A Man As Big As The West

There’s a table in the dining room of Sheila Schafer’s house in Medora that has hosted many important and not-so-self important visitors to Medora in the last 45 years. It’s “a large round mahogany table with a heavy center pedestal and four supporting legs, each ending in a finely carved dolphins head.” That description is from Nellie Snyder Yost’s biography of Ralph “Doc” Hubbard, and those are Doc‘s words.

Doc was the historian Harold Schafer brought to Medora in Harold’s early days of rebuilding that town in the 1960’s. Doc served as museum curator for the Museum of the Badlands that Harold created as an attraction for visitors. The museum sat where the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame is today.

Doc, born in 1885, was a colorful character, a pretty good Indian and Old West historian, a dreamer who never prepared for old age. So it was given to Harold, the philanthropist, to take care of Doc, who lived into his early 90’s. There were some medical bills and transportation costs that Harold had his Gold Seal company pay while he just looked the other way. Not ungrateful, Doc from time to time gifted or sold items to Harold from the historical collection he had picked up along the path of his life. There wasn’t much in the way of record keeping, but Rod Tjaden, who managed the Medora operation for Gold Seal for many years, told me once that there was no doubt that Doc got the better end of the deal. Harold never took advantage of anyone in his entire life, but that was often a one-way street.

One of the items that Doc sold to Harold was the table that Doc’s mother had built for their home in East Aurora, New York, on the Roycroft campus. Now a National Historic Landmark, the Roycroft Campus was home to an artistic revolt in the late 1880’s in the United States against the societal changes and restrictions ushered in by the Victorian Age. It was founded by Doc’s father, Elbert Hubbard and it became a Mecca for master craftsmen and a gathering place for notable artists, authors, philosophers, and power brokers, according to the Roycroft website (view it here) and Yost’s book. The elder Hubbard later perished as a passenger on the Lusitania.

Which brings me to the point of this post. Sorry for the long introduction. In the last years of Doc’s life, in the 1970’s Yost, no spring chicken herself, came to Medora for months at a time and interviewed Doc. The book which resulted, Doc’s definitive biography, carries Yost’s imprimatur as author, but it is mostly a first-person narrative as recorded by Yost. It’s interesting. I have no doubt that most of it is true. Most of it. In her introduction, Yost writes:

“Doc has had a lifelong love affair with words. Frequently, during the interviews, he would use a good descriptive word, then pause to ask me how I liked it. Over the period in which we were engaged in writing the book, Doc wrote me many letters. Here, too, his pleasure in words was evident and his breezy anecdotes a delight, right down to the signatures: Old Confucius, Rocky Mountain Moses, Sagebrush Socrates.

“A sincerely modest man . . .” she continues, and she goes on telling about how she had to learn a bit of his history from others.

Okay, Okay, I’m getting there. Back to the table. I sat at the table in the Schafer home in Medora the other night and looked through the book. As I said, the Hubbard home at Roycroft became a gathering place for the famous of the last part of the 19^th century and the first part of the 20^th. Let Doc take over:

As I look back on it now, the names of some of the people who sat with us at that table come to mind as follows:

Susan B. Anthony, American suffragist leader

Carry Jacobs Bond, writer of “The End of a Perfect Day.”

Mrs. William Jennings Bryan, wife of the great American statesman

Maude Adams, fine American actress

Edwin Markham, beloved American poet, author of “The Man with the Hoe”

Edgar A. Guest, American poet, author of “The House By The Side Of The Road”

Stephen Crane, author of "The Red Badge of Courage"

John Burroughs

John Muir

Ernest Thompson Seton, writer, painter, Boy Scout leader

Rudyard Kipling

Ella Wheeler Wilcox, American journalist and poet

Harriet Beecher Stowe, American writer, author of "Uncle Tom’s Cabin"

Isabell Irving, great English actress

Henry Irving, British actor

Ellen Terry, English actress

Eugene Field, American poet and journalist

Joel Chandler Harris, author, writer of Uncle Remus stories

Frank Bacon, actor and playwright

James Lane Allen, American novelist of Kentucky

George Washington Carver, American Negro botanist and chemist

Booker T. Washington, American Negro educator and author

Sherman Coolidge, Arapaho Indian, rescued from enemy tribe as a boy and named by an officer, a Coolidge relative

Joe Jefferson, famous player of Rip Van Winkle

David Bispham, fine singer

Clara Barton, organizer of the American Red Cross

Captain Jack Crawford, poet

Richard Le Gallienne

Anne Besant, famous student of Sanskrit and other eastern languages

Anna Kathryn Green, popular mystery writer of that period

Ida Tarbell, popular writer, exposed the Standard Oil scandals

Mark Twain

Eugene Debs

Margaret Sanger, famous American advocate of birth control

Judge Ben Lindsey, well-known Denver juvenile court judge

Gutzon Borglum, American Sculptor, carver of the Mount Rushmore heads

Clarence Darrow, famous American lawyer

Sir Harry Lauder, Scottish comedian, singer, and writer

Andrew Rowan

Whew! Doc later qualifies the list a bit:

“Some of these, such as Kipling and Crane, were our guests at Roycroft before Mother had the table made, and some came to visit her after she moved to Buffalo and took the table with her . . .”

Still, it’s an impressive list of guests for a table now sitting in little old Medora, North Dakota. One of these days I’m going to sit down with Sheila and have her try to remember some who have sat at it since its arrival in Medora.

Doc lived long and traveled much. Among his other acquaintances, some fleeting, some long lasting, were Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Buffalo Bill Cody, Jim Thorpe, Gene Autry, Owen Wister, Ben American Horse, (”last chief of the Teton Sioux Dakota Nation,”) Dan Beard, illustrator of Mark Twain’s books, and Dr. Charles Eastman, who, Hubbard says, was a witness to the Custer massacre as a young Indian boy and later became a doctor and treated the victims of the Wounded Knee massacre. Doc died in Dickinson in 1980, at age 95, and is buried in the Medora cemetery.

The book is “A Man as Big as the West” by Nellie Snyder Yost, published in 1979 by Pruett Publishing Company of Boulder, Co. It’s not one of the best books ever written about North Dakota, but it’s an interesting read. It’s out of print now, but still available from time to time from used booksellers. Doug Ellison at Western Edge Books in Medora says he still gets requests for it and has been thinking about having it reprinted. Ellison, also Medora’s mayor and a fine historian in his own right, was instrumental in 2009 in officially getting the street on which Hubbard lived in Medora renamed as “Doc Hubbard Drive.”

According to a story printed earlier this year by Kurt Eriksmoen in some North Daktoa newspapers, on May 14, 1983, astronomer Norman G. Thomas discovered a new asteroid in space that he named “Hubbard” in honor of Doc Hubbard. Doc would have liked that.