1958 Chingo Smith of the Erie Canal Samuel Hopkins Adams Historical Fiction
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Chingo Smith of the Erie Canal
by Samuel Hopkins Adams
Illustrated by Leonard Vosburgh
Published by Random House (1958)
Condition:
Excellent 1st Edition Hardcover Book! The binding is tight and all 276 pages within are bright white with NO WRITING, UNDERLINING, HIGH-LIGHTING, RIPS, TEARS, BENDS OR FOLDS with the exception of general light wear, two small library stamps: one on the inside front cover and the other on the title page; and a glue stain on the inside back cover where a checkout envelope was removed. The covers look excellent with a partially removed library mark on the spine, as can be seen in my photos. All flaws are shown. You will be happy with this one! Buy with confidence from a seller who takes the time to show you the details and not use just stock photos. Please check out all my pictures and email with any questions! Thanks for looking!
A Book Review:
4/5 Stars - A great historical novel about a little-known time
Written for kids aged about 10 and up, this book follows the fortunes of the homeless orphan Chingo Smith, who got his first name in trade from a Seneca Indian and his second from a gypsy with whom he travelled. When we first meet him, it's the summer of 1816 ("Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death," or The Year Without a Summer) in upstate New York--a place still barely past its frontier era, where gypsies wander, wolves and horse thieves and Indians lurk, and the only way to get from here to there is by foot, wagon, or stagecoach. Travelling with a higgler (peddler) and his woman, Chingo finds himself at loose ends when they get into a brawl with the citizens of Rochesterville (the future city of Rochester) and are thrown into jail, and finds work at a local inn--and a friend in Horner's Betsy, one of the maids, who urges him to learn to read and write and ignites in him a burning desire to better himself. As we follow Chingo over the next eight years, his fortunes rise and fall, but when he sees the partially-built Erie Canal for the first time, he knows he wants to be a part of it. His fortuitous meeting with Captain Fortescue Lumm--first a recruiter for canal laborers, later booster for a packet-boat company--and a two-year apprenticeship with Isaac Mendham, the Learned Tinker, help him to realize his dreams, and even though he is once robbed of his savings and another time cheated of his earnings, occasionally shorted on food and once threatened with indenture, he gradually rises in the world of canallers and makes some important connections. Quick thinking and quicker action when a breach in the berm threatens to drain the canal, and a simple but revolutionary idea that changes the whole future of passenger boating, finally bring him to triumph as the youngest packet captain on the Ditch.
Adams writes vividly of a time little noted by novelists (young people who enjoy this book might like to look into Walter D. Edmonds's several novels about canal life), creating a rich picture of a region emerging almost at one bound from wilderness and of the canvas of characters, good, bad, and indifferent, who inhabit it. (Young readers will learn that this was an era when banks--not the Government--printed paper money, and that people as often transacted their business in shillings as in dollars.) He also has a splendid command of the language of the time ("dicty" for fancy or impressive-looking, "chintz" for bedbug, "agonistes" for a professional boxer, etc.). Chingo is a gutsy, clever, determined chap whose early struggles toughen but never embitter him, and who understands the importance of loyalty, hard work, and readiness to give of himself, and the people who enter his life--especially Lumm, Betsy, and Mendham--are vividly drawn. This, like so many OP juveniles, is both enjoyable on its own terms and a book that would fit very well into a homeschooling curriculum, and should definitely be brought back into print.
--Chrijeff
About author, Samuel Hopkins Adams:
At seventy-nine Samuel Hopkins Adams attributes his longevity, vigor and vim to neither smoking nor drinking, except when he feels like it. This is typical of the intelligent attitude toward the vagaries of life that has maintained him through the years in which he has authored more than forty books, written countless magazine articles and, as a crusading reporter, almost single-handedly accounted for the passage of the Federal Food and Drug laws which pave protected millions of his fellow citizens.
Mr. Adams' amazing knowledge of the history of upper New York State is the result of his lifelong interest in the region in which he was born. His home is Wide Waters, on the shore of Owasco, "loveliest of the Finger Lakes." From Wide Waters he still makes forways into the surrounding countryside, attending antique-auction sales "for the purpose of sneering at the prevalent junk," which he says he wouldn't put in his open hearth Franklin stove for fear of insulting it.
A graduate of Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, class of 1891, Mr. Adams introduced football to the campus, played tackle on its first team, and won the Intercollegiate Tennis Championship. For these contributions to scholarship, his college conferred on him the degree of L.H.D. in 1926.
Adams also wrote under the pseudonym Warner Fabian.
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