A single arrowhead pointed James A. Braden toward a literary path.
He was a little boy when he discovered the chipped-stone relic on his family’s farm in Trumbull County’s Greene Township. The artifact piqued his curiosity about the natives who had lived in Ohio before the arrival of New England settlers. From that day forward, he kept a closer eye on the ground, gathering all the arrowheads he could find.
Braden grew up to be a children’s author in the early 20th century, selling millions of copies of adventure books about American Indians. He loved sharing stories with youngsters — just as much as he enjoyed reading them as a kid.
“A good book was worth more to me as a boy than a gold mine,” he once said.
One of eight siblings, Braden was born in 1872 to James and Miriam Braden and attended Warren schools. His interest in Indian customs became something of an obsession after his father gave him a worn copy of Henry Howe’s Historical Collection of Ohio (1847).
Braden delved into that book and learned many interesting things about Indians and the great outdoors.
“The stories in that old book fascinated me,” he told the Akron Times-Press years later. “Then Dad took me to interesting historical places. … I visited many Indian burial grounds.”
The boy found that he could work the tales to his advantage. One of his chores was shucking corn, a tedious job for a child who preferred to read. With the aid of neighbors, Braden turned the job into a pastime.
“Often I would invite the boys to father’s barn with the understanding that as long as they helped husk the corn, I would keep on telling stories to them about the Indians,” Braden recalled. “Always I drew out my stories until all the corn had been husked.”
Braden planned to be a teacher, but entered journalism after his father bought a Warren weekly newspaper. He was 18 when he joined the Canton Repository in 1890, earning $3 a week. Three years later, he moved to Akron, where he landed editing jobs at the Evening Times and Daily Beacon.
“How well I remember the days of reporting here,” he reminisced in 1927.
In 1894, Braden married Rosalie M. Flohr of Canton. Within a few years, the couple welcomed a baby daughter, Dorothy, and moved to a house on Adams Street in Akron.
Although newspaper work paid the bills, Braden needed a creative outlet. He began writing an adventure tale about pioneers, carefully crafting words in longhand before committing them to a typewriter.
The Saalfield Publishing Co. of Akron was so impressed that it bought the manuscript.
Braden’s first book, Far Past the Frontier (1902), which sold for $1, was set in the Western Reserve and told the story of two pioneer boys camping near an Indian village along the Cuyahoga River in 1800.
Among the glowing reviews, the Beacon Journal predicted that Braden would make his mark in the literary world.
He followed up his debut novel with Connecticut Boys in the Western Reserve (1903), Captives Three (1904) and The Trail of the Seneca (1907). His early books were serialized in the Akron Evening Times.
The author weaved fact with fiction, creating exciting tales that enthralled children. He filled stories with references to “palefaces,” “redskins” and “savages” — words that might be considered disparaging today — and had Indian characters occasionally grunt “Ugh!” and “Heap good!”
To modern eyes, Braden’s stories seem rather grisly for kids. Consider this Connecticut Boys passage in which a character finds a body in the forest:
“In his still open eyes, was a look of abject terror, and a cry of pain and fear seemed to have stopped half uttered on his lips. From his head the scalp was missing, and where his hat still lay, and under the body, the snow was red with blood.”
Braden did writing on the side. He held various jobs, including advertising manager of Diamond Rubber Co., traffic manager of Northern Ohio Traction & Light Co., salesman at Commercial Printing & Lithograph Co. and editor of Akron Topics magazine.
He changed gears entirely in 1908 with The Auto Boys, a Saalfield book about young adventurers in a sputtering car. The book was so popular that it spawned four sequels.
In the 1920s, Braden and his wife lived in a home on Medina Road in Copley Township. Their daughter, Dorothy, married Warren Packard, heir to the Packard Motor Co., and the couple had two children, Rosalie and Warren.
Aside from editing the 1925 Centennial History of Akron, Braden took a break from the past, but resumed writing about Indians as a favor to H. Karl Butler, founder of Camp Manatoc near Peninsula.
“Karl wanted to impress the boys with the traditions of the land there, so I told them about the Erie massacre which is believed to have happened there,” Braden said.
Saalfield published Little Brother of the Hudson (1928), and it became one of Braden’s best-selling books. The “Little Brother” in the title was a reference to the Cuyahoga River.
Braden’s final novel, The Carved Sea Chest (1930), published by Harper and Brothers, was a Canadian tale of lost ships, buccaneers and Indians.
The author said his research of Indians brought him closer to “the real Americans.” He championed preservation of historic sites and lamented the destruction of an Indian mound east of Cleveland.
“Even as I looked over the scene of the domestic and the wartime life of those who were here before us, workmen were busily engaged in converting this grand old monument into cement building blocks,” he said. “Could there be a more pathetic commentary upon the value which a commercial and industrial age is wont to place upon the relics of the historic past of its own surroundings?”
After his wife, Rosalie, died in 1932, Braden took a long vacation, following the Northwest path of Lewis and Clark.
He returned to Akron and tried his hand at cowboys, assisting Saalfield with picture books based on movie serials.
“I experienced more pain keeping Tom Mix alive from one reel to another than letting Pokog the Pequot live for 21 chapters,” he lamented.
The logic of movie serials was utterly ridiculous, he said.
“Why, a reel would end with the hero prostrate, literally riddled with bullets,” he said. “In the next, he would fight a gang and hold a buxom but fainting heroine under his free arm.”
In 1936, the author moved to Michigan to be closer to his daughter and grandchildren.
“While I hate to leave Akron, most of my old friends here have gone, and it will not be such a pull as it would have been in the old days,” he said.
But come back he did. In 1940, he married Alta Taylor, a Saalfield editor, and the couple moved to a home on Revere Road in Richfield Township.
The retired author was content to live out his remaining years overlooking the Cuyahoga Valley, which he called “my Indian land.”
After Alta died in 1954, Braden went to visit his daughter in Michigan. He took ill there in June 1955 and died at age 82. He was laid to rest at Rose Hill Burial Park.
Today, Braden’s books are out of print, but they can be found at local libraries or read online for free at websites such as Google Books. More than a century later, Braden still takes readers far past the frontier.
As he once said: “If I was nothing else in my life, I do believe I was a good storyteller.”
Copy editor Mark J. Price is author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.