Book: Bransford of Rainbow Range

The novels of Eugene Manlove Rhodes are short, and I’ve been reading more before moving on to another early western writer. He’s also fun to read and an increasingly curious character as I learn more about him.

Eugene Manlove Rhodes, 1913

This novel was published in 1913 after Rhodes had left New Mexico to live with his wife and his in-laws in upstate New York. The New Mexico he remembered was taking on a nostalgic glow. Anyone who has spent a winter in upstate New York will understand how deeply the warmth of that glow can be missed.

The set-up. We last saw Jeff Bransford being rescued by his friends from the cellar in Juarez where he was being held hostage (see last week’s review of Good Men and True). This novel finds him again up to his ears in trouble, pursued by the law for a bank robbery and the near-fatal shooting of a night watchman.

He is, of course, innocent of either crime. However, his one alibi is a pretty young thing, Ellinor Hoffman. She it is who was with him at the time of the robbery. But, alas, their meeting was unchaperoned. Given the Victorian-era regard owed to a woman’s respectability, it is an alibi he cannot use in his own defense.

Allowing himself to be arrested the following day and taken before the justice of the peace, he pleads not guilty, but to no avail. Not only is he unable to account for his whereabouts at the time of the robbery. There is evidence linking him to the crime scene. He’s looking at doing time – and far worse if the night watchman croaks.

There’s only one thing to do, and he does it. He makes a dramatic escape – leaping through a second story window of the courthouse. In a moment he’s borrowed another man’s horse and is well out of town before a posse is organized to give chase.

Prospector, 1916

The ruse and another chase. Jeff finds himself pursued by four men on horseback while the rest of the posse heads off in another direction. When two of the men catch up with him in the mountains, he has transformed himself into a prospector and offers to help them catch the man they’re after.

A night and another day pass with no success, of course. Grub is sent for from the next town, and when it arrives it’s delivered by a youth who then assists Jeff in making a getaway. Under cover of darkness, they head south toward Mexico, the other men in hot pursuit.

Jack London and Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury, 1975

Searching online for something else in the Saturday Evening Post archives, I found that they're reprinting old stories on their site. Fans of Jack London and Ray Bradbury may want to check out the links below.

“A Goboto Night,” by Jack London

Four stories by Ray Bradbury plus an interview with Bradbury

Picture credit:

Ray Bradbury, 1975; Photo by Alan Light, wikimedia.org

First westerns: Thomas Ince and William S. Hart

It's Friday again, and I'm taking a break from the "literary" direction this blog has taken to look at early western movies. A while ago I wrote here about the first cowboy star, Broncho Billy Anderson. Today's post is about a director and actor who followed close behind. By the way, credit for all this goes to film historian Jon Tuska whose The Filming of the West covers this subject in depth.

Thomas Ince, 1922

Thomas Ince. When he came to Los Angeles from New York in 1911, Thomas Ince (1882-1924) was a 29-year-old actor and aspiring filmmaker. He was hired on by the Bison Life Motion Picture company to make one-reeler westerns. G. M. Anderson had already begun his successful Broncho Billy franchise, but Ince took western movie production to the next level.

The Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch Wild West show was wintering in Venice, California, when he arrived. Ince hired them, and in one stroke had himself an entire stock company. Next he acquired an acreage in the Santa Monica Mountains for shooting pictures.

Miller Bros. 101 Ranch Wild West Show, 1913 (click for more)

Production expanded to the making of two-reelers, the first of them War on the Plains (1912). In Ince’s hands, the scope of the western expanded as well. He wanted to portray the drama of westward expansion and in particular its impact on the native populations. He had an empathy for what he saw as the tragedy of the red man. It was an attitude he shared with William S. Hart, a fellow actor Ince had known in New York.

Production quickly expanded in 1912 to the making of three-reelers, Custer’s Last Stand and another Indian saga, The Invaders. By this time, Ince had turned over most of the production to others and was saving only the editing for himself. Which, of course, didn’t stop him from giving himself credits for direction and screenplay when a film was released.

Ince joined Kay-Bee Pictures, which produced some 256 films during the years 1912-1918. Below is one of their westerns, Past Redemption (1913), co-written by Thomas Ince and William Clifford and directed by Burton King. It features Ann Little as the feisty daughter of a saloon owner who is put out of business by the local temperance league. She decides to mend her wild ways, but to no avail.

Notice the use of Indians in some scenes and the dust and excitement in a fight scene shot from a very high angle. A chase on horseback is also well done. A writer at imdb.com calls it a 30-minute film, but this version is only ten minutes, and the abruptness of scene changes suggest that it may have been cut from a longer original. [If the video won't play, give the slide bar under the pic a little nudge to get it going.]

William S. Hart, c1917

William S. Hart. In 1914 actor William S. Hart (1864-1946) comes into the picture, joining Ince’s company to make westerns of his own. By this time, the market was already becoming glutted with westerns, and Ince had lost interest in them. But he let Hart make two two-reelers, On the Night Stage and The Bargain. Both did well at the box office, and at the age of forty Hart began a career as a cowboy actor in the movies.

Hart is often given credit for bringing a depth of new realism to the western. But film historian Jon Tuska argues that Hart’s western setting is little more than a backdrop for a morality drama. A typical Hart film is about the reformation of a good-hearted bad man and the evils of drink and loose women. All of which reflects the growing public sentiment against alcohol that would lead to Prohibition by the end of the decade.

The Toll-Gate (1920) is an example. Hart plays a train robber who takes refuge in the isolated cabin of a widow (Anna Q. Nilsson) and her young son. Sweetly innocent and trusting, she hides him from the law, not knowing he is a guilty man. Remorse overwhelms him, and he decides to reform his ways – venturing onward to meet his reward at some time in the future life. There’s also a villain, who meets a well deserved end at the hands of our good-bad hero. Contemporary reviews were mixed but are interesting to read for their take on all this.

Hart’s career lasted for hardly more than a decade. His last film Tumbleweeds (1925) was a farewell to the screen. Set in the Cherokee Strip at the start of the Oklahoma land rush in 1889, it’s a saga-size western. Hart plays a cowboy who falls in love and is confronted with obstacles as he tries to start a ranch. It’s re-release version after the introduction of sound has a lugubrious introduction by Hart who seems eternally saddened by the passing of the West.

Source: Jon Tuska, The Filming of the West, New York: Doubleday, 1976.

Further reading: A lot more on William S. Hart at Laurie’s Wild West

Bill Hart’s Pinto Pony

The William Hart House

 Picture credits:

1) Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Wild West Show, 1913, sideshowworld.com

2) DVD cover, Tumbleweeds, amazon.com

3) All other photos from wikimedia.org

Coming up: More on Eugene Manlove Rhodes

Book: Good Men and True

Previously, we gave due regard to the early years of Eugene Manlove Rhodes in New Mexico, where he began as a writer. This time, let’s look at his first short novel, Good Men and True (1910).

Literacy was not uncommon among early cowboys. While whiskey, gambling, and women are the usual stereotype, accounts of the West show an appetite for reading that also ran deep. Not just dime novels, but anything in print. And that ranged from labels on canned goods to the classics. The Police Gazette was also a favorite, as Charlie Siringo recalled. Even the illiterate could “read the pictures.”

Bull Durham book list (see larger)

It’s worth remembering that packets of Bull Durham smoking tobacco came with coupons redeemable for paperbound books. There were, Rhodes says, 303 titles in this library of yellow-backed volumes, mostly fiction, all of them in the public domain. They included Rider Haggard, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, A. Conan Doyle, James M. Barrie, and so on. You can see the entire list here. Since virtually all cowboys smoked, it didn’t take long for a bunkhouse to accumulate its own library.

Meanwhile, Rhodes has said that he grew up in a house with books: Shakespeare, Dickens, Scott, Whittier, Longfellow, Tennyson, Byron, Burns, Poe. And he obviously read them. The framework of his western stories is largely – though not totally– literary. He lovingly embeds the cowboy West into the great tradition of western literature.

There’s also a contemporary feel in them, akin to O. Henry and Twain. Good Men and True has their tongue-in-cheek cleverness in spades. Its plot is improbable and completely believable, because you want it to be, and its down-to-earth characters are thoroughly likable.

El Paso, 1886 (detail; click here to see entire map)

The plot. The story takes place in the sister cities of El Paso and Juarez (way out there at the western tip of Texas where the Rio Grande comes romancing out of New Mexico). Our hero is a 36-year-old cowboy by the name of Jeff Bransford. In the opening chapters, he befriends the clerk of a lawyer who owns the ranch where Bransford is foreman. The young clerk’s name, George Aughinbaugh, gets its own sentence.

George has recently arrived from Kansas City and is eager to make a new friend of Jeff. Their familiarity with the classics is quickly evident, and they have an entertaining conversation. Their attention visits for a moment the typewriter that the clerk has been using – that and a typing drill to improve dexterity on the machine: “Now is the time for all good men and true to come to the aid of their party.” Hence the book’s title and its plot in a nutshell.

Eugene Manlove Rhodes

Eugene Manlove Rhodes (1869-1934) is not exactly a forgotten western writer. He earned considerable appreciation among others, including Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie, who praised his fiction and admired him as a man. A one-volume collection of Rhodes’ work is still in print. A scholarly collection of his life and letters was published in 1956.

Gene Rhodes

He is still remembered in New Mexico, where he cowboyed and ranched for many years as a young man. He arrived there in 1881, he liked to say, the year Billy the Kid was shot. The town of Alto, New Mexico, has a web page devoted to him. Another western writer, William MacLeod Raine, wrote a book about him.

He worked for pay from the age of thirteen, and seems to have been fearless, resourceful, and a real scrapper. Self educated from the library of books in his family’s home, he loved ideas and had a way with words. He seems to have been at ease with all kinds of people – a real old-fashioned American democrat – even if some of them were wanted by the law.

He was apparently also one of those generous souls who’d give you the shirt off his back, even when he had only one – which may have been often the case. Sadly, in his last days he was penniless, politely requesting an advance on a novel just to put food on the table. I wouldn’t call it a writer’s life, but many writers have that same expansive spirit and resist the constraints of self-interest.

Early years. Born of homesteaders in Tecumseh, Nebraska, and spending his boyhood on dirt farms there and on the plains of Kansas, he’s someone I can truly identify with. Before he reached adolescence, his family had moved once more, to south-central New Mexico.

If there’s a place on earth where each of us is supposed to be, as a friend once said to me, Rhodes found that place in the “land of enchantment.” In those years, when greed and corruption were pervasive among men who never quite broke the law, it was a rough time to be coming of age. But Rhodes forever loved this arid region of deserts and mountains. (For the early history of this area and how it came to be known as Jornada del Muerto, read more here.)

San Andres Mountains, New Mexico

Settled first by miners and then cattle ranchers, it was bordered on the west by the Rio Grande river and on the east by the San Andres Mountains, extending south to Las Cruces. Located in Apache territory, it saw some of the last armed conflict with Indians.

Growing up. As a teenager, Rhodes worked wherever he could find a job – with overland freight runners and prospectors, as a well digger, and in road construction, branding cattle, horse herding, haying. His most frequent employer was the Bar Cross ranch, which ran cattle on the open range. He did not have a boyhood, he said later, until he attended the University of the Pacific for two years in San Jose, California.

Back in New Mexico, he briefly taught school, then homesteaded, running cattle and horses in a canyon, still named after him, in the San Andres Mountains. These mountains are now in the White Sands Missile Range (and closed to the public). They lie between the Jornada and the Tularosa Basin to the east. His stories are set in places throughout this region. At his request, he was buried in the San Andres.

Though remembered as a hard worker, he lacked the interest in actually running a ranch. Located in a remote, mountainous area, his place became instead a hang-out for acquaintances, some of whom just happened to be robbers and thieves. One of them, to avoid arrest, shot and killed a deputy sheriff in Rhodes’ horse corral. 

In his defense, one has to recall the code of the West, which asked no questions of another man's past and cooperated as little as possible with duly constituted authority - given that it was often in the hands of men without a strong record of lawfulness themselves. You closed your eyes when someone left, as someone has said, so you could say afterward that you didn't know which way they went.

Rhodes and Pat Garrett. Just 30 years old in 1899, he found himself on the wrong side of a dispute involving lawman Pat Garrett. Rhodes had befriended two men wanted by Garrett for the alleged killing of a special prosecutor who’d been hired by the state Stockgrower’s Association. As Rhodes accompanied them by train to turn themselves in for trial, the three men found themselves on the same railroad car with Garrett. If Garrett recognized them, he chose not to say so.

The Desire of the Moth, 1916

Years later, Walter Noble Burns disparaged Garrett in his bestseller The Saga of Billy the Kid. Rhodes took issue and wrote his own “Defense of Pat Garrett,” which was published in Sunset magazine in 1927. Garrett as a lawman had also acted as a gun-for-hire, Rhodes reasoned, and he shouldn't be blamed if over the years this eroded his character.

The close call on the train was a tense moment in the life of a free-spirited young man who’d already had his share of close calls. Despite his penchant for writing poetry, he was also a compulsive poker player, who usually lost his money, and a fierce opponent in a fist fight. As J. Frank Dobie described him, “he was as gay, gallant, and witty as he was earnest.”

Meanwhile, in 1899, he was also carrying on a long-distance romance with a woman in upstate New York, who would soon become his wife. Eventually leaving New Mexico to live with her and his in-laws, Rhodes began writing and publishing short stories in the magazines. His first novel was Good Men and True (1910), which I’ll be talking about next time.

Sources:

W. H. Hutchinson, A Bar Cross Man: The Life and Personal Writings of Eugene Manlove Rhodes, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956.

J. Frank Dobie, Life and Literature of the Southwest, Dallas: SMU Press, 1952.

Further reading:

A remembrance of Rhodes’ early years in New Mexico

Picture credits:

1) Photo of Rhodes, nobodyshorses.com

2) San Andres Mountains, wikimedia.org

3) Book cover, The Desire of the Moth, altonewmexico.us

Coming up: Early western films

Book: The Outlet, part 3

Last time we considered the cowboy world of the characters in Andy Adams’ novel and the absence of women and romance. This time, after a look at how the novel regards nonwhites on the open range, we’ll wrap things up. Three of the images below are from the 1905 edition of the novel, by illustrator E. Boyd Smith. [As usual, click them for a larger pic.]

Diversity. Like other novels of this period, race has a way of showing up in the storyline. Along the way, Quirk and his men encounter two herds in trouble. One has an all-black crew with a “darky” foreman. They have become disorganized and are unable to take their herd across a river. The Texan cowpunchers, showing their Southern roots, opine that while blacks are good workers, “it ruins one to give them any authority” (p. 87). It takes a white man to get them to follow orders.

Something similar happens with a white rancher from Wyoming whose Mexican crew has come unglued when one of their compañeros gets killed by lightning. After a proper burial, the solution this time is to give the Mexicans a pep talk in Spanish and then have the white rancher travel with Quirk’s bunch. The point this time is that it takes a Texan to know how to handle Mexicans. Quirk makes the following observation:

The inferior races may lack in courage and leadership, but never in cunning and craftiness. This alien outfit had detected some weakness in the armor of their new employer, and when the emergency arose, were ready to take advantage of the situation. Yet under an old patron, these same men would never dare to mutiny or assert themselves (p. 168).

Although not liberally, the n-word gets used in the book. So does the word “white,” meaning trustworthy, intelligent, respectable, as we’ve seen before. Quirk’s boss Lovell says:

We’re strangers here, and we want to make a good impression, and show the public that we were born white, even if we do handle cattle for a living (p. 314).

A sand and dust storm struck us

On one occasion, the wrangler gets to talking about the ignorance of Cajuns. And on the subject of Indians, the cowpunchers make a distinction between the “civilized” tribes in Indian Territory and what they call “blanket Indians,” who stubbornly resist assimilation. Though the trail crosses through Indian Territory, they don’t encounter Indians until crossing the Niobrara in northern Nebraska.

This meeting is more or less cordial. The Indians, Lakota from Pine Ridge, are gathering and drying wild fruit. The cowboys share some tobacco with the men, and while Quirk considers them “tall, splendid specimens,” he finds the women “nearly all of one stature, short, heavy, and repulsive in appearance” (p. 244).

Wrapping up. Glancing back at Owen Wister, we notice that we’re in another kind of West. It’s a West of real working cowboys. The Virginian is never given a job as demanding as trailing a large herd of cattle for several months.

Outriding the flood by a close margin

The issue of character is a big one for both writers, but Wister’s cowboy hero faces a different kind of challenge. He has to outwit his nemesis Trampas and finally to face him in a gun duel. That shows a clever use of intelligence and the courage to risk being shot – and thereby proves his manhood.

The strength of Tom Quirk’s character lies in the intelligence and courage required to assume the responsibilities of a trail boss. Though there are villains in this story, they’re not lowly rustlers and horse thieves. They’re brazen crooks, with lawyers and powerful friends to stand up for them and do their dirty work. And unlike Trampas, they exist as shadowy figures we never see up close. There’s no dealing with them by intimidation (“Smile when you call me that”) or a gunfight at sundown.

Quirk’s worth as a man comes across also in the way he wins the trust of his employer and comes to his aid. When he and a partner attempt to prevent the rivals’ herds from getting to the Fort by the contracted delivery date, it’s all part of the job.

This involves some quick thinking and an ability to win friends and influence people. He knows how to build alliances with a few friendly drinks in the saloon. He has social skills that are never required of the Virginian, who seems often to get by on his good looks and boyish charm.

The hireling deputies plunged into the river

What we don’t learn from Adams is how all this manly character would fare in the company of an attractive, available woman. He doesn’t give us a clue. The story takes place in a world from which marriageable women have been banished. And Quirk seems perfectly happy with that.

True, there’s no opportunity for a tag-along sweetheart on a trail drive. But at the end, when his employer asks him to stay on in Dakota and manage his ranch, he accepts the job with only one reservation – that he’d prefer spending the winter in Texas, where the weather is warmer. Not because a sweetheart is waiting there for his return.

Finally, for the reader who wants to know about the real Old West, this is a novel that tries to tell it like it was. Adams wrote several other novels, and I hope to spend more time with them before I’m done.

Coming up: Eugene Manlove Rhodes

Book: The Outlet, part 2

Last week I talked about Andy Adams’ theme of how the Old West way of doing business was being subverted. Today, let’s look at what else is going on in this novel. [Photos from Library of Congress. As usual, click to enlarge.]

The other story. Like Adams’ earlier novel The Log of a Cowboy, we get to ride along on a summer-long cattle drive from Texas to the north. Much of the length of the novel is about the logistics of moving a large herd of cattle. And for plain historical value, the novel has a lot to contribute.

B&M Railroad, Dakota Territory, 1891

The railroads have gotten in on the action, and Texas drovers can have their cattle shipped by train to the Red River crossing into Indian Territory (Oklahoma). Prices for this service are steep, and in the novel’s opening scene, Lovell declines to do business with them.

Later, we learn that a derailment has caused the death and injury of many cattle being transported by rail. Stress caused by poor conditions of travel has also been the cause of shipping fever – these losses being absorbed by the cattlemen, not the railroads.

Branding cattle, 1891

Before leaving the home ground, a herd has to pass inspection of the local county inspector. Inspection served the chief purpose of making sure that the herd included no cattle belonging to someone else. The herd also had to be marked with a road brand – showing their current owner. There was a charge for this inspection, and Quirk the trail boss plays one county inspector off against another to get each to lower his fee.

Sometimes the story digresses to include something that comes straight from a cowhand’s storehouse of cow and horse knowledge. As Quirk’s herd starts out in West Texas, he discovers that the horses have ticks in their ears. He explains how this happens, the symptoms, and how to treat it (a preparation for blisters mixed with axle grease).

The westward spread of fenced-in settlements creates an obstacle in some places. Water is no longer freely available in these areas, and drovers find they have to pay to let their cattle drink. Some trails have been so heavily used that for a mile and more across there’s not a single blade of vegetation. They have to trail the herds far to one side or the other.

Beef issue to Indians, Pine Ridge, 1891

One river crossing in Dakota Territory gives them trouble. The banks are steep and hard to negotiate. Fifty or so head of cattle get stranded against one of them, and the cowboys have to strip down and plunge in to push them downstream to where they can climb out of the water.

Then cloudbursts in the mountains flood the river and the men get separated from the wagons. They have to go without food, and sleep without their bedrolls until the floodwaters recede.

Texas fever (carried by cattle ticks) shows up as a plot element as the herds reach the north. Montana ranchers have set up a quarantine area in the Power River basin to prevent herds from entering their state until after the first frost. Lovell’s herds pass to the east, through the Dakota Territory, so they get to the fort OK.

The crooks’ herds, however, take the Power River route out of Wyoming and get quarantined with the other waiting herds. Because the crooks have a government contract, they claim not to be bound by state regulations (damn that Washington), and after attempts to stop them, they get through. 

By the way, you can follow the entire trip on a map of the middle states that shows the many rivers they cross. Their route more or less follows the divide between the Central and Mountain time zones.