Once upon a time, one of the most famous writers in America was Walter D. Edmonds. He was an Upstater, and his novels brought Upstate to a fascinated readership coast to coast. He’s mostly remembered for two books now: Drums along the Mohawk (which became a hit movie starring Henry Fonda) and The Matchlock Gun (which won the Newbery Medal for the year’s most distinguished contribution to children’s literature). He also won the National Book Award and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award.
The Matchlock Gun takes place at Guilderland in Albany County – suburban now, but very much frontier back in 1756, during the French and Indian War.
Edmonds tells a story that he says has been handed through two centuries by the family of ten year-old Edward van Alstyne and his mother Gertrude. With militia (including the boy’s father) in the field hunting a raiding party, Gertrude loads an obsolete Spanish matchlock gun brought over three generations earlier from the Netherlands, sets it up (the thing’s huge), and coaches Edward in how to use it.
That night she’s attacked, barely making it to the house with a crippling wound. As five attackers charge Edward lets loose with the matchlock gun, whose great shotgun-like blast kills three of the five attackers and wounds a fourth, driving the survivors off. The mother survived, but lost the use of one arm.
Coming out in 1941, just as we were sucked into the Second World War, Edward’s and Gertrude’s story probably struck a chord with frightened Americans who felt themselves under siege. But in 1974 Walter Edmonds published an altogether different children’s book. While The Matchlock Gun is set in a small tense compass, The Story of Richard Storm makes a rollicking romp through Upstate. William Sauts Bock illustrated the picture book.
Richard is one of the many children of old Mother Catskill, who sends her little thunderstorms out to play, racing around the mountains and the Hudson River Valley. Richard, on the other hand, won’t budge. He only sits at home, laying his plans while getting bigger and bigger.
And bigger. At last he sets off without a word to Mother, but heading WEST, rather than east. He pushes through Diamond Notch between West Kill and Hunter Mountains (in Greene County) and rampages into central New York.
From there it’s a short hop to Gilboa in Scoharie Countty, where Richard blasts lightning down the whole length of the reservoir, worrying the residents with this early start to the season. Next stop Otsego County, where Richard strips the trees along Charlotte Creek, blasts a poultry barn to flinders, tears down trees in Oneonta and even blows up a freight car.
He quickly tears across Unadilla Valley and the Butternut Creek before turning north across Oneida lake; by now he’s big enough to cover half a county. Exalted with himself, Richard kills a whole dairy herd and terrorizes picnickers before jumping Tug Hill into Black River Valley, on the edge of the Adirondacks.
But by now Richard Storm is even out of his own control – he’s become a tornado, capriciously wrecking houses and churches and yanking the cables from Snow Ridge ski slopes near Turin. In Port Leyden he turns a house around. Hawkinsville loses a pile of firewood, and Forestport Flats the good part of a pine plantation. He bowls fifty milk cans down the street in Remsen “in a clatter that has not yet been forgotten.” Richard rips the roof from a home in Olden Barneveld, then spins on up Deerfield Hill, from which he spies the target-rich environment of the Mohawk Valley… the river, the railroad, the Thruway, the Barge Canal, and even the City of Utica. But the twisting cloud continues to rise from the top of the hill, finally ending the career of a frustrated Richard Storm.
Walter Edmonds wrote some tremendous stuff, and this is definitely a minor work. But he clearly had fun with it and so, we imagine, did his grandchildren. Read it to young kids, especially if they know any of the territory. Get out a map, and follow Richard’s route. They’ll love seeing places that they know in the pages of a book. And what kid wouldn’t love to roll fifty milk cans down a village street?