Wednesday's Western: The First Gothic Western: JACK LONG or SHOT IN THE EYE by C. W. Webber

The first gothic western was published in February, 1845, as Jack Long, or Shot In The Eye by C. Wilkins Eimi--and a bit later, in a different format, under the author's real name, Charles Wilkins Webber.  It was highly praised by Edgar Allan Poe, who compared it favorably with Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction.  The author prefaces the story by saying that it is a true tale, that he was there in Texas during the time.

The use of alternative titles was already something of a standard for western narratives written by engaging liars, something parodied well by Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West.  Texas historian C. L. Sonnichsen researched and wrote about the historical details behind the Regulator War, and it seems that the story could be roughly true.

Webber's yarn opens during that time of the Regulators, when Texas ranchers employed mercenary lawmen to keep order.  Unfortunately, some of the Regulators abuse their power for nefarious ends and severely beat the protagonist, leaving him for dead.  After a time, Jack Long reappears in the form of a primitive wild man, and one by one he hunts the Regulators down, shooting their eyes out with miraculous shots, often at long range.

Webber infuses his story with gothic images and legendary nuances, with suggestions of both naturalism and supernaturalism.  Only when his vengeance has been "consummated" can the protagonist return to his wife and children and his peaceful pastoral existence.  The core of this story would later become a standard of the genre, in a large number of westerns such as Max Brand's The Rancher's Revenge.

Western pulps are often looked upon with distaste by more sophisticated readers, and with good reason.  With some notable exceptions, the pulps were written to formula, and that formula usually dispensed "justice" in the form of a violent comeuppance.  Personalities were usually neglected in favor of interchangeable stock characters, at once adhering to and reinforcing stereotypes.   Usually a good guy/bad guy duality was artificially drawn and the plot manipulated with coincidence and melodrama, the white hats predictably prevailing.  Yet some very good books have been written using imaginative variations of the formula, in parody or parable.

Pre-dating the pulps were the western narratives, biased Davy Crockett-styled yarns told in the form of often flowery history and embellished autobiography.  Both Chamberlain and Webber wrote this kind of narrative.

Although Jack Long, or Shot In The Eye is a delightful find, many of Webber's other books are not only hard to find, they are hard to read, though interesting for the historical puzzles they present.  Much more interesting is the history of the man himself as naturalist, theological and medical expert, soldier, author, editor, and as a character in his own books.

Was Charles Wilkins Webber the model for Samuel Chamberlain's Judge Holden?  Cormac McCarthy's Judge Holden is based upon Samuel Chamberlain's quasi-historical memoir which includes a narrative of an 1849 scalp-hunting expedition with a man he calls Judge Holden, scientist, naturalist, and yarn-spinner, whose existence can't be verified in the census--nor so far in any other historical document.

Chamberlain says that Holden was wanted under another name for an outrage he had committed on a young girl in the Indian territories, suggesting that Holden had at least one alias.  We know that Webber wrote under different names, including Charles Winterfield and C. Wilkins Emmi.  The 1849 scalping expedition described by Samuel Chamberlain may not exactly jibe with the 1849 southwestern expedition undertaken by Webber, but we have far too little evidence to go on.  Much of Chamberlain's narrative is factual--collaborated with other historical documents--but like Webber's narratives, it often falls into dubious melodrama.    

Webber was said to have been friends with John James Audubon and his sons, and with that other naturalist/explorer, Alfred Jacob Miller, whose illustrations of pastoral American Indian life were published in Webber's books on naturalism, auctioned off at this link.

The Wikipedia link for Webber is here, but more can be found at this link from the Dictionary of Literary Biography.  And there is my own truncated list of sources related to Webber and the other filibusters at Amazon, here.

All of the internet sketches seem to have their source in the Cyclopedia of American Literature available at this link at Google Books.  Written back when such histories were notoriously unreliable, it still contains what may be valuable clues, an autographed sketch of Charles Wilkins Webber, and information on his association with Audubon.

But I'd like to see some primary documentation, some collaborating documentation.  What was his wife's maiden name?  On which of his trips to the Rocky Mountains did he meet Audubon?  And in what years?  Webber was 36 when he was killed.  That would make him 30 in 1849, and just 19 or 20 when he rode with Jack Coffee Hays and the Texas Rangers.

I first ran into Webber decades ago when I was researching filibuster Capt. Jack Allen, who raised a couple of companies in Louisville, Kentucky in 1855 for the set purpose of joining William Walker in his conquest of Nicaragua.  One of the local contemporary newspapers carried an editorial description lauding one of Allen's officers.  Charles Winterfield stopped by the newspaper office to chat, a very large man, and "every inch a hero."  An acclaimed author, naturalist, and scholar.

Later I found a roster of the two companies leaving Louisville by steamboat for New Orleans.  Some of the men were convicted murderers let off by the courts under the condition that they join the filibusters.  I was puzzled because there was no man named Winterfield on the list.  In a deposition in a Jefferson County (Ky) Circuit Court case, another man on the expedition referred to Winterfield as "Winterfield or Holden as he is called."

Researching contemporary records, I compiled mini-biographies of the Kentuckians in this expedition by each name, but a couple of decades passed before I realized that Webber and Winterfield were the same man.  Was he also Chamberlain's Judge Holden?

Webber also seems to have been affiliated with Holden's Dollar Magazine, briefly discussed by Pulitzer Prize winning author Perry Miller in The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville, and the New York Literary Scene, p. 226, who says that the mysterious publisher Holden went west and died in California, causing the magazine to fold.  Well, when did he go west and how did he die?

I went to Google Answers when the beta model came out, and I presented the mystery of the identity of Holden/Webber at large to researchers and reference librarians as an open question there.  No one has come up with anything that I hadn't already seen, but one researcher insisted that if Webber got married in Boston in 1849, he could not have been on a western expedition in 1849.  Furthermore, the Cyclopedia info says that the Comanches ran off the horses at Corpus Cristi and Webber never made it past Washington--therefore Holden was a fiction, case closed.

Well, it is not as simple as that.  Holden may yet have be found, under another name.

An historical fact, once stumbled upon, has to be walked around and looked at from all sides.  If I had a plane ticket and unlimited time, I would go find that marriage certificate, note the witnesses, the presiding magistrate, and the time of the marriage.  Then I would search all of the contemporary newspapers looking for a notice of the ceremony.  Marriage records are usually reliable, but sometimes the marriage has taken place earlier and recorded much later.

A basic name search through the back issues of the New York Times might be productive.  I don't think that has been done.  Clues might pop up anywhere.

Then again, if I had another plane ticket, I might thoroughly search the filibuster records that are down in the special collections at Tulane University, as well as any extant New Orleans records and newspapers for the time that Jack Allen's filibusters were there.  According to the little biographical information that we have, Webber met his artist/naturalist wife in New York.  Did they travel together before they were married?

Webber himself is a character in his western narrative, Old Hicks: The Indian Guide.  Is his wife the woman on the expedition, Emily L'Enville, with whom he falls in love?  His wife was an artist/naturalist and contributed sketches to his works in the manner of Alfred Jacob Miller and John James Audubon.  She outlived him and was involved in the reprinting of his books.  I've no doubt that there is more information on her than I have yet seen.

In Nicaragua, Charles Wilkins Webber, under whatever name he was going by, took a handful of Kentucky volunteers on a mission behind enemy lines at the Battle of Rivas.  All were said to have been shot down, but we know some who survived.  On page one of the Louisville Daily Courier, September 20, 1859, it was revealed that Ned Parker and a few other survivors had returned to Louisville via different routes.  Parker said that he escaped and made his way alone into Costa Rica and then into Mexico.

I'll post more on the works of C. W. Webber later. 

Friday's Forgotten Book: THE APRIL ROBIN MURDERS by Craig Rice and Ed McBain

After Craig Rice died, Ed McBain finished her novel about actress April Robin and the murders that take place at her haunted house.  To me, the cover on the first edition (and bookclub edition) always seemed right.  A busy screwball novel with Hollywood jokes scattered about, a period piece and a murder mystery completely in the style of Craig Rice's other murder/comedies.

I like the cover art on the above edition too, but some of the covers on the other editions took the screwball out and sold it as a harder work, as sex and murder.

The book pushes the morals of the 1950s, something a bit foreign to readers today, yet Craig's writing is infused with an understated whimsy that is timeless.  It's there if you can see it.  McBain certainly could.

April can be the cruelest month, yet it is the month of rebirth.  Historians conjecture that Jesus Christ was born in the spring, the church authorities deciding much later to move his birthdate to coincide with the solstice holiday already in place and thus reverse birth and rebirth.  It is out of this controversy that April Fool's day was born, although it can also be seen as the month of the Great White Rabbit of Native American lore, the celtic pooka and the modern Easter bunny.  Which reminds me, we might go see the matinee of the movie Hop, which opens today, April Fool's Day.

My list of April-related works is at this link.

You should read Jeffrey Marks' biography of Craig Rice, Who Was That Lady? Craig Rice: The Queen of Screwball Mystery.

Wednesday's Western: Firsts: The Book Collector's Magazine

Firsts: The Book Collector's Magazine occasionally devotes an issue to westerns, and the current issue is a fine example.

The works of western author David Lavender are discussed in detail in an article by Jerry Bartholomew, with pictures of dustjacket art and a listing of current market prices.  I had read Lavender's history of Bent's Fort, back when it won the Spur Award, but I had no idea that he had written so many other fine books, both history and fiction.  Lavender's work was lauded by A. B. Guthrie, jr., and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.  He even wrote a rather conventional western novel under the pen name of Ralph Catlin.

Also in this issue is a long interesting article on Howard Fast's The Last Frontier (North Castle Books) , Mari Sandoz's Cheyenne Autumn: An American Epic, and John Ford's transformation of the history into film.

Back in February, 2008, Firsts devoted an issue to "The Books of Texas" and featured Elmer Kelton's The Time It Never Rained on the cover.  Inside are articles by Bill Hanrahan and Robin H. Smiley and on the works of Kelton, Benjamin Capps, John Graves, Gail Caldwell, and many others--some of them little known gems.

The September, 2010 issue featured works pertaining to George Armstrong Custer, the works of western novelist Ernest Haycox, and many other fine features.  The books-into-film segment in this issue was The Stalking Moon based upon a book by that sadly neglected author of western novels, Theodore V. Olsen.  The life  and other works of T. V. Olsen are also discussed.


Firsts can sometimes be ordered from Amazon, and you can directly subscribe or order back issues from their website, at this link.

Friday's Forgotten Book: THE KILLERS, TREASURE ISLAND, AND THE FUGITIVE PIGEON

This is a tag-along to the Friday's Forgotten Book series, with the blogs of many fine authors featuring little known gems and sometimes forgotten classics.  The links to their blogs is at this link and going back a week at a time, you can trace their previous selections.  Donald Westlake's THE FUGITIVE PIGEON was well reviewed by James Reasoner two years ago this month, at this link, and mystery authors Bill Crider, Randy Johnson, Ed Gorman, Patti Abbott, and the usual suspects comment on the review.

The door of Henry's lunch-room opened and two men came in.  They sat down at the counter.

"What's yours?" George asked them.

"I don't know," one of them said.  What do you want to eat, Al?"

"I don't know," said Al.  "I don't know what I want to eat."

These are the opening lines of Ernest Hemingway's short story, "The Killers," an eleven-page story written mostly in dialog and very short narrative sentences.  Ellipsis is all around, but the situation of being confronted and bullied by strangers is universal and it is not hard even for school-boys to fill in the blanks.

In the noir 1946 movie adaptation that starred Edmond O'Brien, Burt Lancaster, and Ava Gardner, the story is fleshed out one way.  Don Siegel did a different version later in 1964 with Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson, and the Criterion Edition has many extras, including interviews and essays by director Paul Schrader, authors Jonathan Lethem and Stuart M. Kaminsky, and other fine features as well.

Donald E. Westlake's novel,  THE FUGITIVE PIGEON,  is another fleshing out of Hemingway's story, in a different and very original way.  The two hit men come in to the Rockaway Grill and badger Westlake's protagonist, Charlie, who tells it in the first person.  The protagonist has kept the grill open past closing time in order to see the end of High Sierra, on a television behind the counter, the movie ending with Bogart being shot in the back.  It is his uncle who is named Al, and he is the nephew, the pigeon.

If you're anywhere near as old as I am, you probably studied Hemingway's collection, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories, which includes "The Killers."  I don't know if they teach it in universities these days.  But Westlake's protagonist seems to have read it, for after three pages of this Hemingwayesque dialog, he thinks:

"Life imitates art.  And yet I'd bet neither one of them had ever read Hemingway."

Then one of the men takes a card out of his coat and slaps it on the counter.  The card is reproduced in the book, a black spot with Charlie's name on it.  More Hemingwayesque dialog follows as Charlie tries to figure out what it all means.

But all of us readers of a certain age recognized the card from Walt Disney's version of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island.  It is the black spot given by the pirates to the marked man, the condemned man.  Westlake might well have quoted Stevenson's text in the epigraph, but instead he gave us:

"He shall not live; look, with a spot I damn him." --Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare

There are many rifts on postmodernism in the book and Westlake must have had great fun in the writing of it.  I was amazed to read his account of the difficulty he had in getting it published.  Some undergraduate ought to take it on as a thesis.

Life imitates Art, and Art returns the favor.  The black spot and the X marking the spot have their historical connotations in Robert A. Prather's historical study, The Strange Case of Jonathan Swift and the Real Long John Silver.

Robert Louis Stevenson said that he wrote the novel for his step-son, but Prather shows that Stevenson's wife and former husband had ties to the silver of Jonathan Swift's legend and that, more over, there are many more connections between the legend and the novel than scholars have previously thought.  He loses me a chapter where he tries to sure up his arguments with details on the Masons and Da Vinci-cryptic codes, but the documented Robert Louis Stevenson family history along with that of the mines and the maps is indeed interesting.  Amazing, I should say.


X indeed marks the spot, and God save the mark.

Wednesday's Western: MAVERICK

maverick:  a, someone who exhibits great independence in thought and action; b, an unbranded range calf, sometimes used to refer to adult cattle, particularly lone steers of an independent or wild nature; commonly, unbranded, irregular: independent in behavior or thought.

The word was derived from the legend of the no-brand brand of  U.S. cattleman Samuel Maverick.  The name became widely famous  due to a comedy-western television series created by Roy Huggins that ran from September 22, 1957 to July 8, 1962 on ABC and featured James Garner, Jack Kelly, Roger Moore, and Robert Colbert as the poker-playing traveling Mavericks (Bret, Bart, Beau, & Brent).

The success of the series depended on its humorous non-conformity to the standard television westerns of the 1950s.  The Mavericks were also mock-existentialists, pretending to care only for their own interests but constantly drawn into situations where they worked cons for the common good, often winding up broke themselves in the process (except for the $100 bill pinned to the lapels of their coats), and then moving on to the next game.

Ed Robertson wrote what will probably be the definitive history of the series, with a forward by Roy Huggins himself.  Huggins also ghosted Poker According To Maverick in the persona of Bret Maverick.

The concept of maverick was appropriated by the Republican Party during the last Presidential election,  with Sarah Palin calling Senator McCain a maverick, then McCain at first denying it (even though the subtitle of his own ghosted book had previously proclaimed him as such).  The media then immediately picked up the term as a buzz word both cheerfully and sarcastically, depending upon the partisan agenda at hand, thus making it a political cliche, devaluing the word and the concept behind it in the process.

Unrecalcitrant academic westerner Owen Ulph wrote his history and defense of the concept in The American West back in 1966.  It was subsequently published in his book of essays entitled The Fiddleback.  Besides detailing the history of the usage of the term, he explains why it was the maverick steer instead of the mustang which became "the distinctive appellation applied to the independent, irrepressible individualists."  Here is just a small sample of his flamboyantly ranting style:

"The maverick is not a recluse or a reject from organized community life as a consequence of his personal psychoneurosis.  He is an independent spirit who avoids becoming bogged to the saddle-skirts in conventional mire...in disregard and contempt of atrophied institutional morality...a creative, integrated, compulsively self-reliant personality type with which the West, factual and fictional, was as speckled as a spotted hound.'

"The mutations in the term maverick and its ultimate extravagant transfiguration into the concept of 'the Maverick' is only a single instance in which skirmishes between romantics and realists mask a basic conflict between ethical and material values within a society.'

"Which brings us to the cream of civilization's jest.  Settled in debilitating, easy-payment-plan comfort, the remnants of their shrunken minds transfixed by a square of jittering glass, the pitiable, spineless, sniveling, sycophantic slaves of the Gorgon-headed establishment revel in the antics of saddle tramps who are never gainfully employed, bonanza-ing rancheros whose fancy spreads miraculously operate themselves...Spellbound audiences thrill to the chivalry of noble mavericks who...always upholding principle over expediency and reaffirming justice...in the face of the grinding tyranny of a corrupt law and the apathetic gutlessness of an ossified community.'

"These same audiences, fatuous and fragmented, return to their respective offices, practitioners as well as victims of the vices they had vicariously deplored and hissed the evening before.'

"Throughout densely populated, suburban Squalidonia, the maverick is a hero as long as he confines his heroics to Stultavision, Blatherania, and Disintegral Paperbacks.  But whenever he is so indiscreet as to materialize and venture into the lush pastures of the current establishment, he is hazed off to forage with the wild cattle as soon as possible. . .Such ambivalence, characteristic of the psychosis of nostalgia, betrays the confusion, self-deception, hypocrisy, and absurdity of homogenized establishmentarian society.  Rotten as the old corrals may be, they will hold as long as some ornery critter can be prevented from taking it into his skull to give them a try.'

"Present-day existence is hopelessly schizoid.  Nobody really loves Big Brother, and inside the most timorous conformist a smothered rebel cringes in fear.  The discrepancy between our ideals and daily realities is manifest in the fascination with which even intelligent people view western fantasies depicting the achievement of social justice by maverick heroes who ride roughshod over all obstacles and 'put things right,' and the silent despair most of us suffer at the shoddy compromises and degrading sell-outs we incessantly endure.  How else is it possible to account for the fervid popularity of a novel and film such as Shane?'

"Sophisticated critics insist that no mature person takes Westerns with their maverick heroes seriously--their popularity being attributable solely to their escapist entertainment value.  It is a simple explanation that eliminates necessity for considering them critically and also allows one to enjoy them without admitting to complete infantilism.  But this explanation is unconvincing.'

"Much western myth and legend can be described as 'hokum' and its defenders contend that it is a hokum we cannot do without.  The hokum does not consist of the inner nature of the myths and legends, but in their crude distortion.  The ideals behind these myths were present long before the western frontier.  The frontier provided another historical theater in which they could find expression.'

"What elevates Shane to the status of literature is that the ideals retain plausibility and purity in the eminently human course of the action and do not cease to carry conviction under the impact of a conventionally dramatic plot structure.  These same ideas remain valid even though the frontier has gone."

If you like this style, you should read the entire essay and Owen Ulph's other books as well.  He wrote about mavericks at the time the Ford Motor Company was coming out with the car by that name.  The American West ran its Ford Maverick advertisement in the same issue, a caption under the picture saying that it was available in the colors "Anti-Establishment Mint, Freudian Gilt, and Thanks Vermillion."

This is just one of the many things mentioned by Thomas Frank in The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, his study of how corporate materialists sell the image of individuality to the masses, Americans choosing material appearances instead of intrinsic inward values time after time.  All of which goes to prove Owen Ulph's point.

Friday's Forgotten Book: THE ONE-EYED MAN by Larry L. King

This is a tag-along to the Friday's Forgotten Book series.  The links to the others in the series are available at the website of author Patti Abbot or one of her deputies, at this link.

The One-Eyed Man by Larry L. King, first edition published by the New American Library, New York, 1966.  The Signet paperback edition, scanned above, was published in December, 1967.

First epigraph:  "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." --Anon.

Second epigraph:  "Do you think I am trusty and faithful?  Do you see no further than this facade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me?  Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?  Have you no thought O dreamer that it may be all maya, illusion?" --Walt Whitman

I prefer a reading in the spirit of the second epigraph, though the author does not defend it this way.

Excerpt:  "It has been a while since the day when we whoosed through the boondocks, stopping to pump the hands of the back country jackdaws and feeling the first swift currents of their discontent, with Collie spraying his waste water among the tall stalks, and bending into the sweet melon, and cheerfully baiting Bo.  It has been a while, and tired bones record the passing."

"The sun has beamed down on rooftops a thousand mornings and the winds have promiscuously changed course, and pious prayers have been shouted over the uncaring forms of the dead.  Our mudball has turned among the stars, and beasts have prowled the fields , and time has cracked into the old patterns of split seconds of joy trailed by eons of sorrow."

"Later on, the goddamn historians will get hold of it.  They will fix the past in the hard glare of twenty-twenty hindsight and go conjuring up visions and assigning motives as though they had a special license for the purpose, and all the time they won't have a clue.  They will see the indelible tracks in the endless desert and chart the winding curves of the main path, but miss the subtle signs of struggle on the trackless rocks and the dead-end cakewalks along the hidden side trails."

"History is just a bunch of spooked people hoo-hawing around, straining a guy to stay ahead of those hairy hounds of horror Cullie used to talk about.  Hoping they won't be bayed down and treed.  Historians forget the black X of chance.  They honk up the notion that everything was planned, was willed and done for a reason.  The old wheel of fortune keeps spinning in worn grooves and the X of chance falls wantonly on the squares, and about all any mother's son can do is ride with the play."

 The opening (and just about any passage your read in this novel) immediately conjures up Robert Penn Warren's 1947 Pulitzer Prize winner,  All the King's Men.  King thought his book a tribute and an updating of Warren's original work, but a novel to stand on its own.  Pre-publication blurbs were gathered from respected authors.  John Kenneth Galbraith called it "the best political novel since The Last Hurrah."

It was timely, a novel about the end of the segregated south and with it any vestiges of the states rights movement.  The novel was well promoted and big things were expected of it.  A major book club made it an alternate selection.  But it did not sell well.  Most reviews were negative, and a lot of reviewers thought it a bad parody of All The King's Men.

When Signet came out with the paperback (scanned above), the cover promoted a smokey vision of a couple about to have sex--which has almost nothing to do with the book.  When the author protested to his editor, he was asked, "Do you want to sell any books or not?"

In Larry L. King's memoir, None But a Blockhead: On Being A Writer,  King discusses the writing of the novel and tells of a party he and his wife were invited to at the home of authors Willie and Celia Morris.  The guest list also included Robert Penn Warren, King's "hero of heroes," his wife author Eleanor Clark, husband and wife authors William and Rose Styron, and the historian C. Vann Woodward.

After King met Warren, the two engaged in conversation about books.  King said that there were many other books that he would like to write, but that he thought himself too unworthy, having so little formal education.  Robert Penn Warren replied:

"Well, if you thought you understood very much about anything I doubt whether you'd be successful at the creative process.  I've always found that I write to learn, as much as I write to tell or to instruct."

"I don't believe a writer is having a creative experience when he merely tells.  There should be in the writer's work a great seeking."

Earlier, King's editor had sent the galleys of The One-Eyed Man to Warren and received the terse reply, "It looks like your new writer has been writing in my sleep."  At the dinner table later that night, King's wife brought that up, embarrassing both Warren and her husband.  Warren acted gentlemanly throughout--"Oh, my, how ungenerous of me!"--and both authors apologized to each other.  In his memoir, King admits and regrets the degree to which he channeled Warren's great novel.

King also recounts the efforts of actor Dan Blocker--who played Hoss on the television western, Bonanza--to produce and star in a movie adaptation of The One-Eyed Man.

King went on to write The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas and many other works.  Yet King's forgotten first novel is valuable for its historical insights and humor and, indeed, in its artifact reminder of the once unrepentant and segregated South, now happily gone with the wind.

Wednesday's Western: THE DAY THE COWBOYS QUIT by Elmer Kelton

My copy of this western treasure is not the first edition, though it shares the same dustjacket illustration.  It is the TCU hardcover reprint with the new introduction by Elmer Kelton.  He then wrote:

"When The Day the Cowboys Quit was first published in 1971, one critic declared that it was out of character for cowboys to strike and that therefore the novel was a transparent attempt to place modern-day labor-management problems in the context of a western."


Not so, Kelton wrote:  the novel is based on historical incidents, including the actual cowboy strike, and more generally upon the inroads that  laissez faire capitalism made upon the individual freedoms of the historical cowboy.

Traditionally men joined up with an outfit on a handshake agreement, were loyal to it and in turn earned the trust of those who ran it.  Cowboys owned their own horses and tack, were allowed to run their own stock in the company remuda, with the hope of one day having their own spreads.  Such men partnered up to larger outfits, and they drove their cattle together to markets.  "Howdy, partner," was more than just a catch-phrase.


The western cattle industry prospered to the point that it attracted rich easterners, who bought up the bigger ranches.  "The elevated status of the cowboy was not recognized by many of the newcomers, who saw him as no different from their employees in a shoe factory or a cotton mill.  They began imposing rules of employment which took away freedoms and privileges the cowboy had regarded almost as a birthright."

They denied cowboys the right to own their own stock, including the owning of their own horses.  No longer could the cowboy ride off seeking a better deal elsewhere, for he rode the company horse and if he should quit, he was stranded and afoot--dependent upon the company for his transportation, and thus for his next meal.


The value in the traditional cowboy arrangement was that a man took pride in his horsemanship; he did a better job breaking and training his own horses to work the cattle, and thus took more pride in his work.  All of that now disappeared with the poor choice of stock the company insisted upon.  The western code of trust between owner and employee vanished, and cowboys were treated as chattel, as numbers on a ledger.  Although those who worship laissez faire do so giving lip service to freedom for all, just the opposite is the goal.  What they really want is control.

Americans admire the western rugged individualist and the maverick small businessman on the screen or in novels; but in real life, laissez faire capitalism encourages big business to collude and stamp them out, to destroy them at every turn.


This was Elmer Kelton's first literary western and the first to appear in hardcover.  His characters are well drawn, and his dialog is superb.  All of his previous westerns were shoot-em-ups, higher quality than most maybe, but still written to the same pulp formula.  His later novels were of finer stuff, and I'll be writing about them some wednesday soon.