#1 The Secret of Jungle Park by Laura Lee Hope (Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1987.
Before I begin, I’d like to acknowledge Sean Hagins, for supplying me with photos of this book! Usually, I take pictures of books myself, but I just couldn’t find a physical copy of this one. Sean is a big fan of the Bobbsey Twins, particularly the New Bobbsey Twins mysteries, and you can see some of his video reviews as well as videos about his photography work on his YouTube channel, SJHFoto. Thanks, Sean!
Twelve-year-old twins Nan and Bert Bobbsey are part of a rock band with some of their friends. They call themselves The Aliens, and they’re participating in a Battle of the Bands at the amusement park Jungle Park. Nan plays the keyboard, Bert plays the drums, and their friends, Jimmy and Brian, play guitars. Flossie, their younger sister, wishes that she could join the band, too, but she’s still too young. Flossie and her twin brother, Freddie, are there to help their older siblings get ready and watch them perform. (And, the case of the boys, use some fake blood to play a trick on the girls.)
While they watch the first bands perform, they see some smoke. At first, they think that it’s just a stage effect, but it becomes thicker, and they realize that something is really wrong! Most of the audience flees, but Bert stays behind to save his band’s equipment. Nan tells him it was a dangerous thing to do, but Bert says that he doesn’t think it was a real fire. Fire fighters come, and so does their police officer friend, Lieutenant Pike. Lieutenant Pike also tells Bert that he took a foolish risk, but he agrees with Bert’s impression that the smoke was actually caused by a smoke bomb. Even though a smoke bomb isn’t real fire, setting one off in a crowded auditorium can still be very dangerous because someone could have been hurt in the panic when everybody rushed out.
Lieutenant Pike confides in the children that the police have been called to the park three other times recently for other apparent accidents and problems. He says that if things like this keep happening, they might have to shut down Jungle Park due to safety concerns. The four Bobbsey Twins don’t think that’s fair. They love Jungle Park, and they want to catch the person who set the smoke bomb!
Lieutenant Pike lets the kids look around after the police and fire fighters are finished with the auditorium. There are two clues that they find: a black eye patch and a swizzle stick. Bert doesn’t think that the swizzle stick is much of a clue, but Freddie thinks it might mean something. The eye patch points to two possible suspects that the kids know about: a member of a rival band in the contest and a man the girls saw who was lurking around the dressing room area. Bert thinks that the rival band was trying to disrupt the contest so they would win, but the others aren’t so sure. It turns out that the guy with the eyepatch was hired by one of the owners of the park to make some repairs, but could he have been hired to do more than that? Could one of the owners have a reason to make sure the park closes? What about the woman who takes care of the animals at the park? She doesn’t seem happy about the conditions they’re kept in.
As the kids investigate their suspects, they get chased by elephants, hunt for a suspect in a fun house, tackle someone in a gorilla suit, and win the band contest!
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
Like Sean, this particular Bobbsey Twins series was the one that I read as a kid. I didn’t even know the difference between the New Bobbsey Twins series and the earlier series until I was older. The Bobbsey Twins series, like other Stratemeyer Syndicate series, is typically set contemporary to when the stories were written, so the New Bobbsey Twins series is set in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when they were originally written and published.
That time period was when I was a kid myself, so things that the kids did in the New Bobbsey Twins series were very like things kids my age were doing when I was a kid. A lot of kids wished that they could be part of a band. At one point, Flossie talks about something she saw in a teen fashion magazine. Flossie isn’t a teenage herself, but as I recall, teen magazines were largely popular with pre-teens (or “tweens”), who wanted to look like teenagers. Later, she pretends to be collecting signatures for Save the Whales, which was a popular and well-known cause at that time.
The mystery in this book was pretty good. I was sure from the beginning that the kid from the rival rock band wasn’t the park saboteur, but I wasn’t completely sure which of the adults was responsible for much of the book.
The Bobbsey Twins’ Adventure in the Country by Laura Lee Hope,1907, 1961.
Before I explain the plot of this story, I have to explain that this is one of the early Bobbsey Twins books, originally published in the early 20th century, and like other Stratemeyer Syndicate books that were still in print during the mid-20th century, it was revised from its original form to update the language, culture, and technology in the story and, especially, to remove questionable racial terms and caricatures. The physical copy of the book I read as a kid was the revised version, and I didn’t know about the revisions until I was an adult. When I describe the plot at first, I’m talking about the revised version, but I’m also going to explain some of the differences between the original version and the revised version, so you can see what changed.
The two sets of Bobbsey Twins (Nan and Bert are the elder set of twins and Freddie and Flossie are the younger set) are enjoying their summer vacation at home when their mother receives an invitation for the family to visit the children’s aunt and uncle on their farm and to attend an auction that will be held somewhere nearby. The aunt says that there is something that will be sold at the auction that she thinks will interest the family, but the adults are keeping it as a surprise. The children are excited because they like visiting the farm, and they’ve never been to an auction before.
Mr. Bobbsey has to work at his lumber yard, so the children and their mother take the train to the farm ahead of him, accompanied by their cook/housekeeper, Dinah. (Dinah is black and is a recurring character in the series. The book refers to her as “colored.”) The train trip is a bit chaotic because they nearly forgot to bring their packed lunch, and then, Fred’s cat escapes from its carrier and is nearly left behind when they reach their destination. However, they do get there safely.
At the farm, the children enjoy seeing their cousin, Harry, and visiting all the animals. Freddie loses one of the calves when he tries to take it for a walk, like it’s a dog, and at first, the children fear that it fell in the river and drowned. Fortunately, someone from a nearby farm finds the calf and brings it home. These unrelated misadventures are just the beginning of the children’s summer because there is a mystery that seems to be unfolding at the farm.
On their first night at the farm, Flossie wakes up in the middle of the night because she hears someone playing the piano. She wakes Nan, and the two of them go downstairs, but by the time they get there, whoever was playing the piano is gone. At first, the children’s uncle thinks that it was just a dream, but Nan knows that it wasn’t because a piece of sheet music was knocked off the piano. Later, when they hear the piano at night again, there are smudges on the keys.
The auction is fun. The children each have a little money to buy something small for themselves, just for the experience of bidding on something at an auction. They all find something to buy, and some of the things they find are funny and eclectic. The mystery object that their mother is there to buy is a pony and cart. A neighbor of the aunt and uncle had a pony and cart that his grandchildren used, but they’ve moved away, and the Bobbseys have decided to buy it for their children. The twins’ aunt and uncle are willing to keep them at their farm because they can’t have a pony in the city, and their cousin can use them when the twins aren’t there. The children love the pony, and they have fun with him and the cart with some other kids. However, when they return to the farm after they auction, they discover that the family’s prize bull has been stolen!
The story is somewhat episodic, but there is a thread of mystery that runs through the whole book as the children try to find the missing bull. There’s a boy from New York City who was lost from a group heading to a nearby Fresh Air Camp (part of a charity that has existed since the 19th century to provide poor city children with enriching summer experiences in the countryside – I referred to it before in another vintage children’s book, Ruth Fielding at Sunrise Farm) who witnessed the theft but didn’t realize that the men he saw didn’t own the bull. There’s a Fourth of July celebration and a picnic with other kids, including a local bully. There is some real danger, where Flossie falls over the edge of a cliff and has to be rescued, and the family has to evacuate the farm temporarily when they fear that a nearby dam might break after a fierce storm. Along the way, the Bobbsey twins gather pieces of information that help them find the missing bull.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). The original edition of the book is public domain and available online through Project Gutenberg.
My Reaction
The Mystery
The mysteries in the story are pretty simple. The story is pretty episodic, and the nighttime piano-playing is unrelated to the theft of the bull. The reasons for that are partly related to the way the book was written in the original version. Originally, the book was more of a general collection of stories about how the Bobbsey Twins spend their summer on their aunt and uncle’s farm and have little adventures there, and it wasn’t really a mystery story. One of the features of Stratemeyer Syndicate books is that chapters are always supposed to end on cliffhangers to keep the stories exciting and encourage children to keep reading. That format lends itself well to the mystery genre, which is why some Stratemeyer series that originally started as more general fiction or adventure gradually evolved into mysteries, but some of the early books, like this one, kind of end up being somewhere between mystery and general fiction and read almost like collections of shorter, interrelated stories.
The theft of the bull didn’t occur at all in the original story, but there was a thread through the book about the piano playing at night. In both the new and the old versions, they eventually find out why, but there are different explanations between the versions. In both versions, the nighttime piano player is an animal, not a human.
Original Version vs. Revised
Like other Stratemeyer Syndicate books that were in print in the mid-20th century, the early Bobbsey Twins books were revised and reprinted around the time of the Civil Rights Movement, both to update the technology and slang in the stories and to remove inappropriate racial language. The 1960s edition of the book uses the word “colored” to refer to the housekeeper/cook who works for the Bobbsey family and her husband, which was an acceptable term in the early and mid-20th century (as in The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP), but the word “black” became the common accepted informal, generic term and “African American” became the accepted formal, specific term post-Civil Rights Movement because people were trying to distance themselves from racial words that, while they were not meant to be derogatory, had some emotional baggage attached to them. In the case of this particular book, the changes from the original version to the version I have include making Dinah more intelligent and eliminating the use of stereotypical black people speech. In the original book, even though she’s an adult, Dinah seems childlike in her reactions to things and seems to need the children to explain things to her, like the scale they see at the train station. When she speaks, her speech is spelled out with a strong accent (ex. “dat chile” instead of “that child”), and she throws out phrases like, “Lan’ o’ massy!” In the revised version, she acts and speaks more like the other adults.
Something else that changed from the original version is how much emphasis there was on poor people vs. upper middle class people, like the Bobbseys. The older version of the story emphasizes more how poor the kid from the Fresh Air Camp is and how charitable the Bobbseys are toward him. There are also other instances of charity toward the poor, like when Nan lends another girl a dress because they need to wear white dresses for the Fourth of July celebration, and the other girl doesn’t have a white dress. The book is careful to mention that nobody else knows that the other girl was borrowing a dress from Nan, with the implication that it would have been embarrassing or a mark of shame for people to know that it was a borrowed dress instead of one of her own. Things like this appear in many vintage children’s books from the 19th century and early 20th century, but it’s not something you find much in modern modern books, at least not described like that. Even when I was a middle-class kid in the late 20th century, it wouldn’t be assumed that a kid would necessarily have certain types of clothes for a special occasion or that their family would be able to just quickly buy something new for one-time use. It was also normal for people to borrow things from friends, even just on whims, so borrowing a dress for one-time use for a special occasion wouldn’t have been regarded as either an act of charity or anything to cause embarrassment, if other people just happened to know about it.
Even though there are things in the stories that were changed to make the stories contemporary with the time of the revisions, the 1960s, there are still aspects of the stories that would be out-of-date culturally by 21st century standards. One of those issues relates to how the adults in the story handle the children. One of the adults in the story tries to resolve the bully situation by letting Bert physically fight the boy who was picking on him, telling both the boys to wrestle with each other to settle their differences and get it all out of their systems. This is not advice that most modern adults would give to kids, and one good reason for not giving that advice is that it doesn’t work, not even in this book. First of all, the kid being bullied might not be the winner of the wrestling match in real life, and no kid should be forced to fight physically just because some bully wants to beat them up. In the book, Bert wins the wrestling match because he’s had wrestling classes before, but as the case would probably be in real life as well, it resolves nothing. The bully is resentful about losing the fight and continues to bully him and play mean tricks on the other kids. The bully episodes are basically there just to add conflict and excitement to the story, and they don’t do much more than that.
I was a little surprised that they left in the part from the original story where the kids put on their own circus, and they have an act they call the “Sacred Calf of India.” In the revised version, Nan wears an improvised sari for this act, and they teach the calf to do a trick. Animals doing cute little tricks are just fine, but adding in the exoticism seems in poor taste. I suppose that they left this part in the revised version because it’s not trying to be insulting to people from India, more that the kids are trying to play on the concept of circus acts and snake charmers, but it is another example of something that you find sometimes in vintage books but wouldn’t be likely to find in modern ones.
The Bobbsey Twins of Lakeport by Laura Lee Hope (Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1904, 1961.
Before I begin discussing the story, I need to explain that this story, I need to explain that, in the 1950s and 1960s, children’s series books from the Stratemeyer Syndicate that were still in print were rewritten and reprinted to update slang and cultural references and, importantly, to remove inappropriate racial language and stereotypes. This was the time of the Civil Rights Movement, and people were becoming more self-conscious about the language they were using and what they were teaching to children. The Bobbsey Twins was one of the series that was rewritten, and I was surprised by some of the things that appeared in the original printings of the first Bobbsey Twins series. As a kid, I was more familiar with The New Bobbsey Twins series, which was written in the 1980s and 1990s. The Bobbsey Twins was one of those series that has multiple sub-series, sort of like the various incarnations of Scooby-Doo cartoons, each one updated to fit the decades when they were written. The original Bobbsey Twins series was first written in the early 1900s, and the way it originally portrayed the black couple who work for the Bobbsey family was very problematic. I was really surprised. The edition that I’m describing below is the revised 1960s edition, with the problematic elements changed or removed.
The story begins with both sets of Bobbsey Twins – the older set, Nan and Bert, and the younger set, Freddie and Flossie – disassembling their old tree house because they’re planning to build a new one. Six-year-old Flossie mentions that a spooky old house near their school is also going to be torn down, and Freddie says that another kid at school claims that house is haunted. The children’s father says that they must be talking about the old Marden house. It used to a farmhouse, but the town has grown around it. Mr. Marden was a wealthy man who had once been ambassador to Great Britain, and he build the large house when he retired. Since then, the place has become disused and badly run-down, which is why the kids think it’s spooky and why it’s going to be torn down.
The children’s mother explains that she knows Mrs. Marden, who is the widow of the original Mr. Marden’s grandson. Mrs. Marden is now elderly, and she sold the old Marden house to the school when she went to live in a nursing home. Mrs. Bobbsey says that she hasn’t been to visit Mrs. Marden lately, she decides to pay her a visit that afternoon. The kids are still curious about whether the house could be haunted, and they ask their mother to ask Mrs. Marden about it. It doesn’t seem likely that the house is really haunted, even though it is old and spooky-looking. Danny, the kid at school who claims that he’s seen ghosts around the place, is known for playing mean tricks, so he’s not a reliable witness.
Bert suggests to the others that they could go take a look at the house themselves. When they get there, they see men surveying the property. The men say that, after the house is torn down, it will be replaced by an addition to the school. The kids ask the men if they’re worried about the house being haunted. One of the men says that he heard some strange sounds, but he thinks it was just a couple of local boys playing a prank. The men don’t think that there’s a real haunting there. The Bobbsey Twins want to see the inside of the house, but the surveyors tell them that they can’t go inside because the house is locked up to discourage vandals. The kids spend a little more time with the surveyors, helping to hold their equipment and seeing how it works. However, the children are still curious about the house and wish they could investigate it more.
Then, when their mother comes home from visiting Mrs. Marden, she tells them that there really is a mystery about that house. Mrs. Marden’s memory is failing her, but she knows that some valuable souvenirs from old Mr. Marden’s time as an ambassador are missing. One of them is a cameo surrounded by diamonds (the book defines what a cameo is for the benefit of kids who don’t know) and a collection of obsidional coins. (The book also explains what these coins are. The characters had to consult a book because even Mrs. Bobbsey doesn’t know. I hadn’t heard of them before, either, because I don’t know much about coin collecting. They’re basically improvised coins made during times of siege to pay off soldiers. They’re made from whatever materials the makers had at hand and are often irregular in shape. I love stories that explain interesting and unusual historical details!) Mrs. Marden knows that she hid these things somewhere in the old Marden house, but she just can’t remember where. Since the house is going to be torn down, there isn’t much time left to find them!
Mrs. Bobbsey gives the children permission to investigate and tells them that the principal at their school has the keys to the house. She thinks that the principal might let the kids into the house if they explain that they want to retrieve something for Mrs. Marden. The school principal is surprisingly agreeable to the idea of the children poking around the old house and gives them the key, but Danny overhears their conversation and tries to convince them again that the house is haunted.
When the twins and a couple of their friends go inside the house, there isn’t much there. All the furniture has already been cleared out of the house, and it doesn’t seem to leave many possible hiding places to search. The only thing Mrs. Marden seems able to remember about the hiding place is that it has something to do with a hearth, but there are many fireplaces in the old house.
It turns out that the old house is hiding many secrets! There are secret passages and hidden trap doors. The kids also discover that someone is sneaking around the old house, someone who seems to know its secrets. Could it be Danny, playing ghost to scare them, or could it be someone who’s after the same treasure the children are trying to find?
The revised edition of the book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction and Spoilers
New vs. Old Editions
I have trouble talking about the original edition of this book because I haven’t been able to find it. I’m not sure if that’s because the racial language was just too objectionable for anyone to want to put a copy online, even though it should be public domain now. Although, it could be that it is online but I just don’t recognize it because it’s called something different. Some of the revised Stratemeyer Syndicate books are so different from their originals that they’re barely recognizable as being the same story. Some original stories were considered so outdated that they were completely rewritten. I know something about the level of racial language and stereotypes in the Bobbsey Twins because I did find an older edition of the next book in the series, and I’ve read articles about some of the other books I haven’t read yet.
Even though this printing doesn’t contain the problematic racial language and stereotypes of the original, there were things some of the characters said that I still didn’t like. Mr. Bobbsey calls Flossie “my little fat fairy” as a term of endearment, but it sounds a little rude to me to call attention to her being “fat.” Flossie doesn’t seem to mind, probably partly because she’s only 6 years old and not at the stage where girls really start worrying about their appearance, but some girls can really be affected by being called “fat”, especially if there’s a lot of teasing at school aimed at “fat” people. The father similarly calls Freddie his “little fat fireman” because Freddie wants to be a fireman. Freddie doesn’t seem to mind it, either, but I still feel like the “fat” part is just unnecessary. If he’s going to give nicknames, why not just say “my fairy princess” or “little fireman”, sticking to words with positive connotations, without adding an extra, unnecessary word that can easily turn negative? I’m not fond of teasing, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to teach kids to tease or set them up for teasing later.
The Mystery
One thing that makes this story a little different from other books in the Stratemeyer Syndicate series is that the children get some adult help with the mystery. Usually, the children in Stratemeyer Syndicate series try to do everything themselves, but when the kids realize that there is a strange adult sneaking around the house and trying to scare them away, they tell their school principal, and he comes to investigate with them. However, even when the adults realize that there’s some strange adult lurking around and trying to scare the kids, nobody stops the kids from continuing to investigate the house.
There are various other little adventures that happen throughout the book, like Freddie getting lost in a department store and adopting a cat he names Snoop and the boys camping out with a friend but ending the trip when it starts to rain too hard. However, these incidents also help the kids to gather some additional clues to the main mystery.
The identity of the adult sneaking around the house would be impossible for readers to guess because we don’t really get to meet him until later. The kids are the ones who find the treasure, although it happens by accident. I would have liked it better if they had reasoned it out, but it’s still a pretty good kids’ mystery story.
Ruth Fielding in Moving Pictures; Or, Helping the Dormitory Fund by Alice B. Emerson (Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1916.
One day, while Ruth Fielding is out with her friends, Helen and Tom, they see a film crew working by the river. (Because this is the 1910s, they are making a silent film and using the kind of old-fashioned movie camera that needs to be cranked, like the one shown in the picture to the right.) They talk about whether to not they would like to be in movies themselves. The girls think it sounds exciting, but Tom thinks that they’re too young. The girls say that they are not too young because the actress who is being filmed looks like she’s about their age. As they watch, the young actress accidentally falls into the river, which is freezing cold because it’s winter. Ruth and her friends hurry to help pull her out before she drowns. When they get her out of the river, Ruth is appalled at how unconcerned the director is for the actress’s health while she’s clearly suffering from the cold. Ruth and her friends take the actress, Hazel Gray, back to the Red Mill where Ruth lives, where she can warm up and recover.
While Hazel is resting at the Red Mill, she and Ruth tell each other about themselves. Like Ruth, Hazel is also an orphan. Her parents were actors, and some friends raised Hazel to be an actress after her parents died. Ruth tells Hazel that she has been thinking about writing a movie scenario (script) just for fun, and Hazel offers to show it to the director if she does. Ruth isn’t sure she likes the idea because she didn’t like the director, Mr. Grimes. Hazel explains that, while the director can be callous and abrasive, he is a famous director who really knows his business and can help actors and scenario writers make their careers.
The next day, Mr. Hammond, the manager of the film company, comes to the Red Mill to see how Hazel is and to ask Ruth about how the accident happened. He seems concerned about whether or not Ruth’s description of what happened matches what Mr. Grimes told him. Ruth explains what she saw to Mr. Hammond, and she also tells him what she thinks about Mr. Grimes’s lack of concern about Hazel’s welfare. Mr. Hammond says that it’s impossible to change other people, indicating that he knows how callous and unpleasant Mr. Grimes can be, but he promises to make sure that Hazel gets a fair deal for her acting and the accident she suffered.
While he is there, Mr. Hammond becomes fascinated by the quaintness of the Red Mill. He thinks that it would make an excellent setting for a movie. Ruth says that she would love to write a scenario about the Red Mill herself. Mr. Hammond asks her if she’s ever written a scenario before, and Ruth admits that she hasn’t, but there has to be a first time for everything. Mr. Hammond is amused and says that he would be very interested in any scenario that Ruth might write. However, he suggests to her that, before she writes a scenario about the Red Mill, she write a short story about something else, something exciting, so he can see what her writing is like. Ruth happily agrees, and after she returns to boarding school with her friends, she starts writing.
Ruth and Helen are now seniors at their boarding school, and they are starting to think nervously about their lives after graduation. They know that they want to go on to college, but they find the prospect intimidating, too. Neither of them is quite sure what they want to do with their lives. The idea of growing up in general sounds frightening.
The girls aren’t the only ones showing signs of growing up but feeling awkward about it. Ruth finds herself getting unexpectedly jealous about Tom having a crush on Hazel. Helen says that Ruth simply hasn’t been paying attention to the things the boys are doing. All of Tom’s friends at his school have crushes on actresses, and they’ve been collecting pictures of them from the newspapers and pinning them up in their rooms. At the same time, Tom seems oddly sullen that other people are starting to treat Ruth and his sister as young ladies. It’s one thing for him to have a crush on Hazel, who is a couple of years older than they are, but he doesn’t seem to like the idea of Helen and Ruth seeming too grown up.
These things are in the back of Ruth’s mind as she finishes writing her story. After she sends her story to Mr. Hammond, a fire breaks out in one of the dormitories at the school because of a neglected candle. The dormitory that is destroyed is the one where Ruth lives with her friends. Ruth is tempted to try to save their belongings, but the teachers tell her that it’s just too dangerous. They’re just thankful that all the girls are safe.
After the fire, there is the question of rebuilding the dormitory. At first, they think that the insurance money will pay for a new dorm, but it turns out that the school’s forgetful headmaster accidentally let the insurance policy lapse. Some of the girls at the school are from wealthy families, and they are sure that their parents would be willing to contribute to the building of a new dorm, but Ruth sees a couple of problems with that. First, while the wealthier students’ families would certainly be able to contribute sizable amounts toward the building project, the families of poorer students may hesitate to contribute at all because they may be embarrassed that they cannot possibly match the donations the wealthier families can contribute. Second, the girls are overly relying on their parents. While the parents may be glad to help, Ruth thinks it would be better to find a way that the students themselves can contribute to the building fund. The other students agree that they would all like to find a way for everyone to contribute.
An idea for a group project the entire school can participate in comes to Ruth when Mr. Hammond sends Ruth a check to pay for her first story. He thinks that Ruth has a great talent for writing, and he’s going to make her story into a short, one-reel movie! That makes Ruth realize that, if she can write a short story for a short movie, she can write one for a long, five-reel picture. If she can write a long scenario for a movie, all of the girls in the school can be in the film! She thinks that she can persuade Mr. Hammond to produce the picture and distribute it to the surrounding town, and the royalties from the movie can pay for the dorm reconstruction.
Mr. Hammond agrees to help Ruth and her friends make a movie on behalf of the school, and the school’s headmistress agrees to allow the students to participate in the project. The donations that the school has already received from the parents have paid for the removal of the ruins of the old dormitory and the beginning of the construction of the new one, and the money the girls earn from the movie can pay for the completion of the building project. Ruth already has an idea for the plot of the movie, one about girls at a boarding school, so they can film the movie on their own campus. Mr. Grimes turns out to be the film director, and he is still temperamental, but he shows more patience when dealing with the students than he had before.
There are complications, of course. Hazel Gray is one of the professional actresses helping with the movie, and Ruth is still jealous about how fond she seems of Tom. Then, there is drama when the other girls learn which girl left the candle unattended and vent their wrath on her. The girl, Amy, was already a troubled student with an unhappy home life. Then, Amy gets upset when the boy she likes seems to be getting too friendly with Ruth, and she runs away. Ruth and the other girls have to search for her, and they learn the embarrassing secret behind the dormitory fire and some other secrets that Amy has been hiding from them.
This book is now in the public domain and available to borrow and read for free online through Project Gutenberg.
My Reaction and Spoilers
Is There a Mystery in the Book?
Not exactly a mystery, but there are some things that Ruth and her friends discover some secrets about their prickly fellow student, Amy, and when she runs away, the other girls have to figure out where she went and rescue her. Although Ruth and the other girls are unhappy with Amy because of the dormitory fire and because Amy frequently has a sour attitude, but they become more sympathetic when they learn more about some secrets that Amy is hiding. The embarrassing secret behind the dormitory fire is that Amy is afraid of the dark. She doesn’t want to admit it to the other girls because she doesn’t want to be teased, but that’s why she left a candle burning in her room; she was afraid of returning to her room after dark. The school has electric lights, but she grew up in a more old-fashioned town and isn’t used to them.
Worse still, Amy is terrified that her father will find out that she caused a fire at school. He is already harsh with her, and it has gotten worse since he remarried. He seems to view the child from his first marriage as a nuisance, and it seems like he sent her to boarding school to get her out of the way as he starts a new life with her stepmother. Actually, Amy’s father’s reasons for sending her to boarding school were not just to get her out of the way. Ruth and the others learn that part of Amy’s difficulties with her stepmother have partly been because Amy behaved badly toward her because her aunts disliked her and were a bad influence on Amy. It wasn’t just that the boy she liked seemed to like Ruth that made her run away; she had gotten an angry letter from her father that not only accused her of doing something bad before she left home but also saying that he has heard rumors about her involvement with the fire. He is coming to the school to find out for himself what she’s been doing there, and Amy is terrified of what he will do when he gets there.
To find Amy, the girls and Curly (the boy Amy likes) have to think of all the things they know about Amy and the places she could have gone. Curly knows more than the girls do because Amy confides in him. I appreciated that Ruth and the other girls are much more active in this story in solving the problem of Amy’s disappearance than they often are in other books. In the earlier books in this series, Ruth and her friends frequently rely on chance and coincidence to reveal hidden information and other people to carrying out the final action, but this time, they use their own reasoning to figure out where to look for Amy and go after her themselves. In some ways, I think that the more active roles that Ruth and the others play in the story are because they are growing up. Amy is younger than Ruth and her friends, and they feel responsible for her. In earlier books, adults and others were looking after them and helping them, but now, they are older than someone else. I’m looking forward to seeing how this develops in other books in the series.
When they find Amy, she has had a bad reaction from poison oak or poison sumac, and everyone feels sorry for her. Amy gets the first sympathy that she’s had for some time. Amy straightens out her relationship with her father when he comes and realizes that she was unfair to her stepmother. The other girls at school forgive Amy for the fire when they find out what she’s been through, and her father makes a generous donation to the building fund.
Characters That Age
One of the most unique features of this book is that the characters are growing up, and it’s part of the story. That’s something that doesn’t happen in other, later Stratemeyer Syndicate books. In this book, Ruth and her friends graduate from their boarding school. As the girls think about their graduation and going on to college, they’re a little intimidated because they don’t know what they want to do with their lives, but Ruth discovers her talent for writing movie scripts/scenarios. (These are silent films in her time, so there’s no dialog for the “script.” Any dialog that the audience needs to understand would have been shown in text in the intertitles. I think that’s why they call this form of script a “scenario” in the book.) There is some awkwardness in the way the boys and girls in the story start looking at each other because they realize that they’re becoming young ladies and young men. They’re not used to thinking of themselves and each other in that way, and they’re developing crushes.
You won’t find this sort of thing much in the on-going Stratemeyer Syndicate book series, like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. Those characters are frozen in age on purpose, and the Ruth Fielding series was part of the reason why. In early Stratemeyer Syndicate book series, like Ruth Fielding and the Rover Boys, the characters did age. They grew up, graduated from school, got married, and eventually, had kids of their own. The problem for the Stratemeyer Syndicate was that, when their characters got married and became parents themselves, they were starting to get too old to be teen detectives and young adventurers. Their child audiences wanted to read about kids like themselves or teenagers or young adults, not people who were more like their own parents. So, whenever characters started getting too old for the target audience, they would have to end that series and start a new one. After going through the Rover Boys and Ruth Fielding and some of their other popular series in this way, they realized that they could keep a book series going much longer if they just didn’t let the characters age.
That’s why Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys are frozen in age somewhere in their late teens or early 20s, and the books typically leave it vague which it is. It’s mostly important that readers know that the characters are young but old enough to travel and have adventures by themselves. Nancy Drew is not going to school, and if she takes any classes in individual books, she isn’t studying for a degree. If she did, her series would eventually end because she would graduate and move on to adult life. Similarly, the Hardy Boys are learning to be private detectives by working with their father, who is a private detective, but they will always be in that apprentice phase, so their series can continue. There are times when the characters date other characters or have crushes, but their romances don’t progress to anything serious because that would also age the characters. Every decade or so, the books in those series get revamped or the characters get a new, updated series that incorporates modern technology and culture, but the characters stay roughly the same age throughout. It’s basically what happens with new Scooby-Doo cartoon series, but with books, and the Stratemeyer Syndicate did it with their characters first.
Part of the reason that I wanted to read the Ruth Fielding books was that I knew the characters would age, and I also knew that she was a kind of prototype for Nancy Drew. The Nancy Drew series started around the time Ruth Fielding’s series ended, as a replacement for Ruth Fielding. Fortunately, we’re not at the end of Ruth Fielding’s series yet. The series doesn’t end with her boarding school graduation. It continues through her time in college and into her career in the movies.
Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies; Or, The Missing Pearl Necklace by Alice B. Emerson (Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1915.
Just as a quick note before I begin to describe the plot of this book, this book is part of the Ruth Fielding series, an early Stratemeyer Syndicate, before they started writing some of their more popular and best-known series, like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. Some books in early Stratemeyer Syndicate series are awkward because they use racial terms that polite people would not use now. During the mid-20th century, around the time of the Civil Rights Movement, the Stratemeyer Syndicate revised the books it had in print, updating the technology and slang terms in the stories to be more modern and removing or altering some questionable racial terms and attitudes. Unfortunately, the Ruth Fielding series had already ended by that time, and these books were not among those that were revised and updated. I’ve explained this before on the pages for some the Stratemeyer Syndicate book series and individual book reviews, but I have to explain it again here because some people might object to the word “gypsy.” I know that’s not really the correct or polite way to refer to the Romany or “Travelers”, as they’re sometimes called, but it can’t be helped here because the Stratemeyer Syndicate put it right in the title. This is one of those books where I just can’t avoid it, and it’s all through the book. Some of the attitudes and stereotypes around the characters are also likely to be objectionable, but I’ll address that further in my reaction section.
The Ruth Fielding series is interesting because it was kind of a precursor to Nancy Drew, with a similar type of heroine, but one that, unlike Nancy Drew, grew up, went through school, and had a career during the course of the series. There are some aspects of this series and the development of the characters that I think were better done in this series than in the Nancy Drew series. There are also times when the books are surprisingly thoughtful about the conditions of life and society in the early 20th century, when they were written, and this book and the next one begin to mark a turning point in the main character’s life. Ruth is a poor girl, and before her education is over, she will have to seriously consider her career options, which is something you don’t see much in the Stratemeyer Syndicate series that are still in print because those characters never age. The characters in the earlier series did, which is why those series ended. There are some things in the series that I don’t like, like the racial terms and attitudes and when the stories are more adventure than mystery because I really prefer mystery, but this is what the books are like. In these reviews, I’m just explaining what the books and characters are like. On the bright side, if you don’t like what the books are like, you can consider that I read and reviewed them, so you don’t have to. You can find out what they’re like from my reviews and save yourself some time.
The Plot
Ruth Fielding is with her Uncle Jabez in a boat on the river near the Red Mill where they live when the boat overturns. Uncle Jabez falls out and hits his head. He almost drowns, but Ruth holds his head above water. She can’t pull him out of the river by herself, but she calls for help and attracts the attention of a passing gypsy boy. The gypsy boy, called Roberto, pulls Uncle Jabez out of the water.
Uncle Jabez is grateful, but the incident brings back an earlier argument about whether boys are more useful than girls. Uncle Jabez argues that boys are more useful than girls because they are stronger and can do heavier work, and he thinks that his near-drowning proves that. Of course, Ruth, Aunt Alvira, and Ruth’s friend Mercy are all offended by that assessment. Aunt Alvira points out that the boy who helped Uncle Jabez wouldn’t have been able to do that if Ruth hadn’t already been holding his head above water and calling for help. Ruth says that not all work is heavy work. Uncle Jabez says that girls are costly because they need money for education, and they’re not likely to have careers afterward, like men do. Ruth says that the reason why she wants an education is so that she can have a career and support herself.
Ruth knows that a poor orphan like her is lucky that she can attend boarding school with her friends. Her friend, Helen, is from a wealthy family, who is willing to fund her education in anything she wants to study, whether it eventually produces money or not, but Ruth doesn’t have that luxury. Eventually, she will have to get a job of some kind. Aunt Alvira says that, when she was young, most girls got a basic education and then got married, which is probably what Uncle Jabez is expecting Ruth to do. However, Aunt Alvira knows that modern girls have more ambitions. (Keep in mind that this story is set around 1915, contemporary to the time when it was written.) Ruth’s music teacher at school thinks that Ruth has a promising voice, and she wonders if she can train as a singer, although that’s not the kind of thing that her uncle would think of as something useful.
Before returning to boarding school with her friends, Ruth goes on a car trip with Helen and Helen’s twin brother, Tom. It turns out to be an unexpectedly eventful trip. Not long after setting out on the trip, they meet up with Roberto again and begin talking with him. The others ask Roberto about being a gypsy and if he wouldn’t prefer a more settled life with a regular job. Roberto says that, while he could work as a farmhand easily enough, few people would hire him for other jobs because he’s a gypsy, and people don’t trust gypsies. Besides, he sees little use in such a life. Tom says that he could afford better food and better clothes if he had a better job. Roberto says that he does well enough traveling around with his family, taking odd jobs, and helping his uncle at horse trades. He tells the others a little about his family and his life with them. After he leaves, Tom makes jokes about the rumors of gypsies kidnapping people.
Further down the road, Tom accidentally hits a lamb in the road with his car. The lamb is still alive, but its leg is broken. The farmer is angry, says that the lamb is useless now, and demands that Tom pay for the lamb. The price he demands is about twice as high as it should have been, but Tom pays it anyway to avoid further trouble. Then, they learn that the farmer, who doesn’t want to be bothered nursing the lamb until it heals, plans to simply kill it and feed it to his dogs. The girls are upset about the poor little lamb, and they plead for its life. Ruth is sure that the lamb can be healed. The farmer says that the lamb is his to do with as he pleases, but Helen points out that the lamb isn’t his anymore because Tom just paid for it. The farmer protests, but they take the lamb anyway. At first, Tom says that he doesn’t know what else to do with the lamb except take it to a butcher, but the girls persuade him to let them keep the lamb and try to help it.
Later, there is a storm, and the group seeks shelter in an old, empty house. The girls go inside while Tom parks their car in an old shed. The girls find the house spooky and wonder if it could be haunted. In some books, investigating a haunting in an old, abandoned house like this would be the main mystery, but in this one, it’s just one episode that gives them a clue to something else. While the girls are exploring the upstairs rooms and Tom is still outside, two strange men enter the house. The girls don’t let the men know they’re there. They’re not sure of who the men are or what their intentions are, so they listen to their conversation. They can’t understand everything the men say because half of their conversation is in an unfamiliar language, but from what the girls understand, they have either committed a theft or are going to be involved in one. The girls don’t want the men to find them or Tom, so they scare them out of the house by spooking some bats, which take flight and frighten the men away.
All of this would be exciting enough, but as they all travel further, Tom’s car breaks down. Tom leaves the girls and sets out on foot to get some help. The girls wait at the car for him, but it starts getting dark, and they start to get worried. A group of gypsies passes by with their wagons, and although Ruth isn’t sure it’s a good idea, Helen asks the gypsies if they can give her and Ruth a ride to her parents’ house. The gypsies ask the girls some questions, and then, they agree that the girls can come with them. Helen leaves a note for her brother that they’ve gone with the gypsies, but when she isn’t looking, one of the gypsies takes the note and destroys it.
It turns out that Ruth’s concerns about the gypsies were justified. The leader of this gypsy band is an elderly woman, who the girls recognize from Roberto’s stories as his grandmother, although Roberto is not currently among the group. The grandmother is a greedy woman, and she has realized from the girls’ car that at least one of them is from a wealthy family. To her, that means that they have relatives who would be able to pay a ransom for the girls. The girls become captives of the gypsies. The old woman also has an ability to hypnotize people with her eyes, and Helen seems particularly susceptible to it. During the night, while spying on the old woman, Ruth also learns that she is involved with the thieves they saw in the empty house.
The girls try to escape from the gypsies, and Helen gets away, but Ruth is caught. The old woman makes Ruth disguise herself as one of the gypsies so no one will notice her among the others. Can Ruth find a way to escape, or will Tom, Helen, or Roberto manage to help her?
This book is now in the public domain and available to borrow and read for free online through Project Gutenberg.
My Reaction and Spoilers
The Mystery/Adventure
The story covers not only Ruth’s adventures but the adventures of Ruth’s friends while she is captive, including Tom’s encounter with a suspicious farm couple and Helen’s frightening experience on a whitewater river. In the end, Roberto does help Ruth to escape. By the time Ruth returns to her friends and is able to tell her story to the authorities, the gypsies are well out of the area.
However, there is still something that bothers Ruth. She knows that Roberto’s grandmother had a valuable pearl necklace in her possession, apparently the spoils of the theft that the men in the empty house were talking about. Ruth wonders who they robbed and where the necklace came from. At first, it seemed like this plot line was going to be left hanging, but when Ruth returns to boarding school with her friends, she gets the answer. A new student is joining the school, Nettie Parsons, and she is the daughter of a multi-millionaire who made his money in sugar. She is the one who was robbed of the pearl necklace, which really belongs to her aunt, and there is a $5,000 reward for its return. $5,000 would be a pretty decent reward even in the 2020s, but it went much further in the 1910s. Ruth realizes that she knows who has that pearl necklace, and if she can get it back for Nettie, she would not only be doing a good turn for a classmate but getting the much-needed reward for herself. $5,000 would be enough to give Ruth some monetary independence and could fund her continued education.
Like other early Stratemeyer Syndicate books, the story is more adventure than mystery, although there are some mystery elements. Ruth gets some of the clues to the theft that the gypsies committed, but it’s more by coincidence than investigation that she discovers who the pearl necklace belongs to. Ruth does get the reward in the end, which allows her to finish at Briarwood Hall and go on to college in later books. However, while the old woman was apprehended with the necklace on Ruth’s information, I think it’s important to note that Ruth does not chase her down and apprehend her herself. Ruth is still at boarding school when others do that on her behalf, and she is then summoned to identify the apprehended suspect. On the one hand, this would never happen that way in a modern, 21st century book. In modern books, the girl heroines are much more active and would insist on catching the bad guys themselves. On the other hand, I have to admit that the way the book did it would actually be the more likely way this situation would play out in the real world, with the boarding school kid just providing information and being kept at boarding school while others apprehend the criminals. I think if the book was rewritten in the 21st century, Ruth would be more active in catching the criminals and retrieving the necklace, but there is some realism in the way the book actually ends.
Ruth’s career ambitions are not resolved in this story but are addressed more directly in the next book in the series.
Stereotypes and Racial Attitudes
I was curious about the notion that gypsies kidnap people because I’ve read about that in other books, and I wondered where that idea came from. According to an article that I found, it seems to come partly from traveling gypsies being used as scapegoats for missing or murdered children (like in old movies, where the small-town sheriff is anxious to blame a “drifter” for a crime) or as “bogeymen” in stories parents told to scare their children into not wandering away from home and also partly from people noticing children among traveling Romany groups who did not seem to resemble the people raising them, particularly if the children seemed to be lighter-skinned or have lighter hair or eyes than the adults. The reasons for the children not looking like the adults have been proven in modern times to be because the children were either adopted or were simply biological children who didn’t look like their parents through quirks of genetics, which sometimes happens. Light-colored eyes and light-colored hair are recessive traits, while dark eyes and dark hair tend to be more dominant traits, but even a dark-eyed, dark-haired person can carry the recessive genes for light hair and eyes, and those recessive traits can come out in the next generation. Basically, the children resemble previous generations in the same family, such as grandparents or great-grandparents, and if observers could see all the generations of the family together, it would be more clear how the traits were handed down to the children. (People also used to think that it was impossible for two blue-eyed parents to have a brown-eyed child, but that also happens sometimes because genetics can be complicated, eye color can be influenced by combinations of multiple genes together, and genetic mutations sometimes take place.) Basically, some people overreact when they see a child who doesn’t match the adults they’re with and start imagining kidnapping, but often, there are other, logical explanations, and being too quick to scream “kidnap!” causes problems. Some people do this to families who have had interracial adoptions. Personally, my brain would be more likely to consider possible divorces or previous relationships or possible affairs or maybe that the adult was actually a hired caretaker rather than a parent to be the next most-likely explanations after adoption for children who don’t look like parents, and I wouldn’t be eager to publicly ask questions about the sexual or reproductive history of total strangers. Unless the child appeared to be in immediate physical danger or was screaming, “Help!” or “This isn’t my daddy!” or something similar, I would be unlikely to interfere. “If you see something, say something” can be helpful, but it also helps if what you see is the big picture.
I also noticed that the gypsies in the story are described as being non-white people because they have darker skin, and even Ruth seems to dislike them and be suspicious of them for that alone. Granted, these particular people are actually criminals in the story who kidnap Ruth and Helen, but Ruth was thinking that just from looking at them. While I would have understood Ruth being reluctant to trust them because they’re strangers and because they know from the men in the empty house that there are thieves in the area, it’s their darker skin that bothers Ruth first. When Ruth first meets Roberto’s grandmother, Ruth thinks that the gypsy woman is too dark and strange/foreign to be trustworthy, and she later hates that her gypsy disguise involves bare feet and her skin dyed darker. She is ashamed of the way she looks in that disguise and thinks that she would be embarrassed for Tom to see her looking like one of the gypsies. Ruth’s prejudices bothered me more than if another character had done it because, while the older Stratemeyer Syndicate books do have inappropriate racial language and attitudes, the characters who are outright racists are typically the ones the stories show to be unfriendly antagonists or outright villains. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s rare for a friendly main character to be outright disparaging of racial appearances even if they have stereotypical notions about other people.
It’s really an irony that Ruth has prejudices against non-white people because the beginning of the story involves an argument with her uncle about his prejudices about girls. If this book had been written, or at least revised, during the 21st century, the rest of the story would have involved overturning both sets of prejudices. In the book as it is, nobody’s prejudices seem to be proven wrong.
Uncle Jabez’s assertions about girls’ usefulness go largely unchallenged. The girls are kidnapped when they’re by themselves, after Tom leaves them alone. Ruth copes decently with her captivity by helping Helen escape, but she needs help to escape herself, and men apprehend the criminals in the end, not Ruth herself. If Ruth’s uncle has any rethinks about the relative usefulness of boys and girls, he doesn’t mention it, and he isn’t presented with any strong evidence in favor of girls. Ruth is just content that she got the reward money for the return of the necklace, so she isn’t solely dependent on miserly Uncle Jabez’s grudgingly-given support.
There are no prejudices about gypsies proven wrong in the story. While I’m sure that most real-world Romany are not kidnappers, the gypsies in the books are criminals and kidnappers. Roberto is fond of his family and their traveling lifestyle, but at the end of the book, he accepts a new job as a gardener at Ruth’s school. He cuts his hair more like mainstream American styles of the time, and he starts wearing more mainstream American clothes. Ruth notes that his skin is still darker, but she is happy about these other changes. It is revealed that Roberto’s family came from Bohemia (a region now part of the Czech Republic) about ten years before, and his grandmother will now be deported back there, but Roberto wants to stay in the United States. He Americanizes his name and starts having people call him Robert. That’s quite a conversion from his attitudes much earlier in the book. Granted, having relatives arrested for theft and kidnapping can have an effect on a person, but from his earlier descriptions of his grandmother, I’m pretty sure that these sort of situations are not new to Roberto’s grandmother and the rest of their group. Maybe getting caught is new, but there is an implication that his greedy grandmother has done shady things before for the sake of money. But, part of the happy ending of this story is that Roberto gets assimilated into mainstream American society and becomes less ethnic, which is bound to leave a bad taste in the mouths of modern Americans.
So, Did I Like the Book?
I liked parts of it. As I pointed out, there are things in this book that are highly problematic for modern people, and I think the book as it is would be more suitable to adults who are interested in nostalgic children’s literature or the evolution of children’s literature. However, there are parts of the book I did find interesting, and I can see ways in which the book could be rewritten to make it both more exciting and more acceptable to modern people. For example, I really liked the part with the empty house where they overheard the thieves talking and the way the girls scared the thieves with the bats. If I were rewriting the story, I would extend that scene and leave out the part with the lamb, which didn’t contribute much to the rest of the story.
Of course, I would just have the criminals be part of a random criminal gang, not Romany. (How common were traveling caravans in the early 20th century anyway? I’ve never seen even one in real life. Was that really a common thing at one point so that it ended up in so many children’s books? From what I’ve read about Romany populations and migrations in the United States, some of the stereotypes about them had some basis in fact, like that some of them occasionally resorted to stealing to survive, but were exaggerated in the press for the sake of sensationalism, so I’m thinking that the prevalence of gypsy caravans and fortune tellers were probably also greatly exaggerated in literature.) I picture the criminal gang organized with the two guys who hide out in the old house being the thieves, and the others being a seemingly-ordinary and pleasant-looking couple who act as the fences of their stolen goods. Then, the girls could hitch a ride from this nice-looking couple after their car breaks down. At first, they wouldn’t know there was a connection between the “nice” couple and the thieves, but they would later accidentally see the couple talking with the thieves and the thieves handing over their goods. The girls would get caught spying on them, so the criminals would kidnap them because the girls now know too much.
Later, after the girls get away from the criminals, Ruth could find out that the necklace they saw being handed over wasn’t among the thieves’ belongings when the police caught up with them. Thinking about the place where the thieves were caught and something she may have heard them say, she could then realize that the thieves doubled back on their trail after the girls escaped from them, returning to their hideout in the abandoned house to hide the necklace because they still don’t know that the girls were in the house when they were talking there before. Then, Ruth could sneak away from her boarding school for a day to go back to the house and look for the necklace, finding it in a clever secret hiding place. I think that arrangement of events would make Ruth more active in solving the mystery, better justifying her acceptance of the reward at the end.
Ruth Fielding at Sunrise Farm or What Became of the Baby Orphans by Alice B. Emerson (Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1915.
When the story begins, Ruth and her friends are at boarding school, and they are having a secret night meeting of their club, the Sweetbriars, to initiate some new members. Their initiation ceremony includes the story about the statue with the harp in the fountain that the girls were told during a scary initiation to another club in an earlier book, but the Sweetbriars are against tormenting and hazing new members. Instead of the scary ceremony, their initiation ceremony involves marching around the fountain while chanting a rhyme about the statue. There is supposed to be a mild prank of splashing the new members as if the fountain did it, but that’s as much hazing as the Sweetbriars will allow.
However, their ceremony is interrupted when one of the girls who is already a member of the club starts screaming. When everyone runs to see what happened, the girl who was supposed to do the splashing of the new members is all wet and says that someone pushed her into the fountain. She doesn’t know who did it, but she saw someone run away afterward. Ruth catches this mysterious lurker, and it turns out to be a younger girl who doesn’t belong to their school at all. The girl says that she had just been at the fountain, getting a drink of water. She says her name is Raby and that she ran away from some people called Perkins, who beat her. Ruth isn’t able to get much of Raby’s story that night, but she can tell that the girl is in trouble, so she says that if Raby will meet her the next morning, she can give her some money and help her.
The next day, Ruth’s friend, Madge Steele, invites Ruth and the other girls to spend part of the summer at a farm that her family bought near Darrowtown, where Ruth used to live with her parents before they died. The farm is called Sunrise Farm, and this trip is also meant to be a graduation party for Madge. Madge is older than the other girls, a senior at Briarwood, so these are her last few months at the school.
Ruth slips away from the others to bring some food to Raby, and she learns more about the girl’s plight. Raby explains that she’s an orphan. Raby is her last name, and her first name is Sadie. She was at an orphanage with her two younger brothers, a set of twins called Willie and Dickie. However, kids are only kept at the orphanage until about age 12, when they are put to work. Sadie is about 12 1/2 years old, and she was separated from her brothers when they were taken in by another family and she was sent to work for the Perkins family. The Perkins family acted kind in front of the adults at the orphanage, but they started treating her badly as soon as they got her to their home. Ruth is very much aware that she is also an orphan, and if it hadn’t been for her uncle and her friends, she would never have been able to go to a school like Briarwood and might have ended up in a situation very much like Sadie’s.
Ruth gets to see for herself what Mr. Perkins is like. While the girls are talking, he enters the school grounds to find her. Sadie runs away and hides, and Mr. Perkins grabs hold of Ruth. He has a whip with him, and he whips Ruth across the knees, demanding that she tell him where the runaway girl is. Mr. Perkins is interrupted by a stage driver, Mr. Dolliver, who sees what’s happening and yells at Mr. Perkins to leave Ruth alone and not to bother any of the girls at the school. Mr. Perkins claims that he didn’t know Ruth was a student, and Mr. Dolliver makes Mr. Perkins leave. When he’s gone, Ruth explains the situation with Sadie to Mr. Dolliver. Mr. Dolliver tells her that it’s against the law to help runaways. Ruth asks if that means that Sadie will be sent back to the Perkins family if she’s caught, and Mr. Dolliver says that’s probably the case: “Ye see, Sim Perkins an’ his wife air folks ye can’t really go agin’—not much. Sim owns a good farm, an’ pays his taxes, an’ ain’t a bad neighbor. But they’ve had trouble before naow with orphans. But before, ’twas boys.” Ruth says she hopes that the boy orphans also ran away from the Perkins family, and Mr. Dolliver says, “Wal—they did, by golly!” (Oh, surprise, surprise.)
Ruth begs Mr. Dolliver not to turn Sadie in if he sees her, and Mr. Dolliver says that his plan is to not see her, and he advises Ruth to do the same. Ruth tries leaving some food out for Sadie again, but she doesn’t return to the school. She hasn’t been returned to the Perkins family, either. Ruth is glad that she’s not with the abusive Perkins family, but she’s still worried about where Sadie went and what she’s going to do. As the school year comes to an end, Ruth gets a letter from Aunt Alvirah saying that her Uncle Jabez is willing to let her go to Sunrise Farm with her friends during the summer. Aunt Alvirah has hired a “tramping girl that came by” to help with the work around the Red Mill, so Ruth will be free for a relaxing visit. Ruth later learns that the “tramping girl” was Sadie, but Sadie has moved on to find work elsewhere by the time Ruth gets home from boarding school. Ruth hears stories about her from other people who employed her or helped her, and her best friend’s brother, Tom, says that he paid for her to get a ride on a train to a town called Campton.
Soon, it’s time for Ruth and her friends to go to Darrowtown and meet at Sunrise Farm. It’s an emotional journey for Ruth because she has bittersweet memories of Darrowtown from when she lived there with her parents, when they died, and the period when she was an orphan there, before she went to live with her great uncle. While she’s there, she stops to visit with Miss Pettis, a seamstress who looked after her before she went to live with Uncle Jabez. Miss Pettis is happy to see her, and the two of them spend some time catching up on what’s been happening to everyone since Ruth left Darrowtown.
When they all get to Sunrise Farm, Madge’s father is annoyed because he’s discovered that their neighbors, the Caslons, are having a bunch of “fresh air children” coming in the summer. (“Fresh air children” are children who come from the city, usually from unfortunate backgrounds, to experience the fresh air and wholesome activities of the countryside. There are still programs that do this, including the Fresh Air Fund in New York. In fact, I think that might be the program that the Caslons are supposed to be participating in as a volunteer host family during the story because it existed in this time period, and the series is generally set somewhere on the East Coast.) Mr. Steele thinks that the Caslons are bringing in a bunch of children to make noise and annoy him personally, but Madge says that she’s heard that they take in children like this every summer. Madge’s parents see this as a personal inconvenience to them. Ruth knows that Mr. Steele is a wealthy businessman who has always lived in the city. He doesn’t know much about the countryside, doesn’t understand the people who live there, and has little patience for any of it. When he bought Sunrise Farm, he did it with the idea of being kind of a gentleman farmer, but it’s starting to become obvious that he has little idea of what that means.
It turns out that Sadie’s little brothers are among the group of orphans who are visiting the Caslons this summer, and Sadie soon shows up, looking for them. At first, Mr. Steele thinks he should call the orphanage when Sadie shows up at Sunrise Farm, but after she rescues his young son from a runaway horse, Mr. Steele is grateful and decides not to. Instead, he plays host to Sadie and her brothers at Sunrise Farm. Then, they learn that a lawyer has been looking for the Raby family because they have inherited some property in Canada. When the Raby twins and some of the other “fresh air” boys run away and get lost on a prank, Mr. Steele and Mr. Caslon join together to find them and get a new respect for each other.
This book is now in the public domain and available to borrow and read for free online through Project Gutenberg.
My Reaction and Spoilers
This is one of the books in the series that is really more adventure than mystery. There are some moments of slight mystery, when Ruth wonders where Sadie is or where her brothers are, but those are cleared up pretty quickly, just by chance, without Ruth having to go out of her way to investigate. The Raby children’s unexpected inheritance is quite a convenient coincidence, but it still leaves the children’s custody to be decided. At first, I thought that they might stay with the childless Caslons, but Mr. Steele, having been won over by the children, agrees to look after them and manage their inheritance until they’re old enough to manage it themselves. It feels a little classist that rich Mr. Steele gets the children and manages their inheritance, but by the end of the book, the Steeles are getting along better with the Caslons, so I suppose they’ll be seeing each other on a regular basis. The Caslons will also probably continue to invite “fresh air” kids from the city to visit their farm.
I really appreciated the part in this book where Ruth gets emotional about returning to the town where she used to live with her parents before they died. Orphans are common in children’s literature, partly because their orphaned status can be a reason for leaving home and finding adventure. However, I’ve noticed that many children’s series don’t dwell on the loss of the parents for long after it occurs and the adventure starts. Even when a child grieves for the loss of a parent, that grieving doesn’t show up much in sequels in a series as the story focuses more on the orphan’s adventures and new friends, like they kind of got over it. The Boxcar Children, for example, rarely mention their parents at all, and their cause of death isn’t even described in the main series (except for the oldest edition of the first book, which has a really dark first chapter). Ruth Fielding, as a character, was kind of a precursor to Nancy Drew in the Stratemeyer Syndicate, and Nancy Drew also lost her mother, but she never really talks about it. Ruth is usually a pretty happy person, even in difficult circumstances, but I like this acknowledgement that she still feels something from the loss of her parents. Even though she tries to keep cheerful and busy, there are times when she can still get sad about their loss. It’s like that in real life. Even when someone has had a long time to get accustomed to a loss, they can still have moments when they think about it and feel sad. This is the type of character development that I like in the Ruth Fielding series that doesn’t appear much in other vintage children’s series.
This book also addresses the fact that, as orphans go, Ruth has been more fortunate than some. Ruth’s uncle isn’t rich, and he’s kind of a miser, but he still takes care of her, gives her a place to live, and makes sure that she gets an education. Uncle Jabez sometimes says that he doesn’t know what good a fancy education will do for Ruth and that other girls like her stay home to help with chores or go out and get jobs. However, Ruth’s friends are getting an education, so Uncle Jabez decided in earlier books that Ruth should go to the same school and not be left out. Ruth comes to see how other people look at orphans. People accept Ruth because she lives with her uncle and goes to school with girls from better-off families, but would they all look at her the same way if she’d been forced to grow up like Sadie?
Mr. Steele is rather self-centered, thinking only of his convenience in everything. He sees the presence of the young orphans next door as some kind of personal affront to him because he thinks they’re just there to cause noise and mess and make trouble for him. Madge and her mother don’t like that kind of talk, but Madge’s brother echoes everything his father says. Even some of the other guests at Sunrise Farm express similar sentiments about how troublesome the young orphans are or must be, even for the Caslons: “Just think of troubling one’s self with a parcel of ill-bred children like those orphanage kids.” However, when the young people talk to the Caslons, they learn that the Caslons love having the orphans visit them every year. While Mr. Steele tells himself (and anyone who will listen) that the Caslons have only decided to do this out of spite for him, they’ve actually been hosting orphans for years, long before they ever met the Steeles, and it has nothing to do with the Steeles. Their own two children died very young, and they find joy and fulfillment in helping to take care of other children. They know that kids cause a certain amount of noise, mess, and chaos, but they feel like the inconveniences are worth it because they truly enjoy the children and have fun with them.
There is also a theme in the story about neighbors, what makes somebody a good neighbor or a bad neighbor. Mr. Steele thinks that the Caslons are bad neighbors from the beginning, both because they invite the orphans to join them for the summer, which Mr. Steele thinks is going to cause him some kind of personal inconvenience, and because the Caslons refuse to sell their farm to him when he decides that he wants to buy them out, like he’s entitled to their farm and they’re somehow “bad” for not letting him have it when he wants it. From my perspective, Mr. Steele is the bad neighbor because he’s the one who comes in without knowing the things that people in this area do, and he expects everyone to change their plans even sell out to him just on his say-so. Mr. Steele wants everything to be about him, even when it takes place on someone else’s property, and it bothers him that other people’s property belong to them and not to him. It seems to me that various characters in the story rate their neighbors not on how their neighbors behave or what they actually do but on how they happen to feel themselves at that particular moment. Mr. Steele seems to be in a mindset where I would expect that anything a neighbor did on his own property would be some kind affront to him because what he really wants is the neighbor’s property itself. It feels to him like his neighbor is doing things to him because, in his mind, the neighbor’s property is already his, even though it’s not, so the neighbor is already committing a trespass just because they are on their own land and doing what they’ve always done there, which Mr. Steele doesn’t own outside of his own mind. Fortunately, Mr. Steele’s experiences with the Raby children and his acknowledgement that Mr. Caslon is more experienced with this area and better able to find the lost children than he is humble him a little and get him to take a different view of both the Caslons and the “fresh air” children.
Some of the characters seem to have poor priorities when it comes to figuring out who makes the best neighbors, and I think maybe they should take some of their neighbors’ actions under realistic consideration. I don’t know what Mr. Dolliver means when he says that Mr. Perkins “ain’t a bad neighbor.” That’s definitely not the impression I’m getting. When someone storms onto someone else’s property in a full rage and starts randomly grabbing and whipping a girl he’s never seen before, it’s not just a red flag anymore. A red flag would be a warning of potential danger, and this is full-on, uncontrolled physical violence in action in front of a witness! Ruth’s skin is described as having red welts from the whip! If this is part of Mr. Dolliver’s definition of a neighbor who “ain’t bad”, just how does he define a bad one? Honestly, where are the limits? It seems like the only thing Mr. Perkins has going for him is money from his “good farm” and “taxes”, which makes me think maybe the locals are easily bought off. As long as this neighbor seems to be contributing money (through direct or indirect means, through taxes) and there is the option to ignore his behavior, the local people seem content to ignore the behavior and accept the money.
From what Mr. Dolliver says about Mr. Perkins’s problems with other orphans before, his physical violence is repeated behavior. By Mr. Dolliver’s admission, the Perkins family has never had a different result with any orphan they’ve had in their custody. Each time, they mistreat the orphan and the orphan runs away in desperation, unable to return to the orphanage that’s supposed to be caring for them because the adults there seem to think that it’s more important to not say “no” to the Perkins family than to ensure the physical safety of children. I’m pretty sure they’re getting money for this, because otherwise, why in the name of all that is truly good, holy, and sane, would anybody ever let him have access to any other orphans after he’s already gone through multiple orphans in this fashion already? To very loosely quote Oscar Wilde, to lose one might be considered unfortunate, to lose two begins to look like careless, and to lose three or more brings everyone involved in the process into question. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result each time. How many minors is the orphanage prepared to sacrifice to the Perkins family before they decide it’s enough, and at what point will it dawn on them that the Perkins family is the common element to the disappearance of all of the previous orphans?
I’m just going to say it: Mr. Perkins is a dangerous weirdo. He’s unsafe with vulnerable children or really anyone who gets in the way when he’s angry and is not in a position of authority or able to fight back. I’m sure his neighbors are either being bribed or they’re all in deep denial about it and that’s why they end up being complicit in the continuance and repetition of orphan abuse. I know that, as a character, Mr. Perkins is deliberately set up as a villain and an obstacle in the story to be escaped or overcome, but he’s such an over-the-top violent character, running around with a whip that he uses on total strangers, it just brings the orphanage, the neighbors, and everybody in the community who still calls this wacko a basically decent neighbor into question.
Ruth Fielding at Silver Ranch, or Schoolgirls Among the Cowboys by Alice B. Emerson, 1915.
In the last Ruth Fielding book, Ruth and her friends met a girl named Jane Ann who had run away from home. In this book, Ruth and her friends go to Silver Ranch in Montana, Jane Ann’s home, which is owned by her uncle, Bill Hicks. Ruth’s best friend, Helen, is surprised that Ruth’s Uncle Jabez let her come on the trip because he’s been very upset about the money he lost investing in a mine. Helen says maybe the investment will turn out fine after all, and Ruth says that the mine he invested in, the Tintacker Mine, is coincidentally nearby. It’s supposed to be a silver mine, although Uncle Jabez now doubts whether the mine is real or some kind of scam. The young man who talked him into investing hasn’t answered Uncle Jabez’s letters for months. So, while they’re staying at the ranch, Ruth plans to ask some questions in the area about the mine and see what she can learn.
On their first evening at the ranch, while they’re playing music, singing, and enjoying themselves, they suddenly get word that there’s a prairie fire up by Tintacker, and a cowboy says that it was probably set by “Bughouse Johnny.” (“Bughouse” is an old-fashioned slang word meaning “crazy”, so this is a descriptive nickname.) Ruth and her friends go to help the cowboys with the fire, and they watch as they slaughter three steers and use the carasses to smother the flames.
Ruth asks some questions about Tintacker, and the cowboys mention a new man who’s been hanging around that area. They don’t know much about him, but he’s pretty young, and they call him “the tenderfoot.” Ruth thinks he might be the young man her uncle has been looking for. She also asks them about Bughouse Johnny, but they don’t tell her much more than he’s a crazy guy who camps out in the area of Tintacker.
Ruth explains her uncle’s situation to Jane Ann’s uncle. Bill Hicks says that, as far as he knows, there’s no more silver left in the Tintacker Mine, and he thinks that Ruth’s uncle has been cheated. Ruth asks him if there’s any way that she can see the official papers associated with the mine, and Bill Hicks introduces her to a friend of his who is a lawyer, Mr. Savage. Mr. Savage confirms that ownership of the mine belongs to a man named John Cox, who bought out the other heirs of the mine’s original owners. Like Bill Hicks, Mr. Savage thinks that the mine isn’t worth anything, but if the young man Uncle Jabez invested with is John Cox, the investment is valid, just not one that’s likely to see a return. Ruth says that she will give the lawyer’s information to her uncle and that her uncle may ask him to act on his behalf later, depending on how he decides to handle this investment.
Ruth and her friends have some Western-style fun and adventures with Jane Ann, the cowboys, and the other locals. Jane Ann gets to show off her riding and ranching skills, and they all attend a local dance, where Ruth and her friends play matchmaker between a shy cowboy and the haughty schoolmistress he admires. They have a hair-raising encounter with a wild bear, and the man who saves them by shooting the bear turns out to be the man from Tintacker who Ruth wants to see.
When Ruth and one of Hick’s men go to see this man later, they find him deathly ill. If the man doesn’t recover, and if the mine turns out to be worthless, Uncle Jabez will lose his money, and there will be no way for Ruth to continue attending the boarding school she loves with her friends! However, the answer to the truth about John Cox’s identity is closer than Ruth and her friends suspect.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies) and Project Gutenberg (multiple formats).
My Reaction
Like many other early Stratemeyer books, this story contains elements of a mystery but is really more of an adventure. I didn’t like parts of the adventure because there were repeated instances of characters being attacked by animals and then the animals needing to be killed. At one point, Ruth herself beats an attacking wolf to death, and I thought that was a shockingly violent scene for a Stratemeyer Syndicate book! Although, earlier Stratemeyer Syndicate books are quite different from the later ones.
The mystery part of the story focuses on the identity of John Cox, the man who convinced Uncle Jabez to invest in his mine, and the truth about his mine. I actually felt a little silly for not figuring out the true identity of John Cox sooner because he actually shares the same last name as one of the other regular characters in this series, and it’s not a coincidence. John Cox is Mary Cox’s brother.
Mary Cox, nicknamed “The Fox” by her schoolmates for being sly, is along on the trip with the other Briarwood Hall girls, although she is a nasty rival for Ruth in particular. Even though she has gotten along better with some of the other girls in the past, her snooty attitude and bad behavior have finally gotten on everybody’s nerves in this book.
When Mary is temporarily in control of a wagon Ruth and Helen are in, she does something reckless and almost gets them all killed until Ruth takes control of the reins and saves them. Everyone knows that the situation was Mary’s fault and that Ruth saved the day, and this is not the first time that Ruth has saved Mary from something. (By my count, it’s the third time.) However, Mary is ungrateful for her help and in denial that she did anything wrong (as usual). Just when everyone has decided that they’re completely fed up with her, the discovery of her brother changes things. While Mary is unmoved by Ruth saving her life, she is genuinely grateful to Ruth for saving her brother when he was ill and alone, which is astonishing for a girl who has never seemed to genuinely care about anybody else before. John Cox is an honest man, and Uncle Jabez’s investment turns out better than expected, guaranteeing that Ruth will be able to return to boarding school with her friends.
I want to warn readers that this is one of the Stratemeyer Syndicate books that has characters using racial slurs. The Ruth Fielding books were written before the Stratemeyer Syndicate revised its books in the mid-20th century to remove language like that. As in other Stratemeyer books, the use of inappropriate racial language is used to show which characters are crude and antagonistic, and in the case of this book, that character is Mary.
Mary Cox sneers at one of Bill Hick’s men, Jib, because he is of Native American descent, although Helen’s brother Tom stands up for Jib, pointing out that he’s much better educated than most of the men Mary knows, even though he works as a cowboy, and that Native Americans used to own the entire country before white people came, which is nothing to sneer at. Mary still insists on calling him a “savage”, mostly because Mary’s habitual method of communicating with people is to put someone else down so that she can look superior. This entire exchange takes place during an episode when Mary is trying to flirt with Tom, and bringing up racial slurs to put someone down during a flirtation with someone else is a very weird thing to do. It’s mostly a part of the story to show why Mary is such a pain. Tom just ends up being disgusted with her. It’s not the last time Mary uses racial slurs. At one point, she also calls the ranch cook a “fat and greasy Mexican squaw.” It’s pretty bad to see that kind of language in a kid’s book, even though it’s there to show that Mary has a nasty personality and behaves badly, which irritates and embarrasses people around her.
On a lighter note, the story is peppered with all sorts of Western words and slang. Since slang changes over time, and I’m not sure how people said things in the 1910s, I’m not sure how accurate the slang is for the time, but I’d like to call attention to a couple of words in the story that will be familiar to readers, but not in the way that they usually see them. “Cañon” is actually the Spanish word for “canyon”, pronounced the same way that we say in English, but the little tilde symbol over the ‘n’ adds the ‘y’ sound. The word that confused me the most was “kiotes,”, not because I didn’t know what they were talking about, but because that is not the Spanish version of the word. It looks like a phonetic spelling of the way we pronounce “coyotes” in English, but the Spanish word is also spelled “coyotes”, just pronounced a little differently. I didn’t know where the spelling “kiotes” came from, and I’d never seen it anywhere else before. I tried Googling it to find out more, and I saw a few mentions of the word with that spelling. One mention said that it was a Native American word, but it didn’t explain much more than that, so I can’t be sure. The book also uses the plural of “beef”, which is “beeves“, a word that used to be a joke with my brother and my friends the first time we heard it years ago because we thought it sounded funny. It also mentions the girls wearing “furbelow“, a word that I’d never heard before that means ruffles, pleats, or flounces in women’s clothing.
The Rover Boys in the Jungle by Arthur M. Winfield (aka Edward Stratemeyer), 1899.
My Foreword
I wasn’t particularly eager for this book after the first one in the series. I didn’t think the Rover Boys was as much fun as later Stratemeyer Syndicate books and there are some instances of racial language that are uncomfortable to explain. However, this is the book where the boys actually go to Africa in search of their missing father, and it resolves one of the major problems that the first book in the series set up, and I wanted to see it end.
As the book says at the beginning, the boys’ father went to Africa before the beginning of the series to look for gold mines and hasn’t been heard from since. The boys don’t know if their father is alive or dead, and meanwhile, the boys’ enemies from the first book in the series are still hanging around. The Baxters were put in prison for attempting to kidnap Dora at the direction of Josiah Crabtree in the book immediately before this one, but Dan Baxter escapes early in this book, and Crabtree is still around somewhere. The introduction and first chapter to the book brings readers up to date on developments from the previous books, sort of like the introductions to episodes of movie serials that didn’t exist at the time these books were written. Books in this series really need to be read in order, and if you skip any, like I did, you really need the introduction to bring you up-to-date.
The Story
There is a new boy at school, Hans Mueller, who is from Germany. This book was written before World War I, so there is nothing critical or derogatory about Germans, but the boys decide to tease Hans a little by playing up myths of the Wild West to scare him. They tell him that the school will be teaching them how to fight Indians (Native Americans) and that he’ll have to learn how to scalp people. Hans doesn’t know what they’re talking about at first, and when they explain it to him, he’s alarmed. (Good, Hans. That’s a sign of sanity.) Hans says that the only time he’s seen American Indians was at a traveling Wild West show that came to Germany, and he thought they looked scary. The other boys have a laugh about spooking poor Hans and drop the matter.
I mentioned in my last Rover Boys review that early Stratemeyer Syndicate books had archaic racial language and sometimes questionable racial attitudes that was later rewritten when various series were reissued. This early series hasn’t been revised. This first scene with Hans isn’t really so much a slur against Native Americans as prank with the boys playing up Wild West stories, but the book is just starting out.
Hans becomes the boys’ friend, but they prank Hans again later, scaring him with Tom wearing a Native American costume as he threatens to scalp him to continue their earlier joke, and they use the term “red man.” (We haven’t even gotten to Africa yet, so I was cringing at this point at what might be in store.) When Hans realizes that it was all just a prank, he tries to get the better of Tom by taking away the gun that Tom was using as a prop to scare him, and Tom tells him that the gun is too old to fire and isn’t dangerous. He just found it in the barn, and it’s all rusty. Tom tells Hans to pull the trigger and see that it won’t fire, which is the dumbest thing that anybody can do with a random old gun they just found somewhere. The gun explodes in Hans’s hands, knocking both Hans and Tom unconscious and scraping them with shrapnel. The other boys are scared, but they finally manage to bring them both around. Tom is horrified when he realizes what happened, saying that he’s been playing with that gun for awhile and pulled the trigger a dozen times himself, which is why he thought that the gun was unloaded and harmless (meaning he did the dumbest thing that anybody can do with a random old gun they just found somewhere repeatedly because, up to this point, dumb luck was on his side). He is shocked to realize that he’s lucky that he hasn’t shot somebody before and that he and Hans weren’t killed by the exploding gun. He apologizes to Hans and promises that this is the end of the pranks. Tom was always the lead prankster in earlier books, but he grows up a little here, realizing that reckless pranks have consequences.
At school, the boys participate in a kite flying contest, and Sam is almost pulled over the edge of a cliff by his kite. (Seriously.) Dora tells Dick that her mother had a dream that Crabtree tried to shoot him in a forest. (Prophetic?) The boys also have a run-in with Dan Baxter, who is still lurking around and swearing revenge.
Then, the boys turn their attention to a thief at school. Sam witnesses someone, who is probably the thief, sneaking around at night. Unfortunately, he didn’t see the person’s face, only describing this person as tall. Captain Putnam comes to believe that Alexander “Aleck” Pop, a black man who works for the school, is the thief because he receives an anonymous note that says he’s guilty. Sam doesn’t trust the anonymous note and tells the Captain so, saying that he can’t believe anyone as good-hearted as Aleck is would be a thief. However, the Captain insists that Aleck’s belongings be searched, and some of the objects that have been stolen turn up among his stuff. It’s a pretty obvious frame, and Alexander protests that he’s innocent, but Captain Putnam doesn’t believe him. There’s some ugly racial language used during this part. The word “coon” is used twice, and when the students at the school discuss the situation, one says the n-word. Fortunately, our Rover boy heroes aren’t the ones using that language, and Tom even tells the boy who used the n-word that he’s just resentful against Aleck for catching him doing something he shouldn’t have done earlier. The boy who used the n-word, Jim Caven, is portrayed as mean and unreasonable, and he gets into a fight with Tom in which he almost hurts him very badly. I was uncomfortable with the language in this scene, although I was somewhat reassured to see that it was used to characterize the ones using the worst of it as being the bad characters. My reassurance wasn’t complete because that’s not the only questionable racial language in the book.
Captain Putnam sends someone to escort Aleck to the authorities. He says that he supposes that the boys think he’s being too harsh with him, but he’s also suspicious of Aleck because he knows that members of his family have been in trouble with the law, too. The boys say it isn’t fair to blame him for things his relatives did and that they still don’t think he’s guilty. However, Aleck escapes before they reach the authorities, and they hear rumors that he went to New York City and boarded a ship to go overseas somewhere. The boys are sad, thinking that maybe they’ll never see him again. (You know they will.)
It’s not much of a surprise when the Rover boys later learn that Jim Caven has sold some things that match the description of other objects that have been stolen. Apparently, he’s been the thief all along and deliberately framed Aleck to get revenge on him. (I partly expected that the thief might be Dan Baxter, considering that he’s escaped from jail and is hanging around somewhere, probably needing money.) When the other boys confront Jim Caven, he flees into the woods. The other boys explain the situation to Captain Putnam, and he searches Jim Caven’s belongings, finding the rest of the stolen items. (You know, they could have just conducted a general search of the school and everyone’s belongings before this. This is a military academy, so a surprise dorm inspection wouldn’t be out of character, and it would have settled the matter much earlier.) Aleck’s name is cleared, but since he’s fled, they don’t know how to find him and tell him. Captain Putnam is sorry that he didn’t believe Aleck before.
However, they don’t have much time to consider it because the boys are soon summoned home by their uncle because he’s had news of their father. A ship captain has written Uncle Randolph a letter saying that his crew rescued a man who was floating on a raft off the Congo River. The man died soon after they brought him aboard their ship. They don’t know who the man was, but he was carrying a letter from the Rover boys’ father saying that he found a gold mine in Africa but was taken captive by King Susko of the Bumwo tribe (not a real African tribe, I can’t find anything about it) in order to prevent him from telling the secret of the mine to outsiders. Specifically, the tribe is afraid that the English and French colonizers will come to loot the mine and kill them. (Actually, a depressingly reasonable fear.) Anderson Rover explains in the letter that they don’t understand Americans. (That wouldn’t help, Anderson. Your boys attend a school run by a man who served with General Custer, and if this tribe knew what happened to Native Americans when gold was discovered on their land, they wouldn’t be reassured at all.) Anderson Rover is in fear of his life and asks his brother Randolph to come and rescue him if he can, but the letter is dated a year ago, so his family still doesn’t know if he’s alive now or not.
Uncle Randolph tells the boys that he wants to go to Africa to find his brother and asks Dick to come with him, as the oldest of his nephews. Dick, of course, agrees to go, but Tom and Sam refuse to be left behind. They decide that all of them will go.
On the ship to Africa, they meet an English adventurer named Mortimer Blaze, who is going to Africa for big game hunting. Tom asks him what will happen if the big game decides to hunt him instead, and he just says that it will be a “pitched battle.” (Doesn’t sound appealing to me.) When they talk about the people in Africa, they use the word “native” a lot and not in a flattering way. The general attitude seems to be that the “native” Africans are not very civilized (I was expecting they would say that because of the time period of this book), and Mortimer Blaze tells stories about tribes of people who are either very tall or very short. (I think he’s really referring to people from folktales, which I covered in the Encyclopedia of Legendary Creatures.) At one point, the characters say that the warm climate is the reason why Africa hasn’t made more progress toward civilization, that the warmth makes people want to be lazy. The adults in the story shock the boys by saying that not only is there no Christianity but that people there don’t really believe anything in particular, putting them even behind people Christians would consider heathens. They also make a shocking comment at one point about unwanted children being fed to crocodiles. They conclude that “civilization” can’t come soon enough to Africa, even if it has to be forced in with weapons. (Wow. I knew there was bound to be a lot of generic “native” and “savage” talk when I started this book because of the time period, but these matter-of-fact slights and accusations sound like they came straight out of Mrs. Mortimer’s books about Countries of the World Described, which heaps criticism and accusations of violence and immorality on pretty much all of the people of the world. Mrs. Mortimer’s books are much older than any Stratemeyer Syndicate books, and I wonder if Edward Stratemeyer read them in his youth. It wouldn’t surprise me because the attitudes match, and here he is, passing it all on to the next generation of kids in the form of an exciting adventure story.)
In a stroke of good luck, they end up rescuing Aleck, who was stranded at sea from the ship he boarded during his earlier escape. Aleck is glad to see the boys again, and they tell him that his name has been cleared and the real thief was caught. Aleck is glad to hear that, but he’s worried when he finds out that the ship that picked him up is headed for Africa. Aleck reflects that he always heard that his ancestors came from the Congo region of Africa, but he doesn’t really want to go there because he’s used to life in America and wouldn’t know what to do in Africa. (The Rover boys and Aleck go on for awhile about how great the United States is, and I know they were trying to sound patriotic, but the way they said it felt oddly like a sales pitch to me. I felt like saying, “You don’t need to sell me on the place. I already live here.”) The boys explain how they’re going there in search of their father. Aleck decides that he’d rather join their expedition than stay on the ship, and he offers his services as a valet. Uncle Randolph and the boys are glad to accept his help, and Uncle Randolph says it might be useful to have a black man with them who they know and trust in case they need someone to blend in with the native population and spy for them.
In a surprising twist, the boys also run into Dan Baxter on their arrival in Africa. When they ask him what he’s doing there, he says that he got drunk and was Shanghaied onto a ship, forced to work as a sailor. He was treated cruelly on the ship and ran away as soon as he had the chance. Now, he’s alone and has no money and no way home. The Rover boys feel sorry for him and give him money for him to buy his passage back to the United States. Dan Baxter asks to join their expedition, too, and they consider it as a sign that Dan is starting to reform because of his expedition. However, Dan is still a bully and an opportunist, and when he gets a counter-offer from someone else who is willing to hire him to make trouble for the Rovers, he accepts that instead, still holding a grudge against the Rovers because his father always told him that Anderson Rover stole a mine from him years ago that would have made them rich.
When I reviewed the first book in this series, I complained about the various unresolved story lines and miscellaneous villains still running around at the end of the story, still left to work on their individual plots against the Rover boys and their friends. In this book, every unresolved story line and villain from the first book collides with each other in Africa. Not only is Dan Baxter in Africa coincidentally at the same time as the Rovers, but Josiah Crabtree is also in Africa, for completely unrelated reasons from either the Rovers or Dan Baxter. He does attempt to kill Dick, but Dick survives. He is even rescued from a lion by one of his brothers.
So, is there true resolution with the main villains of the story, Dan Baxter and Josiah Crabtree? Not really. I looked up summaries of other books in the series, and even after they get some comeuppance, they continue to come back in sequels.
What is resolved by the end of the story is that the Rovers find their father alive. They rescue him from the village where he was being held captive, taking some of the women and children from the village with them as hostages to keep the village warriors from attacking them. They say privately that they wouldn’t have really hurt the women and children, but they tell the men that they’ll kill them if they don’t let the rescue party go. (This was another shocking part for me because I wouldn’t have thought of any of the usual Stratemeyer Syndicate heroes doing this. Somehow, I can’t picture the Hardy boys going this far, taking women and children hostage and threatening to kill them.) Once the rescue party is sure that they’re safe, they release their hostages and head for home. Anderson Rover says that he did find a gold mine, and someday, he’ll come back and loot it, er, mine it, but right now, all he wants to do is go home with his boys. It would be heartwarming if I didn’t know that he’s going to come back someday for gold on land that belongs to someone else who would never willingly sell it to him, and his boys are talking revenge on the king of the tribe that held their father captive.
This book is in the public domain and is easily available online in various formats through Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive (which has an audiobook).
My Reaction
I already gave much of my reaction to this book during the description of the plot because much of my reaction had to do with the racial language of the book. I knew there were going to be problematic portions before I even started, but frankly, there were too many of them for me to go into detail on all of them. What I described gives the broad strokes. I won’t say the book is deliberately trying to be insulting to black people. Aleck is portrayed as a good character who was wronged by a white boy by being framed for theft. However, there is a kind of casual racism in the story, like the casual references to how “uncivilized” Africa is and the characters’ off-hand supposition that it’s probably due to the climate there. I wouldn’t say that the characters or author hate black people (except maybe the non-Christian ones who feed children to crocodiles, which sounds like things Mrs. Mortimer accused various people of doing in the worst parts of Countries of the World Described), but I would say that there is a kind of condescension and dismissiveness that everyone, characters and author, seems to take for granted.
I can’t recall any of the characters using the phrase, “you know how they are”, but that’s the vibe I was getting. I got the feeling like the characters were saying things to each other and the author was saying things to his child readers with that sort of knowing tone, like “we all know these things.” No. “We” don’t. I know that Stratemeyer probably got a lot of this from a combination of old minstrel shows and Mrs. Mortimer or something very similar because I’ve seen Mrs. Mortimer‘s books, and I know how she talks. I also know why she says the things she does, and I’m not putting up with her attitude, even when it’s coming from someone else. Maybe the Rovers boys as characters and their child audiences would have read her books or similar ones before and nodded along with what Stratemeyer says because it confirms “information” they’ve seen before, but I’ve had more than my fill of wild accusations and crazy conspiracy theories, and I have no more patience left for any of it.
Mrs. Mortimer portrayed her book series as a factual introduction to world geography and the habits of people in different countries, but the truth behind her criticism, condescension, outspoken rudeness, and many of the wild accusations she makes about badly-brought-up children, dead bodies floating in rivers or just left in the street (depending on nationality), or the “antics” of “savages” around the world is her religious agenda (and, I think, probably some personal emotional and self-esteem issues, but that’s just a guess). She used missionaries with their own agendas as references for anecdotes in her books and tried to make people of various religions around the world sound evil and crazy on purpose to emphasize why “the Protestant” is the best religion (her words – she was specifically Evangelical and downright pushy about it). I would say that she also never hated black people … except maybe non-Christian ones, who as I recall, she claimed didn’t know what religion they were and were given to “antics”, dancing around and yelling or something. She wasn’t too clear on that point, probably because she didn’t know what she was talking about herself. On the other hand, she seemed inclined to be sympathetic to black people in the US who were victims of ill treatment, probably because they were Christian and most likely Protestant, which would have made all the difference in the world to her. She probably would have been okay with Aleck because he’s a Christian who was born in the US and has definitely never fed a baby to a crocodile in his life. She did not approve of the the concept of slavery at all and wouldn’t have tolerated physical cruelty of anyone due to race, which is to her credit, but none of that stopped her from spreading stories and rumors of violent savagery and teaching children that anyone who believed anything other than Protestant Christianity was “ignorant”, “savage”, and “wicked”, all words she actually used in describing people from various countries around the world because that’s what she wanted young children to “know” about other people. Mrs. Mortimer’s religious prejudices probably would have gone over the heads of the children who were these books’ original readers, especially if it echoed the talk of the children’s parents, but that’s how we end up with generations of children who grow into adults with casually racist ideas, thinking nothing of it, throwing around racist language without a clue or a care for the consequences. It’s in the book because it’s what “we” all “know”, dear Mrs. Mortimer said as much before, and Stratemeyer is just saying what “we” were all thinking, right? I think that’s about how that goes.
Let me bring you into the real world. If readers want to know what was really happening in Africa during the 19th century, there are far better sources. Africa is an entire continent, and there were many complex events happening all over, particularly related to European colonization. Outside forces were claiming territory in Africa, not so much for benefiting the people there and bringing them “civilization” as accomplishing their own personal aggrandizement and enrichment. (You know, rather like a man who is already rich in his own country coming to find and claim a gold mine that’s on someone else’s land because he’s addicted to the thrill of the hunt and acquisition and uses that thrill to hide from his own personal problems that he doesn’t want to face at home, like dealing with the loss of his wife and the raising of his boisterous sons. Just saying.) There were wars, famine, and disease in various parts of Africa during this period, partly due to internal power struggles among different African groups and leaders. I don’t know if anybody ever fed anyone to a crocodile on purpose, but infanticide is part of the dark side of humanity that comes out when times are desperate and hopes of survival in general are low. It’s a symptom of a society that’s suffering, and societies have suffered in that way many times around the world. If someone is likely to die soon after birth anyway, the hopeless parents might say, why even try? I suppose some might be tempted to say that having a religion that forbids killing children would help, but it hasn’t always, and having food also helps. I don’t blame 19th century missionaries for attempting to help people, but those who came in with a sense of self-importance, deciding ahead of time what would help without understanding the situation they were walking into, often didn’t help. Missionaries sometimes ended up getting killed in the middle of the unrest and power struggles. Some were even actively deceptive, using trickery and their position to gain advantages for themselves or the governments they represented at the expense of the people they were supposedly trying to help. But, the 19th century wasn’t all war, famine, and exploitation in Africa. The missionaries who were serious about doing some good and set up practical schools did provide useful centers of learning that helped educate future leaders and professional people and gave them tools they could use to build the lives they wanted. African societies did continue to build their own nations and identities. Overall, the colonization of Africa was more of an intrusive, disruptive force, providing additional hardships and obstacles to success more than solutions to any problems that Africa had before, not the glorious “civilizing” force that prevents people from feeding children to crocodiles that the book described.
So, now that I’ve talked about the historical and cultural influences behind the more uncomfortable parts of this book, I think it’s pretty obvious why early Stratemeyer Syndicate books had to be rewritten and revised in the mid-20th century. I knew this book was going to be cringe-worthy in places, but I have to admit that I was surprised at just how bad certain parts got. I hadn’t even considered that the word “coon” might appear. I never heard that word growing up and didn’t even know what it meant until I was in college, so I was pretty taken aback that a just-for-fun book for kids would use it, even one from the late 19th century. I suppose having grown up with the tamer, revised versions of books from the Stratemeyer Syndicate, I underestimated what the older series were like. I can only hope that I’ve made it pretty clear for people reading this review what the problems with this series were.
I debated about whether or not to even post this review, but I’ve talked about some uncomfortable books before (and said many highly critical things in my earlier rant about Mrs. Mortimer, my favorite example of a very popular bad influence in children’s literature – if you only know about her from The Peep of Day, you haven’t seen anything yet, even though the first chapter of that book is one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever read that was intended for small children). I’ve been planning a page discussing Stratemeyer Syndicate series books because they have been an important force in American children’s literature for so long, and it seemed only right to talk about their first series. So, now I’ve talked about it, and nobody else has to suffer through this book if they don’t want to. I found the characters, language, and situation aggravating, and the rewards for perseverance were inconsequential. This is certainly not something to spring on suspecting people, especially modern children, who might try using certain words for the attention-getting shock value without really understanding what they mean. I would say that this series should be primarily for adults interested in the history of children’s literature and others who know what they’re reading, understand what’s behind it, and can draw the line between fictional book and real life.
I’m not sure if I want to read any further books in this series because the unresolved problems of the stories get on my nerves, and there will probably be further issues with racial language, and I’d just have to repeat all the same explanations I’ve already given. I’m not saying a firm “no” to the rest of this series because there are indications that some people would like to see more coverage of them, but if I do any more, it’s probably going to be awhile and will only be delivered in small doses.
I wasn’t quite expecting to have these Mrs. Mortimer flashbacks from this book, but in honor of that experience, I might as well say that even though I’m leaving the Rover boys behind for now, I’m planning to go read many other useless novels “about people who have never lived”, which Mrs. Mortimer despised, and because I have access to some of them in audio book format, I can listen to them while knitting something completely unnecessary just because I want to. (If you read my rant/review about Countries of the World Described, you know what I’m talking about.) I’m not going to do it just because it would annoy Mrs. Mortimer. It’s something that I enjoy and do routinely anyway. I would do it even if it was something I thought Mrs. Mortimer would actually like. It’s more that knowing that she would have disapproved and can’t do anything about it makes me feel like we’re even because that’s the way I feel about her books and others like them.
The Rover Boys at School by Arthur M. Winfield (aka Edward Stratemeyer), 1899.
The three Rover boys, Richard, Thomas, and Samuel (called Dick, Tom, and Sam), live with their aunt and uncle in the country, but they learn that they are going to be sent to boarding school. The boys have been restless on the farm because they used to live in the city.
The boys’ father, Anderson Rover, is a mineral expert and made his fortune in mining. The family had lived in New York, so the boys are accustomed to city life. The boys’ mother died of a fever when they were young. After his wife’s death, the boys’ father traveled restlessly because of his grief, leaving the boys at boarding school in New York. Then, he had the notion to go to Africa and left the boys with their Uncle Randolph. The boys and their uncle haven’t heard from him since, and they worry that something has happened to him.
When the boys first arrived at the farm, they enjoyed the outdoor life of the country, but there isn’t much variety to the activities, and the boys start getting to trouble when they get bored. Their Uncle Randolph spends all of his time in studying scientific farming, and he can’t understand why the boys can’t take an interest in the subject or at least give him some peace and quiet for his work. The boys aren’t too impressed because, so far, their uncle doesn’t seem too successful at it. Richard (Dick) is the oldest of the three boys and is often quiet and studious, so he gets along better with Uncle Randolph than the others. He is 16 at the beginning of the series. Thomas (Tom) is fun-loving, likes to play pranks, and is 15 years old. His pranks are part of the reason why the boys are driving their uncle and aunt and their cook crazy. Samuel (Sam) is 14 years old and athletic.
Uncle Randolph doesn’t know much about kids or young people, so boarding school seems like the ideal solution. The boys’ aunt and uncle think that the boys need some discipline. They do, but the boys are also looking forward to seeing something of the world and having some adventures, so the prospect of going to boarding school sounds exciting to them. They’ve been to boarding school before, but they think it would be exciting to go to a military academy.
Before the boys leave the farm, Dick is attacked by a tramp, who steals his watch and pocketbook (wallet). The boys chase him and get the wallet back, but Tom almost drowns and Sam is almost swept over a waterfall while they try to pursue the tramp, who escapes in a boat with the watch. The boys are sad about the loss of the watch, which belonged to their father.
Tom gets a letter from his friend, Larry Colby, to say that he’s going to be attending the Putnam Hall Military Academy soon, and Larry’s father has recommended the school to the boys’ uncle. Uncle Randolph says that he’s decided to take the suggestion. The boys think it sounds exciting, and they’re glad that they’ll be going to school with someone they know. Uncle Randolph says that the headmaster of the school, Captain Victor Putnam, is a former military man who has a reputation for being kind to his students but strict on discipline, so it sounds like what the boys need.
Later in the story, they explain that Captain Putnam is a graduate of West Point and that he used to serve under Major General Custer, helping to put down Indian uprisings (Native American) until he was injured in a fall from his horse. For this book’s original audience of boys living in the late 19th century, this probably would have sounded exciting and noble, but not to people from the early 21st century. However Captain Putnam would have looked at it, quelling Native American uprisings would be essentially admitting to being part of their oppression because they weren’t uprising for nothing, and that fall from his horse is probably the only reason why he would even still be alive at the time of this story, given what eventually happened to Major General Custer. Because Custer had been a Civil War hero, people were shocked and saddened by his sudden and violent death. As with many people who die young, they romanticized his past and exaggerated his story, turning him into a legend for young people to live up to. Eventually, the romanticism wore off, and the reality stayed (he was the bottom of his class at West Point, not a student parents would really want their kids to emulate, and there were darker sides to his life and personality than most people in the 1800s would have known and which wouldn’t be appropriate talk for children), which is why his modern legacy isn’t as great as people a hundred years or more ago would have thought. Captain Putnam doesn’t look as exciting and heroic as advertised by association, but it’s enough to know that the Rover boys would have thought that it sounded impressive because of what their elders would have told them and so would their earliest readers, for similar reasons.
Before the boys leave for school on the train, Tom plays one last trick on the unpleasant station master by throwing a firecracker into some trash that the station master was burning, setting the mood for the boys’ eventual arrival at school.
After the train ride, the boy have to continue part way by boat. On the boat, they meet three pretty girls (how fortuitous) and a bully who also goes to their new school, Dan Baxter. The bully is harassing the girls by continuing to try to talk to them when they want him to leave them alone. Dan doesn’t say anything shocking to the girls, it’s more that he’s off-putting because he’s rather pushy and full of himself and can’t read a room to see that he’s making the girls uncomfortable because of the way he talks. It’s awkward. The Rover boys step in and try to get Dan to leave the girls alone, making an enemy of Dan. The girls (Dora Stanhope and her two cousins, Grace and Nellie Laning, who belong to prosperous farming families in the area) are grateful for the intervention and think that the Rover boys are better behaved than Dan is. The boys talk to the girls about their new school and learn that they don’t live far from the school, although they don’t mix with the students there much because the students at Putnam Hall don’t leave the campus very often. The boys hope that they’ll have the chance to see the girls again while they’re at Putnam Hall. (You know they will.)
Tom’s Putnam Hall experience starts off with a bang … literally. As the boys arrive at the school, Tom decides to give the other students a “salute” by scaring them with another of his firecrackers. That’s when Tom gets his first taste of military discipline from the Head Assistant Josiah Crabtree, the second in command at the school and the strictest disciplinarian in the place. Most of the school would have given the prank a pass, especially from a new boy, but Josiah Crabtree takes exception to Tom’s attitude and doesn’t accept his excuse that he doesn’t need to answer to Crabtree because he has only just arrived at the school, isn’t an official student yet, and shouldn’t be subject to the school’s rules. (Tom may have thought that military school would be exciting, but it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t have the first clue what military discipline is about.) Crabtree marches Tom off and locks him in the guard room to wait for Captain Putnam to return to the school and administer his discipline. This is actually in Tom’s favor because Captain Putnam understands that his students are still boys, and therefore, he isn’t as strict with them as he would be full adult soldiers.
Josiah Crabtree’s ultra-strictness has caused him to be not well-liked by other students at the school. When he and Tom discuss Tom’s prank while waiting for Captain Putnam, Tom continues to argue the point that he is not yet a student at the school and that Crabtree has no right to lock him up like he has. Tom tells him that he wants to be released to stay at the hotel in town so he can contact his guardian because he may not wish to join this school after all, threatening to tell his uncle of his mistreatment. Crabtree is correct that setting off a fire cracker to scare people isn’t the best way to start off on the right foot with the faculty (I wouldn’t have liked it if someone did it to me, and this is a school where people learn to fire real guns, so you can’t have people who treat firearms and explosives like toys), but Tom’s point that immediate imprisonment before he’s even really joined the school and been notified of the school’s rules is a valid criticism, and he is not so committed to the school at this point that he can’t leave if he wants to. If Tom makes false imprisonment a public issue, it would damage the reputation of the school. That threat is worrying to Crabtree, who knows that he has already rubbed others the wrong way and made a few enemies of his own.
Tom runs away from Crabtree and hides in the forest outside the school. He plans to walk into town, but along the way, he spots a campfire. He listens in on the conversation of the men sitting by the campfire. He discovers that one of them is the tramp who stole their father’s watch before, and he listens to the men discussing some clandestine “mining deal.” When they catch Tom spying on them, Tom confronts the man called Buddy about stealing his father’s watch. Buddy and his friend deny it, and Tom fights with them before running away and getting help at the Laning farm, where he meets Grace and Nellie again and the family gives him a room for the night. When he explains his story to the family, he learns that Josiah Crabtree has been courting Dora Stanhope’s widowed mother because she owns a sizeable farm and has money from her first marriage.
In the morning, Tom returns to the school and makes his case to Captain Putnam, arguing as he did the night before that he had not yet officially joined the school before Josiah Crabtree imprisoned him and confiscated and searched his luggage. Captain Putnam makes it clear to Tom that certain things, like fire crackers, are forbidden at the school, and he will have to accept that if he’s serious about being a student there. Tom asks what the point is of him joining the school if he’s going to have marks against him before he’s even had a chance to properly start, and Captain Putnam says that if Tom still wants to join, he’s willing to let bygones be bygones and let him start school with a clean slate. Captain Putnam sees Tom as intelligent and spirited even though he’s undisciplined, and is willing to give him a chance. Tom accepts and joins the school, although Crabtree is still annoyed at Tom getting away with his prank and running away the previous night. When Tom rejoins his brothers, he tells them about seeing the thief who stole the watch, and they discuss how awful it would be for Dora if the martinet Crabtree became her stepfather.
Because The Rover Boys is an early Stratemeyer Syndicate series, there is more adventure and the general friendships and rivalries of life at a boarding school than there is mystery. The boys and their friends get used to the routines, rules, and drills of military school, getting into fights with the bullies, playing sports, and pulling stunts with their friends. However, there are villains in the story with secrets for the boys to learn. Josiah Crabtree hasn’t been honest with Dora Stanhope’s mother, trying to use pressure to get her to marry him so he can use her money and property for his purposes … including money and property entailed for Dora under her late father’s will. Crabtree claims to have money of his own, bur shows no evidence of it. Although, who has been giving the bully, Dan Baxter, large sums of money and for what purpose? What about the watch thief and his friend? Why do they keep hanging around?
By the end of the book … not too much is resolved, compelling readers to continue on to the next book in the series to find out what happens.
This book and others in the series are now public domain and are easily available online in various formats through Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive (including audiobook).
My Reaction
I never read any of this series of books when I was a kid, but having grown up with other Stratemeyer Syndicate books, like Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and the Bobbsey Twins, I was curious about this first series produced by the Syndicate. I picked several of the books to get a feel for the series, and I had several reactions. First, the Rover Boys, like other early Stratemeyer Syndicate series, is almost but not quite a mystery series. It has some elements of suspense, but the little mysteries and secrets of the villains in the story come secondary to physical adventures and the drama of boarding school life for much of the book. In fact, the action kind of breaks for stories about football and baseball games the boys play at school, which don’t really have anything to do with the villains’ plots and are just part of school life. Although, the bully Dan Baxter loses favor with other boys at school when they discover that he actually placed a bet against the school’s own football team before a game, which seems pretty disloyal. I also suspected at first that at least some of the villains’ threads would be connected, but really, they have very little to do with each other, which was disappointing.
Stratemeyer Syndicate books have a pattern of ending chapters on cliffhangers in order to keep kids reading to find out what happens, which begins to show in this book, and often, the mystery/suspense elements in early stories help to set up these cliffhangers while the plot is more about the characters’ lives. Personally, I prefer stories that are more definitely mysteries, where the characters are making active efforts to solve problems and discover the villains’ secrets instead of just randomly stumbling on information. This particular story kind of annoyed me because the entire book ends on a cliffhanger. In fact, the only problem/mystery that gets resolved in the story is that Dick eventually gets his watch back. The other villains are still hanging around. At the end of the book, Crabtree is still hanging around, in spite of multiple interventions, trying to get Dora’ mother to marry him and turn over Dora’s inheritance from her father. The bully, Dan Baxter, left the school, but is apparently hanging around with Crabtree. It also turns out that Baxter’s father is secretly an old enemy of the Rover boys’ father and thinks that Anderson Rover cheated him out a mine years ago and still has the paperwork to prove it, possibly carrying it with him to Africa, for some reason. The Rover boys’ father is also still presumably lost somewhere in Africa, doing who-knows-what there. All of these problems are left hanging, apparently to be resolved in later books with other problems probably being added along the way. The only thing that I felt really certain about at the end of the book is that Dick is probably going to marry Dora in the future because he is already trying to be her protector, and his brothers will probably marry her convenient cousins, Grace and Nellie, in some order.
Second, I was bracing myself throughout the story to watch for its use of racial language. One thing to watch with old Stratemeyer Syndicate books is racist language and attitudes. In the 1950s and 1960s, with the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, the Syndicate revised and updated its different series. They changed and removed outdated language, including racial terms, and also updated references to culture and technology. The version of this particular book that I used for my review is the old public domain version. I already talked about Captain Putnam’s service with Major General Custer and how people at the time would have felt about that compared to modern people, but there is also a black man called Alexander who works at Putnam Hall. He doesn’t have a very big role in the story, but I wanted to talk about him because of the way the book describes him. The book describes him using the words “colored” and “Negro”, which are outdated now although acceptable for the time period (that’s why they’re part of the names of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was founded in 1909, and the United Negro College Fund, founded in 1944). However, during the Civil Rights Movement, people wanted to distance themselves from terms that were used during periods of high discrimination, so they began shifting to the use of “African American” as the specific term and “black” as the generic. This is the sort of language update that the Stratemeyer Syndicate books received in later reprintings.
Later in the book, one of the boys’ friends jokingly imitates a “Negro minstrel” in an old minstrel show (an entertainment people of this time would have been familiar with which included caricatured characters of black people), saying “That’s the conundrum, Brudder Bones. I’se gib it up, sah!” (“Brudder Bones” was a stock character in one of those shows, although I don’t know much about it because I’ve never seen a real minstrel show. I think there was a similar reference to the name “Bones” as a minstrel show character in the book Cheaper by the Dozen as well.) This is another cultural element that would be removed from later Stratemeyer Syndicate books and that also appeared in other older children’s books that were written prior to the Civil Rights Movement, including at least one of the Little House on the Prairie books. These references get a bad reaction in modern times because this type of caricature is a mean style of humor that probably wouldn’t have lasted very long against anybody who had the authority to complain about it at the height of its popularity. To put it another way, it’s the kind of humor where someone is definitely being laughed “at”, not “with,” and some even included songs with descriptions of horrifically violent things happening to black people masked as comedy. If you’ve never seen this kind of reference to minstrel shows before, you are not missing anything for having grown up without it. There’s nothing inherently funny in the friend’s little joke, and it wouldn’t mean anything to anybody who didn’t know what the reference referred to. It seems to be one of those things that only becomes amusing when someone recognizes the source of the reference, and as I said, I’m not even sure exactly who “Bones” was supposed to be, other than some kind of stock character. I vaguely know what the reference is from, but not enough to connect with it in the way the original audience might have, and anyone younger than I am probably wouldn’t recognize even that much. I don’t want to put undue emphasis on this line in the book because it was only one line, and the Rover boys weren’t really into it either because they were worried about a problem they had at the time that wasn’t really funny, but I thought that I should explain the background of this comment and point it out as another reason why the Stratemeyer Syndicate books needed revising.
When referring to their father, who is still missing in Africa, the boys also worry that maybe he was killed or taken prisoner by “savage” tribes. “Tribes” in many children’s books of this period are described as “savage.” The exact location their father was trying to reach is not specified, just somewhere in Africa where there is a jungle, although a later book in the series has more about it.
Some general old slang in this book really dates it, like the use of the word “fellows” instead of “guys” and the word “peach” for “tattle” or “tell on” someone. Even later Stratemeyer Syndicate series, like the Hardy Boys, use language that would sound dated to modern people, like the word “chums” for “friends.” These old slang terms were also changed and removed from later reprintings.
There were also some features of this story that took me by surprise. Pranks and stunts are regular features of boarding school stories, but I was surprised at some of the roughness of the boys at the school as well as some of the punishments. At one point, the boys realize that Crabtree has pushed Dora’s mother to marry him, and they’re on their way to town to get married immediately. The Rover boys tell their friends and get them to swarm the carriage, pretending that it’s part of a game they’re playing, trying to delay or disrupt their trip to town and their wedding plans. The boys cause an accident with the carriage that causes Mrs. Stanhope to get a broken arm and a cracked rib. They’re lucky nobody broke their neck. It’s a pretty violent way to interfere, even though they’re trying to save Mrs. Stanhope and Dora from Crabtree’s machinations.
One thing I did enjoy was the description of the game of Hare and Hounds (also called Paper Chase) that came right before the carriage scene. I’d never heard of the game before, but apparently, it’s been a popular game in British schools for centuries. Probably, the reason I’ve never seen it played is because the playgrounds and yards of the schools I attended wouldn’t have been large enough to make a really good game. One person plays the role of the “hare” and is given a head start, leaving a trail of bits of paper behind him as he goes. The other players are the “hounds”, and they try to find the hare by following the trail of paper bits, like they were hounds following a scent. The object of the game is for them to catch the hare before he reaches a designated finishing point. At a school where you can see pretty much the entire playground and everyone on it at once, there wouldn’t be any point in following a trail or any real challenge to the game, but it sounds like an interesting game to play if you can find a large enough space for it.
The Green Cameo Mystery by Frances K. Judd, 1952, 1980.
The story begins with Kay’s friends, Betty and Wendy, treating her to lunch, but when the girls try to pay the bill, the cashier says that their money is counterfeit. Betty and Wendy say that their mother gave them the cash, and she got those particular bills on a recent trip to San Francisco. The cashier tells them to contact the Secret Service and report the counterfeit money and tell them where it came from. (This book is old, but the Secret Service still investigates counterfeit money.)
As the girls leave the restaurant, they talk about the errands they want to run this afternoon. There is an auction Kay wants to attend because there’s a beautiful Chinese desk that she wants to get for her cousin, Bill, for his new office. However, she remembers that she needs to drop Bill’s shirt off at a laundry before they go to the auction. The laundry is a cliched Chinese laundry (connections are building in this story), but the man Kay usually sees there is absent today. The woman at the counter, Lily Wong, says that she’s the man’s sister and that her brother is unwell. Kay asks if he’s been to a doctor, and Mrs. Wong fearfully says that she doesn’t think that there’s anything a doctor could do against the green cameo. She explains that her husband got the green cameo in Shanghai, but it’s cursed, and it brings misfortune to her family every three years. While the girls are talking to the woman, she gets a phone call from someone who tells her that her daughter Lotus is now missing, having disappeared from the college she attends. (Yeah, Lotus. I don’t know if that’s a name that Chinese people actually use, but many of the Chinese names in this book struck me as being made up. I could be wrong because I’m not an expert on Chinese names, but they have that look.)
Mrs. Wong tells Kay that she tried to hire a medium named Cara Noma to break the curse of the green cameo, but she hasn’t been able to do it. Right away, Kay is sure that Cara Noma is a fraud. Kay volunteers to help find Lotus. A prime motive for her disappearance is Lotus’s impending arranged marriage to an older but wealthy businessman named Foochow. (I Googled that name, and apparently, it’s a romanized version of a place name, not a last name.) Kay’s first thought is that Lotus may have run away because she decided that she didn’t want to participate in this arranged marriage. Mrs. Wong also tells Kay that Cara Noma claims that her daughter has sold a jewel box with a green lotus cameo on the lid that Mr. Wong gave her as a betrothal gift.
The medium Cara Noma shows up while Kay is discussing the situation with Mrs. Wong and starts into her mystical act about how she’s going to break the curse. Kay impatiently tells her that it’s all nonsense and that she’s just taking poor Mrs. Wong’s money. Even Mrs. Wong agrees because, so far, Cara Noma hasn’t produced any results, and Kay is nice enough to offer to help her for free. Angrily, Cara Noma grabs both Kay and Mrs. Wong and uses some blood from a cut on Mrs. Wong’s finger to draw a red X on Kay’s forehead. She declares that she has transferred the curse of the green cameo to Kay and that Kay will soon see that the curse is real.
Kay still doesn’t think that the curse is real, and she and her friends head over to the auction where she wants to buy that desk for her cousin. Before the auction begins, Kay and her friends are looking over the items for sale when Kay discovers that the desk she wants to buy has a secret compartment in it. On impulse, she puts the envelope holding her money in the secret compartment to try it out. (This is so dumb, Kay. Don’t put all of your money in the secret compartment of a desk you don’t own!) Then, she gets distracted when she spots a jewelry box matching the one described by Mrs. Wong. Then, Kay’s nemesis from school, Chris Eaton, shows up and tells her not to waste her time bidding on the jewelry box because she wants and she has more money than Kay.
It turns out that Kay is unable to buy the desk she wanted to buy because the bidding is much higher than she can afford. Then, a man named Sidney Trexler shows up and protests the auction, saying that the desk belongs to him and he doesn’t want to sell it. It turns out that he’d been storing the desk there, but the desk was being sold because he hadn’t paid his storage fees. Mr. Trexler says that he has the money to pay his fees now and wants the desk back because he’s planning to get married and will need the furniture. The man who was going to buy the desk agrees to cancel his offer to buy so Mr. Trexler can have the desk back. When the jewelry box comes up for sale, both Kay and Chris Eaton are outbid by Mr. Trexler as well. Kay is disappointed because she was hoping to get the jewelry box for Mrs. Wong.
However, the mystery is only just beginning. When Kay gets home, she finds that the envelope she thought held her money isn’t really her envelope. She did remember to retrieve the envelope from the desk before it was sold (for a moment, I was afraid that she would forget), but by mistake, she grabbed a different envelope. Is this the first bad luck of the curse? Kay knows that she has to talk to either the auction house or Mr. Trexler to get her envelope and money back! Then, a taunting comment from Chris Eaton reveals that Mr. Trexler’s fiancee is actually Lotus Wong. Now, Kay really needs to find Mr. Trexler!
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction and Spoilers
So, right from the beginning of this story we have the mystery of the counterfeit money, the mystery of the cameo curse, the mystery of the fake medium, the mystery of the disappearance of Lotus Wong, and the mystery of Mr. Trexler and his engagement and sudden money. The girls also come to wonder about Mr. Wong. He seems to have much more money than his brother-in-law who operates the laundry, and his wife seems afraid of him. What is Mr. Wong’s business, and why doesn’t he do more for his brother-in-law? Are any or all of these things connected? Actually, yes. At first, I wasn’t sure how they were going to circle back toward the counterfeit money from the beginning of the book, but it turns out that Cara Noma is in on the counterfeiting operation. For a time, it looks like Mr. Wong might be the head of the operation, but it turns out that he’s innocent. I thought that Lotus’s reasons for running away were poorly explained. Part of it is that she doesn’t want to marry Foochow, but there’s also a side plot about Cara Noma using hypnosis to control both Lotus and her mother. I think the implication is that she was doing it to milk Mrs. Wong of money while keeping Lotus hidden from her, but it seemed like an odd complication to me since Cara Noma was also involved in the counterfeiting ring.
I’m not sure that I’d call anything in the book “racist”, although I think there may be justification for saying that parts are “stereotypical” and probably a bit culturally shallow and “tone deaf.” My first impression was that the author and the characters in the story like Chinese culture for being exciting and exotic, but in that way where there’s no real depth to their knowledge it and it comes off as being a bit like caricatures of Chinese people you might see in old movies. I’ve seen some of the old Charlie Chan mystery movies, and the way the characters in the book talked kind of reminded me of them. The Chinese names seem pretty stereotypical and so does the way they speak in broken English. They don’t do the “Engrish” thing where the ‘l’s and ‘r’s are swapped, but the Chinese characters don’t speak proper English, and they throw in phrases and expressions that I think are meant to sound quaintly foreign. At one point, Mrs. Wong says to the girls, “When you see Lotus again, tell my lovely flower not study too hard. Much study make many wrinkles.” I’m not sure whether that was just a joke or if it was supposed to be some kind of pseudo-proverb, like Charlie Chan used to make. On the other hand, some of the speech patterns I thought might be old stereotypical tropes from movies might have more grounding in real life than I’ve credited them for having. Lily Wong also sometimes refers to herself in the third person, “Lily Wong not sure,” instead of “I am not sure.” I’ve met people in real life whose first language was Chinese, and none of them do this. I thought at first that this might be another trope carried over from old movies, but I looked it up, and apparently, actual Chinese speakers can do this sometimes. The technical name for it is illeism. So, while some of the speech patterns seem like old movie tropes, they might not be completely wrong for real life.
One part of the story that bothered me is the Chinese play that Kay’s school decides to perform. Kay and her friends are told that “a delegation of foreign visitors to the United States” (no nationality/nationalities specified at first) would be visiting schools in the area, including the high school that they attend. To entertain their foreign visitors, the school decides that they’re going to put on a short play, and of course, the drama teacher picks one with an “Oriental” theme called “The Pagoda Mystery.” (“Oriental” is the word they use, which is rather vague and considered somewhat outdated now. Some people consider it demeaning because it has old associations with stereotypes that people don’t want to perpetuate. The demeaning part seems to be more in the attitudes associated with its use than in the word itself. It is a technical geographic term that refers to the Eastern Hemisphere, but my thought is that referring to an entire hemisphere is rather vague. I don’t think the book meant it badly, but in modern times, it’s generally considered more polite and a sign of being well-educated to use the most specific word possible when describing geographic regions or groups of people. When people are overly vague, it makes it sound like they don’t know what they’re talking about or what the more specific word is. If this play is specifically about China, they could have just said that.) It’s rather coincidental that they’re doing a mystery play set in China right when Kay is working on a mystery involving people from China, but those types of coincidences happen often in Kay Tracey books. I wasn’t able to find any real information about this play, so I’m pretty sure sure that it was just made up by the author of the book so the school would have just the right kind of coincidental play to perform. Also, of course, Kay gets the lead role in the play when she tries out for it, that of a beautiful Chinese maiden. If there are any Asian students at this school, they aren’t mentioned, so I don’t think there are any. Charlie Chan was also not played by Asian actors, even though other characters in the series were, which is why they bother people now and there haven’t been any new ones made since 1981. The book says, “But because of her recent experiences at the Wong home, Kay spoke her lines with special feeling and proved her familiarity with Chinese customs and people. Therefore, the leading role was given to her.” I’m not convinced that her conversations with Mrs. Wong have really given her deep knowledge of China, but they did have tea together at her house, so maybe there’s an implication that she told her more about Chinese tea customs than the book described or something.
By another coincidence, it turns out that Mrs. Wong was in a production of the same exact play in China when she was young, and she played the part that Kay is going to play, so she coaches Kay in how to play the part. (What stroke of luck! See, Kay isn’t cursed!) Mrs. Wong assures Kay that when her face is made up to look Chinese, no one will know that she isn’t really Chinese because she’s such a good actress. I suppose that people in the 1950s, when this book was originally written, would be a little more accepting of non-Asians wearing makeup to play Asians (called “yellowface“) just because it was done more often back then, and people get comfortable with things they see often. It’s not particularly comfortable for modern people because our society is sufficiently diverse to have actual Asians playing Asian roles without the help of cheesy makeup, so this part of the story is eye-rolling, especially the way everyone fawns over Kay being so authentic-seeming. Also, much of what Mrs. Wong teaches Kay seems to involve making gestures with her hands and fluttering her eyelashes when she speaks, which the drama teacher praises as being very realistically Chinese. It’s hard to know exactly what that means without seeing exactly what Kay’s doing, and the description doesn’t say much. The fluttering eyelashes make me think that she’s acting flirty, but I don’t know if that’s suppose to be part of her role in the play or not because we’re never told the full story. Again, I could be wrong, but it Kay’s apparently authentic performance seems more like something from an old movie than real life.
I think that the drama coach choosing a play from China was meant to be some kind of salute to the foreign visitors (and a coincidence that helps further the plot of Kay’s mystery), but it seems like a kind of tone-deaf choice to me, not thinking about what people really want to see and experience when they visit a foreign country. If I were the person making the decisions, I don’t think that I would be comfortable with showing visiting foreign dignitaries a high school production of a play they would already know from their own youths in their country, entirely acted by people wearing makeup to look like them, probably with varying degrees of success. It just seems awkward and might give the impression that they were being made mocked rather than honored. People travel to see new and different things, not imitations of things they already have back home. That would be like someone from New York City going to New Orleans and spending their entire time there watching productions of Broadway plays instead of touring the French Quarter or the Garden District. If you’re just going to do something you could do back home, what did you even make the trip for? Traveling is about seeing things that make different places unique. So, if I were in charge of the high school play, I think I would have picked something that had nothing to do with China, something new and original that the visitors could describe to people back home as something you could only see if you go to America. It might be an American-written play or maybe something that the students put together themselves to show their individual personalities and interests, a view of the modern American teenager, like a collection of student-written short skits or a talent show. Musical performances would be good because people can still enjoy the sounds of the music even if they don’t know all of the words. It’s pretty likely that this school has a band or orchestra, and there may be some unofficial student bands that could play. Dancing, gymnastics, and juggling acts might be good, too, if there are people who know how to do those, because people understand what they are just by looking at them. They don’t require explanations like humor that involves puns and might go over the heads of people who aren’t completely fluent in a language. I like the idea of the entertainment being a sort of variety show with music and skits because that’s a traditional form of entertainment that was still popular in the 1950s, and it’s a good format when you have a large group of people because there are multiple leading parts and solos in different acts of the show, avoiding some of the inevitable arguments about who gets the best parts. They could even have displays of artwork or science projects from students who aren’t part of the performing entertainment. It would offer variety for the visitors and give everyone a chance to contribute something.
Of course, there’s a subplot to the story about Chris Eaton, Kay’s school nemesis, trying to steal her part in the play. Chris even goes so far as to drug Kay’s food so she’ll miss the performance. First of all, I’d never be as trusting as Kay, and I wouldn’t eat anything that someone who has a history of doing nasty things gave me. If Kay’s so sharp, she should have figured that Chris would do something nasty to her food. Second, drugging somebody isn’t a harmless prank. Chris apparently slipped Kay a strong sleeping pill, and Kay didn’t even finish everything Chris gave her. We don’t know whether Chris might have accidentally overdosed Kay if she’d eaten it all. People can die from drug overdoses. Chris also couldn’t know for sure whether or not Kay might have been taking some other medication at the time that would conflict with what she gave her. People can also die from mixing the wrong medications. For some reason, Kay and her friends don’t tell on Chris, and Chris isn’t punished. I understand that people don’t like to be thought of as tattletales, but I think that there are limits to what people should be willing to put up with, and being drugged should definitely something no one should tolerate. What she did was serious, and I don’t like it that they’re pretending like it isn’t.
Overall, I found myself often thinking of the old Charlie Chan movies while reading this book, comparing what I was reading to what I’ve seen in old movies. There are reasons why the Charlie Chan movies didn’t last, and I think this book is a decent example of some of those reasons. During their heyday, the Charlie Chan books and movies were welcomed as one of the first portrayals of an Asian hero in American culture who was kind, intelligent, and upheld justice. Even though Charlie Chan was a stereotypical character, he was a stereotype of all that was good, which was a welcome break from previous stereotypes of Asians as devious, evil characters, like the fictional villain Fu Manchu. Charlie Chan was one of the first fictional characters to encourage the American public to see Asian people in a friendly light and even as people to be admired. The Charlie Chan series encouraged a positive interest in Chinese people and culture, even though it was also somewhat shallow and stereotypical. As I said, the actors who portrayed Charlie Chan in movies were not Asian themselves. Hollywood back in the day couldn’t bring itself to put an Asian in the leading role. Culturally speaking, it’s probably best to look at that series as a stepping stone to better things. Once people have been introduced to a concept, we expect them to eventually gain more depth and understanding. Charlie Chan helped people to break away from old, toxic ideas and prejudices, but that doesn’t mean that people should stay at that level of cultural understanding and portrayals. People progress. They grow and learn, and so do societies and cultures.
What I’m saying is that nothing in this story related to China or Chinese culture is educational for children. They won’t learn anything from this book, and most of the books that I read as a child specifically included real facts about other countries and culture to be at least factually-correct or semi-educational. This book doesn’t even define the word “pagoda” for anyone who doesn’t already know it. There are no Chinese words in the story, and when Kay and her friends have tea with Mrs. Wong, they don’t say whether there are any special tea customs they observe. What the book tells you about Chinese people is very general – that they have some interesting antique furniture and art objects, they drink tea, they might be superstitious, not all of them speak good English, some are friendly and helpful while others are sinister criminals, and if you want to act like one on stage, hand gestures and fluttering eyes are pretty important (whatever that means). Some of that stuff is true, particularly the parts about tea, the fascinating antiques, and the fact that some can be good and some bad, like human beings in general. But, there’s not much concrete, factual knowledge here, and some parts might give kids the wrong impression. I had the feeling the whole time I was reading it that the person who wrote it was a fan of old movies and didn’t really know much about Chinese culture to tell anybody in a factual, educational way. The old Scooby-Doo cartoons were kind of like this when they talked about other countries and cultures, too, because many of them were written as kind of spoofs on movies that people would have known when they were first made. If you’re into old movies, you can recognize the references, but they weren’t meant to teach anything or include any real information. If you compare the older Scooby-Doo series to the more modern ones, you’ll notice that some of the modern ones make more of an effort to include some real, educational facts. Scooby-Doo isn’t an educational show, but I have noticed a slight shift in how they talk about other countries and cultures. That’s more the standard of children’s literature and entertainment I’m accustomed to – when someone says something about another country or culture, I expect it to be something factual that shows that the author did at least a little basic research and knows something about what they’re talking about. It’s grating to me sometimes that older, vintage children’s series don’t always do this. Some of them even shamelessly make things up about other countries and cultures just because they think it would make the story more exciting, assuming that the kids reading the books won’t notice or care. If this book sparked an interest and encouraged kids to learn more about China or Chinese culture, it’s not too bad, but by itself, it doesn’t demonstrate any helpful level of cultural knowledge and information.
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 