From Jelly Roll to Ambrose Bierce

Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton is usually linked to the Big Easy rather than the Big Orange: “New Orleans is the cradle of jazz,” he once boasted, “and I, myself, happened to be the creator.” But Phil Pastras reveals equally intimate linkages between the pioneering jazz pianist and the American West in “Dead Man Blues,” a biography that casts Jelly Roll as the gifted but flawed hero of a saga that is “truly Odyssean” and, at the same time, thoroughly American.

“Dead Man Blues” is enlivened by the exotica of a life lived in the netherworld of saloons and brothels. Morton’s first gig in Southern California was in 1909, when he played a club in Oxnard--”a high-stepping town,” as he remembers it. He returned for two extended sojourns in the West, once in the 1920s and again in the 1940s, which have been described as “Jelly’s happiest and most prosperous [years].” And it was in Los Angeles that he was reunited with his beloved godmother, a “voodoo priestess” called Eulalie Echo.

Above all, it was “way out west” that Morton fell in love with a Creole barkeeper named Anita Gonzales, whom Morton described in his deathbed will as his “comforter, companion and help-meet” and the inheritor of the royalties on his music. “[T]heirs was not just a love story,” Pastras insists. “Anita’s relationship to Jelly touched virtually every aspect of his life.”

And, as Pastras allows us to see, it was an ill-fated love affair. When Morton died in Los Angeles in 1941--his last address was within a block of the throbbing jazz and blues scene along Central Avenue--she was married to another man and running the Topanga Beach Auto Court in Malibu. Tellingly, Morton composed “Sweet Anita Mine” as a tribute to Gonzales, and she reciprocated by penning the lyrics for “Dead Man Blues.”

Long before Yosemite Valley was occupied by an army of tourists, real soldiers were encamped there--the blue-coated officers and troops of the U.S. Cavalry pioneered and protected one of America’s first national parks, and their wholly unsung story is told with charm and authority in “Nature’s Army: When Soldiers Fought for Yosemite” by Harvey Meyerson.

Taking a bold stance against the cherished myths of the Old West and the currents of political correctness, Meyerson credits the soldiers of the “Old Army” with remarkable achievements in “nation-building” in the most elevated sense. As a case in point, he focuses on Capt. Abraham “Jug” Wood and the other officers of the U.S. Cavalry who were called upon to manage the newly created national park in Yosemite Valley between 1890 and 1914.

“The culture-straddling Old Army of the Western frontier, in many ways an army of Ishmaels, often saw what the restless civilian society it served could not,” Meyerson explains. “They had served their nation as warriors, explorers, administrators, naturalists, builders of roads and bridges, guides, protectors, telegraphists, weathermen, local handymen, lawmen, country doctors, engineers, surveyors and above all mediators in an era of economic and spiritual conquest of the American land and its native inhabitants.”

So it was that the cavalry literally rode to the rescue of Yosemite. “That most holy mansion of the mountains,” as naturalist John Muir called it, was “protected in law but not in fact”: “Homesteading farmers, cattlemen, miners, and timber speculators claimed nearly 60,000 acres within the newly designated national park,” Meyerson explains, “and land promoters were active throughout the area.”

Wood and the soldiers who came after him were vigilant in guarding the irreplaceable legacy that Yosemite represented. They surveyed and mapped the fantastic topography; counted the already-endangered population of bear, deer, grouse and quail; worked to prevent the locals and the tourists from doing damage to the parklands; and championed the right of a tiny remnant of Native Americans to remain in their tribal homeland.

“Blessings on Uncle Sam’s soldiers!” Muir said. “They have done their job well, and every pine tree is waving its arms for joy.”

Rarely does it go unsaid in a review of a book by Oakley Hall that he is revered as one of America’s most accomplished and influential teachers of writing, working at UC Irvine and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Nor will it go unsaid here, if only because it is undeniably fascinating to see how someone who has tutored so many other writers goes about his own work.

Indeed, Hall seems to take pleasure in presenting the plight of a much-put-upon teacher of writing in “Ambrose Bierce and the Death of Kings,” the second in a series of historical thrillers that focuses on the imagined exploits of the real-life reporter who served as the featured scribe of William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper empire in the waning years of the 19th century. According to Tom Redmond, Bierce’s cohort and the character who tells the tale, Bierce devotes his spare time to “editing and emendating the verse his flock of not very talented young poetesses brought him,” dispensing advice to aspiring writers who haunt him even at the breakfast table and telling one desirable but insufficiently compliant author that “the covers of her last novel were too far apart.”

No such complaint can be made about “Ambrose Bierce and the Death of Kings,” a fast-paced, light hearted and unfailingly high-spirited confection that Hall has whipped up out of a few juicy morsels of American history. The starting point is the fact that the last reigning king of Hawaii, David Kalakaua, died in San Francisco in 1891--and the rest is compounded of equal parts of drama, humor and romance, presented with a wry sensibility that owes less to the Gilded Age than to our own era.

The dying king is encamped at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, and the royal entourage is beset by what the Hawaiians call pilikia--trouble. When one of the princesses suddenly disappears from the hotel and a trusted counselor of the king dies under mysterious circumstances, Bierce and Redmond take it upon themselves to go on the prowl through the picturesque streets of San Francisco in a strikingly Sherlockian effort at sleuthing.

Sorcery, scandalous family secrets, palace intrigue and imperialist ambition are among the clues to the mystery. “There is something rotten in Maui,” quips one of the high-born Hawaiians, “and there is something rotten in the city of San Francisco as well.” Hall, mindful of the art and craft that he has taught to so many other writers, keeps his readers guessing until the very end whether a vengeful kahuna or a greedy capitalist is to blame.

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Jonathan Kirsch, a contributing writer to the Book Review, is the author of, most recently, “The Woman Who Laughed at God: The Untold History of the Jewish People” (Viking).