Charles Alden Seltzer, The Two-Gun Man (1911)

Along with Zane Grey and William MacLeod Raine, Charles Alden Seltzer is remembered today as an originator of what’s often called the formula western. In it, a cowboy hero of sterling qualities, who is fast with a gun, meets and subdues a vicious villain. While this part of the story plays out, the cowboy also wins the heart and hand of a pretty sweetheart.

The Two-Gun Man has all these elements firmly in place. The story is told with few complexities of plot or character. It is set at an unspecified time in the open ranges of the Southwest, somewhere in the neighborhood of Raton and Cimarron, New Mexico.

Plot. The central character, Ned Ferguson, arrives in a small desert settlement. He’s been sent for to find and dispose of rustlers who have been decimating the herds of a cattleman named Stafford, who runs a spread called the Two Diamond.

Ferguson comes to suspect Stafford’s range boss, Dave Leviatt. There’s been bad blood between them ever since Ferguson demonstrated his skill with a sidearm. While Leviatt shows he can shoot a tomato can five times while it’s in the air, Ferguson manages the same trick with six.

Cattle roundup, New Mexico

Ferguson works under cover on Stafford’s ranch, posing as a “stray-man,” hired to roam the hills and brakes in search of cattle that have wandered off from the herd. In reality, he is a range detective, with a license to kill, no questions asked. He soon finds evidence of rustling, and Leviatt and a pal Tucson seem the likely culprits.

One day, following them from the ranch, he finds the two men turning over Two Diamond cattle to another pair of rustlers. Confronting Leviatt and Tucson when they return to the ranch, Ferguson is forced to draw on the two men, killing them both. The grateful ranch owner, Stafford, makes Ferguson his new range boss.

Romance. After all that, it may come as a surprise that much of the novel is devoted to a romance that blooms between Ferguson and Mary Radford, who lives with her brother nearby. The one twist in the story is that Mary is an aspiring writer, and after meeting Ferguson, she busies herself writing a western novel.

Cattle crossing the Rio Grande

The central characters are based as close to life as she can make them. The hero is the handsome, two-gun-wearing Ferguson, and the villain is the despicable range boss of the Two Diamond, Leviatt. As the object of his unwelcome attentions, she has reason to hold him in contempt.

Envious of Ferguson’s apparent success in wooing the girl, Leviatt misinforms her of Ferguson’s true purpose at the ranch. He’s been hired, he says, to kill her brother, Ben. When Ben is then wounded in an ambush, she assumes that Ferguson is the gunman. Feeling betrayed, she greets Ferguson with a rifle at his next visit and the promise to use it should he ever return.

Mary is his first true love, and he falls hard for her. At first he is charmed by learning that she is a writer. Then he is hurt when he believes for a while that her affections are only a pretense to learn what she can of him for her novel. When she rejects him, after misunderstanding his true intentions for wooing her, he is thrown into a truly painful melancholy.

No worries, however. Exposing the real rustlers, Ferguson quickly finds himself back in Mary’s good graces. The novel ends as she seeks Ferguson’s help with the ending of her novel. Will the lovers marry and go back East, or will they stay in the West?

They’ll stay in the West, he tells her. The cabin where the heroine and her brother have been living will be enlarged to make room for the hero, he says, and for the arrival of little heroes and heroines. Embarrassed, she stops short of putting “such a thing as that” into her book.

Book: The Coming of the Law (1912)

Charles Alden Seltzer (1875-1942) was a prolific western writer, who spent much of his life in Ohio. His stories were inspired by experience on an uncle’s ranch in northeast New Mexico during his teenage years and his early twenties.

Argosy - Seltzer was a frequent contributor

Talk about tenacity. It took over a dozen years of rejection slips before publication of his first short story. The Coming of the Law was his second published novel. And it’s a good one.

Seltzer’s strength in this novel is its plotting. At 378 pages, it’s a substantial effort that never lags or wanders in its focus. It sets up an underlying conflict and then several related complications, building suspense again and again, and resolving everything persuasively by the end. Within the conventions of the western story, hardly any of it seems contrived.

As a storyteller, he’s interested in how character expresses itself through action. There’s just enough depth to everyone to make them believable. But Seltzer doesn’t devote much time to analysis of motives or feelings. As in a movie, he relies on what people do and say to convey all that – showing instead of telling.

The style is much like news writing. It has that kind of sharp clarity, a focus on story, and a second sense about how to cut to the chase and hold the attention of a general audience. He never over-complicates. He is satisfied with the telling detail and knows where to draw the line between enough and too much. (Interesting that his son Louis B., by the way, became the respected editor of the Cleveland Press for many years.)

Seltzer was a blue-collar laborer and an outdoorsman, but he also had an interest in politics. By 1930, he’d been elected mayor of a town on the outskirts of Cleveland. His interest in small-town politics shows through in this novel.

Union County, NM (today)

The story. The basic conflict in the novel is not original. A young Easterner, Hollis, arrives in a small western town in Union County, New Mexico, to inherit his father’s ranch. He discovers that the town and the entire county are controlled by an unscrupulous cattleman, Dunlavey. This guy is a law unto himself, stealing cattle from his neighbors, who are powerless to defend themselves because not only is he a mean bastard – he also owns the local sheriff.

A federal judge has been appointed to the territory. But Dunlavey has so intimidated the citizenry that getting a case to trial and a jury to decide against him is an impossibility.

The twist on this already familiar material is that Hollis also inherits his father’s weekly newspaper. (And you should have seen this coming.) So we get a crusading newspaperman scenario folded into the mix. Hollis takes over the ranch and the newspaper and sets to building both circulation and community spirit. He uses the editorial page to take on Dunlavey.

Democratic-style government doesn’t have much of a chance where the only law is the gun. So Hollis’ objective is to encourage the “coming of the law” to this part of New Mexico. He persuades a man with law enforcement on his resume to run for sheriff against the incumbent who’s securely lodged in Dunlavey’s pocket.

Frontier newspaper office, 1887

A natural politico, Hollis has curried favor with the town’s merchants and the other ranchers in the area. Meanwhile, he’s also used his connections back East to motivate the politicians to take more action. Which comes, ironically, in the form of a more concerted effort to collect taxes and to confiscate property should there be any, like Dunlavey, who refuse to pay.

The election does not come off without a hitch, however. It takes a “citizens’ revolt” from an unlikely contingent of voters to keep Dunlavey from re-electing his man. All of which may not sound all that compelling, but Seltzer wrings the drama out of it. It’s a page-turner.