Loren D. Estleman, The Master Executioner

Published in 2001, this novel captures something of the sobering mood of that year. It’s about life and death and choices with unexpected consequences. Not really a story, it’s a character study of a young man emotionally marked by wartime atrocity. A Union soldier, still in his teens, he is witness to a clumsy and ghastly execution by hanging.

At war’s end, Oscar Stone is scarcely eighteen years old and the only surviving member of his family, his one brother dead and buried on the fields of Gettysburg. In need of stability and purpose, he resolves to marry and devote his life to a reliable trade. Temperament makes of him a man determined to not simply be good at what he does, but to become a master practitioner. That and pure circumstance lead him into a dark and singular profession. He becomes a hangman.

Plot. Oscar first apprentices to a carpenter, intending to take his skills to the West, where the building of new frontier towns would guarantee him a livelihood. He chooses a wife in the same way, a pretty girl who would be a boon companion and provide him with children. Against her family’s wishes, the newlyweds set out for Kansas.

Alas, Topeka is already well supplied with carpenters, and he gets a job no one else wants—building a gallows. The thoroughness of his work impresses the professional hangman, Fabian Rudd, hired to perform the execution. Before long Oscar has fallen under the man’s influence. Horrified, his wife leaves him.

Public hanging, 1862

Called to a job in Denver, he designs and supervises the construction of a gallows capable of hanging six men at once. The successful dispatch of six convicts wins headlines in newspapers around the country and swiftly builds his reputation. More compelling to him than the publicity is the realization that he has found his true calling.

He also discovers that there is a sudden demand for his talents, mostly in the West, where unlike the East there is little public outcry against capital punishment. Traveling by train and staying in the best hotels, he establishes a comfortable routine. We only sense that something is amiss when he begins drinking more and more regularly. Eventually, alcohol contributes to a bungled execution and produces a momentary crisis of conscience.

Meanwhile, he hires the Pinkertons to search for his missing wife, who has disappeared without a trace. All he knows is that she was last seen traveling with a small boy, who Oscar assumes is his son. After a decade, he has no more than a letter from her assuring him that any effort to find her will be fruitless.

Character. Estleman creates a wonderfully complex character in Oscar, who finds in himself the ability to be a methodical, coldly rational killer. He can do what he does by being emotionally detached from it, focusing instead on perfecting his skill.

Glossary of frontier fiction: C(cove – cymlin)

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

cove = a fellow, chap. “He’s a lazy old cove, dad is.” Frederick Thickstun Clark, In the Valley of Havilah.

“Cowboy’s Lament” = title of a song, also known as “Streets of Laredo.” “They tried all the old favorites, the ‘Cow-boy’s Lament’ being chief among them.” Marie Manning, Judith of the Plains. Listen here.

cowrie = a marine mollusk having a smooth, glossy, domed shell with a long narrow opening, typically brightly patterned. “You’ve seen her wax flowers? Yes; and the shell table with ‘Bless our Home’ on it, in pink cowries?” Horace Annesley Vachell, Bunch Grass.

crab = to spoil, upset, ruin. “Moncrossen is afraid I will crab his bird’s-eye game—and I will, too, when the proper time comes.” James Hendryx, The Promise.

crack a bottle = have a drink. “He could play two deuces pat at bluff, / Could ‘crack a bottle,’ or ‘blow his stuff.’” William De Vere, Jim Marshall’s New Pianner.

Canada in early frontier fiction

There’s surely as much western frontier north of the 49th parallel as there is south, and Canada has had numerous writers setting their stories there. During the years 1880-1915, a dozen or more of them appeared to write from the mountains and timberland of BC, to the prairie, the border country straddling the international boundary with Montana, all the way to the frozen Yukon.

Ralph Connor

Ralph Connor was the pen name of Charles William Gordon (1860–1937), a Presbyterian minister of some prominence in Canada. The Sky Pilot (1899) was the novel that made him famous, selling over a million copies. It is set in a frontier community, Swan Creek, in the foothills of the Rockies, west of Calgary.

Its characters are early settlers, ranchers, and cowboys, and at the center of them is a church missionary, Arthur Wellington Moore, who has been dubbed “the sky pilot.” Connor served 40 years as a minister at a single parish in Winnipeg, Manitoba. In 1972 his Works, containing 43 titles, were published by the National Library of Canada.

Bertrand Sinclair (1881-1972) was born in Scotland and came to North America in 1889. He was a young cowpuncher living in Montana when he wrote Raw Gold (1908) set north of the border in the southern corners of what is now Alberta and Saskatchewan. 

The time is shortly after the arrival of the North-West Mounted Police, and the entire story takes place within one or two days’ riding of Fort Walsh in the Cypress Hills. We get the wide-open frontier of the 1870s with outlaws and lawmen, stolen money, and an innocent fugitive wrongly accused of a crime. After a brief marriage to western writer B. M. Bower, Sinclair settled in British Columbia, where he continued to write.

Quigley Down Under (1990)

First of all, this is a movie about a long-range rifle. Almost incidentally, it is carried through most of the film by Tom Selleck. The weapon is a Shiloh Sharps 1874 Long Range, and Selleck, as the title character, Quigley, is an incredible marksman with it. Much of the excitement of the film is watching him take aim at someone else little more than a speck on the screen and seeing them blown away.

Second, it’s a movie about a hat. Selleck sports a 10-gallon cowboy hat that would not be seen again until the days of Tom Mix. As his fortunes wax and wane in the movie, he loses the hat and regains it. In the final scene it reappears by movie magic between one shot and the next.

Plot. The plot of the movie is structured in such a way that the gun is used in the service of exterminating villains. They are villains because they’re attempting to exterminate the indigenous bands of aboriginals populating the vast reaches of a sheep herding station in western Australia. Owner of the station is a man in black, played to perfection by Alan Rickman.

Selleck is an American answering Rickman’s want ad for a sharpshooter. Arriving on the same ship in Fremantle are several white slaves bound for Rickman’s station. One of them is a woman (Laura San Giacomo) more than a little addled by grief at the loss of her husband. The two pair up, get left for dead in the outback, recover with the help of a band of aborigines, and then are witness to an attempt to cruelly slaughter them, men, women, and children.

Rescuing a baby after the attack, San Giacomo is left in a cave with two days’ supply of water and a pistol to defend herself against predators. Selleck rides for supplies and narrowly escapes a fire that burns down a hotel. Then he attempts single-handedly to put an end to Rickman and his men, which ends in a three-against-one gun duel. Selleck and San Giacomo are reunited as they await transport by ship back to the States.

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.