Eugene Manlove Rhodes was an American writer, nicknamed the "cowboy chronicler". He lived in south central New Mexico when the first cattle ranching and cowboys arrived in the area; when he moved to New York with his wife in 1899, he wrote stories of the American West that set the image of cowboy life in that era. He moved back to New Mexico in 1926 and continued to write novels. In 1958, he was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.
Biography
Rhodes was born in Tecumseh, Nebraska, to Hinman Rhodes and Julia Manlove who were wed March 5, 1868 at Rushville in Schuyler County, Illinois. He moved to New Mexico with his parents in 1881 and "fell in love" with the state. By age sixteen, he was an accomplished horseman and stonemason and road builder. He helped build the road from Engle, New Mexico, to Tularosa, New Mexico. Rhodes was an avid reader, and he was mostly self-educated in his youth. In 1888, he studied two years at the University of the Pacific in California. He began publishing anonymous works in the college newspaper. In 1890, he was unable to continue his studies due to financial problems. His first non-anonymous work was the poem "Charlie Graham". In 1899, Rhodes married May Louise Davison Purple, a widow with 2 sons. He spent the next two decades away from New Mexico at her home in Apalachin, New York. He published seven novels during this time. He and his wife returned to New Mexico in 1926. Despite his literary success, he was not financially successful. They spent less than a year living in Santa Fe. After that they lived in Alamogordo. When they could no longer afford rent there, Albert Bacon Fall gave them a house at White Mountain near Three Rivers, New Mexico. Most of his works were published in newspapers and magazines before they were published individually, including Land of Sunshine, Out West, McClure's, Redbook, Sunset, and Cosmopolitan, and much of his fiction was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post prior to being published as a book. Rhodes published ten books between 1910 and 1935.
Land of enchantment
Rhodes is credited with inventing the phrase 'Land of Enchantment' to describe New Mexico. In 1911, he published A Number of Things, a story in which he described the Socorro area in 1900 as “A land of mighty mountains, far seen, gloriously tinted, misty opal, blue and amethyst; a land of enchantment and mystery. Those same opalescent hills, seen closer, are decked with barbaric colors—reds, yellows or pinks, brown or green or gray; but, from afar, shapes and colors ebb and flow, altered daily, hourly, by subtle sorcery of atmosphere, distance and angle; deepening, fading combining into new and fantastic forms and hues—to melt again as swiftly into others yet more bewildering.” He also used the phrase in the 1914 novelette Bransford In Arcadia, and it was later made the official state nickname of New Mexico. In 1937 the New Mexico Tourist Bureau published a sixteen-page pamphlet Welcome to the Land of Enchantment. The nickname also appeared on a road map that year. It had appeared earlier on Lilian Whiting’s The Land of Enchantment: From Pike’s Peak to the Pacific, published 1906, a dedication to Major John Wesley Powell, “the great explorer.”
Papers
holds a collection of books, correspondence, clippings, magazines, and original manuscripts related to Rhodes. The library's Eugene Manlove Rhodes Room houses this collection and the library's other Southwest books.
