Wingshooting with 'Papa'

    “But when you cannot shoot you can remember shooting and I would rather stay home now, this afternoon, and write about it than go out and sail clay saucers in the wind, trying to break them and wishing they were what they’re not.” 
—Ernest Hemingway, “Remembering Shooting-Flying: A Key West Letter”; Esquire, February 1935

    When Ernest Hemingway wrote his memorable article “Remembering Shooting-Flying,” in the February 1935 issue of Esquire, he already knew the difference between a game (clays) and a sport (hunting). The author was 35 years old, just into the prime of his sporting life and professional career. He’d seen war, lived in Paris, gone on safari, won a Pulitzer, made real money and was on his second wife. This was just the sort of insight expected from the iconic hunter, angler, journalist and genre-busting novelist who became one of the most famous of American writers as well as the poster boy for sporting machismo. During the next 26 years of his life, Hemingway’s public persona—that of the hard-drinking storyteller and man’s man—overtook the man himself. It still feeds the mania that produces countless Hemingway books, magazine articles, library displays, museum events, festivals, memorials and endorsements almost a half-century after his death. But at home in Idaho in the 1940s and ’50s, with his local friends, it was a different story. It was there that the myths—some perpetuated by the man, others by his agents, and many by the public—were put aside.

The Writer’s Retreat
    On September 19, 1939, Hemingway departed in his dusty black Buick convertible from Lawrence Nordquist’s L-Bar-T Wyoming ranch, near Cooke City, Montana. Like Key West in winter, the ranch had been his summer and fall refuge, the place where he could write in the mornings and then play—ride, fish and hunt—with his second wife, Pauline, and his sons in the afternoons. But that part of his life was now over and he needed a new refuge. Picking up Martha Gellhorn (soon to be his third wife) in Billings, he drove to Idaho and checked into Sun Valley Lodge’s room 206. He went not to fly-fish on Silver Creek, not to hunt big game in the Sawtooth Mountains or shoot on the neighboring farms and ranches, but to finish For Whom The Bell Tolls.
    Sun Valley, the brainchild of Union Pacific Railroad’s Averell Harriman, opened in 1936 as the first ski resort in America. Harriman knew his resort had to be an all-season destination in order to be a financial success and he hired fishing and hunting guides, equestrian trainers and even ice-skating coaches in addition to ski instructors. Harriman’s PR department invited the wealthy, famous and connected to Sun Valley, often on the resort’s nickel, and Hemingway fit all three criteria. The route from Montana took him and Martha west through the Snake River Valley, across the Arco desert and lava craters, through the Silver Creek drainage and up the Big Wood River Valley. This was Basque sheep country, and it reminded him of his beloved Sierra de Guadarrama, north of Madrid.
    What was to be a short visit turned into weeks and eventually changed Hemingway’s life. Returning every fall as often as he could to write and hunt, his life there would challenge the Hemingway myths as well. Although the public associated him with Europe, Key West and Cuba, for the last years of his life Idaho would be his spiritual home. According to his son Jack, “He liked Westerners because no one treated him like a celebrity. Westerners don’t kiss ass. They take the circus out of publicity.”
    “Papa” could be himself there, not the celebrity; he was just one of the gang—the Idaho Hemingway. He could be the hunter, not the hunted. Martha was not an outdoor girl, and that marriage didn’t last long. But Mary Welsh, wife number four, learned to love Idaho’s rural beauty and its friendly, unassuming, family oriented people, and she stayed there after Hemingway’s death in July 1961. Three years before, she and Papa had bought a large house on the Big Wood River in Ketchum, the town adjacent to Sun Valley.
    Often rising at dawn to write until midmorning, Hemingway might then pack a picnic lunch and go out with the locals who had become his close friends. Shooting ducks along Silver Creek, the Big Wood River and in the Hagerman Valley; walking the farm fields and creek bottoms in the Magic Valley for pheasants and quail; pigeon shooting in the steep canyons of the Snake River; hiking after chukar and Huns in the Picabo Hills; waiting for flights of doves near Timmerman Hill; pounding the sagebrush in Blaine County for grouse; stalking the sloughs of the valley for snipe—all provided Papa with bird hunting he called “the best in the world.” He couldn’t believe that the world hadn’t discovered it, and he knew better than to shine the light of his writing on it. Only one Hemingway story, “The Shot,” is set in Idaho; it concerns an antelope hunt in the Pahsimeroi Valley, north of Ketchum.
    Of course Hemingway never was just one of the gang; he formed and led the gang—“the tribe,” as his friends called themselves: Taylor “Colonel” Williams; Lloyd “Pappy” Arnold and his wife, Tillie; Clayton “Stu” Stewart; Gene Van Guilder; Pete Hill; Forrest “Duke” MacMullen; Don Anderson; Win Gray; Bud and Ruth Purdy; Charles Larkin; Tom Gooding; John Powell; Chuck Atkinson; Dr. George Saviers; Martha and then Mary; Clara Spiegel. They were ranchers and business people, locals and transplants, young and middle-aged. Papa’s Hollywood friends—Gary Cooper, Robert Taylor, Barbara Stanwyck, Clarke Gable, Ingrid Bergman, Marlene Dietrich—came to Sun Valley to hobnob with Hemingway, but they never achieved tribal status. Cooper, who’d been a Montana boy before the silver screen, came closest. Hemingway once observed: “If you made up a character like Coop, nobody would believe it. He’s just too good to be true.”

A Generous Man
    Even in the 1940s farmers in Idaho were still in straitened circumstances from the Great Depression. Today landowners might charge a fee to hunt their property; then, despite the bad times, Western hospitality meant free access and sometimes a farm lunch. According to Forrest MacMullen, “No matter how often we went somewhere to hunt, we still had to ask every time. That was Papa’s way of doing things. He wouldn’t go into a field unless he had permission.” At one such spread it was obvious that the farmer, his wife and 13 kids were hard up. Not only did the tribe leave all of their game for the farmer, they also passed the hat so that he could get his truck fixed. “When we left, Papa slipped the half-full jug on the truck’s seat [and] told [the farmer] to have it towed into town by his neighbor and get it fixed . . . . The jug was corked with familiar green paper.”
    Then Papa told Life reporter Robert Capa, who was along on the hunt, “Report that in your story and I’ll wring your neck.”
    Jackrabbits were so plentiful then that the state of Idaho paid a bounty of 10¢ per animal. The rabbits multiplied like . . . rabbits, and sometimes thousands overran a farm and its crops. Not one to miss an opportunity, Hemingway organized rabbit drives, with himself as the “general” of a small army of Guns and beaters. Hemingway placed everyone and coordinated the events with a sharp eye. Such days often turned into parties, with a picnic lunch at the farmhouse and hundreds of rabbits taken. Hemingway supplied the ammunition and gave the bag to the farmers as the bounty. Such random acts of kindness became a Hemingway tradition in Idaho.
    Duck shooting, whether by canoeing the bends of Silver Creek or by walking its banks and canals, was also a social activity. Hemingway scrupulously took his turn paddling while another hunter shot from the bow, which he called “the throne”; for safety, the paddler in the stern never shot.
    This was a lesson hard learned. In November 1939 Gene Van Guilder, the young resort publicist who’d lured Hemingway to Sun Valley, was killed while duck-shooting from the bow. Lloyd Arnold was in the stern and another man in the middle. When the canoe rolled violently, something went wrong. The middle gun discharged and Van Guilder was shot in the back. Although Hemingway had known Van Guilder for only six weeks, the young man’s widow asked Papa to speak at the interment. Twenty-two years later Hemingway was buried two graves away and the famous eulogy he’d written for Van Guilder was said for him as well: “Best of all he loved the fall . . . .”
    On foot, Papa often would flank a group of shooters to give the center the best spot for the duck rise. He never let his celebrity status interfere with etiquette, and he genuinely enjoyed providing his friends with the best opportunities.
He also enjoyed having women take part, no matter their marksmanship. According to Ruth Purdy, Hemingway’s position was, “When we go hunting, you’re going to go hunting.“ (However, in 1946 Slim Hawks, wife of movie director Howard Hawks, accidentally triggered her gun so close to Hemingway that the shot reportedly singed the hair on the back of his neck.) One of Hemingway’s favorite sporting companions was Clara Spiegel, ex-wife of the mail-order magnate, who’d settled in Ketchum in 1940. On one furious dove shoot she was reloading from a pocketful of shells. When she went for a double, only one barrel responded. Upon opening her gun, she said to Hemingway: “Papa, have you ever tried to fire a tube of lipstick in your shotgun?”
    Clara was an accomplished hunter; Ruth Purdy had never fired a gun. Hemingway proceeded to teach Ruth with a 20-gauge, giving her such undivided attention that she said it made her feel important. He loved to teach novices to shoot, and his children—by 1946, when Hemingway returned to Sun Valley after the war with his new wife, Mary, the two younger boys were 18 and 15—got 200 or 300 cartridges a day if they wanted to practice. Many a journalist on assignment to cover Hemingway would get instruction, too, and wind up in the shooting party. Movie star, guide, reporter or best-selling author, everyone got his or her turn.

An All-Out Shotgun Man
    Hemingway wasn’t interested in formal clay-target shooting, but he did like a game of hand-tossed clays—with some friendly betting on the outcome, of course. He felt that throwing clays with a hand launcher made their flight more erratic and natural. Bill Marsh, the Winchester-Western rep who had installed the traps at the Sun Valley Gun Club, was there one day when Hemingway arrived. Pappy Arnold recalled that Marsh “dug around in his car trunk for his hand trap . . . and made the layout a present of it. It was Mr. Marsh who called the fun that afternoon ‘a riot of 12-gauge mayhem.’ [Marsh] knew how to use that little three-dollar gadget, had more tricks up the sleeve of his great arm than an all-star pitcher.”
    The back terrace of the Hemingway house was the scene of many such hand-trap shooting parties, which would go until dark and were followed by long and sociable dinners. Mary cooked. The loser bought the wine.
    As a self-proclaimed “all-out shotgun man,” Hemingway preferred that his targets wore feathers and were edible. He was raised in the code that one ate what one shot. Fortunately, he loved game—blood-rare, at that—and after sharing with the landowners and other shooters, he often dressed his own birds. (Ducks would hang for days.) Hemingway’s favorite home-cooked gamebirds were snipe and ducks served at his house or at friends’ homes. After a dinner he often said to Forrest, “That would make a good sandwich in a duck blind.” Hunting lunches in the field were also something Hemingway enjoyed organizing. Forrest recalls that Hemingway loved to build the noontime campfires and often cooked leftover game with chili.
 
A Wagering Man
    Hemingway competed at pigeon rings in Europe and Cuba, but Idaho was far off the live-pigeon circuit. Instead Hemingway devised a game that impressed even the best shots in Sun Valley. The magpie, a predator of ground-nesting birds and also on Idaho’s bounty list (5¢), had intrigued Hemingway with its erratic flight and cunning. He discovered that ranchers trapped the birds. “What do you do with these magpies?” he asked Bud Purdy, who told him they got their necks wrung for the bounty. Papa quickly devised a live-magpie shoot, complete with trophies and betting. The shooter stood at the line while a magpie was released, by hand, and took two shots. If he missed, then two back-up guns could have a go. Mary Hemingway wrote:
    “On Sunday January 18, we tooled down 93 with Chuck and Flos Atkinson, shotguns, shells, four and half gallons of wine, and a huge salad to shoot magpies and eat roast duck on the happiest, most sunlit day thus far of 1959. Bud and Ruth Purdy were giving the first magpie shoot of the year at Silver Creek Rod and Gun Club by the shining river. A hundred and four magpies had been lured into unharming traps on their ranches, and gunnysacks full of them sat on the lawn outdoors while we organized the shoot and the betting odds around the humming fireplace inside. A thirty- to forty-mile wind was blowing from the west, leaving us no doubts that the fastest trigger-pullers would win the biggest shares of the betting pool.”
    Hemingway could be tremendously, aggressively competitive, but among his Idaho friends, people to whom he had nothing to prove, rivalries remained friendly and low-key. Still, Bud Purdy said, “He was a helluva shot. We’d throw clay pigeons up and, for a dollar a shot, he’d always beat us.” Wagering wasn’t restricted to magpies or clays, either. Ducks were in for it too.
    Pappy Arnold remembered, “We’d split into threesomes in the blinds—by the coin-flip method—and then the competitive camaraderie was something to behold. Repeating shotguns were not allowed, only double barrels, when the betting was on—two bits a duck.” Bud Purdy, who located his cattle by plane in the morning, would often spot ducks that way too. Hemingway soon found that hunting with Bud in the afternoon had its advantages. “But it wasn’t just getting the ducks,” Bud said. “He liked to get out and walk and hunt. The excitement of the hunt.”
 
A Drinking Man
    Hemingway’s liquor bill at home and his bar bill in town were always impressive. Despite periodic attempts to cut back, usually under doctor’s orders, no day for Papa was complete without adult beverages—days afield included. His inviolable rule, however, was: no booze until the guns were put away, even when shooting clays at home. MacMullen recalled, “He never mixed drinking and shooting. He would never drink until the guns were unloaded and put in their cases.”
    It wasn’t just for himself, either. In the field, Win Gray remembered, “Contrary to what you hear, he would never let anybody drink anything until the shooting was over. But then he loved to party.” Out would come a bota, the wineskin he’d learned to drink from in Spain. Never one to drive anyway, he would give that chore to someone else so he could talk, sip and watch the countryside. On the way home the party would hit one of Papa’s favorite watering holes. If it had trophies on the walls, sawdust on the floor, a little wagering and a few “locals,” it was his kind of place. At the Manhattan, in Shoshone; Dutch Charlie’s, at Timmerman Hill; Al Lewis’s Snug Bar, in Hailey; the Alpine Club (now Whiskey Jacques), the Club Rio or Christiana, in Ketchum; Hemingway would take up “his” bar stool, order a drink and regale the house with stories. He was never vulgar, though, or off-color or contentious. Purdy recalled that they “never talked about politics. I think he was a Democrat, but I’m not sure of that . . . . He was a real gentleman.”
    Jack Hemingway—Idaho conservationist, fly-fisherman extraordinaire and late esteemed eldest son of a famous father—gets the last word: “Papa was a fantastic amount of fun to be with unless you were a phony, and then he made your life miserable.”
    Hemingway was a great writer of letters and giver of gifts—signed first editions, travel souvenirs, even guns. Bud Purdy is still proud of the 12-gauge Sarasqueta side-by-side that Papa sent him from Abercrombie & Fitch. Forrest MacMullen still treasures the Walther .32 pistol that Papa brought home from World War II. Ernest Hemingway’s guns are of considerable interest themselves. In a future issue we will share what we have learned about them, particularly the shotguns he loved and used throughout his life, in Europe and East Africa, Cuba and Florida, Idaho and Wyoming, Arkansas and Michigan.
 
     Authors’ Note: Bud Purdy is now 92, still active and the patriarch of the Picabo Livestock Co., which owns ranches around Silver Creek. Forrest MacMullen, now 84, was the general manager of one of the Sun Valley hotels. Roger Sanger was able to interview both men many times. The authors wish to thank them now as well.
    Two other tribe members, now deceased, put their memories in books. High on the Wild with Hemingway (Caxton Press, 1969) is by Pappy Arnold, Sun Valley’s chief photographer. Arnold’s wife, Tillie, followed with The Idaho Hemingway (Beacon Books, 1999). Other sources for this article include: How It Was, by Mary Hemingway (Alfred Knopf, 1976); Gary Cooper: American Hero, by Jeffrey Meyers (Harper Collins, 1998); Remembering Ernest Hemingway, by James Plath & Frank Simons (The Ketch and Yawl Press, 1999); “Hemingway in The Autumn” (DVD), by Centennial Entertainment and Silver Creek Outfitters (1999); Hemingway: The Final Years, by Michael Reynolds (W.W. Norton & Co., 2000); and Hemingway on Hunting, compiled and edited by Sean Hemingway (The Lyons Press, 2001).
    The authors also wish to credit and thank Mike Reidel, Sean Larkin, Allen Brooks, Chuck Webb, Gloria Gunter, Mike DeChevrieux and Don Anderson in Idaho; journalists Greg Foley and Dana Dugan; the Idaho Mountain Express; the Sun Valley Guide; Paula Bock and the Seattle Times; Chuck Petrie and Ducks Unlimited; E.M. Swift and Sports Illustrated; the Ernest Hemingway Festival; Sandra Hofferber at the Community Library of Ketchum; Susan Beegel, editor of The Hemingway Review; and Susan Wrynn and Maryrose Grossman at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.

    In October 2007 Silvio Calabi began to write a long chapter on Hemingway’s guns and rifles for a forthcoming book on the famous author’s African works by Professor Miriam Mandel, of the Dept. of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University. A year of research and writing led to other Hemingway projects, of which this article is one. Roger Sanger lives in Sun Valley part-time, with ready access to people and places that Hemingway knew intimately.