Alfred Henry Lewis, Wolfville (1897)

Alfred Henry Lewis (1855-1914), published a trio of books, Wolfville (1897), Wolfville Days (1902), and Wolfville Nights (1902). Each is a collection of sketches set in a fictional frontier settlement in the Arizona desert. Ominously called Wolfville, it was no doubt meant to emulate the very real town of Tombstone.

Cast of characters. The narrator of the sketches is a longtime resident of Wolfville, a man from Tennessee known as the Old Cattleman. The old man spends his time in the saloon or on the hotel verandah—usually drinking and smoking a corncob pipe—where the unnamed writer prods him into telling his yarns.

The yarns concern the dozen or so characters who live in or pass through Wolfville. Some of them cowboy for a living; one drives the stage; and one offers his services as the resident faro dealer at the Red Light saloon. One is the town’s doctor, and another is the town marshal. Mostly they seem to have a lot of time on their hands—time to sit around drinking and talking.

One of the women in town runs the OK Restauraw [sic], and another assists as lookout for the faro dealer, keeping an eye on the bets. The stories are similar to what you’d find in a TV sitcom. There’s this stable of characters, and each chapter finds them with some unexpected situation that throws them into a comical upset.

The Old Cattleman

Style. What makes these stories genuinely entertaining is the way they are told. The Old Cattleman speaks in a mix of Southern and Westernisms, drawing heavily from the language of cowboys, card playing, and gambling. Multi-syllable words straight from the dictionary are mixed freely with slang, malapropisms, skewed syntax, and chopped logic.

Pronouns include you-alls, we-alls, and they-alls. “Which” functions as an all purpose relative pronoun and can be found at the beginnings of sentences even as the first word of a story. Language is often figurative and mixed with unexpected analogies. A man is described as so obstinate that he “wouldn’t move camp for a prairie fire.” An action with no useful effect is said to be like “throwin’ water on a drowned rat.”

Cherokee Hall

Character. The test of character in Wolfville comes down to whether a man has grit. Of all the men in town, Cherokee Hall earns the most admiration, and partly for being beyond fathoming. As a gambler, he has a reputation for being always honest, and he calmly deals with even the most obstreperous players at the gaming tables.

He shows true heroism when he gallantly risks his life to save a coach full of passengers from an Indian attack. Surprised by a band of Apaches, Cherokee shows thoughtful concern for a woman passenger and her children. Asking the driver to stop for a moment, he leaps out with his guns and makes a stand.

When the coach arrives in Wolfville, its passengers unscathed, rescuers quickly come to his aid. They find him shot once but still alive, the bodies of Indians he’s killed lying around him. His actions demonstrate what is summed up as Doc Peets’ words to live by: “Life ain’t in holding a good hand but in playing a pore hand well.”

Women. Wolfville is a man’s world, and the men generally keep women at a safe distance. Using faro terminology, Cherokee advises the other men to always “copper a female,” betting on them to lose. The one exception is Faro Nell, who frequents the Red Light saloon and is regarded as one of the boys. She gets her name by being the lookout at the faro table for Cherokee, who calls her a “winner every trip.”

Book: The Cowboy Humor of Alfred Henry Lewis, part 3

Today I play Word Detective and offer a glossary of the colorful and whimsical language used by the Old Cattleman in Alfred Henry Lewis’ sketches from Wolfville, his fictional town in southeast Arizona, circa 1880.

I had to search high and low for the meanings of most of these terms. Ramon Adams’ The Cowboy Dictionary was a help, and where that reference failed, I went online and found many at Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang and dictionary.com. Some just plain threw me.

I’ve attempted to create some order by putting them in groups. If reading a glossary is not your idea of fun, here are a few words to whet your curiosity: larrup, jodarter, fan-tods, air-tights, clanjamfry, ranikaboo, pirooting, bazoo, dornick, hewgag, skew-gee, and wamus.

Actions

cooper = to spoil, ruin

crawfish = to back down, renege on a previous statement

dragging a rope/lariat = said of a woman on the lookout for a husband

drop one’s watermelon = make a serious mistake

lam = beat, thrash

larrup = strike, thrash

saw off = dispose of

Complementary terms

coony = sharp-witted, shrewd

jodarter = something or someone unsurpassed

sand = courage

Conditions

brunkled up = uncomfortably confined

fan-tods = nervous upset, fits

Death and dying

beef = kill (for food)

peter = die

quit out = die

too dead to skin = dead for a long time, unquestionably dead

Book: The Cowboy Humor of Alfred Henry Lewis, part 2

My commentary continues for those who haven’t read enough about this entertaining example of early 20th century American humor.

About cowboys. The name of this collection is somewhat misleading. Lewis’s stories are not about cowboys. They take place mostly within the city limits of Wolfville and rarely venture out to the open range.

Wolfville is, in fact, a mining town, and you might mistake it for another famous mining town in southeastern Arizona – that being Tombstone. However, while Doc Holliday might show up at the dance hall in Wolfville (and does), there’s no reference to others whom history tells us took up residence in Tombstone. There are no Earps or Clantons or anyone much resembling them. There’s an OK establishment, but it’s a hostelry, not a corral.

And while we’re on the subject of real people, the Old Cattleman has in fact made the acquaintance of Tom Jeffords of Tucson, who helped broker a peace treaty with the Apaches (a topic covered in the review of Broken Arrow, which appeared here previously). He finds Jeffords a bit odd, but doesn’t dislike him.

  

But he doesn’t have much to say about cowboys. Most of what the book has to say about them is in an opening essay ("Some Cowboy Facts," from Wolfville Nights) in which Lewis speaks in his own words. And he doesn’t contribute a lot that we don’t already know.

They were out on the trail for months at a time, he notes, and generally comported themselves professionally while on the job. A trip into town, however, when the work was done, was opportunity to cut loose and spend every cent of a cowboy’s pay. Which could take one or two weeks.

The money went for liquor, gambling, and any other form of “action” (unspecified). Only a handful of rules required enforcement: 1) no insulting the ladies, 2) no use of firearms indoors, 3) no riding your horse indoors, and 4) no riding your horse on the sidewalks.

If there’s a theatre in town, a cowboy might smuggle a rope into a show and lasso a female performer from the stage. Afterward, should she be willing, said cowboy may escort her to the dance hall where they’ll dance until dawn.

Cowboys were fiercely clannish, looking after their own, from setting their broken bones to springing them from jail if need be. They could squander their earnings on a few luxury items, like fancy hatbands, spurs, saddle, and leggings.

Book: The Cowboy Humor of Alfred Henry Lewis, part 1

Tag line for today: I read old forgotten books so you don’t have to.

This will be one of those multi-part posts, because old books about the West are a big interest of mine. I know that enough is too much, but I want to share here whatever patience permits. Today’s book is a 1988 anthology of sketches written by Alfred Henry Lewis (1855-1914), selected from his books Wolfville (1897), Wolfville Days (1902), and Wolfville Nights (1902).

Who the heck was Alfred Henry Lewis? Lewis comes out of a 19^th-century literary fraternity of writers called local colorists. I’m already in deep water here because I have only a scattered knowledge of American literary history. But I can say this:

If you’ve read Mark Twain, you’ve encountered this kind of writing. Think of Huckleberry Finn. It can be nostalgic and sentimental or humorous and satirical. It’s typically written in a regional dialect and intent on preserving a passing way of life, usually rural.

Alfred Henry Lewis (left) comes along at the tail end of that whole tradition. He grew up in Ohio, practiced law in Cleveland and then fled to the West for a time in the 1880s. He worked as a cowboy on ranches in New Mexico and Colorado and as a freighter on an overland line from Las Vegas, New Mexico, to the Texas Panhandle and between there and Dodge City.

Returning to the Midwest, he took up residence in Kansas City. There he began publishing stories in the newspapers about a mythical Arizona town called Wolfville. They were so popular he was soon earning $15 a week writing for the Kansas City Star, and he quit practicing law to devote the rest of his life to writing.

Besides his many Wolfville sketches, he was a fiercely partisan political writer and a friend of William Randolph Hearst. He also had the acquaintance of Teddy Roosevelt and Bat Masterson. He was hugely popular, and readers of western fiction apparently ranked him with Owen Wister and O. Henry.

He is  unknown today.

Which is unfortunate, because he is genuinely entertaining and a window into that period of American social history and the American West in particular.