Saddle Tramp by Todhunter Ballard

 

Shamus McGee was happy. There had been few days during his twenty-three years when he had not been happy. He was a big man and when people made fun of his good nature he grinned.

“I'm too big to be nasty,” he told them. “If I went around hunting up trouble people would call me a bully. And if I refused to fight they'd call me a coward. Way it is, I like everyone, so I never have cause to battle.”

This 1957 novel from Mr. Ballard gives us the trope of the big amiable man who’d rather not fight but…as one would assume, he gets pushed a bit to far and even mild pots sometimes simmer and boil over.

This is fine serviceable entertainment in the “Destry” vein. It may be formulaic, but I found it to be more successful than the highly regarded Destry Rides Again by Max Brand. I think that good reputation is more from the film than from the source  novel, but that’s just me, what do I know?

While no classic, it’s head-and-shoulders over all the “Solid-jawed” heroes who boil from the go.

A fine afternoon whilin’.

The Killers, Edited by Peter Dawson

 

Pop Jennings took care of the horse and then warmed up a pot of beans and a pan full of bacon for Jeff. After Jeff had eaten, the old man looked at him with shrewd, twinkling eyes and asked, “Are you ridin’ or lookin’?”

“I'm not headed any place in particular, if that's what you mean,” Jeff said.

“Then you're lookin’. There's only two kinds of people. One kind is always ridin’ over the hills to a place where the grass is greener. They never find it. The other kind is lookin’ for a place to settle down and it don't matter much to ‘em where that place is. I figure you're the looking kind.”—Bill Gulick, Gambler’s Luck

This 1955 anthology is subtitled “A Collection of Stories About Gunslingers.”

It has 11 stories from Gulick, L.L. Foreman, Elmore Leonard, Thomas Thompson, Bennett Foster, John Jo Carpenter, Tom Blackburn, Steve Frazee, William Holder, Verne Athanas, and Will Brown.

Some are a little less than others, but the following tales are worth an afternoon’s read: Gulick’s work, Steve Frazee’s “Learn the Hard Way,” Will Brown’s “Into the Guns,” and the oft-anthologized Leonard’s “3:10 to Yuma.”

Overall, a solid sampling of the 1950s style of hardmen.

The Pick of the Roundup Edited by Stephen Payne

 

Sighs and sniffling and throat clearing came from the far corner of the room where two old men haggled softly over the pawns on a chess board. The corner was dim as twilight. Cullen turned his head to stare at them, seeing bent spines and white, tufted hair and withered hands reaching out to touch the pawns with such anxiety that life and death hovered over the board, and each breath was a shallow jealous effort. Time dribbled away between their withered fingers.

That opening quote is from The Promise of the Fruit by Ann Ahlswede, the crowning story in this 1963 anthology from the Western Writers of America.

This anthology offers ten stories and one poem.

Ahlswede’s story is the reason I sought out the anthology—Jon Lewis has listed it as one of the 100 Best Western Short stories and it does indeed pack a mature wallop.

Another fine story is T.V. Olsen’s They Walked Tall. It is a formulaic tale well told.

The remaining offerings, well, they pale alongside Ahlswede’s work.

I repeat, I sought it out for a single story—not sorry I did.

Fine writing, fine observation.

And I got Mr. Olsen’s winner as a bonus.

Weird Western Tales: The Black Seer of Death Canyon

 

This August 1977 issue of the DC Comic is my first foray into the Weird Western series.

I was rarin’ to go for a bit of colorful nostalgia.

In this story by Michael Fleisher, with art by Dick Ayers and Frank Springer we are treated to what I can only assume is an attempt to launch a series character called The Scalphunter.

The Scalphunter is a half-white, half-Kiowa named Ke-Who-No-Tay.

This issue’s scrap is not much above a Hopalong Cassidy adventure with a bit of bloodshed thrown in for good measure.

We are also introduced to Wakwame, the Black Seer who seems to be an additional attempt to launch a Black character in the West ala Marvel’s Luke Cage Power Man hero.

I reckon I’m not qualified to pass judgement on this tale as it was clearly not written with a 59-year-old man in mind.

It seems serviceable comic book fare.

Not sorry I delved.

I likely won’t delve more.

The Quick and the Dead by Louis L ’Amour

 

“You seem willin’ to take the chance. I’ve known folks to cross all the way without seein’ ary an Injun, and others had a fight ever’ day. You face things when you get to ‘em.”

This 1973 novel is a puzzle to me.

Not the plot, meager as it is, that is easily understood.

The puzzle is the utter simple-mindedness this usually on-top-of-it author brings to this tale.

I add, this novel is often considered one of L’Amour’s best—that in itself is a puzzle to me.

Puzzle #1

We are clearly asked to admire the frontier protagonist Conn Vallian who comes to the aid of a Westering family.

The trouble, Conn is not a likable man. As a matter of fact, he behaves not much better than the carboard villains he has come to “save” the family from.

We open with the family in peril—a band of ruffians want to steal their belongings, murder the man of the family and pave their way to taking liberties with the man’s wife.

Our “hero” Conn drops into the mix and commences with droll humor about how the woman is “a sight attractive” and might be “in need of company” once her man is gone.

I believe the author means this as playful banter.

I ask this…if a complete stranger shows up on your doorstep and begins making overtures to your partner—would you find that playful?

Add to it, this stranger shows up in the midst of danger when the husband’s death at the hands of other’s seems to be imminent, the “playful banter” strikes one all the more off-key.

It just doesn’t border on the distasteful it has an air of threat to it.

If the husband dies, would Conn have continued this wildly odd “banter”, or would he make good on his intentions?

Initially, I assumed L’Amour was creating a rarity for him, an insidious villainous presences that the family must also escape. A double-threat.

But, alas, no. We are meant to admire Conn.

The author wastes not a page without a scene that feels would be written in an outline as follows, “Describe an incident where Conn is cool again.”

Puzzle #2

The villains. Long-time inhabitants of this area one would assume. Their motivation for pursuing the Westering family so persistently, so far, and for so long is merely gold.

We are never led to understand why they think this family has this huge cache of gold or just why this single family of greenhorns has been so successful in thwarting these hardmen.

Puzzle #3

The timeline. The family is in a single wagon pulled by oxen—no swift means of travel, one presumably laden with gold and yet, these hardmen on horseback spend the entire novel trying to “catch up” to the family.

For some reason it takes them months to pursue and catch this apparently exceptionally fast oxen-led wagon.

At one point, Conn is out of the picture as he recovers from a wound with a friendly Indian tribe—we are led to believe this took weeks and yet when the plot circles back to the hardmen, they seem not an inch closer to the wagon that is presumably slow and laden with all this assumed gold.

Now, before L’Amour fans write me off as a hater, peruse this blog, I’ve sung the man’s praises here and there, but I gotta call it like I see it—this novel seems like a first draft at best.

I am pleased I did not start my L’Amour reads with this one. Not sure I would have pursued further.

Again, if you love this novel, simply assume I am too uncultured to get the brilliance.

By all means continue to enjoy it.

Consider yourself the winner in this.

For me, it is a puzzling waste of time.

Ride West by Frank O’Rourke

 

 Edgar Johnson was so big and strong, and so good natured, that people mistook his friendliness for timidity.—Whippletree

This 1953 anthology by an author I hold in high estimation features 11 stories.

Not many can claim to be more than formula tropes but all feature O’Rourke’s mature gimlet eye for life and detail all winnowed to a terse line or two.

As in the following examples.

John Thorpe straightened wearily, chisel in hand, and regarded Gordon with wise, rain-blurred eyes. He saw a thin, wiry man with regular features and black hair already salted gray by experience; a man of thirty or so with an inherent good breeding behind a recent life of unguessable activity.—The Widow’s Peak

Most author’s give us mere, “Here’s what he looked like” and get to shootin’. Mr. O’Rourke tells us what is seen and what lies under the skin.

She was already peering eagerly across the street, and then she saw her husband. Charlie Bourne watched her face break and change into something any man would cherish and be selfish about letting anyone see.—Argument with Death

We know this marriage relationship before we even meet the husband. He does it with a single sentence.

Here is the author in his method.

In my western experiences I've been over every bit of ground I've ever written into a short story or book. I've got a mighty library of the very best fact books on the West, a good many first editions of old books hard to find these days. From my grandmother on my father's side, from my father, from several of his old timer friends, a lot of stories came down to me. I've hunted a lot, have a good many guns, and have also studied old guns of the West, so my characters use the right gun at the right time. You add history as it really was, old newspaper stories, other books, research, and your own general mind picture of things as they were. and I guess that's the way a book comes about.

Mr. O’Rourke sells himself short; all the research in the world don’t make a Man see deeply like he does. That is less research than a Man who Lives, a Man who Feels, a Man who Sees and Remembers.

 

The Investigator by John Sandford

 

Hawkes’s father had been a white-trash loafer, hard drinker and sometime over-the-road trucker out of Houston. Her mother worked occasionally as a house cleaner and a window-washer for rich people as she tried to take care of her seven children. She took them to church some Sundays and read to them from the Bible some nights, which Hawkes found stultifying and often incomprehensible. The Army, Hawkes thought, was the one way out of that life, if you couldn't afford community college. She was wrong about that; some things that you were born with, you can never escape. She was white trash.

This neo-Western from the impressively entertaining Sandford allows him to feature a new character in the form of Letty Davenport.

Often when an author attempts to concoct a fictional bad-ass, it falls flat as one doubts the bona fides of the author themselves being able to recognize anything in true toughness.

One must live a life to describe it with any accuracy. Too often our fictional “heroes” are echoes of other fictional “heroes” the author has read of.

We can all feel the authenticity when we are offered anything from someone who has really lived or who has really seen.

John Sandford was an award-winning crime repeater. He’s been to crime scenes; he’s sat in SUVs overnight sipping cold coffee with US Marshals. That experience shows.

What is all the more impressive here—he offers us a bad-ass in feminine form and makes her real and all the more formidable than the now cartoonish Jack Reacher.

Letty lives and learns from each step of the investigation—a subtle but too often ignored aspect of fictional exploits.

The plot involves our heroine down Texas-way and a bad of self-styled militia who have something big planned.

No worries, this is not a political novel. It is a novel of “Folks who feel left behind, and we’re not gonna take it anymore.”

It gets the indignation right.

It gets the misguided consequences right.

Mr. Sandford impresses again.

Mackinac And Lake Stories by Mary Hartwell Catherwood

 

Though in those days of the young century a man might become anything; for the West was before him, an empire, and woodcraft was better than learning.—“The Black Feather”

This 1899 anthology of short-fiction center around voyageurs, trappers, and the culture of the mountain and river men of the US-Canadian Border.

The author was exceptionally strong in her historical detail, so much so that no less an authority than esteemed historian Francis Parkman praised her novels for their accuracy, and she was dubbed by some reviewers as “The Parkman of the West.”

Now, onto the prose.

The historical details are correct.

The tales themselves seem to straddle the line between aiming for high accuracy and elevating a bit above “Boy’s Own Adventure Tales.”

While not necessarily compelling literature, if one is an enthusiast of the exploits of the voyageurs of the northern Rivers [and I am] she is fine author to sample now and then.

Desperate Rider by Frank O’Rourke

 

Tony Casper stood at the Colombian bar with his friends, drinking wine, acquiring that tipsy feeling of magnitude. Hat pushed up on jet black hair, accentuating his narrow, handsome face in which his mother's blood dominated, he laughed uproariously at a joke and lifted his glass. This was his element-- the cheap bar, the cheap wine, the friendless friends.

That character description is from the 1959 novel Desperate Rider by Mr. O’Rourke. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, the man is practically second to none when it comes to limning a character or even a town in a line.

Where many stick with the physical description, O’Rourke let’s us know his weary opinion of Tony and the Tonys of the world with the single line: This was his element-- the cheap bar, the cheap wine, the friendless friends.

O’Rourke’s characters and towns are seldom all good, or all bad. Seldom are they mere plot pawns, they are human beings or environments that shape the human beings that inhabit it.

The novel plays like a Western version of the classic gangster flick The Desperate Hours. It is a self-contained piece.

While not O’Rourke’s strongest work, there is more than enough intelligence, human observation and fine craft to keep the Western genre appreciator turning the pages.

I’ve said before, Mr. O’Rourke, is one of my favorite genre novelists, even if his work is inconsistent—I still always find something worthy of mulling within.

Moonshine by Alec Wilkinson

 

For more than thirty years Garland Bunting has been engaged in capturing and prosecuting men and women in North Carolina who make and sell liquor illegally. To do this he has driven taxis, delivered sermons, peddled fish, buck danced, worked carnivals as a barker, operated bulldozers, loaded carriages and hauled logs at sawmills, feigned drunkenness, and pretended to be an idiot. In the minds of many people he is the most successful revenue agent in the history of a state that has always been enormously productive of moonshine.

This volume’s full title is Moonshine: A Life in Pursuit of White Liquor. It is a non-fiction work written in 1985.

Wilkinson, our reporter, spends much time with Garland Bunting, a renowned revenuer and raconteur. While not fiction, it reads as smoothy and beautifully as the best of the genre.

Wilkinson has an eye for detail that rings true.

Having grown up in moonshining districts and having known many an extracurricular distributor, hell, I live not four miles from the famed Thunder Road, Wilkinson’s world is A1 authentic.

And I’ve got to mention that he writes like a dream.

It all plays as if Larry McMurtry [or his songwriter son, James] spent time in the milieu of the Deep South drive-in flicks of the 1970s and told you what he saw.

It is deep, sweaty, affectionate and our protagonist drops a line of patter to chew on about every page.

For example:

These folks are suspicious and they'll kill you. They'll shoot the grease right out of the biscuit and never even break the crust.

Along the way you’ll learn more about making and distributing illegal liquor than you ever knew was possible.

It all goes down smooth unlike the product in question.

This one, my friends, is an easy A

It’s called corn liquor, white lightning, sugar whiskey, skull cracker, pop-skull bush whiskey, stump, stumphole, ‘splo,  ruckus juice, radiator whiskey, rotgut, sugarhead, block and tackle, wildcat, panther’s breath, tiger’s sweat, sweet spirits of cata-a-fighting, ally bourbon, city gin, cool water, happy Sally, deep shaft, jump steady, old horsey, stingo, blue John, red eye, pine top, buckeye, bark whiskey, and see seven stars.

In times when the price of sugar has risen high enough to make the use of it unprofitable, bootleggers have substituted molasses. Moonshine made with molasses called monkey rum.

One Ranger Against a Conman Named Trump

 

Pump the brakes, this is not a political post.

It is a review of a single episode of a western television series, but…

Depending on your relationship with facts, it either strikes one as prophetic, or grand coincidence, or, at the very least a mighty odd curiosity.

May 9, 1958, CBS airs an episode of Trackdown titled “The End of the World.”

Trackdown followed the exploits of Texas Ranger Hoby Gilman as he righted wrongs in the West of the 1870s.

Gilman was portrayed with cool conviction by the redoubtable Robert Culp.

The episode in question tells the tale of a conman visiting the town of Talpa where he claims that he [and only He] can save them from threats that only exist in his own prognostications.

The name of this doom slinging conman? Trump. [Nope, I ain’t even kidding—the name is Trump.]

The town seems to swallow his venom hook, line and sinker.

The newly arrived Hoby Gilman takes in Trump’s spiel and shakes his head in mute wonder at such utter preposterousness.

His incredulousness is magnified when he looks around him assuming that all see through the transparent clothes of this “emperor”, but his jaw is left hanging open as he realizes those that surround him are hanging on the words of the conman.

Our conman Trump even utters these lines “I’ll build a wall and protect you.”

Our Texas Ranger’s arguments to “Pay attention, use your minds” falls on mute ears.

We move from this fascinating set-up and second act where Hoby Gilman tries to urge folks with reason—to no avail and we end the episode with some standard “Let’s wrap this episode up neatly 1950s”-style shenanigans.

All in all, a slight episode.

In a world where there was no echoed comparison, I’d say the episode’s premise is so preposterous that it seems more like kiddie fare than something programmed for the usually adult themed Trackdown episodes.

But now, well, now the episode strikes one as remarkably prescient, on-point concerning the herd mentality of human nature.

What in most circumstances is a C episode becomes an A+ fascinating curiosity at the coincidences of life.

Politically this episode and review are neuter.

But…like our Texas Ranger, I stand on the side of reason over obeisant swallowing of the palavering of hucksters.

Fighting Man by Frank Gruber

 

He was twenty-six years old, a towhead with washed out blue eyes. Schoolteacher, gambler, horse thief, camp follower, murderer and cannibal; he had been all of them.

The above is the first sentence in this 1948 novel by Mr. Gruber. That succinct matter-of-factness is peppered throughout the brief page run.

The novel follows an old storyline—the outlaw assuming the guise of a lawman.

The difference here, despite the 1948 pedigree, there is a casual violence that one might encounter in later Spaghetti Westerns or “adult” Westerns of the ‘70s.

The other difference, where often the violence in the two later examples I provided, that “modern” violence is often for grand guignol effect, inserted for the “cool” factor. Here its offhanded matter-of-factness serves us better as it seats the realities of true grimness without the need of wallowing for effect.

The difference between a hunter telling a tale and gamers swapping first-person shooter “accomplishments.”

Overall, it is a formulaic novel but an effective one.

I close with another brief offering of Mr. Gruber’s barebones violence.

A sentry stupid from illicit sleep, raised himself between two tents to see what was causing the noise that sounded like galloping horses. His mouth fell open in amazement—and then he died.

Says it all in two short sentences.

·        In war not all are diligent, nor all brave.

·        Some of us are prone to the realities of being a tired human.

·        Bodies need sleep.

·        This sentry slept when he shouldn’t.

·        He awakes as we all do, slow to process what is around us.

·        For that he is surprised by his end.

·        Surprised in a war zone.

·        We all sleep, we are all surprised.

·        T’is life.

·        T’is death.

Solid fare for a “mere formula Western.”

Gun Hand by Frank O’Rourke

 

“He had no real zest for the job; that was lost in the past and he was beyond the age of eagerness. The old urge for trouble had died in his chest, the once bright game had passed on to younger men.”

That is Mr. O’Rourke describing an aging John McCabe’s view of having lost his taste for plunging into wild ways.

In this blog, I have made it no secret that I consider O’Rourke one of the best in the genre even…even if many of his novels suffer from plots that hew to formula.

I read O’Rourke not for the freshness of the tale [that can occur] but for the riding along for a while inside the skull of a Man who Sees the World.

A Man who Sees the world well.

I won’t offer plot here, that is seldom the way in these pages, rather I will offer another extract.

Here we go from food at a station to ride along on a stagecoach to first viewing of a town.

One paragraph. One.

It tells far more than the words on the page.

“He rose early and ate his breakfast at the counter before the other passengers came down, and took his place beside the driver on the top seat, busied himself with a stick on his muddy boots when she came to the door. He rode all day in moody silence that bothered the driver, and eventually pulled them completely apart. He watched the changing land as they galloped north along the river, made their stop at noon to change teams, and galloped on again. Two hours before sunset they swung into a broader road lined with houses and barns and fields. They clattered over a planked creek bridge and swung into a wide street that boasted the business of this town--- eight solid blocks of stores and saloons and hotels, all slapped together in a rush from green lumber, but there to stay and to be replaced by the brick, for this town was a comer. They pushed into the stage yard and stopped and the lassitude that followed so much movement struck them all as they got down and looked about at the town.”

One paragraph. More setting, character, and story than many an entire chapter.

Winter Count by Barry Lopez

 

What I remember most from the first visit, however, was neither the dryness nor the cactus but the wind. When I was a child in California the Santa Ana wind that came west to us from this side of the mountains seemed to me exotic but aloof. The wind I found in this upper Sonoran country with my father was very different. It was intoxicating. The wind had a quality of wild refinement about it, like horses turning around suddenly in the air by your ear. Whether it blew steadily or in bursts its strength seemed so evenly to diminish as you turned your face to it, it was as though someone had exhaled through silk. I have never since felt so enticed or comforted by the simple movement of air.

This slim volume of short stories [9 total] by the noted naturalist, Barry Lopez highlights his knowledge Plains Indians and the Land---very much the Land.

Those familiar with Lopez, either thru his work with National Geographic or his nonfiction works Arctic Dreams and Of Wolves and Men can expect the writing quality to be high and the observations of natural phenomenon to be gimlet focused.

That is, indeed, what one finds here.

I will say each story, while interesting, is of the elliptical style, where often the point or even the finale of the story is a bit…lost in the horizon, very much like the horizon of the Land Mr. Lopez describes so well.

At a slim page count [my copy runs 112 pages] and written with clear intelligence, I am not sorry I spent time with it.

I will admit, I am philistine enough to long for tighter plotting once I finish such New Yorker fare no matter how Western or skillfully done.

“Trouble Weather” by Lauren Paine

 

Carter stood up. His height seemed to tower over her. “Your family likes Nevada, doesn't it?”

“Yes. We've had it hard here, but we like it…we're going to stay.”

“Then do something for Nevada. Not just for Will, but for Nevada… for yourselves. Pioneers don't come to a wilderness just to take, ma'am… they come to give.”

“I'll do it,” Mister Alvarado.

My first encounter with the mighty prolific Mr. Paine.

I hardly know if this example is typical, but it struck me as on par with mid-to-late L’Amour: brisk, amiable, nothing deep, and given to a bit of preacher-ness.

Note, not preachiness, which is pushing the lesson a little too hard at the expense of story, but rather Preacherness, where the piece and the point of view seem intertwined.

Without looking around, Dago said, “The Indians used to have, Carter let the deed die with the wind. You go on back to town.”

Overall, a fine story, no roof shaker but fine afternoon fare all the same.

Apache Ambush by Will Cook

 

Lovington was in the barn, still alive, hanging by his wrists from one of the rafters. The Apaches had sliced through the calf muscles and his feet kept twitching. Another had flicked out Lovington’s eyeballs with the point of his knife. They hung on his cheeks like boiled eggs dangling from bloody strings.

The metallic clank of spurs roused Lovington and he croaked, “Shoot me! In th’ name of God-- shoot me!”

Now that is undoubtedly stark, particularly for a novel penned in 1955.

In Apache Ambush, Mr. Cook dishes up another one of his hyper-competent cavalry procedurals.

The land is right, the protocol is right, the men are dust-caked and hard.

It has predictable formulary elements to it that prevent it from being raised to an A level but the ride along the way is so true to lived experience that is easily head and shoulders above many a formulary tale by others who lack his life-experience.

I read Cook for his starkness and also for his offhand observations of the human character, as in the next extract.

Like many weak men, he easily mistook desperation for courage and this ride, in spite of pain and discomfort, would remain a hallmark in his life.

In my estimation, lesser Cook is what many another western author strives for on their best days.

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

 

Bergson went over in his mind the things that had held him back. One winter his cattle had perished in a blizzard. The next summer one of his plow horses broke its leg in a prairiedog hole and had to be shot. Another summer he lost his hogs from cholera, and a valuable stallion died from a rattlesnake bite. Time and again his crops had failed. He had lost two children, boys, that came between Lou and Emil, and there had been the cost of sickness and death. Now, when he had at last struggled out of debt, he was going to die himself. He was only forty-six, and had, of course, counted upon more time.

The opening extract from Cather’s 1913 novel is just one of the gemlike observations from this gorgeous novel.

It was offered as one of The 100 Best Western Novels by editor Jon E. Lewis.

It is not your formulary Western chockful of rootin’-tootin’-shootin’ action by any stretch of the imagination—if that is what one requires, look elsewhere.

But…but, if one allows the prose to wash over one, the people with their hopes, dreams, internal frictions in a small Nebraska town come alive.

Cather’s own experience growing up on the plains fuels the reality of what she offers.

Like most of their neighbors, they were meant to follow in paths already marked out for them, not to break trails in a new country. A steady job, a few holidays, nothing to think about, and they would have been very happy. It was no fault of theirs that they had been dragged into the wilderness when they were little boys. A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.

Here the rural envies the cosmopolitan, but the tables are turned.

Which are we?

“I'd rather have had your freedom than my land."

Carl shook his head mournfully. "Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder."

Ponder this precious diamond of a throwaway line.

People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find.

Or this observation in tune with the tides of life.

When she went out into the dark kitchen to fix her plants for the night, she used to stand by the window and look out at the white fields, or watch the currents of snow whirling over the orchard. She seemed to feel the weight of all the snow that lay down there. The branches had become so hard that they wounded your hand if you but tried to break a twig. And yet, down under the frozen crusts, at the roots of the trees, the secret of life was still safe, warm as the blood in one's heart; and the spring would come again! Oh, it would come again!

A truly gorgeous novel.

Wise, mature, observant. Real.

Frontier by Louis L ’Amour

 

“For some people the term “frontier” may bring to mind only the way west. That is acceptable as long as one remembers that everything from where the Atlantic Ocean breaks upon the shore was at one time west. It was all frontier, and it is the entire breadth of the continent from east to west that I’ve attempted to deal with in this volume.”

That, my friends, is but one treasured observation from this gorgeous volume from Mr. L’Amour, one of his few non-fiction works. This work leaves me a bit wistful for what we might have had if he had produced more in this contemplative non-fiction mode.

I offer copious excepts from the text, but…the accompanying photos by David Muench make this volume well-worth a look.

“Our country was opened up and built by people unwilling to accept the horizons they were offered: they had to push ever forward, trying to go beyond the limits presented to them. They gave themselves many excuses for going--to settle upon new land, to trap for fur, to dig for gold, but the real reason was their wish to extend themselves to extend their horizons.”

·        To “extend horizons” is always the real reason for “What’s next?”

·        For “What’s over that hill?”

·        If we trod repetitively in the same paths, feel secure only in the ruts of “I eat at these restaurants, I watch these shows, I only go out in this weather, I need these policies I was hereto before now unaware of to be in place forever” to feel secure…

·        If we have no urge for the new, for a wee bit of risk, if we are unwilling to sample change without a whine or a complaint we are demanding that horizons remain unchanged.

·        We cannot claim intrepidity and stasis at the same time.

·        If we desire no extended horizons, we have not extended the self.

 

Europeans traveling in rural areas expected subservience but found an irritating independence, failing to understand that what they were encountering was a new sort of man. Europe had for hundreds of years been a relatively settled society, changing slowly and according to patterns known and accepted. Such was not the case on the frontier. The pioneer had to constantly adapt to changing conditions or to peace or war with various tribes of Indians. He not only considered himself as good as any man but had proved that under the harshest conditions.

·        The democracy of ability, equality via action not elevation via fiat.

Europeans traveling in the backcountry often found themselves treated rudely or with indifference. Dismounting at a tavern, they rarely saw anyone come forward to take a horse to the stable or carry their luggage inside. When some bystander was asked to take a horse to the stable, more often than not would either stare with contempt or reply with some rude comment. For the most part men stabled their own horse on the frontier took care of their own gear.

·        “ Ask not what” rendered in the small everyday actions.

Sod houses could be warm and snug. Often when visitors were expected the earth floor would be sprinkled with water and tamped hard; then with a small stick or other instrument a design would be traced, resembling a carpet. The design would not last long but would, for the first comers at least, add a pretty touch to the bleak surroundings.

·        The surge for beauty and improvement no matter the circumstances.

The country into which they ventured was rich with wild game, edible plants, fish leaping from streams. The Long Hunter was only secondarily an explorer, so he often lingered for weeks and some likely spot where the fishing was good and life comparatively easy. Our present conception of the importance of time [born in part from the railroad timetable] had not come in to be. People lived and worked by the sun's rising and setting, and when they paid attention at all, they judged longer periods by the waxing and waning of the moon.

·        A creature of the Sun, Moon and Seasons.

·        Whereas, we have multiplied our masters by adding slavery to matinee times, timetables, and the myriad stopwatch additions of the day.

Education is of many kinds, and these boys went to school with Nature, learning to read a trail as a modern man would read his newspaper, and reading the forest itself just as well, knowing its plants and animals, the way of the insects and the birds, and where to find springs. Any of the girls could have done as well had they been called upon, and there were some who proved it in escaping from Indians. At a later time Annie Oakley became famous for her shooting, her skill acquired in just that way, but in an earlier time there were girls in every hollow who could have done as well or nearly as well. Marksmanship was not a pastime or an entertainment, it was necessary for survival.

·        Education via immersive doing.

·        No YouTube tutorial then assuming, “Yeah, I could do that.”

One estimate has at the seventeen people died for every westward mile of the covered wagons. I think the estimate is a modest one. So many died of whom there is no record. Years later the remains of wagons might be found, merely a few scattered bones and nothing to identify anyone. In one case, Captain Eugene Ware went on patrol up Lodge Pole Creek found sixteen wagons, all neatly circled, grass growing up around them, some weathered harness, wagons showing every evidence of having been where they were for years. There was no food or ammunition left and the trunks have been ripped open and hastily looted. No letters, papers, or any marks of identification could be found. Although the story was widely reported at the time, nothing ever came of it, and the wagons remain a mystery, the owners vanished and unknown.

·        Standard human beings, not superheroes, who desired something so dearly they uprooted and braved the harshest for the dream.

·        How many of us can honestly claim we would be among that stock that braved the journey?

All things change in the mountains. Sand becomes sandstone and then quartzite; gravel becomes conglomerate and then gneiss; mud changes to shell, to slate, and then to schist; shells change to limestone and then to marble. Nothing remains the same as the years become centuries and the centuries, millenniums.

·        I love the long perspective, one informed by understanding the natural processes around the Man.

·        The more blind we are to what we see, the more ignorant we are of the “How” of what we see the less depth we see in the beauty.

Often I hike the mountains and desert, but when along I do more loitering than hiking. When one adopts a goal that is miles away one misses too much. If one is to understand and appreciate the wilderness one should stroll along, pause, sit down for a while and just absorb what there is to see, to hear, to smell. Walking too fast one misses too much. If you see a wild animal at such a time it is strictly by accident. If you sit quietly and make no sound they often appear. I had a deer come to feed within 50 feet of me when I was downwind of them.

·        Elemental. A Man. A Stroll. An Environment.

·        No speed, no timetable, no phone to steal life.

The mere fact that you do not see animals does not mean they are not present. Usually they see you first and quietly disappear into the landscape. From time to time a would-be explorer goes into the jungle or mountains searching for some strange animal of which he has heard. A few weeks later he returns saying there is no such beast because he found none. I have spent years in mountains where there were mountain lions, yet the only two I have seen were treed by dogs.

·        Even a watchful Man may not see it all.

·        Are we as watchful as He?

A man traveling wild country in the old days always kept his eyes open for possible camping places, not only for the immediate journey but for some future time. Those things essential for a camp--shelter from the wind, fuel, and water-- were the same essentials for the Indian or for prehistoric, and often on the sites chosen I have found evidence of previous use, sometimes from the pioneer years or earlier.

·        I can vouch for this. I have located many a pocket Sinagua ruin, campsite, and, in some cases entire villages in canyonland by simply asking myself, “Where would I receive the most sun? What’s the closest water run-off on this redrock shelf? Where are the closest game trails?”

·        The following observations double-down on the wisdom of following the footsteps.

Unfortunately, much of the knowledge of terrain acquired by mountain men in the course of their hunting and trapping was never written down, for the simple reason that it seemed too obvious. By simple observation they learned to read the land, to tell directions by plant growth or by melting snow, and to find the easiest routes of travel.

Buffalo and other wild game had found the best trails long before any white man and probably before any Indian. Engineers who came to layout roads or railroads usually found they could not improve on buffalo trails, which always followed the easiest route.

In travelling wild country it is always best to stay with the trail, for a trail is always going somewhere it's usually the shortest route between points. Whenever I have left a trail, except for a bit of exploration, I've gotten into trouble. Once, following a long, winding trail I came up on a long, beautiful slope of grass leading down to the very point where I wish to go. The car waited for me down there, and the trail led off in a roundabout way, so I decided on the shortcut. I was tired. It had been a long day, and the easy way down the grassy slope was inviting. After nearly two miles I came suddenly to a deep canyon, dropping sheer for 300 feet, and no way down. Across the canyon that nice grassy slope continued, I had to walk all the way back to the trail, and it was all uphill. Common sense should have told me that had there been an easy way down others would have used it.

Nobody knows the wild country. No matter how long one lives in it and with it one is forever learning, and there's always much to see and hear. Nor are any two places the same.

·        Deep meaning in that preceding extract. Profound.

Much of what one gets from the wilderness depends on what one takes to it. By this I mean that the more that is known of simple geology, of plant growth, and so on, the more interesting an area becomes. The point is not only to see what is there but to know what is happening and what has happened. Soon one is able to travel the country with an awareness impossible before.

If you believe the wilderness is gone you are mistaken. It is out there, miles upon miles of it.

[On being picked up after a week alone in the mountains.]

“Must have been quiet,” he said. “How can you stand being alone?”

“I wasn’t alone,” I said, “I had a mountain with me.”

The greatest stories ever told are those around campfires, and bunkhouses, or in ship fo’c’stles with a bunch of wandering men. They'll have dropped their anchors in forgotten coves and paddled canoes up nameless creeks, and the best of the stories are always for each other, for the ones who have not known the life will not believe what they are hearing.

·        Dead on!

·        Stories from those who have lived, who have dared trump those who have only viewed the YouTube video, read the article or had AI read it to them.

·        Find your Wanderers, converse with them.

·        Better yet, ask to go with them on their next excursion, even if it’s a mere trip to the local BBQ, these people, my friends, these people have stories.

·        They will not regale you with last night’s Netflix binge, this morning’s headlines, or yesterday’s scores.

·        They are too busy living to speak spectator tales.

The more we learn of the world the more we should be cautious about our statements on the past. So much of what we believe is theory or founded upon theory, and much of such theory is based on insufficient evidence. The greatest danger lies in accepting a theory for fact and building mountains of learning on insecure foundations.

·        Sage advice to the cocksure on any topic.

·        And…his cherry on top.

One has to begin somewhere and a theory is such a place, but a theory can be a trap and is not to be trusted too much.

·        This may be non-fiction but it is easily my favorite work of Frontier literature from Mr. L’Amour.

·        Simply superlative.