Dennis H. Stovall, The Gold Bug Story Book (1906)

This collection of 13 short stories is a modest celebration of miners' lives. They’re set in a fictional mining camp called Gold Bug, in the mountains 40 miles from Boulder. While there are references to Colorado, Stovall says in his preface that they might just as well have taken place in California or Nevada.

He dedicates the book to the army of western miners, whom he describes as “soldiers of honest toil.” The stories saw print previously in The Daily Mining Record, published in Denver, Colorado, 1893-1913.

Setting. They take place almost entirely within the confines of the camp. Stovall takes us down the mine, which extends on several levels many hundreds of feet beneath the surface. The references to machinery, the various jobs the men perform, and the overall operation of extraction are not explained for the novice reader. The primary intended audience seems to be miners like the characters in the stories and mining enthusiasts.

The action of several stories occurs in the Dewdrop Saloon, which is the social center of the camp. On a typical night, a few men play poker and faro, and others listen to the old-timers’ stories. The men’s only connection with the outside world is the stagecoach, which travels daily to and from Boulder and has a driver, Slivers, usually well oiled with whiskey.

The Dewdrop Saloon

There is a boarding house where the men sleep in bunks. It is run by an Old Woman, called Aunt Mollie, who also cooks meals for them. The crushing mill runs day and night, maintaining a constant noise level. The rare miner with a wife lives with her in a small cabin out of earshot of the ribaldry in the saloon and beyond the range of the occasional high-spirited gunshot.

Character. Almost to a man, the miners are decent and hardworking. The ones with true grit are brave and capable of unflinching heroism as they battle fires and cave-ins. In “The Gold Bug Kid,” Hudson, the superintendent, hires a new young employee, Sam Jimpson. The boy proves his worth to everyone but the foreman Jackson, who is well known for hating women and kids.

On a fateful night, the underground pump station catches fire, and the three of them work against all odds to put it out. When the kid is injured by falling timber, Jackson admits that he’s underestimated the boy, begs to be forgiven, and sheds a tear.

Suicide

Weakness of character is illustrated in the story “When the Plunger Quit.” The plunger of the title is Mark Blevins, a young man who arrives in Gold Bug on the same stage with a brother and sister, Dick and Lucy. Dick is a ne’er do well who squanders his money in gambling with Blevins, who intends to return his winnings but is too late to prevent Dick from committing suicide.

Villainy. Occasionally a man with a shady past finds work in Gold Bug, and the mean streak in him is revealed. In “The ‘Dare Devil’” a hold-up man in red wig and mask regularly robs the passengers of the stagecoach. As long as he leaves the U.S. mail untouched, the stage driver makes no effort to stop him. Theft is simply part of the cost of living in the West.

A dispute settled by a fistfight

Red Head, as the thief is known, is discovered to be one of the miners, going by the name of Buck Tyson. Not only that. Harry Fields, son of the general manager, remembers him as a bully from his school days. Tyson denies he’s the same person but starts taking pot shots at Fields, finally challenging him to a fight during a dance at a nearby camp. Though he draws a knife on Fields, Tyson gets soundly beaten.

Women. The fair sex tends to have a civilizing effect on the camp. Lola Langhorn, a dentist who arrives by coach one day, sets up a practice. The miners take a sudden interest in oral hygiene and keep her quite busy. Meanwhile, preaching temperance to them, she has the men abstaining from alcohol so thoroughly that the Dewdrop nearly goes out of business.

In time, the miners trust her to provide a home for their safe, in which they keep their savings. But her intentions are not all they seem. The Sunday finally comes when she fails to make an appearance for one of her temperance sermons. And the men discover that she has picked the lock on the safe and absconded with all the contents.

Old West glossary, no. 42

Montana cowboys, c1910

Here’s another set of terms and forgotten people gleaned from early western stories. Definitions were discovered in various online dictionaries, as well as searches in Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang, Dictionary of the American West, The New Encyclopedia of the American West, The Cowboy Dictionary, The Cowboy Encyclopedia, and The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

These are from Alfred Henry Lewis’ Wolfville, about life in an Arizona cow town, G. Frank Lydston’s Poker Jim, Gentleman, a short story collection, and John C. Bell’s The Pilgrim and the Pioneer, about lawyering in Colorado mining camps. Once again, I struck out on a few. If anyone has a definition for “corral count,” “Rocky Mountain Hanks,” or “bread pine,” leave a comment below.

black-and-tan = derogatory term for someone of mixed race. “The way he gets a bullet onder that black-an’-tan’s left wing don’t worry him a little bit.” Alfred Henry Lewis, Wolfville.

bull luck = very good luck. “We are all betting on the ‘bull luck’ of old ‘P.’” John C. Bell, The Pilgrim and the Pioneer.

Calumets

calcium light = limelight; a lamp consisting of a flame directed at a cylinder of lime with a lens to concentrate the light; formerly used for stage lighting. “There will be no villain clothed with a little temporary power to shut the calcium light out of these putrid beds of corruption.” John C. Bell, The Pilgrim and the Pioneer.

calumet = a highly ornamented ceremonial pipe used by Native American tribes, a  peace pipe. “As the circling smoke rings rose from the sachem’s calumet, the gentle breeze bore them slowly to the southward.” G. Frank Lydston, Poker Jim, Gentleman.

capper = an accomplice in a gambling game who works to swindle other players. “The furtive glance which the dealer exchanged with his charming ‘capper’ now and then, was sufficient to enable even one of my limited experience to form a correct conclusion as to the status of affairs.” G. Frank Lydston, Poker Jim, Gentleman.

Thomas Corwin

Corwin, Thomas = Congressman and Senator from Ohio, known for his extravagant humor (1794-1865). “I have a lawyer friend here who has more imagination than John Bunyan, more pathos than John Calvin, more eloquence than Wendell Phillips, and more fun in him than there is in Tom Corwin.” John C. Bell, The Pilgrim and the Pioneer.

crack a cap = to fire a bullet. “‘If one of you-alls so much as cracks a cap,’ he says, ‘I blows the head offen this yere blessed child.’” Alfred Henry Lewis, Wolfville.

cross vine = an evergreen, tendril-bearing woody vine native chiefly to the southeast United States and having showy red-orange, trumpet-shaped flowers. “If you smoked opium as the nervous Cherokee Indian smokes cross vine, I might recommend you because, while it might make you stupid, enervated, and dreamy, your sins would be probably only of omission.” John C. Bell, The Pilgrim and the Pioneer.

cuchillo = a knife. “Through his sash was thrust the inevitable murderous-looking cuchillo—the symbol of his individuality.” G. Frank Lydston, Poker Jim, Gentleman.

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.

glame = natural vitality involving the most vigorous impulse of the life-principle (from Book of General Membership of the Ralston Health Club, 1898). “If you think you can gather some of the gangleonic glame from the aromatic damsels skirting the banks of the San Isabel, you go.” John C. Bell, The Pilgrim and the Pioneer.

heel = to make a loan or provide with money. “I came away from ’Frisco in a deuce of a hurry, and without heeling myself properly.” G. Frank Lydston, Poker Jim, Gentleman.

Alexander Hermann

Herrmann, Alexander = a French magician (1844-1896). “It disappeared so mysteriously that it shrouded the young Missourians in as complete confusion as Hermann could have done in the days of his most clever legerdemain.” John C. Bell, The Pilgrim and the Pioneer.

hit the pipe = smoke opium. “I used to ‘hit the pipe,’ as you now express it, when I was on earth before.” G. Frank Lydston, Poker Jim, Gentleman.

Holland gin = the juniper-flavored and strongly alcoholic traditional liquor of the Netherlands, from which gin evolved; also call Geneva gin and Dutch gin. “Our outside passenger would, in the next three days, get more color in his face and nose from the angry elements than he could get from a whole barrel of Holland gin.” John C. Bell, The Pilgrim and the Pioneer.

Jack Robinson = a mythical person associated with speed or quickness; the phrase “faster than you can say Jack Robinson,” dates from the 1700s. “The train’ll be here before we can say Jack Robinson.” G. Frank Lydston, Poker Jim, Gentleman.

Jackplane

jackplane = a carpenter’s tool for shaving off small amounts of wood; a plane. “This is the legal chisel, the lawyer’s jackplane, the symmetrical mould that will enable us to cut out, polish, and mould this contract.” John C. Bell, The Pilgrim and the Pioneer.

jar = a disagreement, quarrel, dispute. “The drenched eyes of Mrs. Warner bespoke a family jar.” John C. Bell, The Pilgrim and the Pioneer.

last run of shad = having a very thin, wretched, forlorn, or played-out appearance. “I don’t think I could accuse him of being personal—I look like ‘the last run o’ shad.’” G. Frank Lydston, Poker Jim, Gentleman.

leg bail = unauthorized absence. “We grabbed Jim an’ hustled him out, an’ made him take leg bail ’long with the rest uv us.” G. Frank Lydston, Poker Jim, Gentleman.

Santa Fe Trail, 1940

You can sense the lingering images of Gone With the Wind (1939) on movie screens when this film was released in 1940. With its Southern sympathies, it has much of the same view of Civil War era history. Though shot in black and white, the scale of many scenes, the size of the cast, and especially the appearance of Olivia De Havilland in a full antebellum dress, also bring that earlier film to mind.

Plot. Its opening scenes set in 1854, the film introduces us to its central characters, J.E.B. Stuart (Errol Flynn) and George Armstrong Custer (Ronald Reagan). De Havilland is with a contingent from Kansas at their West Point graduation ceremonies. In a secondary role is Van Heflin, expelled from the academy for distributing anti-slavery literature in the cadets’ quarters. A monumental presence in the film is Raymond Massey’s stormy and apparently mad abolitionist, John Brown.

The characters all converge in Bleeding Kansas as pro- and anti-slavery forces take up arms against each other. Heflin, we learn, has become a strategic military advisor to Massey. But before engaging Massey’s army of volunteers, best friends Flynn and Reagan amicably woo de Havilland. Her father is a Kansas merchant with a vision of building a railroad from Fort Leavenworth to Santa Fe.

(Left to center) Raymond Massey, Van Heflin, Errol Flynn

Flynn, wearing a handsome black hat, is taken captive by Massey and escapes both hanging and a burning barn before being rescued by the cavalry, with Reagan in command. Defeated, Massey and his followers are driven from Kansas, only to turn up again at Harper’s Ferry.

Disenchanted with Massey, Heflin goes to Washington to reveal the man’s plans to incite a slave rebellion. Flynn and Reagan lead the charge that lays siege at Harper’s Ferry and take Massey captive. He is eventually hanged. Meanwhile, tracks for the new railroad are being laid along the Santa Fe Trail and de Havilland has decided it is Flynn she wants for a husband. The disappointed Reagan is quickly introduced to a fetching blonde who turns out to be the daughter of Jefferson Davis.

Ronald Reagan, Olivia de Havilland, Errol Flynn

History vs. bunk. The portrayal of J.E.B. “Jeb” Stuart comes fairly close to actual history. Stuart, who was later to be a Confederate general, did graduate from West Point in 1854, in time to receive a commission that put him in Kansas during John Brown’s tenure there.

As an officer in the military, Stuart was called upon to support the pro-slavery government of the Territory and to help quell the growing violence and bloodshed. In a whirlwind courtship, he also met and married Flora Cooke, the daughter of a lieutenant colonel.

The specifics of John Brown’s activities in Kansas are probably manufactured. But his portrayal as a fiery, Scripture-quoting domestic terrorist squares with the estimation of some, though not all, historians. His capture and attempted hanging of Stuart is an invention by the screenwriter.

Ronald Reagan’s George Custer is more of a fabrication. Custer was still at West Point during John Brown’s crusade and graduated with the rest of his class, a year early, when the Civil War broke out in 1861. Reagan’s big grin gives Custer more the manner of a good-time fraternity bloke, although from what we know of the man’s career as a cadet, that’s probably not too far off the mark.

Saturday music: Roy Rogers

A Cole Porter song from the movie, Hollywood Canteen (1944), with the Sons of the Pioneers and Trigger.

Coming up: Errol Flynn, Ronald Reagan, Santa Fe Trail (1940)

Phil Truman, Red Lands Outlaw: The Ballad of Henry Starr

Review and interview
This must be one of the gentlest western novels ever written about an Old West outlaw. Phil Truman takes the story of bank robber Henry Starr’s life and retells it as a lightly humorous, slightly quirky, and sometimes bittersweet tale of an otherwise decent man who happens to find his calling on the wrong side of the law.

A descendant of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma, Starr might have lived his life differently. But despite his efforts to earn an honest dollar, his natural gifts inclined him otherwise. Not that he was always lucky, as the opening scene demonstrates. What starts out as a Dalton-style double bank holdup in 1915 gets him shot and arrested. The novel closes with his last turn of bad luck, shot again during another bank job in 1921, this time fatally.

Starr, by Truman’s account, was also unlucky in love. Married three times, he had no trouble charming the girls. But his inability to support them, once wedded, kept his marriages brief.

Character. Calling the novel a “Ballad” nicely describes its overall structure. Like the verses of a long narrative folk song, the story Truman tells is not so much biographical as it is a sequence of dramatic incidents portraying the character of the man.

What neither title nor subtitle reveals is the novel’s wry humor. And much of it comes from Starr’s way of choosing to be amused by any unexpected turn of events. An early attempt at robbing a train becomes a comedy of errors, but while nearly everything goes wrong, the man remains a model of grace under pressure.

Poster for movie about Starr, 1919

He is respectful of others, even as he’s robbing them. He speaks calmly, assuring them that no one will be hurt, so there’s no reason to be alarmed. Determined to be remembered as a professional and a gentleman, he tells them his name while making off with the loot. He even gives a girl a handful of quarters before one departure.

His nemesis in the novel is legendary lawman Bill Tilghman, who had done much to clean up Oklahoma in the years following statehood. Seeming to understand Starr’s basically well-mannered temperament, he treats him with polite regard. He also gets Starr involved in a movie project, reenacting one of his unsuccessful robberies, to show that crime doesn’t pay.

The only real villain of the story is hanging Judge Isaac Parker of Fort Smith, Arkansas. The judge sentences Starr twice to the gallows for the same crime and finally fails to see him executed, by dropping dead himself before a final retrial. Also appearing in the novel is Comanche chief Quanah Parker, who invites Starr into his home one night for a dinner of fresh game.

Wrapping up. Truman chooses as his central character a man who grew up a contemporary of Old West outlaws and lived to a time when bank robberies made use of getaway cars. A fugitive from justice much of his life, he spent only a handful of years behind bars, always winning early parole by being a model prisoner.

You believe as surely as he does that he’ll never break the law again when he’s released, but it’s hard for an Indian and an ex-con to find a steady job. Eventually, a wife and child become a responsibility beyond his means to support, and ill-gotten gains are too temptingly irresistible.

From beginning to end, Starr is a man who learns from his mistakes, but what he learns is not of much use to him. And when his luck finally runs out at the end, he accepts it without complaint. He only asks that he be buried in the new suit he’s just bought, hoping the bloodstains won’t show. The whole novel is like that, its wry humor unforced and always catching you by surprise.

Red Lands Outlaw is currently available in paper at amazon and Barnes&Noble and for the kindle.

Phil Truman

Interview

Phil Truman has agreed to spend some time here today talking about writing and the writing of Red Lands Outlaw. So I'm turning the rest of this page over to him. 

Phil, how do you define the “traditional western”?

I grew up in the era of TV westerns—Gun Smoke, Have Gun Will Travel, Bonanza, Wagon Train, Rawhide, and on and on. So for me a traditional western has, at a minimum, one good guy, one bad guy, a good woman (or a good bad woman—see Kitty, Miss), perhaps some Native Americans, several horses, cows, lots of dust, fist fights, an agreeable amount of gunplay, and preferably some American history.

They’re usually morality plays—good vs. evil, right vs. wrong. Two writers come to mind when I consider the traditional western novel: Louis L’Amour and Larry McMurtry. One is the godfather of the American Western, the other is the Homer. One defines the genre, the other carries it to epic proportions.

Do you think of Red Lands Outlaw as an example of it?

According to the elements I listed above, I suppose Red Lands Outlaw would fit the traditional western category, but my gut feeling is, it’s not. I see it as more of a character study, a biographical morality play, about a man cornered by societal circumstances and making bad choices. Also, it’s my rookie attempt at writing a western, so what do I know. I feel I have a lot to learn from those who write westerns really well.

Belle Starr

Talk about how the story of this novel suggested itself and came to take shape for you.

Part of my my second novel, Legends of Tsalagee—a non-western, mystery, adventure—involves a supposed lost treasure of Belle Starr. While doing research on Belle for that novel, I ran across the account of Henry’s dual robberies of the banks in Stroud, Oklahoma. That fascinated me, so I dug a little more. I used him as a minor character in that second novel, and decided to make his biography my next project for a historical western novel.

Did you have the title from the beginning, or did that come later?

No, I had about fifteen working titles throughout the writing of the book, even ran some of them by friends. Red Lands Outlaw was one of the finalists, but the secondary title, The Ballad of Henry Starr, came to me the day before I sent it off to my publisher. As far as I’m concerned titles are the hardest part of writing a book.

What was involved in your research for the novel?

I’ve found that you can find out just about anything you want to know on the Internet, and some of it is actually factual. One of the reasons I gravitated to writing novels is because you can get away with making up most of what you don’t know. Historical novels, on the other hand, do require a certain responsibility to get most of your facts straight, especially biographical work.

I did a fair amount of scouring old newspaper articles about Henry Starr. The double bank robberies in Stroud, Oklahoma, were well documented, and the movie he made was based on that event. I also found and bought a copy of his autobiography. Interesting, though, that I found several written “histories” with varying accounts of the same events, including names of some of the principals in the stories. So I guess journalism hasn’t changed all that much over the years.

John C. Bell, The Pilgrim and the Pioneer (1906)

Written by a former U.S. Congressman, this autobiographical book is less a novel as it is a miscellany of anecdotes, travel writing, boosterism, musings, and political rhetoric. In the character of John Campbell, the storyline parallels the career of the author during the years 1874-1878, when Bell was a young lawyer in Colorado.

Plot. Campbell is the “pilgrim” of the story, a tenderfoot from Tennessee, fresh out of law school. Traveling to the gold fields of the Rocky Mountains, he meets and befriends an older man, Joshua Wickham, who was an early Colorado settler and is the “pioneer” of the title. He encourages Campbell to establish a law practice in a succession of mining camps that are growing into towns—Del Norte, Saguache, Lake City.

After a while, they take a long excursion together, first to arid southwestern Colorado, then northward to Salt Lake City, Butte, and Idaho’s Couer d’Alene. At that point, they part company. Wickham travels on to British Columbia, and Campbell returns to Colorado.

Wickham and Campbell

In the final three chapters, the narrative jumps ahead to the year 1900. Campbell, now middle aged, retraces the route of his journey to Idaho, and Wickham, an elderly man, returns to Colorado to find it greatly changed. The old frontier spirit he once cherished is now hard to find. The book ends with a family reunion for Wickham and his grown children.

Structure. At 531 pages, this is a long book to be summed up in just three paragraphs. The action doesn’t come together as a plot so much as a loosely connected series of incidents that illustrate larger philosophical and legal themes. A central thread running through the book is the pioneer Wickham’s philosophy of optimism. He believes that Nature moves at all times toward peace, harmony, and justice.

The unjust and dishonest, he says, are merely temporary impediments in the path of progress toward a more perfect world. For him the glass is always half full. Right will prevail. A skilled arbitrator, he keeps apparently irreconcilable disputes from escalating to litigation. He boasts that his efforts have made courts unnecessary.

Wickham returns a bad horse

Character. In a rough and ready way, the book is a bildungsroman. It tells the story of a young man, Campbell, who gains the courage to be a true public servant by becoming socially conscious and confronting injustice wherever it rears its hoary head.

He starts out as a timid fellow, a tenderfoot in the wild and woolly West. From humble beginnings, he has trusting expectations of a world that is in fact full of predators. The loose behavior of dancehall girls unnerves him, and he’s often the butt of practical jokes.

Nonetheless, he acquires a reputation among the more reputable among his fellow frontiersmen. Known to be unstinting in his efforts to serve his clients, he is soon elevated to the position of county attorney.

Whites and nonwhites. The subject of interracial marriage is a prominent theme in the book. Wickham, we learn, married an Indian chief’s daughter when he was a young man on the frontier. She bore him six daughters, all of whom shame him because they show no mixture of white blood. When his wife dies, he sees that they are married to white men, and he divides up his extensive property among them before leaving.

Susan B. Anthony and the miners

Over the years, Wickham laments that he ever fathered his daughters because he disadvantaged them by giving them mixed blood. Another man faults him for giving his children a “greasy, dumb, thoughtless, unsympathetic Indian squaw” for a mother. He hardly disagrees and comes to believe that it would take generations of infusions of white blood to lift his progeny out of their unfortunate genetic heritage.

Women. Respectability comes at a high price for the women. A young bride is forced by winter weather to overnight in a one-room inn with several men clustered in blankets around the fire. The next morning, they must promise that no one, not even her husband, will ever learn of their unconventional sleeping arrangements. 

There’s one stellar appearance by Susan B. Anthony, who comes to town briefly in 1876. She appeals to the assembled miners to support the personal, property, and political rights of women. The men are won over by her well-reasoned argument that women should be granted equal rights in the Colorado Constitution.

The Best Reviews Money Can Buy

A New York Times feature article in the Business section of Sunday’s edition reports of the appearance of a new service industry--providing rave book reviews online for authors needing publicity to boost sales. This development raises a bunch of issues this blogger feels obliged to address. As someone who has reviewed books regularly for more than a decade—hundreds of customer reviews at amazon and lots more here on this blog—I have a few rules about reviewing.

One of them is never to accept compensation for reviews I’ve written. I also routinely turn down offers to write reviews for pay at online publications. The only payment I occasionally accept is a free copy of the book I’ll review, either paper or an ebook. And I don’t agree or offer to write a favorable review in exchange for that free copy or any other consideration.

The reasons for this should be obvious. But apparently they aren’t to a lot of people. So I’m using this space to clarify some of the rules I try to follow when reviewing a book.

When I’m reading a book to review, I read every word of it. Seems only fair. That means not skimming or skipping through or not finishing.

If I make a judgment about something in a book, I clarify it by giving examples. Otherwise, a reader can’t know for sure what I’m saying. “Exciting,” for instance, will mean something different to nearly everyone without a for instance or two.

I don’t use a single standard of judgment. Instead, I evaluate a book against what the writer seems to have set out to accomplish. A historical novel about the West, for instance, should show an effort to be historically accurate. A mystery should really keep me guessing to the end.

I look for “added value.” In a novel, that may be some ingenuity and originality, even if it’s constrained by the requirements of a genre. It could be ironies and unexpected plot turns. Humor. Really, a gift of any kind.

I’m not trying to sell books. Instead, I want the reader to get enough of an idea of a book to decide whether it’s for them or not. If it’s slow paced, for instance, I’ll say so and explain how that works for the story, but I won’t pretend every reader is going to love it.

As a former teacher, I tend to use a review to expose readers to different ways of enjoying fiction. Someone reading just for the storyline can miss a lot of the art that a good writer brings to the craft of storytelling. I think of these as “pleasures of the text” and try to raise readers’ awareness of them.

I don’t believe in giving stars. Never mind that amazon requires them and goodreads encourages them. Someone gives a book five stars, and I’m thinking, “Compared to what?” Similar books? Books currently in print? All books ever written? An ideal book? Some general standard? The current best sellers? The literary canon? The reviewer’s favorite authors? Shakespeare? John Grisham?

I know, stars are important for authors’ sales, but when The Great Gatsby can get a one-star review at amazon, you know they don’t mean much for the serious reader.

I don’t review books I don’t like. For me, four or five stars mean: “Don’t know about you, but I got a lot of enjoyment from this book.” And surveying my reviews at amazon, you’d find almost nothing but four- and five-star reviews. I prefer not to bad mouth a book that wasn’t written for a reader like me in the first place.

To be honest, I just want to help books find the readers they deserve. I don’t bother with bestsellers. They don’t need my help. So you’ll often find me reviewing books that haven’t had their 15 minutes of fame. They may even be out of print. Like introducing two good friends, you believe book and a certain kind of reader would enjoy getting to know each other.

So, no, I don’t take money for my reviews. Payment cancels out all of the legitimate reasons for taking the time to write and publish them. Worse, it destroys the integrity of the reviewer. If Orwell were here, he'd probably add that when words are grounded in falsehood, damage is done to language itself. As writers, we should care about that.

Finally, I’d like people to think, Scheer will be honest with them. He’ll expect you to make your own choices, but you can trust what he says. It's an aspiration not easy to achieve, I know, but like the frontier cowman’s code of ethics, I want my word to mean just that and nothing less.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: John C. Bell, The Pilgrim and the Pioneer (1906)