Buddies in the Saddle

Photo-finish Friday: out and about

2012-01-27T06:00:00.000-08:00

Here's another in the ongoing series "The Wall Murals of Los Angeles County." Found behind a high fence in a paved vacant lot on Hope Street near 18th. Would love to know the story.

Photo-finish Friday is the bright idea of Leah Utas over at The Goat's Lunch Pail.

Coming up: Gregory Peck, The Stalking Moon (1968)

William Lacey Amy, The Blue Wolf (1913)

2012-01-26T06:00:00.000-08:00

The Canadian West has its writers, and among the earliest was William Lacey Amy (1877-1962), later known as Luke Allan. His first novel, The Blue Wolf, was published in London in 1913. It’s a mystery-adventure set in the Cypress Hills and surrounding prairie south of Medicine Hat, Alberta.

The narrator, Arthurs, is a tenderfoot from Toronto, gone West to visit a college chum who has taken up cattle ranching. The mysterious deaths of two other chums while visiting the same ranch should have been warning enough to stay in Toronto, but this fellow has a lot to learn.

Plot. The blue wolf of the title is a much-feared predator believed to lurk in the vicinity of the ranch. Arthurs has a close encounter with the creature in the opening chapters, its startling howl sending the horse he’s been riding over a precipice. Fortunately for Arthurs, he’d just dismounted.

It’s old home week when he gets to the ranch, discovering that another man, Dicky, has also arrived. Together with the rancher Jock, they are the remaining three of the original circle of five chums. Also at the ranch are Jock’s wife Aggie, whom they all loved while in university, and her sister Margaret.

Arthurs has some history with Margaret. Their reunion is somewhat awkward, especially as he learns she’s been keeping company with a local Mountie, Corporal Humby. The corporal has his eye on a communal settlement of farmers who call themselves Dreamers and are led by an unsavory character, Maskin.

Cypress Hills

A handful of other characters figure into the story: a consumptive Englishman, Mathers, with his wife and young daughter, Rosa, and the ranch’s foreman, Squart. During the novel Mathers dies and is buried near the verandah of his house, under a Union Jack flying at half-mast.

There are peculiar goings-on. Jock behaves strangely. Margaret is meeting someone in the woods around the ranch house at night. Long after dark, a gunshot takes out a ranch house window. Corporal Humby seems to have everyone under surveillance and keeps popping up unannounced.

More curiously, Arthurs sees flashes of light and a climber on a rocky peak that rises from the Hills, but Jock warns him not to investigate. There’s mysterious singing from a nearby lake to be heard after nightfall. The Dreamers have clandestine, moonlit meetings in the hills, where they are harangued by Maskin. And so on.

Everyone has secrets, and rather like a Hardy Boys’ novel, Arthurs and Dicky try to piece together a disconnected series of clues. When the mystery is finally solved, it involves a Jekyll-Hyde mad scientist and technology that would be at home in a science fiction pulp novel. The nerve-wracking climax includes a literal cliffhanger and multiple deaths. In the final scene, two pairs of lovers are united.

Canadian cowboy, c1917

Cowboys. The cowboy on the cover would make a reader expect a shoot-em-up tale akin to Zane Grey. In fact, the single cowboy character in the novel, Squart, plays only a small part in the story. Still, Amy’s interest in him is not peripheral. He’s a three-dimensional creation and larger than life.

Besides the usual trappings of hat, spurs, and sheepskin chaps, he sports a mouth full of gold teeth, having lost the originals in a bad fall from a broncho. He also does not drink, smoke, chew, or swear. He is almost, but not quite, a comic character.

With a heart as big as all outdoors, he is devoted to the care and protection of the English family, the Matherses, especially the eighteen-year-old Rosa. He herds cattle within sight of their house, which overlooks the prairie. When the old man is dying, he rides his horse for help until it drops dead of exhaustion.

Women. Arthurs, the narrator, is a bit unreliable as a chronicler of life on the prairie for women. He’s brought his Eastern prejudices with him and finds the condition of the ranch house not up to his Toronto standards for feminine domesticity. Despite the presence of a German maid, he considers the furnishings sadly shabby.

Arthurs is not convinced the West is a good place for anybody with the refinements afforded by urban living and a university education. Aggie, a tender soul, yearns to return to Toronto and relies on her husband like an emotionally fragile child.

Her sister Margaret seems made of tougher material. She is independent and intelligent, ready to confront a gang of belligerent college men, as we learn in a flashback. She also easily holds her own in an exchange of wits with Arthurs, who carries a torch for her that years of separation should have extinguished by now. He manfully resists his jealousy when he sees there’s something going on between her and Corporal Humby.

Somewhat oddly, he makes an issue of Margaret’s riding “astride” a horse, western-style. It embarrasses him when she doesn’t ride sidesaddle, and she herself claims to dislike wearing a divided skirt. Meanwhile, Rosa is a true horse-loving girl of the West and, for that reason, seems excused from being more lady-like.

North West Mounted Polive, 1898

East vs West. The opening pages describe the narrator’s arrival in the Canadian West after a long, uncomfortable train ride from Toronto. There are horses, a cattle ranch, and a vast sea of prairie, which Arthurs finds lifeless, dreary, and sometimes frightening in its vastness.

People out here are unfriendly and impolite. The farmer, Maskin, makes no pretense of courtesy or generosity. His physical appearance, his posture, and his manner trigger immediate dislike for Arthurs:

In the steadiness of his gaze there was something so self-confident, something so expectant of servile recognition, that I was impelled to resentment.

The U.S. is only a few miles to the south, and the Canadian prairie offers refuge for outcasts from “Uncle Sam Land” like the agrarian religious sect, the Dreamers.

Disturbing to Arthurs is the leveling of social classes in the West that permits a Maskin to behave discourteously to his betters. In one scene, Dicky refuses to get out of his way as Maskin impolitely attempts to enter the ranch house without being invited.

Wrapping up. According to one source, William Lacey Amy was born in Ontario and was for a short time editor and owner of the Medicine Hat Times. In 1920, he began a popular western series based on a half-breed cowboy, Blue Pete. There were over 20 Blue Pete novels, published chiefly in England, featuring both cowboys and Mounted Police.

Ebooks of The Blue Wolf: A Tale of the Cypress Hills seem to be currently unavailable. Used copies can be found at AbeBooks. Friday's Forgotten Books is the bright idea of Patti Abbott over at pattinase.

Photo credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Gregory Peck, The Stalking Moon (1968)

Win some, lose some

2012-01-25T08:33:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the early-western researcher in me got some unwanted news. I’ve been hoping to find a copy of a novel that’s not available anywhere as an ebook. It’s a book by western writer Hugh Pendexter, called The Mantle of Red Evans (1914). A short version of the story can be found in Munsey’s, published October 1911. It’s even nicely illustrated there (at right and below).

I know that at least six hard copies of the novel exist. I can see them online, arranged in a digital list at worldcat.org (you can see for yourself). The nearest is at the University of Tulsa, and in progressive giant steps across the country, the next are at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Ohio State University, The Strong Museum in Rochester, New York, and finally Harvard University, where there are not one but two copies.

"Unbuckle those guns!"

Alas, they are apparently too fragile or valuable to circulate. Yesterday I learned from interlibrary loan that they’ve been unable to turn up a copy for me. The only current alternative is to travel to Tulsa, which is 1700 miles from where I’m sitting. (The worldcat site conveniently provides the mileage between me and each copy of the book.) Not likely to happen.

I might shrug this off except that Hugh Pendexter (1875-1940) went on to be a prolific western writer. Judging from the story in Munsey’s, he shows an early gift for the genre. "The Mantle of Red Evans" has strong characters and clever plotting, and it shows a gift for comic irony.

All of which is not to say I’ve given up looking for the book. It’s there somewhere, located maybe at as many as six degrees of separation. Unfortunately interlibrary loan is not one of them. I’m happy to entertain search ideas from anyone reading this. I'm also available to commiserate with anyone who’s had the same or a similar problem.

Illustrations: W. Herbert Dunton

Coming up: William Lacey Amy, The Blue Wolf (1913)

John Ford, The Iron Horse (1924)

2012-01-24T06:00:00.000-08:00

Followers of TV’s Hell on Wheels will be interested in this silent epic about the building of the first transcontinental railroad. The grandness of the movie’s scale is equal to that of its subject. John Ford weaves together several plots, deftly manages a large cast of characters, and constantly fills the eye with grand, sweeping photography.

It’s also a history lesson that celebrates American know-how, vision, and democracy. The railroad is an achievement of common men and women working together to overcome obstacles of all kinds in the building of a great nation. The making of the railroad across hostile and forbidding terrain, connecting East and West, becomes a symbol of Manifest Destiny.

Enough breathlessness, which the movie aims for and surely earns. It’s also darned entertaining.

Plot. Beginning in Springfield, Illinois, the film introduces us in wintry scenes to a boy, Davy, whose father sets out West with a dream of a cross-country railroad. The man has already discovered a mountain pass that, he says, will some day be a passage for trains. The boy then witnesses the death of his father at the hand of a half-breed Cheyenne with two fingers on one hand.

Years later, the two-fingered half-breed, going by the name of Deroux, shows up again, wearing a fur coat and with one hand shoved into his pocket. A land speculator, he tries to get the railroad built through a valley where he owns property.

Joining the tracks, Promontory, Utah, 1869

The boy Davy now re-enters the story, a handsome young pony express rider (George O’Brien), and discovers that the sweetheart of his youth, Marian (Madge Bellamy), is engaged to the head engineer Jesson. When Davy tells of his father’s pass through the mountains, which would save 200 miles of track-laying, Deroux and Jesson attempt to have the young man killed.

That scheme fails, and after a big fight with Jesson, Davy is made gang boss. With Jesson out of the picture, Deroux returns to the Cheyenne to incite them to attack the railway crew. In a battle that involves most of the population of the nearest town, Davy finds and kills Deroux.

Before long, the two sections of the railroad meet in Promontory, Utah, where the golden spike is driven that completes the project. Davy is on hand for the ceremony and so is his childhood sweetheart. No longer engaged to Jesson, she is free to be Davy’s wife.

More. That’s the thread running through this 2.5-hour movie. Along the way we are treated to numerous subplots and incidents that range in tone from farce to melodrama. Hell on Wheels itself appears as the name of a saloon, presided over by a Roy Bean-style judge. A suspenseful scene occurs there as several thugs gather to do away with Davy. When their efforts fail, Davy and Jesson slug it out until Marian arrives and makes them stop.

Union Pacific poster

Several historical characters appear at points in the story, Abraham Lincoln, Buffalo Bill, and Wild Bill Hickock. Presidents of the two railroads, Leland Stanford and Thomas Durant, are on hand for the ceremony at Promontory. So are the actual locomotives that were there, Jupiter and Engine #116.

Ford works in a cattle drive from Texas, with bearded cowboys and cattle with actual long horns. He includes a tribe of friendly Pawnee who are hired by the railroad company for protection from the hostiles. He also makes an effort to include the Chinese laborers who helped build the Central Pacific eastward from Sacramento.

The cinematography is often remarkable, especially shots of bands of Indians on horseback racing over the landscape. Large crowd scenes are orchestrated with dramatic movement and depth, such as when the town of North Platte is taken down and moved by train to Cheyenne, where it is quickly reassembled.

There is some nifty stunt work as Davy, chased by Indians, tumbles from a falling horse and then leaps onto a passing train. His fall while rappelling down a cliff, after Jesson cuts his rope, is a seamless mix of actual footage and matte work.

Madge Bellamy, 1928

Fordisms. For comic relief and a lesson in melting-pot nationalism, Ford brings together three former soldiers of different backgrounds: Sgt. Slattery, Corp. Case, and Pvt. Schultz. They are bonded together as war veterans against the “furriner” Italians, who are often at the point of going on strike when payday or the beef from Texas is late in arriving.

There is a long farcical sequence as two of them help a barber-dentist extract a tooth from the third. Later, when Slattery is killed in the Indian attack, tears are shed, and eventually the “Eyetalians” are welcomed into the fold of American workingmen.

The town’s dancehall girls join in the rescue of the railway crews who are under siege by the Cheyenne in the film’s last big battle scene. One of them, Ruby, is a kind of Belle Starr, who shoots a customer in the dance tent when he insults her. Though she’s done some dirty work for Deroux, she redeems herself by shifting her alliances to the good guys. Predictably, she gets shot by Deroux for her efforts.

There are sudden, surprising shifts in mood. As the train pulls out of North Platte, loaded with celebrating folks on the move to Cheyenne, a woman is left behind, weeping beside an open grave. When an Indian falls dead from a horse in the midst of a gun battle, a small dog runs to him to nuzzle his face and then crawl next to him.

Trailer, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

George O’Brien. The starring role given to George O’Brien was his first. The son of a San Francisco cop who became chief of police, he’d done little more than stunt work and playing bit parts in movies. An athlete and boxer, he had all-American good looks and a studly physique. In a “Matthew McConaughey scene” he gets his shirt ripped off and accounts for the nickname he apparently acquired—The Chest.

Unlike John Wayne in his first big film, The Big Trail (1930), O’Brien seems a natural in front of the camera. Of course, he didn’t have to speak lines, but his face registers believable emotions, and his physical presence is relaxed and persuasive. His acting career flourished in the 1920s, then waned in the 1930s, though he became one of the better-known cowboy stars in B-westerns. In later years, Ford cast him as cavalry officers in Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Cheyenne Autumn (1964).

Wrapping up. The film was shot in southern California and northern Nevada, which accounts for the mountains that appear in most of the exterior scenes. Ford was all of 30 years old when he directed this film. It’s a remarkable achievement. Charles Kenyon wrote the scenario. Among his 100-plus film writing credits were adaptations of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935) and The Petrified Forest (1936).

The Iron Horse is currently available at netflix and amazon. Tuesday’s Overlooked Films is the much-appreciated enterprise of Todd Mason over at Sweet Freedom.

Source: imdb.com

Image credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: William Lacey Amy, The Blue Wolf (1913)

Old West glossary, no. 25

2012-01-23T06:00:00.000-08:00

Montana cowboys, c1910

Here’s another set of terms garnered from early western novels. Definitions were discovered in various online dictionaries, as well as searches in Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang, Dictionary of the American West, The New Encyclopedia of the American West, The Cowboy Dictionary, The Cowboy Encyclopedia, The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, The Oxford Dictionary of Idioms, and The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

These are from Patience Stapleton’s Babe Murphy, about an independent young woman in Colorado, and Marah Ellis Ryan’s Told in the Hills about a squaw man in Montana. As usual I struck out once or twice. If anybody knows the meaning of “grave room,” leave a comment.

Basque, 1857

basque = waistcoat, bodice, corset, or other tight-fitting clothing for the upper body. “Somehow I remember that Jim Dunn’s saying I’d a trim figure, and being more than ever careful of the set of my basques.” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

battledore = a small racket used in a game of badminton. “Some of the dismal periods of my life have been passed in the company of married folks, where I became a sort of shuttlecock for their contradictory battledoors.” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

boodle = money. “Clara’s got the boodle too, and I’m broke, as usual, and we are going to Texas, cuss the luck.” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

bump = a mental faculty supposedly associated with certain shapes of the cranium; from phrenology. “My bump of curiosity was enlarged somewhat as to his life.” Marah Ellis Ryan, Told in the Hills.

by hooky = a mild expletive. “‘A regular cave, by hooky!’ said the moral guide from Idaho, as he stood upright at last.” Marah Ellis Ryan, Told in the Hills.

catamaran = a quarrelsome woman. “There are lots of old catamarans around me all the time to tell on me.” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

corndodger = cornbread made in a skillet. “He uncovered the fire, set on the coffee-pot, and, with Rachel’s help, had, in a very short time, a steaming-hot dinner of broiled bear steaks and ‘corn-dodgers.’” Marah Ellis Ryan, Told in the Hills.

Presidential fifteen-puzzle, 1880

croaker = killjoy, complainer, pessimist. “Her joy was mine, and I would not be the croaker to cast the first shadow over her sunshine.” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

fifteen puzzle = a sliding puzzle that consists of a frame of numbered square tiles in random order with one tile missing. “We resume our conversation on the tariff, which we know as little about as anybody else, and which is, it seems to me, the great fifteen puzzle of the nineteenth century.” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

freeze to it = hold fast to something. “This trail goes somewhere; may be to an Injun village. I allow we’d better freeze to it.” Marah Ellis Ryan, Told in the Hills.

Gainsborough portrait, c1876

Gainsborough hat = A woman's broad-brimmed hat resembling those shown in portraits by Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788). “Mrs. Ballinger was with her in gorgeous raiment, as usual, this time I think some sort of a figured silk in soft pink and blue with a wide Gainsborough hat.” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

got up regardless = furnished at great expense. “‘Yes,’ remarked a gentleman who joined them during this speech, and whose brand-new hunting suit bespoke the ‘got-up-regardless’ tourist.” Marah Ellis Ryan, Told in the Hills.

in the sulks = unhappy. “But he was divided between his impulse to send the trio on a double-quick about their business and the doubt as to what effect it would have on the tribe if they were sent back to it in the sulks.” Marah Ellis Ryan, Told in the Hills.

independent as a hog on ice = ungovernable. “A young cub of a Siwash came a-riding along to camp about noon, as large as life and independent as a hog on ice.” Marah Ellis Ryan, Told in the Hills.

jog = the space created by a right-angled notch in a surface. “In a jog behind the door, a safe was set in the wall.” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

The Kelpie, Thomas Millie Dow, 1895

kelpie = a supernatural creature of Scottish and Irish folklore, appearing as a woman or, more often, as a horse luring riders into the water where they are drowned and eaten. “O’ course a man likes to try his chance on the chips once in a way, and to the kelpies o’ the drinkin’ places one must leave a few dollars.” Marah Ellis Ryan, Told in the Hills.

Lalla = Persian princess, in a poetic romance, Lalla Rookh (1817), by Irish poet Thomas Moore. “He would do all right for the poet-prince—or was it a king? But you—well, Rachel, you are not just one’s idea of a Lalla.” Marah Ellis Ryan, Told in the Hills.

leghorn = the dried and bleached straw of an Italian variety of wheat. “She came in then, in her pretty blue muslin, with her leghorn hat and drooping plumes.” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

mousquetaire = opera or evening glove. “As I turned to go home, I saw in the road at my feet, a mousquetaire glove, tan-colored and scented with violet.” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

osier = willow branches used for basket weaving. “The brief blaze of the match showed him the fireplace and a pile of wood beside it, and a great osier basket of broken bark.” Marah Ellis Ryan, Told in the Hills.

pattern = model, exemplary. “Not that she did not always behave perfectly proper, she is a pattern woman, but she did not act the recluse because Tom was absent.” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

petted on = fond of, pleased by. “Aunty Luce declared she ‘nevah did see a chile so petted on one who wasn’t no kin.” Marah Ellis Ryan, Told in the Hills.

Bustle frame, 1873

plumpers = a contrivance for expanding skirts; a bustle or hoop. “I’ve a mind to get some red paint and what are those things, plumpers, and blonde my hair and start out on the war path.” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

pone = cornmeal bread made in a skillet. “Here is a little crock half full of eggs—prairie-chicken, I guess—say, can you make a pone?” Marah Ellis Ryan, Told in the Hills.

ranch manners = rules of behavior considered polite by western standards. “‘You are the rudest boy,’ laughed Mrs. Beach; ‘ranch manners, I suppose.’” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

rattling = very good. “I never knowed she was such a rattlin’ cook.” Marah Ellis Ryan, Told in the Hills.

sauce = speak impertinently. “As old Ben Rines, of Southport, used to say, when the boys sauced him, ‘Let ’em talk, it don’t hurt me none.’” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

sham = decorative pillow cover. “I followed him into a beautiful room, a soft blue tint in paper, carpet and furniture, a bed with lace shams and spread, exquisite pictures on the walls, and everywhere dainty bric-a-brac.” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

Simon-pure = the genuine article; the real thing. “I have been reading of Southern gentlemen all my life, and there is the Simon-pure, only with the great heart this generous big State gives to all of its men.” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

Siwash = derogatory term used to refer to Indians in the Pacific Northwest; from Chinook. “Even a hulking Siwash, with his squaw and children, came dragging down the valley in the wake of the freshets.” Marah Ellis Ryan, Told in the Hills.

smutch = blacken, dirty, smudge. “Tillie had a great deal of charity for black sheep, but she believed in them having a corral to themselves, and not allowing them the chance of smutching the spotless flocks that have had good luck and escaped the mire.” Marah Ellis Ryan, Told in the Hills.

snow wreath = snow drift. “To be sure, there be times when one canna stir for the snow wreaths, but that’s to be allowed for.” Marah Ellis Ryan, Told in the Hills.

spoon = foolish, sentimental affection. “Stuart had a bad case of spoons.” Marah Ellis Ryan, Told in the Hills.

stump = a dare. “You think you are witty, Con, but you are only aggravating, sort of stumping me, as Tom used to, and I would break my neck rather than take a stump.” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

Thomas Moore

talking-paper = Indian term for written message, letter, document. “Genesee has sent in the talking-paper to Ole-Man Mac that the Reservation Indians south have dug up the hatchet.” Marah Ellis Ryan, Told in the Hills.

Tom Moore = Thomas Moore (1779-1852), popular Irish poet; remembered for “The Last Rose of Summer.” “‘Well, you must have had a nice sort of a time up here,’ concluded Fred; ‘a sort of Tom Moore episode.’” Marah Ellis Ryan, Told in the Hills.

ward bummer = political trickster; ward heeler. “When the blatant noises in Congress and conventions and the ward bummers in the beer halls quit war talk, the late unpleasantness will be forgotten.” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

yaller/yellow = the U.S. Cavalry, so called for the yellow trim on their uniforms. “All else had drifted into nothingness to him, for the ‘yaller’ had come.” Marah Ellis Ryan, Told in the Hills.

Image credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: John Ford, The Iron Horse (1924)

Western writer inspiration, no. 21

2012-01-21T06:00:00.000-08:00

Here is the #westernwriter inspiration omnibus of Old West images posted during the past week on twitter. Feel free to follow me there @rdscheer. Click each pic to enlarge.

Batoche, Saskatchewan, 1885

"Moonlight Tower," arc light tower, San Jose, California, 1881

Curecanti Needle, Colorado, c1884

Bozeman Pass, Montana, c1884

Canadian Pacific Railway construction, Fraser River valley, British Columbia, 1881

Hanging of a horse thief, Oregon, 1900

Parade, Deadwood, South Dakota, 1888

Image credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Old West glossary

Photo-finish Friday: out and about

2012-01-20T06:00:00.000-08:00

On a walk to catch a bus, I noticed this appealing sign on the side of a building at Washington Blvd. and Oak Street in central Los Angeles. DANCING TONITE. The second-floor windows under it look out from a large open space that may once have been a ballroom. I figure it was a happening night spot in another era, and I get a mental image of low-cut print dresses, wide tides, fedora hats, hip flasks, and the sound of a swing band on warm nights.

Photo-finish Friday is the bright idea of Leah Utas over at The Goat's Lunch Pail.

Coming up: Old West glossary

Marah Ellis Ryan, Told in the Hills (1890)

2012-01-19T06:00:00.000-08:00

There’s a bit of Charles Dickens in this story of long-held secrets ending with a cascade of deathbed revelations. In its study of white-Indian relations on the frontier, it is also a critique of racial prejudice. As a study in character, its hero and heroine portray a stubborn independence and loyalty to higher ideals that put them at odds with their social equals.

The hills of the title are the ranges to be found on the western slope of the Continental Divide in Montana, where a handful of whites have settled amongst Native American tribes. We are in the verdant valleys somewhere north of Fort Owen and near what is now Missoula.

Plot. Arriving in the West as a visitor, the central character is Rachel Hardy. On a packing trip into the mountains, she is fascinated by the taciturn scout Jack Genesee, a white prospector and mountain man. He has befriended the local Indians and has close ties with them, having been adopted into the Kootenai tribe. He introduces Rachel to Chinook, the language spoken by the Indians.

Ruggedly handsome, Genesee reveals little of himself to her, and seems to prefer being a man of mystery. Their friendship abruptly deepens when he rescues her after her runaway horse leaves her afoot and lost in the woods.

Genesee rescues Rachel

Rachel, her sheep-rancher brother, and his wife, welcome Genesee into their midst until they learn that he is a squaw man—a white man who has taken an Indian woman as a “wife.” Having crossed a racial boundary, he has made himself according to custom unfit for the company of respectable women. Rachel, however, is not so quick to judge.

He disappears for a long while, scouting with the U.S. cavalry. During his absence, another Easterner arrives, Charles Stuart, whose presence in the West is not fully explained. Gradually we begin to suspect that he is the long-estranged younger brother of Genesee. Although Rachel and the rest of the Hardys are charmed by him, they do not know that he has a guilty past.

Matters become complicated and tensions heighten when a regiment of cavalry camp near the Hardys’ ranch. The theft of half the camp’s horses is assumed to be the work of the Kootenai, and suspicion falls on Genesee who is their ally. He is taken prisoner and hostilities break out with the Kootenai when the chief’s son is shot dead by a cavalryman. Forty of the soldiers wind up trapped by the Kootenai in a ravine and facing certain death.

In repayment for having twice rescued her from death by exposure in the woods, Rachel daringly frees Genesee, who comes to the aid of the cavalry by leading them through an ancient silver mine. Recovering the body of the chief’s son, Genesee returns it to the Indians, where he is mortally wounded. He then dies with Rachel, Stuart, and the Kootenai at his bedside.

Rachel and sick Indian child

Women. Ryan’s heroine, Rachel, exhibits a tough-minded independence that keeps her aloof from the petty prejudices of the other women. She also often defies the men who are committed to protecting her from harsh frontier realities. None of them comprehends the ease with which she befriends and converses with the Kootenai.

Regarded as a little “queer” even as a girl back home, she is content to make her own sense of the world, a trait that does not change now that she is on the frontier. She admires the strength and intelligence of the man Genesee, though she does not fully understand him. When she learns that he is a squaw man, she resists the urge to condemn him, and takes the attitude that to know all is to forgive all.

Her sister-in-law Tillie is more deeply conditioned to follow the dictates of her social peers. While she was first enchanted by Genesee’s presence in her home, she cannot forgive him for allowing them to assume that he is of equal social standing. Being a squaw man marks him with an indelible stigma.

Rachel and runaway horse

Romance. Early westerns without a romance subplot are rare, but this is one of them. While you expect romance to bloom in some way between Rachel and Genesee, they never become more than respectful friends.

There’s a bit of Charlotte Bronte’s Rochester in Genesee’s mysterious reserve, the lonely, alienated man wounded by misfortunes of the heart. While he may fall in love with Rachel, we are only left to surmise, for there are hardly more than brief glimpses of his emotions. At one point near the end, he finally kisses her, elated with gratitude for her continued faith in him.

It’s a tragic romance. Lovers meet but are prevented by circumstances, morality, and social customs from acknowledging that love. It’s interesting that Rachel’s surname is Hardy, because there is more than a little Thomas Hardy in the way Genesee is deprived of a fully rewarding life. Even his brother Stuart sadly observes that his life has been “one immense sacrifice—and no compensations—one terrible isolation.”

Character. While Genesee is a physically powerful man, the strength that Ryan celebrates in him is his moral courage. His acts of compassion and sacrifice come at great cost and are the cause of considerable loss. The squaw Talapa originally came into his life as a woman he rescued from beating by another Indian. He did not acquire her as a “wife,” like other squaw men. But rescuing her made him one of them.

Macdougall, a friend of Genesee, remarks after his death that his life was wasted. His kindness to an Indian woman won him the disrespect of other whites. Rachel disagrees, seeing in the man a Christ-like generosity. “He is not the first lion who has died to feed dogs,” she says.

Wrapping up. Marah Ellis Ryan (1860-1934) was a prolific novelist during her lifetime. She developed an ongoing interest in Native Americans and seems to have been regarded as an authority. Her novel is unusual for its attempt to present white-Indian relations with a degree of candor that would not have been widely accepted among many readers.

It also takes on the potentially sensational subject of crossing racial boundaries. While stopping somewhat short of advocating mixed race marriage, the novel presents a clearly sympathetic portrait of a white man who has taken an Indian wife.

Told in the Hills is currently available at google books, Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, and for kindle and the nook. Friday’s Forgotten Books is the bright idea of Patti Abbott over at pattinase.

Illustrations: Stanley L. Wood

Further reading:

Kootenai website

Fort Owen, Stevensville, Montana

Coming up: John Ford, The Iron Horse (1924)

Clint Eastwood, Pale Rider (1985)

2012-01-17T06:00:00.000-08:00

This retelling of the story in Jack Schaefer’s novel Shane is handsome to look at and has notable performances by director Clint Eastwood, Michael Moriarty, and Carrie Snodgress. Eastwood’s “Preacher” gunman is probably closer to what Schaefer had in mind when he created the character in the first place. Many have said that Alan Ladd’s portrayal in the movie is too family friendly. The Shane in Schaefer’s novel is a visitor from a noir world, a killer on the drift from a shadowy past, which is more of what we get here.

Eastwood sticks pretty much to his one-note mysterious gunman role, wearing the same flat hat and long coat that he wore in High Plains Drifter (1973). Michael Moriarty actually delivers more of a three-dimensional performance. He plays a miner, working alongside a community of other prospectors and their families in gold-rush era California. Instead of the cattleman-settler conflict of Shane, we get a corporate boss attempting to run them off their claims.

Boss LaHood’s thugs have license to terrorize the miners, and they are beating up Moriarty when Eastwood arrives in town. He comes to the outnumbered miner’s defense, taking on a gang of a half dozen with an axe handle. The rest of the film involves his providing aid, assistance, and encouragement to the miners.

Sawtooth Range, Idaho (CC) Fredlyfish4

LaHood has a high tech outfit, under the direction of the young Chris Penn, which operates in a way like strip mining with similarly devastating environmental effects. For those who enjoy explosions, as I do, there is plenty of dynamite pitched into the works by Eastwood and Moriarty to bring this operation to a temporary standstill.

Producing a greater sense of finality is the demise by gunfire of a good dozen thugs, including a small force of deputies in long coats, who look like they may also work as strike breakers. Eastwood takes down all but one. Moriarty does in LaHood.

It should be said that the thugs, LaHood, and the deputies earn their deaths. LaHood's goon squad are hateful, uncouth men. The deputies are like robots. And John Russell is a coldly handsome and business-like lawman who says “You!” before Eastwood empties his revolver into him. I guess there’s some history there that doesn’t need to be explained.

Carrie Snodgress plays a widow with a 15-year-old daughter who has moved in with Moriarty. Both women take a shine to Eastwood in a romantic subplot. In my opinion, this makes an awkward fit into the movie, though it may have seemed daring and exciting at the time. Eastwood honorably and sensibly deflects the daughter’s advances but obliges the mother.

Sawtooth Range, Idaho (CC) Jonathon Fox

I say “awkward,” but it might be just the ticket for any women in the audience who fancy a vicarious tumble with the likes of Eastwood. All tastefully done, of course. There’s a bird’s eye view of the mining camp after nightfall, and the lights go out in one window.

The film’s ending borrows shamelessly from the movie, Shane. The fifteen-year-old daughter arrives in town, after the killings, too late to say goodbye to Eastwood. She calls out to him as he disappears in the distance, “We love you. I love you,” her voice echoing back from the mountains. Hard not to recall the young Brandon DeWilde calling out “Shane, come back!”

Shot on location in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area and Sun Valley, Idaho, the film has some dramatic photography of snow-covered mountains. The scruffy settlement looks like it was plunked down from the sky and not quite yet lived in. There’s also a little confusion about whether to dust the town with fake snow. Sometimes it’s white as Christmas, sometimes not.

Altogether, I’d recommend this one over High Plains Drifter by a country mile. Pale Rider is currently available at netflix and amazon. Tuesday's Overlooked Films is the much-appreciated enterprise of Todd Mason over at Sweet Freedom.

Photo credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Marah Ellis Ryan, Told in the Hills (1890)

Commentary: Family values in the western

2012-01-16T06:00:00.000-08:00

Two westerns have been on my mind lately: Elmore Leonard’s Last Stand at Saber River (1959) and Louis L’Amour’s The Quick and the Dead (1973). Add to that another, Jack Schaefer’s Shane (1949). All of them concern small nuclear families on the frontier that are being menaced by villains.

In Schaefer’s Wyoming, the villain is a cattle baron who simply wants settlers off his open range. The mysterious stranger Shane, takes up residence with a settler family, the Starretts, then defends them by killing the cattleman’s hired gunslinger. The story is told by a boy, who has only a boy’s understanding of conflict and danger, so the violence is muted.

A decade later, Leonard’s novel, set in Arizona, whittles this story down to a long confrontation between a settler and a whole family of villains. Civil War veteran, Cable, has been off fighting for the Confederacy. After being wounded several times, he is sent home. There he finds that Union sympathizers have taken over his house and pastures. He has to evict them by force in chapter 1, and for the rest of the novel he must defend family and property. It’s kill or be killed.

L’Amour blends these two stories and sets his short novel in Colorado, where his family, the McKaskels, is protected from a nasty gang of villains by a Shane-like frontiersman and gunman, Con Vallian. The atmosphere from the start is another one of kill or be killed. While the killing in Shane takes place at a saloon in town, Leonard and L’Amour bring it right to the family’s doorstep.

Fiction, including westerns, is a product of the time when it was written. And put in chronological order, from 1949 to 1973, these three westerns make an interesting progression. While the central situation is the same—family vs. menacing villains—the escalation of violence from Schaefer to L’Amour is notable.

Shane. I have come to read Shane as a postwar story in tune with the reentry of WWII soldiers to the homeland. Trained to kill, many of them survivors of fierce combat, these returning veterans were not all successful making the transition to peacetime. We know now from modern psychology, especially after Vietnam and with wars in the Middle East, that the stress of life-and-death conditions can be traumatizing.

Shane can be read as a return from the killing fields to hearth and home. Like the combat veteran, Shane has a history he does not speak of, and he attempts to leave it behind by becoming another kind of man, a farmer like Starrett. Unlike the film, which preserves Shane’s identity as a gunman, Schaefer has him actually put away his gun belt, like a past he wants to disown.

The lesson of the story is that Shane is forever marked by his past. Like the returning veteran forever changed by his experience on the battlefield, he’s fated never to settle down into family life and the workaday world. Most of all, he can never find peace.

There is sadness and a sense of loss as he rides off at the end, but only after there is no longer need for his services as a gunman. His job is done. For Starrett, the range war and the killing are also over, and the novel ends with him at the center of stability and restored order—husband, father, and respected community leader.

Leonard and L’Amour. But you can tell from Leonard and L’Amour that the conflict at the heart of Schaefer’s story has not been resolved. It comes back even more fiercely in a West where a man must be hyper vigilant and well armed, to protect his property, his wife, and his family. And always it is kill or be killed.

This constant state of high alert bears a strong resemblance to PTSD, a condition found in men and women who have experienced an overwhelming threat to their lives. The condition is not limited to combat veterans but can affect any survivor of extreme violence. Stories like Last Stand at Saber River and The Quick and the Dead are set in a similar high-risk world of constant danger. Their titles even suggest close encounters with violent death.

I’m not a psychologist, and I’m not saying PTSD accounts for the popularity of these three westerns, all of which were made into movies. The parallels do strike me as curious, however. In all the many early westerns I’ve been reading (1880-1915), I have not come across a novel with a plot even remotely similar to this one.

Clarence Mulford’s Bar-20 boys get themselves into high-risk situations and the body count can be high, but his stories are exaggerated beyond any resemblance to reality. His is a dime novel world. Zane Grey’s penchant for intense melodrama can lead a character into extreme situations, but a plot like what we get in Heritage of the Desert (1910) is the familiar one of the hero rescuing a woman from the clutches of an unsavory man.

Leonard’s and L’Amour’s is a different kind of intensity. It goes for raw nerves and primal fears in the reader. And it does so by portraying an assault on the nuclear family, including insults and threats against the welfare of a man’s wife. At a time when many perceive the nuclear family as under attack from all sides—not from foreign invaders but enemies within—maybe the appeal of this theme is understandable.

But it doesn’t fully account for the kill-or-be-killed world in which defense of family and property takes place. A related storyline often found is the revenge plot, in which a man avenges the death of a family member, often a wife or sweetheart. I don’t know how these came to be such prominent themes in westerns, but they are there and apparently there’s an audience for them. I don’t believe it’s because western writers lack the imagination to come up with other kinds of stories.

Wrapping up. We know that death from disease and accident was more prevalent on the frontier than death by violence. For instance, one out of ten Americans back then died of TB. The arid air of the West made it a common destination for people with respiratory illnesses. Maybe in the age of modern medicine and less danger of accidents, readers find it easier to identify with other kinds of threats.

James Reasoner recently commented that the economics of the western favors storytelling that is steeped in mythology. And I can appreciate that. But there’s an appetite for the kill-or-be-killed story that puzzles me, because I do not share it. I’ll be honest here and say so. The historical West will continue to be of more interest to me than this mythical one.

Coming up: Clint Eastwood, Pale Rider (1985)

Western writer inspiration, no. 20

2012-01-14T06:00:00.000-08:00

Here is this week's omnibus of #westernwriter inspirations posted each day at twitter [click to enlarge]. If you are on twitter, you can follow me @rdscheer.

Indians at NW Mounted Police barracks, Regina, Saskatchewan, 1885

Navajo hogan and cornfield near Holbrook, Arizona, c1880

First and Last Chance Bar, California, 1885

Mounted Police barracks, Calgary, Alberta, 1889

Building under construction, Fort Keogh, Montana, c1889

Library, University of Colorado, Boulder, 1889

Indian burying ground, near Yale, British Columbia, 1887

Picture credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Clint Eastwood, Pale Rider (1985)

Photo-finish Friday: out and about

2012-01-13T06:00:00.000-08:00

A river runs through it. My commuter train paused for a moment on a bridge over these untroubled waters one morning this week. We're a few minutes from Union Station in Los Angeles. Yes, it's the Los Angeles River.

It didn't end up this way because city fathers preferred a concrete sluice to grassy banks, sand bars, and trees. For decades in the early history of the city, the river refused to stay in one place. A rainy winter would send it flooding wherever it pleased across the LA basin, wiping out everything in its path. Enough was finally enough, and miles of concrete were poured with the above result. Problem solved. But it makes you want to sing "Cry Me a River."

Photo-finish Friday is the bright idea of Leah Utas over at The Goat's Lunch Pail.

Coming up: Clint Eastwood, Pale Rider (1985)

Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy (1890)

2012-01-12T06:00:00.000-08:00

This is a sentimental novel set in the West that’s a blend of romance, morality tale, and murder mystery. The narrator is a fifty-year-old woman from New England, Lydia Wilder, who falls into a small inheritance and goes adventuring. She fetches up first in a Colorado mining town, where she befriends the young, independent woman of the title, Beatrice “Babe” Murphy.

A third woman, Clara Beach, provides the novel’s romantic melodrama. Unhappily married, she becomes involved in an adulterous love affair. If Douglas Sirk had been making movies at the time, this story would have fallen squarely in his ballpark. There would be roles for Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson.

Issues. Like Sirk, Stapleton uses this material to raise all manner of questions about expected social roles and limited opportunities for women. Smothered by her husband’s Victorian-era desire to preserve her “innocence,” Clara is trapped and isolated in her marriage. Finding true love in the arms of another man, she must bear the judgment of those who regard her as a wanton, fallen woman.

Were the story set in New England, we could expect something like scarlet-letter morality to run its course, but out here in Colorado, things are different. In a mining camp especially, there’s a bit more elbow room for the wanton and the forbidden. Even the surrounding mountains seem indifferent to the indiscretions of humans.

Argentum, Colorado

Lydia’s New England upbringing keeps reminding her that Clara’s infidelity is wrong, yet she reluctantly becomes an accomplice. She may refuse to carry messages between the two lovers, but she can’t help but be touched by Clara’s dilemma. A complicating factor is that Clara’s lover is Babe’s father, Con Murphy.

Another is that Clara’s husband became wealthy by scheming to gain ownership of Con’s silver mine. Taking his wife, Con reasons, is fair repayment. And there’s yet one further complication—Clara’s dashing young cousin Tom arrives from the East and begins to court Babe. Before long, the two couples are having idyllic picnics in the woods, with Lydia as something of a guilty chaperone.

Plot. The crisis point for Clara comes when her husband learns of her affair. She and Con then disappear, having run off together. Her husband is not only shocked and bereaved. He turns up dead, the apparent victim of foul play.

Suspicion turns to Con, who would have more than enough in the way of motive, but a grand jury decides they lack sufficient evidence to charge him. Lydia and Babe leave Colorado and eventually find the two lovers in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Corpus Christi, Texas, 1887

Con, exhausted and in poor health, lies on his deathbed, attended by the stricken Clara, who reveals how her husband was killed—not suicide or murder, but an accident. When Con is dead and buried, she leaves, a shattered woman, and we never see her again. At which point the story turns to its other plot, Tom’s courtship and eventual marriage to Babe.

Tone. Though the novel has a happy ending, there are numerous shadows in the telling of its story. Loneliness, loss, and death are frequent themes. These are expressed partly in the restrictive conditions of the remote mining camp. The mountains themselves are a wall that separates Lydia from a more hospitable terrain. She misses the ocean, and she much admires the prairies and flatland of Texas, where a person can see the horizon.

In the carpe-diem ruminations of characters, there’s also an awareness of the brevity of life, the emptiness of social forms, and the few pleasures granted to the living. When all is said and done, Con argues, we are just skeletons and dust. After death, there’s no difference between rich and poor, moral and immoral.

Portrait of a woman, c1890

Character. What is the test of character for a woman? Through her narrator, Stapleton seems to say that it’s the courage to leave the domestic security of hearth and home and venture into the world. In both Lydia and Babe, she argues for a kind of gender equality that allows women freedom of movement and full exercise of their intelligence.

She laments how social restrictions keep women dependent on men, and she blames women themselves for colluding in that practice. Finding herself in an unhappy marriage, Clara seems as much the victim of her mother’s intentions as she is her husband’s. Prepared for nothing else, however, she has no resources for striking out on her own. And marrying Con would mean life as a poor miner’s wife—not much of an option either.

Her fault is one of weakness, a lack of moral strength to do the right thing—starting with being honest with herself and her husband about her unhappiness. Instead she uses her cleverness to excuse the doing of the wrong thing—lying and cheating on him. Given the circumstances, her behavior is understandable, but not excusable. At the end of the novel, we learn that the rest of her life has been a misery, and she yearns only to be dead and buried next to the man she loved.

Wrapping up. Patience Stapleton (1861-1893), like her narrator Lydia, came to Colorado from Maine. She wrote for the Denver Tribune and married an editor of the Rocky Mountain News. Writer of numerous short stories, she published one other novel set in Colorado, Kady (1888).

Babe Murphy is currently available at google books and Internet Archive, and for the nook. Friday’s Forgotten Books is the bright idea of Patti Abbott over at pattinase.

Photo credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Marah Ellis Ryan, Told in the Hills (1891)

Women writers and the early western

2012-01-11T06:00:00.000-08:00

Patti Abbott once asked on her blog whether readers could tell a difference between the fiction of men and women writers. As with many topics raised there, this one generated a long discussion. I don’t remember much of a consensus being reached, except that women writers tend to take greater note of domestic concerns, like preparing meals.

Fiction set in the American West divided along gender lines pretty much from the beginning. Men wrote action adventures with plenty of muscle. Women writers did other things. Living at a time before they had the vote, and a Victorian morality kept them at home and minding children, women used writing as a way to flex another kind of muscle—the brain. As if to prove that women could think, their novels are full of ideas.

As writers, both share a similar interest in the frontier. They recognize and explore the freedom from Eastern social norms that is to be found there. For men, it’s an opportunity to confront villainy by a display of character, courage, and gunplay, and as in Wister’s The Virginian (1902) their novels often question assumptions about class differences. For women, it’s an opportunity to question what a male-dominated social order assumes to be true about both genders.

B. M. Bower’s first novel Chip of the Flying U (1906) is a good example (reviewed here earlier). There she opposes a top-hand cowboy and a lady doctor, Della, in an even match of wills. In the story, there’s a replay of the scenes in The Virginian, where Molly the schoolmarm plays nursemaid to her own injured cowboy.

The difference in Bower’s novel is that Chip resents becoming an invalid after an accident on the ranch. And his relationship with his caretaker doctor draws sparks as often as sweetness and light. Bower, a sharp observer of male ego, gives a believable account of male-female relations, where each has achieved a different kind of independence.

Bower’s novel is a comic romance, and any elements of action-adventure are outside its main interests. Most of the story takes place indoors and around the ranch. A memorable indoor scene occurs in the bunkhouse, where Chip is surprised to discover the doctor. Her curiosity has led her to this male-only province, and Bower’s eye for domestic detail provides us there with a picture of cowhand living conditions.

Though out of place in the bunkhouse, Della doesn’t beat a retreat. She learns that Chip has come for his gun to shoot his injured horse. Sensing his dismay at the loss of a favorite animal, she asks to let her try to nurse it back to health.

Their meetings in the barn (another male province) as the horse slowly mends give Bower an opportunity to let this friendship between unequals develop. And they are doubly unequal, Chip assuming superiority by virtue of his gender while she is superior in her intelligence and training as a doctor.

Uncowboy-like, Chip has a gift that she values more than he does. He is a natural with a paintbrush, and she helps win him recognition as an artist. This is a far different outcome from The Virginian, which ends with the killing of a villain. What has to die in Bower’s novel is Chip’s narrow understanding of himself—and of women.

I mention Bower, because she was the first woman writer of cowboy westerns that I read. Before her, as I’ve come to learn, there were already women writers publishing novels set in the West. A partial list includes Mary Hallock Foote’s novel about mining, The Led-Horse Claim (1883); Helen Hunt Jackson’s well-known Ramona (1884); and Mary Austin’s story of Old California, Isidro (1905).

Lesser known today was Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s novel about the fate of a California land grant ranch, The Squatter and the Don (1885); Patience Stapleton’s novel about an independent girl in a mining camp, Babe Murphy (1890); and Mollie Davis’ novel about the barb-wire wars in Texas, The Wire-Cutters (1899).

I’m currently reading an early western by Marah Ellis Ryan, Told in the Hills (1890), which got me thinking about all this. It’s another prime example of how women writers took to the West. Ryan’s particular take grew from what became a life-long interest in Native Americans.

Her young heroine, Rachel, fetches up in the mountains of western Montana as a “dude” from Kentucky. Riding on horseback on a two-week pack into the mountains, she learns enough Chinook to converse with the local natives. Meanwhile, she and two of the women riding with her develop a fascination for the subject of squaw men—white men who take Indian women as “wives.”

One of the women finds the idea repulsive. In her eyes, Indian women are dirty, lazy, and ugly. The offspring of such unions are regarded with even greater disgust. As in other western novels of the time, it’s believed that no good comes from mixing races. Rachel, described as being an independent thinker, reserves judgment. Maybe, she thinks, marriage to a white man would help Indian women learn to “improve.”

The scout on the trip, Jack, is a mysterious man who has lived in the West for many years. His manners are “western,” but Rachel senses there’s a great deal more to him. He seems to have much bottled up inside about a past he finds shameful. By the middle of the novel, Rachel learns that a half-breed woman lives with him. Unshocked, her response is one of “to know all is to forgive all.”

While the story of Rachel and Jack's friendship is told with considerable tenderness and emotion, Ryan is putting a lot on the table for discussion about race and race relations. Without having to say it in so many words, she’s also talking about sex. Creating a strong, thinking heroine, she’s insisting that, “queer” though it may seem, women can think and act as independently as men—if not more so.

As is often the case with outsiders, Rachel has a sharp eye for details of behavior. For a male reader, Ryan offers the experience of being seen through the eyes of a woman. While Jack stoically refuses to reveal anything of his private life, Rachel reads him like a detective at a crime scene. Like Bower, you can tell that Ryan has observed men closely.

And she’s also good at domestic detail, the sort of thing male writers seldom focused on. At one point in the novel, she lists the entire contents of the larder in a deserted cabin. Then she puts together a meal out of what she finds.

Which brings us back to that discussion at Patti Abbott’s blog. As feminist critics would put it, the early western novel is “genderized,” meaning that what’s going on in the fiction by men and women generally falls on either side of a fairly clear line. The stories of male writers take place largely outdoors; women writers tend to focus on what goes on indoors.

That, of course, would begin to change. But maybe not all that much.

Image at top of page: Anna Brassey (1839-1887), English traveler and writer; Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy (1890)

Stranger on Horseback (1955)

2012-01-10T06:00:00.000-08:00

The French may not make westerns, but this western by French-born director Jacques Tourneur shows a bit of Gallic sensibility. Shot in all of 18 days in Mexico and Arizona, it features fine performances by Joel McCrae and John McIntire. It also captures the desert West in warmly muted Ansco Color, a process developed by Agfa in Germany.

The script was based on an early story by Louis L’Amour. While the rest of the characters are chiefly recognizable genre stereotypes, McCrae’s circuit judge Richard Thorne is something of an original. He’s so original that his job has to be explained at the beginning of the film.

Unlike the dark, mysterious presence of a central character like Sam Elliott’s frontiersman in L'Amour's The Quick and the Dead, McCrae is squarely on the sunny side of law and due process. We first see him riding his horse while reading a law book. Arriving in town, he is business-like and resolute in carrying out his duties, even if it means inquiring into a killing by the son of a local cattle baron.

John McIntire is the crusty, blustering ranch owner, who also owns the town. Rather than the two-dimensional heavy often portrayed in westerns, McIntire is more complex. He’s an intelligent man, and his offer of hospitality is genuine. He also recognizes McCrae’s judge as someone not easily intimidated, whose strength comes from the force of the law he represents, not the six-gun.

Kevin McCarthy is the arrogant and over-confident son of the powerful McIntire, never wiping the lop-sided sneer from his face. But it’s a niece, played by the Czech-born actress Miroslava, who has McIntire’s real admiration. Fearless and good with a gun, she rides an uncertain line between loyalty to the family and her growing respect for the handsome circuit judge.

Saguaro (CC) Bernard Gagnon

Its story told in little more than an hour, Stranger on Horseback is no B-western. It deftly manages a large cast of characters, including a garrulous Southern lawyer (John Carradine), a second woman (Nancy Gates), her gunsmith father, and the town banker. Republic Pictures veteran and comic actor Emmett Lynn plays a wonderful town drunk, and Emile Meyer is enjoyable as the town marshal, glad to help McCrae take on McIntire and his henchmen.

The film is interesting for its lack of violence. Advocating rule by law, as it does, physical conflict and gunfire seldom result in more than a bloody nose or broken windows. In one scene, a cowboy asking for trouble gets tossed by McCrae into a horse trough. When a gun is drawn, it’s to fire a warning shot or to persuade a reluctant law-breaker to go directly to jail.

The obligatory shoot out comes at the climax of the film as McIntire and his men apprehend McCrae, who is escorting murder suspect McCarthy to the next town for a jury trial. By now McCarthy has caused the death of another man, and Miroslava has switched her allegiance to McCrae.

Instead of resolving the confrontation with a bloodbath, the story has McIntire call the gun battle to a halt and permit his son to face justice in a court of law. And the film ends not with a kiss, a ride into the sunset, or even the killing of the villain McCarthy. In the moments before the last fade out, McCrae enters a courtroom and opens the trial of “the people vs. Tom Brannerman.” We never discover the trial’s outcome. The film’s point about law and order has been made.

The original negatives of this film were lost, we are told, and the version currently available on DVD was restored by the British Film Institute. It can be found at amazon and netflix. Tuesday's Overlooked Films is the much-appreciated enterprise of todd Mason over at Sweet Freedom.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Women writers and the early western

Commentary: cowboys as aliens

2012-01-09T06:00:00.000-08:00

Holton-Curry Reader, 1913

What was the frontier? Asking that question is like asking the proverbial blind men to describe an elephant. Case in point:

Recently, notice came of an upcoming scholarly symposium on “The Significance of the FRONTIER in an age of Transnational History.” The word “frontier” was not only all in caps, but it extended across the entire width of the poster advertising the event (click here to see). The copy on the poster was superimposed over a photograph of Frederick Jackson Turner—the man who famously announced the closing of the American frontier in 1893.

For readers and writers of western fiction, there’s a curious thing about the description of this symposium. While it’s clearly about the American West, there is not a single reference in its 395 words to cowboys, ranching, cattle, outlaws, lawmen, or firearms. For the folks organizing this event, theirs is a different frontier and a different West—one without cowboys.

Frontier studies, while you may not have heard of it, is a self-explanatory term and probably seems a worthy subject of scholarly interest. I could tell you that “Turnerian historiography” refers generally to Turner’s theory that the frontier experience shaped American character, and you would know what I’m talking about. You’d probably even agree with the idea.

Children's Classics in Dramatic Form, 1909

However, several terms crop up in the description of the symposium that might have you wondering:

New American History
Borderlands studies
Critical race theory
Settler colonialism
Environmental history
Postwestern

You can google on all these terms and discover that each stands for a complex of ideas, theories, and publications that reflect what scholars talk about when they talk about the frontier. And most are conversations that have been going on for decades.

The copy describing the event ends with a list of possible questions the symposium hopes to address. At the very end of that list, the organizers wonder whether academic scholarship in frontier studies has had “any effect on contemporary popular productions.” In other words, is any of their work showing up in western fiction, movies, TV, poetry, and whatever else about the frontier West is being produced for popular consumption.

After some thought, I’d have to say the answer to that hopeful question is mostly no. You could probably even put that in capital letters and make it extend across the page.

Golden Treasury Reader, 1909

And therein lies the problem for both western fans and scholars. It’s the separate-but-equal world they inhabit. There’s mythology on one hand and ideology on the other. One camp’s point of view is faith-based; the other is analytical. Both are political—each more red or more blue.

I’m not one to take sides here. I just wish the two would find more of a meeting ground. As long as scholarship talks in a language ordinary folks don’t understand, there will be little that western fans will learn from it. As long as western fans regard the mythology as gospel and not to be tampered with, their devotion to the genre will go unshared by most scholars.

Heath Reader, 1907

So I find myself in the middle, borrowing from the new frontier scholarship to see and enjoy more in western fiction and movies than I would otherwise. And I try to pass some of that along here. As I try my hand at writing western fiction, I also attempt to blend the two perspectives to contribute something fresh and original to the genre.

The early western writers I’ve been reading (1880-1915) were not afraid to set all kinds of stories in the West. They were unconstrained by requirements of a genre still in the process of being born. Thus, much of what they wrote was fresh and original.

I’d like to see the western open again to that kind of freedom. It’s been argued that the western lost its audience in the late 20th century because it couldn’t reinvent itself. But enough time has passed for writers and filmmakers to do just that. Like western writers of 100 years ago, they are free to bring their imagination and their skill as storytellers to the West, as if the western never existed.

Unsatisfied with the old formulas, they may draw if they like on the scholarship that has been freeing history of the old mythologies and out-dated or unfounded beliefs. Lonesome Dove was already a step in that direction. More recently, Deadwood and Hell on Wheels. In each of them, mythology confronts history in ways that excite, inform, and entertain. And they chip away at the dead wood that has taken over the genre.

Itcho Hanabusa, 1888

There are contemporary writers of western historical fiction like Richard Wheeler, Carol Buchanan, Johnny Boggs, and many others whose work brings the past compellingly to life. But it’s the blending of history with myth that has become a challenge for western genre fiction.

Still, there are signs this is changing. As just one example of western genre fiction that most readers here are likely to know, I’d pick Edward Grainger’s stories of U. S. Deputy Marshals Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles. Both characters are clearly fictional, but they deal with aspects of American social history that have been largely ignored in the past. And they’re grounded in a historical reality that a reader in 2012 can recognize and care about.

It’s not surprising that many readers posting favorable reviews of the Cash-Miles stories say these are the first westerns they’ve ever read. Many moviegoers who saw last year’s True Grit were of a similar mind. Like probably anyone who has read this far, I’d like to see the western make a comeback. But I don’t think it will happen without a continued infusion of something other than the same old formulas and clichés.

Phra That Phanom chedi, Thailand

I know, some readers love the formula western because it is so predictable. A certain kind of hero, a high-risk conflict, and a resolution involving gunfire. I recall sitting in front of several boys in cowboy hats who took seats behind me in a screening of “Hud” back in 1963. Their running commentary on that movie predicted every turn they expected the plot to take, only to be disappointed each time.

Readers in cowboy hats, especially young ones, need not be disappointed like that. There should be westerns for them. But I’m arguing for westerns you can’t predict. In fact, I think there should be more general disagreement about what a western is. That’s the kind of diversity I think many new readers could get behind. And for starters, the blind men who proved their worth describing an elephant would be perfect for the job.

Further reading:

Postwestern

Lamar Center for border and frontier studies, Yale

Frontier studies, Google Scholar

Image credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy (1890)

Western writer inspiration, no. 19

2012-01-07T06:00:00.000-08:00

Here is this week's omnibus of #westernwriter inspirations posted each day at twitter [click 'em to enlarge]. If you are on twitter, you can follow me @rdscheer.

Warehouses and steamship dock, Sitka, Alaska, c1888

The court house at the trial of Louis Riel, Regina, Saskatchewan, 1885

Soldiers and Indian Scouts before the Battle of Big Dry Wash, Arizona, 1882

Geronimo and warriors, Arizona, 1886

Kamloops, British Columbia, 1887

A game of poker, Arizona, c1888

Mormon women and children, Arizona, c1880

Picture credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Joel McCrae, Stranger on Horseback (1955)

Photo-finish Friday: out and about

2012-01-06T07:00:00.000-08:00

Finally found a horse that will stand still for me while I take a pic. This one is outside the front door of Ballard's Saddle Tack and Western Wear near Palm Springs, California.

Photo-finish Friday is the bright idea of Leah Utas over at The Goat's Lunch Pail.

Coming up: Joel McCrae, Stranger on Horseback (1955)

Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don (1885)

2012-01-05T06:00:00.000-08:00

This historical romance, set mostly in southern California, has a bundle of different aspirations. It’s a nostalgic recollection of life on the Spanish land grant haciendas and a bitter account of its swift demise when Alta California became part of the United States. The book is also a family saga, incorporating several love stories. And it’s a shrill screed attacking the greed and political corruption of the railroad monopolies.

Ruiz de Burton (1832-1895) was born of an aristocratic family in Baja California in the years before the Mexican-American War. After becoming the wife of an American military officer, she traveled widely among the Eastern states as her husband saw active duty with the Union Army during the Civil War.

After her husband’s death in 1869, she returned west to property near San Diego that had been granted to her husband by the government. There, she was engaged for the rest of her life in lawsuits, as Anglo squatters contested ownership of her land. She also began writing fiction and became the first Mexican-American to publish novels in English.

Long-Waterman House, San Diego, 1889

Plot. Much of her own story finds its way into The Squatter and the Don, which is set in the 1870s. The Don of the title is the patriarch of the Alamar family near San Diego and a warmly dignified gentleman. Operating a 47,000-acre cattle ranch that was originally a Spanish land grant, he’s being invaded by squatters.

The squatter of the title is Darrell, who agrees to pay the Don for the land he’s homesteading, but only after suits and countersuits over legal ownership of the rancho have been resolved. His son, Clarence, is a young man already wealthy from lucrative investments.

A natural gentleman in his own right, Clarence also has set his eye on the Don’s youngest daughter, Mercedes. She resists the advances of the handsome American but falls hard for him anyway. The Don encourages the courtship and eventually his wife comes around to the prospect of the young couple’s marriage.

An ugly dispute between Darrell and the Don puts the wedding on hold, and Clarence leaves San Diego while Mercedes is left stricken with anguish. Believing his father has ruined his chances for marriage to Mercedes, he travels to Arizona to visit his gold and silver mines, which are making him a multi-millionaire.

Returning to California after three years, he is happily reunited with Mercedes. With his extensive wealth, he is able buy the now-deceased Don’s rancho and relocate the entire extended family to his home in San Francisco.

Collis Potter Huntington, 1872

More. This synopsis covers about one-fifth of this 400-plus-page novel. There are multiple subplots and a Dickensian cast of characters. Nearly everyone’s fortunes begin well and then gradually deteriorate due to illness, poverty, suicide, disabilities, accident, shootings, bad investments, malice, and bad luck.

A major cause of misfortune is the robber barons Leland Stanford and Collis Potter Huntington. They are two of the Big Bad Four who comprised the Railroad Monopoly in California. Owners of the Central Pacific Railroad, they’re able to prevent the building of a competing railroad that would serve San Diego, thus crushing any promise of economic growth there.

The novel returns again and again to a recital of grievances against Huntington, who actively bribes members of Congress to favor the monopoly. Adding insult to injury, the monopolists also decline to repay Congress for its initial loans, and they refuse to pay federal or state taxes.

The Octopus of the Railroad Monopoly

Villainy. There are small time villains in the novel, the most unsympathetic of them being the squatters who despise the Don as a “greaser” and as a second-class citizen. These squatters are crude men, cowardly, and at least one of them a hopeless alcoholic. One, a virulent democrat, argues that the Don deserves no more than the 160 acres coming to anyone wanting a homestead.

The most despicable villains, however, are Huntington and Stanford. Ruiz de Burton includes pages of documents leveling charges against Huntington for blatant bribery of public officials, influencing legislation, and buying key committee seats. The novel closes with excerpts of correspondence in which he openly discusses his chicanery.

Leland Stanford we get to meet in person, as a delegation comes from San Diego to win his support for their railroad. He scoffs at their philanthropic expectation of fair play. Business is business, he tells them. If it wasn’t me screwing you, he says, it would be somebody else. So don’t ask me to do anything that’s not in my financial best interest.

Mussel Slough Five, defendants in dispute with railroad, 1880

Character. Like many western novels that would follow, Ruiz de Burton makes a strong case for qualities of character that she admires in a man. The Don is clearly the living example of them. He is a natural aristocrat, generous and even-tempered. Though the squatters could easily provoke him to anger, he remains civil and even makes reasonable offers to negotiate with them.

Honest to a fault, he refuses to take payment for a herd of his cattle that is lost in a snowstorm on the way to being delivered to Clarence. It does not matter that Clarence has already bought them and considers himself the owner. As much as the Don needs the money, to take it would be dishonorable, and a man’s honor is worth more than gold.

He loves his wife and, at the age of 50, continues to have a romantic streak in him. When he realizes how much Clarence loves his daughter, he encourages him to court her. “Faint heart never won fair lady,” he says to the young man.

Leland Stanford, 1881

Wrapping up. The problem with this book for modern readers is that it is far too long and repetitive. The diatribes against the squatters and the railroad are rehearsed so often they become tiresome. The many sequences of high melodrama are also heavy going. There are histrionics, sobbing, and all manner of emotional distress for both genders.

It’s a world where a highly distraught young woman is likely to fall unconscious and succumb to a fever that lasts for months. Young men, for their part, fall hopelessly, obsessively, and painfully in love at the first sight of a pretty new girl. And there is far too much talk, talk, talk about all this.

Meanwhile, there are long accounts of the social affairs of elite folks who entertain each other with balls, receptions, musicales, yachting, nights at the opera, and parties. These are not quite digressions but simply long stretches where even the idea of plot simply disappears.

The novel offers not much in the way of good storytelling, but as a document of the times, it’s memorable for being a sad account of a disgraceful period of American history. Maybe the most compelling episode is the meeting that the small delegation from San Diego has with Leland Stanford. Captured in that scene is the altruistic and hopeful dream of democratic America being scoffed at by greed incarnate.

The Squatter and the Don is available at google books, Internet Archive, and for kindle and the nook. Friday’s Forgotten Books is the bright idea of Patti Abbott over at pattinase.

Further reading:
The Mussel Slough Tragedy
Frank Norris, The Octopus (1901)

Image credits:

Wikimedia Commons

The Octopus of the Railroad Monopoly, from The Wasp, August 19, 1882

Coming up: Joel McCrea, Stranger on Horseback (1955)

Comanche Station (1960)

2012-01-03T06:00:00.000-08:00

This is a gem of a 1950s western (released in 1960) and another fine one from the team of Budd Boetticher, Burt Kennedy, and Randolph Scott. It’s a high-stakes and tightly knit story with a handful of well-drawn characters. Shot in CinemaScope in the Alabama Hills of Lone Pine, California, the film is also gloriously handsome.

Plot. Jefferson Cody (Scott) rescues a white woman, Mrs. Lowe (Nancy Gates) who’s been taken captive by Comanches. Arriving at Comanche Station on the stagecoach line to Lordsburg (same destination as the folks in John Ford’s Stagecoach), they find it locked up and vacant. The Comanche are on the warpath and have temporarily put the line out of service.

Soon the two are joined by three more men (Claude Akins, Skip Homeier, Richard Rust). They are being pursued by a large band of Comanche, and there’s a fierce firefight, which the five whites survive without a scratch. When no stage has arrived by the next morning, and the station manager shows up near death with an arrow in his chest, they decide not to wait for the stage and head for Lordsburg on horseback.

The rest of the film is their two-day journey over rocky wastes and through handsome groves of live oaks. The mission is to deliver the woman safely back to her husband, who’s offered a reward of $5,000 for her return. The Comanche are in pursuit, so there’s danger enough from that quarter.

Alabama Hills, Lone Pine, California

But there is some history between Scott and Akins, and the two men do not make easy travel companions. The stakes mount among them as Akins has ideas about taking Mrs. Lowe himself for the reward, maybe enjoying her company for a while before delivery. He may even find it convenient to kill her since the reward is for her return dead or alive.

Meanwhile, the relationship between Scott and Mrs. Lowe continues to shift. At first she regards him as no more than a bounty hunter. Eventually, she comes to respect him as she learns that he has been looking for his own abducted wife for ten years. “You must have loved her very much,” she says.

Along the way, the travelers lose one of Akins’ young companions to another Indian arrow. When his other companion refuses to join him in his treachery, Akins shoots him in the back, and he is dragged to his death by a fleeing horse. Scott finally has to do away with Akins himself, and Mrs. Lowe is brought safely home to the welcoming arms of her son and husband.

Women. During the film, Mrs. Lowe plays several roles in succession. First of all, she’s the rescued woman. We don’t know how she happened to be the victim of Indian abduction, but there’s no doubt that some man or men need to risk their lives to bring her back to the protection of civilization.

Partly because she needs rescuing, she starts out as an object of disappointment and aggravation. “All right, lady, what’s your name?” Scott says not too kindly as they ride off from the Indians. Not a lot of sympathy for a woman who’s been held captive by savages and bought back for a few dollars in dry goods and a rifle. For her part, she assumes the reason for his brusque attitude is that she’s damaged goods.

During the Indian attack, she becomes an object of farce, as Scott tosses her into a water trough. Afterward, her wet and torn dress clinging to her body, she’s transformed into a sex object by the leering Akins and the two young men with him.

When she learns of her husband’s offer of a reward, she assumes Scott is only interested in the money. Abruptly resentful, she brands him a “comanchero” and attempts to recover her lost dignity by refusing to travel with him. She’ll wait at Comanche Station for the next stage.

Alabama Hills, Lone Pine, California (CC) Bobak Ha’Eri

Soon she becomes the imperiled object of Akins’ dark villainy. Also, because she’s a woman, she gets the cooking duties, which then sets her up as an object of sexual harassment. She makes a great cup of coffee, Akins tells her, with a leer that implies he’d like to know what else she’s good at.

Designated caregiver, she tends to Scott when he suffers a knee wound. Unskilled with a gun, and therefore unable to protect herself, she empties a revolver at Akins at close range without hitting him. Scott, the marksman, then takes him down with a single shot.

Finally, she is more wrong than wronged. Mistaken in her judgment about Scott, she comes to know the truth about him and wants to apologize. He is a far better man than she has ever thought. Returned to her husband and young son, she looks with a regretful gaze over her shoulder at the departing Scott.

While Kennedy has written a nicely complex and interesting female character, Mrs. Lowe is also a composite of stereotypes. More often an object than a subject, she is portrayed as vulnerable and copeless outside her domestic and care-giving roles. At best, she is a grace note in the lives of men of true character. Before returning her safely home, Scott thanks her for helping him forget the loss of his own wife for a little while.

Comanche

Indians. The Comanche were a fierce tribe, said to be at war with most other Plains tribes, and least enamored of Texans. Their nomadic range was vast, but the movie has them situated in what I think of as Apache country, in southeastern Arizona.

As for appearance, the movie’s Indians have been given bushy Mohawk haircuts and nothing distinctive to wear. The chief emerges from his tent like a man having stepped from a shower with only time to wrap a towel around him.

Unequipped with firearms, they suffer numerous casualties in an attack against white men with guns. Typical for the time, the camera chooses not to reveal the corpse-strewn field after the battle. Someone simply says, “Bury these Indians,” and the area is cleared between scenes.

Wrapping up. For a western actor, Randolph Scott had a broad range. Here he has a flinty nobility and stoic reserve that seem to suit him well. Discovering that he is a wounded man obsessed with finding an abducted wife, you see the hurt and the courage behind the stern exterior.

Credit goes to Burt Kennedy for adding complexity to his characters. Akins’ villain is nicely ambiguous, as he smiles and laughs easily and almost genuinely. There are hints, but it’s not clear for a long time that he’s been a vicious bastard and still is.

The two young men, Frank and Dobie, are believable trail pals, each alone in the world until they found each other. Kennedy gives the two a long scene of what could be called pillow talk as one unburdens his heart about wanting “to amount to something.” Then after the loss of Frank, Scott invites the tenderhearted Dobie to join him on the trail. “A man gets tired of being all the time alone,” he says.

For a high-tension western, Comanche Station is unusually spare in its use of violence. Fifteen minutes into the film, there’s a two-minute gun battle when the Indians descend on the whites at the station. After that we wait until almost the end before guns are fired again. Of fist fights there are none—only a single punch as Scott knocks Akins down for some loose talk around Mrs. Lowe.

This was Scott’s second to last film, before being called out of retirement in his sixties by Sam Peckinpah for Ride the High Country (1962). And a last word about the cinematography, by Charles Lawton, Jr., who has a long list of credits, including the original 3:10 to Yuma (1957). Filmed often in long shot, this western captures the grand sweep of the great outdoors. Not a single scene takes place indoors. Its characters are sometimes small moving specks against a vast, sometimes forbidding landscape. Perfect for the wide screen.

Definitely one of Boetticher’s best, Comanche Station is currently available at netflix and amazon. Tuesday's Overlooked Films is the much appreciated public service of Todd Mason over at Sweet Freedom.

Further reading:

History of the Comanche

Photo credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don (1885)

Old West glossary, no. 24

2012-01-02T08:05:00.000-08:00

Montana cowboys, c1910

These are from Honoré Willsie Morrow’s novel The Heart of the Desert about the abduction of a white woman by an Indian, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don about the fate of a Spanish land grant rancho in California, and Patience Stapleton’s Babe Murphy, about an independent young woman in Colorado. Once again I struck out a few times. If anybody knows the meaning of “limping piper” or “in the moon,” leave a comment.

basket of chips = a basket made of thin strips of wood interwoven or joined; title of a collection of anecdotes and poems (1888) by noted humorist and poet Joseph Bert Smiley (1864-1903). “My young man carried my carpet bag when I changed cars and saw me aboard all right, as polite as a basket of chips.” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

Horse thief hanged, Oregon, 1900

bludgy = thieving by violence if necessary. “‘I’m liable to follow Indian tradition and take whatever I want, by whatever means!’ ‘My! My!’ said Rhoda, ‘that sounds bludgy.’” Honoré Willsie Morrow, The Heart of the Desert.

calf’s head jelly = head cheese; a meat jelly made with flesh from the head of a calf or pig and often set in aspic. “It is a good thing, I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, a very fortunate thing, that I am so amiable, and Gabriel so good a fellow, or else I would have punched his head into calf’s head-jelly, twice a day, many times.” Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don.

chromo = an unattractive person. “Git onto that old chromo; Beach has got a school marm that will stay this time.” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

Concord wagon = four-wheeled, horse-drawn wagon or coach for carrying one, two or more passengers; made in Concord, New Hampshire. “I brought the Concord wagon for the women folks and the light spring wagon for the boys and Tisha.” Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don.

dogger = a worker performing a menial task. “No wonder nature kicks you out with all manner of illness. You are mere doggers of the machinery.” Honoré Willsie Morrow, The Heart of the Desert.

domino = a large, hooded cloak with a mask covering the eyes, worn at masquerades. “I think the best plan is to wear a domino and mask, as we go in with you ladies, so that you may not be recognized.” Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don.

figure-four trap = a simple deadfall animal trap, with supports arranged in the shape of the number 4. “Instead of shooting the rabbit for supper, I’m going to try a figure-four trap.” Honoré Willsie Morrow, The Heart of the Desert.

Four-in-hand, Thomas Eakins, 1899

four-in-hand = a vehicle drawn by four horses and driven by one person. “Robert Gunther passed by, driving his four-in-hand at a furious speed, with a very handsome girl sitting by his side.” Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don.

frog = the point in a railroad switch where two rails cross. “‘I’ve caught my foot in a switch-frog,’ muttered Kut-le, keeping his hold on Rhoda with one hand while with the other he tugged at his moccasined foot.” Honoré Willsie Morrow, The Heart of the Desert.

horse-hair = a fabric made from fibers taken from the mane or tail of horses; used for upholstery. “My horse-hair trunk was along, too, and when there was time, and it was possible, I got out at stations and peeked in the baggage car to see it wall all right.” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

Page from The New England Primer

John Rogers = so-called “first Protestant martyr,” whose wife and ten children witnessed his burning at the stake, as depicted in the New England Primer (where it is spelled “John Rodgers”). “She was a widow with a John Rodgersy sort of family, nine children like I used to read about in the primer.” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

lancers = a quadrille for eight or sixteen pairs. “Lizzie has been looking for you; she wants you for a partner in the lancers.” Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don.

mare’s nest = an extremely confused, entangled, or disordered situation. “Evidently the solicitor is beating the bush to start some game, and will be satisfied with a ‘mare’s nest,’ if he can only entangle the Attorney General in it.” Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don.

miaul = meow. “He snorts and clucks and growls and snarls. Romeo says he miauls like a disappointed hyena.” Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don.

Miss Nancy = an effeminate man; presumably homosexual. “Parting a name always seemed to me like parting a man’s hair in the middle, and both habits to belong to Miss Nancy’s.” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

Mouchoir

mouchoir = handkerchief. “She had been embroidering a mouchoir case for Clarence that unfortunate afternoon of Darrell’s performance, when she heard loud talking in the piazza.” Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don.

Mrs. Grundy = a narrow-minded, conventional person extremely critical of any breach of propriety. “Mrs. Grundy ascertained who were to be the best-dressed ladies, what their pedigree was, and how their money had been made.” Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don.

murphy = a potato. “Oh, you ain’t up to Western slang, a Murphy then. Really Murphy, slang for potato. I’m of Irish distraction, as Mrs. Finnerty says.” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

P. C. = prominent citizens. “‘Depewted,’ he said, ‘by a number of prominent citizens,’ with the usual meddlesomeness of the P. C. in all communities.” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

pip = ill humor, poor health; a disease of poultry and other birds. “‘You certainly have about as much spunk as a chicken with the pip!’ he said contemptuously.” Honoré Willsie Morrow, The Heart of the Desert.

Sailors at helm, 1888

put on dog = to show off, put on airs. “Don’t put on dog just because you belong to the white race. You’re disreputable, and you know it.” Honoré Willsie Morrow, The Heart of the Desert.

trick at the wheel = time allotted to a sailor on duty at the helm. “I’ve played the baby act on this picnic as much as I propose to. It is my trick at the wheel.” Honoré Willsie Morrow, The Heart of the Desert.

Image credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Budd Boetticher, Comanche Station (1960)

Western writer inspiration, no. 18

2011-12-31T06:00:00.000-08:00

Here is this week's omnibus of #westernwriter inspirations posted each day at twitter [click to enlarge]. If you are on twitter, you can follow me @rdscheer.

Sitka, Alaska, c1888

Prospector Edward Schieffelin, founder of Tombstone, Arizona, c1880

Rogers Pass and Mount Carroll, British Columbia, 1887

Knowles Canyon, Colorado

Charleston, Arizona, 1885

Calgary, Alberta, c1885

Wagon Shop, Broken Bow, Nebraska, 1889

Picture credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Budd Boetticher, Commanche Station (1960)

Photo-finish Friday: out and about

2011-12-30T06:00:00.000-08:00

Here's another in the ongoing series, Murals of Los Angeles County. This celebration of diversity in a city with no ethnic majority can be found at Union Station where commuters (glimpsed at bottom of photo) connect between trains and the many bus and shuttle systems that serve the city.

Photo-finish Friday is the bright idea of Leah Utas over at The Goat's Lunch Pail.

Coming up: Budd Boeetticher, Commanche Station (1960)

Ted Kooser, Lights on a Ground of Darkness

2011-12-29T06:00:00.000-08:00

Given the brief shelf life of books today, a book published in 2005 probably qualifies as “forgotten.” Ted Kooser, despite his credentials, may well be unknown by many here in the blogs. Written by a Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry and former U.S. Poet Laureate, Lights on a Ground of Darkness is a short, tenderly written memoir of the writer’s family.

A book like this, full of family stories, always intrigues me, for I come from a similar ancestry (German Lutheran immigrants) but hardly a single story to commemorate it. There seemed to be a code of silence about the past among my forebears. Or maybe I wasn’t paying attention, which is just as likely.

Kooser’s memoir is structured mostly around his maternal grandfather, a farmer in Iowa, who operated a full-service gas station after his retirement in the Mississippi River town of Guttenberg. He was a man who lived into his 90s despite being a smoker and eating a diet that included sandwiches laced with lard. There’s also Kooser’s disabled uncle, Elvy, born with cerebral palsy and living at home.

Kooser has a poet’s eye for detail, and the stories and vignettes come to life with a vividness that’s sometimes startling. Moving back and forward in time, he anchors the flood of memories to a summer evening in 1949 at his grandfather’s house next to the gas station, when Kooser was ten years old. There family members gather for weekly pinochle.

Instructive for any writer is the way Kooser navigates the waters of emotion and sentiment. The dominance of hard-boiled and noir writing today makes distant company for a book that takes the greater risk of honoring everyday life and taking on themes like loss and the relentless erosion of time. The shadows and darkness in his writing are told of simply and not sensationalized.

Ted Kooser's hometown, Guttenberg, Iowa.

The title of the book originates in a quote from Scots poet Edwin Muir. “Our memories of a place, no matter how fond we were of it, are little more than a confusion of lights on a ground of darkness.” The bitter-sweetness of that observation about the way the past is remembered occurs over and again in this book. It is balanced against a motif of generations of irises, blooming anew each year.

The Dead about an evening gathering in James Joyce’s Dublin (and John Huston's wonderful film adaptation) has a similar ring of poignance. Beneath the everyday surface of lives being lived, there are loss and sadness that are sometimes crushing. Yet people persevere with home-grown humor and a quiet dignity.

It’s the tone that’s missing in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone, where the attitude is more like satire. And it’s what annoys me about that program. Keillor affects a warm regard for small-town midwestern life while making light of it—when he’s not making fun of it.

The achievement of Kooser is that he is able to honor the lives of very ordinary people. They are the ones left behind by the flight of their more gifted, moneyed, intelligent schoolmates to college and the City—the audiences who laugh knowingly at Prairie Home Companion. Not to mention the New Yorker readers who are amused by Roz Chast’s cartoons.

Kooser tells of their lives with an honesty that makes readers realize they are no different. Illness and age will find them, dreams will gather dust, and one day they will be no more. Only as memories of those who outlive them, for a while, and then not at all.

Lights on a Ground of Darkness is currently available at amazon (paper and kindle), AbeBooks, and alibris. Friday’s Forgotten Books is the bright idea of Patti Abbott over at pattinase. Thanks to my wife for putting this one under the tree for me this Christmas.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Maria Ampara Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don (1885)

BITS top 10 westerns in 2011

2011-12-28T06:00:00.000-08:00

I was over-energized posting top-ten lists last year, and I’m keeping it simple in 2011. Below are the ten western films I most enjoyed viewing and reviewing during the past year. Click each title for a link back to the review.

True Grit (2010)

The Return of Frank James (1940)

Will Penny (1968)

Valdez is Coming (1971)

The Westerner (1940)

Rio Bravo (1959)

The Man From Laramie (1955)

The Quick and the Dead (1987)

Meek’s Cutoff (2011)

Last Stand at Saber River (1997)

Coming up: Ted Kooser, Lights on a Ground of Darkness

Tom Mix, Sky High (1922)

2011-12-27T06:00:00.000-08:00

What a thrill this must have been for moviegoers in the early 1920s. Mix and director Lynn Reynolds go out for high adventure in the most spectacular canyon of all, Grand Canyon. Not only is there plenty of action up and down the canyon walls and in the water, but an airplane is worked into the story, with breathtaking aerial footage.

Plot. The situation in the story is unfortunately still topical 90 years later. Tom is a Deputy Inspector of Immigration, watching the US-Mexico border for illegal entry. This time around, it’s Chinese sneaking in, and we see him detaining a car full of passengers who turn out to be Chinese men dressed in women’s clothing. He ties a rope to the car and takes them into custody. All in a day’s work.

Next we learn that a couple of crooks have brought in 200 “chop suey eating Chinamen” along with a fortune in smuggled jewels and laces (yes, laces). Where they cross the border is not clear, but for unknown reasons they’re holed up in a camp at the bottom of Grand Canyon.

Tom gets an assignment to infiltrate the operation and learn who the kingpins are. There’s not much of a mystery to be solved. Tom finds out what he needs to know in short order and there’s only the matter of authorities to be notified and arrests to be made.

Tom Mix and Eva Novak

Also smuggled into the story is a romantic interest for Tom. A young woman, Estelle (Eva Novak), recently graduated from a “fashionable seminary” in Chicago, arrives at the Grand Canyon to summer with her guardian. Little does she know that her guardian is one of the alien smugglers. Affronted by the fresh advances of a male companion, she ventures into the Canyon alone and gets lost.

On an unofficial walkabout from the camp, Tom chances to meet her just as she falls from a ledge into enough water to get her soaked to the skin. He carries her, unconscious, to a ledge in the canyon wall where he provides her with blankets, a change of clothes, and some food to keep soul and body together. They picnic on crackers and sardines before turning in for the night.

Tom’s absence from the camp is noted, and he and Estelle are discovered by two of the villains. Tom is captured, fighting about 15 men until he's tied up and told that he can look forward to being drowned in the Colorado River. But he escapes, cutting his ropes with the sharp edge of a sardine can.

Mix in flight

The rest of the film is a series of chases on foot and horseback, fistfights, and not a few daring stunts. Tom (or his stunt man) scales up and rappels down canyon walls like Spiderman. The most spectacular stunt involves climbing down a rope and hanging suspended from under a biplane, finally dropping with a splash into the river.

Tom. As in Just Tony (reviewed here last week), Tom lights up the screen with his presence. Unlike the lugubrious William S. Hart, Tom is eager, athletic, and quick with a smile. Not much in the way of a ladies man, he can get playful when a woman is around. He hangs a blanket for Estelle to step behind while she changes clothes, and though his back is turned you know he’s aware of her draping over it the garments she’s taking off.

Eva Novak, 1924

Far more respectful and well mannered than the young cad who tries to steal a kiss from her, Tom waits until the last minute of the film to reveal his feelings. When her guardian asks Tom to look after her while he does time in federal prison, Tom says he’d happily look after her for the rest of her life! Then he joins her at the edge of a cliff and politely kisses her before the fade to black.

Just 50 minutes long, Sky High was one of the six to nine Tom Mix feature-length films produced every year during the 1920s until the introduction of sound. It is currently available and streamable at amazon. Tuesday’s Overlooked Movies is the much appreciated enterprise of Todd Mason over at Sweet Freedom.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Ted Kooser, Lights on a Ground of Darkness

Progress report

2011-12-26T06:00:00.000-08:00

Owen Wister

Have you ever started out on a project that just kept growing? A year and a half ago I got the idea I’d like to read the novels of the writers who helped invent the western. There was Owen Wister and Zane Grey, and a gap of about a decade between them. I figured there was maybe a dozen writers at the time trying their hand at cowboy westerns. It would not be a big job.

Acquiring a few reference books, like Tuska and Piekarski’s Encyclopedia of Frontier and Western Fiction and Geoff Sadler’s Twentieth-Century Western Writers, I found there were a good deal more than a dozen. The notion of a “cowboy western” also enlarged until I was considering any fiction set in the West. Western writers of the time were also telling exciting stories about mining, railroading, and engineering projects. Cowboys sometimes figured in them; sometimes not. So the notion of a “cowboy western” got fuzzy and then kind of leaked away.

The period I was looking in expanded, too. There were more western writers than I expected to find who were publishing before Wister. If you think about it, there were “westerns” to be read from almost the beginning of American fiction. From the days of the first white settlements, there was always a “West” out there beyond civilization. I arbitrarily chose to draw the line at 1880.

At the other end of the period, I came to see WWI as an important watershed and chose to stop with 1915. That was also the first year after The Virginian that a western novel reached the annual top-ten best seller list at Publisher’s Weekly. It was Zane Grey’s The Lone Star Ranger. (His The U.P. Trail would go to no. 1 in 1918.)

What made the project doable at all was the purchase of a nook and the availability at Barnes & Noble of nearly every book I was looking for at .99 or free. So far, I have read the first novels or story collections of 48 writers, starting with Mary Hallock Foote’s The Led-Horse Claim (1883) and ending with George W. Ogden’s The Long Fight (1915). Meanwhile, my TBR pile of early westerns has kept growing.

The light was at the end of the tunnel a week ago until I got my hands on a copy of Nina Baym’s Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927. It’s an old story, and we know how male writers took over the genre of western writing. Women, it turns out, were also publishing volumes of fiction about the West. I’d found a few of them before now: B. M. Bower, Mary Austin, Kate Boyles, and Carol Lockhart. Now I’ve got a bunch more. Which is a lot of reading, but definitely cool. I like the idea of a more balanced picture.

So I am now miles away from the book I’ve been putting together about these writers. There’ll be about 75 of them when I’m finished. Maybe a year from now, you’ll hear me shout on the western wind, “I’m done!” In the meantime, I’m enjoying this project even more now than before, and I continue to believe I’ll be pleased with the end result and that readers and writers of westerns will find it fun and informative reading.

I’d be interested in hearing stories by anybody else who's had similar experiences.

Photo credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Tom Mix, Sky High (1922)

Photo essay: Los Angeles Public Library

2011-12-25T06:00:00.000-08:00

On this Christmas Day, I'm devoting the space here to my favorite place in all of LA. I've posted some pictures here before. Last week, I had a couple hours to explore further, and in the spirit of the season, I'm sharing these cell phone pics with you. Happy holidays, one and all.

View from the top of the atriium. Art hanging from the ceiling.

About 1,800 books in the western section. Here's Elmer Kelton.

Wall murals with romanticized versions of California history.

More wall murals

Christmas tree and glossy marble floor.

Chandelier with lighted globe in the center; amazing ceiling.

Annenberg Gallery with Hollywood memorabilia.

Annenberg Gallery, movie poster.

Movies and music; big as Blockbuster inside.

Exhibit of old maps of Los Angeles

Adult Literacy Center

Coming up: Tom Mix, Sky High (1922)

Western writer inspiration, no. 17

2011-12-24T06:08:00.000-08:00

Here is this week's omnibus of #westernwriter inspirations posted each day at twitter [click to enlarge]. If you are on twitter, you can follow me @rdscheer.

Territorial University at Norman, Oklahoma Territory, c1897-98

Sioux encampment, Pine Ridge, South Dakota, November 1890

Teacher and children, sod schoolhouse, Woods Co., Oklahoma Territory, c1895

Steamer Bessie, Rio Grande River, Fort Ringgold, Texas, c1890

Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses, Oglala Sioux, Pine Ridge, South Dakota, 1891

Wooden jail house, Wyoming Territory, 1893

Broadway Street, Round Pond, OkIahoma Territory, 1894

Picture credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Photo essay: Los Angeles Public Library

Photo-finish Friday: out and about

2011-12-23T06:00:00.000-08:00

Here’s another in the series “Wall Murals of LA County.” This one can be found in downtown LA on Grand Avenue at Fifth on the side of the AT&T Building. A full view of it is blocked by its neighbor, The Gas Company. Walk along Fifth to Olive Street, and you can see the rest of it (below):

Photo-finish Friday is the bright idea of Leah Utas over at The Goat’s Lunch Pail.

http://thegoatslunchpail.blogspot.com

Coming up: Tom Mix, Sky High (1922)

Kent Meyers, The Work of Wolves

2011-12-22T06:00:00.000-08:00

A slender plot-line for its 400+ pages, this novel set in the reservation and ranchland of central South Dakota glows with intensity at each turn. While your desire to know what happens next presses you onward, you pause along with the author to reflect on the thoughts and feelings of the characters who are pulled into the flow of events that begins with the purchase of a horse and leads inevitably to the burning of a house.

There are humor, suspense, family drama, surprises, ironies of all kinds, a smoldering romance, conflicts, animosity, suspense, farce, triumphs and sorrows in Meyers' novel. And all is woven around a continuing meditation on moral complexity and finally the great difficulty of doing the right thing when there are deep emotions, conflicting points of view, and only degrees of violence and loss to choose from.

The four young men at the center of this story, two Indians, a cowboy, and a German exchange student, each bears a legacy of history that pulls them together in the single effort to rescue three horses. Meyers makes them come to life vividly through action, thought, and dialogue. Around them is another dozen or so characters, just as carefully drawn and revealed through illuminating flashes of incident. And as in the author's other work (Light in the Crossing, The River Warren), there is the continuing presence of the landscape and the seasons, as summer turns to autumn and snow-driven winter.

South Dakota, Needles Highway overlook (CC) Vladsinger

Especially interesting is the characterization of the young cowboy, whose ancestry in American literature dates back to Owen Wister's Virginian. Here is that same set of values, courage, pure-heartedness, and self-containment, 100 years later, set in conflict with a cunning villain. It is moving to learn what has become of him.

The Work of Wolves is currently available at amazon, Abebooks, Alibris, and for kindle and the nook. Friday’s Forgotten Books is the bright idea of Patti Abbott over at pattinase.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Tom Mix, Sky High (1922)

Photo essay: Union Station, LA

2011-12-21T06:00:00.000-08:00

My commute twice a week takes me through this car-dependent Los Angeles landmark, Union Station. It’s a cheerful, benign place compared to the fierce charm of Grand Central Station in New York, which I used to commute through twice a day 25 years ago.

Built in the 1930s, it had a checkered past even before construction began. Voters narrowly passed a measure to level the existing Chinatown to make way for it. Today there’s a pleasant tranquility about the place, even when it’s busy. Maybe except for the man near me in the waiting room whose sandwich was stolen the day I took these photos.

Waiting room

Colored marble main aisle in the Waiting Room

Among several food vendors, See's Candies

Roomy, leather cushioned seating in the Waiting Room

Patio and garden area with fountain, just outside

Outdoor cafe with colorful tile bench seating

Waiting Room with entrance to trains, decorated for Christmas

Gardens with birds of paradise on the other side of the station

Travelers shop with hanging monkey dolls

Coming up: Kent Meyers, The Work of Wolves

Tom Mix, Just Tony (1922)

2011-12-20T06:00:00.000-08:00

Appearing in over 300 movies during his career in Hollywood, Tom Mix made this film in honor of his horse Tony. In its 58 minutes, the film tells of a wild mustang also named Tony who has lived with his band of horses in the Nevada deserts. There he is observed by a cowboy from Utah, Jim Perris (Tom Mix), who hopes one day to be Tony’s owner and "pal."

Captured by a man who mistreats him, Tony is saved from further harm by Jim, who has come to town for a rodeo. His giving the horse-abuser a thorough pounding in the dusty corral is appreciated by an observer, the pretty Marianne, recently returned from an Eastern college.

Marianne’s father owns a horse ranch, whose stock is being driven off by his shady foreman. Jim helps Marianne buy four new mares by preventing Tony from losing a race at the rodeo, and Tony eventually escapes back to the desert. As the foreman and his cowboys go after the wild horses with guns, Tony retaliates by stealing away the four new mares.

Marianne hires Jim to capture Tony, promising the horse to him if he’s successful. The foreman tries to interfere, but Jim is able to catch Tony in a trap. He ropes and rides him, bucking bronco style, until Tony finally throws him, knocking the cowboy unconscious. Remembering how Jim had saved him once before, Tony takes an interest in the man's welfare and follows him back to his cabin.

In an exciting finish, as Marianne and Jim are dodging bullets while being pursued by the ranch hands, Tony comes to the couple's rescue. Together they ride on his back to safety at the ranch. There Jim settles an old matter with her father and instead of returning to the desert to roam free, Tony decides to stay with Jim.

Tom Mix, 1919

Just Tony was adapted from the novel Alcatraz by Max Brand, which had appeared as a five-part serial the same year in Country Gentleman. The film was shot at Lone Pine in the Sierras of central California.

Pitched to a young audience, the movie is wonderfully unembarrassed in its sentiments. Talking to Marianne, Jim professes his love for Tony and his hope that Tony will some day love him. Rescued from abuse, Tony receives from Jim’s gentle hand the “first caress” he has ever known.

Tony is indeed a wonder horse, chewing through ropes, opening gates, and taking down fences. If we can believe the inter titles, he even has human thoughts. Concerned for Jim’s welfare when he’s waylaid by three bad men, he sees Marianne arriving and thinks, “A woman. More trouble.”

Mix is a warm, athletic presence before the camera. In his gigantic hat, wide leather chaps, and handsome shirts, he comes close at times to disappearing inside his outfit. Apparently doing at least some of his own stunts, he leaps over fences, rolls down a steep sandy bank, and rides the sunfishing Tony until he is thrown off.

The photography is often scenic, with snow-capped mountains in the background as horses and riders race across sagebrush flats, deserts, and wide rivers. Scenes from a rodeo include a parade, rough stock events, and a thrilling horse race.

Director and scenarist Lynn Reynolds is credited with 81 films during a Hollywood career cut short in 1927, when he took his own life during a party being held in his honor. Included in his credits are numerous westerns, including film adaptations of Henry H. Knibbs’ Overland Red (1920), Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1925), and B. M. Bower’s Chip of the Flying U (1926).

Just Tony is currently available and streamable at amazon. Tuesday’s Overlooked Movies is the much appreciated enterprise of Todd Mason over at Sweet Freedom.

Sources:

imdb.com

maxbrandonline.com

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Kent Meyers, The Work of Wolves

Matthew Pizzolato, The Wanted Man

2011-12-19T05:37:00.000-08:00

Western writer Matt Pizzolato has his storytelling down to a fine art. When he credits Louis L’Amour for what he knows about writing, you can believe him. His stories are told with that same clean, crystal-clear style. Not a word is wasted.

They also take place in a world akin to L’Amour’s. It’s a mythical West of dusty trails and frontier settlements, where characters often find themselves in a situation of kill or be killed. Someone usually dies in a Pizzolato story, and for good reason. It could even happen on the first page.

It’s a rough and tumble West of lawmen, outlaws, prostitutes, and anyone else you can think of who’s up to no good. That would include men who abuse women, a theme that appears in two of the stories in this collection.

As for more sanguine meetings of the genders, some of the stories generate a good deal of sexual steam. His cocksure outlaw Wesley Quaid is particularly irresistible. A lady contract killer in “In Plain Sight” decides he’s more fun alive than dead.

Pizzolato has a particular gift for dialogue that he got from somewhere (not L’Amour). I’m sure he came by it honestly, but there’s a bit of Elmore Leonard in the way his conversations turn into wry repartee. Even while he puts his characters into high stakes situations, they can’t resist the urge for a snappy comeback.

The mood of these stories ranges from humorous yarn spinning to the supernatural, and violence is the constant theme. You can be sure as you start into one that there will be blood. The Wanted Man is currently available for kindle.

Coming up: Tom Mix, Just Tony (1922)

Western writer inspiration, no. 16

2011-12-17T06:00:00.000-08:00

Here is this week's omnibus of #westernwriter inspirations posted each day at twitter [click to enlarge]. If you are on twitter, you can follow me @rdscheer.

J. M. Hall & Co. Store, Tulsa, Indian Territory (Oklahoma), 1890

Oklahoma City, Main and Broadway, Harper's Weekly, April 1892

Railway and wooded hills, Wyoming, John C. H. Grabill, 1890

Band of Sioux Indians, Cheyenne River, South Dakota, August 1890

Laredo, Texas, 1892

Oklahoma land rush, September 16, 1893

Anglers, Yellowstone Park, Wyoming, 1897

Photo credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Tom Mix, Just Tony (1922)

Photo-finish Friday: out and about

2011-12-16T06:00:00.000-08:00

Here's another in the on-going series of wall murals. This pic was taken from a window of the Metrolink train from Riverside to Union Station in LA. It's one of a series at the Montebello station, placed at intervals along the side of the tracks. Somewhat faded, they may date back a few years.

This one represents the valley as it must have looked 75 or more years ago. There seem to be irrigated fields of maybe strawberries or some other vegetables. Beyond are low hills with oil derricks, and beyond that the mountain skyline. Looking over the fence, you can see what's become of all that today.

Photo-finish Friday is the bright idea of Leah Utas over at The Goat's Lunch Pail.

Coming up: Western writer inspiration, no. 16

Honoré Willsie Morrow, The Heart of the Desert (1913)

2011-12-15T06:00:00.000-08:00

Georgia O’Keefe didn’t find the Southwest until more than a decade later, but it’s hard not to think of her in this story of a woman who undergoes physical and spiritual rebirth in the deserts of New Mexico. Rhoda Tuttle begins this story of romantic adventure as a severely neurasthenic young woman from the East, convinced that she is about to die.

Visiting friends at a desert reclamation project, she is courted by two suitors. Both of them are refined, gentlemanly products of an Eastern education, who slip into white flannels as the occasion calls for them. One, John DeWitt, is a white man of good breeding. The other is an Apache Indian, who has adopted an Anglo name, Charley Cartwell.

Rhoda, when she is not too dispirited to object, dismisses the solicitous attentions of both men. DeWitt wants her to marry him, but she does not want to burden him with her sick self and, she believes, imminent death. Charley, whose Indian name is Kut-le, triggers mixed feelings in her. Handsome, well polished, and courteous enough, he makes her uneasy.

And well he should. He is an Indian inside his khakis, and a thousand years of white civilization separate the two of them. Though he is trained as an engineer and has plans for study abroad at the Sorbonne, he is little more to her than a dressed-up savage. When he says he loves her and proposes marriage, flags go down all over the field.

Rhoda and Kut-le

Plot. Rejected by Rhoda, Kut-le calmly and coldly cuts to the chase. He changes into his Indian garb, which leaves his broad shoulders and handsome body next to naked, and he kidnaps her. For the reader ready for a no-holds-barred romance, this has to be a thrilling development. For Rhoda it’s mortifying and horrifying.

Tied to her horse, she undergoes all manner of agonies as Kut-le spirits her off into the desert, traveling by night in the company of three other Indians. One of them, a squaw named Molly, ministers to the angry, humiliated, and terrified Rhoda.

Meanwhile, a search party follows in pursuit, comprised of DeWitt and three other men. An army of cowboys at a nearby ranch combs the desert for Kut-le and Rhoda. The declared intention of everyone is to shoot the Indian on sight or string him up. DeWitt, intent on revenge, wants that honor for himself and says he’s grateful to live where “lynch law” would exonerate him in the eyes of any jury.

Kut-le, nonetheless, eludes capture, and weeks pass as they live off the land. The strenuous cross-country travel first worsens Rhoda’s health and then makes her stronger. Resting at a pueblo, she discovers that she’s come to love the desert. Contemplating its shifting colors and moods, she senses something of a mystery much larger than civilization itself. Though she’s never had to do a lick of work in the past, she volunteers to pitch in with the camp chores and learns to eat roasted desert mice.

In time, she begins to experience a kind of “Stockholm effect.” She regains some of her old respect for Kut-le, who has never been more than firm and friendly with her—a complete gentleman in all things, if you don’t count abduction. She even comes to admit her love for him. But marriage would mean crossing the “race barrier,” and that she doesn’t have the chops for. True love, he argues, overcomes all obstacles. She isn’t convinced.

She’s rescued, recaptured again, and finally set free. But when the search party finds Kut-le, she defends him and, to the amazement of all, confesses her undying love for him. Discovering that Kut-le would rather die than live without her, she agrees to marry him. DeWitt realizes he can’t win and gives up his desire for revenge. The couple is married at a conveniently located desert mission, and they ride off into the sunset.

Mesilla Valley Desert, New Mexico (CC) Brian Stansberry

Race. Few if any early western novels tackle the subject of race and race relations so directly as this one. Frederic Remington’s John Ermine of the Yellowstone (1902) ventures into this territory but with unhappy results. His white man raised by Indians makes a similar play for the pretty daughter of an Army officer, but all the cards are stacked against them, even though there’s no racial divide to keep them apart.

Morrow has stacked them another way, making her male lead an Indian educated by whites. Gifted with superior intelligence, he exhibits mastery of both worlds, Indian and white. Rhoda, meanwhile, is beautiful and intelligent, capable of flourishing in the right conditions.

She has courage, strength of character, and the ability to think outside the box she’s been confined to by her “civilized” upbringing. Consider the strait-laced, rigidly constrained social world of Edith Wharton’s women by comparison. The result for Morrow is an interesting, though speculative, journey of what would later be called self-realization.

Her desert experience would have been lost on the shallow, empty-headed girl in Remington’s novel. His story is one of tragedy, its characters the victims of class and cultural differences. Morrow adds racial difference and writes a romance that is also a novel of ideas. Challenging the sexual fears that underlie racial prejudice, it surely must have been regarded by many readers as scandalous.

Sandstone cliffs, New Mexico

Wrapping up. Is it a western? While focusing on a love that hardly dared speak its name in 1913, its story is certainly set in the West, and its desert setting plays a major role in the action. Far from the ill effects of city living, it offers healing and rebirth for people enervated by civilization and its discontents.

Teddy Roosevelt, we know, was a big advocate of the strenuous life offered by the West, to toughen both body and spirit. Zane Grey’s first novel, with nearly the same name as Morrow’s, Heritage of the Desert (1910), maps out a similar course of therapy for its sickly protagonist. Both novels involve perilous treks across desert wastes, as do Peter B. Kyne’s The Three Godfathers (1913) and Harold Bell Wright’s The Winning of Barbara Worth (1911).

So Morrow’s story figures into the East vs. West theme to be found in most early western novels, with an emphasis on the West’s health benefits. It certainly goes a big step farther by throwing off social and cultural restraints entirely to find spiritual health in passionate interracial love.

Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico (CC) Daniel Mayer

Iowa-born, Morrow studied history at the University of Wisconsin and married twice, the second time to publisher William Morrow. Her books include a three-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln. The Heart of the Desert is currently available at google books, Internet Archive, kindle, and the nook. Friday’s Forgotten Books is the bright idea of Patti Abbott over at pattinase.

Further reading: Short bio of Morrow as a “Famous Iowan”

Image credits:

Illustration from first edition, W. Herbert Dunton

Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Tom Mix, Just Tony (1922)

Heath Lowrance, Miles to Little Ridge

2011-12-14T05:00:00.000-08:00

Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles belong to us all by now, which is how fast things happen in the new Old West. Already a franchise, and none to soon for Edward Grainger fans, this pair of U.S. Marshals portrays a timely style of frontier justice. And hats off to Heath Lowrance for contributing to their unfolding stories with such heartfelt energy.

Hard-boiled crime fiction has been well suited for a certain vision of moral ambiguity and an unreliable criminal justice system. The western, with its Code of the West, has been visiting that same lawless territory since before Owen Wister. The two genres, as they do here, can blend seamlessly.

Gideon Miles, as most of us know by now, is a black man with arguably a white man’s job. In the world of the whites-only western, colored folks if they appear at all were once referred to routinely with the n-word. While a polarized nation went to bloody war over their slavery, they all but disappeared from the mythology of the West.

Emancipated though they may have been in America, they were still regarded as an inferior race, along with Indians, Asians, and so-called “half-breeds.” A long-active racial hysteria intensified in the country after the Civil War, taking legal form in laws against so-called “miscegenation” and enforcing segregation.

There were regiments of black “buffalo soldiers” all of them with white officers. And there were homesteading settlements of freed slaves to be found on the plains of Kansas and Nebraska. Historical research has found that blacks had a visible presence in nearly all walks of life, including cowboying, all over the West. Reading most western fiction, back to the turn of the last century, you would not know it.

Bass Reeves

So here we have something of a compensation for that oversight in a historical anomaly that only fiction can provide—a black U.S. Marshal. True enough, his character is based on an actual historical anomaly, Bass Reeves, who provided federal law enforcement in Indian Territory, until it became the state of Oklahoma and he was put out of a job. But there was no Gideon Miles on the payroll for the feds in the Wyoming and Montana of 1885.

So Edward Grainger has had to invent one. Thus there are the particular pleasures to be had in a Gideon Miles story. Miles embodies the fierce independence celebrated in the western hero who stands up not only to criminals (“murderous skunks” as a Louis L’Amour character calls them). He must remain untouched by undisguised racial prejudice, and the color of his skin means he can trust no one—not even another law officer. Add to that another complication: as an armed lawman, he can fire only when fired upon.

Miles is a perfect hero for certain readers who have always been drawn to the western. There they can find the sense of isolation and vulnerability that comes with realizing the shortcomings of a flawed or inadequate criminal justice system. Gun law, as practiced in the Old West, has both a practical and romantic appeal for these readers.

At a time of political polarization evident in every sorry report of partisan wrangling from Washington, it’s not surprising that a Gideon Miles or Cash Laramie should emerge in the imagination of readers impatient with the nation’s unmet need for social justice. While Miles, despite all the odds, represents respect for the letter of the law, Cash is a kind of “rogue cop,” serving and protecting the marginalized with his own brand of justice.

Miles to Little Ridge articulates all this very nicely. Suspend your disbelief about black U.S. marshals on the frontier, and Heath Lowrance takes you on a journey that honors what you surely care about—eliminating hardened criminals and upholding the law, without making a single compromise.

Not only that, for any reader who ever feels alone, misunderstood, and unappreciated, Miles represents the saving importance of personal integrity. That may be a cold comfort, but it is a value that has been celebrated by the western since the beginning. To the extent that we can learn such a thing from fiction, it’s here to be learned and learned again.

Miles to Little Ridge is currently available for kindle.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Honoré Willsie Morrow, The Heart of the Desert (1913)

High Plains Drifter (1973)

2011-12-13T06:00:00.000-08:00

This Clint Eastwood classic was his second film as a director (following Play Misty For Me) and seems much influenced by the Euro westerns he made with Sergio Leone. Stripped of naturalistic trappings, it is set in a raw, isolated mining town called Lago on the shores of a lake.

Unlike the processed western mythology of 1950s Hollywood and the often bland family fare of network TV, this film revels in its MPAA-rated sex and violence. Stylized and amped up, the action is of a piece with Eastwood’s trademark squint, cheroot, flat-brimmed hat, and unshaven grimace.

The contrived plot has a dream logic that makes sense only if you accept the premise. The townsfolk are so fearfully desperate that they will give a nameless gunman and rapist anything he wants to protect them from three bad men being released from prison.

Helping himself to whatever catches his eye in the stores of the town’s few merchants, including some dynamite, he orders up drinks for everybody at the saloon. There he gives the sheriff’s badge and the mayor’s bowler hat to a little person who’s obviously been kicked around for a long time by just about everybody in town.

In a disturbingly graphic flashback, we see the same Eastwood being whipped to death by three badmen, while the townspeople look on. A former marshal, his body is buried in the local cemetery. You puzzle over how no one would notice that the stranger they've hired looks like the same man. Eventually you begin to understand that something spooky is going on. Eastwood’s character is both buried in the graveyard and walking the streets, an avenging ghost.

Vengeance may be the Lord’s, but Eastwood does plenty of damage before he’s done. And he rides off into the wavery distance in the last shot, just as he appeared magically out of it in the first.

Lake Mono, California

Clint Eastwood went on to make more naturalistic westerns, which I prefer to this supernatural one. But for vicarious sex and violence, this one is hard to beat. There are many unusual effects of note, like Eastwood’s long, long entry through town on horseback, without a single sound except the plodding hoofbeats on the dusty street. The music track is also spare and appropriately eerie.

The screenplay was by Ernest Tidyman, newly established as a Hollywood writer with scripts for Shaft (1971) and The French Connection (1971). The film was shot at Mono Lake in the Sierras of Central California.

High Plains Drifter is currently available at netflix and amazon. Tuesday’s Overlooked Films is an enterprise of Todd Mason over at Sweet Freedom.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Heath Lowrance, Miles to Little Ridge

Louis L'Amour, The Quick and the Dead (1973)

2011-12-12T07:00:00.000-08:00

1973 edition

A book is a product of both the writer who wrote it and the time when it was written. L’Amour was at a mid-point of his long career when The Quick and the Dead saw print. Vietnam was still fresh in people’s minds, and America was impeaching a president. The past decade had seen civil disorder and the assassinations of four prominent Americans.

It was an age of anxiety, and this novel shows it. Fear is there to be felt from the opening pages. In a retelling of the American story of pioneers venturing onto the frontier to settle, it concentrates on their vulnerability. Not to Indians, bad weather, misfortune, or open-range cattlemen. But to murderous outlaws.

Plot. The McKaskels, Duncan and Susannah, are by late 20th-century standards a typical nuclear family. Educated and used to the comforts and the law and order of civilization back East, they have a dream of starting a new life out West. They have one son, a young teenager, and a lot of belongings. Their covered wagon is a kind of Bekins van, stuffed to the ceiling, pulled by four mules, with two fine horses in tow.

Like a modern-day family, they are confidently making this journey alone. They’re part of no wagon train of fellow emigrants. They’re off-road, following no trail, somewhere on the high plains of Colorado—and with no particular destination.

By chance, they encounter a gang of men intent on doing them harm. At the same moment, they are befriended by a drifter, Con Vallian, who becomes their protector. He knows the frontier, Indians, and bad men. He is also very good with a gun.

The rest of the novel concerns the gang’s long pursuit of the family and, with Vallian’s help, the one by one demise of the gang’s most dangerous and loathsome members. It’s like a frontier retelling of the Vietnam War, as a platoon far from base camp is stalked by a vicious armed enemy—but with a happier ending.

HBO tie-in, 1987

Hawks vs doves. The argument of the novel is a hawkish one. The non-violent, gentlemanly manner of McKaskel is a product of book learning and shown to be useless in a lawless environment. Out here it’s kill or be killed. A man unable to defend himself will have everything taken away from him, property, wife, and finally his own life.

It’s probably too much to characterize Con Vallian as a kind of Green Beret. But his survival skills are well developed; so are his abilities as a tracker, gunman, and defensive strategist. He knows and understands the wild, its wild animals, wild Indians, and wild men.

Through him, L’Amour amplifies the perils of being on the frontier. He writes:

These western lands brought death suddenly, without warning, and in a hundred ways. It had a way of exploding into violent action leaving a man broken and bleeding, far from any help. Many a father or son rode away never to return, many a lone hunter left coffee on the fire to picket a horse or fetch a bucket of water, and that was the end of him. Sometimes his bones were found. Often enough not even that.

As a scout Vallian is often on recon. He pays close attention to the lay of the land, calculating the relative advantages for attack and retreat. There are scenes of hand-to-hand combat, and when guns are drawn and fired, and bullets fell a man, we are told their points of entry. In the final chapters of the novel, Vallian even refers to the impending confrontation with the gang as “war.”

Vallian. In a word, the man is intimidating. Unwavering in his self-discipline and self-reliance, his entire focus is on self-preservation. He admires the Indians, who are loyal to no one and have no ties. Guns, L’Amour tells us, are a natural extension of him.

Part of the intimidation is that Vallian is a man of mystery. We learn nothing about his past. Even his name is ambiguous, a combination of “valiant” and “villain.” (There’s also Liberty Valance, which I’ll come back to later.) And while Con might be short for Conrad, it’s also the beginning of words like “convict,” “contrary,” and “contempt.”

Boxed set, 1974

When the story follows him, there is only his moment-to-moment experience of his life. Ever on guard and alert to the slightest sign of danger, he lives fully in the present. He seems unable to understand his own motivation for offering a helping hand to the McKaskels, except that Duncan is an educated gentleman and Susannah is attractive and a good cook. He would take her for himself if he could, and he says so.

He’s also not quite invincible. Badly shot in an exchange of gunfire, he allows himself to be nursed back to health by a band of Indians. The one man in the story able to win his respect as an equal is another Indian, known only as “the Huron,” who tries twice to kill him and is the only member of the gang to survive.

Rough and unsentimental, Vallian is also a man of sharp intelligence. This is the one thing that separates him from the real villains of the story. They are grossly stupid; he is not. Still, though he may well have read his Shakespeare at some point in the past, he’d never let you know it. His wisdom is all frontier realpolitik. “You’ve got to fight for most of the things worth havin’,” he’s likely to say. And don’t expect a quote from Coriolanus.

L’Amour. Written 70 years after The Virginian, this is a very different kind of western from Owen Wister. For one thing it’s only a fraction of the length. Instead of Wister’s numerous characters and multiple situations, L’Amour has only a dozen characters with speaking roles and a single situation.

Wister’s story covers a number of years; L’Amour’s is only a matter of weeks. Wister’s tone ranges variously from comedy and romance to melodrama and suspense. L’Amour maintains a single anxious tone of urgency. Five men die in The Virginian; eight are killed in L’Amour.

Vallian is the most fully developed character in the novel. The others are pretty much stock characters—the educated gentleman, his pretty wife, their son. The villains are hardly distinguishable from one another. The Huron stands out from them, but as another stock character, the inscrutable Indian.

The sexual undertone of the story also darkens it by comparison with Wister. Trampas utters a single disrespectful comment about the schoolmarm, and the Virginian sets him straight. But L’Amour makes a continuing unpleasant refrain of one villain’s lascivious remarks about Susannah and his undisguised lust. The effect is to amp up the tension and intensify her husband’s and her vulnerability.

1982 edition

Written by an accomplished storyteller, the novel is surprising for its occasional lapses. A saddle mysteriously appears on a stolen horse early in the book. The McKaskels cross several creeks that they seem to know by name, though it is uncharted land. The villains account for the apparent weight of their wagon by believing it is loaded with gold—which makes no sense. Vallian even knows of their mistaken belief, but there's no way that he could. Later, Duncan is badly hurt when thrown from his horse, but his injuries are quickly forgotten and never mentioned again.

Wrapping up. I read this novel because I’d recently seen the HBO adaptation with Sam Elliott (reviewed here). The screen version streamlines the story neatly and actually makes the book seem long-winded by comparison, short as it is. Many of the same themes are there, and thanks to the performances, the characters are more fully developed.

The contrast with the early western novel is considerable. L’Amour’s strips his story down to fewer elements, which are then intensified. The lack of historical context allows a reader to read it as a kind of parable about the modern world. Its moral is that we are each left to face life’s perils alone, and the best strategy for protection is to be watchful at all times and well armed.

Compared to the heroes of early westerns, Con Vallian is a modern invention. Dorothy Johnson tried to lay this character to rest in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” There the cowboy played by John Wayne in the movie has many of the virtues of Vallian but Johnson shows that he quickly outlived his time. L’Amour would have us believe that there’s still a need and a place for this kind of man—that nothing has changed. And among those who still have that notion in the 21st century, the message continues to have ready ears.

Further reading: Matt Pizzolato, Why I Admire Louis L'Amour

Coming up: High Plains Drifter (1973)

Western writer inspiration, no. 15

2011-12-10T07:00:00.000-08:00

Here is this week's omnibus of #westernwriter inspirations posted each day at twitter (click to enlarge). If you are on twitter, you can follow me @rdscheer.

Gen. Miles and Buffalo Bill near Pine Ridge Agency, SD, January 16, 1891

C. B. Lynch Store in Tulsa, 1891

Portland, Oregon, Mount Hood, 1890

Deadwood, South Dakota, 1900

Fort Worth, Texas, 1891

Land office, Round Pond, Oklahoma, 1894

Salt Lake City, c1890

Picture credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Louis L'Amour, The Quick and the Dead

Photo-finish Friday: out and about

2011-12-09T07:00:00.000-08:00

Here's yet another mural. Three-dimensional this time and not on a wall. This one adorns what I would call a switch box for the phone company. It's along the street in front of a large new apartment complex near where I live. Above is a view from the left side. Below is a view from the right. The wonder, I suppose, is that is has not been tagged.

Photo-finish Friday is the bright idea of Leah Utas over at The Goat's Lunch Pail.

Coming up: Louis L'amour, The Quick and the Dead

Frederick Niven, Hands Up! (1913)

2011-12-08T07:00:00.000-08:00

This early cowboy western by Scots-Canadian writer Frederick Niven (1878-1944) is a character study of a frontier outlaw with “good” bad man credentials. Like other train robbers and road agents of western history, he is absorbed into the cowboy culture of the open range between his crimes. There, even should his identity be known, he’s given shelter from the long arm of the law.

Niven, who spent time in the West as a young man, seems to understand this careful balance between observing the letter of the law and loyalty to the Code that preceded it. One often serves justice better than the other. One is a more accurate measure of a man’s character than the other.

The Apache Kid in this case is a decent and honorable man, who happens to rob trains. Even in that vocation, he exercises scruples, cleverly outwitting an expressman instead of shooting him.

Deeply thoughtful, he’s something of a philosopher. Smarter than your average lawbreaker, he knows how to deal with more venal men to get what he wants from them. Nervy and daring, he can volunteer under an assumed name to help a sheriff’s posse track down a gang of cattle rustlers.

Knowles Canyon, Colorado

Villainy. The villains and crooks in the story are those men who lack character. And they can be found in both high and low places, including the seats of power occupied by elected officials. No less a man than a U.S. Senator is willing to cut a deal with a convict for his own personal profit.

As the story is told, the crime of rustling cattle pales in comparison with a man’s attempt to rob a woman. Believing her to have come into possession of money, he shows up at her isolated cabin with dishonorable intentions. As it happens, she is not alone, and he is dismissed at gunpoint.

Meanwhile, a ranch foreman shows his true colors when he fires a new cowhand for using another name beside his own and then reports him to detectives investigating a killing. This behavior violates the Code, whereby a man may go by any name he chooses, and whatever is known about him is never freely revealed to authorities.

Humorously told in many ways, the novel is fully serious about how to judge the worth of a man. Being on the wrong side of the laws that protect the corrupt and the greedy is not enough to brand a man a criminal. Even a sheriff comes to that conclusion when he chooses not to arrest the Apache Kid and then turns in his badge.

Wagon shop, Broken Bow, Nebraska, 1889

Plot. The story is told in first-person by a young Scotsman, Will Barclay, who has run away from home, thinking he’s killed a hooligan in the streets of Glasgow. Fetching up in the arid West, he steps off a train in a whistle-stop called Black Kettle. Taking a job with a railway crew of burly and hostile Italians, he is rescued from assault by a man on horseback who turns out to be the Apache Kid.

Befriended by a cowpuncher, Panamint Pete, Will takes a job at the Diamond K ranch, where he learns the rudiments of horseback riding and working cattle. News of a train robbery by the Apache Kid soon animates the cowhands.

When Apache and his partner Jake Johnson are captured and sent to prison, he offers to reveal the whereabouts of stolen government bonds in exchange for pardons. But only he gets his freedom, and two troopers have ideas of their own about what’s to become of him and the bonds once they’ve been retrieved.

The narrator happens upon them and prevents Apache from becoming the victim of foul play. Thus he repays the man for his earlier rescue from the Italian railway crew. There follows an exchange of gunfire with the troopers, and both fall dead, one shot by Apache, the other by Will.

Buck Johnson, the brother of Apache’s partner, makes an unwelcome entrance into the plot. Already wanted as a cunning cattle thief, he tries to get his hands on the stolen money. Angered by the man, Apache joins the posse when the county sheriff is charged with bringing him in. Tracked along the Outlaw Trail to the Hole in the Wall, Buck and his gang are dispatched in a dawn firefight.

There follows some days off for recreation at a big rodeo, during which Will gets involved in the involuntary manslaughter of a policeman who is on the trail of Apache. Then it’s back to the routine of ranch work, which is abruptly interrupted by the arrival of Apache, with a posse in hot pursuit. As the cowpunchers attempt to save him, he is shot down and dies.

Cowboy roping a cow, Montana, c1910

Structure. If the plot seems somewhat rambling and unfocused, it may well be that Niven is more interested in other matters. Affecting a more documentary-style verisimilitude, he even remarks wryly at one point that if this were a novel, events would move along more quickly.

Chiefly, the novel keeps coming back to this irony of qualities of character to be found in a high profile lawbreaker. Also noteworthy is the presence of a social network of law-observing men who harbor and protect him, while discouraging him from getting deeper into trouble.

And all of it is embedded in the point of view of a tenderfoot from Scotland, whose story is that of a stranger in a strange land. Frequently the novel digresses into cultural observations of English-speaking men, their roots in the Old Country, who nevertheless live by their own rules. Fascinated, Niven and his narrator choose not to pass judgment.

Unlike more plot-driven western novels of the period, Hands Up! offers a running commentary on the customs and habits of frontier cowboy culture. We learn that

A cowpuncher may put on a swallowtail coat to dress up for a festive occasion.

Sitting in a bucket is easier on a sore backside when a man is not used to riding a horse all day. (The narrator, in fact, earns the nickname Bucket for this reason.)

A cook’s helper on a ranch is known as the cook’s “bitch.”

The wearing of earrings is believed to improve vision.

Like many western novels of the time, this one is also about the transition to manhood. A kind of bildungsroman, it begins with a boy’s irrational flight from the consequences of an impulsive act and ends with his achieving confident maturity. Reunited with his father on the last pages, he is greeted with his father’s first words, “Will! I see you are a man!” (p. 286).

A journalist, writer, and traveler in both North and South America, Niven produced a long series of novels during his life, largely set in Scotland and western Canada where he settled in mid-life. Hands Up! is currently available for kindle and the nook. Friday's Forgotten Books is the bright idea of Patti Abbott over at pattinase.

Photo credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Old West glossary, no. 23

Story: The Truest Story of Jesse James

2011-12-07T07:00:00.000-08:00

It's 2085. Do you know where your grandchildren are?

Here's my take on the post-apocalypse. The good folks over at Schlock Magazine picked my story "The Truest Story of Jesse James" for their current anthology. It's now up and begins thus:

The town library at Prairie Creek fit into three old crates kept in a storage room where the school teacher lived. Virgil Case, the current teacher, used the books—or what was left of them—to teach reading. His young scholars cut their teeth on the likes of John Grisham, Louis L’Amour, and Reader’s Digest condensed books.

They also served for history texts, since Virgil had to explain words the kids didn’t understand. Like “martini,” “bushwhack,” and “World Series.”

Some parents disagreed with him about teaching all that old stuff. His library was about a world dead and gone, and good riddance. About as many argued that if you don’t study the past, you’re destined to repeat it, and nobody wants that. One holdout from either camp said history repeats itself anyway, so what’s the difference?

Continued here.

Bend of the River (1952)

2011-12-06T07:00:00.000-08:00

This James Stewart and Anthony Mann western makes an interesting comparison with Meek’s Cutoff, reviewed here last week. There are many of the same elements, including a wagon train, a hired scout, Indians, and the vast unsettled terrain of Oregon.

This Oregon is a good deal more picturesque, with forests, a distant snow-covered mountain peak, and a navigable river. Like Meek, Stewart plays a man with something of a past, though he rarely speaks of it. He’s run with border raiders in Missouri and Kansas during the Civil War, the scars on his neck evidence of an encounter with vigilantes.

It’s hard to believe likable James Stewart as a former bad man. While he is always an enjoyable screen presence, this is a role more for Clint Eastwood or Sam Elliott. Actually, it’s a role for Arthur Kennedy, who is also in the film as another former bad man. We first meet him, about to be elevated at the end of a rope, and Stewart saves him without asking any questions.

Plot. The two men team up and are joined later by a third man, a gambler played handsomely by Rock Hudson. The wagon train is harassed by Shoshone, who are dispatched one by one, 1950s style, by gun and knife. The travelers are received warmly by the folks in Portland, who give them a big send-off as they head upriver by steamboat to a valley where they intend to settle.

The warm welcome quickly disappears with the discovery of gold in the vicinity. Portland turns into sin city, and the settlers’ supplier reneges on a deal to ship them cattle and food for the winter. Stewart, Kennedy, and Hudson seize the goods and set out on a long trek, first by boat and then overland, blazing a trail over a mountain pass.

They are pursued first by the supplier and his henchmen, who come to an unhappy end in a fierce firefight. Then several hired hands mutiny, and with Kennedy taking charge, there’s a change of plans. He heads the wagons instead for a mining camp, where big money has been promised for delivery of the settlers’ food and cattle.

Left behind but undaunted, Stewart pursues them, and during a shootout in the midst of a river crossing, he struggles fiercely with Kennedy, finally overpowering him and sending his body down the river. Stewart’s past becomes known, and he’s recognized as a changed man. The supply train arrives at the settlement, where Stewart gets a big thank you for his efforts and the affection of Laura whose respect he has won.

Mount Hood, Sandy River, Oregon

Genre conventions. Indians in this film are menacing figures, plain and simple. There’s no debate about how to deal with them. It’s kill or be killed. Bad men are the same. Many bite the dust during the film, and their deaths are treated like ball players who have fouled out of the game. We see them fall dead, and for all we know they are left where they fall.

Filmed on location in Oregon, this color film makes the most of being outdoors. There are grand vistas, and steamboat lovers will enjoy the footage of river travel. Four-horse teams exert impressive effort as they pull wagons up to mountain snowlines, where beyond them distant valleys and ranges can be seen. The music track is correspondingly grand.

Though blacks are seldom seen in westerns, this one has the dubious presence of Stepin Fetchit, who does his usual slow-witted routine, as assistant to the ship’s captain. You can imagine a mid-century audience chuckling at his coon antics and you can cringe with embarrassment.

Women are present to add a grace note of femininity. Julia Adams, in fact, is grace under pressure. Wounded by an Indian arrow to the throat, she hardly pales under the primitive conditions of frontier health care. The traditional alcoholic doctor removes the arrow and prescribes a month of bed rest, during which she gets to liking city life and takes a job as a cashier in a gambling den. Instead of taking a shine to the likes of Stewart, she shows additional bad judgment by getting chummy with Kennedy.

Portland, Oregon, 1898

Performances. Which brings these comments around to Kennedy, whose appearance as a film star always puzzles me. No matter what the rest of his face is doing, his crooked smile has a way of signaling uncertainty and unpleasantness. Here you suspect him from the start, and it’s no surprise when he becomes a turncoat and leaves Stewart on the mountain without a horse or a gun.

Meanwhile, Rock Hudson plays his gambler as so engagingly charming, you wonder why he isn’t in his own movie. His character is mostly only sketched in, and he’s really too big for the role. Henry Morgan also plays a part that doesn’t really fit him. Destined to be the avuncular Col. Potter on MASH, he is not too convincing in this film as a malcontent and mutinous member of the supply train.

Lessons learned. The lesson of the movie is that the chance to get rich quick corrupts the old school values of many. It takes a strong man to resist it, and Stewart, of course, is the man. As someone with a checkered past, he redeems himself by keeping a promise to the settlers, even if it means getting no more than a thank you from them for his efforts. That would feel better, he says, than any amount of money.

Jay C. Flippen as Laura’s father is the patriarch of the settlers and the film’s moral center. Holding to old-fashioned values like honesty, hard work, and a belief that bad apples never change, he comes to see that Stewart is an exception to the rule. A peaceable man, he doesn’t take well to being betrayed and abused by Kennedy and admits that “For the first time in my life I want to see a man killed.”

Add caption

Wrapping up. For all its miscast characters, Bend of the River has many good moments, and you don’t mind that it’s a little dated. It has high ambitions, and the photography and grand sweep of the film put it squarely in the Hollywood tradition of 1950s westerns with adult themes.

By comparison, Meek’s Cutoff is a small film. But how much does size matter? It takes on some pretty hefty issues and doesn’t use the shortcuts of movie conventions to deal with them. It also doesn’t short change American history by playing to old mythologies. A movie like Bend of the River tells a story about the West that is larger than life. There’s a time for that, but there’s also a time for trying to see it as it really was.

The screenplay for Bend of the River was by Borden Chase, a screenwriter with a long list of movie and TV credits, many of them westerns, including Red River and Winchester ’73. It was based on the novel Bend of the Snake (1952) by Bill Gulick, who was a frequent contributor to Saturday Evening Post and went on to write a number of books, fiction and nonfiction, many about the Pacific Northwest.

The movie is currently available at netflix, amazon, and Barnes and Noble. Overlooked Movies is a much-appreciated enterprise of Todd Mason over at Sweet Freedom.

Photo credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Frederick Niven, Hands Up! (1913)

Old West glossary, no. 23

2011-12-05T07:00:00.001-08:00

Montana cowboys, c1910

These are from Frederick Niven’s novel Hands Up! about a tenderfoot and a train robber. Once again I struck out a few times. If anybody knows the meaning of “wax on one’s fingernails,” “wag the whip,” or “picture soldier,” leave a comment.

arnica = an herbal remedy for sprains and bruises. “Oh I don’t think you need anything much. If you like, a little arnica—three parts water, and bathe that jaw.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

big bug = an important person; one who considers himself so. “A man does not become a political big bug without having some kind of savvy.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

bootblack tough = a criminal who starts out as a petty crook. “But the men we were after were not ‘boot-black toughs,’ as the West calls such characters who have graduated through picking pockets, knuckle-dusting—in groups—late homing merchants in alleys, breaking open freight cars, to shooting clerk and teller in some small mining camp.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

bousy = intoxicated, drunk. “The first thing he knew being landed on his back before his bousy finger could press the trigger.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

brass-pounder = telegraph operator. “Scotty, the brass-pounder, over at Black Kettle—the agent—he says Apache went out with them all right.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

bring to book = call to account, investigate, punish. “But ‘using his position erroneous,’ as the narrator expressed it, he was brought to book.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

bucket = saddle scabbard for a rifle. “The troopers had still their rifles in the buckets, but it was safe for Apache then to let go his hold.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

codfish mouthed = open-mouthed; reference to the codfish, which swims with its mouth open. “Pain will teach you how to grip your jaws together and I never heard that a cod-fished-mouthed man was much use.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

cold deck = to cheat, to deceive; dealing from a prepared deck of cards. “That sheriff would never cold-deck no man.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

cook’s bitch = cook’s helper. “What was you doing at the Diamond K? Cook’s bitch?” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

cracksman = burglar. “His name only led on to some tale of another brigand, train-robber, hold-up man; or some horse-thief, brand-faker; or townsmen (for I was not the only man at the Triangle who had begun life in a city) would tell of some cracksman.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

curve = to travel purposefully or with some urgency. “News of Apache Kid’s presence there reaching Lone Tree, the marshal would have come curving into town with a posse at his heels.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

Pre-Raphaelite painting, 1895

greenery-yallery = over-refined, unmanly; reference to the favorite colors, green and yellow, of Pre-Raphaelite British painters and satirized by Gilbert and Sullivan. “So I saw myself, if not a ‘greenery yallery, oh such a good young man’ as—in the phrase of old women—a ‘good son.’” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

guts = undercarriage of railroad cars on which tramps hitched a ride. “His comrade left him lying there, And took the guts of an Eastbound train.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

hair brand = a brand made by burning the hair but not the hide. “You ponder on that and get it fixed proper in you—no hair-brand—but plumb well in.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

jack easy = easy-going; a reference to Frederick Marryat’s comic novel Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836). “My father was a queer old fellow. He was a determined enough man, but very ‘jack easy’ as the word is.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

jig juice = alcohol, spirits, whisky. “He pikes over to call on the mayor, and sets up the jig-juice to him, pours flattering words in his ears.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

kidney = temperament; type. “It was well enough known, he said that representatives of the law and road-agents, and men of such kidney, often (as it is called) ‘josh’ one another.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

kittle cattle = capricious, difficult, erratic, rash. “Relatives are sometimes kittle-cattle, and as I did not know how he would take my letter I wearied for a reply.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

Boss Tweed, 1869

king bolt = a main or large bolt in a mechanical structure; thus, a leader, boss, kingpin. “He has already got the king-bolt but he wants to round up the whole outfit.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

knucklebones = an ancient game, similar to jacks. “Isn’t that just the way ninety-nine men out of a hundred go on dickering with evil week-days and salving it all on Sunday—playing knucklebones with brain, heart, conscience, and what are called primitive instincts?” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

liquidate = to drink. “We passed into the bar and liquidated.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

long clothes = clothing worn by an infant, extending below the feet. “‘Compose myself!’ she cried. ‘And me through the war when you was in long clothes.’” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

lurcher = hooligan, bum. “It must gall you—that lurcher not being dead!” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

pass in one’s checks = to die. “He’d have passed in his checks then if you had not stepped in.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

pike = to leave, run off quickly. “Apache, who had either played possum for sheer devilment, or wakened up and tumbled—after this fellow piked out—and reckoned it was his long suit, though maybe they didn’t think so—well, Apache had ridden along and cached himself there in the scrub.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

push = a crowd, group, gang. “I see—you was broke and so you went on with the Dago push till such times as the white gang would come along?” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

round robin = A petition or protest on which the signatures are arranged in a circle in order to conceal the order of signing. “They want to quit badly. They’ve filed a petition to him—kind of round-robin.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

Smoking concert, 1901

smoking concert = social event for men only with a program of music and comedy and often including drinking. “He who worships a Goddess in spirit and in truth is not likely to slide too often from his chair beneath the table, at a smoking concert.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

spread rail = rails spread apart by the weight of a train causing derailment. “I still has faith in the United States, but there’s individuals I don’t trust no more than a spread rail.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

spraddle = to sprawl, straggle, spread. “The men who were to drive the herd ki-yied it out, and spraddled it en route, and away they went, herd and beeves, in a cloud of dust.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

spring gun = a gun set with a trip wire. “I put spur to my pony so sharply that he leapt forward as if he had been ejected from a spring gun.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

stagger juice = spirits. “I got him to sing it three times, him being that full of song and stagger-juice.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

storm center = a center of trouble or disturbance. “Black Kettle seems to be getting to be a storm-centre.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

tell off = assign to a particular task. “I did my share in the exciting and dirty work of cutting out; and sometimes was told off to lend a hand at the branding during the succeeding days.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

time check = notice of termination of employment. “I took the time check from him, tore it into little pieces and dropped it in the sand.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

tongue-loosener = spirits. “Some devilment makes me throw a lariat of friendship over him and corral him over into the ho-tel and put tongue-loosener into him.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

too green to burn = inexperienced, a tenderfoot. “He’s either plumb locoed, or else he’s too green to burn, or else he’s lookin’ for trouble.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

tumble = realize. “It was at this here point that I tumbles to it where they had come from.” Frederick Niven, Hands Up!

Image credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Frederick Niven, Hands Up! (1913)

Western writer inspiration, no. 14

2011-12-03T07:00:00.000-08:00

Here is this week's omnibus of #westernwriter inspirations posted each day at twitter [click to enlarge]. If you are on twitter, you can follow me @rdscheer.

Interior, church, Isleta, New Mexico, 1895

T. J. Archer Store, Tulsa, Indian Territory (Oklahoma), 1893

Overland caravan, with boats. Survey of Colorado, 1889-1890

Las Vegas, Nevada, c1895

Taos pueblo, New Mexico, 1893

Fort Reno, Oklahoma, 1891

Waterfront, sternwheelers, Portland, Oregon, 1898

Picture credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Old West glossary, no. 23

Photo-finish Friday: out and about

2011-12-02T07:00:00.001-08:00

Here's another wall mural. This one is near downtown LA, on Figueroa. The pic looks a little quick and dirty because I took it on the fly as the bus I was in rolled by.

Photo-finish Friday is the bright idea of Leah Utas over at The Goat's Lunch Pail.

Coming up: Frederick Niven, Hands Up! (1913)

Caroline Lockhart, Me—Smith (1911)

2011-12-01T07:00:00.000-08:00

Smith and the schoolmarm

Smith, the title character of this unusual cowboy western is no damn good. He’s not just a good bad guy, who wins your sympathy even while he breaks the law. He’s rotten to the core. And he shows his true colors from the opening chapter, as he shoots an Indian in the back, for his blanket.

Born in Illinois, author Caroline Lockhart (1871-1962) grew up there on a family ranch. Working as a journalist, she settled in Wyoming, where she began a career as a writer of western fiction. An opponent of Prohibition, she acquired a weekly newspaper in Cody and actively promoted the preservation of western culture.

Me—Smith was her first published novel. It is a wry, anti-romantic portrayal of cowboys and Indians. The setting is a ranch in Wyoming owned by the Indian widow of a Scots rancher. Lacking even an ounce of conscience or generosity, Smith hatches a scheme to get the widow’s money. Pretending to fall in love with her, he promises marriage, all the while putting the moves on a pretty schoolmarm who boards at the ranch.

A small cast of other characters takes up residence there: several grub-line cowpunchers, a paleontologist from an Eastern college, his field assistant, a deputy sheriff looking for rustlers, and the Indian woman’s half-breed daughter, Susie. There’s also a Chinese cook.

Smith watching Susie at work

Plot. Susie is naïve but sensible for her 16 years. She pegs Smith as no good from the start and is alarmed when her mother falls for him. Plotting against him, she allows Smith to involve her in the theft of horses from the local Indian reservation. But he foils her attempt to get him arrested.

Blowing all the money he gets for the stolen horses at a gambling saloon, Smith persuades Susie’s lovesick mother, Prairie Flower, to give him her savings. Returning by night from the bank, she is held up by road agents who make off with a flour sack stuffed with all her cash.

Meanwhile, as the deputy Ralston discovers an occasional fresh cowhide with the brand cut from it, he suspects the local Indians of thieving from a nearby white rancher. When no evidence of that turns up, suspicion is thrown to the paleontologist, McArthur, who spends long days wandering the hills alone. Only we know that Smith is the real culprit.

A romantic thread emerges amid all this as Smith and Ralston get into a competition for the affections of the young schoolmarm, Dora. Inexperienced at judging the depth of mendacity in others, she gladly agrees to offer Smith nightly grammar lessons. He is a poor student, but she is undaunted in her efforts.

Ralston courts her more winningly on an excursion into the hills to catch grasshoppers for fish bait. Seized with jealousy, Smith presses his advantage as Dora’s pupil. Misinterpreting the attention she gives to Smith, Ralston figures Smith is her favorite.

As contrived as this may sound, Lockhart makes it work by holding the romance at a comic distance. Her young lovers are a bit too polite and too principled for their own good. Utterly unscrupulous, Smith is able to outmaneuver them at almost every step. When he can’t win, he gets even.

Convinced that all he needs is a stash of cash to make Dora his bride, Smith rustles a herd of the Indians’ cattle and enlists the help of McArthur’s slow-witted assistant, Tubbs. Finally onto Smith, Ralston catches the two men red-handed, and justice is eventually served.

Prairie Flower dies, in a sequence of events too complicated to go into here, including being shot in the arm by Smith and the careless processing of some rattlesnake venom. The paleontologist helps Susie locate her father’s family back East. Ralston and Dora profess their love and kiss. And the Indians arrange a special fate for Smith.

Smith makes an escape

Villainy. Unlike almost any other western writer at the time, Lockhart gives us a thorough character study of a hateful man. Smith is not so much malevolent as supremely self-centered and indifferent to the welfare of others. With him, it’s every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.

She doesn’t argue that he was born this way. Dora sees in him at times a boyish innocence when he’s pleased by something. And we learn later that he was abused by his father and left home at the age of thirteen.

In some ways, he invites comparison with Trampas in The Virginian. His may well be the thoughts of a villain Wister never makes us privy to. Smith’s contempt for Ralston parallels Trampas’ jealousy and his motiveless dislike for the Virginian. There’s the same distaste for honest labor when thievery pays more, the same easy manipulation of weaker men, and the same indifference to their fate.

Lockhart goes a step farther by giving Smith designs on two women: Prairie Flower, whose bankroll he’s after, and the pretty schoolmarm Dora, whom he desires and hopes to corral like a fat heifer.

An added dimension to his inner life is his magical thinking. Lacking guilt or remorse, he is also untroubled by worry. He has a boundless confidence in his own good luck. No matter how unpromising the situation he’s gotten himself into, he trusts that things will break his way.

Smith taken captive by Indians

Inflated with a sense of his own superiority, he also lacks a cowboy’s proper humility. He constantly punctuates his claims and pronouncements with the words “me—Smith.” And lest any reader be tempted to catch a glimmer of outlaw glamour in Smith’s character, Lockhart reminds us that he has a short upper lip and protruding teeth. He’s no Sam Elliott.

Wrapping up. Caroline Lockhart is a real find among early western writers. Her novel is well structured, with a good number of unexpected turns. Its story is rich with cowboy-style lingo and nicely observed detail. Her bunkhouse is so thick with tobacco smoke you can't see from one end to the other. While there are dark elements that can be startling in their suddenness, Lockhart is mostly having fun.

As for romance, the story has its young lovers, but theirs is a minor subplot. If the story provokes a misty eye, it comes when Susie learns the whereabouts of her father’s family. After her mother’s death has left her alone in the world, this news is a dream come true.

Lockhart went on to write more novels set in the West, as well as numerous short stories for the magazines. If they’re as good as this one, they’re all worth reading. Me—Smith is currently available at google books and for kindle and the nook. Friday's Forgotten books is the bright idea of Patti Abbott over at pattinase.

Further reading: Bio of Caroline Lockhart

Illustrations: From first edition by Gayle Hoskins

Coming up: Frederick Niven, Hands Up! (1913)

Meek’s Cutoff

2011-11-29T07:00:00.000-08:00

Imagine a western without a single western cliché. This one comes close. If it used documentary camera techniques, you’d call it a docudrama. But in fact a large part of the film’s effect is the artistry of the cinematography and editing, plus a haunting music track.

The plot of the film is based on an actual journey of emigrants by wagon train across Oregon in 1845. In the film, three families are traveling over high desert terrain, led by a Buffalo Bill-style scout called Meek (Bruce Greenwood), who may or may not know where he’s taking them.

The group dynamics begin to shift as some of them lose confidence in the blowhard Meek. One of the wives (Michelle Williams) has yielded, like the other wives, to the will of their husbands, who do all the deciding. But she doesn’t pretend to like or respect Meek. Eventually they lock horns.

Running low on water, with no sign of an anticipated mountain range ahead, they encounter a lone Indian in beads and buckskin leggings. After he is captured, Williams and Meek disagree over whether to kill him or keep him alive. Meek considers him dangerous, but she and others hope that he can lead them to water.

The difficulty is that neither understands a word of the other’s language. The Indian leads them onward, but it is never clear that he is taking them where they want to go. Meanwhile, one of the families relies on the good will and protection of the God they pray to. The wife of one man loses heart and panics, wanting only to go home. Another man falls ill.

Oregon high desert

With the loss of one wagon, they quickly regroup, generosity and helping each other coming as readily as the expected mercy of God. But their blithe acceptance of adversity and uncertainty is not assurance of eventual deliverance from the growing dilemma of their situation. They are lost in a harsh, uncharted land.

The film sloughs off all the Hollywood and textbook myths about transcontinental emigrants and leaves you with the more likely reality of the actual experience. Long takes and slow tracking shots mirror the slow, tedious process of covering hundreds of miles on foot. Shown sometimes as tiny figures moving across a serenely empty landscape, they appear plainly vulnerable to unspeakable dangers.

The startling effect of the film is the way it cuts you off from all the comfortable expectations of the Hollywood western. The most comforting of those is the element of story itself. Real life, someone has said, has lots of beginnings, some middles, and rarely the endings we are used to from fiction.

While there are plenty of story elements (character, setting, conflict), they keep dissolving into a formlessness that is more like life. You realize that if they ever reach their destination, there will be no ending and no happily ever after. Life will continue on as it has for them, rife with uncertainties and lack of resolution.

Without the usual conventions, Meek’s Cutoff puts the audience into terra incognita, just like the characters in its story. Watching it, you literally have no clue what if anything is going to happen next. It’s a strange, uncomfortable, but illuminating feeling. If the western is in fact entering a renaissance, Meek’s Cutoff is a doorway out of the dusty storehouse of overused western clichés into something new and excitingly different.

Further reading: An account of the 1845 emigrant train led by Meek

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Caroline Lockhart, Me—Smith (1911)