Saturday music, Brenda Lee

Brenda Mae Tarpley, born 1944, Atlanta, Georgia. First big hit, "Jambalaya" in 1956, at the age of 11. "I'm Sorry" released in 1960.

Coming up: The Texas Rangers (1951)

Robert Dunn, The Youngest World: A Novel of the Frontier (1914)

There are long novels, and then there are monumental novels. This one falls in the latter category. It is not one but as many as four separate adventure stories folded into a saga of a man’s journey to Alaska to make something of himself and to understand the meaning of existence. Few early westerns take on such an ambitious project, but Dunn is determined to give it a go.

Plot. His main character, Gabriel Thain, starts out as a confused and unhappy 25-year-old. On impulse, he books passage on a coastal freighter sailing from Seattle to Alaska. En route, he meets two people, Clara, who catches his fancy, and an explorer, Robert Snowden, who persuades him to climb a snowbound mountain peak with him. The climb is arduous and finally a killer. Thain survives, but Snowden, snow-blind, succumbs to mountain fever and freezes to death before reaching the top.

Back off the mountain, Thain joins a party of explorers from Idaho, led by a forthright man, John Hartline. They have found copper in the interior of the territory but are up against the greedy machinations of a big copper trust. A crew employed by the trust blocks their way and a gun battle ensues.

Mt. McKinley, Alaska, 1903

Thain treks by dogsled for months across the uncharted land, meeting all manner of colorful and intrepid frontiersmen. One of them, Dick Trueblood, saves his life when he falls through ice into a river. Thain then winters in a mining camp, Chickaman, a desperate place full of desperate people.

In an isolated valley, he discovers gold and stakes a claim. To his surprise, he also discovers Clara nearby. They travel by skow on an open channel in a frozen river, and they narrowly escape death in an ice jam.

Skip ahead a year or more. He and Clara are operating a trading post in an Inuit village along the coast. A pair of speculators arrives on the monthly mail boat. They have invested in Thain’s claim and want to see it. With Thain, they strike off into the approaching winter.

After many weeks, without locating the claim, they reach the end of their rations and their strength. The horses, unable to go farther, have been shot. The dogs pulling their sled have drowned in the river. Looking at certain starvation and death by exposure, they are rescued in the novel’s final pages by another prospector, Thain’s old friend, Trueblood.

Climbers on Mt. McKinley, 1903

Women and romance. There is plenty in the book about males and females getting together in the quest to live happily ever after. But this is not your usual romance. Always rationalizing, Thain is not content to just let libido lead the way. Love has to fit into some grand design of the Universe. Woman has to take her place alongside a bunch of other capitalized abstractions: Self, Nature, Love, Fate, Charity, and the Great Will of Existence.

In the wilderness, he gets conflicting advice from other men about women. Climbing the mountain, he comes to understand that for Snowden women are not a necessity. Conquering an unclimbed mountain is grander than being a husband and father. Later, Dick Trueblood tells Thain that attachment to women is the ruin of men because they make a man too soft, and you have to stay tough in the wilderness.

When Thain and Clara marry, he is troubled when after a year she has been unable to conceive a child. Their lack of offspring erodes the confidence he struggles to have in himself. He believes their union is incomplete until she has made him a father.

Dogsled

Character. Like other early western novels, this is a story about the building of character. When we meet Thain, his life has gone off the rails, chiefly because he has been willful and impulsive. During the rest of the novel, he keeps meeting men who demonstrate different ways of being strong and independent.

In the final chapters, facing death on the trail, he realizes that he has finally lost all of his self-doubt. He has a confidence born of “his own lonely being.” All comes together for him as he comprehends once and for all that he is “a wanderer, marching eternally upon the common trail of life.”

Old West glossary, no. 61

Montana cowboys, c1910

Here’s another set of terms and forgotten people gleaned from early western fiction. Definitions were discovered in various online dictionaries, as well as searches in Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang, Dictionary of the American West, The Cowboy Dictionary, The Cowboy Encyclopedia, Cowboy Lingo, The Dictionary of Victorian Slang, and The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

These are from Robert Dunn’s The Youngest World and Gertrude Atherton’s Perch of the Devil and Los Cerritos. Some I could not track down are at the bottom of the page.

Julius Wayland

Appeal to Reason = a political newspaper published 1895-1922 by Julius Wayland (1854-1912), supporting the Farmers’ Alliance, the People’s Party, and, after 1901, the Socialist Party in America. “He bought an ‘Appeal to Reason’ from a stunted boy in a grey sweater.” Robert Dunn, The Youngest World.

bombazine = a twilled fabric made with a silk warp and a worsted weft; the black fabric used for legal gowns or mourning clothing. “In the railroad station, the grey-haired, torpid station-master banged up the ticket window, drew on his bombazine sleevelets.” Robert Dunn, The Youngest World.

box-stall = an enclosure in which a single animal can move around freely. “He sat on the string-piece of the empty pier next the vessel, and, hanging his feet over the water, watched a box-stall jerked up into mid air by the coughing hoist.” Robert Dunn, The Youngest World.

chow-chow = a pickled relish made from a combination of vegetables. “These derelicts stood among the long tables laid out with chow-chow and condensed milk (watered in pitchers), shouting coarse stories to one another.” Robert Dunn, The Youngest World.

chrysoprase = a green gemstone. “She had the green eyes of California—the limpid, translucent green of crysoprase.” Gertrude Atherton, Los Cerritos.

cocotte = a prostitute. “The cocottes were so young and fresh as well as beautiful that to Ora and Ida they looked much like girls of their own class.” Gertrude Atherton, Perch of the Devil.

Waiters

croaker = a whiner or whinger, a pessimist. “Our long tussle on the trail was only a joke to him, and then he’s made a croaker this way.” Robert Dunn, The Youngest World.

flunky / flunkey = a cook, kitchen-hand, or waiter. “‘Waiter? You mean you want to be a flunky,’ he snapped, spitting. ‘D’you belong to the Union?’” Robert Dunn, The Youngest World.

flyer = a lark, a fling. “She had had her ‘flyer’, and, allowing for social triumphs, returned to Butte to settle down.” Gertrude Atherton, Perch of the Devil.

Foot gong

foot gong = a spherical bell operated by a foot pedal, used on horse carriages and early automobiles. “A whip flecked the bay, and the buggy started up Occidental Avenue to the blare of a foot-gong on the dashboard.” Robert Dunn, The Youngest World.

footwall = in mining, the rock underlying a vein or ore deposit. “Cut across the fault at once and follow it on the footwall side to the east.” Gertrude Atherton, Perch of the Devil.

Henry George

George, Henry = an American writer, politician, and political economist (1839-1897). “It will be a hundred years before Henry George is recognized as a great man.” Gertrude Atherton, Los Cerritos.

goose = a practical joke. “I guess I don’t like being turned down for once. Goose.” Gertrude Atherton, Perch of the Devil.

Honiton lace = lace made by descendants of Flemish immigrants in Honiton, Devonshire, England; the lace made for Queen Victoria’s wedding dress. “She stole to the front door and peered through its curtain of Honiton lace.” Gertrude Atherton, Perch of the Devil.

Honiton lace

in bond = a term applied to the status of merchandise admitted provisionally to a country without payment of duty, to be kept in a bonded warehouse or for shipment to another point where duties will be imposed. “She gave final and minute orders to tailors and dressmakers, instructed them to send the trousseaux in bond directly to Great Falls, Montana.” Gertrude Atherton, Perch of the Devil.

Lorelei = a siren of German legend who combed her copper hair atop a rock above the Rhine and lured men to their death. “He watched her for a moment as she sat on a box braiding her long fair hair, vaguely recalling the legend of the Lorelei.” Gertrude Atherton, Perch of the Devil.

Lorelei, c1900

mantle = the incandescent gauze surrounding the flame in a gas lamp. “Minker’s windows defied the darkness of Pike Street with a greenish glare of mantle gas and porcelain tiles.” Robert Dunn, The Youngest World.

parr = a young salmon or trout. “We’ve fished her out down to the last parr, and that means she’ll stay barren till kingdom come.” Robert Dunn, The Youngest World.

peg away = to move off quickly. “She would simply tell me to go back and peg away.” Gertrude Atherton, Los Cerritos.

Prie dieu

prie dieu = a low bench for kneeling. “She prays a great deal and has a beautiful prie-dieu, carved all over.” Gertrude Atherton, Los Cerritos.

pug = a boxer, brawler. “He had drawled of his early days as a barroom pug in Omaha.” Robert Dunn, The Youngest World.

rag = to dance to ragtime music. “She gave several small dinners and a dancing party, devoted to the new excitement of ‘ragging,’ in which no one became more proficient than herself.” Gertrude Atherton, Perch of the Devil.

Albuquerque (1948)

A western is like watching a chess game. It’s black vs. white, the board is the western landscape, and you know all the pieces, their moves, and the overall objective. And like chess games, each western is a little different.

Albuquerque is a Randolph Scott and Gabby Hayes vehicle, colorful and action packed. Scott is his usual handsome and even-tempered self, and Hayes is his comic foil, in some ways the rodeo clown who gets laughs but has a serious purpose. He pitches in with a six-gun when the going gets tough.

Plot. Scott arrives in Albuquerque to take a job with his uncle (George Cleveland), a wheelchair-bound robber baron who wants to monopolize the freighting business. Quickly discovering the man’s lack of scruples, Scott goes to work for his uncle’s only competitor, a freighting company run by a brother and sister (Russell Hayden, Catherine Craig). Hayes is their head muleskinner.

Randolph Scott, Gabby Hayes, Barbara Britton

Cleveland owns the local sheriff (Bernard Nedell) and has a stable of henchmen. Most menacing of the bunch are Lon Chaney, Jr., and Dan White, who gets jailed for a stagecoach holdup. White knows too much and when the sheriff arranges a jailbreak, Chaney shoots him before he can get out of town.

Cleveland plants a mole (Barbara Britton) in Hayden and Craig’s operation. He soon learns that the brother and sister have won contracts to freight ore from two mines situated on a nearby mountain ridge. One is mysteriously dynamited before freighting can get started. The other, called Angels Roost, is accessed by a narrow, dangerously steep road and considered inaccessible by most everyone except Hayes.

Scott discovers that Britton has been in league with Cleveland and confronts her with the evidence. But when a fire breaks out at Cleveland’s offices, Scott is blamed and faces trial for arson. His only alibi is that he was with Britton at the time, but chooses for his own reasons not to disclose the fact. A witness, however, saw him coming from her place—a little girl (Karolyn Grimes), who takes the witness stand and clears him. When Britton confirms her story, the case is dismissed.

Gabby Hayes, Karolyn Grimes

Romance had begun to bloom between Scott and Hayden, but she now suspects him of fooling around with Britton. All bets are off for the two of them. Craig not only gets shot in the leg by an assailant. He’s gotten sweet on Britton and now learns that she has betrayed him.

The trial judge makes Cleveland and Scott put up a peace bond to maintain a truce, but Chaney picks a fight with Scott, who beats him to a pulp. Scott is then about to leave town, believing he’s been the cause of enough trouble, but Hayes stops him. He wants to attempt bringing down the ore from the Angels Roost mine.

Despite further efforts to sabotage them, they are successful. But before they can say mission accomplished, they have to face a gun battle with a gang of hired gunmen brought to town by Cleveland. Scott, Hayes, and the others pick off all the villains, including Chaney, and Britton puts a bullet into Cleveland as he watches from a window.

In the denouement, wedding bells are back in the offing for the two couples. And Hayes is about to get a shave and a haircut from his heartthrob, Pearl, who runs a tonsorial parlor.

Tom Rizzo, Last Stand at Bitter Creek

Review and interview

Tom Rizzo has taken three unsolved mysteries from the 1860s and woven them into a story of espionage and criminality. His central character is an innocent man, just doing his job, who becomes a wanted fugitive.

Plot. Grant Bonner is a young Civil War veteran who has been a spy for the Union in the Confederate South. As the war ends, he is put on the trail of a colonel in the Union Army suspected of engineering the robbery of a gold shipment. Accompanying five heavy coffins in the express car of a westbound train from Cincinnati,  Bonner is surprised by a derailment that leaves him running for his life from thieves. 

Thus begins a complex story extending over several years and told from the point of view of 20 or more characters, including men who are plotting against Bonner. Eventually working with him to unmask the villain they’ve both been after is a young black officer, David Webster.

The story takes them to Bitter Creek, Wyoming, where Bonner is cowboying under an assumed name for reasons I’ll leave it to readers to discover. Under suspicion is an ambitious local rancher who has acquired a big spread and seems to have enough money to buy up most of the town. In a plot twist that involves the theft of a valuable document, he is about to become even richer.

Union soldier, photo by Mathew Brady

Character. Grounded as it is in actual though little-known events, the story is a departure from what is thought of as the “traditional” western. Characters come and go, and new ones are still being introduced in the final chapters. While Bonner is the main character,  he is absent from about a third of the book, which has an interesting effect.

He is often unaware of developments that the reader has already been informed of, and his welfare is far more precarious than he knows. On the other hand, his training as a spy comes to his aid as he thwarts an ambush, studying the lay of the terrain and divining where a shooter might be hiding if he cared to.

Curious is the absence of a single romantic interest for Bonner. Instead, there is not one but three women who figure into the plot, each of them taking a shine to him and helping him out of a jam. Each teases a reciprocal twinge of interest from him, but at the end he is still on his own and apparently OK with that.

There’s not a lot of back-story for Bonner, but Rizzo does describe a boyhood incident that casts a shadow over him. A young friend was killed one day as the two of them handled a loaded revolver. Feeling responsible for the boy’s death, he is haunted years later, especially as he feels angry impulses to use his own gun.

Still from The Great Train Robbery, 1903

The most interesting creation is the black officer, David Webster. Outside of David Cranmer’s U.S. Marshal, Gideon Miles, it’s unusual to find an African American in a western story. Webster is a sharply intelligent man and in full possession of his authority, despite any prejudices working against him.

For villains, it’s hard to beat Marcus Steele, who is not just a greedy man with a criminal mind. He has a contempt for other people, including his own wife, that is blood curdling. Steele is the kind of villain often found in early westerns, an ambitious man intent on getting rich quick, by any means, and entertaining schemes to buy his way into public office.

Wrapping up. Rizzo has constructed an intricately contrived western tale. The shifting points of view bring even minor characters to life during their brief moments in the narrative. The train robbery and Bonner’s final confrontation with Steele are nicely suspenseful. Last Stand at Bitter Creek is currently available at amazon and Barnes&Noble and for kindle and the nook. You can learn more about Tom Rizzo at his website.

Interview

Tom Rizzo

Tom Rizzo has generously agreed to spend some time here today at BITS to talk about writing and his novel. I’m turning the rest of this page over to him.

How did the idea for Last Stand at Bitter Creek suggest itself to you?

I read a short paragraph about the first peacetime robbery in the US taking place in North Bend, Ohio, just outside Cincinnati. If you Google first “train robbery”, you’ll find the Reno Brothers robbed an Ohio & Mississippi train October 6, 1886—the first time a “moving” train was stopped and robbed. The Pinkertons finally solved the case.

But, the truth is an Ohio & Mississippi train was robbed May 5, 1865, and derailed outside North Bend. I wrote an article on it that was published by Wild West Magazine in October 1995. This case was never solved. A few years later, I thought since the case was never solved, what if the train was transporting a valuable cargo no one knew about.   

Is the published version similar to how you first conceived it or somewhat different?

It is somewhat different. A rough chapter-by-chapter outline got me started, but then new elements came into play and I made major changes along the way. 

What sort of research was involved in writing the novel?

Quite a bit of research, not only about the historical incidents I included, but about that particular period of history as far as how people lived, worked, what they wore, how did they travel, what did they eat. A lot, of course, was never used but was necessary to know to get a sense of time and place.

Talk a bit about editing and revising. After completing a first draft, did it go through any key changes?

It probably took me nine months to write the first draft. And it underwent several revisions. The biggest one, ironically, was after I sent it to a professional editor. She made excellent suggestions and pointed out some pitfalls, and made the appropriate edits, and put it to rest for a couple of weeks to let it marinade a little.

At that point, it was 80,000 words. When I returned to it, read it again from beginning to end, and carved out about 10,000 words that I thought slowed things down too much.

Was there anything about the story that surprised you in the writing of it?

How difficult it was to write a novel with such an involved storyline. I also discovered how much fun I had at creating different characters, slipping into their skin, and trying to think and act as they might.

What parts of the novel gave you the most pleasure to write?

I enjoyed so many parts of it, including the interplay between the newspaper publisher and his daughter... the characters who played the role of lawmen... the strength of the three major female characters... the pairing of Bonner and Webster... the evil and single-mindedness of the antagonist... and David Webster’s reaction to the shootout he was involved in.

Saturday music, Patsy Cline

Virginia Patterson Hensley, born Winchester, Virginia, 1932. "I Fall to Pieces" released in 1961.

Coming up: Tom Rizzo, Last Stand at Bitter Creek

Gertrude Atherton, Perch of the Devil (1914)

A New York Times reviewer called this novel “crude, shrill, unscrupulous, splendid,” which no doubt pleased its author. Atherton seems to have been bent on twisting conventional literary expectations by its ear. This novel is a wry and ironic take on all manner of romantic notions about love, money, and power. Its in-your-face title comes from the name given by early prospectors to the mining camp that became Butte, Montana, where the novel is set.

The story is “western” in a modern sense of the word, for it mixes a favorite theme of early western fiction—mining and sudden riches—with a story of two wealthy socialites. Both women are married, but one loses her heart to the other one’s husband. So it is a love story, too, played out in elegant gowns, well-furnished drawing rooms, and the fashionable watering holes of Europe.

Plot. Gregory Compton is a man obsessed with extracting a fortune from the earth. Son of a rancher, he is forced to interrupt a course of study at the School of Mines in Butte when his father dies. After a time, he excavates a rocky hill on the ranch, believing he will find gold. Instead, it is rich with copper, and he soon becomes a new Copper King.

Colorado Smelting and Refining Co., Butte, c1900

His wife, Ida, born into poverty, rises swiftly from rags to riches. Embarrassed by her unpolished speech and manners, Compton hires a tutor to act as Henry Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle. The tutor so enrages her with his snobbery that she pitches him out a window. Taking his place is the other woman of the story, Ora Blake, who befriends her and, by her own example, helps Ida learn to be a lady.

Ora grew up in the lap of luxury but was left almost penniless when her father died. She has married one of her father’s employees, a lawyer. A lover of books and the arts, she is a sleeping beauty, content with her modestly secure life and a little agoraphobic. Meeting the energetic Ida, she is amused an entertained by her, and like true opposites they quickly bond.

All Ora needs to come out of her long dream-like seclusion from the world is an infusion of capital. This occurs in the form of an old mining claim of her father’s long thought worthless. A short walk from Compton’s claim, it is discovered to have deposits of copper ore as well. She quickly finds herself a well-to-do woman again and getting more so.

Deer Lodge Valley, Montana, 1906

Romance. Wealth offers Ora a degree of independence, and she realizes that she is married to the wrong man. After a moonstruck meeting with Gregory Compton, she becomes convinced that the two of them are soul mates. During a year in Europe with Ida, she falls deeply into an imagined love affair, writing him letters that she never sends.

We know from page one that there’s not a romantic bone in Ida’s body. Gregory, a handsome rancher, is a “catch” and little more to her. It hardly matters that he gives all his time to his mine. She is fancy free, on a grand tour of Europe, buying clothes and socializing with the titled and the upper crust.

When the two women return to Montana, Ora informs her husband that she wants a divorce and secretly sets about separating Ida from her husband. Gregory, it turns out, has been fostering a smoldering attraction to Ora. It looks like the two of them will become the answer to each other’s dreams.

Women's fashions, 1910

But Ida isn’t about to give up Gregory. And it turns out that she is really the better match for him. His true love is really his mine. Only the sensible, rational, and independent Ida can grant him the freedom to give himself completely to his business interests. With his millions, she graces his achievements by being the grand dame of Butte society.

Women. You gather that Atherton does not waste a lot of sentiment on women as a gender. When Gregory tells Ida that she is “an extraordinary woman,” she scoffs and says “the extraordinary woman hasn’t been born yet.” Like men, such a woman would be fully engaged in the world and unable to live on love alone.

Women’s weakness, Ida argues, is their fairy-tale wish for a Prince Charming. Despite appearances “they are just one perpetual shriek for the right man to come along.” When women achieve true independence, she says, “they will be just as happy without men as they now want to be with them.”