The Life and Times of Maxwell Stump

   In his time, Maxwell Stump was considered the “Great Philosopher of the New American West.” That’s a heck of a title, and it still holds water today. Except now we’d probably change it to say Old West. 
 
   I first learned about Maxwell Stump in The Secret History of the Wild West – a great book, by the way, especially if you’ve ever daydreamed about finding yourself some buried treasure. There’s gold out in them hills, for sure. Anyway, I thought I’d do my part to spread the word about Stump since most history books seem to have dropped the ball.
 
   Maxwell Stump started to make his mark back in the 1840s or thereabouts, and he was one of those unsung hero types that's been swept aside by the dust broom of history for some reason or another. Just like Penelope Bridgewater and that guy from Japan who invented time travel. It’s a real shame.

   Have you ever heard the expression, “Buff my knob?” Well, that was Maxwell Stump.  Actually, the complete saying is “Buff my knob quick-like before the roof gives way, Katherine.” A lot of famous phrases end up getting shortened like that. The same thing happened with “Happy as a clam.” That one’s supposed to be “Happy as a clam at high tide.” The short version doesn’t even make sense. But there you go. Stump didn’t come up with “Happy as a clam at high tide.” That was Billy Merkle, of course. But Stump did come up with a ton of sayings and expressions that we use every day without realizing it. Have you ever been accused of “farting against thunder?” You guessed it: Stump. There are tons more.

   Back in Stump’s day, there were fewer boundaries on being a philosopher. That made Stump an inventor of things, as well as idioms and ideas. For example, he was the guy who originally came up with the Ferris wheel. He built one and had it running on a patch of land outside Turner's Creek, Oklahoma in the summer of 1842. It was enormous. More than seventy-two feet tall, and it took a team of horses to run the gearing. He called it the Splendid Stumptifier People Wheel, and he had big plans to sell it to a circus promoter in New York, a guy named William Somers. Unfortunately, Stump lost his Splendid Stumptifier People Wheel in a poker game before he could sell it. The physical contraption as well as the design drawings were scarfed up by a Frenchman, Antonio Manguino, whom Stump mistook for an Italian. Stump never would have played poker with a Frenchman.

   Losing out on what later became the Ferris wheel invention didn’t mean much to Stump. Ideas and inventions gurgled out of him like cold, clear water from a natural spring. In a minute we’ll get to the invention that made famous. First, let’s get into some Stump family history.

   There was a Stump on the Mayflower. This was Asa Stump, Maxwell’s great-grandfather. This was not the original Mayflower of Plymouth Rock fame. It was another boat from England that was also called the Mayflower. This boat came over to America quite a while later and ended up reefing itself near what’s now Savannah, Georgia. Unlike the folks on the first Mayflower or the other folks that ended up colonizing Virginia, the folks on the Mayflower-II weren’t a bunch of religious nuts. They were a bunch of political nuts. Asa and his people were Libertarians.

   Asa Stump died of botulism when he was just twenty-seven, but not before he knocked up his young wife, Beatrice. Beatrice had fraternal twin boys about six months after Asa passed away. She discovered after a while that it was a problem for some folks that she didn't name one of those boys Asa Junior, after their dead Pa. Apparently it violated their expectations or broke some secret rule that she was never taught. She had an answer prepared for anyone who asked why one of her sons wasn't called Asa Jr.: She said that name would have gone to the oldest boy, but because she didn't know which one came out first, it went to neither. This was a lie.
 
   Beatrice knew damn well that Polycarp came into this world about ten minutes before Maxwell. Her sister, Sara, who served as her midwife, knew it too. The truth was that Beatrice didn’t pass on the name, Asa, because she was mostly glad to be rid of the man who originally went by that name. As it turned out, her late Asa was a a pain in her ass. When they were over in England, all he ever did was talk about the New World, and then after they arrived in the New World, all he ever did was talk about the Old Country. Beatrice named her boys Polycarp and Maxwell because Sara convinced her that these were “famous names” that would inspire respect.

   Sara, incidentally, was rumored to be a witch. Along with other weird talents, she could catch decent-sized alligators and put them to sleep by rubbing their bellies in a special way. This was spooky to watch. There were tons of alligators around their little town, Libertyville, and people were mostly scared to death of them. Had Sara lived up north with the religious nuts, she would have been a goner, for sure. But she was relatively safe amongst the Libertarians. She suggested the name Polycarp because it was a name she liked from one of her favorite short stories. She suggested Maxwell based on a dream she had about a beautiful little boy who single-handedly saved Libertyville during a drought because he could magically make crystal-clear water flow straight out of his hands.
 
   The boys, Polycarp and Maxwell, were Stumps through and through. Maxwell headed west way before anyone had ever heard of a gold rush. He went for the pure, pioneer-style adventure of it. Although great admirers of rugged individualism, a good number of the Libertarian townsfolk thought he was mad as a hatter for heading into the unknown and heavily-forested west. Most of those who said, “Best of luck, Max!,” were secretly placing their bets that he’d be back in a month or two to help out Polycarp run his farm. His mom and his Aunt Sara knew he was serious, though.
 
   Polycarp sure could have used some help on his farm. He had no sons, and would never be able to either, on account of losing his testicles in a feed auger accident. “That auger pulled off my whole bag, and I saw my balls go right down the chute, and then my pigs ate ‘em up,” Polycarp would say to horrified listeners in his characteristic falsetto. Being a Stump, he made the best of things, considering. He’d mainly laugh about his misfortune and shake his head in an awe shucks kind of way. And he sure got tons of mileage out of his story. It was such a shocker of a tale, that no one ever asked him why he was running that auger with no pants on. That was a whole other story that involved the minister's daughter, Mary McClure. That story got zero mileage.

   Maxwell, son of Asa and Beatrice, brother of Polycarp, ended up part-way out west before settling down. He made it past the mountains at least. He wound up marrying a 15-year-old pioneer girl named Sue. She told him she was an Indian and he believed her. He would introduce her as “my Cherokee bride, Sue.” This was a great joke to him because of the play on words with Sioux, but it rarely got a laugh. Folks back then weren’t big on homophones. Max never did find out that his darling Sue was a full-blooded Italian. She knew that it probably would have broken his heart a little, made him feel a little less pioneering, so she kept a lid on it. To her credit: Sue always felt very Indian. She knew boat-loads of Indian things, and she was well-versed in several of the northern and southern Iroquoian languages.
 
   Max and Sue had eight children, seven girls and one boy. All Stumps. The boy was Daniel, father of Maxwell Stump, the Great Philosopher of the New American West. The girls were all prettier and smarter than hell, being half-Indian (Italian) and all. One of the girls, Mabel, actually ended up living amongst the Comanches. The Comanches were mesmerizing, majestic geniuses on horseback. But fundamentally, they were terrifying, brutal savages who delighted in laying waste to all non-Comanches that had the misfortune to bump into them. Sue got a free pass because she looked like a Comanche and because the son of a territorial chief fell head over heels for her.

   Now let's skip ahead.
 
   Maxwell Stump, named after his grandfather, was an only child. Many a great philosopher has been an only child since growing up that way offers ample time and space for self-reflection. Young Maxwell spent his time daydreaming, wondering why creek water stayed cold in the summer but didn’t freeze in the winter, and how come birds could fly, and all sorts of things, while other kids his age were fighting with their siblings over food and chores and survival. When he was twelve, Maxwell started keeping a journal of all his observations. He also came up with the first version of his 'little money maker,' as he later called it, when he was only twelve. He kept a journal every day until he died at the ripe, old age of eight-nine. Maxwell Stump never did get married. Many a great philosopher has been a lone wolf because living that way offers ample time and space for self-reflection. Alas, never getting married also made him the last Stump.
 
   When he was older, people who didn’t know Maxwell would often ask, “Who’s that weird old bird scribbling in that little book all the time?”
 
   People who knew him would answer, “Why, that’s Maxwell Stump, the inventor of the Water Witch.”

   If they asked what a Water Witch was, they’d learn all about one of Maxwell’s greatest inventions (his little money maker) and how it could help anyone find the perfect spot to dig a well. More often then not, they'd then go have a talk with him, and if they were serious about buying a Water Witch, Maxwell would go into his palm-reading routine. Now, this wasn't really palm-reading in the classic sense – it's just that he always liked to start off by examining the prospective buyer's hands for a while before getting down to business.

   Anyway, Maxwell sold tons of Water Witches in his day, each one made-to-order. This allowed him to live a pretty comfortable life, get free meals and lodging now and again from grateful customers, and to sometimes get treated like a minor celebrity. In the autumn of 1868 they asked him to make a speech out in front of where they were building the Kansas State Capitol building in Topeka. It was still basically in the ground-breaking phase, so there wasn't much there yet except for the main parts of the foundation. But it was a pretty big deal to be asked to speak there. That was the speech in which Maxwell Stump famously said, "Nobody really needs a Water Witch, because everyone is a water witch."

   People loved the Water Witch. It actually saved a lot of lives too. You've got to have water. Water Witches always worked, and people would surely still be using them and loving them today if the Smithsonian Museum folks hadn’t confiscated all of Maxwell’s private papers when he croaked. There were no more Water Witches after that. No new ones at least. People tried to copy the ones Maxwell had made, reverse engineer them as it were, but the copies were all duds. There was something special about the ones he made for people, something that no one could ever figure out. Because he made each one to order, each one was a custom job, and no two were exactly alike. And they rarely worked in the hands of anyone but the original owner.
 
   By all accounts Maxwell Stump was a special man. In all the sparse materials that I've been able to find on him so far, there are hints that he had all sorts of inventions and capabilities that people were unable to understand or describe at the time. For instance, there are stories about him building "invisible bridges" over large trees and buildings and being able to walk across them, about him being able to "throw" bullets faster than they could be shot from guns, about him being able to light rooms at night without using lamps, about him being able to single-handedly move huge rocks and loads of lumber to job sights, and so on. It really makes you wonder.

   I wonder, too, if the reason that his name has been all-but-erased from history is to keep people off the scent, so to speak. I guess we’ll never know. I do know that history tends to shape-shift as the years go by. I’ve seen plenty of that in my own lifetime. So old Maxwell Stump may come gurgling back up to the surface again, sparking some renewed interest. Maybe we’ll learn something in the process.
 
   As Maxwell Stump himself said, “Keep on learning your whole life.” That’s the short version, of course. The whole saying goes, “If you keep on learning your whole life, Katherine, you start to figure out that Truth is a state of mind.”
 
 – O.M. Kelsey

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This story was first published in May, 1999 in the UTT zine. Some changes and updates have been included in this republishing. Authorship and Copyright remains with O.M. Kelsey.