Bright with Silver

Kathrene Sutherland Gedney Pinkerton

• Publisher: Red Kestrel Books
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781839740480
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Bright with Silver, first published in 1947, it has been nearly sixty years since Kathrene Pinkerton wrote Bright with Silver. This study of the famous Fromm brothers and their endeavor and persistence to breed a very rare and valuable type of fox would become a landmark history of American entrepreneurship. The simple beauty and elegance of the silver fox would be the fulfillment of the brothers' struggles to build a fur breeding empire. The story of the Fromm brothers that Pinkerton provides is a classic study of ingenuity and stick-to-itiveness that for so many years became a trademark of these four brothers. The intricate and complex history of their endeavors began with growing ginseng. This included intense observations of the plant that would provide the conditions, which eventually yielded abundant harvests that resulted in the necessary cash to start their fur business. Of course, the main story of Pinkerton is how the dreams of a perfect silver fox culture had overtaken the Fromm's possessions, thoughts and lives. The continual endeavor to find the right strain for their silver fox breed and their devotion to medical research that would ease the ravages of disease that could plague these precious animals would be the story that Pinkerton does so very well. It is without doubt that these four brothers, Walter, Edward, John, and Henry brought to the central Wisconsin landscape a business enterprise that played a large part in the economic development of this part of the state. Their story has all the ingredients of imagination, creativity, and great business sense. This edition brings back the story of the Fromm brothers that has been long gone, and sorely missed from the Wisconsin literary scene. Included are 32 pages of photographs.

Chapter One

HENRY FROMM had always liked foxes. The hardwood land of north central Wisconsin was famous for them, and before Henry knew A from B he could read the story of their footprints in the snow. The forest pressed close around the few cleared acres of his pioneer farm home, and its creatures were as familiar to Henry and his brothers as were their father’s horses, cows, and pigs. They were even more important, for only by trapping could they obtain the things all boys want.

Henry, youngest of four brothers who grew up together, couldn’t remember when he had not heard talk of fur, and before he was able to set his first weasel trap he roamed the woods with John, two years older. They were a strange pair, Henry intense and eager, and even at six a husky chunk of a lad; John shy and remote, and as niggardly with words as an Indian. John loved the forest. He knew it better than the others, and sometimes disappeared in it for two or three days. His traps earned as much as those of his two older brothers.

The four depended for their income on skunk and weasel but caught an occasional raccoon and mink, and there was always the possibility of a red fox. Even grown men got only three or four in a winter, but John and Henry talked more of foxes than other animals. John, a born trapper, was challenged by their craftiness, Henry fascinated by the creatures themselves. Since he was old enough to hold a pencil he had drawn pictures of them, and imagined how wonderful it would be to have a fox of his own. Then he could be near it and watch it, really know it. He never followed a fox track without thinking of this, and although he knew that he and John could never overtake one, he always hoped to catch a glimpse of a red coat.

“Maybe we could find young ones and keep them,” he said.

John walked a hundred yards before he spoke.

“You couldn’t put collars on ‘em, like on a dog,” he said.

“We could keep them in a box with chicken wire,” Henry said. “You and I’d shoot birds and snare rabbits for them. And I’d take care of them.”

John considered the suggestion. “Maybe it would work,” he agreed at last.

Henry was thinking only of a fox, any fox, a creature of sagacity and of pride too, with eyes of intelligence and ears alert for the faintest warning. Having such an animal would be exciting, but later he became aware that there were even more glorious foxes than the reds which lived in their forests. He learned this when, with weasel pelts of his own to sell and fur prices of vital interest, he listened as the older boys read fur buyers’ price lists. Always at the top was the incredible sum of fifteen hundred dollars offered for the rare black silver fox. This never failed to arouse the wonder of the Fromm boys. It was exciting even to think that so fabulous a creature existed.

They always read the placards of itinerant fur buyers tacked on trees, and whenever they could afford it they bought a copy of Hunter-Trader-Trapper, a monthly magazine that was the trappers’ Bible. Walter, oldest of the four, always looked first at market reports. He worked hard at trapping because he wanted things, and in summer he added to his income by hoeing corn and potatoes for neighbors at fifty cents a day. He was no more industrious than the others, but he had learned what money could accomplish, and he always knew which fur buyers offered the best prices.

Weasel was usually quoted at fifty cents, and to Henry four skins from a winter’s work meant that he could buy more traps for next year. The other three were concerned with bigger sales. A double-striped skunk might be quoted as low as a dollar but a single-stripe brought more, and a short-stripe was worth three times as much. Raccoons did not bring much, mink varied, and a red fox might go as high as five dollars, although a trapper was prepared to take less. Buyers and trappers always differed on grading pelts. After the boys compared fur prices, guessed at the quality of their skins, and estimated the winter’s income, their eyes always went to the offer for a black silver fox. None of the boys believed a trapper would get that much, Edward least of all. He was the next oldest, but surer in his opinions than the others. He knew that the fur was precious and that only a few were caught each year, but buyers who haggled over the size and quality of a skunk were not merchant princes.

“Those fellows would never pay fifteen hundred dollars for one skin,” he said. “If I caught a black silver I’d take it right to St. Louis where you could find out what it was worth. What do you suppose it would really be?”

The boys spent hours talking about how a man would feel and what he’d do if he caught a silver fox. A discussion of the most dramatic event possible in any trapper’s life held a vicarious thrill for the older three. Henry listened, and wondered what a black silver would look like.

In 1901, when Henry was seven, he became sure that the silver fox must be the most beautiful creature in the world. Hunter-Trader-Trapper printed a picture and story of the pelt that had topped the London auction at twelve hundred dollars. Edward read it aloud after the chores were done that evening. Another skin had brought the record figure, eighteen hundred, the previous year.

“Don’t you wish you’d got that one!” Walter said. “We’re lucky if we get four dollars for a red.”

John, now nine, had already caught a red fox, and Walter, thirteen, had two to his credit. Edward trapped as industriously as the others, but he was not an instinctive hunter. Already he was strongly set apart from his brothers. His features were finer, he was not so shy, and he looked ahead of the moment. His eyes, of the same intense blue, kindled as did Henry’s to an idea. In many ways these two were alike, and yet strangely different.

When Edward finished reading, Henry reached for the picture of the famous pelt. More than the record price, it proved how wonderful such a creature must be.

Walter wished he knew where the fox was caught. “Probably ‘way up north in Canada,” he said. “No one around here ever got one, and that’s funny when we have so many foxes.”

“But there could be one,” Edward said.

The boys knew what he meant and now, with the picture before them, they thrilled to this possibility. Only recently they had read that it was definitely established that silver foxes could be born of red parents. Trappers still spoke of them as “freaks,” and Charles Darwin had pronounced them a separate species, but at the turn of the century evidence had piled up that the two were of the same family. It had been nature’s whim to make the lowly commoner, the red fox, capable of producing the aristocrat of fur land, while the cross fox, with its curious markings of red, black, and silver, was merely a red fox showing silver blood.

Much proof of this had been uncovered. A Nescape Indian in Labrador found a litter of one silver, one red, and two cross pups. Similar accounts came from trappers who wrote of their experiences to local newspapers and to Hunter-Trader-Trapper. Men saw reds running with silver mates, found mixed litters, and even trailed what appeared to be a silver and a fortune to dig out pups that were cross, or common red. Despite this simple explanation of its origin, the silver continued to be rare. In 1901, when the Hudson’s Bay Company sold 5,446 red and 1,534 cross fox pelts, it offered only 325 silvers, and these were of all grades. Some brought as little as five dollars. The rarity of a perfect black silver was one reason for its being so precious. A pelt could be marred by many factors — fur not prime, damage to a skin in capture, a red tinge in what should be lustrous black, a pepper-and-salt coat instead of veiled and gleaming silver or a long hard winter’s wear by the original owner.

But to the Fromm boys the article in Hunter-Trader-Trapper proved that eighteen hundred dollars actually had been paid for a single pelt. They could talk of nothing else that evening until their father said boys who had work to do in the morning should get some sleep. Their mother had long since gone to bed with their baby sisters. The little girls slept in their parents’ room, and through eighteen years of marriage the small cot beside the bed of Frederick and Alwina Fromm had always had an occupant. The boys went upstairs to the unfinished half-story where the cold usually ended any desire to talk, but tonight the news of the silver fox kept them excited.

Such a price seemed fantastic. In their pioneering farm life they had known only frugality, self-denial, and the need to work. A large family and a partially cleared homestead could mean nothing else. The farm had good land, but it was a farm in the making. Alwina’s father, Joachim Nieman, had given her the quarter-section in Hamburg township when she married. A forester in Germany and a Social Democrat, he came to America in the political exodus of 1848, and recognized the fine soil of the hardwood country of northern Wisconsin. Alwina’s wedding gift was an untouched wilderness. Frederick built a small log cabin and began to chop a farm out of the forest. It was hard and slow work but eventually he achieved tilled fields, a barn, and a farmhouse of logs hewed foursquare and sheathed with siding. The acres were claimed so slowly that when Frederick’s father gave him rich cleared Iowa land he wanted to move his family to it, but Alwina, with an obstinacy rare in her, had clung to her farm, her forests, the people she had always known, and the Lutheran church she loved. Frederick, usually a man of stubbornness, did not persist, and now the land he had won was as dear to him as to Alwina.

The homestead was built by ceaseless and driving toil. Ease and comfort were unknown. Each year another field was added, and another child must be cared for. Not an hour, not a penny, could he wasted. Wool from the sheep was carded, spun, and woven, to be made into clothing for the boys. Produce was traded for groceries. Trees felled in clearing were cut into cord-wood, hauled twenty-two miles by oxen, and sold to pay the yearly taxes. Barley grown for a brewery was the cash crop. As on all pioneer farms, the table depended largely on the forest. Rabbits were snared, small streams yielded fish, and roadsides and clearings were filled with wild berries. In autumn butternut trees were laden, and in spring maple sap was boiled to make syrup for the year.

Always the four younger boys turned to the forest for the money they needed, and carrying on this serious business of making a living welded a close-knit group. As early as they began to roam the woods, they called themselves “The Wolves” because they ran in a pack and believed they were invincible. There had always been an age-cleavage between them and their older brothers, Arthur and Herbert, and it had widened when these two went away to study for teachers’ certificates. Frederick Fromm had encouraged this ambition. A few pioneer acres could not support so many boys, and he would never be able to leave each of his sons a piece of land, as his father and Alwina’s had done before them. Teaching offered a thrifty way to education and independence, for with savings from a country school position a boy could go to normal school and equip himself to escape the drudgery of farming. Frederick was already looking forward to the time when Walter and Edward would follow their older brothers.

“I want you boys to get your feet out of the mud,” he said.

If at times Frederick seemed inexorable about farm tasks — and he expected every boy to earn his keep — it was understandable to The Wolves. They had known the necessity of work and a serious purpose since they could remember, but they were aware that their father was capable of strange contradictions. To his people music was a part of living, and as a young man he had played the violin for square dances as well as on Sundays when neighbors gathered. He gave violins to the older boys and taught them to play, and when six sons made family concerts possible he bought a cottage piano, horns, and flutes, and on trips to town he took the boys along for music lessons. The instruments and occasional instruction made inroads on a scanty cash crop, but Frederick gave them to his sons at a time when a new pair of shoes would have been a major purchase. The little orchestra practiced winter evenings, and Alwina spun or knitted as she listened, surrounded by her sons. She did not worry about their future. That was for men to think of. To be sure, life was hard when so little must be spread so far, but this was only to be expected when people married and had children. She was a happy woman, for she knew no mother had finer sons.

As music was an expression of the family’s self-sufficiency, so the activities of the four younger Fromm boys set them apart from their fellows. To be one of The Wolves entailed achievement. They bought corduroy to replace the homespun clothing made by their mother. They bought traps, ammunition, guns, a tent for camping trips, and at last bicycles to ride when others walked, an undeniable mark of success. Fur supplied their wants, and when their wants increased they thought more and more of what the forest offered.

Trapping pelts which brought only a few dollars had limitations, but they had never accepted these. Trapping was also a gamble. A clever set took a poor pelt as surely as a valuable one, and a trap baited for a red fox might catch a silver. It could happen, and they talked of it as they did their chores, roamed the woods, and hoed in the field. A Fromm boy catching the greatest prize in fur land! He might even dig out a litter in the spring and find a black silver among the reds. They talked of this, too.

“We’d keep it until it was grown and the fur was prime,” Walter said. “If other trappers can, there’s no reason why we couldn’t.”

Several instances had been related in Hunter-Trader-Trapper of men carrying over a young or late-spring-caught silver to pelting time.

“But if we had a silver why couldn’t we raise some more?” Henry asked. “What if we were lucky and got two pups?”

“We’d be dumb if we didn’t try to raise a litter,” Edward said.

They talked of this more and more, and the dazzling idea received new impetus each time Hunter-Trader-Trapper carried news of silver foxes, or a price list quoted fifteen hundred dollars. At last the boy...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve
• Chapter Thirteen
• Chapter Fourteen
• Chapter Fifteen
• Chapter Sixteen
• Chapter Seventeen
• Chapter Eighteen
• Chapter Nineteen
• Chapter Twenty
• Chapter Twenty-one
• Chapter Twenty-two
• Chapter Twenty-three
• Chapter Twenty-four
• Chapter Twenty-five
• Chapter Twenty-six
• Acknowledgments
• Illustrations