The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters
by Robert Lewis Taylor
Summary
Jaimie McPheeters is thirteen when his father decides that Louisville has nothing more to offer, that the gold in California is real, and that the two of them will join a wagon train west and go and get some. Cholera is raging in Louisville when his father decides California gold is the answer, and his mother finally lets them go.
Doc Sardius McPheeters is the reason the book works. He is educated, garrulous, generous and completely unreliable, a physician who gambles away money the family does not have and drinks when he should be sober, and the novel gives him room to explain himself at length while Jaimie reports what actually happened.
What happens is the overland crossing of 1849 at the length and pace it really took: outfitting, quarrels over provisions, weather, river fords, desert, Mormon settlements and the question of polygamy, and the pointless deaths of people the reader has been given time to like. Jaimie is captured by a raiding party, freed by a hunter named Coulter, and later owes his life to a Pawnee chief. The diggings, when the pair finally reach them, turn out to be mud, prices and disappointment.
Taylor writes a boy's adventure for adult readers, and the difference shows. The violence is not softened, the humour is dry, and the gold country is a business proposition rather than a romance.
Over five hundred pages, episodic by design, and it moves.
Best for readers who loved Huckleberry Finn and Lonesome Dove for the same reason, and who want a first person voice that keeps its nerve through material that would sink a more solemn book.
Historical Context & Significance
The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters won the 1959 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Doubleday published it in 1958, and by its publisher's account it has sold more than a million copies since publication.
Robert Lewis Taylor came to it from journalism and from comic biography, and reviewers treated the book as a deliberate throwback to the picaresque. Time compared Jaimie to Tom Sawyer while noting that he absorbs punishment at a rate closer to James Bond. The passages on Native custom and captivity are considerably harsher than the wagon train fiction of the period, which is part of why the novel was published for adults rather than for the children's shelf it is often shelved on now.
ABC turned it into a western series in September 1963 with a twelve year old Kurt Russell as Jaimie, Dan O'Herlihy as Doc, and Charles Bronson among the wagon masters. It was cancelled in March 1964 after a single season, which is roughly the shape of the book's wider reputation: enormous at the time, and now the least read Pulitzer winner of its decade.