Dark Valley Destiny Read Online Free Page B

boundless lands of heroic fiction.
    To investigate the relationship between Robert Howard's life and his art is the purpose of this book. Who was this man who transformed Dark Valley, Texas, into Cimmeria and all West Texas into a continent contemporary with Atlantis? What essence of self was projected into his fictional characters? Was he a barbarian, like Conan? A buffoon, like Breckenridge Elkins, his comical cowboy character? Or was he the desperately tragic hero of his poetry? What events influenced his personal development? What was the impact of the times upon his personality? What assumptions and dispositions determined his values? And, finally, what led him to take his own life when he stood on the threshold of a successful literary career?

II. DESTINY'S CHILD
    At birth a witch laid on me monstrous spells, And I have trod strange highroads all my days, Turning my feet to gray, unholy ways. I grope for stems of broken asphodels; High on the rims of bare, fiend-haunted fells, I follow cloven tracks that lie ablaze; And ghosts have led me through the moonlight's haze To talk with demons in their granite hells. 1
    Robert Ervin Howard was born on January 24, 1906, in Peaster, Texas, a village in Parker County, ten miles northwest of Weatherford and thirty-five miles due west of Fort Worth. 2 The Howards at that time lived in Dark Valley, a community of some fifty souls in Palo Pinto County, near the Parker County border; but Dr. Howard had taken his wife to Peaster, a larger settlement in the adjacent county, as her confinement drew near. He wished, presumably, to insure adequate medical facilities for her lying-in, as well as the services of Dr. J. A. Williams, the physician who attended Mrs. Howard at the birth of her only child.
    Although little is known about his condition at the time of his birth, it is fair to say that Robert Howard's personality was to be determined, not only by his childhood health and the surroundings in which lived, but also by the kind of people his parents were. It is, therefore, instructive to review the family history and to consider his parents' personalities, experiences, and beliefs.
    Robert Howard was proud of his mother's family, the Ervins, whose name he bore. He wrote his friend Lovecraft that, whether or not he ever wrote his projected history of the Southwest, people of his blood had had a hand in making it. His kinsmen, he said, were among the riflemen at King's Mountain and with Andrew Jackson at New Orleans. He had three uncles in the gold rush of '49, a Howard and two Martins, one of whom had left his bones on the trail. Both grandfathers, he went on, had ridden for four years with Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate cavalry general. A great-grandfather had served in the Confederate Army, too, as had several great-uncles, one of whom fell in the battle of Macon, Georgia.
    Howard also related how his maternal grandfather, Colonel George Washington Ervin, arrived in Texas while the land was still wild. He went on to New Mexico before it became a state to work a silver mine until he was driven out by Geronimo's Apaches. An aunt went to live in Indian Territory with her husband before the Settlements of 1889; and an uncle settled in Oklahoma while it was still a territory swarming with untamed Indians and fugitive white criminals from other parts. 3
    The Ervin family had been established since 1724 in the northeastern part of North Carolina near the Virginia line. Here in 1801, Howard's great-grandfather, the first Robert Ervin, was born on a plantation close to the shores of Currituck Sound. At the age of twenty-three, Robert Ervin married Jane Tennyson, also a member of an old Tidewater family. The couple settled on a plantation near Raleigh where, in 1830, George Washington Ervin first saw the light of day.
    Caught up in the westward movement of the 1840s, Robert Ervin took his family to Tennessee and thence, in 1842, to a farm near Iuka in Tishomingo County at the