the Americans, into Ontario, where he died a Canadian folk hero.
The Ford family grew.
In 1859, young Hugh Girty Ford married Miss Alice Selwyn, formerly of Prince Edward Island. Owen Selwyn Ford was born in November 1860, the same month that Abraham Lincoln won the election for President of the United States. By April 1860, Hugh cast his sympathies with the newly formed Confederate State of America. In October 1864, Hugh assisted a group of American Confederate soldiers in taking shelter in Canada, crossing from Canada to the United States to raid a series of banks in St. Albans, Vermont, and then crossing back into Canada. The Confederates intended to use the proceeds from the bank heists to support the Confederate war effort. Montreal law enforcement arrested 13 of the Confederate bank robbers but then released them on a technicality.
Hugh Ford returned to Toronto, to his failing marriage with Alice Selwyn, and to his young son Owen.
After the Confederacy lost the American Civil War to the United States in 1865, ex-Confederates with financial resources, targets on their backs, and much to lose if they stayed south of the border fled to Toronto. Hugh Ford befriended and aided many of them.
Alice Selwyn Ford passed away on July 1, 1867, the same day celebrated for Canadian Confederation. Hugh Ford ran for public office several times as a Conservative. Hugh remarried and fathered several more children. Owen didn't care for his new stepmother or his new half-siblings.
Owen Selwyn Ford grew up craving the sense of honor that he believed Hugh forfeited with his political views and political actions. He grew up fascinated by the American Civil War and horrified by the own father's role - or alleged role - in aiding the pro-slavery American South.
Owen grew into a young man deep into establishing his Toronto newspaper career when word came over the wire of the event that defined the rest of Owen's writing career:
General Grant was dying of cancer.
General Ulysses S. Grant was the United States military officer to whom the Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered at the end of the American Civil War in 1865. He was the son of the Ohio leather tanner and self-made businessman Jesse Grant. Jesse Grant had secured for his son a spot at West Point, the United States Military Academy in upstate New York. Ulysses Grant graduated at the middle of his West Point class. He went on to serve as a junior officer in the Mexican American War. He won medals for bravery. Grant was then stationed in California. Grant resigned his military commission over angst at the separation from his young wife and children, and over an alleged alcohol problem. Grant lived in poverty for the next seven years, until the Civil War started. Grant received a new military appointment and rose to national prominence after a series of military victories over the Confederates. Three separate Confederate armies surrendered to Grant. In 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant and the Civil War ended shortly afterward. Grant became President of the United States himself from 1869 - 1877. He retired from public life to tour the world for two years with his wife Julia. He settled in New York City's Upper East Side and joined a Wall Street brokerage house.
That was the magic side of Grant's story. Grant faced allegations of alcohol abuse - and military blunders that resulted from said alcohol abuse - from his time in California up until his death. Grant's fondness for cigars was well documented by photographs.
In 1883, Grant's business partner Ferdinand Ward swindled their brokerage house's assets. Grant was financially ruined. Grant's investors - many of them war veterans who had served under Grant - also lost their investments.
Grant's sons all invested in said brokerage house. They ended up in their own dire financial straits with young families to feed. Grant's only daughter was stuck in an unhealthy and possibly abusive marriage that she would not leave for several years. So, Grant had to find a way to keep the wolves away from his family's doors.
Grant scraped together enough money to live and eat by writing a series of magazine articles about his military experiences. A publisher - The Century Company - offered Grant 10 percent of all sales for him to write his memoirs.
Grant began to write his memoirs. He prepared to sign the contract with The Century Company.
Fate has a sick sense of humor, though. In 1884, Grant learned that he was dying of throat cancer. Was it the cigars? The alcohol? Who knows?
By this time, Mark Twain (the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemons) controlled Charles Webster Publishing. Twain possibly wrote the Great American Novel. He was also a personal friend of the Grant family. Twain rushed to Grant's New York City residence. Twain claimed that he reached Grant just as Grant was getting ready to pick up his pen and sign The Century Company contract.
Twain advocated to Grant that The Century Company's contract was exploitative. Twain could offer Grant a contract that provided 70 percent of all sales. Twain proposed to Grant that they would sell the memoirs through a subscription system, in which door-to-door salesmen sold the book. Grant agreed to Twain's proposal.
Grant spent the last year of his life terrified that he would die of cancer before he finished writing. In 1884 and 1885, Grant wrote through his pain. Twain sat at his side, proofread his work, provided literary input.
The tumor in Grant's throat grew.
In the summer of 1885, Grant and his family left the heat of their Manhattan brownstone for the cool mountain air of the Adirondacks in upstate New York. Grant was too ill to leave his wheelchair.
Ulysses S. Grant completed his memoirs in late July 1885. He passed away on the morning of July 23. Grant spent his final week on earth writing the final pages of the story that he had committed to write.
Grant's memoirs were sold in two volumes through the subscription system that Twain proposed. Charles Webster Publishing presented Grant's widow, Julia, with a royalty check for $200,000 in 1886. Julia Grant received payment for the memoirs for the rest of her life. Grant saved his family from poverty.
This was the story that young Owen Ford from Toronto had been sent by his newspaper employer to cover in 1885. The story of the dying American president and general, racing against Death itself, to finish his own Life-Book.
There was another story in this as well - the story of Grant's friendship with Mark Twain. Mark Twain was born and raised along the Mississippi River in Missouri. In Missouri, some residents supported the North, and some residents supported the South during the Civil War. Twain briefly served as a Confederate soldier. Then, Twain stopped being a soldier. Did Twain desert the Confederate Army? Did he just informally stop being a soldier? Not much paperwork existed on the matter. Twain sort of mocked the whole thing in a short story that he wrote after the war. Twain established a career as a Mississippi river boat captain. Then he established a career as a writer. He transformed into a Manhattan publisher.
Ulysses S. Grant, the former Union general, made a lot of money for his beloved family from writing his memoirs nearly up to the hour of his death. Ulysses S. Grant also made a lot of money for his publisher, Mark Twain, the former Confederate soldier.
Young Owen Ford took note of all of this. He took note of the fortunes made and lost in the publishing industry. Owen never forgot the stories that he overheard of Mark Twain as a publishing titan.
In the spring of 1890, Owen came down with a serious case of typhoid. As he lay in his bed recovering, he thought Mark Twain's multiple successful novels. He thought about General Grant, laying in his own deathbed, writing his final testament to his own life. What if he, Owen Ford, were to die right now? He, Owen, would have no book to show for it. Just a series of newspaper articles that his employer assigned for him to write.
No Great Canadian Novel. Not even the Selwyn family memoir about life on Prince Edward Island that he had always intended to pen. Nothing.
Owen "recovered," but did he really recover? Owen didn't regain enough stamina to resume his newspaper career. Not really. What did the doctor call this weakness, again? Long Typhoid?
Fortunately, Owen had saved enough money so that he didn't have to return immediately to the Toronto newspaper. He resolved to visit the old Selwyn family home on Prince Edward Island.
That's how Owen Ford ended up boarding with Leslie Moore and her "disabled husband" Dick Moore at Four Winds on Prince Edward Island. That's how Owen Ford ended up falling in love with Leslie while Owen and Leslie and the rest of the world believed Leslie to be a married woman. Of course, after Dick Moore was declared legally dead and Owen and Leslie were free to marry, Owen and Leslie sanitized the story that they told their children Kenneth and Persis.
The revisionist history of his marriage aside, that's how Owen Ford ended up meeting Captain Jim Boyd and writing "The Life-Book of Captain Jim."
There were a LOT of "life-books" being written in those heady days.
For instance, everyone who had ever been an Important Somebody during the American Civil War and had lived to survive said war seemed to write a book about it after the war. Generals and other military officers - and their wives and widows - wrote memoirs to settle old scores, and to advocate their side of controversies over key battles and campaigns. Also to keep the wolves from their doors.
Confederate President Jefferson Davis's wife Varina helped her husband to complete his book "The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government." Varina Davis was a relative through marriage of New York newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer. After her husband's death, Mrs. Davis moved to New York and wrote an advice column for the "New York World."
George Armstrong Custer, the Union Civil War general and later invader of Native Americans who fell to Chief Crazy Horse at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, left behind his widow, Libby. Elizabeth Bacon Custer wrote multiple articles and books about her late husband and her claims of his heroism.
LaSalle Pickett, the widow of Confederate General George Pickett, wrote three books about her own husband's military prowess as a losing Confederate commander.
Jessie Benton, only child of United States Senator Thomas Hart Benton, eloped with wilderness explorer John Freemont when she was 17 years old. According to the lore, she snuck out of her bedroom window to marry the dreadfully handsome and dashing Freemont. Freemont became a politician and a Union Civil War general that Abraham Lincoln fired for disobeying orders. After Freemont's death, Jessie wrote stories about her husband's claimed adventures to pay her bills.
Lew Wallace, another Union Civil War general, wrote Ben-Hur in 1880. (Shortly afterward, a young Anne Shirley got busted by Miss Muriel Stacy for reading Ben-Hur during her lessons at Avonlea school.)
These were some of the writers who lived to see publication of their books. Julia Dent Grant and Mary Chesnut, the wife of a former United States senator-turned-Confederate general, both wrote memoirs that were published decades after their deaths.
Of course, all the names just mentioned here were Americans.
When Owen Ford wrote The Life-Book of Captain Jim, Canadians toasted and feted Owen for bringing literary accolades to Toronto and to Prince Edward Island. Owen Ford was one of them! Owen Ford's wife was "a leader in social and intellectual circles" in Toronto, "far away from Four Winds."
Owen became one of the rising literary stars of Charles Webster Publishing's Canadian imprint. Charles Webster Publishing invited Owen to a reception honoring its biggest names.
And this is where Owen met Mark Twain for the very first time.
Owen knew prior to the reception to not bring up the name of Charles Luther Webster the man. Charles Webster the man had run Charles Webster Publishing into the ground. Webster the man left Mark Twain to pick up the pieces. Twain had publicly described Webster as "one of the most assful persons I have ever met - perhaps the most assful." Twain straight out said to a group of other writers that he "never hated anyone as much as I" (meaning Twain) "hated Webster."
At the reception that night, Owen did make a slip-up - a very big slip-up - for which Twain never forgave him.
At the fancy New York City reception, Mark Twain ran his very newest book idea past Owen.
Twain's newest idea was for a sequel to both "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." In this new sequel, Huck Finn would be 60 years old and struggling with dementia.
The demented Huck Finn would travel through the country, seeking his old buddies Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher, but not finding them. The story would be an ode to the tragedies of old age and illness.
"I think it's a fine idea," Owen said to Twain that night.
Owen learned later that Twain was deep in the grips of a depressive episode when he plotted this novel and proposed it to reception invitees, including Owen. Later, after Twain recovered from his depression, he trashed the entire idea. He wondered whether those who had supported this terrible idea - including one Owen Ford - where merely agreeing to get into Twain's good graces. That was when Mark Twain first decided that he could not trust Owen Ford.
