Book: Bar-20, part 2

More thoughts on Clarence E. Mulford’s first novel, Bar-20:

Myth vs. reality. Mulford has a reputation for historical accuracy. Tuska and Piekarski, in the Encyclopedia of Western and Frontier Literature make note of his “vast library” of sources. But a reader gets the feeling in this novel that Mulford is relying a lot on guesswork and dubious assumptions. 

I said yesterday that he was born in Illinois, which is true, but he seems to have grown up in Brooklyn, NY. Many western writers born elsewhere who fell in love with the West eventually settled there. But Mulford didn't visit the West until he was 41 years old. Then he moved even farther away, living the rest of his life in Maine.

In Bar-20 he provides an accurate description of a spring roundup and how calves are branded. He explains the work of riding the line and the purpose of line cabins. He has Hopalong lecture a female companion on the many uses of mesquite. But he doesn’t relay much of the real work of cowboying.

His cowboys go into town to hang out in the saloon about every night. They have long vacations that permit them to roam like knights errant around the Southwest and into Mexico. On leave like this, they might try a hand at mining for gold. As a fraternity of mostly young males, they resemble a kind of Animal House in boots and chaps.

The outfits on the far-flung ranches, we learn, communicate with each other by smoke signals. There’s always a first time to run across a little known historical fact, but I have my doubts about the accuracy of this one.

What Mulford did understand was the ethos of the West. This is a long quote, from chapter 4, but what he says about the mythic West is right on the money:

A man was only a man when he had the qualities necessary; and the illiterate who could ride and shoot and live to himself was far more esteemed than the educated who could not do those things. The more a man depends upon himself and the closer is his contact to a quick judgment the more laconic and even-poised he becomes. And the knowledge that he is himself a judge tends to create caution and judgment. He has no court to uphold his honor and to offer him protection, so he must be quick to protect himself and to maintain his own standing.

His nature saved him, or it executed; and the range absolved him of all unpaid penalties of a careless past. He became a man born again and he took up his burden, the exactions of a new environment, and he lived as long as those actions gave him the right to live. He must tolerate no restrictions of his natural rights, and he must not restrict; for the one would proclaim him a coward, the other a bully, and both received short shrifts in the land of the self-protected. The basic law of nature is the survival of the fittest.

There’s a direct line between Mulford’s words here and the men who walked the pages of westerns during the century that followed.

Book: Bar-20

Clarence E. Mulford (1883-1956) gave us Hopalong Cassidy, a young red-haired cowboy who appears in his earliest work. Mulford, living in New York, had only read about the West when he wrote the first stories that became Bar-20 in 1907.

Reading this rambling, strung-together set of adventures, you can see Mulford finding himself as a novelist. The book is a collision of different influences, from dime novels to Owen Wister’s The Virginian and books about cowboying and the actual West.

Getting started. The first half of the book is as poorly organized as a train wreck. There’s not much continuity, and it seems to start over again several times. I’m guessing this is because the chapters began as stand-alone short stories.

It’s also hard to figure out how much disbelief to suspend. Mulford carefully locates the Bar-20 ranch and the nearby town of Buckskin, Texas, near the Pecos River, fifty miles south of the New Mexico border. He describes the physical appearance of the town in some detail.

Then the town is the scene of an exciting but improbable gun battle after one of the Bar-20 cowboys is shot in cold blood by a cowboy from a neighboring ranch, the C-80. The fight goes on all day, with the C-80 boys holed up in the hotel and the Bar-20 boys surrounding them. The Bar-20 punchers are a jocular, practical-joking bunch, and they don’t lose their sense of humor as the bullets fly.

Besides a couple of flesh wounds, the Bar-20 boys have no further casualties, but one by one they kill all the C-80 men. Kind of extreme and unrealistic – wiping out the entire outfit of another ranch.

A short while later, we’re with Bar-20 cowboys on the trail of Indians who’ve stolen some horses. After days of following them, there’s a long shootout in which Hopalong is wounded, and it ends with the deaths of all the Indians. A similar exchange of lead takes place in Santa Fe in a dispute over a mine.

In Mexico, where Hopalong tries without success to pay a call on a señorita from a previous visit, he enters a cantina on his horse and holds several men at gunpoint. Before leaving town, he shoots the sheriff – just winging him to keep the man from using his guns. Weeks later, the two men meet cordially, and the sheriff is too charmed by the young man to arrest him, even though there’s a $500 reward on his head.

Put simply, the separate stories take place in different realms of probability. A reader has to keep adjusting expectations.

Saturday matinee: Hopalong Cassidy in FORTY THIEVES (1944)

Get your popcorn and go to the rest room now, because you don’t want to miss a minute of this one.

The story begins. There’s exciting music, and we quickly find out that Hoppy is a town sheriff and he’s been bringing in the outlaws, one bunch after another. Newspaper headlines trumpet his successes with exclamation marks!

Deputy California Carlson is doing one of his comic routines as he stands on a stack of boxes beside a sign: “Re-elect Hopalong Cassidy for Sheriff.” He practices delivering a speech to an imaginary audience (well, there's one kid watching) but loses his balance and falls into a horse trough. Ha-ha-ha! Hoppy and Deputy Jimmy Rogers come along and laugh, too.

Fresh out of prison, here comes bad guy Tad Hammond. Serving 20 years for rustling cattle and now out on parole. He doesn’t like Hoppy and makes no bones about it. “My trigger finger doesn’t itch anymore,” he says, “except when I see you.”

Inside the saloon, Hammond is persuading saloon owner Jerry Doyle to run against Hoppy for sheriff. Doyle looks like he could be a nice guy, but Hoppy has been keeping the town too law-abiding, which cuts into his business.

Hammond says he’ll bring in his old gang members from where they’ve been hiding out in Indian Territory. There are 40 of them. That’s where they got the name for the movie. Together, they’ll run Hoppy out of town.

Next thing, we see all of them getting together on their horses. It’s Election Day and they’re going to foil it up, which they do. They spread a rumor that the election has been postponed and do other things. Finally they’re stuffing the ballot box when nobody’s looking.