W. R. Benton, James McKay, U. S. Army Scout

This is a kill-or-be-killed western with a very high body count. Something like 20 named characters die in one way or another, plus a lot of hostile Indians and all but one of a troop of cavalrymen. Death comes in various ways, including fever, infection, torture, and a grizzly attack. There are also flashbacks to Civil War battlefields, carnage, and hand-to-hand combat.

The central character is a veteran of that war. Having served as a young Confederate colonel, he is too much his own man to endure taking orders and dealing with fools in uniform. Along with the occasional PTSD-influenced dream, he has been deeply affected by the war. He has learned more than a few survival skills, as well as a coldly business-like way of distancing himself from death. You are a hard man, someone tells him.

Plot. McKay takes a job on the frontier for the U.S. cavalry, chasing down a gunrunner who has been selling war-surplus repeating rifles to the Sioux. His pursuit takes him across the plains from Omaha to Montana, then south to Missouri. Associated with him along the way are a settler and his wife, a mountain man, an Indian, and a former slave. Given the high-risk nature of McKay’s mission, only one of them survives.

The narrative shifts between pursuer and pursued. The gunrunner is an unpleasant man named Wild Bill. More than half afraid of the Sioux, he keeps them suitably intimidated by demonstrating the killing power of a Gatling gun. When they see it used to wipe out a bunch of mounted blucoats, the Sioux would love to get their hands on one themselves.

U. S. Cavalry, 1868

One arch-villain not being enough, Benton provides us with a white man raised as a Sioux, who goes by the name of Sun Warrior. A fierce renegade, he has kept fluent in English and by dressing as other white men is able to pass freely among them, gaining their trust before doing them in. (A chilling foreshadowing of a post-9/11 terrorist.)

Glossary of frontier fiction: C(collar box – Cousin Jack)

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.”

collar box = a round cardboard box with a lid, for the storing of collars. “Bill says she was wearin’ one of them fancy collar-box hats, with a duck-wing hitched on to it.” Eleanor Gates, Alec Lloyd, Cowpuncher.

Collar box, c1890

collar tie = a board or beam fastened between pairs of rafters in a peaked roof, like the crossbar of the letter A, to prevent the rafter ends from forcing the walls outward. “Next came the disguising of the rafter and ‘collar-ties’ of the building.” Ridgwell Cullum, The Story of the Foss River Ranch.

collarette = a woman’s ornamental collar of lace or fur. “The editor chose to refer to the pineapple pattern, No. 60 cotton, collarette which Mrs. Jackson had crocheted between beers in the good old Dance Hall days as an ‘exquisite effect in point lace.’” Caroline Lockhart, The Lady Doc.

Colorado-claro = light brown (said of cigars). “She made a good, mild, Colorado-claro wife.” O. Henry, Heart of the West.

coma mott = small grove of trees. “I used to see her in that coma mott back of the little horse corral.” O. Henry, Heart of the West.

combination car = a railway car containing two or more compartments used for different purposes. “They run a combination car each way every day—two cars when business is brisk.” Samuel Merwin, The Road-Builders.

combing = a straightening out. “I gave him a combing just now; but it’s no good, I think.” Frank Lewis Nason, To the End of the Trail.

come-all-ye = a popular narrative ballad, folk song. “Great Scott, Jack, where did you pick up that old come-all-ye?” A. M. Chisholm, The Boss of Wind River.

come to taw = to meet a requirement or expectation. “In some way he or his partner, Clark, came to taw with additional funds.” Charles King, Two Soldiers.

comfort tacking = a process similar to quilting in which the layers of fabric, filling, and lining are tied together rather than sewn. “She agreed that if Cornelia would tack some comforts, and cut some carpet rags for her, that she would yield her objections.” Emma Ghent Curtis, The Fate of a Fool.

Max Brand, Red Hawk’s Trail (1925)

Five Star has been publishing Max Brand westerns in modern editions, three and four of them a year since 1998. This is a new one, the first time in hardcover since it ran as a serial in Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine in 1925. It appeared there with the title “Fire Brain” and was published under one of Frederick Faust’s pen names, George Owen Baxter.

Plot. Sprung from Faust’s fevered imagination, it tells a complex story of a hard-luck loser, John Sherburn, who is befriended by a man who gives him a second chance. The man, Peter Gresham, owns much of a frontier town, Amityville, in Texas. He is widely respected there for his ongoing fight against a gang of robbers led by an Indian chief, Red Hawk.

Not just generous but one could say magnanimous, Gresham takes Sherburn on as a business partner. His job is to keep order in Gresham’s saloon, a popular hangout for a rough crowd of miners and cowboys. To win their respect, Sherburn talks big and pretends to consume large quantities of whiskey, which are in fact weak tea.

A girl in town, Jenny Langhorne, catches his eye, and she makes little secret of her interest in him. An obstacle between them, however, is that Gresham has already laid claim to her. There’s reason to believe he would kill another man, even Sherburn, who gets too friendly with her.

The issue in which the serial began

Another suitor, Oliver Clement, tangles with Sherburn over Jenny, and after some fisticuffs they come to an odd agreement. Clement wants to settle their differences with a gun duel, but Sherburn doesn’t want to kill the young man. So he gets him to agree that the loser of the duel, should he survive, must hunt down Red Hawk and try to kill him.

Sherburn arranges to lose and gets himself inducted into the gang. The gang’s next raid is a stage holdup, involving the dynamiting of a bridge. It’s a suspenseful climax as Sherburn is given the job of lighting the fuse while the suspicious gang leader holds him at gunpoint. When Sherburn returns to town, the separate threads of the plot converge and we learn the identity of Red Hawk.

Shoot Out (1971)

Two years after Henry Hathaway made True Grit (and at the age of 73), he directed this western with Gregory Peck. It’s a handsome film shot in New Mexico and the Sierras of California, with a notable score by Dave Grusin.

Peck manages to plausibly play an ex-con bent on revenge and a man whose fatherly instincts emerge when he’s put in charge of a six-year-old girl. The role is a reprise of Atticus Finch, but with six-guns and a prison record. Somewhat implausibly, the screenplay claims to be based on Will James’ fictional autobiography, Lone Cowboy.

Plot.  Peck is released from prison after serving a seven-year sentence for bank robbery. While leaving the scene of the crime, his partner shot him in the back, and Peck refused to name him at the time of his trial. Now he plans to find the man and even the score between them.

Expecting some money from a former lover in Kansas City, he is surprised when the train delivers instead a small motherless girl (Dawn Lyn). After trying unsuccessfully to get someone to take her off his hands, he takes her along with him on his mission of revenge. Doing the math, he (and we) suspect that the girl is really his daughter. She is feisty and mouthy and adorable most of the time, though sometimes you wish someone would tell her to shut up, and Peck eventually does.

Dawn Lyn and Gregory Peck

The pair of them are being followed by three punks in the hire of the man Peck intends to kill (James Gregory). Led by a young tough (Robert F. Lyons), they have with them a saloon girl (Rita Gam), whose shrill complaints would put cracks in plaster. Together they are like a street gang as imagined in West Side Story.

The crisis in the film comes as the gang invades the home of a widow and her young son, who have given Peck and the girl shelter on a rainy night. The gang’s wanton violation of the sanctity of hearth and home produces a scene that gets creepy with dread, especially as Lyons takes to shooting pieces of fine china off the head of the girl. After long minutes of scary suspense, Peck finally gets the upper hand. What’s left for him is the final meeting with Gregory and the settling of yet another score with Lyons.

Four stars. This is an above-average western, made when the golden age of the Hollywood western was about over. Peck brings an ease to his character that is evident from the first scene as he makes clear to the prison warden that he has not been rehabilitated by his term behind bars. He still has plenty of fight in him.

The supporting cast includes the excellent Jeff Corey, who plays a saloon owner in a wheelchair. Lyons, on the other hand, plays a sadistic villain who is as much punk as psychopath, and you can weary of his unrelenting mockery and malice. Here are all of them in an early scene:

Despite its GP rating, this is a movie meant for adults. There’s some coarse language. Even the little girl swears. For the time, the sexuality is fairly frank, as two of the gang make a three-way with Gam’s saloon girl, and we get a glimpse of frontal nudity. Their raucous carryon interferes with the post-coital mood of Peck and another woman in the next room.

Shoot Out is currently available online and streamable at netflix. For more of Tuesday’s Overlooked Films, hop on over to Todd Mason’s blog.

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Image credits:

Peck and Lyn, themoviescene.co.uk

Coming up: Max Brand, Red Hawk's Trail (1925)

James D. Best, The Return

You know you’re in good hands with James Best. This new “Steve Dancy Tale” is told with the usual economy, clarity, and attention to detail. Best’s characters are fully three-dimensional and spring to life in a few words of dialogue. Best of all, you enjoy their company.

I like Steve Dancy. He’s an Easterner who has adapted in a few short years to the West, where he has interests in the silver mining town of Leadville, Colorado. He comes with a social pedigree that he never flaunts, and he has grown up the son of a firearms merchant. He has a head for business and is a good judge of character.

He tells his own stories, and Best is one of the best at first-person narration. Dancy is articulate and intelligent, the sort of man who draws similar men to him, so you like his friends, too. They are, as he says, honest and true. In this story, one of those friends is a woman, who offers Dancy some very adult and levelheaded long-term romance.

Leadville, Colorado

Plot. You think this story is going to take place entirely in Leadville, as it sets up the initial conflict. A nasty protection racket has sprung up in town, and one by one the shopkeepers and other places of business are being forced to make weekly cash payment to a gang of thugs. It’s either that or trouble, from broken windows to arson.

Dancy, his friend Jeff Sharp, and their business partner Virginia Barker stir up enough support to stage a protest, and they are joined by six Pinkerton agents from Denver. Soon the thugs are sent packing. And before we know it, Dancy, Sharp, Mrs. Barker, and Captain Joseph McAllen of the Pinkertons are involved in quite another gambit. This one takes them back East.

There, they work as a team of investigators for none other than Thomas Edison. The famous inventor retains them to find out whether a project to bring electric lights to lower Manhattan is being sabotaged by competitors vying to grab up the market for this new technology.

Glossary of frontier fiction: C(chokeweed - cold plucked)

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.”

chokeweed = a weed that chokes other plants. “You’ve growed an’ growed around this country like choke-weed, an’ it’s ter’ble hard to get good an’ started on you.” Ridgwell Cullum, The Sheriff of Dyke Hole.

cholo = a derogatory term for a Mexican, especially lower class or mixed blood. “Them cholos was all quiet now, and actin’ as keerful as if that rock was dynamite.” Eleanor Gates, Alec Lloyd, Cowpuncher.

chop = to stop. “Oh, chop on yellin’ ’n’ let’s hear!” Frederick Thickstun Clark, In the Valley of Havilah.

Chop house, Toronto, 1866

chop-house = a cheap restaurant. “McCloud took supper afterward with Whispering Smith at a Front Street chop-house, and the two men separated at eleven o’clock.” Frank H. Spearman, Whispering Smith.

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.

Chromolithograph

chromo = a mass-produced color image using a lithographic printing process; a chromolithograph. “The altar flared with innumerable candles which twinkled on ancient saints and modern chromos, on mirrors and tinsel and paper flowers.” Charles Lummis, A Tramp Across the Continent.

chromo = an unattractive person. “Git onto that old chromo; Beach has got a school marm that will stay this time.” Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy.

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

chuck it = to give up. “I do not believe these people ever take a bawth. I’ll have to chuck it or I’ll cat.” Marion Reid-Girardot, Steve of the Bar-G Ranch.

chuck tender = in mining, a workman who replaces drills in the drilling machines. “When ken you go to work? I want a chuck-tender on der night-shift.” Frank Norris, McTeague.

chuck-a-luck = a gambling game played with dice. “And a man's so sick of himself by the time he gets this far that he’d play chuck-a-luck, let alone faro or monte.” Stewart Edward White, Arizona Nights.

Chuckwalla

chuckwalla = a stocky, wide-bodied lizard with a flattened midsection, a prominent belly, and a thick tail, tapering to a blunt tip. “Once he thought a chuckwalla addressed him, saying: ‘Hello, Bob Sangster, what are you runnin’ away from?’” Peter B. Kyne, The Three Godfathers.

chunk = to hit with a missile. “He got so hungry for meat he up ’n’ chunks ’n’ kills ’n’ cooks ’n’ eats a porcupine.” Edgar Beecher Bronson, The Red-Blooded.

church privileges = protections granted to churches limiting intrusion by secular authorities. “You are blasphemous, you unconscionable creature! I lament afresh that we are fifty miles from church privileges.” Mary Etta Stickney, Brown of Lost River.

cinch = to impose upon; put the squeeze on. “I have it on pretty good authority that the ring is cinching the other companies right and left.” Francis Lynde, The Grafters.

cipher = to calculate, think out. “Glad to hear of it. I’ll cipher out somehow to be there.” William MacLeod Raine, Wyoming.

Ralph Connor, The Doctor: A Tale of the Rockies (1906)

This novel by Canadian Ralph Connor was a top-10 bestseller in the U.S. when it was published. Set partly in Ontario and partly in British Columbia, it’s an inspirational story of sacrifice and suffering that would strike most readers today as profoundly sentimental.

The doctor of the title, Barney Boyle, is a man from a country village who overcomes the disadvantages of rural poverty to become a world-traveling doctor. Tirelessly serving others, he at last exhausts himself and falls ill while treating the miners and railway workers on the Canadian frontier.

Plot. At the center of the novel are three more characters: Boyle’s brother, Dick; a childhood friend, Margaret Robertson; and a schoolmistress from the American South, Iola Lane. It is a foursome fraught with unrequited affection. Margaret loves Barney, Dick loves Margaret, Barney loves Iola, and Iola wants a high-profile singing career.

Years pass as each finds a place for themselves in the world, winning the adulation of others. While Barney becomes a skilled doctor championing the introduction of proper health care for workingmen, Dick achieves fame as a frontier missionary and social reformer. Margaret becomes matron of a charity hospital, and Iola a world-famous opera diva.

Illustration from the novel

The two brothers vow undying love for each other as young men. Barney has yielded without complaint to their mother’s wish that Dick should be the one to get an education. But as Barney struggles against adversity to become a doctor, he discovers that Dick and Iola have become improperly friendly. This severs the bond between the two men until they meet again by chance in the wilds of British Columbia and are reconciled.

Romance. Connor’s characters are possessed by feelings of romantic attachment, while each is doomed to be unloved in return. The energies they might throw into passionate enjoyment of eros are diverted instead to their careers. And Connor would have us believe that this is God’s plan for them.

At the heart of the novel is a belief that God uses the suffering of unrequited love to bring these four to a deeper faith and a higher spirituality. When the heart starves for affection, it surrenders of necessity to the love that passeth all understanding. To add a merciless twist to this argument, Connor has two of the characters die just as they are joyfully reunited after many years of painful separation.