Fitz Hugh Ludlow

Fitz Hugh Ludlow, sometimes seen as "Fitzhugh Ludlow", (September 11, 1836 – September 12, 1870) was an American author, journalist, and explorer; best-known for his autobiographical book The Hasheesh Eater (1857).

The heart of the continent

In 1863 Albert Bierstadt was at the peak of a career that would make him America's top landscape artist. Ludlow considered Bierstadt's landscapes representative of the best American art of the era and used his position as art critic at the New York Evening Post to praise them.

Related Topics:
1863 - Albert Bierstadt - America - New York Evening Post

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Bierstadt wanted to return West, where in 1859 he had found scenes for some of his recently successful paintings. He asked Ludlow to accompany him. Ludlow's writings about the trip, published in the New York Evening Post, the San Francisco Golden Era, the Atlantic Monthly and then later compiled into book form, according to one biographer of Bierstadt, "proved to be among the most effective vehicles in firmly establishing Bierstadt as the preeminent artist-interpreter of the western landscape in the 1860s."

Related Topics:
1859 - New York Evening Post - San Francisco Golden Era - Atlantic Monthly

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During the overland journey, they stopped at Salt Lake City, where Ludlow found an industrious and sincere group of settlers. He brought to the city prejudice and misgiving about the Mormons, and a squeamishness about polygamy which embarrassed him almost as much as his first view of a household of multiple wives. "I, a cosmopolitan, a man of the world, liberal to other people's habits and opinions to a degree which had often subjected me to censure among strictarians in the Eastern States, blushed to my very temples," he writes.

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He couldn't believe that a pair of co-wives "could sit there so demurely looking at their own and each others' babies without jumping up to tear each others' hair and scratch each others' eyes out… It would have relieved my mind… to have seen that happy family clawing each other like tigers."

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His impressions of the Mormons came when Utah was seen by many of his readers back home as rebellious and dangerous as those states in the Confederacy. Ludlow encountered frequent snide comments about the disintegration of the Union, with some Mormons under the impression that with the flood of immigrants to Utah fleeing the draft, and with the decimation of the male population in war time making polygamy seem more practical, the Mormon state would come out of the American Civil War stronger than either the Union or the Confederacy. Ludlow's opinions were read with interest back East, and would constitute an appendix to the book he would later write about his travels.

Related Topics:
Mormons - Confederacy - Union - Utah - American Civil War

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"The Mormon system," wrote Ludlow, "owns its believers - they are for it, not it for them. I could not help regarding this 'Church' as a colossal steam engine which had suddenly realized its superiority over its engineers and... had declared once for all not only its independence but its despotism." Furthermore, "t is very well known in Salt Lake City that no man lives there who would not be dead tomorrow if Brigham willed it so." Ludlow spent considerable time with Orrin Porter Rockwell, who had been dubbed the "Destroying Angel" for his supposed role as Brigham Young's assassin of choice. Ludlow wrote a sketch of the man which Rockwell's biographer, Harold Schindler, called "the best of those left behind by writers who observed the Mormon first-hand." Ludlow said, in part, that he "found him one of the pleasantest murderers I ever met."

Related Topics:
Mormon - Salt Lake City - Brigham - Orrin Porter Rockwell - Harold Schindler

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Ludlow wrote that "n their insane error, are sincere, as I fully believe, to a much greater extent than is generally supposed. Even their leaders, for the most part, I regard not as hypocrites, but as fanatics." For instance, "Brigham Young is the farthest remove on earth from a hypocrite; he is that grand, yet awful sight in human nature, a man who has brought the loftiest Christian self-devotion to the altar of the Devil…" A warning that must have seemed especially poignant was this: "he Mormon enemies of our American Idea should be plainly understood as far more dangerous antagonists than hypocrites or idiots can ever hope to be. Let us not twice commit the blunder of underrating our foes."

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Ludlow occasionally expressed racial bigotry in his writings. Contrary to his progressive nature, inquiring mind, and abolitionist politics, we find him describing a "motherly mulatto woman" as possessing "the passive obedience of her race;" or Mexicans in California described as originating from "a nation of beggars-on-horseback… the Spaniards, Greasers, and Mixed-Breeds…;" or Chinese immigrants in "a kennel of straggling houses" with Ludlow imagining them "finally… swept away from San Francisco, and that strange Semitic race… either exiled or swallowed up in our civilization…;" or "the natural, ingrained laziness of the Indians."

Related Topics:
California - San Francisco - Semitic

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Native Americans were a particular target of his bigotry. "The copper-faced devils" he called them, and he looked with scorn on "the pretty, sentimental, philanthropic prayers" that constituted much of the contemporary literature about the "noble savage." Ludlow believed the "Indian" was subhuman - an "inconceivable devil, whom statesmen and fools treat with, but whom brave and practical men shoot and scalp."

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During his stay in San Francisco, Ludlow was a guest of Thomas Starr King, the youthful California preacher and passionate public speaker.

Related Topics:
San Francisco - Thomas Starr King - California

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There, Ludlow again found himself in a vibrant literary community, this time centered around the Golden Era, which published Mark Twain, Joaquin Miller and Bret Harte. Twain was at the time still a virtual unknown (he had first used the pen name "Mark Twain" in a published piece a few months before). Ludlow wrote that "n funny literature, that Irresistable (sic) Washoe Giant, Mark Twain, takes quite a unique position.… He imitates nobody. He is a school by himself." Twain reciprocated by asking Ludlow to preview some of his work, and wrote to his mother, "if Fitz Hugh Ludlow, (author of 'The Hasheesh Eater') comes your way, treat him well.… He published a high encomium upon Mark Twain, (the same being eminently just & truthful, I beseech you to believe) in a San Francisco paper. Artemus Ward said that when my gorgeous talents were publicly acknowledged by such high authority, I ought to appreciate them myself…"

Related Topics:
Mark Twain - Joaquin Miller - Bret Harte - Sic - Artemus Ward

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Ludlow also observed the ravages of opium addiction among the Chinese immigrant population in San Francisco:

Related Topics:
Opium - San Francisco

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:I shall never forget till my dying day that awful Chinese face which actually made me rein my horse at the door of the opium hong where it appeared, after a night's debauch, at six o'clock one morning.… It spoke of such a nameless horror in its owner's soul that I made the sign for a pipe and proposed, in "pigeon English," to furnish the necessary coin. The Chinaman sank down on the steps of the hong, like a man hearing medicine proposed to him when he was gangrened from head to foot, and made a gesture, palms downward, toward the ground, as one who said, "It has done its last for me — I am paying the matured bills of penalty."

Related Topics:
Hong - Pigeon

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From San Francisco, Bierstadt and Ludlow ventured to Yosemite, then to Mount Shasta, and then into Oregon, where Ludlow was struck "by a violent attack of pneumonia, which came near terminating my earthly with my Oregon pilgrimage" and which stopped their wandering for the better part of a week.

Related Topics:
San Francisco - Yosemite - Mount Shasta - Oregon

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By late in 1864, after Ludlow's return to New York, his marriage was in trouble. The reasons for the strife are unknown, but surviving letters suggest a mutual and scandal-provoking flood of infidelity. Rosalie obtained a divorce in May of 1866. She would, a few months later, marry Albert Bierstadt.

Related Topics:
1864 - New York - 1866 - Albert Bierstadt

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Fitz Hugh meanwhile was again trying to kick a drug addiction, but he quickly started up a relationship with Maria O. Milliken, of whom little is known except that she was ten years his senior. They were married shortly after Rosalie's marriage to Bierstadt.

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