Frank Collinson, Life in the Saddle

There were cowboys, and then there were cowboys. Frank Collinson (1855-1943) had a “life in the saddle” so full, it’s hard to believe it all happened to one man. Born in Yorkshire, England, he was nineteen on his first trail drive from Texas to Nebraska in 1874.

By the age of twenty, he’d become a buffalo hunter. When the “big kill” was over, four years later, he cowboyed for the first cattle barons on the western plains of Texas. Along the way, he fought Indians and, while in New Mexico, met Billy the Kid and cattleman John Chisum.

Ironically, maybe all of his story would have been lost if he hadn’t been persuaded to write of his early life for Ranch Romances in the 1930s. There today you’ll find numerous articles and a couple short stories written by him, illustrated by Texas artist Harold D. Bugbee, whose drawings also appear in this edition.

First published in 1963, Life in the Saddle is a memoir assembled from those writings for Ranch Romances, his letters, and interviews with people who knew him. It was put together by Mary Whatley Clarke, western historian and small town Texas newspaper editor, who seems to have had an eventful life of her own.

Buffalo hunting grounds of the Llano Estacado

Violence and death. What’s startling about Collinson's recollections is the starkness of the picture he draws of frontier violence. Any fan of noir western fiction would find his historical West familiar territory. While he doesn’t dramatize the bloodshed, his portrayal of it is unflinching.

Death, in fact, is a prevailing theme. On his first trail drive across the Indian Territories, he has a 19-year-old’s foolish wish to tangle with Indians, then doesn’t see a single one. But delivering beef to the Sioux agency at Fort Robinson in western Nebraska, he gets a jolt of reality. The men look pretty fit (many six feet and over, he guesses, and 200 pounds), and among the women there are already many widows.

Returning to Texas, he partners with another buffalo hunter, Jim White, who had once taken a job with the U. S. Army in 1866, clearing the field of dead cavalrymen after the Fetterman Massacre. The next year White was at Fort Phil Kearny, Dakota Territory, when it was attacked by 3,000 Indians, who lost 1,100 of their number in the battle. White, an excellent shot and not given to exaggeration, told Collinson that he must have killed or wounded 50-60 of them himself.

A year after that, while in Fort Union in New Mexico, White shot and killed two Mexican officials who mistakenly tried to arrest him. On the run and pursued by a posse, he and a partner killed two more and left a wounded man behind to warn the others to give up the chase.

3-minute western: Whispering Smith

Time for another sample of a really old western. Hit play, and you can hear me this time reading the first pages of Frank H. Spearman's novel, Whispering Smith, which I reviewed here recently. It's another exciting beginning, as a railroad crew is being assembled to go clean up a train derailment.

It's 5:00 in the morning and Spearman captures the noise and the busy activity as men hurry about the operations center. These paragraphs are so packed with vivid detail, you can read them several times and still find more in them. We are then introduced to Sinclair, the boss of the crew. He is a big, bluff man quick to give orders and glad to be in charge.

The photos are all from 19th-century Colorado and Wyoming.


3-Minute Western: Whispering Smith from Ron Scheer on Vimeo.

Love that last exchange: "How many cars have you ditched this time?" "All I had."

Coming up: Frank Collinson, Life in the Saddle (1963)

"Revenge by Fire" by Jack Schaefer

For Jack Schaefer fans, there's a downloadable reprint online of his story "Revenge by Fire" from the April 28, 1962, Saturday Evening Post.

Forgotten book: Solo Faces by James Salter

James Salter's 1979 novel tells the story of Rand, a solitary man in his late 20s, with a fatal attraction to mountain climbing. We meet him on a hot, hazy day doing a roofing job on a church in Los Angeles. Quiet, focused, he watches warily the heedless young man working with him and then catches him just in the last moment as he falls from the roof. This same drama plays out again later in the novel, as Rand saves the lives of other mountain climbers, high in the French Alps, in wintry, bone chilling conditions.

One case of heroics makes him a media celebrity, and for a time he is an American in Paris enjoying his 15 minutes of fame. But the time passes, and he returns again to the austere, stoic life of a climber, growing older, with no assets, no home, no one who will love him on his own terms. He has only his desire to continue climbing and the need to take ever greater risks. Emptied of every other need, his lonely heroism is an ironic portrayal of the individual who strives against all odds to achieve impossible goals.

Salter's writing style is crystal clear, always vivid. He tries for no special effects, just a precise choice of words, sentence after sentence, and an unblinking eye for detail. If you have the slightest trepidation about heights, the descriptions of the climbs make your heart race. Master of his matter-of-fact style, Salter moves beyond emotion and the romance of adventure to capture the excitement of being fully in the present moment and intensely alive.

Coming up:  another 3-minute western

Photo-finish Friday: Eadweard Muybridge

There’s a huge new film school complex on the USC campus built to look like the old Hollywood studios of the 1920s. Tucked against the back fence of a little square of lawn behind one of the buildings, you’ll find this statue of the man who styled himself as Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904). Here he is with his invention, the zoopraxiscope, an early motion picture projector.

Muybridge (born plain old Edward Muggeridge) was a British-born entrepreneur. He was the kind of man California was and still is made for. His work, currently on exhibition at the Tate Britain in London, was a mash-up of science, art, and entertainment. Robber baron and railroad magnate Leland Stanford was for a time a patron. With a bank of cameras and trip wires, he proved for Stanford that a galloping horse does for a moment lift all four feet from the ground.

It was a helluva life, with much travel, sometimes as a photographer in far-flung places for the U.S. government. He was a developer of stereoscopic photography and dragged a behemoth camera around Yosemite to anticipate the work of people like Ansel Adams. And he was famously acquitted of murdering the drama-critic lover of his young wife. Meanwhile, the multi-image “movement studies” of mostly nude men and women in his later years lean suggestively away from pure scientific inquiry.

You can catch the exhibition in London until January 16, 2011. Here’s an informative account of the man’s life.

Coming up: another 3-minute western

Frank H. Spearman, Whispering Smith (1906)

Born in Buffalo, NY, Frank H. Spearman (1859-1937) first tried his luck managing a bank in McCook, Nebraska. In those days of boom and bust economy, the bank failed to survive a bust. After that, his life was divided between business interests in Omaha and Wheaton, Illinois.

At the age of 40 he began a writing career, with a special interest in railroads. By 1906, he’d already published numerous stories and articles and a serialized novel in The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines. Whispering Smith was his first best seller.

Smith is a railroad detective working the Rocky Mountain lines of Wyoming. His job is something like Tom Horn’s was for the cattlemen’s association. He hunts down and brings in any outlaws cutting into the company’s profits – which includes train robbers and anyone disrupting business or willfully damaging company property. If they resist arrest, he has license to kill.

Because he is lightning fast with a gun, he has a reputation that gives your average lawbreaker an instant case of fear and trembling. He’s also in possession of superior intelligence and razor sharp judgment. Add to that his generous and winning ways with both friends and the ladies, and you have the kind of man every grown man wishes he could be.

J. P. McGowan, Whispering Smith, 1916

He got his nickname as a boy, when bouts of laryngitis reduced his voice to a whisper. But it suits him as a man with a dangerous job who brings an enviably deft touch to whatever he does.

Whispering Smith is a wonderfully complex creation. While apparently fearless, he knows he has enemies and is aware that his life may be cut short at any moment. Spearman hints that he is a lonely man whose chief compensation is knowing that he does his work well. Meanwhile, he is conscious of its moral ambiguity. He is, after all, a hired gunman, serving the interests of a railway tycoon.

The plot. There’s a kind of tongue-in-cheek irony in the way the story opens and unfolds. We first meet the villain, Sinclair, a man who also does his job well. He’s a train wreck boss, supervising a hard-working crew that clears up after derailments. Turns out he and his men are also looting from the freight shipments. A new young supervisor, McCloud, stops him in the act and fires him.

This sets in motion a sequence of crimes against company employees and property – an engineer is killed during a holdup and a railroad bridge is burned. Sinclair is suspected. Enter, after several chapters, our man Smith.

Railroad, Platte Canyon, Wyoming, 1923

Finding and bringing in the criminals is complicated by the fact that the mountains are a lawless territory infested with outlaws. Most are two-bit renegades without the cunning or intelligence to be more than a middling menace. A few are malicious killers, chief among them an albino named Du Sang.

While McCloud lives as a man marked for murder by a vengeful and unforgiving Sinclair, he bravely goes about his business. This includes laying track for a new railway through the mountains, rebuilding that burned bridge, and coming to the aid of a rancher during a flood.

Whispering Smith is on the trail of Du Sang. The novel would not end well if he didn’t get his man. And I’ll only say that after a confrontation meant to raise the hair on the back of your neck, he eventually does. Sinclair gets what’s coming to him, too.

Remembering Jan

Today I’m remembering Jan. She was my first cousin, in both senses of the word. My mother and her father were brother and sister, and when I arrived on the planet in 1941, Jan was already here and waiting. Always a year behind, I never really caught up with her.

We grew up in Nebraska, and a big difference between us was that I lived on a farm and she lived in town. We went to different schools, so my early memories of her are mostly of family gatherings three or four times a year. Then we’d get to be kids together for a few hours.

That's a photo of us taken on a snowless Christmas Day at our grandparents' farm in 1946. Janice, as she was called then, is the tallest, in the back, and I'm next to her. Our cousin Marlene and Jan's brother Larry are in front. Jan seems to be the only one really enjoying this. That was Jan.

In later years, she loved to tease me about one of those times in particular. We were about the age we are in the picture, and she decided it would be fun if the two of us got married. Not when we grew up, but right then and there. We’d have a little do-it-yourself ceremony, and we’d be hitched for life. It was probably the only time she ever really scared me. I had enough of let’s-pretend and ran off to join the adults, probably in tears.

I remember her folks’ house on Pioneer Boulevard in Grand Island – the first one, where one of the neighborhood dogs left a permanent tooth mark in one of my arms. And what I really remember is that it was a house full of games and toys. I was envious that her parents – my aunt and uncle – believed so generously that children should have plenty of fun.

Life there seemed idyllic and relaxed. There were no farm chores to be done morning and evening, and there were other kids to play with. The streets were paved so you could ride a bicycle just about anywhere. Rules were enforced with an easy hand. It seemed to be a perfect setting for developing a sunny disposition, and Jan always had one.

Our lives grew apart as Jan married and came to California. Over the many years, we have seen each other a few times, but briefly, whenever I’ve been to the Bay Area on business trips or a rare vacation. I knew the house in Mountain View and have memories of it when her two children were toddlers, then years later when they were long gone and living lives of their own.

Then there was the house in Sunnyvale. I remember it as a library of books filling every available space, two and three deep on book shelves and stacked on the stairs. She had owned a bookstore once. As another book lover, I can say that being surrounded by all those volumes was like being wrapped in a security blanket.

Jan was a great birthday rememberer, and I could expect a call from her every year in October. Once I remember a long conversation of ours on a cell phone as I stood outside the museum at Manzanar. I missed that phone call this year, and I’ll go on missing them. She was the only member of our rather reserved German Lutheran family who felt comfortable saying, “I love you.”

The last time we spoke, she said again that we needed to spend more time together. We had allowed the contingencies of our lives to keep us from what the heart needs most – to be in touch with those we’ve been close to. I would like to have had one more time together, although with Jan – being Jan – one more time would never have been enough.