The Jew-Wedge-Du-Gish

FORGOTTEN PIONEER by Harry Golden. 157 pages. World. $4.

They did not carry long rifles or travel in prairie schooners, and there was not a Daniel Boone in the lot. They were peddlers. In their 140-lb. packs, they carried free enterprise in its purest form to the frontier. Inexpensive needles, thread, piece goods, fancy notions, buttons and furbelows, even snake oil, but these were what the pioneers needed -- the thousand tiny common denominators of civilization. Most ended with little more than sore feet. But some who began as peddlers created American business dynasties: Samuel Pels of Fels-Naptha soap, Department Store Founders Adam Gimbel, Benjamin Altman and Marshall Field, and Meyer Guggenheim, whose family made a fortune in copper.

Harry (Only in America} Golden, whose brother Jacob came to the U.S. in 1905 and peddled to support his family, tells the story of the peddlers and, in a leisurely introduction, offers insights into life on the road. He invents two typical peddlers--a Connecticut Yankee and a Carolina Israelite--and lets them tell their own tales.

The Jewish peddlers, he maintains, were some of the first white men who dealt fairly with Indians and Negroes.

The Cherokee called them jew-wedge-du-gish (literally, "the egg eaters") because, to avoid breaking kosher rules, they lived almost exclusively on hard-boiled eggs while on the road. Unlike town merchants in the South, the Jewish peddlers cultivated Negro customers, entered their names respectfully in ledgers as "Mr." or "Mrs.," extended them credit, and let them try on clothing before a sale. The Jews were rarely greeted with hostility. Bible Belt fundamentalists believed they were the living witnesses to the Old Testament. Often one was asked, "Are you a Methodist Jew or a Baptist Jew?"

Golden winds up with the tale of a peddler whose first name is still a household word. He was a Bavarian immigrant named Levi Strauss. He sailed to San Francisco in 1852 with a batch of denim canvas. Strauss hoped to sell the fabric for tenting, but noticed that the men needed pants that would hold up in the rugged gold-mining hills of California. The canvas started his inimitable blue jeans, called Levi's, walking all over the world.

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