Glossary of frontier fiction: D(d.f. - ding)

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.”

d. f. / dee-fool = damned fool. “Air you a-jumpin’ on us ’cause Marthy Thomas is a d.f.?” Nancy Mann Waddell Woodrow, The New Missioner.

dang my melt = literally, damn me; dang me (from melt = spleen). “Dang my melt if I can see how them wild-catters can keep on takin’ money from folks.” George W. Ogden, The Long Fight.

Daniel in the lions' den, 1890

Daniel come to judgment = someone who makes a wise judgment about something that has previously proven difficult to resolve (reference to the Old Testament prophet Daniel; the phrase first appears in Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice). “When it came to doing the Daniel-arrived-at-judgment act, he had Blackstone and all the other calf-bound antiques begging for mercy.” Hugh Pendexter, Tiberius Smith.

dark as Egypt = totally dark (maybe a reference to the plague of darkness cast on Egypt by Moses in Exodus 10:21). “Flatray counted four other cabins as dark as Egypt.” William MacLeod Raine, Brand Blotters.

Grace Darling, c1839

Darling, Grace = an English woman (1815-1842) who in 1838, along with her father, saved 13 people from the wreck of the SS Forfarshire. “As Grace Darling she smooths the fever-heated pillow of the Crimea.” Alfred Henry Lewis, Wolfville.

dasher = a plunger for agitating cream in a churn. “He took the dasher into his own hand and began a brave onslaught on the over-sour cream.” Dell Munger, The Wind Before the Dawn.

dasher = a board of wood or leather in the front of a carriage to keep out mud; a dashboard. “There was a swift lurch that sent him flying over the dasher.” Hamlin Garland, Main-Travelled Roads.

David Harum = fictional character in a popular novel of the same name, published 1898, about a sharply devious horse trader. “It was with many misgivings that I called out in a loud, breezy voice and David Harum manner; ‘Hello, Governor, how will you trade mules?’” Oscar Micheaux, The Conquest.

daystar = the morning star, the sun. “It was his day-star and his life, the one pleasure that brought no suffering with it.” Harry Leon Wilson, The Lions of the Lord.

Charles Sealsfield, The Cabin Book (1842)

1844 edition

Was the first western novel written in German? Many Americans know of Karl May (1842–1912), but even before him there’s the remarkable story of Charles Sealsfield, the pen name of an Austrian, Carl Anton Postl (1793–1864). After breaking his monastic vows, he traveled to America in 1822, and though he eventually settled in Switzerland in 1832, his career as a novelist began in the English language.

His first novel, Tokea, or The White Rose (1828) is set in Louisiana, its title character an Indian chief who rescues an orphaned white girl. It is a big-hearted historical novel with cameo appearances by Stonewall Jackson and the pirate Jean Lafitte. The novel was well received by American readers and was later published in London and translated to German as Der Legitime und der Republikaner in 1833.

Sealsfield seems to have fallen in love with the American frontier and continued writing in German a series of novels set in Texas, beginning with Das Kajuttenbuch, oder Nationale Charakteristiken, published in 1842. It was first translated by C. F. Mersch and published in New York as The Cabin Book, or Sketches of Life in Texas in 1844. That edition incorrectly identified the author as “Seatsfield.” Another translation was published in London as The Cabin Book, or National Characteristics in 1852, followed by an American edition in 1871.

Morse rescued

Plot. A group of mostly single Mississippi plantation owners gather in a modest house built by a former sea captain. An oddly built structure, it resembles a ship’s cabin, from which the novel gets its name. The men spend a long night in gentlemanly banter, drinking, and telling stories. A newcomer among them, Edward Morse, is a Marylander who has been on the Texas frontier. He tells of getting lost on the endless flat prairies along the Gulf coast and being rescued by a wild man described as a bear hunter.

The man, Bob Rock, is acting strangely and seems to be having a psychotic episode. He takes Morse with him to the local alcalde who has a large cotton plantation. There he confesses that he has killed a man and tells a story of shooting a traveler for his money belt and burying the body under a massive tree. He is overwhelmed with guilt and wants to pay for his crime.

The alcalde calls a jury of other plantation owners who hear his case, and over the alcalde’s objections, they determine he should be hanged. The alcalde argues that Texas needs men of Bob’s fierce nature to fight for independence from Mexico. But the other men do not share his opinion.

Silver Lode (1954)

McCarthyism hit full tide in 1954 with the Army-McCarthy hearings, and this western by veteran Hollywood director Allan Dwan tells a story that parallels those years of suspicion and public witch-hunts. The villain of the movie is even named McCarty.

Plot. In a frontier town in Nevada, Dan Ballard (John Payne) is about to marry his sweetheart Rose (Lizabeth Scott). In the short two years he’s lived there, he’s become a well-respected local rancher. The wedding is interrupted by the arrival of four men, led by Ned McCarty (Dan Duryea), with a warrant for his arrest. Seems he’s wanted for robbery and murder in California.

The town’s citizens stand by Payne, including the bride-to-be and an old flame, Dolly (Dolores Moran), who hangs out in the saloon. At first outspokenly supportive, the tide of opinion begins to turn against Payne, especially as the sheriff is shot by Duryea and Payne is discovered standing next to the body holding two pistols.

Payne flees, firing the pistols as he goes and casualties accumulate. Taking sanctuary in a church, he is followed by Duryea who traps him in the church’s bell tower. When it looks like it’s all over for Payne, Scott comes running from the telegraph office with a wire exonerating him, and a ricocheting bullet fired from Duryea’s gun puts an end to Duryea instead. The trailer shows the plot of the film in a nutshell:

Parallels. Duryea’s constant hectoring seems pretty obviously modeled on the rhetorical style of Joseph McCarthy himself. In its story of a man fighting outlaws single-handed on his wedding day, the plot of the film also has a lot in common with another movie, High Noon (1952). There’s even the hero’s attachment to two women, one his respectable young bride and the other a former lover. In this film, the two women actually conspire to keep the hero alive.

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.