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Title
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The Hasheesh Eater Exhibit Panel: The Wild West, Divorce, and Opium
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Transcript
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In just 12 years, Fitz Hugh ended up writing over 4,000 pages of short fiction, novels, essays and criticism. But the literary life did not pay well during the Civil War. Fitz Hugh joined forces with painter Albert Bierstadt, and they traveled on the Overland Stage to California in 1863. Fitz Hugh was an early reporter of life out West – gold miners, American Indians, and Mormons. In San Francisco, they met then-unknown writers Mark Twain and Bret Harte. Fitz Hugh praised them –“[Twain] is a school by himself” - and that praise helped encourage Twain to seek his fortunes in the East.
The pair were feted upon their return. Bierstadt’s paintings became famous, including one featuring “Mount Rosalie.” This foreshadowed Rosalie’s divorce of Fitz Hugh for adultery and her remarriage to Bierstadt just six months later. Fitz Hugh suffered an emotional and physical collapse (the latter a result of tuberculosis which he contracted in Oregon) from which he never really recovered.
Fitz Hugh began using opium for the pain, experiencing its addictive properties. He spent his remaining years helping fellow sufferers (including many Civil War veterans) and appears to have originated the concept of a “halfway house” for addicts. Fitz Hugh died of tuberculosis in 1870.
He was survived by his sister Helen, who never married. Helen was a lesbian, in the closet in those days, but understood by Fitz Hugh who actually wrote a thinly veiled short story about her true gender identity. After her brother died, Helen was invited by an abolitionist friend of their father to become an English teacher at the Hampton Institute (now University), one of the first of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Helen visited Union several times in her retirement years.
The 1960s generation re-discovered and re-published The Hasheesh Eater. Three collectors created the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library of drug literature, now located at Harvard. That Library was a catalyst for The Collected Works of Fitz Hugh Ludlow, compiled by Don Dulchinos ’78 and Steve Crimi ’80.
