Glossary of frontier fiction: E

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.”

earthen and iron pots = a fable in which an earthen pot is shattered by an iron pot, the moral being that one should keep the company of one’s own kind. “Nothing will satisfy them but a human sacrifice on the altar of a questionable nobility, and a repetition of the old fable of the earthen and iron pots.” Willis George Emerson, Buell Hampton.

eat dog = to suffer humiliation and insult. “You needn’t think we are specially keen for eating dog on this kind of a job!” Agnes C. Laut, The Freebooters of the Wilderness.

Edward Eggleston, 1912

ecarte = a two-player card game similar to whist and closely related to euchre. “I just got nicked for a hundred in your ecarte game.” W. C. Tuttle, Thicker Than Water.

Eggleston, Edward = American author and historian (1837-1902), best known for novels set in Indiana. “This serial (which involved my sister and myself in many a spat as to who should read it first) was The Hoosier Schoolmaster, by Edward Eggleston, and a perfectly successful attempt to interest western readers in a story of the middle border.” Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border.

Electrolier, 1910

electrolier = a fixture, usually hanging from the ceiling, for holding electric lamps; analogous to chandelier, from which it was formed. “Society’s gradations, markings and distinctions, were measured by the number of electric bulbs in a merchant’s window, the size of the gaudy ‘electrolier’ on the table in his newly-plastered dining room.” George W. Ogden, The Long Fight.

elevate = to execute by hanging. “‘We’ve got a half-breed here,’ said he, ‘who’s got to be elevated.’” John Neihardt, The Lonesome Trail.

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

Writing in 1913, H. L. Mencken called Mark Twain (1835–1910) “the true father of our national literature.” In 1934, Ernest Hemingway ranked the author with Henry James and Stephen Crane and opined, “all of American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”

More interesting from the viewpoint of frontier fiction, F. Scott Fitzgerald ventured in 1935 to call Huckleberry Finn “the first journey back.” He says of Twain, “He was the first to look back at the republic from the perspective of the west.” And it’s worth remembering that Twain himself had traveled in the West by the time he wrote this novel of life on the Mississippi, set during the years of his own boyhood before the Civil War.

One of many ways to read the novel is to see it as a prequel to a tide of frontier fiction that followed. Huck’s is the backstory of the typical hero of the cowboy western. Think of how many of them have a central character who started out like him, either an orphan or a runaway, who has come west—"lighting out for the Territory," to use his words for it.

Cover of first edition

Consider the basic elements of the mythic cowboy:  his preference for drifting and living outdoors, carrying a rifle and shooting game for food, getting in and out of scrapes while relying on his wits and knowledge of survival skills. These elements of the myth, along with visits of loneliness and attachment to a "pardner," are already there in Huck.

Huck’s basic decency is another parallel. Unschooled and unadulterated by pious religious beliefs, he does the right thing, even when he suspects that it is wrong. He is haunted with guilt that he has broken the law by helping the slave Jim run away from his owner, Miss Watson. While reason may not lead him to question slavery itself, he gradually comes to acknowledge Jim’s worth as a human being—and as a friend.

Plot. For anyone who hasn’t read any or all of the novel, you no doubt know the novel’s basic plot. Huck Finn and Jim take a ride on a raft down the Mississippi River. Along the way, they have several adventures (for a full plot synopsis click over to wikipedia).

After separations and reunions, Huck eventually winds up on a plantation far down river, where Jim has been captured as a runaway slave and is being held captive. There they are joined by Tom Sawyer, who happens to be visiting relatives on the very same plantation.

Ride Lonesome (1959)

This Budd Boetticher western filmed from a Burt Kennedy script is a classic. Shot in Cinemascope entirely in the Alabama Hills of Lone Pine, California, it’s a low-budget movie that looks as high-gloss and polished as any 1950s western.

Plot. Like their other films, e.g. Seven Men From Now (1956), the storyline is spare. Four men and a woman cross an arid landscape to get from point A to point B. One of the men (Randolph Scott) is a bounty hunter, another is his prisoner (James Best), and two others (Pernell Roberts, James Coburn) are partners with an outlaw past. The woman (Karen Steele) is the widow of a stagecoach relay station agent.

They are followed first by Indians, who have killed the woman’s husband and seem bent on making more trouble. Then they are being followed by the prisoner’s brother (Lee Van Cleef) and his gang, determined to rescue the young man before he is turned over to be hanged. That’s it.

Characters. The marvel about a script like this is how much tension and suspense these two filmmakers could create with so few elements. The film illustrates perfectly the dynamics of a story driven more by character than plot.

Randolph Scott

At first the differences between the characters seem only to do with temperament and personality. Then as the story unfolds, we learn that each of them has some key incident in the past that accounts for what they are doing at this moment in their lives and what they want.

This rounds them out as characters and also puts them at uneasy cross-purposes. The more we learn about them, the harder it gets to predict what they will do, as when the prisoner surprises Randolph with a rifle he’s taken from Roberts. While he holds Randolph at gunpoint, Roberts draws his sidearm and persuades him there’s no shell in the firing chamber. For a long moment, we don’t know whether it’s a bluff, whether the prisoner will believe him, or even Roberts’ real intentions.

The economy of the scene is so uncomplicated and simple, but it’s turns like this in the plot that build tension and uncertainty. And the source of the uncertainty is in the characters themselves, Scott being a prime example.

Lawyers in early frontier fiction

William Nelson Cromwell, attorney, 1904

A law degree was not always a guarantee of employment in the Old West as we find it in the pages of early frontier fiction. Before widespread settlement, vigilance committees dispense with malefactors, and lawyers are regarded as superfluous if not troublemakers themselves. 

But as the need grows to administer property rights and establish ownership of land and mining claims, lawyers begin to find a niche for themselves. An influx of other business interests then calls for the orderly settlement of conflicts, and we see the introduction of due process—generally referred to as “the coming of the law.” And the lawyer becomes a fixture of the frontier landscape.

The reputation of fictional frontier lawyers is pretty much the same as it is today. In novels set during the period, they’re either fighting bravely for justice or they’re in league with the villains. Here is a sample of lawyers of both kinds, as writers portrayed them at the turn of the last century.

In Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885) squatters enlist the services of a shady lawyer, Roper, to force a Californio ranchero off his land. Contemptuous of both fair play and legality itself, he’s in league with a crooked judge, aptly named Lacklaw, who hands down rulings favoring Roper. The state Supreme Court routinely overturns his decisions.

In Mollie E. Davis’s The Wire Cutters (1899) a gang of young men is jailed after a deputy is shot trying to stop them from cutting barbwire fences. Though they have scorned a local rancher, Roy Hilliard, for refusing to join their nighttime raids, he magnanimously comes to their defense, using his legal training to act as their attorney at their trial. After an impassioned plea, he gets a not-guilty decision from the jury.

Clifford G. Roe, 1911

Frank Fields, a high life-loving lawyer in Elizabeth Higgins’s Out of the West (1902), is banished by his father to a small town in Nebraska, where he gets into state politics. Riding a wave of populist sentiment against the railroads he eventually makes his way to Congress. There he is sorely tempted to cash in his principles for a return to the high life.

Pauline Bradford Mackie casts a lawyer in a love triangle in The Voice in the Desert (1903). Jarvis Trent finds the woman he once loved, Adele Lispenard, in a desert settlement in Arizona where she lives a spartan life married to a clergyman. Lawyering has made him a wealthy man, and he’s only partly successful in winning her away from her husband. She takes his money and heads back East with her two young sons—but without Trent.

A young lawyer, David Kent, takes a job as corporate attorney for the western division of a railway in Francis Lynde’s The Grafters (1904). A gang of corrupt politicians takes the governor’s office and engineers legislation calling for state regulation of the industry. Then, with the help of a pliable judge, they get Kent’s railroad thrown into receivership. The rest of the novel recounts Kent’s attempts to recover the railroad and put a stop to the “grafters” of the title.

One-sentence journal, Nov. 17-23

Costco, 11/20/13

Time marches on . . .

11/17, Sunday. Must be the full moon; all night I dreamed of Quanah Parker.

11/18, Monday. Koan for the week: The wise don’t strive to arrive.

11/19, Tuesday. There’s something satisfying about pushing a big cart through the aisles at Costco and filling it up while wondering at what other people are buying—like that huge, mouth-watering pecan pie I saw going by in another cart.

11/20, Wednesday. Everybody needs coffee once a month with an old college friend who rides a bright red Vespa, votes Socialist, and can explain the difference between high-, broad-, and low-church Episcopalians.

11/21, Thursday. The vagaries of Coachella Valley weather: we dress warm for an overcast morning walk with the dog, and 20 minutes from home the sun comes out, hot as ever.

11/22, Friday. In the margins of old maps, you can sometimes find a fierce face with wild hair and cheeks puffed out, blowing gusts of wind over land and sea—he’s out there today.

11/23, Saturday. The stormy weekend, with wind and spitting rain, is a replay of 50 years ago as the chapel bell tolled under a leaden sky at the university in Valparaiso, Indiana, and the TV was an endless recitation of assassination.

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Image credit: Ron Scheer

Coming up: Lawyers in frontier fiction

Glossary of frontier fiction: D(drench - dyke)

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.”

drench = a drink or a dose of medicine. “When they had one of Doc Simpson’s drenches they haids was as big as Bill Williams’s Mountain.” Eleanor Gates, Alec Lloyd, Cowpuncher.

Bloomer dress, 

dress reform = a movement in support of women’s clothing more “rational” and comfortable than fashions of the time, e.g. the Bloomer dress. “‘I dare say,’ said Miss Crowley, ‘that his wife wears spectacles, believes in dress-reform or woman’s rights, or she has six babies.’” Elizabeth Higgins, Out of the West.

dressing case = a box or case fitted with toilet articles necessary for dressing oneself, arranging one's hair, etc. “In a curtained alcove was a French dressing-case that Mrs. Suffridge said was over a hundred years old.” Elizabeth Higgins, Out of the West.

Dressing case, 1840-1860

drill = to walk. “One mornin’ I noticed that I was dead broke; so I drilled down to the dock an’ sat on a post.” Robert Alexander Wason, Happy Hawkins.

drill / drilling = a fabric in various weights used for work clothing and uniforms, e.g. khaki. “Her short skirt of heavy drilling came only to her knees.” James Hendryx, The Promise.

drivers = the wheels of a locomotive that transmit the power of an engine or motor to the track. “Then the drivers gripped heavily and the engine surged ahead.” W. C. Tuttle, Thicker Than Water.

drop light = a portable gas lamp attached to the gas pipe by a flexible tube; an electric light suspended from the ceiling. “The judge pressed the button of the drop-light and waved his visitor to a chair.” Francis Lynde, The Grafters.

drop one’s watermelon = to make a serious mistake. “That’s where Coyote makes the mistake of his c’reer; that’s where he drops his watermelon!” Alfred Henry Lewis, Wolfville Nights.

druggeting = a heavy felted fabric of wool or wool and cotton, used as a covering. “Already the lights were being extinguished and the ushers spreading druggeting over the upholstered seats.” Frank Norris, McTeague.

drum stove = a stove made from a barrel-shaped container, e.g. an oil drum. “A cheery fire was burning in the stuffy little drum stove in the center of the common waiting room.” G. Frank Lydston, Poker Jim, Gentleman.

dry moon = a lunar phase when the points, or “horns,” of the crescent moon point downward toward the horizon. “Well, Slocum, he owned a third of everything, mind, an’ his expression flopped square over like a dry moon, an’ stayed points up.” Robert Alexander Wason, Happy Hawkins.

dub = awkward, unskillful person; a bungler. “‘Why, you old dub,’ cried Wade, ‘the wire is from Jim Hess, Clyde’s uncle.’” A. M. Chisholm, Desert Conquest.

John Reese, Texas Gold (1975)

This novel gave me a case of déjà vu. It’s almost a mix of two other novels I read recently. Take Larry Sweazy’s Austin, Texas, from The Coyote Tracker and add to it the central characters and a nasty villain from James Best’s The Return. You get something a lot like Reese’s novel about a private detective after an international counterfeiter.

Plot. This was one of ten Reese novels featuring detective Jefferson Hewitt, who is one of a pair of partners running a bonding and indemnity company based in Cheyenne. Hewitt does all the legwork while his partner, Conrad Meuse (whom we never meet), runs the bonding end of the business. They communicate by telegrams so cryptically worded you’re hardly able to make sense of them.

The plot is complicated and not easily summed up in a few words. The villain, a Fantômas-style count from some East European backwater, has dreamed up a scheme to throw the world’s monetary systems into chaos. He is threatening to swamp them with a truckload of phony $50 gold pieces, taking down governments along with their currencies.

Austin, Texas, c1885

When the pieces start showing up and a man is killed over them, Hewitt gets interested. He guesses that someone somewhere has been stung by the counterfeiter and needs help that he’s willing to pay good money for. Tracing the fake coins to a rancher and his son outside San Antonio, Hewitt begins putting the clues together.

His path quickly crosses that of three other investigators, all of them converging in Austin, and each of them, as it turns out, on the trail of the same counterfeiter. The four join up—but only after Hewitt gets a promise of $30,000 from the Treasury Department if he can deliver the crook, the fake coins, and the die used to create them.

Gold Eagle

One of the investigators is a woman, Mrs. Chaney, the bored widow of a Texas rancher. She’s an amateur, but Hewitt thinks she has promise, and the two become a duo. Reluctantly working with them is a railroad detective, Tommy Quillen, and Dennis McGucken of the Treasury Department.

Character. Hewitt is a curious creation, not exactly a warmly congenial man. At one time a Pinkerton detective, he’s now self-employed and always calculating the profitability of the cases he takes on. He is adept at sizing up people and situations, drives a hard bargain, and has killed four men in his line of work.