Hough

jects at Harvard, Cornell, and Pennsylvania.
In 1925 he published under the auspices of a
committee of the bar Reports of Cases in the
Vice-admiralty of the Province of New York
and in the Court of Admiralty of the State of
New York, 1715-88. He died in New York
City and was buried in the family burying
ground near Mount Holly, N. J., among five
generations of his ancestors. He had married,
on Nov. 21, 1903, Ethel Powers, by whom he
had two children.

IWho's Who in America, 1926-27; Annals of the
Class of Eighteen Seventy-Nine, Dartmouth Coll.,
1879-1924 (1924) ; The Asso. of the Bar of the City of
New York, Year Book, 1928 (1928); N. Y. Times, Apr.
23,1927.] V.V.V.

HOUGH, EMERSON (June 28, i8S7~Apr.
30,1923), journalist, author, was the son of Jo-
seph Bond and Elizabeth (Hough) Hough and
a descendant of John Hough of Chester, Eng-
land, who landed near the mouth of the Dela-
ware River in 1683. Emerson was born at New-
ton, Iowa, whither his father had emigrated
from Virginia. After graduating with only two
other pupils from the little high school at New-
ton, he taught a country school for a brief sea-
son, then entered the State University of Iowa
where he graduated in 1880. His father, who
had been a Virginia schoolmaster, had chosen his
college course and now insisted that he read law.
The young man was admitted to the bar in New-
ton, but when he prepared to practise, his natural
bent led him toward the frontier. He set up his
little office in Whiteoaks, "half cow town and
half mining camp," in south-central New Mex-
ico, midway between the Rio Grande and the
Pecos River. A better atmosphere for the nour-
ishment of his own peculiar gifts could scarcely
have been found. He was far more interested in
hunting and fishing and in the rugged human life
about him than he was in law. He began selling
little sketches and articles on these subjects to
the magazines devoted to sport and the outdoors
and finally decided to make writing his profes-
sion. After brief experiences in newspaper work
at Des Moines and at Sandusky, Ohio, he ob-
tained in 1889 the job of looking after the Chi-
cago office of Forest and Stream, receiving a
weekly salary of fifteen dollars which he pieced
out by doing newspaper and syndicate writing.

In 1895 Hough published his first book, The
Singing Mouse Stories^ a series of studies or
reveries upon outdoor life. In the winter months
of that year he explored the Yellowstone Park
on skis, and his observations on this trip are
largely responsible for an act of Congress pro-
tecting the park buffalo, Thereafter he became

Hough

more and more widely known as a propagandist
for the conservation of wild life and the preser-
vation of the integrity of the national parks. On
these subjects he wrote hundreds of newspaper
and magazine articles. In 1897 he brought out
The Story of th& Cowboy, which was a favorite
book of Theodore Roosevelt's. In 1900 appeared
Hough's first novel, The Girl at the Half-way
House, and in 1902, his first great success, The
Mississippi Bubble, which became one of the
year's best sellers. He said that he was holding
four jobs at the time this book was produced,
and that it was partly dictated at his office, part-
ly written at home between 10 P.M. and 4 A.M.
Thereafter he was able to devote more and more
of his time to free-lance writing, and his books
appeared rapidly. The more important were: The
Way to the West (1903); The Law of the Land
(1904); Heart's Desire (1905); The Story of
the Outlaw (1907) ; The Way of a Man (1907);
54-40 or Fight! (1909); The Sowing (1909);
The Purchase Price (1910); John Rawn
(1912); The Lady and the Pirate (1913); The
Magnificent Adventure (1916) ; The Man Next
Door (1917); The Passing of the Frontier
(1918), Volume XXVI of the Chronicles of
America series; The Way Out (1918); The
Sagebrusher (1919); The Webb (1919); The
Covered Wagon (1922); North of 36 (1923)
and Mother of Gold (1924). The Covered Wag-
on was made into one of the most popular mo-
tion pictures which had been produced up to that
time. Hough also wrote a series of books for
boys chronicling the adventures of "The Young
Alaskans." For many years he was a contribu-
tor to the Saturday Evening Post for which he
conducted a regular page entitled "Out of Doors/'
He was a good story teller and drew some clever
pictures of Western characters, being particular-
ly apt at catching the dialect and point of view
of those numerous cowboys and ranchmen who
were of Southern origin; but it is as a lover of
nature and as a guardian of the national parks
that he will be best remembered. He was married
on Oct. 26, 1897, to Charlotte Amelia Cheesebro
of Chicago, who was a descendant of the founder
and first white settler of Stonington, Conn.

[L. A. Stone, Emerson Hough; His Place in Am.
Letters (1925); Who's Who in America, 1922-23; The
Annals of Iowa, Oct. 1925; obituary notices in the
American newspapers, May i, 1923.] A.F.H.

HOUGH, FRANKLIN BENJAMIN (July
22, i822-June ii, 1885), forester, physician, was
born in Martinsburg, Lewis County, N. Y., the
§on of Dr. Horatio G. Hough, the first physician
to settle in the county, and Martha (Pitcher)
Hough. He was christened Benjamia

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