Cast of characters.
The narrator of the sketches is a longtime resident of Wolfville, a man from
Tennessee known as the Old Cattleman. The old man spends his time in the saloon
or on the hotel verandah—usually drinking and smoking a corncob pipe—where the
unnamed writer prods him into telling his yarns.
The yarns concern the dozen or so characters who live in or
pass through Wolfville. Some of them cowboy for a living; one drives the stage;
and one offers his services as the resident faro dealer at the Red Light
saloon. One is the town’s doctor, and another is the town marshal. Mostly they
seem to have a lot of time on their hands—time to sit around drinking and
talking.
One of the women in town runs the OK Restauraw [sic], and
another assists as lookout for the faro dealer, keeping an eye on the bets. The
stories are similar to what you’d find in a TV sitcom. There’s this stable of
characters, and each chapter finds them with some unexpected situation that
throws them into a comical upset.
 |
| The Old Cattleman |
Style. What makes
these stories genuinely entertaining is the way they are told. The Old
Cattleman speaks in a mix of Southern and Westernisms, drawing heavily from the
language of cowboys, card playing, and gambling. Multi-syllable words straight
from the dictionary are mixed freely with slang, malapropisms, skewed syntax,
and chopped logic.
Pronouns include you-alls, we-alls, and they-alls. “Which”
functions as an all purpose relative pronoun and can be found at the beginnings
of sentences even as the first word of a story. Language is often figurative
and mixed with unexpected analogies. A man is described as so obstinate that he
“wouldn’t move camp for a prairie fire.” An action with no useful effect is
said to be like “throwin’ water on a drowned rat.”
 |
| Cherokee Hall |
Character. The test
of character in Wolfville comes down to whether a man has grit. Of all the men
in town, Cherokee Hall earns the most admiration, and partly for being beyond
fathoming. As a gambler, he has a reputation for being always honest, and he
calmly deals with even the most obstreperous players at the gaming tables.
He shows true heroism when he gallantly risks his life to
save a coach full of passengers from an Indian attack. Surprised by a band of
Apaches, Cherokee shows thoughtful concern for a woman passenger and her children.
Asking the driver to stop for a moment, he leaps out with his guns and makes a
stand.
When the coach arrives in Wolfville, its passengers
unscathed, rescuers quickly come to his aid. They find him shot once but still
alive, the bodies of Indians he’s killed lying around him. His actions
demonstrate what is summed up as Doc Peets’ words to live by: “Life ain’t in
holding a good hand but in playing a pore hand well.”
Women. Wolfville is
a man’s world, and the men generally keep women at a safe distance. Using faro
terminology, Cherokee advises the other men to always “copper a female,”
betting on them to lose. The one exception is Faro Nell, who frequents the Red
Light saloon and is regarded as one of the boys. She gets her name by being the
lookout at the faro table for Cherokee, who calls her a “winner every trip.”
 |
| Doc Peets |
The problem with women, it is often said, is that they are irrational
and thus unpredictable. As the presence of a single woman stirs up the eligible
men in town, there is an immediate effort to marry her off.
When the tenderfoot bookkeeper for the stage company starts
keeping company with a female newcomer in town, there’s concern that his
attentions compromise her purity. A wedding is quickly arranged to make an
honest woman of her, and as a form of encouragement, the men collect $700 as a
dowry for the groom.
Cowboys. The men in
the stories have among them about 2,000 cattle out on the open range. The
cattle do not much occupy them, except at spring roundup, when the men leave
town to spend a week or more branding calves. Only one of the stories involves
cattle, and that is chiefly to give an account of a practical joker by the name
of Jaybird Bob.
Out in the cow camp, Bob takes to playing pranks on a young
tenderfoot from the East named Todd, who has a deadly fear of rattlesnakes.
Wakened from sleep one night by Bob, who has dropped the end of a lariat on the
boy’s face, Todd jumps up running and scatters the herd. It takes two days to
round them up again.
To prevent the enraged Todd from killing Bob on the spot,
another of the men confirms Bob’s snake story. Bob is not long among the
living, however. Disguised as an Apache, he surprises Todd on his return to
camp one evening. Startled, the boy rides off, turning in his saddle to put a
bullet through Bob’s head before disappearing, never to be seen again.
 |
| Wolfville |
East vs. West. There
being no appropriate trees in town, the windmill in front of the OK Restauraw
is used for hanging malefactors. All judicial proceedings are handled by the
vigilance committee, known familiarly as the “Stranglers.”
There is fear in Wolfville that with the introduction of a
newspaper and an opry house, the community is getting perilously close to
having to elect a town judge. The coming of civilization, it is firmly
believed, will disrupt the smooth execution of justice by the vigilance
committee, which is swifter than the law and more responsive to public opinion.
 |
| Alfred Henry Lewis |
Wrapping up. Lewis
grew up in Ohio, practiced law in Cleveland and then fled to the West for a
time in the 1880s. He worked as a cowboy on ranches in New Mexico and Colorado
and as a freighter on an overland line from Las Vegas, New Mexico, to the Texas
Panhandle and between there and Dodge City.
Returning to the Midwest, he took up residence in Kansas
City. There he began writing his Wolfville stories for the newspapers. They
were so popular he was soon earning $15 a week writing for the Kansas City Star, and he quit practicing law to devote the rest of
his life to writing.
Wolfville is
currently available at google books, Project Gutenberg, and Internet Archive,
and for kindle and the nook. For more of Friday’s Forgotten Books, click on
over to Patti Abbott’s blog.
Illustrations: Frederic
Remington, from the first edition
Further reading:
Flournoy D. Manzo, “Alfred Henry Lewis: Western
Storyteller,” Journal of the Southwest, 10:1,
(1968), 5-24.
Coming up: Larry Sweazy, The Coyote Tracker
Excellent post, Ron!
ReplyDeleteI agree: excellent. I have been reading these stories for some time now and was very glad to stumble upon your site. It's good to know others out there are reading them, too.
ReplyDelete