Owen Rhoscomyl

By John S. Ellis

Around the turn of the century, Welsh readers thrilled to the heroic stories of Owen Rhoscomyl. Having been a cowboy, frontiersman, soldier and mercenary, Rhoscomyl was as adventurous and exotic as his stories. Roving the wilds of the American West, Patagonia and South Africa before finally settling in Wales, Rhoscomyl was a flawed hero who led a rough life that exacted a personal price in poverty, delinquency and violence. He identified deeply with the Welsh nation as a source of tradition, legitimacy and belonging within a wider imperial world. As a popular commercial writer of historical romance, imperial adventure, popular history and public spectacle, he rejected accusations of national inferiority, effeminacy and defeatism in his depictions of the Welsh as an inherently masculine and martial people, accustomed to the rugged conditions of the frontier, ready to advance the glory of their nation and eager to lead the British imperial enterprise. This literary biography will explore the vaulting ambitions, real achievements, and bitter disappointments of the life, work and milieu of Owen Rhoscomyl.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781783169511

John S. Ellis

John S. Ellis is Professor of History at the University of Michigan-Flint.

Book preview

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Cowboy 1863–1886

Although an influential and versatile pioneer of Welsh writing in English, Owen Rhoscomyl is an almost forgotten figure in the literary history of Wales. With its breathless tone of soaring romance and melodrama, Rhoscomyl’s florid prose has often been dismissed or ignored by scholars. A staunch Welsh nationalist as well as a monarchist and imperial patriot, Rhoscomyl held views that further estranged his work from the conventional narrative of Welsh history and literature. Yet, Owen Rhoscomyl was a popular commercial writer and a public personality in Edwardian Wales. Exploiting his colourful past as a cowboy, adventurer and war hero, he became a minor celebrity and a well-known advocate of Welsh cultural nationalism, particularly in south Wales. Rhoscomyl strove to create a heroic and inspirational past for the Welsh nation through his novels, short stories, journalism and historical writing. Often featuring gallant Welsh characters, he also wrote short stories and three adventure novels of a semi-autobiographical nature set in the American west, Patagonia and South Africa.

His was a distinctly Welsh contribution to the historical romance and adventure fiction epitomized by such authors as Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and Stanley Weyman. Seeking to further engage the masses, Rhoscomyl experimented with other genres and would extend his popular literary campaign into the production of spectacle and drama, playing major roles in the National Pageant of Wales (1909), the investiture of the prince of Wales (1911) and the movement towards a national theatre of Wales (1912–14). Sensitive to accusations of national inferiority and defeatism, Rhoscomyl depicted the Welsh as an inherently martial people, accustomed to the rugged conditions of the frontier, ready to advance the glory of their nation and eager to lead the British imperial enterprise. Along with his celebrated contemporary Allen Raines, Rhoscomyl was a pioneer of Welsh writing in English. Although aimed at a broad buying public and sold on four continents, his work was written primarily with a Welsh audience in mind. With no pretentions to literary greatness, his work was overtly commercial and spoke to many in ‘imperial Wales’ whose Welsh nationalism and British imperialism were mutually compatible sentiments. Widely distributed across libraries and schools in early twentieth-century Wales, Rhoscomyl’s heroic image of the Welsh continued to inspire schoolboys beyond his death in 1919. Indeed, Roland Mathias, the father of Anglo-Welsh literary studies, once confessed that his own Welsh identity was awoken by a Rhoscomyl adventure novel he read as a boy. Owen Rhoscomyl is an important if over-looked and unconventional figure in the history of modern Welsh literature, a voice that speaks to the imperial dimension of the Welsh experience and to the multiple ways in which Welsh national identity has been imagined, projected and contested.

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According to public records, Owen Rhoscomyl was born in 1863 with the more prosaic name Robert Scowfield Mills. His father, Robert Mills, was a skilled mason from the hills of Rochdale who in 1855 married Jane Ann Schofield. Residing in Rochdale before relocating to the growing resort town of Southport, Jane Ann gave birth to four children by Robert, but only two of them survived infancy: Robert and his elder sister Ada, who was born in 1861. In 1863, a scant few days after his son’s birth, the elder Robert Mills was killed in a construction accident. In 1865, the widowed mother married Luke Etchells, an iron moulder from Droylesden. Relocating with her family several times across the industrial suburbs of Manchester, Jane Ann gave birth to another three children, only one of whom survived infancy. She herself succumbed to tuberculosis in 1869 at the age of thirty-four. Her death left her second husband to care not only for his own son, Philip Etchells (age four), but also his two stepchildren, Ada (eight) and Robert Mills (six). Perhaps alarmed by this prospect, Robert’s 72-year-old maternal grandmother, Anne Jones Gill, joined the household to care for the children, keep the house and contribute to the family income with her wages as a laundress.

The primary figure in Rhoscomyl’s youth was the formidable and proud Welshwoman that was his grandmother. Public records and family memory reveal fascinating details of Anne’s very full life. Born in 1797, she was raised an Anglican in the rural parish of Tremeirchion in Flintshire. Rhoscomyl would later describe his grandmother as one ‘who was famous for her looks, but who also stood six foot, & at eighty four walked like a girl should do, though you have to go to Spain to see girls do it’.¹ She left rural Wales for a new life in the metropolis of Manchester, where she gave birth to a child out of wedlock. Brought back to Tremeirchion to be baptized in 1829, her child was adopted and raised under the name Owen Williams by a close cousin. Anne returned to Manchester, but she made annual visits back to Wales to see her son for several years. She married Joseph Schofield, a Manchester pattern card maker, in 1833, shortly after the death of Schofield’s wife. In 1835, Anne gave birth to Rhoscomyl’s mother, Jane Ann. After Schofield’s death in 1839, Anne remarried in 1841. Her new husband, John Gill, was a Manchester mechanic, a widower with children and a recently converted Mormon. Anne Jones appears to have converted to Mormonism sometime before the marriage. Shortly afterward, the Gill family emigrated to the United States to settle in the recently founded Mormon enclave of Nauvoo, Illinois. The sect was the target of religious hostility and life must have been difficult. Arrest, legal challenges, violence and vigilantism eventually led the Mormons to abandon the site for the Salt Lake Valley of Utah in 1848. According to family lore, it was during her stay in Nauvoo that the fiery Anne rescued a young horse thief from being lynched, repelling a band of vigilantes while armed only with a carving knife. Apparently dropping their Mormonism, the family soon returned to Manchester where John Gill died in 1859.

Contemporary accounts of Rhoscomyl’s life and family lore agree in their description of Anne’s influence on the young boy. A charismatic individual and a powerful storyteller, she amused the wide-eyed children by spinning romantic tales of her childhood home in the mountains of Wales. She celebrated the martial valour and patriotism of Welsh heroes like King Arthur and Owain Glyndŵr and encouraged her charges to emulate them. According to Granny, their own family was of noble lineage, associated with the gentry and descendant from no one less than Dafydd ap Gruffydd, the ‘last king of the Welsh’. Extolling her more immediate kin, she taught an eager Robert and Phil the presentation of arms as shown to her by her own brothers, whom she claimed had all fought at the Battle of Waterloo. On the grim streets of industrial Lancashire, Granny Anne’s stirring tales, ethnic identity and Welsh patriotism were enthusiastically embraced by her young grandson. In The Jewel of Ynys Galon (1895), there were clear autobiographical echoes in Rhoscomyl’s description of how Dew the pirate was brought up in exile by his Welsh mother:

From his earliest years, she had filled his mind with the glories of Ynys Galon and its people; magnifying them with the loving extravagance of womankind, and picturing his own future as lord of it. Mothers instil religion into their children, and this was her religion, and her son was the devoutest of believers. As he grew up she put weapons into his hands and bade him learn their use; for by them he must live, as his people before him … In short, she had thrown so fair a robe upon the figure of her people, that the heart of her son was all ablaze whenever his mind rested upon it.²

Rhoscomyl’s later career as a soldier, writer and nationalist would focus on themes of Welsh martial glory and ancestral heritage first imparted to him by his grandmother. Certainly, his love of story and thirst for adventure can be attributed to her tales and example. Extolled by an emigrant long removed from her native land, the martial vision of Welsh identity celebrated by Granny Anne was told in apparent isolation of contemporary currents in Welsh life. Although the traditional image of Wales as an ‘old and haughty nation proud in arms’ was well established, by the mid-nineteenth century it was increasingly out of step with the more pacific culture of religious nonconformity that had come to dominate the identity of Wales. As puritan followers of the Prince of Peace, Welsh nonconformists frowned on violence, martial adventure and military service. By 1884, Henry Richards MP believed that memories of the old warrior heroes of Wales had ‘happily faded, or are fast fading out of the popular mind’.³ Celebrated in numerous biographical works, a new heroic pantheon of Welsh preachers arose in its place.

In his youth, Robert Mills demonstrated a talent for literary, intellectual and physical activity. His literacy was probably the result of the 1870 Education Act and he was recorded as a ‘scholar’ in the 1871 census. He chaffed at the restrictions of school and so ran away to pursue a life of adventure. Despite his evident frustration with formal education, Rhoscomyl would highly value learning and knowledge throughout his life, becoming an autodidact of some achievement. His fiction reflects a childhood passion for the historical romances of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson and for swashbuckling tales of adventure found in the likes of the Boy’s Own Paper and Alexander Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. An old ledger preserved by the family contains a roster of the ‘Edge Lane Regiment’, a make-believe troop of urchins Mills recruited and drilled as a child. Characteristic of his later life and work, the ledger also contains an ode the young man composed revelling in the martial glory of Welsh history and celebrating the heroics of Glyndŵr, Caradoc and King Arthur. Rhoscomyl would write of being inspired by frontier adventure stories about scouts like Buffalo Bill Cody. He described himself as a boy imitating his western heroes, ‘stealthily stalking policeman or peddler or even Margiad Elin laying out the washing on the gorse bushes on the hill behind the house’.⁴ Letters show that the young man enjoyed the outdoors and took long treks in the country surrounding Manchester and Liverpool. Bolstered perhaps by Granny’s tales of her own voyages across the Atlantic, the frontier clearly beckoned to the youngster.

However, like many working-class youths, Robert Mills began work at a young age. He resented the nature of factory labour and later expressed his horror of ever returning to ‘the stifling atmosphere of the cotton mill’. His working life may have begun with the remarriage of his stepfather in 1875. Two women proved too many in the Etchell household and, in Robert’s words, Granny Anne was thrown ‘out on the rocks’. Furious with his stepfather, 12-year-old Robert joined Anne in her domestic exile, living in Manchester with the elderly woman for four more years while apparently holding a factory job. Despite the grind of the works, Mills would later describe living with his grandmother as the best time he had ever had in his life. When she died at the age of eighty-three in June 1879, there was nothing holding Mills back from pursuing his dreams. After registering his grandmother’s death and witnessing her burial, the 16-year-old Robert Mills turned his back on industrial Manchester and launched himself on a life of adventure.

Trekking across northern England and exploring his ancestral homeland in north Wales along the way, Robert set out for the Americas. The circumstances of his passage are unknown but according to most accounts of his life, Mills stowed away on a brig from Portmadoc bound for Rio de Janeiro. In A Scout’s Story, Rhoscomyl would later write of such an adventure, explaining that his young character wanted to make the crossing in the old-fashioned way and that wooden sailing vessels were still used in Portmadoc for the slate trade to South America. The boy is smuggled on board as an additional hand by an overworked ship’s crew.⁵ Whatever the circumstances of his journey, Mills’s letters show that he learned enough maritime skills on the passage over to pick up jobs in ocean-going tug boats along the eastern seaboard of the United States. As he worked the shipping routes, Mills’s scrappy Welsh patriotism would earn him his first alias. As he explained in a letter home,

I cannot take my own name. On board ship the ‘S. S. Macduff’ there was an apprentice who reckoned he knew a fearful pile. He came from Shrewsbury and he used to say that King Harry beat the Glyndower [sic], I said that he didn’t and from these arguments the men call me Glyndower …

Collecting his pay and abandoning his work as a sailor, Mills toured the eastern and mid-western states, stopping in the major cities and visiting the remnants of the Mormon settlement in Nauvoo where he found people who knew and spoke kindly of his grandmother.

Lusting for adventure and looking to find his fortune, Mills took the train from Chicago to Denver in pursuit of the rapidly receding American frontier. Mirroring his own youth, Rhoscomyl wrote of a young hero who had also thrown his school books down and run away in pursuit of adventure.

By the time he got his sea-legs, he found that pirates were decidedly ‘off,’ and so he compromised by deciding to go out West and ‘kill Injuns,’ as the next best thing. Being that sort of boy to whom obstacles are like the paper hoops in a circus – things to be gone through head-first, he presently turned up smiling on the prairies and, not knowing one end of a saddle from the other, promptly found himself describing the airiest of movements on top of a particularly vicious broncho. With that contrariness which was the main feature of his nature, however, he was still in the neighbourhood of the saddle when the bucking ceased, and from that day forward ‘he never looked back’.⁶

The exploits of Robert Mills in the United States between January 1880 and November 1884 are remarkably documented in a series of letters written to his sister Ada and his half-brother Phil.⁷ Although reflecting his limited education, his ‘western letters’ show his joy of writing, his gift for description and his ear for dialect. The letters feature narratives and vignettes recounting Mills’s experience in the far west that foreshadow the style of his later adventure stories. Providing fascinating details of life on the range, these letters also have a broader importance as rare, early first-hand description and commentary from an actual cowboy of the wild west. Mills would work variously as a cowboy, prospector and hunter in the Kiowa range near Denver; the Republican River territory running across the borders of Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska; the Medicine Bow Mountains of Wyoming and the North Park of Colorado; and the freshly opened range of the Musselshell Valley in Montana. Working the range for at least four years in the American west, Mills was the exception rather than the rule to an occupation generally seen as temporary labour undertaken for a single season by restless farmers’ sons. A hardened frontiersmen in his teens, Mills became a knowledgeable and skilled equestrian and scout, a veritable knight of the plains.

The western letters describe Rhoscomyl’s first introduction to western life at seventeen. Shortly after arriving in Denver, a rancher approached Mills offering him $25 a month to work on the spring round-up. Labour was in heavy demand during the round-up and ranchers were not particular as to whom they hired as cowboys. Although experience, knowledge and skill were important for the old hands, the essentials of rounding up grazing cattle and horses could be quickly taught to any man fit enough to do the work. To the wandering young Mills, the offer promised the chance for adventure, comradeship and excitement. Having never ridden a horse before, Mills spent four hours in the saddle the first day, eight hours the second and then joined the rest of the cowboys on the third. In July 1880, he would write:

This is a ‘bully’ life. Riding all day. Just before sundown, we camp … [and] after supper we spread our beds, (generally consisting of blankets & skins) then turn in (with the silvery moon for a lamp) to snooze till the light begins to show in the east, when we ‘rise, take up our beds & walk’ as far as the wagon, into which we pitch them, then catch our horses, breakfast, & by 4 o’clock, we are off on circles. By noon we are back in camp with the cattle. We take dinner & then the fun begins, for there is more hard mad riding, done in ‘cutting out,’ wild cattle from a herd of 4 or 5 thousand, than anywhere else in the world. But the horses ‘stand it’.

The young Rhoscomyl was not on the range long before he began to look the part.

If you could see me now, you would think I looked kinder outlandish. Clad in a red woollen shirt, blue cotton pants, brown top boots, & a great felt hat, whose brim covers my shoulders, mounted on a good black horse (rifle, revolvers & knife are a necessity) & togged up this fashion, along with a crowd composed of all nations, riding like mad after a herd of wild cattle or horses, or sitting at night around the camp fire, is a little different to the old life in England.

Bragging about his pair of grizzly-fur chaps and rawhide moccasins, he would boast ‘no one would think I was the most verdant of tenderfeet to see me.’ At the end of the season, itinerant photographers would set up their tents in the rough cattle towns in anticipation of the influx of free spending cowpunchers. Like other cowboys, Rob was eager to have his portrait taken. In the photo, Rob stands tall as a Western hero, dressed in leather leggings with hand gripping a holstered revolver. A determined gaze and the hint of a mischievous smile adorn a youthful face beneath a broad brim. It is a remarkable evocation of Mills’s developing persona and it is easy to understand why copies of this image were in demand amongst his relations back home. Like his appearance, Mills would express his new western identity through a score of nicknames – ‘Roving Rob’ and ‘Panther Killer’ among them. However, according to later fictional and biographical references, the most common of his monikers was simply ‘the Kid’.

Mills was soon introduced to the dangers of a cowboy’s life. The letters record in dramatic and descriptive detail how he nearly died of thirst when his search for cattle led him to wander too far from water. He almost drowned when trying to ford a raging flood with a handmade raft. On another occasion, the letters record a desperate escape from a massive prairie fire which caused him to lose his horse and fall down a canyon. Rhoscomyl would draw upon all these harrowing experiences in his later western short stories and his semi-autobiographical novel Lone Tree Lode.

On the Republican River, however, Mills was to discover that not all the hazards on the range were posed by nature. In a short story,