Jubal (1956)

Cover, Criterion Collection

Someone has already called this western a cowboy soap opera, so I won’t take credit for that label, though it fits. Glenn Ford is fine in this handsome Cinemascope production shot against the Teton landscape of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. (Ford was pretty much fine in anything.) 

Playing the title role of Jubal Troop, he’s a cowboy down on his luck who seems unable to escape being drawn into even worse luck. Though we know little to nothing of his back-story, a history of mischance and bad breaks is etched in his expression in scene after scene.

Plot. Found afoot and freezing by a ranchman (Ernest Borgnine), Ford is offered a job as a cowhand and is quickly promoted to foreman for his work ethic and dependability. Borgnine seems to be the first person who has ever liked and trusted him, and a strong bond builds between them.

This development rubs another of the hands (Rod Steiger) the wrong way, who takes an Iago-like dislike to Ford from the start and makes no secret of it. Even more problematic is Borgnine’s unhappy wife (Valerie French), who quickly makes seductive moves on Ford, further angering Steiger, who’s been having an adulterous affair with her already.

Glenn Ford as Jubal

Though one senses a hesitancy in him, Ford resists her advances out of loyalty to Borgnine, who suspects nothing. Ford seems not to lack a sense of decency, but lonely cowboy that he is, you wonder whether he might act differently under other circumstances.

Long story short, Steiger finally turns Borgnine against Ford, and in the misunderstanding and confusion that follow, Borgnine is killed. Matters are not resolved until a posse pursues Ford and finds him at yet another death scene, where the truth of Steiger’s villainy is finally revealed.

Paul S. Powers, Riding the Pulp Trail (2011)

Review and interview 

This is a much overdue review for this enjoyable collection of Paul Powers’ western stories edited by Laurie Powers. Half of them were previously published during 1947-1953 in various pulp magazines. Six of them were published here for the first time.

They are a varied selection and show Powers at the height of what was a long career writing for the pulps. They are skillfully told stories, some artfully compact and others more leisurely and complex. You can sense in some the demands and constraints of the genre as defined by editors looking for certain kinds of copy for the pages of their magazines. In others, you can see him pushing against its limits, allowing story and character to unfold in unexpected directions.

Economy. The first two stories in the collection are short and streamlined and share the same narrative elements while seeming to be very different. In both of them, a pair of friends is menaced by several villains attempting to steal something from the two partners. The climax comes during a storm, and a device planted at mid-story (and conveniently forgotten) brings the law to the rescue.

Paul Powers, 1950s

The difference is that one story, “Death is Where You Find It,” is about gold miners whose gold is stolen during an early winter snowfall. The other, “To Steal a Ranch,” is about just that, the theft of a ranch, with its key scene played out in a fierce rainstorm. Each has a neatly embedded surprise.

Romance. Several of these tightly plotted stories include a pretty girl and the quick resolution includes an avowal of love, even a proposal of marriage. “Hangnoose for a Prodigal” manages to work in two romances, one old and one new. In “Judgment Day on Whisky Trail,” a man rescues a girl while revenging the death of a deputy U.S. marshal 15 years ago, and love blooms in the final paragraph.

“Dave,” whispered Libbie O’Day. “Will you take me with you, out of Devil’s Basin?”

“I’d decided about that,” Dana said, tightening his arm around her, “the very first time I set eyes on you.”

In “Buzzards Hate Bullets,” a man discovers that a nose flattened from a kick in the face doesn’t prevent a girl from falling in love with him. And where there’s not a girl in the story, two men provide a feel-good ending of their own by becoming fast friends.

Novelty. The best stories of the collection take you in surprising directions. I liked “By the Neck Until Dead,” a long story featuring Powers’ continuing character, Sonny Tabor. The ever likable and honorable Sonny has a big reward on his head in this story and gets arrested and jailed.

Exciting Western, cover, 1947

Suspense builds as he waits several days for his hanging and finally manages to escape—even as he’s being taken to the scaffold. A nasty gang has stolen a rancher’s money and left him dying. Sonny finds the gang in their hideout and after a shootout returns the money to the rancher’s son before eluding the posse that’s after him and disappearing into the desert.

I also liked “A Pard for Navajo Jack,” in which a deputy bitten by a rattlesnake is saved by the Indian he has been about to arrest. The two men become friends, and the deputy solves a mystery that saves the Indian from the gallows.

In a dark little story called “Yellow Glass,” a man finds his friend dying from a gunshot wound, and his friend’s young wife seems oddly unmoved by what’s happened. The two men had both been attracted to her, and she acts now like she married the wrong one. Did she try to kill her husband? The killer is found in an unexpected way and with a cleverly embedded piece of evidence.

Wrapping up. These stories, in their variety, offer a glimpse of the creative output of a writer who has made a living spinning out popular magazine fiction. They are especially revealing as they show him observing the conventions while pushing their limits.

A word also needs to be said about the handsome design of this book. The typography is elegant, and each story begins with a two-page illustration. Laurie Powers also provides an informative introduction about the process of researching and assembling the collection of stories.

Riding the Pulp Trail is currently available in paper and ebook formats at amazon and Barnes&Noble.

Interview

Laurie Powers

Laurie Powers has generously agreed to spend some time at BITS today to talk about her books and her current research. I’m turning the rest of this page over to her.

How long was this project from the first idea of it to publication?

Well, to be accurate, the whole project took really almost ten years. My aunt and uncle had been continually looking for my grandfather’s stories since 1999. I had reunited with my aunt that summer after 35 years, during my research of my grandfather’s pulp fiction career. That summer they gave me my grandfather’s personal papers and that’s how I came across the manuscript for Pulp Writer, his memoir on being a pulp fiction writer.

But since then, we were discovering that, while my grandfather had been primarily known as a contributor to Wild West Weekly from 1928 to 1943, he had a whole other career writing for magazines such as Thrilling Western, Exciting Western, The Rio Kid Western, Texas Rangers. Almost all of these stories had been published after Wild West Weekly shut down in 1943.

Lost and found

Prickly pear lining up spring blooms

The days are marked by small improvements. Though the numbness in my left hand continues, I have recovered the ability to (a) tie my shoes, (b) use a knife and fork together, (c) walk past things on my left without bumping into them, (d) pull on a shirt without much confusion, (e) floss my teeth, and (f) hold a book while reading. However, typing remains difficult, driving a car is a hazard not even to be considered, and the TV remote has never turned up.

The excerpts from the journal I’ve been keeping have been running a few weeks behind here, I know. Today I’ll try to skip ahead some.

3/16/14. With watching and concentrating, I discover the complexity of the way a hand multi-tasks—holding something in the grip of three fingers while doing something else with thumb and forefinger. Like holding onto one sock while putting on another. Tying shoelaces calls on a similar dexterity. My left hand still drops things that slip away as my concentration drifts, but so far I haven’t broken anything. A lid unscrewed from a bottle or jar will stay in my hand if I do not purposely put it down. Using the dull ones, I’m getting OK with kitchen knives again.

Morning moths by the garage door

Magazine and newspaper reading continues a challenge, and trying to keep loose sheets of paper in order (like the pages of this journal) gets much the same result as turning on a fan in the room. They want to fly in all directions.

3/18/14. Yesterday marked the end of three weeks of radiation. After a weekend that brought waves of fatigue and knocked me out for most of a Sunday afternoon, I’m feeling rested and upbeat. The radiation oncologist was encouraging when we saw her. Attitude, she says, is a factor in improvement. So is being older rather than younger. She guesses the tumor started in my brain 5-6 months ago, and there’s no telling what caused it.

Glossary of frontier fiction: P-Q(pork pie – Queer Street)

Below is a list of mostly forgotten terms, people, and the occasional song, drawn from a reading of frontier fiction, 1880–1915. Each week a new list, progressing through the alphabet, “from A to Izzard.”

pork pie = a small round hat with a narrow brim worn by women in the mid-19th century, usually with a ribbon or hatband where the crown joined the brim, with a small feather or two attached to a bow on one side; made of various materials (straw, felt, cotton canvas covered in silk). “The hat thus procured, a few days later, became, by the aid of a silk handkerchief and a bluejay’s feather, a fascinating ‘pork pie.’” Bret Harte, Frontier Stories.

A. MacMechan, 1897

port = deportment, carriage, bearing. “And there’s the sky pilot! What a Jovelike port!” Herman Whitaker, The Settler.

“Porter of Bagdad, The” = title of a whimsical story by Canadian author Archibald McKellar MacMechan (1862-1933). “Mr. Nitschkan, with something of the sensation of the Porter of Bagdad when he awoke to find himself in the palace of the Princess of China, now completely threw off the surly suspicion of the early evening.” Nancy Mann Waddell Woodrow, The New Missioner.

Porter, Jane = Scottish historical novelist (1776-1850); author of Scottish Chiefs (1810), a novel about William Wallace. “Anything in print received our most respectful consideration. Jane Porter’s Scottish Chiefs brought to us both anguish and delight.” Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border.

portière = a heavy curtain hung across a doorway. “The tiers of almost priceless volumes, the antique furniture, the costly Persian rugs and portieres, the pictures, bronzes, bric-à-brac,—all were valueless in his eager eyes.” Charles King, Dunraven Ranch.

Portland Fancy = a traditional dance for four couples. “‘I expect you used to dance a lot,’ remarked Sabina, for a subject. ‘Yes. Do yu’ know the Portland Fancy?’” Owen Wister, Lin McLean.

post oak = a slow-growing, drought resistant, medium-sized tree found in the Southeastern and South Central U.S., used widely for fence posts (also called iron oak). “The sun was near its setting; a yellow haze filtered through the scant foliage of the stubby post-oaks that covered the wide monotonous stretch of rolling country.” Mollie Davis, The Wire-Cutters.

pot = to shoot. “I’d pot any man tried that on me.” Adeline Knapp, The Well in the Desert.

Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (1929)

First edition

Set in a fictionalized Butte, Montana, this novel has been on my to-read list for a long time. Maybe least known of the five novels by Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961), it is based in part on his employment as a Pinkerton detective in San Francisco, 1915-1922.

Plot. An unnamed detective (“Op”) for the Continental Detective Agency is assigned to a job in Personville, a western mining town often called “Poisonville” for its pollution from nearby copper smelters. The town is crime ridden and run by mob bosses operating in every form of unlawful activity, chief among them bootlegging and gambling.

Dashiell Hammett

After a crusading newspaper editor is murdered before the Op even has a chance to meet him, he discovers the extent of lawless chicanery in town. Aided and abetted by a woman implicated in the murder, Dinah Brand, he decides to clean up the town himself, a classic plot line from countless cowboy westerns.

Think of 1930s gangster films, and you get a picture of the action Hammett’s Op gets himself involved in. It’s a nighttime world of car chases, abandoned warehouses, machine guns, and killing. Long after you’ve lost count of the deaths, he takes a moment to list them:

There’s been what? A dozen and a half murders since I’ve been here; Donald Willson; Ike Bush; the four wops and the dick at Cedar Hill; Jerry; Lew Yard; Dutch Jake; Blackie Whalen and Put Collings at the Silver Arrow; Big Nick, the copper I potted; the blond kid Whisper dropped here; Yakima Shorty, old Elihu’s prowler; and now Noonan. That’s sixteen of them in less than a week, and more coming up.

Soon there are 17, and it’s a big one that has the hard-drinking Op not so sure he isn’t the murderer himself.

Storytelling style. Hammett, of course, defines a whole genre of fiction known as “hard-boiled.” The talk is tough and violence is always about to break out. The influence in pop culture seems to have been pervasive. Reading Black Mask magazine, you find the style often imitated, though rarely as successfully. And here it is in the movies, a scene from The Roaring Twenties (1939):

The tone of Hammett’s writing is not humorless. There’s a wry, poker-faced delivery, matter of fact, sometimes resigned and world-weary. It lives on years later in the clipped flat voice of Sgt. Joe Friday of Dragnet (on radio, 1949-1957, and TV, 1951-1959). But combine Hammett’s narrative style and the wild excesses of the novel’s storyline, and you have something that goes beyond deadpan to undisguised farce.

Organized crime is just plain butt ugly, and the people drawn to it are shallow and stupid—ugly, too. In Hammett, the same goes for the local police, incompetent and easily corruptible. It’s not the Three Stooges, but you can see them from here.

Red Harvest was originally published in four parts (1927-28) in Black Mask magazine. It was followed in hardcover by The Dain Curse (1929), The Maltese Falcon (1930), The Glass Key (1931), and The Thin Man (1934). It is currently available in print, audio, and ebook formats at amazon, Barnes&Noble, Powell’s Books, and AbeBooks. For more of Friday's Forgotten Books, click on over to Patti Abbott's blog.

 Tweet

Image credits: 

Author's photo, Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Glossary of frontier fiction

Michael Zimmer, Leaving Yuma

I was drawn to this recent novel by its theme—a perilous journey into Mexico, which as a subgenre of the western in both fiction and film continues to fascinate me. I already mentioned this a while ago in a review of The Wonderful Country. As a theme, it can be traced back at least as far as Stephen Crane, whose story “One Dash—Horses” (1896) tells of an American adventurer’s scary encounter with Mexican rurales.

Plot. In this nerve-jangling novel, the central character is a Yuma Prison inmate, who gets early release to lead a party of men into Sonora to deliver a ransom. The ransom is in the form of machine guns and ammunition for a brutal bandit, Chito Soto, who has taken over a garrison town during the revolution against Porfirio Díaz. The man is holding a man’s wife and two children, kidnapped from a train. The year is 1907.

J.T. Latham has been doing time at Yuma for smuggling consumer goods across the border. He knows the forbidding terrain south of Nogales from three years as a young captive of Yaqui Indians, who bear a savage intolerance for both Mexicans and norteamericanos. Capture means almost certain death by gruesome torture.

Sonoran desert

Getting the guns to Chito Soto is confounded by the high-handed demands of Davenport, the wealthy businessman paying the ransom; an ill-tempered and distrusting Arizona deputy sheriff; an Irish driver (the novel involves early motorized transportation); and two viciously untrustworthy Mexican indios. Latham is joined by an old friend, Luis Vega, the only man among the lot he can trust not to betray him.

Tension mounts as Latham and Vega deliver the first gun. But all well-laid plans soon begin to unravel as the novel spins into a downward spiral of treachery and sudden death. Before long, the two men are rescuing the remaining prisoners and making a punishing run for the border, pursued by Chito Soto’s soldados.

Storytelling style. While the storyline is not original, Zimmer fills it with so much suspense and so many surprises that he seems to be inventing the form. One of the least predictable is the character of Davenport’s wife, Abigail. In the routine hands of a lesser writer, she would have been sexy and copeless or a weepy, awkward burden.

Instead, Zimmer makes her bravely fearless and the possessor of unexpected skills that get Latham and Vega out of more than one life-threatening predicament. With the introduction of a woman, the novel also avoids the tempting prospects of steamy romance. Intent on saving their skins at all costs, they have no time to waste on hints of amorous attraction, so love does not bloom, not even in the end when safety is reached north of the border.

Sonoran desert mountains

And Zimmer has more than one trick up his own sleeve. There are cleverly ironic twists in the presentation of the story that nearly bend it in the direction of literary fiction. Not satisfied with a simple first-person narrative account of Latham’s adventure, which would have been finely told all by itself, Zimmer invents for it what can be called a rhetorical situation.

Latham is supposedly telling his story some 30 years later to a collector of people’s personal narratives for the Federal Writers Project. What we are reading is a verbatim transcript, with interruptions caused by a power outage during the recording and his comments about the recording equipment. The 1930s feel of the text is heightened by the editorial “bleeping” of Latham’s coarser language (h---, d---d, and so on).

Passing itself off as a long monologue, the novel also rambles believably at times, with flashbacks and digressions. Along the way, there are loose ends, unanswered questions, guesses and speculations, much as there are in anyone’s recollections of the past. There are also moral quandaries as Latham wonders aloud years later whether choices he made were right or wrong. He obviously remains haunted by them. All of which give the story a tone of credibility.

So do the occasional editor’s notes that appear in the flow of Latham’s account and the excerpts from historical records providing background and filling in the gaps in Latham’s knowledge of the Mexican Revolution and Mexico’s Indian tribes. In the end is a brief obituary for Latham, revealing a surprising life that began as a young runaway in the borderlands of the Southwest before the turn of the last century.

Aranguez, Sonora, Mexico

Logistics. Unlike other writers who can lose me at times in the description of an action scene where the logistics matter, Zimmer expertly sets up the layout beforehand. I felt I was always seeing it exactly as he was. No confusion about where anything was in relation to anything else.

An example would be the physical layout of the garrison town held by Chito Solo. You need a mental map of it to thoroughly enjoy the daring prisoner rescue and escape. Zimmer has that well in place before the action begins. And he has done it seamlessly as part of the flow of the narrative—nothing obviously methodical or deliberate about it.

Weapons. Western fiction today, much more so than in the formative years of the genre, gives considerable attention to the make, model, and caliber of weapons carried by characters. To me, this is a habit akin to name-dropping that seems often little more than a nod to the gun enthusiasts among readers. As such it often comes across as window dressing and a distraction that slows the narrative.

Zimmer is the first western writer I’ve read who actually takes the time to let his narrator explain, for instance, why such details matter—why one gun is preferable to another in a given situation. And since situations are not always clear-cut, that moment of calculation adds to the unpredictability of what lies ahead. I liked that.

Wrapping up. Leaving Yuma is one heckuva western novel. It is a well-crafted, well-paced, high-tension adventure by a gifted storyteller. If it were a movie, the excitement at times would have you under your seat. It is currently available in hardcover at amazon and Barnes&Noble.

Tweet

Interview

Michael Zimmer

Michael Zimmer has generously agreed to spend some time here at BITS to talk about Leaving Yuma and his writing. And so I turn the rest of this page over to him.

The perilous journey into Mexico has been a sub-genre of western fiction and movies from early on. What drew you to this material?

I don’t have a simple answer for that. I’ve always been intrigued by transitional periods in history, and certainly the two decades immediately following the turn of the 20th century were rife with change. The industrial revolution was in full swing, automobiles were creeping into places where they had never ventured or been seen before, and war was becoming even more brutal with the advent of powerful new weapons.

It was a time of immense change, clashing cultures, and social upheaval, and that was especially true of the U.S./Mexico border. A fascinating time with a lot going on, and researching a novel is a great way to learn more about an era or event.

Did the story come to you all at once or was that a more complex part of the process?

My ideas usually come to me piecemeal. One image that stands out in my mind, and that was instrumental in this story, was a painting I saw many years ago of a 19-teens motorcycle pulled up in front of an adobe trading post. I remember a bedroll and canteen, and there might have even been a rifle in a scabbard hanging off the side.

Another image I had was from reading about automobiles capable of carrying up to a dozen passengers taking over the old stagecoach routes. I also read an article, probably a couple of decades ago, about smuggling merchandise across the border. Not guns or whiskey, but just common trade items like bolts of cloth or lanterns or shoes, to avoid paying a tariff.

So I had a lot of scenes like that just floating around in my mind, along with partial stories that lacked either a beginning or an end, and what I thought were interesting characters but with no place to put them. And then out of the blue, it all starts falling into place.

Backlash (1956)

This is one of those 1950s westerns where a Richard Widmark can haul off and slap down a Donna Reed in the last reel with impunity. It’s also one of those moments like others in the film that seem like western-movie clip art pasted into the story to make up for lack of actual substance you can believe in.

This is a little surprising in a film from the hands of John Sturges, who made Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), The Magnificent Seven (1960), and many others. Not to mention screenwriter Borden Chase, with a notable list of western scripts that became vehicles for James Stewart.

Plot. Widmark plays a man determined to find and kill the killer of his father, so the plot is a revenge story. It’s also a mystery, because he never knew his father, and he doesn’t know who killed him. There is only a mysterious “sixth man” who disappeared after the robbery of $60,000 in gold that left several men dead.

Donna Reed, Richard Widmark

At the start of the film, Reed encounters Widmark at the scene of the crime. A hardened woman and widow of one of the dead men, she’s after the gold. Sharing a similar objective, she and Widmark develop an uneasy alliance.

The rest of the film is filler as a trip to a trading post to question the Army sergeant who buried the robbed dead men develops into a siege by Apaches. Escaping that, Widmark tangles with a pair of men (Harry Morgan, Robert J. Wilke) whose brother also died in the robbery. They are after the missing gold, too. A saloon shooting puts Wilke out of the picture, and Widmark takes a slug in the shoulder, but Morgan survives to make trouble later.

Reed with Bowie

Some kind of steamy attraction builds between Widmark and Reed as he forces a so-long kiss on her, and she gives him a slap. Later, she finds him in the desert and cuts the slug from his shoulder with a Bowie knife, the only realistic part of it his agonized cries as she does the deed. They snuggle with more kissing in the campfire light as he swoons under the influence of a  “Southern painkiller” she has slipped to him. It apparently also is effective as an antibiotic, as he claims to be mostly recovered the following morning.

Now available: How the West Was Written, Vol. 1

David Cranmer over at Beat to a Pulp Press has just announced publication of my new book, How the West Was Written, Vol. 1, 1880 - 1906. Here's a short description from the introduction:

This book began as a question about the origins of the cowboy western . . . how it grew from Owen Wister’s bestseller, The Virginian (1902), to Zane Grey’s first novels a decade later. A reading of frontier fiction from that period, however, soon reveals that the cowboy western was only one of many different kinds of stories being set in the West.

Besides novels about ranching and the cattle industry, writers wrote stories about railroads, mining, timber, the military, politics, women’s rights, temperance, law enforcement, engineering projects, homesteaders, detectives, preachers and, of course, Indians, all of it an outpouring between the years 1880–1915. That brief 35-year period extends from the Earp-Clanton gunfight in Tombstone, Arizona, to the start of the First World War.

The chapters of How the West Was Written tell a story of how the western frontier fed the imagination of writers, both men and women. It illustrates how the cowboy is only one small figure in a much larger fictional landscape. There are early frontier novels in which he is the central character, while in others he’s only a two-dimensional, tobacco-chewing caricature, or just an incidental part of the scenery.

A reading of this body of work reveals that the best-remembered novel from that period, The Virginian, is only one among many early western stories. And it was not the first. The western terrain was used to explore ideas already present in other popular fiction—ideas about character, women, romance, villainy, race, and so on. A modern reader of early western fiction discovers that Wister’s novel was part of a flood of creative output. He and, later, Zane Grey were just two of many writers using the frontier as a setting for telling the human story.

Readers’ comments. "This is a splendid study of early western fiction, most of it written contemporaneously with the settlement of the American West. A surprising number of women authors are included among the sixty-some novels reviewed by the author. The book offers penetrating, rich, and lucid examinations of these early novels, and gives us a good understanding of where western fiction came from and how it has evolved. Highly recommended." 
—Richard S. Wheeler, Spur Award-winning author

"[Ron Scheer's] scholarship is meticulous and the book is an enlightening contribution to American literature with this study of the Western, its roots and its themes. I'm proud to have it on my bookshelf. It's unique in the canon, as far as I know." 
—Carol Buchanan, Spur-Award-winning author

Currently available at amazon in ebook format for kindle and in paperback. In paper also at Createspace. A second volume is in the works for the years 1907 - 1915.

Ruminations

Jasmine blooming in the side yard

This being Easter weekend, the ruminations of this lapsed Lutheran lapse a bit into the liturgical. Continued below are excerpts from the journal I've been keeping since leaving the hospital. Weigh what you find lightly. 

3/10/14. There are moments of fear about what lies ahead, but I almost automatically turn back to the present moment. So I write here that it’s another flawless morning, the sun breaking brightly on San Jacinto, the air utterly still after brisk breezes. I open doors and windows, and turn on the patio fountain. True, I can feel a little anxious when I sense something unexpected, like discomfort along the incision that’s supposed to be healing in my scalp. But dismissing alarm comes as easily as turning to another distraction, especially reading or writing. If there’s a heaven, as someone has said, I’ll be disappointed if there isn’t a library.

3/11/14. At yesterday’s visit with the radiation oncologist, she regaled us with stories of med school worthy of a stand-up routine, and again revised upward the window of possible years that a more aggressive treatment may offer me. I welcome this development as a challenge I had not anticipated—a long-term pushback against the cancer that redefines the time to come. Rather than some graceful submission to a fate beyond my powers to avert, life becomes a whole new enterprise. I like the prospects of that.

Our ocotillo

With my Lutheran upbringing, cancer finds me reading books on spiritual matters once thoughtfully read and found now tucked away on the shelves. And then there’s the devotional material that comes my way, intended to be spiritually uplifting—like from the nice folks who leave religious tracts in my screen door.

Glossary of frontier fiction: P(piazza – popple)

Below is a list of mostly forgotten terms, people, and the occasional song, drawn from a reading of frontier fiction, 1880–1915. Each week a new list, progressing through the alphabet, “from A to Izzard.”

piazza = a colonnaded porch. “Conrath’s shadow was thrown up against the side of the house, as he came along the piazza, walking with a heavy, careful step.” Mary Hallock Foote, The Led-Horse Claim.

Piazza, Verona, c1900

pick a crow with = to pick a quarrel with someone. “If you’ve got a crow to pick with me, bring it out in the open, and we’ll pull feathers in daylight.” Dennis H. Stovall, The Gold Bug Story Book.

picket = small detachment of troops positioned towards the enemy to give early warning of attack. “And the riders, front and rear, were in the nature of pickets; for, though it was unlikely that any one would be met at that time of night, it was just as well to take no chances.” A. M. Chisholm, Desert Conquest.

picket house = a dwelling with walls made of stakes or poles driven into the ground. “A picket house is sorter like a Mexican jacal; it’s jest poles driv’ in the ground, clost together, an’ chinked, for a wall; the dirt fer a floor; an’ a roof put over of some sort.” Grace and Alice MacGowan, Aunt Huldah.

Picketwire / Pick Wire = a river in southeast Colorado, called La Riviere-de-la-Purgatoire (River of Lost Souls) by early French explorers. “When the cowboy followed the pioneer, knowing neither French nor Spanish, he onomatopoetized the last appellation into ‘The Pick Wire,’ which was as near as he could come to the pronunciation of Purgatoire.” Cyris Townsend Brady, Web of Steel.

picture hat = an elaborately decorated, broad-brimmed hat for women. “Her figure was perfection, her gowns of the quiet elegance of ultra-refinement always harmonious, as now, from the tip of the jeweled aigrette in her picture-hat to the points of her aristocratic shoe.” Hattie Horner Louthan, This Was a Man!

Bertrand Sinclair, Big Timber (1916)

Looking for a theme song to go with this novel by Canadian writer Bertrand Sinclair, you might pick Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” It’s a story set in the old growth woods of British Columbia, where a one-sided marriage of convenience leads to a good deal of heartbreak and disappointment.

Character. The central character is 22-year old Estella Benton, suddenly thrust on her own by the accidental death of a father who has left her penniless. Unprepared for the cold, unpredictable world, she is summed up by the narrator as “a young woman who had grown up quite complacently.” She has been “wholly shielded from the human maelstrom, fed, clothed, taught, an untried product of home and schools.”

As for the future, she has had no more than a vague notion of eventual marriage to a Prince Charming who would come along to sweep her off her feet—and maintain her in a life style to which she has been long accustomed.

Plan B finds her on a long train journey to remote British Columbia, on the banks of a lake north of Vancouver, where she joins her brother, Charlie, who has a start-up logging company. Obsessed with becoming wealthy, he has little regard for his sister’s personal welfare and puts her to work as camp cook, a grueling job that exhausts her and brings her to near despair.

Movie still, Wallace Reid, center, as Jack Fyfe

Romance. A rescuer and prince by almost any standard shows up in the manly form of Jack Fyfe, who has a well-run logging operation of his own. He partners with Charlie to deliver on a timber contract and befriends Estella, who discourages what she interprets as his unwelcome attention.

Any reader can see that he is filled with a gentle compassion for her and has fallen quite in love. But she will have none of this rough, handsome man of the woods. Nevermind that he has a fine intelligence and tender sensibilities. He frightens her, and for no apparent reason than her unwillingness to consider meeting him on equal terms, as a caring, considerate friend and potential life mate. For love to be true, she has to feel it as a delirious infatuation, and it’s not there.