Hopalong Cassidy:
Knight of the Frontier

FRANCIS M. NEVINS, JR.

It began in the waking dreams of a meek and scholarly-looking
young man, a low-ranking municipal paper-pusher with bifocals
and a slight but muscular build, who visualized a frontier world
he had never seen, and put words to his imaginings at the end of
each day's drudgery. Of all the couples who applied for marriage
licenses from the Borough of Brooklyn in the early years ofthe cen¬
tury, few could have suspected that the mind of the introverted
young clerk who processed their paper work was not in the teem¬
ing streets of the city but out on the open range, among the great
cattle herds, in the flimsy shantytowns, roaming across a vast
imagined West whose geographic center was a Texas ranch called
the Bar-20 and whose human center was a red-thatched, gimp-
legged, liquor-swilling, tobacco-spitting young puncher called
Hopalong Cassidy.

The only child of German-American parents, Clarence Edward
Mulford was born on February 3, 1883, in Streator, Illinois, a town
ninety-eight miles southwest of Chicago. His father designed and
manufactured low-pressure boilers for hot-water heating plants,
and at the time of the boy's birth was operating his own steam
heater factory in Streator. During Clarence's childhood his father's
business kept the family on the move, but they were back in
Streator for the boy's junior year in high school. A dedicated
student he wasn't. He kept his school desk so crowded with five-
cent Wild West paperbacks that there was scarcely room for
anything else, and he would spend study periods reading some lurid
exploit of Buffalo Bill or Kit Carson, which he kept hidden in
his textbook.

In 1899 Mulford's father gave up the risks and rewards of being
his own boss and moved himself, his wife, and sixteen-year-old

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