Tom MacWood:
I would tend not to use a word like itinerant to describe the lives and times of those early immigrant Scottish and English golf professionals who were over here in the 1890s. I would tend not to use that word not because it is inaccurate but simply because someone like you tries to put some negative connotation on it. Look up the definition of that word in any dictionary and even you should be able to see that the word is actually not one that has some negative connotation----at least not until about the sixth inclusion of its meaning.
But there is no factual or historic doubt that those early Scottish and English immigrant professionals such as the Dunns, Davis, Campbells, White etc most certainly were intinerant. To prove that one only has to chronicle their itineraries and the multitple jobs they had at multiple clubs over a fairly limited number of the years in that early time and generally including multi-tasking jobs that required them to do a whole lot more than just creating golf course architecture.
They were all early multi-taskers and that too is completely provable historically and factually. And not a single one of them stayed at any club very long in the 1890s or even the early 1900s.
I have said many times over the years on here that I do not believe the fact that they were so peripatetic (itinerant) in the things they did over here in that early time indicates that they were men that had no talent for architecture (I said that very thing on another thread yesterday and Moriarty turned it around and wrote I said the exact opposite! Will he acknowledge that? Of course not!
).
Matter of fact, I have said for years now (and included in the theme of that article I wrote for the 2009 Walker Cup program) that I think it is unfair to assume and certainly to conclude that those men had no talent for golf architecture in those years simply because they were never afforded the time and the opportunity and the money to show what they may've been able to do if they were afforded those things as some of the best of the early "amateur/sportsmen" architects were.
The trouble with you, MacWood, is you are clearly trying to make something out of what they did that they just never accomplished for good and understandable historic and factual reasons. That you keep trying to do that I feel actually dishonors them and what they did do over here which frankly was a whole lot more than golf course architecture!
As even Mr Weeks said in his book and so many others have said who have chronicled those men in that time accurately, perhaps the most important thing they accomplished over here in that early time was to teach and certainly SHOW those early golfing Americans how to play good golf or certainly what the playing of good golf looked like. Other than that they also probably made golf clubs or even balls and helped those early clubs maintain their golf courses. Included in that certainly was the quick laying out of rudimentary courses but given their inablility to stay long they just were rudimentary in those years and for that that architecture failed to last or endure.
I have also said over the years and in that Walker Cup article that if those early "amateur/sportsmen" architects who ended up doing such good and lasting and respected work with architecture because they took so much time with it on their special projects, were forced to work at the pace and itineraries those early immigrant English and Scottish professionals did they would probably not have been able to even do as good and those journeymen professionals of that early time did, even though it was rapidly produced, inherently rudimentary and not significant in its architectural quality.