Thomas D. Clagett, The Pursuit of Murieta

This novel is a lot like a Budd Boetticher western. It has the structure of a movie plot, and much of the action takes place a good distance from civilization. A group of male characters deal with life and death issues like what to do with and what to believe about a man they have captured. And a woman riding with them has an agenda of her own.

Plot.  At the center of the story is real-life Mexican bandit Joaquin Murieta who harried the americanos flooding into California after it became a state. Something of a Robin Hood, he reputedly stole from the wealthy to distribute among the poor. He was a popular hero among the disenfranchised and a pain in the backside of law enforcement, which found itself plagued with not one but several “Joaquins” roaming the state.

The story begins with a scene of unprovoked yanqui violence against Murieta and his wife as they attempt to return to Mexico after an unfruitful sojourn in the California gold fields. Then it jumps ahead to 1853 during a few days in which Murieta is pursued by a contingent of rangers tasked by the governor with bringing him in. They finally run him down in the mountains above San Gabriel Mission.

Lt. Ambrose Quick, the young man in command, has trouble keeping order among his men and deciding whether to believe their captive when he claims to be Murieta. Addie Moody, a saloon girl who has joined them has revenge in mind. Her sister was raped and killed by a man she believes is Murieta.

Style and structure. Like a movie, the novel has a single central conflict, pitting two men against each other: Murieta and Lt. Quick. One of them is more admirable than the other, but neither of them is a villain. That honor goes to one of Quick’s men, Ned Needle, who is a hateful bigot, driven by sneering contempt for everyone.

As in a movie, the characters tend to be types whom we quickly recognize. Besides the bigot Needle, there’s a drunk, a self-important sheriff, his featherbrained daughter, and a mysterious Mexican woman. Addie Moody is the outspoken prostitute with more intelligence than any of the men. Besides Lt. Quick, only one of them actually breaks out of the pattern created for them and makes a choice that amounts to a change in their character.

Quick is interesting for starting out a man with aspirations far beyond his capacity to achieve. He wants to be mayor of Los Angeles, but has no qualifications for the job. He hopes that capturing Murieta will sweep him into office. Before the story is over, he makes some difficult decisions and some unwelcome discoveries that both lift and lower him in our estimation.

Many of the characters in the novel are based on actual historical figures. Ten or more of them walk from the pages of history. Maybe most surprising is to find “Judge” Roy Bean running a saloon in the little settlement of San Gabriel. Andres Pico, retired Mexican general runs horses on the verdant ranges of the San Fernando Valley.

Roger Pocock, Curly: A Tale of the Arizona Desert (1905)

Although vengeance is a common theme in the modern western, Roger Pocock (1865-1941) provides one of its rare occurrences in the early-early western. Not only vengeance, but counter-vengeance. By the end of the novel, there’s been a truckload of scores settled.

In a story set in an eye-for-an-eye world, it’s an irony that the narrator is a one-eyed cowpuncher by the name of Chalkeye. And being a Brit, Pocock gives his own slant to the usual frame of reference. The central characters include a titled family from Ireland, and the back-story involves the forced removal of tenant farmers there from their homes.

Plot. Lord Balshannon has bought an old hacienda in southern Arizona. But his efforts to build a cattle ranch are cursed by one of his former tenants, Ryan, who has also come to America. Building his own business in gloomily named Grave City, Ryan becomes a wealthy man. He lures Balshannon into ruin with alcohol and gambling and eventually seizes his ranch, sending his dying wife into the desert to expire.

Illustration by Stanley L. Wood

Both men have fathered sons. Ryan’s son Michael builds a financial empire back East, while Jim, son of the lord, runs the Balshannon ranch. A third father who plays a key role is McCalmont, the leader of a gang of outlaws who hang out at Robbers’ Roost on the Outlaw Trail. He has an offspring by the name of Curly, who we eventually learn is not his son but a daughter. Something of a wildcat in a cowboy outfit, she would be a match for Deadwood’s Calamity Jane.

Following that, it would take several paragraphs to untangle the twists of plot involving Curly, Jim, Chalkeye, and the others. In brief, there’s a shootout in a saloon, an escape from a Mexican jail, a kidnapping, the wearing of disguises, separations, reunions, and considerable travel on horseback across arid lands with the law in hot pursuit. 

Saguaro, (CC) Bernard Gagnon

Women. The usual early western after The Virginian features a romance. The woman is young and pretty; the cowboy handsome and a natural gentleman. But this novel has a girl who’d rather be a boy. Purposely disguised to protect her from sexual predators, she has come to like the freedoms and the opportunities that go with wearing britches.

Curly is a firecracker. So thoroughly boyish, even the narrator refers to her as “he” and “him.” Jim has been her friend and co-worker for many years. Their friendship qualifies as male bonding. When she finally reveals her true gender to him, it’s only to account for her “weaknesses,” like sobbing when she kills two men in a gunfight.

The gender bending with a cross-dressing heroine keeps any romantic sentiment pretty much at bay. In the last chapter, Pocock jumps ahead to a quick glimpse of Jim and Curly’s happy wedded bliss. How husband and wife have resolved any awkwardness about gender roles we are not given to know.

Mystery Valley, Arizona (CC) Bernard Gagnon

Character. In Chalkeye’s opinion, “a right proper man is strong, rough, hardy; he ought to have a temper and be master, ready to work and fight for his women folk.” The man who comes closest to that qualification is the character of McCalmont, the leader of the gang.

While there’s no question of his being strong, rough, and hardy, McCalmont is also a complex figure. He has turned to crime after losing his Kansas homestead to a big rancher. Economic necessity and an appetite for justice have driven him to thieving and robbing trains and banks.

If he has claim to any honor, it’s that he steals only from the wealthy, and he is a fast and true friend to anyone who befriends him. Meanwhile, he is a brilliant strategist and tactician, the brains behind an operation that local law enforcement is powerless to stop.

He’s also honest about what he is. He knows that what he does is wrong, and he makes no attempt to hide behind the law. He accepts whatever punishment he has coming, either in this world or the next.

Cowboys in the news, 1882

Cowboys of Arizona, W. W. Rogers, 1882

According to the newspapers, cowboy-related trouble in Arizona and New Mexico got so bad, no less than an American president saw fit to speak out against it. Shortly after taking office in 1881, Chester Arthur had this to say:

A band of desperadoes known as “cowboys” from ninety to 100 men, have been engaged for months in committing acts of lawlessness and brutality, which the local authorities have been unable to suppress.

A correspondent’s write-up for the Cleveland Herald, later published in the Chicago Daily Tribune, January 5, 1882, clarifies for readers that there are two kinds of “cowboy.” One is a cattle herder, and there are “several thousand” of them.

The ideal cowboy has long hair, big boots, leather pants, buckskin shirt, and the broad white hat, with spurs as big as saucers.

These cowboys pose no problem until they get paid, when they head for town where “there is no limit to their outrageous conduct.”

They get drunk, gamble, fight, and shoot recklessly at friend or foe. A long plug of black tobacco, a couple of revolvers, and a heavy knife are sure accompaniments of a cowboy.

Killing another man is a badge of honor, “so that friendship or kindred ties are no barriers to the cowardly bullet.” If they don’t like a man, they may shoot a cigar out of his mouth. A stovepipe hat is sure to attract gunfire. Shooting up a town, they are said to have “murdered old men, babies, and women.”

Cowboys in the news, 1881

Tribune Building, Chicago

In the 1880s, cowboys on the frontier were regarded as untamed and more than a little dangerous. A correspondent for the Chicago Daily Tribune, writing from Tucson, Arizona, in 1881, gives an illuminating account of them.

He’s interviewed one cowboy, Jerry Benton, who’s been charged with murder and is on his way by train (and still armed) to face trial. Benton, who has killed men before, expects acquittal unless the jury has too much sympathy for the victim. “The law gets the best of us fellows,” he says, but he’ll stand trial “like a man.”

He has the “scarred face and desperate look so characteristic of the border-ruffian,” says the writer. Yet a man friendly to Benton calls him “a good fellow,” who behaves badly only when he’s “angry or under the influence of liquor.”

Photo by Erwin Smith, 1909

His “huge revolver” is a weapon he carries for self-defense. In Arizona, it’s explained, you can’t be “squeamish about shooting” if you expect to stay alive. And in these few paragraphs we get the picture of an affable man of both honor and violence. It’s the seed from which the myth of the cowboy would grow.

Cowboy characteristics. Benton, we learn, is one of a type. A cattle herder originating on the plains of Texas, the cowboy has now followed the expanding cattle industry into Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. An expert horseman, he can outride an Apache or a soldier. He may be American, Mexican, a half-breed, or Indian.

Besides a six-gun and belt, he carries a knife and repeating rifle and wears “a huge pair of spurs.” While “quick, wiry, and intrepid,” he is also “often generous and humane.” In temperament, “he is as uncivilized as a grizzly-bear and reckless as a savage.” For citizens and immigrants “he is fast becoming a terror” as he shoots up frontier towns. Stories abound of his “bloodthirsty career.”

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Tombstone, Arizona; built 1882.

Practical jokes. There follow several stories of cowboy hi-jinks. According to report, a bunch of them cleared a restaurant by shooting at the plates in front of customers. Ministers were apparently the frequent butt of this kind of humor. In two accounts, cowboys enter churches and threaten to shoot the preacher.

Curly Bill (Brocius), who’d already shot a marshal in Tombstone, is given credit for terrorizing a congregation in Charleston, Arizona. While Curly Bill’s gang blocked the exits, the reverend was forced at gunpoint to do a dance. The writer wryly concludes: “The minister is now more strongly opposed to dancing than before.”

Other desperadoes who get a mention in the story include Johnny Behind the Deuce and Buckskin Sam. Of the latter, a story is reported that he celebrated the purchase of a new gun by firing it while riding through the streets of town. Later he turned himself in and “paid a handsome fine.”

Charleston, Arizona, 1885

Jack Slade is offered as a “specimen desperado,” and a story is told of his merciless killing of “an old enemy.” Tied to a post, the man was shot 23 times. Slade was said to be in no hurry, stopping to have a drink after every two shots. The final fatal round was discharged into the man’s mouth. Not finished, Slade cut off the dead man’s ears. (There’s yet another version of this story at legendsofamerica.com.)

Summing up, the writer portrays the majority of cowboys as a dangerous menace. They sell cattle to their “Greaser” friends in Mexico, then steal them back to sell again north of the border. As they invade towns and terrify citizens, they are no better than roaming bands of “bloodthirsty and daring” hooligans – Hell’s Angels on horseback. 

“A wild life on the plains,” the writer surmises, “is not generally adapted to bring out the better qualities of a man’s life.” There is talk of sending in Federal troops to “exterminate” this element. The writer concludes by pointing out that the spread of unchecked lawlessness has a way of discouraging agricultural and mining development – and we can’t have that.

Photo credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Robert Alexander Wason, Friar Tuck (1912)

Johnny D. Boggs, Northfield

Sampling modern-day western writers, I picked this novel based on the James-Younger gang’s bungled bank robbery in Northfield, Minnesota. The year was 1876. To mix a little fact with fiction here, it was the same year as Lonesome Dove and Little Big Horn.

For anyone who has seen the variety of movies based on this incident, the overall story will be familiar. Jesse and Frank James team up with three Younger brothers, plus three others, and journey from Missouri to Minnesota to knock off a “Yankee bank.”

Unable to get into the bank safe that fateful day, they shot one of the employees dead before making an escape into a hail of gunfire from Northfield citizens. Two of the gang died on the streets of town, and the Youngers were captured days later. Only Jesse and Frank made it back home.

Boggs’ challenge was to make this all new again with a fresh point of view. And he does. Each chapter is told from the perspective of a different person. Some are members of the gang; others are local citizens and law officers. There are 23 in all, plus a prologue and epilogue by Cole Younger, remembering the whole episode from the distance of many years later.

Jesse and Frank James, 1872

From Boggs’ notes at the end, it seems safe to say the book is based on considerable research. So we learn a lot about the men, as well as the Minnesotans whose lives they invaded. Still, it’s a montage and not a complete picture, which makes it as much speculative fiction as history.

Anyway, I liked it. The story begins several weeks before the raid and ends several weeks after. It builds slowly as the men split up once they get to Minnesota and decide on which bank to rob. Then there’s time off for drinking and visits to brothels, as they gradually run through their travel funds.

Curiously, the excitement doesn’t really take hold until after the mid-point of the story when the gang has fled town and is on the run. Shot up and lost, riding stolen horses in dismal autumn weather, they are a sorry lot. Bickering among themselves, regretful and miserable, they are hungry and increasingly desperate. Their clothes have been reduced to tatters.

In this 150th year after the start of the Civil War, the book is a reminder of the sectional animosities that lingered long afterwards. For Confederate supporters, memories of humiliation and abuse at the hands of Unionists still rankled. We are also reminded that the James and Younger boys had ridden with the murderous Quantrill Raiders during that war.

The Left Handed Gun (1958)

Here’s another one of many screen versions of the story of Billy the Kid. Based on a teleplay by Gore Vidal, this first film by director Arthur Penn may or may not be faithful to Vidal. It surely is not faithful to history.

This time, thirty-three-year-old Paul Newman plays the nineteen-year-old Billy. Like The True Story of Jesse James (1957), the film gives us a painfully confused young outlaw as a protagonist. Two other films from the same period come to mind, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and The Young Stranger (1957), about alienated young males.

Must have been something about the 1950s. I felt a twinge of it even as a farm boy in Nebraska.

The concept of the film had some promise. What if you forgot about all the previous Hollywood versions of Billy and portrayed him instead as he probably was – an adolescent boy who never had a real father, a lost young soul who was also quick with a gun.

Then let the murder of his father-like employer, John Tunstall, be the motivation to kill the four men who ambushed him. Cast him as an avenging angel, serving his own sense of justice. Alas, taking the law into his own hands gets him deeper and deeper into trouble. First he is badly burned in the torching of a house where he has taken refuge. Then his old friend Pat Garrett goes after him.

The result is a kind of melodrama that’s supposed to feel like a tragedy. Which is OK, but a half century later, Paul Newman’s portrayal of this beautiful loser seems more than a little heavy-handed. The broadness of Billy’s goofy playfulness with his buddies and the scenes of adolescent angst seem styled for the stage. But they feel overdone for the camera.

The film offers an interesting example of how the past gets mythologized. The messiness of historical fact is simplified and understood in terms of the present day. So we get Billy as an alienated youth of the 1950s. While the real Billy might be flattered to be portrayed by the likes of Paul Newman, he’d surely not recognize most of his own story.

History vs. Hollywood. The film portrays the Lincoln County War as a conflict between rival cattle barons – a range war. This is a Hollywood shortcut that sidesteps the complexity of the competing business interests that fought over economic control of the region.

The actual “war” in the streets of Lincoln, New Mexico, was a day-long affair and involved Army troops from a nearby fort. The McSween house, where Billy and the other men were under attack, was a large adobe structure that burned slowly. Billy escaped unscathed under cover of darkness – not badly burned in a sudden conflagration and believed dead, as the film tells it.

The Sheriff Brady killed by Billy was not one of the men who ambushed Tunstall. Billy had killed him in younger days after a heated dispute in a saloon. So when he signed on with Tunstall, he had already killed a law officer – not a street drunk who once insulted his mother, as the film suggests.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)

There are two or three versions of this film, depending on how you count them. According to film historians, it was rushed into theaters by MGM in 1973 before receiving a “fine cut.” In 1988, there was another version put together by Turner Entertainment, meant to restore director Sam Peckinpah’s vision of the film.

Then 2005 saw yet another attempt to create a definitive version. These last two of the three are currently available on DVD. If you want, you can put them side-by-side on two laptops and let them duke it out.

I saw the original in 1973 and found it unmemorable, so I can’t say today that its vision is much different from the latter two. But it’s probably safe to say that all three attempt to (a) portray the Old West realistically and (b) make an angry statement about corrupt and oppressive power structures. It was, after all, the year of Watergate.

History vs. myth. The film tells a story about Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid that is more or less accurate in some details. Billy’s breakout from the Lincoln County jail follows historical accounts fairly closely. But it shouldn’t be taken as a reenactment.

Neither should Garrett’s shooting of Billy at the end of the film. The writers had read their history, then “dramatized” it. Garrett sits outside the room where Billy has a lovemaking scene, and listens to the sound of what seems to be soul-satisfying sex. Then while Billy goes out to bring back something to eat, Garrett slips inside, where he is waiting when Billy returns.

In real-life that fateful night, Garrett and Billy happened by chance to meet in a darkened room. Garrett was probably surprised. Billy probably never knew what hit him. And he hadn’t come from lovemaking but from the nearby rooms of friends, where he’d shown up for a late night meal.

Mark Lee Gardner’s To Hell on a Fast Horse portrays both men as simply that – men whose lives took them in directions that finally converged. Billy was both a thief and a killer; Garrett as sheriff of Lincoln County had taken on the job of stopping him.

Peckinpah’s film prefers the myth. Not only is his Billy a free spirit at odds with unscrupulous cattlemen, speculators, and businessmen. Garrett is portrayed as corrupted by serving their interests. “It’s just a job,” he says, justifying himself. But to Billy (and Peckinpah, one gathers) he’s a man who has sold out.

Book: To Hell on a Fast Horse

New Mexico was no land of enchantment during 1870-1910. After the Civil War, it was the frontier beyond the frontier, where the West was still wild and woolly. Territorial officials, duly elected and otherwise, were corrupt right up to the governor. Honest men with any power or authority were a rarity.

The murderous efforts of those outside the law kept them even rarer. Pat Garrett, a gambler, speculator, one-time buffalo hunter, and part-time lawman was one of the few with the determination to take on some of the criminals – and one of them in particular, Billy the Kid.

Mark Lee Gardner has written a well-researched book about both men. He claims that everything he has to say about them, including the words he attributes to them, are recorded and documented. His account is a happy mix of history and good storytelling. While he writes in a conversational style, his scholarship is evident from the 50 pages of notes and bibliography, plus a lengthy index.

Pat Garrett. Gardner finds both men engaging but keeps a historian’s distance. If anything, he may wish that events after the shooting of Billy had been kinder to Garrett. What made him a fearless man-hunter did not serve him in his later pursuits. He tried various business ventures that didn’t pan out. And he made enemies among people who were unscrupulous enough to want him dead.

He also had a love of gambling and drinking (not uncommon in the West) and a tendency to make the wrong friends. While a supportive husband and father of eight children, he let it be known that he kept a mistress. During most of his years, he was either poorly paid or in debt. He was finally murdered with a shot to the back of the head while stopping to take a leak at the side of a road near Las Cruces in 1908. His murder, like others at the time in New Mexico, was never satisfactorily solved.

The irony of Garrett is that today he is scarcely remembered, while the outlaw he killed has been mythologized and celebrated for over a century. For the hundreds who visit Billy’s grave in Sumner, New Mexico, its only the rare soul that seeks out Pat Garret’s in El Paso. Even today, there are renewed efforts afoot to have Billy the Kid pardoned by the state governor, and descendants of Pat Garrett continue to defend their grandfather.

The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972)

Myth, reality, and Hollywood are fairly evenly matched in this film about the James-Younger gang’s failed attempt to rob a bank in Northfield, Minnesota, in September 1876. Cliff Robertson as Cole Younger takes center stage from the more often romanticized Jesse James, played here by Robert Duvall. As a corrective to all that romance, Duvall’s Jesse is more than a little whacked out – and cold blooded.

The film correctly shows them all as Confederate guerillas still fighting the Yankees a decade after the Civil War had ended. In the film, their reputation as heroes results from resistance to the land-hungry railroads, robbing trains and sharing the proceeds with the poor. No less a figure than Alan Pinkerton himself is enlisted to bring a stop to them. The film gives him credit for paying off the right Missouri state legislators to prevent a populist effort to grant amnesty for the boys. While speculative and oversimplified, the film shows that writer-director Philip Kaufman had looked at some history books before writing his script.

Cliff Robertson’s pipe-smoking Cole Younger is a congenial outlaw. Intelligent and reflective, he’s fascinated by new technology. A steam tractor on the streets of town stops him in his tracks with wonder – or “wonderment,” his favorite word. However, he does not see the appeal of baseball when he happens upon a game. “Our national sport is shooting,” he says, “and always will be.”

History tells us that the gang rode into Northfield wearing long coats to hide their guns – and looking like cattlemen in this community of Scandinavian immigrants. But the robbery didn’t go as planned because of a time lock on the bank’s vault. A bank employee and a bystander in the street were shot dead, and two of the gang were killed as the citizens fired on them during their escape from town. The gang then split up and only the James brothers got back to Missouri. The Youngers were caught by a posse and sent to prison.