Sandra Dallas is known for her historical fiction about the ordinary people who chose to make new lives for themselves in northwest America during theSandra Dallas is known for her historical fiction about the ordinary people who chose to make new lives for themselves in northwest America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I have read several of Dallas's earlier novels, so I knew of her work well before finding her latest novel, Where Coyotes Howl, in the library. But I have to tell you that it is the book's wonderful cover that first caught my eye. (Proving yet again that cover art is a big, big deal in the publishing world.)
Where Coyotes Howl begins in 1916 when Ellen Webster, a young woman who accepted a schoolteaching position sight unseen, arrives in tiny Wallace, Wyoming, to begin teaching in the town's little one-room schoolhouse. This part of Wyoming is not at all how Ellen pictured it in her mind before leaving Iowa, and she is a bit stunned at what she sees in every direction: the horizon. But as seems to be the pattern with Wallace schoolteachers, Ellen will barely finish the first school year before leaving to marry a young cowboy whose eye she caught almost as soon as she stepped off the train on her first day in Wallace.
The novel focuses on what life was like for the "pioneer" women of the West even well into the twentieth century. Making a go of a small ranch/farm was never a given, and the prairie was dotted with the abandoned homesteads of those who failed to make it work for them. Whole families were likely to pack up and leave quietly every spring after having desperately struggled to survive the previous winter. But life in the West was especially precarious for women. For some it would be death during the birth of a child, for others being moved to an asylum after having lost their minds due to the extreme isolation that surrounded them during the long winters.
Where Coyotes Howl is another memorable Sandra Dallas novel, one in which Dallas pulls no punches about the day-to-day struggle so many families endured in order to begin their lives anew with a decent chance of bettering themselves. It was a time when every neighbor was a valuable asset, a time when survival really did depend on "treating your neighbor as yourself." It was a tough world, one in which wives and mothers usually had to play the toughest roles, a world that Sandra Dallas vividly brings to life in Where Coyotes Howl. ...more
Set primarily in the 1870s and 1880s, Kathleen Grissom's novel Crow Mary is a fictionalized look at the very real Cypress Hills Massacre that occurredSet primarily in the 1870s and 1880s, Kathleen Grissom's novel Crow Mary is a fictionalized look at the very real Cypress Hills Massacre that occurred in Saskatchewan, Canada, in the spring of 1873. The ambush caught a small tribal group of Nakodas completely by surprise, and the ensuing slaughter of forty innocent men, women, and children forever changed the lives of Crow Mary and her white trading-post-owner husband who witnessed the whole thing.
Once the drunken massacre is underway, it is impossible for anyone to stop it without being themselves killed. But after Mary witnesses five female survivors being taken inside the camp of the men who killed their families, she knows that she will either rescue them or die trying. After her husband forbids her to approach the camp, Mary knows that she - and her two pistols - will be doing it all alone. So she does.
The novel begins with a short foreword written by Nedra Farwell Brown, a great-granddaughter of Crow Mary herself. Brown is understandably proud that her grandmother's story is finally being celebrated this way, and says this about Crow Mary:
"My great-grandmother, Goes First, who became known as Crow Mary, was a beautiful, strong young woman who married a white man she did not know. That she faced this world with such bravery makes me proud to think that I carry her blood." Crow Mary explores a period during which the native population on both sides of this country's northern border were being pushed into ever shrinking reservations and denied the ability to feed and clothe their families in the manner their ancestors had done the job for countless generations. They were told that they could no longer hunt outside the arbitrary boundaries of their new "reservations," and that the government would supply them with the food they needed if it was not available to them within those boundaries. The politicians wanted to turn them all into subsistence farmers and cattle ranchers. But as it turns out, that would lead to the bloody fighting that marked the rest of the decade.
Crow Mary and Abe Farwell tried to put things right after the Cypress Hills Massacre, testifying in trials on both sides of the border against the men who participated in the slaughter. Sadly, the chief result of their efforts was a lifetime of denunciation and hatred directed toward Farwell as being nothing but a traitor to his race; no convictions of the killers were handed down by either of the biased juries. Crow Mary is as much Abe's story as it is Mary's even though Abe suffered in a whole different way than his wife.
Readers interested in the history of this period will, I think, come away from Crow Mary with a clearer understanding of what a clash of cultures this all really was, and how tragically misguided and callus those in charge of policy were. Sadly, it all seems so inevitable, even in retrospect, that it triggers my general feeling of pessimism about the human race...are we any better today, really?...more
According to Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow came to her very easily. Once she gathered up various elements of her own family hAccording to Olivia Hawker, One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow came to her very easily. Once she gathered up various elements of her own family history, the plot and the characters fell right into place, and even the actual writing was not that much of a chore. She still says that this 2019 novel is the "easiest" one she has ever written. I don't know about all of that, but I can tell you that I was almost immediately taken by the setting (two 1876 Wyoming homesteads) and the tragedy/crime that bound two families so close together whether they wanted to be bound that tightly or not. After the two families find themselves both lacking an adult male as winter approaches, they have little choice but to move in together and share what they have. Any other decision will likely result in the deaths of several children and most of the livestock owned by the families.
Really, the Bemises and the Webbers were bound together long before the two women put aside their rage and pride long enough to consider what was best for the children. Ernest Bemis made certain of that when he shot and killed Substance Webber after catching the man and Cora Bemis in a more-than-compromising position. Ernest almost immediately rode the 20 miles into town to turn himself in to the sheriff, and after his trial was sentenced to two years in jail. Suddenly the women are dependent on the seventeen-year-old Clyde Webber and the sixteen-year-old Beulah Bemis to do all of the farm labor their husbands had previously done if either family were to survive the approaching winter.
One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow is a well written piece of historical fiction, one that gives a clear picture of how precarious life was in that part of the American West in 1876. It features two strong women trying to do what's best for their own families despite what has so recently torn both families apart. It is part western, part love story, and part character study. ...more
As it turns out, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, who was a thirty-one-year-old English teacher at the time, struck literary gold in 1940 with the publicatioAs it turns out, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, who was a thirty-one-year-old English teacher at the time, struck literary gold in 1940 with the publication of his debut novel The Ox-Boy Incident. The novel was made into a major motion picture starring Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, and Harry Morgan in 1943, and today Tilburg’s novel is considered a classic of its type.
Most readers will be familiar with plots similar to the story Clark tells in The Ox-Bow Incident even before they pick up the book for the first time. Tales about a group of cattle rustlers being chased down and lynched by a posse of local vigilantes have been played out in countless novels, movies, and television shows for near one hundred years now. The stories are usually rather gut-wrenching ones even when those being hanged from the nearest big tree really are the bad guys. But when mistakes are made, and innocent men are rashly killed by a mob of executioners, the stories truly are heartbreaking.
What makes The Ox-Bow Incident so different from most of the others is the emphasis Clark places on the motivations of the twenty-eight men who band together to chase down the men they believe have killed a local ranch hand while in the process of running off with forty head of cattle. The novel is both a character study and a hard look into the power of a mob to carry men to places they would never otherwise be willing to go. Even as the posse is being pulled together, the novel’s narrator makes this observation:
“Most men are more afraid of being thought cowards than of anything else, and a lot more afraid of being thought physical cowards than moral ones. There are a lot of loud arguments to cover moral cowardice, but even an animal will know if you’re scared.�
Then, a few pages later, the narrator points out how the local men are being pushed into riding with the posse by having it pulled together out in front of the local saloon rather than inside it:
“…a lot of these men must be fixed so that nothing could turn them off unless it could save their faces. The women were as stirred up as the men, and though a lot of them would have been glad if they could keep their own men out of it, that didn’t make any difference. When a man’s put on his grim business face, and hauled out a gun he maybe hasn’t used for years, except for jack rabbits, he doesn’t want to go back without a good excuse.�
It is inevitable. Twenty-eight men, led by two or three bloodthirsty types who always enjoy bullying and fighting anyway, are going to risk their own lives to chase three or four unidentified men into the blizzard that is fast descending upon them all. Most of them don’t really want to be part of a lynching, but only the town’s two preachers (one of them white, the other black) have the courage to speak up about what they are doing. The riders already assume the guilt of those they are chasing, and they do not intend to bring them back to town for a jury trial. The posse will be judge, jury, and executioner � and no one is going to stop them. Guilty or not, someone has to die tonight.
Bottom Line: While Clark’s moral arguments can get a little longwinded and a little repetitive as several of his characters attempt to find the moral courage to refuse to join the posse and to persuade others to do the same, but the pace with which the posse finally forms helps build the tremendous tension readers feel as the book reaches its climax. What happens at that point, and what happens in its immediate aftermath, is heartbreaking for all concerned. Walter Van Tilburg Clark hit a home run his first time at bat....more
Even today, it’s hard to avoid the names Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when traveling around the Utah, Wyoming, South Dakota area like I did backEven today, it’s hard to avoid the names Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when traveling around the Utah, Wyoming, South Dakota area like I did back in July, so when I spotted a copy of Charles Leerhsen’s 2020 Butch Cassidy biography in Wall, South Dakota, I was intrigued enough to bring it home with me. Pretty much all I knew about Butch and Sundance to that point came via the entertaining 1969 movie starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford as Butch and Sundance, respectively. We all know not to take movie biographies too seriously, however, and William Goldman, author of the screenplay, admitted that he knew only a handful of sketchy facts about the pair when he wrote the script. As it turns out, Goldman got the basic outline pretty much right and even captured the correct personalities of the two outlaws, but that was pure luck in the movie business of the day. Still, it was all a jumble of a few basic facts in my mind.
Robert Lee Parker, who tried several aliases before settling on Butch Cassidy, was born into a large and dirt-poor Mormon family in Utah on April 13, 1866. Amazingly, the last member of Butch’s “Wild Bunch� gang (a woman who may have sometimes held the horses for the gang while they were otherwise occupied) was not “put into the ground� until December 1961, only eight years before the movie making celebrity outlaws out of Butch and Sundance was released. Butch and Sundance, themselves, were shot down in Bolivia in November 1908. Butch was 42 years old.
A lot happened to Butch in those forty-two years. And Butch was a lot of different things to a lot of different people. He must have been one of the most charismatic men in the West during his day because even his victims often praised the way he handled his bank and train robberies, and the large ranchers who suffered cattle and horse losses to Butch’s rustling ways were often reluctant to charge him with the crime. Butch was just so damned likable, that it was hard for those who knew him to imagine him languishing in a jail cell. The Pinkerton Detective Agency used the threat of being robbed by Butch Cassidy to drum up business for the company, often knowingly attributing robberies to Butch and his gang when they knew the case to be otherwise. Butch refused to rob train passengers or bank customers, and went out of his way to limit violence during the robberies. The movie got that kind of thing pretty much right.
But, surprise, surprise. Butch was almost certainly gay or, perhaps reluctantly bi-sexual. Along with Sundance and Sundance’s partner Ethel Place (who was mistakenly re-named “Etta� on a Pinkerton wanted poster) he formed a threesome that raised a few eyebrows even at the time. Butch was not formally educated, but he was a reader and a natural loner who spent much of his downtime with his nose in a book. And by the time that Butch and Sundance were finally cornered and killed (there is some evidence that Butch killed Sundance before shooting himself in the head) in Bolivia, their celebrity-outlaw status was such that people refused to believe that they could be dead. Butch was the Elvis Presley of his day, and Butch Cassidy sightings in the US were reported for decades after his death.
Bottom Line: Butch Cassidy: The True Story of an American Outlaw is both fun and informative, something that is a little rare in a biography. It explores the Parker family roots in some detail, chronicles the comings and goings of Butch during his forty-two years, speculates on what he was up to during the dead spots in his history, and tries to explain the man’s motivations as he alternated between periods of thievery and trying to go straight for good. Charles Leerhsen uses an irreverently humorous style to tell the story of Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch, and he does much to debunk the many myths and legends that have become associated with Butch and Sundance over time. Surprisingly enough, the “true story� may just be even better than the myths....more
David Fisher’s Legends & Lies: The Real West, an oversized book of 285 pages of text and historical photos, was published in 2015 as a companion piece David Fisher’s Legends & Lies: The Real West, an oversized book of 285 pages of text and historical photos, was published in 2015 as a companion piece to a television series of the same title. As such, I’m sure it provided much more detail and context than the television shows could have possibly offered. However, readers picking it up at this point, especially those who know even the basic history of the American west are likely to be at least a little underwhelmed by the book.
That said, Legends & Lies does have separate chapters on the people that most of us so readily identify with the history of America’s westward expansion. Too, the chapters help the reader separate fact from myth even if they do not always provide enough context to explain effectively the motivations of everyone involved. This is very far from being the whole story, but I don’t think it pretends to be that. Legends & Lies, for the most part, delivers what it promises: a brief look at the “characters� that Hollywood and early television programming turned into mythical American heroes, be they “good guys� or “bad guys.� And, many times, they were both.
The twelve chapters are these:
Daniel Boone: Traitor or Patriot? David Crockett: Capitol Hillbilly Kit Carson: Duty Before Honor Black Bart: Gentleman Bandit Wild Bill Hickok: Plains Justice Bass Reeves: The Real Lone Ranger George Armstrong Custer: A General’s Reckoning Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley� The Radical Opportunists Jesse James: Bloody Politics Doc Holliday: Desperate Measures Billy the Kid: Escape Artist Butch Cassidy: The Last Man Standing
Bottom Line: Legends & Lies is a good place to start for readers wanting to learn more about a period of American history that still fascinates so many people all over the world. The book is both a primer and a decent jumping off spot for more focused histories on the same topic. There is certainly nothing new here, and that is likely to disappoint readers hoping to learn more about the “lies� referenced in the book’s title. Frankly, this is pop-history and it is probably more suitable for a Middle School audience than it is for an adult audience. ...more
Rightfully so, Elmore Leonard is best known for his crime fiction, but Leonard was not always a mystery writer. He began his career, in fact, as a wriRightfully so, Elmore Leonard is best known for his crime fiction, but Leonard was not always a mystery writer. He began his career, in fact, as a writer of western novels and short stories, and he made significant contributions to that genre. And, just as with his crime novels, several of Leonard’s westerns were chosen by Hollywood producers to become major movies of the day. Hombre, written in 1961, was one of those so chosen, and in 1967 it became a feature film starring Paul Newman as “Hombre,� a white man who had been raised by his Apache kidnappers.
“Maybe he let us think a lot of things about him that weren’t true. But as Russell would say, that was up to us. He let people do or think what they wanted while he smoked a cigarette and thought it out calmly, without his feelings getting mixed up in it. Russell never changed the whole time, though I think everyone else did in some way. He did what he felt had to be done. Even if it meant dying. So maybe you don’t have to understand him. You just know him.�
As a boy, John Russell was taken from his family by Apaches who made him one of their own. Now, Russell so easily passes for Apache that the light color of his eyes is the only startling thing about his physical appearance. Russell continued to live with the tribe even when it was eventually forced onto the reservation, so for all practical purposes he considers himself to be Apache - not white. But now, John Russell, sporting a fresh haircut and dressed as a white man, is on a personal mission of his own, and he finds himself on a small stagecoach making its final run across that part of Arizona.
When the other passengers realize who John Russell really is, they want nothing to do with him � even to forcing him to ride atop the coach with its driver. The passengers include a young woman who has just been recaptured from the Apaches who had held and abused her for several weeks, another woman and her Indian Agent husband who has a secret of his own, and an intimidating cowboy who bullied his way into the stage at the last minute. Russell, who has little other choice, tolerates the abuse, but he’s listening to their words � and he’s taking notes.
But then everything changes.
Suddenly, the passengers are begrudgingly depending on John Russell to keep them alive. And John Russell is probably just as surprised as they are to find himself defending a bunch of people who hate him so much.
Bottom Line: Hombre is significant in the degree to which it exposes the exploitation and deadly abuse suffered by the Indian tribes at the hands of those who continually invaded their lands, and it is highly sympathetic to that point of view. It is also a novel about the foolishness and hypocrisy of any kind of racism that happens to have been written in the midst of America’s civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties � and the timing was no accident. This is a reminder of just how good and impactful a western novel can be, and I highly recommend it. ...more
Three summers ago, a friend with longtime family ties to Wyoming suggested that we visit Fort Phil Kearney while I was wandering around that part of tThree summers ago, a friend with longtime family ties to Wyoming suggested that we visit Fort Phil Kearney while I was wandering around that part of the country. About the only thing that sounded remotely familiar to me at the time was the name of the Civil War general for whom the fort was named. I knew nothing about the history of the fort itself or what had happened there. Fort Phil Kearney is in such a remote location even today that it is easy to envision how scary it must have been there when the fort was constructed by military personnel in 1866, but it was only after hearing the fort’s history from an excellent Wyoming State Parks ranger that I wondered why it was still such a well-kept secret. Why were there no movies or novels about Fort Phil Kearney and the “Fetterman Fight� that happened there on December 21, 1866? After all, the Fetterman Fight, right up until the massacre of troops at the Battle of the Little Bighorn almost ten years later, was the worst defeat the US army ever suffered in battle against united tribes of American Indians.
Well, finally, someone has written a novel about Fort Phil Kearney, and as it turns out, it was well worth the wait because Michael Punke’s Ridgeline brings it all to life for today’s readers. Punke is, of course, best known for his novel The Revenant and the successful film version that followed some years later, and this seems like a natural for the Wyoming native who as a teenager was himself a National Park Service employee at the state’s Fort Laramie National Historic Site.
No one can know exactly what happened on that bloody day � or why it happened the way that it did � but Punke’s combination of historical fact and logical speculation is certainly plausible. The basic facts are these:
Several Indian tribes, some of them longtime enemies, worked together to bring approximately 2,000 warriors to the battlefield.
Tribal chiefs, with the help of a young warrior called Crazy Horse, concocted a precisely coordinated plan to lure soldiers from the fort into an ambush from which they could not possibly escape.
Despite being directly ordered not to cross the ridge that placed them out of sight from fort observers, a combination of 81 calvary and infantry soldiers did exactly that.
Within an hour (some say thirty minutes) of having crossed that point, all 81 soldiers were dead.
The Indians knew they were fighting for their very survival as a people. A lesser threat would not have allowed longtime mortal enemies, as some of the tribes were, to put aside their differences even long enough to defeat a common foe. The soldiers were there because of the country’s inevitable western expansion and its hunger for gold. The troops were a mixture of Confederate and Union veterans, and not all of them were even soldiers by choice.
The story Punke tells, because he tells it in alternating sections from the points of view of both sides, has a little of the feel of watching two runaway trains approach an unavoidable head-on collision. It has a tragic feel about it, especially because all of the key characters in Ridgeline are based upon historical figures and what historians know about them. Among the Indians, there are: Crazy Horse, his friend Lone Bear, his brother Little Hawk, and chiefs Red Cloud and High Backbone. Soldiers include: the fort’s commander Colonel Henry Carrington, Captains William Fetterman and Tenador Ten Eyck, and Lieutenant George Washington Grummond (the wild card in this story). In addition to the troops, a few families, including children, were also inside Fort Phil Kearney, and Punke uses two of the wives, Frances Grummond and Margaret Carrington, to illustrate some of the personality conflicts and jealousies that existed in the officer ranks. Scouts Jim Bridger (who played a key role in Punke’s The Revenant) and James Beckwourth also add to the mix.
Bottom Line: Ridgeline is the kind of historical fiction that reminds readers that those who came before us were not all that different from the people we are today. Punke does not take sides. Instead, he gives the reader a sense of how � and why � something as tragic as what ultimately happened to this country’s native peoples happened. This is a memorable account of one little known fight between two very different cultures that had a much greater impact on American history than anyone could have realized at the time.
Elmer Kelton was really something. Born on one ranch in 1926, and growing up on a different one, Kelton had plenty of time to observe the cowboy life Elmer Kelton was really something. Born on one ranch in 1926, and growing up on a different one, Kelton had plenty of time to observe the cowboy life through his own eyes. He earned a journalism degree from the University of Texas, and served as editor for various agricultural and ranching publications for most of his life. But what makes Kelton so special is his success with writing western novels. Eight of his novels won the Spur Award given annually by the Western Writers of America in recognition for best western novel of the year. So, the group finally just decided to proclaim Kelton “the greatest Western writer of all time.� Heck, back in 1997 the Texas state legislature even proclaimed a special “Elmer Kelton Day� in his honor. In other words, Elmer Kelton may just be the Babe Ruth of westerns - underrated as I feel he still is even today.
Shadow of a Star is Kelton’s 1959 western novel about Jim-Bob McClain, a young man still on the cusp of manhood who finally realizes the dream of his life: the sheriff he has admired for most of his young life hires him as his only deputy. In the truest sense of the term, Shadow of a Star is a coming-of-age novel, one in which this young man needs to get things figured out quickly so that he doesn’t die in the process.
Sheriff Mont Taylor is showing his age now, and he’s recently had to fire his deputy because the man enjoyed the power that comes with wearing a badge a little too much. The ex-deputy doesn’t have that power anymore, but he has a new enemy: Jim-Bob McClain, the kid who replaced him. And he thoroughly enjoys watching Jim-Bob botch the first couple of incidents he’s called upon to handle - especially the one during which the young deputy’s gun is snatched from him as he attempts to handcuff a would-be prisoner.
The climax of Shadow of a Star finds Jim-Bob McClain fighting to get a bank-robbing murderer to authorities before the locals catch up with him and lynch the man. Also on his trail, is a gang-of-three - including the prisoner’s elder brother - that intends to relieve Jim-Bob of his prisoner. Finally, within two miles of the town he’s so desperate to reach, both groups are closing in on him. And now, he realizes that he doesn’t have much of a chance of making those last two miles in one piece. His head tells him to give up; his heart tells him hell, no.
Bottom Line: I don’t think that Elmer Kelton necessarily thought of Shadow of a Star as a YA novel, but that’s what I consider it to be today. Because it was written in 1959, it seems tame by today’s standards, especially when it comes to language, violence, and sexual relationships. Things happen, of course, but the details are largely left up to the reader’s imagination, making the novel, perhaps, more appropriate for today’s YA readers than for adults looking for a more gritty representation of the Old West. That aside, Elmer Kelton tells a good western story, and he gives a good feel for what that isolated lifestyle must have been like. Watching Jim-Bob McClain figure out who he is and what his badge represents to him and to the townspeople he protects makes for a satisfying experience for readers of any age....more
Elmore Leonard may be best known for his crime novels, many of which were made into successful Hollywood films, but he actually began his literary carElmore Leonard may be best known for his crime novels, many of which were made into successful Hollywood films, but he actually began his literary career writing Western short stories for the pulp magazines of the 1950s. Hollywood movies based on Leonard’s westerns include Hombre, 3:10 to Yuma, and Valdez Is Coming. Anyone interested in reading an Elmore Leonard western or two should consider the Library of America volume entitled Elmore Leonard: Westerns published in 2018 because it includes four novels (Last Stand at Saber River, Hombre, Valdez Is Coming, and Forty Lashes Less One) plus eight of his most outstanding western short stories. For those more inclined to short stories, there is also The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard published by William Morrow in 2004.
Valdez Is Coming is the story of a man who was known for most of his life as Roberto Valdez. Roberto was an army scout and an Apache-killing machine who was known to have taken a few scalps of his own (among other atrocities) in battle. But now he prefers to be known as Bob Valdez, a stagecoach security guard who also serves as town constable for a small community when he’s actually in town. Bob is still deadly with a shotgun or a Winchester, but the white men who employ him in town do so only to have someone stand between them and any Mexicans who come to town to cause trouble. They have no respect for Bob Valdez; he is just a tool they use for a job they are afraid to do for themselves. Valdez knows that, but to him it’s all just part of the job.
Then one day, during his role as town constable, Bob Valdez turns back into Roberto Valdez.
It happens when Valdez arrives back in town just in time to find that a group of townspeople, led by a prominent cattleman, have trapped a black man and his Indian wife inside a sod cabin not far out of town. The cattleman claims that the man inside is wanted for a murder that occurred six months earlier, and the men are taking turns shooting into the cabin to see if the supposed killer will surrender. Valdez tries to defuse the situation, but Tanner, the cattleman, puts Valdez into a situation where he ends up killing the innocent man in self-defense. Now, Bob Valdez wants to do right by the man’s pregnant woman. It seems only right to him that the men involved collect $500 for the woman before she returns to her people to have the child. Unfortunately for Bob (and ultimately for the men), no one agrees with him.
Bottom Line: At roughly 240 pages, Valdez Is Coming is a relatively short novel, but it still manages to pack a punch. Roberto/Bob Valdez is a memorable character who has come to know right from wrong, and he will not take no for an answer when it comes to helping the wronged woman. Tanner is an evil man who surrounds himself with dozens of men willing to do most anything to impress him. The clash between the two men is memorable, but this is more than a revenge novel; this is a story about all the shades of grey between good and evil, and how one man deals with them. It is action-filled from the beginning, but it ends with a rather unexpected twist that lends depth to several of the characters. This is a good, old-fashioned western, for sure. ...more
For a lot of legitimate reasons western novels get as little respect as romance novels, and, in fact,This review is only for "Shane" by Jack Schaefer:
For a lot of legitimate reasons western novels get as little respect as romance novels, and, in fact, I’ve several times seen westerns characterized disparagingly as “romance novels for men.� But for a lot of equally legitimate reasons, westerns and romance novels, when they are approached in a serious manner by their authors, deserve the same respect granted to their supposedly more sophisticated cousins. Jack Schaefer’s 1949 novel Shane is most definitely a western that stands tall for good reason.
Shane certainly has its share of fistfights, and even includes a memorable gunfight between two of the fastest gunslingers passing through the state of Wyoming. But it also features a young couple trying to teach their son Bob (the novel’s narrator) right from wrong to provide him with a proper moral code he can live by for the rest of his life. It features a man so conflicted by his past that he struggles to keep himself under control even when violence is the only way to protect himself and those he loves. And it even explores one of the sweetest love-triangles I’ve ever encountered in a novel. Shane may not be the perfect western novel, but it comes as close as any to meeting that standard.
“He rode easily, relaxed in the saddle, leaning his weight lazily into the stirrups. Yet even in this easiness was a suggestion of tension. It was the easiness of a coiled spring, of a trap set.�
That’s the impression that Shane gave Bob when the two first set eyes on each other as Shane rides up to the Starrett farm. From that first moment, the boy senses something different about Shane, something very dangerous to anyone who might dare cross him for the wrong reason. Shane arrives just about the time that half-a-dozen small farmers are being coerced by a rich cattleman to walk away from the homesteads upon which they depend for a living. The man wants to drive large herds of cattle through the territory, but he cannot do that if he has to bypass all the fenced-off farms adjoining his own property. And after receiving a big government contract to supply as much beef as he can come up with, he will do whatever it takes to destroy the farms in his way.
Shane has to choose a side or ride away. He doesn’t ride away.
Soon enough, Shane becomes a symbol of resistance to both sides of the fence dispute, something that he both regrets and accepts:
“In some strange fashion the feeling was abroad that Shane was a marked man. Attention was on him as a sort of symbol. By taking him on father had accepted in a way a challenge from the big ranch across the river. What had happened to Morley had been a warning and father had deliberately answered it. The long unpleasantness was sharpened now after the summer lull. The issue in our valley was plain and would in time have to be pushed to a showdown. If Shane could be driven out, there would be a break in the homestead rank, a defeat going beyond the loss of a man into the realm of prestige and morale. It could be the crack in the dam that weakens the whole structure and finally less through the flood.�
Neither Shane, nor the Starretts, are willing to let that happen.
Bottom Line: Shane is filled with memorable characters, heroes and villains, alike. One of the most memorable is Marian Starrett, a woman strong enough to support her husband in his fight to save their livelihood from the man who wants to steal it from them. The complicated relationship between Joe Starrett, his wife Marian, and Shane is one that Schaefer handles perfectly in this, his debut novel. Shane is so good that I can only imagine the pressure that Schaefer must have felt for the rest of his life to match it. ...more
The first time I read Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller, I was already thirteen or fourteen years old and “officially� too old for the book since it was aimed The first time I read Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller, I was already thirteen or fourteen years old and “officially� too old for the book since it was aimed at 9-to-12-year-old children when it was published in 1956. That would be about right, too, since the book is only 117 pages long, and would be called a “chapter book� today. I do hope that copies of Old Yeller can still be found in elementary and middle school libraries because it tells the kind of story that kids are likely to remember for the rest of their lives - just the way I remembered it so well that this re-read held few surprises for me despite my fifty-eight year gap between readings. (I admit that the 1957 Disney movie of the same name probably had a lot to do with those clear memories, though, because the movie seems to have followed the book’s plot straight down the line.)
Old Yeller is a coming-of-age story about Travis and his little brother Arliss, two boys left alone in the late 1860s on a small Salt Lick, Texas, farm with their mother while their father (along with most of the other men in the area) is away on a cattle drive. Fourteen-year-old Travis is going to have to grow up fast if he’s even going to come close to filling his father’s shoes, and it’s not going to be easy. It doesn’t help that “little Arliss� is the kind of free-spirited little boy who likes nothing better than to get naked and spend his time wading around in the family’s drinking water.
When, out of nowhere, a big yeller, meat-stealing, dog shows up at the ranch and devours what was left of the family’s last slaughtered hog, it looks like Travis has another problem to contend with. But after that “big yeller dog� is noisily adopted into the family by little Arliss, he turns out to be exactly the kind of ranch dog that every boy needs by his side. Thus begins a series of encounters with bears, wild pigs, and raging bulls during which Old Yeller proves that he is willing to fight anyone and anything to keep his adopted family safe from harm.
And then, just about the time you finally catch your breath, here comes an ending that no one who has ever read Old Yeller will ever forget. Let me warn you that this is an ending that few ten-year-olds are going to get over quickly � but here’s a tip for you parents out there. Old Yeller has a sequel called Savage Sam that tells the story of one of Yeller’s pups, the little dog that came to live with Travis and Arliss near the end of Old Yeller. That will make it all better.
Bottom Line: Old Yeller may be a children’s book, but it works pretty well for adults, too, especially those who remember the book or the movie from their childhood. It is written in a straight-forward style that sometimes causes the mini-climaxes to come a little too close together for readers used to the more comfortable pacing of adult novels but, after all, that approach keeps it short enough for its target audience. This 1957 Newberry Medal nominee is, in my estimation, a five-star book for readers of all ages. ...more
A New Look at Nine Years with the Indians is by far the best reading surprise I’ve had all year. That’s partially, I know, because I expected so littlA New Look at Nine Years with the Indians is by far the best reading surprise I’ve had all year. That’s partially, I know, because I expected so little of it when I picked it up, but as I got deeper and deeper into Herman Lehmann’s memoir, I began to realize that this is a really good book despite any misgivings about the complete accuracy of the story I still may have. I’m still a bit skeptical that all of it happened exactly the way Mr. Lehmann says it happened, but I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt more times than not. Oh, I expect there are some exaggerations and the like, but how surprising would that be, really, for a book written some fifty or so years after the events being described happened to its author.
On May 16, 1870 eleven-year-old Herman Lehmann and his eight-year-old brother Willie were taken by a small band of Apache Indians from their family homestead near Fredericksburg, Texas. Willie was forcibly abandoned a couple of days later and was returned to his family eighteen days after his abduction. Herman, on the other hand, lived with the Apaches, and later the Comanches, for the next eight or nine years before the Army forced him to return to his white family. I say “eight or nine years� because the book’s title says it was nine years despite there being at least one reference in the book to eight years of captivity. And in addition, the book tells us that Herman was eleven when taken by the Indians and nineteen when he returned to his family.
Herman, in a surprisingly short period of time, fully adopted the culture and lifestyle of his Indian captors, even to going on horse and cattle rustling raids in Texas and New Mexico during which he took great delight in killing farmers, ranchers, and prospectors and taking their scalps. In the process, he came to hate the white and Mexican interlopers in Indian country as much as his Apache brothers and sisters hated them. Herman, in fact, came to consider the band of Apaches he lived and fought with to be his true family, and even after he returned to his German-American family he felt most comfortable when surrounded by his old Apache cohorts.
Herman, in fact, only even returned to his family because he was physically carried there by Army troopers after almost all the Indians in the region had been forced to surrender into the “care� of the U.S. government at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Even then he would have tried to escape on his own if his adoptive father, the great Chief Quanah Parker, had not advised him that it was time to go home. Sadly, going home would not solve Herman’s problems. For the rest of his life he suffered from the trauma of having been violently jerked out of one culture, immersed into a shockingly different one for almost a decade, and then almost as violently being forced to return to the original culture (which itself had already drastically changed). Herman never managed to make a complete return to the white-man culture of his day. Both of his marriages failed, and he never mastered a trade that would have made his and his family’s living.
Willie, on the other hand, did very well in life, probably because he was not held captive long enough to have lost his “personal identity� to his captors. He likely looked back on his kidnapping as one of the great adventures of his life, one in which he beat the odds and came out whole. Willie married for a second time after the death of his first wife, and this second marriage produced two daughters, Gerda and Esther. The copy of the book that I now own was inscribed by Gerda to family friends in 1997 (some sixteen years before her death at age 94). I’ve attached a copy of that inscription and a picture of Gerda and the rest of her family (from the book) that was taken around 1930. (Available on the review posted at bookchase.blogspot.com only)
Bottom Line: A New Look at Nine Years with the Indians is a fascinating account of what life was like in central Texas right up into the 1880s. It was a time in which farmers and prospectors daring to push further and further west were in constant danger of being picked off by raiders from several different Indian tribes that considered that part of the country to be their own. Not surprisingly, this is not a politically correct book and it displays numerous unconscious racist overtones when describing the Indians and their way of life. For instance, Willie is described on page 271 as having been “taken away by animal-like men� and Herman tells an “amusing� story on page 180 about a black man who was forced to dress as an Indian during one skirmish with Rangers so that the Rangers would mistakenly kill him as he ran for his life back toward the Texans. Herman Lehmann was a real life Little Big Man, no doubt about it. ...more
Tombstone is the third book in Tom Clavin’s almost inadvertent “Frontier Lawmen� trilogy that began in 2017 with Dodge City and continued in 2019 withTombstone is the third book in Tom Clavin’s almost inadvertent “Frontier Lawmen� trilogy that began in 2017 with Dodge City and continued in 2019 with Wild Bill. Clavin does not seem to have had a trilogy in mind when he began writing about the period, but with the addition of Tombstone he has now effectively covered the 15-20 years following the Civil War that were dominated by the stereotypical gunslinging frontier lawman. It all seems to have started with Wild Bill Hickcok’s adoption of that style of law enforcement after the war, and what happened in Tombstone in 1881 seems to have brought the era to a close.
What happened there was the famous “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral,� a thirty-second battle during which thirty shots were fired at almost pointblank range, three men were killed, and three others wounded. That was bad enough, but as it turns out, more men one way or another associated with the gunfight, including friends, allies, and relatives of the actual participants, would be gunned down after the fight than during it.
But why did it all happen the way that it did? How did nine armed men end up facing each other across the few feet of a vacant city lot (not in the O.K. Corral at all) prepared to shoot it out despite the high odds against any of them walking away from the fight unscathed? It’s a long story involving politics, rivalries between U.S. marshals and local sheriffs, clashes between out-of-control cowboys and the Tombstone citizens who feared them, and even romantic rivalries between some of the players. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the gunfight between the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday on one side; and the Clanton brothers, the McLaury brothers, and Billy Claiborne on the other is that it occurred only because no one on either side really understood what was happening on that fateful day in 1881. Either side could have stopped the gunfire before it started � but neither did.
A big part of the story is the blood-feud that developed just days after the gunfight, a vendetta in which the Earps became the targets of those wanting to avenge the deaths of relatives and friends who were killed at the hands of the three Earps and Doc Holiday. Having learned their lesson about what happens in a head-to-head gunfight with the Earps, the avengers decided that ambushes and back-shooting offered their best chance at vengeance. Wyatt Earp, the only man to walk away completed whole from the gunfight, could not just wait for his family to be wiped out by the cowboys who wanted them all dead � nor would he run. And in the resulting revenge ride from hell, Wyatt and his personal posse disposed of as many of his enemies as they could find.
Bottom Line: Tom Clavin Tombstone is a well-researched chronicle of how Tombstone, Arizona, earned her place in American history. It’s a story that borders on the farcical at times: who the good guys were and who the bad guys were was a matter of opinion; the Earps spent as much time locked up as did the cowboys trying to kill them; some cowboys demanded to be jailed because they felt safer from the Earps in jail than walking the streets; and the posse chasing the Earps and Holiday often included some of the most vicious killers in the state. This is not the story you may think you already know from all the movies, television shows and novels produced about the Earps, Doc Holiday, and the mislabeled “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.� But, as it turns out, the real story is every bit as fascinating as any of those movies or novels....more
I grew up during what was once called the “golden age� of television, those days when broadcast television’s three networks were filled with somethingI grew up during what was once called the “golden age� of television, those days when broadcast television’s three networks were filled with something for everyone: variety shows, situation comedies, dramas, cop shows, and westerns. Many of those old shows are now considered classics, but for boys my age it was really all about those glorious westerns. We all were as familiar with the likes of Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill, Bat Masterson, Jesse James, Calamity Jane, etc., as we were with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Well, if I admit the truth, probably more familiar with them than we were with Washington and Lincoln. But even as fictionalized as those old shows were, they still managed to do one thing other than simply entertaining the children of the day. Many of us came away from them with a lifelong fascination with the world those “gunfighters� and their friends lived in - and a desire to find out what it was really like to be them. And that brings me all the way to my fascination with books like Tom Clavin’s new Hickok biography, Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier’s First Gunfighter.
As Clavin reminds us, by the time he was thirty years old Wild Bill Hickok was already a bigger legend to the people of his day than Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, or Kit Carson. And make no mistake about it, those three men were deservedly legendary in the minds of the American public. Hickok was the first national celebrity to come along after the Civil War, and only his good friend, the extraordinary showman Buffalo Bill Cody (who outlived Hickock by forty years), would even come close to reaching that kind of celebrity. But barely two months past his thirty-ninth birthday, Wild Bill Hickok was dead.
It all started on just weeks after the close of the Civil War (July 31, 1865) with a gunfight over Hickok’s watch. The watch had been snatched from Hickok by Davis Tutt as collateral for a debt that Hickok owed Tutt as the result of a card game. When Tutt decided to add a little public humiliation into the equation, Hickok decided it was time to call the man out. But this would be no ordinary duel; instead it took the form of what we have come to think of as the traditional western gunfight where two men face each other to see which is the fastest and most accurate shootist between them. Obviously, that man was Bill Hickok (whose real name was James Butler Hickok), and a legend was born. Publication of an account of the duel in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine some eighteen months later only made it official. Twenty-nine-year-old Wild Bill Hickok was now a national legend, and he would remain one well beyond his death a decade later.
But this was not all good.
The Harper’s article implied that Hickok had already killed two dozen men, and that he was the kind of shoot-first-ask-questions-later guy who was likely to kill dozens more before he was done. Suddenly Wild Bill had a reputation to live up to wherever he went, and just as suddenly there were dozens of people out there who dreamed of killing him in order to enhance their own reputations and fortunes. Sadly enough, Wild Bill Hickok would not be blessed even with that kind of glorious death. Rather, his ailing health made it possible for him to be brought down by a cowardly little man with an imagined grudge.
Tom Clavin’s Wild Bill tells you how it happened � and what happened between that first gunfight and Bill’s last card game.
Bottom Line: If you are interested in this period of American history and those most dramatically involved in living it, Clavin’s book Is one you need to read. It is, of course, impossible to know exactly what Hickok was thinking at the pivotal moments of his life so some of what the author says is necessarily built upon speculation, but Clavin does a fine job in filling in the blanks for his readers. ...more
Caroline Fraser's dual autobiography of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane is an eye-opener. It is extensive (515 pages of text, pCaroline Fraser's dual autobiography of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane is an eye-opener. It is extensive (515 pages of text, plus another 125 pages of footnotes and index) and it is revealing, so revealing in fact, that the most rabid "Little House on the Prairie" fans may find themselves regretting that they read it.
Laura Ingalls Wilder was not a particularly happy person, and she only came to write her family's story late in life (the books are a blending of fact and fiction well edited by Rose), but her daughter was a very troubled soul for her entire life. The relationship between the two was a strained one almost from the time that Rose can remember her mother.
Wilder turned to commercial writing primarily out of necessity - and heavy encouragement from her daughter to do so. She was desperate, in her sixties, to finally find some financial security after a life of losing one home after the other and being forced to move from state to state always hoping to find a better life. And the books worked out beautifully despite the little regard that both Wilder and Lane had for sticking to facts even while representing that everything in the books was true. (Even contemporary booksellers found it difficult to know in which section to place the books, Fiction vs Non-Fiction.)
Wilder wanted nothing more than to make her father Charles Ingalls appear to be a good provider for his family even though he was not very good at doing that in the real world. Each of her books was written with that one goal always in mind, and with Lane's heavy editing and re-writing, Wilder succeeded in doing just that. But, especially after Wilders' death, Lane managed to politicize the books by emphasizing the family's aversion to any kind of government interference in their lives, to taxes, and to government welfare programs. Both Wilder and Lane saw FDR as a mortal enemy and despised his policies. In fact, Lane made a small fortune writing about her own brand of politics and gained national fame doing so.
Rose Wilder Lane, who seems to have had mental breakdowns several times in her life, even managed to lose the royalty rights to the Little House series to a despicable Connecticut politician, killing the wish of Wilder that those monies go to a Missouri library upon Lane's death. That may be the saddest legacy of Lane's rather strange life. Yes, this is an eye-opener, but getting behind the scenes to see "how the sausage is made," usually is....more
I particularly enjoy reading history books that manage to put a more human face on figures from the past, books that offer the reader more than the usI particularly enjoy reading history books that manage to put a more human face on figures from the past, books that offer the reader more than the usual dates and a dry regurgitation of a version of the “facts� we all suffered through as public school students. I know that not everyone is happy with what some have come to call “pop history,� but I enjoy being reminded that major historical figures were not so different from all of us today. Keeping that thought in mind makes what happened in the past all the more real and memorable to me. And that’s precisely the approach that Deanne Stillman takes in Blood Brothers: The Story of the Strange Friendship between Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill.
Indian Chief Sitting Bull and scout Buffalo Bill Cody would seem to have had little in common other than being on opposite sides of the fighting that would eventually result in the near extermination of America’s indigenous population. After General George Armstrong Custer’s defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, a battle in which Chief Sitting Bull was mistakenly credited with having personally killed Custer, the US government would settle for nothing less than confining every Native American to one of the country’s ever-shrinking reservations. No one in their right mind could have predicted shortly after the 1876 routing of Custer’s troops by those of Chiefs Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse that Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill, a scout who helped soldiers chase Sitting Bull out of the country, would become close friends in just a few years. But that’s exactly what happened. The caption of a publicity photo the pair took together in Montreal in 1885 capitalized on that unlikelihood by putting it this way:
Foes in �76, Friends in �85.
As it turns out, both Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill Cody were national icons of their day. The men were among the earliest of America’s national celebrities, and they were treated as such by the media and the general population. Both were well aware of their images and, by the second half of their lives, both were comfortable (for different reasons) with the showmanship required to maintain those images. However, what began as a business partnership turned into what seems to have been a genuinely deep friendship that lasted right up to the moment of Sitting Bull’s cowardly assassination at the hands of Indian policemen and American calvary. Cody, in fact, was looking for Sitting Bull, hoping to talk him into peacefully surrendering to authorities, when the chief was killed by a shot into the back of his head. The premise that Sitting Bull’s life may have been saved if only Cody had not been purposely misdirected by a cavalry officer to follow the wrong trail is a haunting one. We will never know what could have been.
Bottom Line: Blood Brothers uses short biographies of Sitting Bull, Buffalo Bill Cody, and the woman that Bull saw as a daughter and Bill as a sister, sharpshooter Annie Oakley, to explore the remarkable friendship they had together and how each of them made the others better during a remarkable period in American history. It all seems to have happened so long ago, but then Stillman reminds us that these were just people doing their best with the hand that life dealt them, just like all of us are doing today. I still find it amazing that in the same decade my own grandparents were born, some in the US government still considered Sitting Bull to be so dangerous that they wanted him dead. They got their wish and we all know what happened next. ...more
Entertaining compilation of 15 very early Elmore Leonard short stories running the gamut from hard core westerns to equally hard core crime fiction haEntertaining compilation of 15 very early Elmore Leonard short stories running the gamut from hard core westerns to equally hard core crime fiction happening in mid-twentieth century Detroit.
As in any short story collection, some stories are stronger than others, but none of them fail either to entertain or display the early talent that would very soon mark Leonard's work as a novelist and short story writer. This one might be a little harder to find than Leonard's better-known work, but I recommend it to his longtime fans - and to those readers who still have the thrill of jumping on the Elmore Leonard bandwagon ahead of them....more
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