Carleton Watkins End of Innocence
What could Julia Watkins have meant she said: "they fondled each other, and they kissed and hugged each other"? We can only dream that time travel were possible and we could hear the family telling and retelling of the Collis and Carleton story over the decades and thereby separate the plausible from exaggeration, fact from fiction. No matter what elements are literally true in Julia Watkins's understanding of the early relationship between her father and Collis Huntington, it is safe to say that she believed her father and Collis Huntington were more than passing acquaintances and spent a lot of leisure time together when her father was growing up in Oneonta. However, there are some darker interpretations of Julia Watkins's remark that are worth exploring such as the possibility that Carleton could have been the target of a pederast. The evidence for this possibility is scant and results in no more than a theoretical sketch of a possible scenario based on biographical fragments like dotted lines in the sand.
One clue to a very close friendship between the two men is gleaned from things Carleton told Willard Huntington in 1905 when he was confessing his earliest childhood memories including observing the Aurora Borealis. Carleton also recalled that around the year 1845, when he was fourteen or fifteen years old, he and Collis went fishing together to an isolated place along Silver Brook and caught trout weighing several pounds each.[9] The implication is that this was one of many such sporting diversions in the woods the two shared during and after Collis's residency at the McDonald Tavern.
One theory of relationship-building is that opposites attract. Carleton and Collis were opposites in practically every way from physical to mental. Collis stood a dominating six feet-one-inch tall and a hefty two hundred pounds, while Carleton was short and wiry; Collis was gregarious, Carleton was ruminative; Collis was a salesman; Carleton was a maker of things to be sold. Collis was proud of his body. H. H. Bancroft described him as ". . .having the physique of a young adonis. . . a magnificent physique . . . of which he took great care,"[10] while Carleton was at best indifferent to how he looked. Others describe Collis as being physically dominant over his male peers, a trait Huntington vigorously defended,[11] while Carleton was yielding.
Moreover, it cannot be overlooked that in 1841 when Collis arrived in Oneonta and reportedly took up residence at the McDonald Tavern, he was twenty years old, while Carleton was just twelve or thirteen. Nor can it
[9] Old Time Notes, p. 2221
[10]Hubert Howe Bancroft, "Life of Collis P. Huntington, '" in vol. 5 of Chronicles of the Builders of the Commonwealth: Historical Character Study, San Francisco: The History Company, Publishers, 1891, pp. 23, 29.
[11] Cerinda Evans, Collis Potter Huntington, Newport News, Virginia: The Mariner's Museum, 1954, p. 10