Carleton Watkins End of Innocence
be ignored that Collis had extensive life-experience gained from five years of work as a traveling salesman up and down the eastern seaboard between the ages of sixteen and twenty years. One material fact worth considering is that the friendship between Collis and Carleton coincided exactly with the younger man's puberty, and flourished through his teenage years.[12]
Another element of Carleton's upbringing was the relationship he had with his mother [Fig. 4a] and father [Fig. 4b] during adolescence and before. Carleton confessed to Willard Huntington in 1906 two unfavorable memories of his father.
One was an incident when Carleton's father gave away to a complete stranger his beloved mastiff-like dog that once saved his master's life.[13] Another unfavorable memory Carleton shared with Willard Huntington was of the ridicule to which he was subjected when he fell off his horse and was knocked unconscious during the course of an important errand for his father.[14] On the other hand Carleton adored his mother and vice versa, a fact reflected in the cameo brooch [Fig. 5] Carleton had made for her and that she wore continuously. We can infer from what Carleton told Willard Huntington in 1905 that growing up in Oneonta he was challenged to meet his father's expectations and could not wait to leave home in quest of independence.
Let us go deeper into how Collis Huntington spent his youth. He was born and raised in Harwinton, Connecticut, a village located about twenty-five miles west of Hartford. According to his principal biographer, Collis's favorite youthful sport was wrestling with other boys.[15] At the age of thirteen he left home to go to work and immediately showed aptitude for the wholesale/retail process and even bartering. He saved enough money by the age of sixteen to quit his clerking job and go to New York City where he bought on credit a supply of knives, pins, needles, thread, tape, brushes, combs, jewelry, watch parts and other sundry items needed by country women. It is said that he put the merchandise into two tin boxes and made calls from house-to-house and farm-to-farm in the manner of a classic Yankee Peddler.[16] His enterprise was a success and soon he procured a horse-and-wagon which allowed him to travel independently over a wide geographical range. As a sideline he bought from New York merchants unpaid accounts receivable and personally collected the money. By the age of twenty Collis was "familiar with every county in almost every state west of the Mississippi, " so we are told by H. H. Bancroft, who confirmed that Collis was about as well traveled as any young person of his time. [17]
[12] The legal definition of puberty was historically fourteen years according to Webster's New World Dictionary (1959 edition), p. 1176. Recent studies have showed puberty could arrive in boys at age ten, New York Times, October 20, 2012, p. A-16.
[13] Old Time Notes, p. 2014
[14] Old Time Notes, p. 2220
[15] Evans, p. 8
[16] Evans, p. 14.
[17]Bancroft, p. 28