Photo-finish Friday: out and about

Most university buildings are named after people you have never heard of. This one facing a courtyard at the cinema arts school gets to be an exception (click on the pic for a better look at the name over the doors). The statue atop a fountain surrounded by greenery is a larger than life bronze, or bronze look-alike, of one of the school's founders, Douglas Fairbanks, holding a script in one hand and a fencing sword in the other.

The whole complex has the look of Old Hollywood. I take any excuse to walk through here when I can. Usually thronged with young people between classes, Douglas has a rare moment of relative silence on the set.

Photo-finish Friday is the bright idea of Leah Utas over at The Goat’s Lunchpail.

Harold Bindloss, Alton of Somasco (1906)

Western Canada also produced its western authors. Harold Bindloss (1866-1945), who was a Brit, sets this novel in the wilderness of British Columbia. The story he has to tell is a complex mix of adventure, melodrama, and romance.

Plot. Out here in the mountain forests, Canadian-born Harry Alton forges a livelihood felling redwoods and operating a sawmill in the Somasco Valley, 100 miles from Vancouver. A firm believer in progress and commercial development, he hopes to expand his remote ranch into a major profit center.

His plans are disrupted by the arrival of a financier, Deringham, from England. He brings news that Alton has inherited an estate in the old country. Alton has long ago cut ties with England and has no interest in renewing them. He considers the rightful heir to be the financier’s lovely but self-centered daughter, Alice, who has traveled West with her father.

Alton buys a horse

Deringham has a bad heart and has come to British Columbia for his health. Turns out his finances are not in great shape either, and delaying the settlement of the estate is to his advantage. He engages a local land grabber, Hallam, to throw a spanner into the smooth-running works of Alton’s enterprises. Hallam, for his part, is a mustache-twirling villain who wants Alton out of the picture completely.

On a search for a lost silver claim, Alton is shot by an assailant in the hire of Hallam and nearly dies before he is found and returned to the ranch in a daring whitewater rescue. In the last chapters, ownership of the estate is transferred to Alice. She secretly provides the venture capital needed to bring in a road and a railroad for Alton and his neighbors, which open up access to their markets in Vancouver.

It’s finally down to a contest between Alton and Hallam to lay hands on the disputed silver claim. Crippled by his gunshot wound, Alton at first fails, but a court decision gives the claim to the winner of what becomes an exciting race of many miles on horseback. Alton finally succeeds, prosperity now lies within reach, and the lovely Alice agrees to marry him.  

Alton throttles his assailant

Character. In some ways, Alton is a boys’ adventure hero. He is a muscular, bronzed, Bunyanesque axe man, with considerable strength and stamina. Like a super-hero, he is fearless and supremely confident. He takes pride in being a man of his word, and he’s generous to a fault.

Unpolished but clearly of superior intelligence, he has ambitions that today’s business journals would call visionary. As he looks at a verdant mountain scene, what he envisions is the energy in a rushing stream put to use and the valley thick with saw mills.

When he’s shot, he must depend on others not only to survive and recover but to save the valley from falling into the hands of Hallam. Thus, there’s a lesson for him. As man and businessman, he is not able to go it alone. In the end, Alton is still the hero, but he shares the laurels with his friends and neighbors.

Romance. The love story in the novel parallels the one in Wister’s The Virginian (1902) so closely, you have to assume Bindloss knew of it. Both Alice and Molly the schoolmarm have pretensions that are in keeping with higher social standing. Both find their western men rough and unpolished, unsuitable as mates. Both spend hours at the bedside of their fallen (and unconscious) western man.

Molly may be wrong-headed about some things, but Alice can be deliberately manipulative and even mean. She works up such bad feelings for Alton at one point that she plays along with one of her father’s schemes against him. Readers would be forgiven for wondering how stupidly blind Alton can be to her faults—or for that matter, whether she’s much of a match for him at all.

Buffalo Bill (1944)

This western biopic is a happy mixture of historical fact and Hollywood formula. It is faithful to enough of William F. Cody’s life story to surprise you. But the complexities of the man and his times have been trimmed to fit into a tidy plot meant to suit its 1940s audience.

Characters. Cowboy actor Joel McCrea plays the man himself. Bill already has his credentials as buffalo hunter and Army scout when he first appears, like the Lone Ranger, to rescue the passengers of a stagecoach under attack by Indians. There, as the dust settles, he is introduced to Louisa Frederici (Maureen O’Hara), a senator’s daughter who takes an instant liking to him.

In short order we meet the effusive Ned Buntline (Thomas Mitchell), Indian chief Yellow Hand (Anthony Quinn), Sgt. Chips McGraw (Edgar Buchanan), and Dawn Starlight (Linda Darnell). She is an Indian woman who speaks fluent English, has excellent cursive penmanship, and somehow has a job teaching white children at the fort.

While the whites in the film are almost universally of the opinion that the only good Indian is a dead one, Buffalo Bill could teach a course in diversity. “Indians are good people if you leave them alone,” he asserts. Louisa gets into the spirit and tries to befriend Dawn Starlight by playing dress-up, but her cross-cultural efforts fall flat. 

Plot. Alas, the War Department and the politicians don’t take Bill’s advice. Promises are broken and the Cheyenne and Sioux organize a full-scale pushback. Before long, Bill is scouting for the cavalry and engaged in a furious and epic battle. On foot and fighting mano-a-mano in the flowing waters of a river, he kills Yellow Hand. Dawn Starlight also meets an untimely end.

Now married to Louisa and already a father, Bill gets pushback on the home front as well. She wants a stay-at-home husband, not someone who chases Indians for the Army. They split up, and she goes back East. They are reunited, but only briefly, when he learns that their first-born is dying of diphtheria.

Invited to Washington to receive a Congressional Medal for his services to the Army, Bill uses the opportunity to voice his complaints about War Department policies on the frontier. He takes on the financiers and profiteers and, before you know it, is being swift-boated in the press and getting boos in public. He quickly descends to playing a caricature of himself on a wooden horse in an amusement arcade.

There Louisa finds him and rescues him from ignominy, and his old friend Ned Buntline gives him the idea of a Wild West show. If the East will not go to the West, he says, bring the West to the East. There follows a montage of riders under a circus tent, entertaining audiences including Queen Victoria and a grinning Teddy Roosevelt exclaiming, “Bully!” Meanwhile, impresario Bill turns gray and ages before our eyes. And a voice-over narrator celebrates his show’s message of freedom, adventure, and fair play. In the final shot, Bill salutes the crowd and rides off into history.

Western writer inspiration, no. 1

I've been posting pics from the Net on twitter and calling them "western writer inspiration" for fellow writers about the West. As an experiment here today, I'm posting pics from the last week for folks not in twitterdom:

Men in vests. Texas cowboys, c1900

Pulp cover cowboy

Cowboy in a hurry, Frederic Remington

You gotta have a hat.

Beef

High country

Pie Town Rodeo, 1940

And if you want to follow me on twitter, I'm @rdscheer.

Picture credits:
proprofs.com
cowboysong.com
psu.edu
pinenutlivestocksupply.com
grouchygrizzlymt.com
wikimedia commons

Coming up: Buffalo Bill (1944)

Photo-finish Friday: out and about

 

Better pictures have been taken of this landmark in central Los Angeles, but I can say that this is what I saw with my own eyes. It's St. Vincent de Paul church on Adams and Figueroa, on a fine late-summer afternoon. Built in the 1920s in this formerly fashionable neighborhood, it's a 20 minute walk from where I work.

Photo-finish Friday is the bright idea of Leah Utas over at The Goat’s Lunchpail.

Coming up: Buffalo Bill (1944)

Roger Pocock, Curly: A Tale of the Arizona Desert (1905)

Although vengeance is a common theme in the modern western, Roger Pocock (1865-1941) provides one of its rare occurrences in the early-early western. Not only vengeance, but counter-vengeance. By the end of the novel, there’s been a truckload of scores settled.

In a story set in an eye-for-an-eye world, it’s an irony that the narrator is a one-eyed cowpuncher by the name of Chalkeye. And being a Brit, Pocock gives his own slant to the usual frame of reference. The central characters include a titled family from Ireland, and the back-story involves the forced removal of tenant farmers there from their homes.

Plot. Lord Balshannon has bought an old hacienda in southern Arizona. But his efforts to build a cattle ranch are cursed by one of his former tenants, Ryan, who has also come to America. Building his own business in gloomily named Grave City, Ryan becomes a wealthy man. He lures Balshannon into ruin with alcohol and gambling and eventually seizes his ranch, sending his dying wife into the desert to expire.

Illustration by Stanley L. Wood

Both men have fathered sons. Ryan’s son Michael builds a financial empire back East, while Jim, son of the lord, runs the Balshannon ranch. A third father who plays a key role is McCalmont, the leader of a gang of outlaws who hang out at Robbers’ Roost on the Outlaw Trail. He has an offspring by the name of Curly, who we eventually learn is not his son but a daughter. Something of a wildcat in a cowboy outfit, she would be a match for Deadwood’s Calamity Jane.

Following that, it would take several paragraphs to untangle the twists of plot involving Curly, Jim, Chalkeye, and the others. In brief, there’s a shootout in a saloon, an escape from a Mexican jail, a kidnapping, the wearing of disguises, separations, reunions, and considerable travel on horseback across arid lands with the law in hot pursuit. 

Saguaro, (CC) Bernard Gagnon

Women. The usual early western after The Virginian features a romance. The woman is young and pretty; the cowboy handsome and a natural gentleman. But this novel has a girl who’d rather be a boy. Purposely disguised to protect her from sexual predators, she has come to like the freedoms and the opportunities that go with wearing britches.

Curly is a firecracker. So thoroughly boyish, even the narrator refers to her as “he” and “him.” Jim has been her friend and co-worker for many years. Their friendship qualifies as male bonding. When she finally reveals her true gender to him, it’s only to account for her “weaknesses,” like sobbing when she kills two men in a gunfight.

The gender bending with a cross-dressing heroine keeps any romantic sentiment pretty much at bay. In the last chapter, Pocock jumps ahead to a quick glimpse of Jim and Curly’s happy wedded bliss. How husband and wife have resolved any awkwardness about gender roles we are not given to know.

Mystery Valley, Arizona (CC) Bernard Gagnon

Character. In Chalkeye’s opinion, “a right proper man is strong, rough, hardy; he ought to have a temper and be master, ready to work and fight for his women folk.” The man who comes closest to that qualification is the character of McCalmont, the leader of the gang.

While there’s no question of his being strong, rough, and hardy, McCalmont is also a complex figure. He has turned to crime after losing his Kansas homestead to a big rancher. Economic necessity and an appetite for justice have driven him to thieving and robbing trains and banks.

If he has claim to any honor, it’s that he steals only from the wealthy, and he is a fast and true friend to anyone who befriends him. Meanwhile, he is a brilliant strategist and tactician, the brains behind an operation that local law enforcement is powerless to stop.

He’s also honest about what he is. He knows that what he does is wrong, and he makes no attempt to hide behind the law. He accepts whatever punishment he has coming, either in this world or the next.

Happy Birthday, Dad

Being a dad isn’t easy, and there should be a medal of honor for dads like mine who got sons like me. Today is my father’s birthday. Born in 1917 to a Lutheran farm family in Nebraska, he grew up speaking German and English. A bright kid, he could have gone to high school, but eight grades were considered enough for a farm boy back then, especially at the start of the Great Depression.

During those grapes-of-wrath years of drought and crop failure, he traveled West with a couple bachelor cousins to find work in California. In 1939 he was back in Nebraska soon to be married, with his future bounded by 80 acres adjoining his father’s farm. The two men farmed together, joined by me when I came along and my legs got long enough to reach the tractor pedals.

The summers I remember were a constant round of haying with him and irrigating corn. Dad had a small dairy herd for several years, which meant a morning and evening commitment 365 days of the year and no vacations.

I was a dreamer and storyteller, a book reader, an over-achiever at school, and ended up getting the education he never had—and then some. Though I was a 4-Her and the only person you’ll probably ever know who was a member of FFA, farming was never in the cards for me. I went off to college, never to return, and if it was ever a disappointment to him, he never said so.

He left farming and worked at what was available to a man with an eighth-grade education in the 1960s. Farming requires a lot of different manual skills. My dad could tear down a tractor and put it back together again. He took a job at a savings and loan company that put him in charge of the physical plant. Perfect for him, he knew how to keep everything running smoothly, and what he didn’t know he could figure out.

After all those years of being at the beck and call of a herd of Holsteins, he loved the chance in those later years to travel. And he visited me wherever I happened to be living with my family—California, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, England. I can’t say we grew closer during those years; he was always a hard man to get close to. But we developed a routine of talking every Sunday on the phone.

Farming is a lonely job, and I think my father was a social man. He enjoyed knowing all the savings and loan employees and being there for them to depend on. And they absolutely could. When he retired at 65, there were some pretty big work shoes for the next man to fill.

He had only another five years of life after that day he retired. I knew he was sick but didn’t understand until the very last months that he might die. He had always been in the best of health. Our last visit together, I tried to get him to talk about himself, but he would only talk about every other member of our far-flung family. I’ll never know what it was to be him in this world, never know his story the way he would tell it.

He died having just turned 70. Far too young, both for him and for me. For years afterwards, whenever something happened, I would catch myself remembering it to tell him the next time we talked. And today, almost 25 years later, I still have dreams about him. Dreams in which he is a quiet presence, and I want so much to please him.

He would surely be embarrassed by what I’ve written about him here. And it would also be like him to never let on he was secretly proud. He deserved more and better than life gave him, yet he patiently shouldered whatever came his way. And that is no small achievement for any man.