Essential Native Wisdom Edited by Carol Kelly-Gangi

 

No offered quote.

I have dozens upon dozens of anthologies, omnibuses, and collections of Indigenous quotations, speeches, and observations.

The best of them are historically accurate and take the time to confirm and verify the utterances.

The worst of them repeat unsourced commonplaces.

The best of them also share a quality of providing a bit of insight into an alternate mindset. Be that an alternate way to view war, peace, forgiveness, possessions or even our own assumptions of history.

What the best of them all have in common is a running theme that portrays a surviving nobility despite abuses and hardships.

Well, that is not what we have here. I suppose it was bound to happen—the quote book goes woke.

Don’t presume my use of the word “woke” to mean that I am “anti-woke” or I am myself “woke.”

Read my use of the word to mean I am fatigued with a dogmatic view that chooses to cull, sift, parse all utterances and wisdom for a preferred point of view.

I prefer my historical information undiluted—give me the good, the bad, the warts, the smiles.

What we have here is a vast collection of utterances that, for the most part, lean heavily on grievance, mistreatment, loss.

Yes, of course, this is a large part of many an indigenous people’s story, but it is not the whole story.

This volume behaves as if grievance were the mainstay of the native experience.

I am in no way asking for a whitewash of history, or to ignore the injustice. On the contrary, I want it all. The atrocities and malfeasance on both sides are shocking.

But…what we have here, primarily with 20^th century quotes is so “What we used to be…” uttered with trembling lip it robs these astonishing cultures of nobility. Denies a sense of agency.

I have no doubt the editor intended a good thing, to rectify and open eyes, but in this form of rectification we are left with little to admire.

Instead, we are asked to pity.

First Peoples deserve better treatment than they have received historically, but they also deserve better than this unmeaning patronizing look at their story.

A Christmas Offering: Trail of Robin Hood

 

In Jeremy Arnold’s book Christmas in the Movies: 30 Classics to Celebrate the Season (Turner Classic Movies) the classic cinema historian selected this Republic Western in the must-see roster.

It is a tale of white hats and black hats and Christmas tree wranglers.

We have Roy Rogers and Trigger starring as well as additional cowboy stars [all playing themselves] Rex Allen, Allan Lane, Monte Hale, William Farnum, Tom Tyler, Ray Corrigan, Kermit Maynard, Tom Keene and Jack Holt.

The story is slight, the plot and staging are aimed towards the youth market, but I wager if one grew up with this fare that this is a pleasant blast of nostalgia.

Not having grown up with Rogers and his ilk, it all comes across a little square to me but I did enjoy the pacing.

Director William Whitney, one of Tarantino’s favorites, keeps all moving briskly.

So, as a Western fan who had to pause often to ask, “Now who is that guy?” I still enjoyed myself.

One familiar with all the names mentioned, well, you likely are in for a treat.

Merry Christmas All!

The Cowboy Havamal by Jackson Crawford

 

 Use yer eyes,

and never walk blind.

There ain't no tellin’

where there's someone waitin’

to put one over on you.

The original Havamal, also called Gestathattr, or The Counsel of Odin the One-Eyed was an Old Norse prose poem found in the Poetic Edda, a collection of Viking tales and legends.

The Havamal is conspicuous for its brevity and down-to-earth warrior wisdom.

Noted Norse scholar, Jackson Crawford of Boulder, Colorado was always struck by its pragmatic bent. He felt that it dovetailed nicely with the cowboy wisdom of his rancher grandfather.

In The Cowboy Havamal he offers a rendering in the voice of a wise, pragmatic but sometimes cynical rancher.

It captures the Viking spirit beautifully, just as it captures the can-do of the Old West.

Both versions can be read in half an hour.

Both are chockful of stick-to-your-ribs wisdom.

The Old Colts by Glendon Swarthout

 

They crossed the concrete platform. They slowed, stopped, put down their bags. Where in the name of God was Dodge City? Where was dear old Front Street with its flies and chuck-holes and dead cats and plank sidewalks, and hitching rails cribbed half through by the teeth of impoverished ponies, and jingling spurs and popping pistols and drunks laid out to dry? Where the loafers and landsharks lounging in the shade of the overhangs? Where the whiskey barrels filled with water in case of fire? Where the town well with its sign “The Carrying of Firearms Strictly Prohibited”?

The author of the tremendous The Shootist gives us another tale of aging and fading lawmen, but here we get the fiction in the guise of faction.

Swarthout re-imagines one last trip on the owl hoot trail with geriatric versions of Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp.

We have some fine writing here and Mr. Swarthout knows his history, he knows these men but...it has none of the elegiac tone of The Shootist, rather it goes for a sort of tongue-in-cheek humor that is of a particular kind.

Case in point…

Halfway up, Bat first, Wyatt a close second for support, the one, the only Bat Masterson rips off a tremendous fart of fear in his friend’s face. “Damn you,” growls Wyatt. “I can’t help it! I’m scared!” “Keep going.”

The tale is filled with such low-bar high-jinks, that may have perhaps played well in a film adaptation with aging charmers such as James Garner or Paul Newman in the leads, but on the page, the charm is lacking, it simply is a bit jarring to see these Legends handled and treated as if they were grammar school delinquents.

It is well written but…I am judging Mr. Swarthout against his own best work, and that bar is mighty high.

I Want Him Dead

 

A 1968 Spaghetti Western from director Paolo Bianchi and writer Carlos Arabia.

To be frank, I had never heard of it but gave it a shot as it turned up on two Top Twenty Spaghetti Western lists: Tom Betts and Thomas Weisser both picked it.

I usually find much to enjoy in Betts’ picks.

Here we have a somewhat bland Craig Hill go through the gritty paces.

Much ado about the usual—vengeance, close-ups etc.

To my eye it wasn’t bad, as some of this genre can be execrable but…personally, I found it in no way memorable and fail to see what distinguishes it from the countless others of this genre.

Day of Anger

 

An esteemed Spaghetti Western, Day of Anger aka Day of Wrath aka I Giorno dell’ Ira.

Released in 1967 and directed by Tonino Valerii who would go on to helm the oddly similar but mighty entertaining My Name is Nobody.

Here we have the aging gunfighter schooling the youngster in the ways of the gun and the eventual showdown.

An able Lee Van Cleef plays our experienced gunfighter and Guiliano Gemma our young hand.

I am a fan of gunplay and Gemma is one of the best in the Spaghetti Western genre, smooth fast, able gun handling, but oddly here, not used to much effect.

We have the usual obstacle of overcoming poorly dubbed dialogue and stretches of “Wha?”

But overall, it is a colorful film with more than a few fine stylistic set-pieces.

It is no classic but keep in mind that is merely my opinion, Spaghetti Western authorities Quentin Tarantino and Tom Betts place it in their top twenty lists.

So, your milage may vary.

Overall, not bad if you have a fondness for the genre.

Death of a Gunfighter by Lewis B. Patten

 

He stared down at the boots. They the finest calfskin a man could buy, Patch had said when he gave them to him. Dan had intended to put them away and save them for good, but Frank Patch told him, “You wear them boy, that's the way to enjoy a thing. Use it. What good ‘ll them boots do you if you put ‘em in a closet and let your feet get too big for ‘em.”

This novel is one of the revised Lewis 100 Best novels.

I’m of two minds here.

On the one hand, the ambition is admirable. A tale of a town that is ready to move on and a man who is not.

A Marshal less past his prime than past his time.

A town perhaps not as civilized as it assumes.

The tale is told inside the heads of many participants, from the marshal to seemingly peripheral players.

The motives and rationales are seldom straight lines as in lesser narratives, but messier, far more human.

This mature take is the admirable hand we consider.

On the other hand, it seems that Mr. Patten’s vision, while mature and appreciated, is not quite matched by skill.

This same story in the hands of a Steinbeck would be a classic.

Here, it is admirable—a thoughtful read without quite being an A.

“La Grande Demoiselle” by Grace Elizabeth King

 

What Mademoiselle Idalie cared to learn she studied, what she did not, she ignored; And she followed the same simple rule untrammeled in her eating, drinking, dressing, and comportment generally; and whatever discipline may have been exercised on the place, either in fact or fiction, most assuredly none of it, even so much as in a threat, ever attainted her sacred person. When she was just turned sixteen, Madame Idalie made-up her mind to go into society. Whether she was beautiful or not, it is hard to say.

A perfectly delightful representative example from King’s Balcony Stories [1893.] These tales are a series of fourteen stories told  one evening by New Orleans women in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Being close in time to the event they are redolent with period detail that was not studied detail but lived detail.

I find it hard to believe that Margaret Mitchell did not read this volume and study it closely for her magnum opus, Gone With the Wind.

Delightful.

A Case for Conan the Barbarian as Western Hero

 

Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.—The Tower of the Elephant

A Barbarian wandering hither and yon and laying waste in a Mythic Age?

What does such a character have to do with Western fiction.

Stay with me as I plead my case, a poor one perhaps borne of predilection, but there are a few points of evidence that may give pause to the doubters.

First, I refer only to the Conan of Robert E. Howards pen, and not to any of the authors that have attempted to follow in his footsteps, be it a character named Conan, Kane, Brak, what have you.

Secondly, I refer ONLY to Conan and not to the “sword and sorcery” genre in general, aka “Heroic Fantasy.”

Again, all of my meager arguments refer to the Conan of Howard, not the conan [lower case] of de Camp, Carter, Nyberg, Anderson, Jordan et al.

All other sword and sorcery and heroic fantasy leaves me unmoved.

Such a thing has always puzzled me.

Why is it that this single character, more specifically this single character in the hands of a single man click whereas the others strike me as carboard pawns?

To my mind this is no mere wish-fulfillment to shoehorn an icon of one genre to be more in alignment with one I adore—The Western.

It may be a small matter, but one that is not small to the author.

Many claim the fictional hero Jack Reacher of the Lee Child novels -and now those of his brother, Andrew Grant—is a “Western” hero.

This is thanks to a New Yorker piece by Malcolm Gladwell [not known for pinpoint research] making claims that “Oh yeah, Western hero thru and thru.”

I quote from Gladwell’s piece:

“The Reacher books are Westerns: they are about the man of honor coming to the lawless frontier town in order to impose a rough sort of justice.”

And…

“Our contemporary fantasy is about lawlessness: about what would happen if the institutions of civility melted away and all we were left with was a hard-muscled, rangy guy who could do all the necessary calculations in his head to insure that the bad guy got what he had coming. That’s why there are rarely any police in Reacher novels—or judges or courts or lawyers or any discussion or consideration of the law."

Sounds like a pretty good justification, right?

The trouble is, Lee Child, the creator himself says, he holds no fondness for the Western. It is a genre he does not enjoy.

I don’t begrudge Gladwell for wanting to claim Reacher for the Western, but, maybe, just maybe it matters what the author himself intended.

Which brings me back to Conan.

Jack Reacher, on the surface at least, has seemingly more in common with the Western hero than a mythic Barbarian.

Let us allow Conan’s creator to have a say in the matter.

Regarding the character of Conan, “[He] simply grew up in my mind a few years ago when I was stopping in little border town in the lower Rio Grande… He simply stepped full grown out of oblivion and set me at work recording the saga of his adventures… Some mechanism in my subconscious took the dominant characteristics of various prize fighters, gunmen, bootleggers, oil field bullies, gamblers, and honest workmen I have come in contact with, and combining them all, producing the amalgamation I called Conan the Cimmerian.”

And there we have the key, to me at least, as to why I felt this Western affinity to the character of the original Conan.

Howard, a West Texan by birth, lineage and experience living in a day when his Conan models walked among us, created a living breathing bold character from living breathing swaggering actual gents.

Howard created the character and wrote from a real-life Western sensibility, whereas his followers are writing imitations of characters they encountered in books in false authorial worlds where inspiration is literary rather than gritty and actually human.

Conan in his wanderings strikes me as a forerunner to the laconic wanderers of the Spaghetti west.

Not cynical but pragmatic.

Not amoral but brutal.

Alive in a mythic past, but nevertheless alive.

One need not agree with my estimation of Conan as a Westerner, I merely offer as food for thought and as mystery solved for why one single character in an entire genre works for me and all other false heroes fail.

Conan was borne of real men.

That reality shows.

“Daughter of Don Manuel” by Frederico Gana

 

Rounding the bend in the road, I came suddenly upon a group of men on horseback. It was a funeral party which had stopped for a little rest. I recognized some of the tenant farmers from the neighboring haciendas. Silent and motionless, they sat on their lean, perspiring horses. On their faces, tanned by the sun, half concealed under blue cotton caps and wide brimmed sombreros, there lingered an expression of somewhat conventional sadness, I might almost say of smiling drowsiness.

Frederico Gana is a new author for me. He wrote of the Chilean countryside and its peoples in the early 20^th century.

This brief tale is melancholic, wise in observation and tinged with cynicism.

It reminds me of a Guy Maupassant writing of the West.

Based on this taste I shall seek more.

“Beyond the Frontier” by Dorothy M. Johnson

 

It was right that Edwards should think of Blossom first; she was his wife. She was standing in the yard in front of the still smoking log house, her long skirts blowing, her hands up to her mouth in a theatrical gesture that said Rancher’s Wife Waiting for Husband’s Return After Indian Raid.

How have I missed this story?

I am a fan of Miss Johnson. “The Lost Sister” and “The Hanging Tree” are acknowledged classics, but this little gem escaped me until now.

It packs a wallop of character in its brief page count. There is more limned in single sentences than many novelists pack into overthick covers.

Art, craft, narrative force—packed tight.

Simply superlative.

West Texas by Al Sarrantonio

 

“The killer’s name is Curtis Marks?”

“Not much of a name for a man who's murdered so many, is it? He must be”-- Thomas studied the short entry—“twenty years old now. This explains almost everything.” He looked up at Lincoln, eyes bright. “The mystery is solved, Trooper Reeves. I not only know where the killer is, but who he is, why he kills and why we'll find him where he is now.”

Um...if that passage feels a bit like the third act wrap-up of a third-rate English murder mystery, well, that’s because that is just one of the shoehorned elements in this mish-mash of a novel.

We take Buffalo Soldiers in West Texas, mix in a serial killer with baroque motivation and apparent superpowers, add a cavalryman who has trained himself to be a detective reading Sherlock Holmes stories, add some various kitchen sinks here and there and you get, well, writing like the opening extract.

The author clearly knows what he has in mind, our Sherlock Holmes wannabe knows what’s what, the problem is, we the reader are never offered the same insight to, well, much of anything.

That is not just referring to the motivation and ability to track down the serial killer [which is well nigh nonsensical] it is also down to standard elements.

I was well into the novel before we are privileged to the information that our protagonist is black and the victim of prejudice. The information just seems to come out of nowhere.

Each additional character along the way, we are never quite certain who they are, or why we are even meeting them.

There are entire chapters that pop up towards the end involving Mescalero Apache—they feel dropped in from a completely separate nonsensical novel.

My first from Mr. Sarrantonio, and perhaps there are excellent choices out there—we can all have a bad day.

But I gotta say, this one is, well…

The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones by Charles Neider

 

Now if you'll be patient I guarantee you'll get your money's worth but it's the truth I'm getting at and if you're not interested I suggest you run along to the stores and pick up one of the little books full of lies about the Kid’s life, written by some smartaleck easterner that never sat in a western saddle, never smelt good horse flesh or a campfire dying in the hills and yet is ready to tell the country all about the Kid. I was there and I know what happened. With a little patience you will know it too before long, what I aim to tell is exactly how he died, when there was no reason for him to have died at all.

This 1956 novel by Neider is a riff on the Billy the Kid tale, it was adapted into the 1961 film One-Eyed Jacks starring and directed by Marlon Brando.

The film is fine; no classic.

As for the Billy the Kid tale, I am no fan, thusly I came to this novel reluctantly.

I was wrong.

This novel is simply superlative.

Hendry Jones is definitely Billy the Kid in outline but there is no legend here.

There is no romance.

No studio picture gloss.

Neider gives us grit and dirt and reality and the smallness of killing.

It is a surprisingly candid novel for 1956.

When they put the hemp around his neck and jerked how long would it take for him to choke to death? What would his legs be doing? How would his face look? Would it turn purple and look like a dried prune, making the kids laugh when he pissed in his pants and be buried with it stinking on him?

With its brief page count-144—Neider accomplishes more than many at four times the length.

Easily moves into the pantheon of one of my favorite Westerns.

The Genuine Article by A.B. Guthrie

 

She collapsed by the roadside and moaned. She could have been pretty, I thought, grade-school pretty, but now her clothes were dirty and torn, and her face swollen and red, like a man’s marked by booze.

A volume in the Sheriff Chick Charleston series by the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the classic Western The Way West, and the screenwriter who adapted Shane for the big screen.

The Chick Charleston series was a series of 5 contemporary crime novels in Big Sky country.

This volume is brief, full of on-point observations such as the one we opened with and the following examples:

The morning was as fair as ever nature could give. The sky was tall, to the end of sight and beyond. The horizons lay peaceful and distant, drowsing under the early sun. I thought of a statement I had read somewhere: values arise by contrast. So, sure, we needed cold and wind and rain for a full appreciation of days like this one.

Or…

It was hard to believe, on this quiet and tranquil morning, that murder could have been done, that violence could exist. Had the killer only counted to ten, so to speak, a day like today would have soothed him. The whole sky said peace.

Gorgeous writing up and down the line.

If there is a problem, and there was to this reader, it is the mystery itself, the reason for the novel’s existence. It is simply formula and, well, unnecessary.

To be candid, I feel that way about many “mystery/crime” novels.

I formerly was a big fan of the genre but now find much of it tedious wheel-spinning no matter how skilled the execution.

They all must wind up being the same.

The end is a foregone conclusion or we, the reader, are left unsatisfied with an unsolved mystery.

Whereas other genres, the Western in particular, to my eye, when skillfully executed may only be predictable in setting. Nothing more.

One opens the pages of a western not knowing if it is a de regueur shoot-em-up, a man vs. land tale, a fable told from the point of view of a dog, the exploits of a frontier newspaper publisher, a verité of a life among the Indians, or…examples and variations abound.

Whereas the murder “mystery” is no mystery at all.

One opens the cover, and one knows there will be a murder. There will be complications to keep the page count on point, and the book exists to solve the “mystery.”

All art that is found within must be shoved aside at some point to fulfill the genre’s dictates.

A shame here, as Guthrie’s skill is so high, I would have loved to see him use it on something less predictable as a “mystery” to be solved.

Again, if you are enamored of the crime-mystery genre, well, you might be in for a treat.

A well-written volume with a gorgeous setting.

Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck

 

It is impossible to be in this high spinal country without giving thought to the first men who crossed it, the French explorers, the Lewis and Clark men. We fly it in five hours, drive it in a week, dawdle it is I was doing in a month or six weeks. But Lewis and Clark and their party started in Saint Louis in 1804 and returned in 1806. And if we get to thinking we are men, we might remember that in the two and half years of pushing through wild and unknown country to the Pacific Ocean and then back, only one man died and only one deserted. And we get sick if the milk delivery is late and nearly die of heart failure if there is an elevator strike. What must these men have thought as a really new world unrolled—or was the progress so slow that the impact was lost? I can't believe they were unimpressed. Certainly their report to the government is an excited and an exciting document. They were not confused. They knew what they had found.

The subtitle of this volume is In Search of America.

Tuska considers Steinbeck a Western genre author and I am grateful for that as it allows me to squeeze in this lolling perceptive work.

The premise of the “nonfiction” volume is the author sets off in his camper van Rocinante along with his poodle Charley, to drive across the nation. Take his time. See some sights. Talk to some people.

There is no clear plan, just a simple dictate of “Let’s hit the road.”

There are some literary “scholars” who quibble that some of the reported episodes didn’t happen or didn’t happen the way Steinbeck presents.

I care not a whit.

A fine observation, be it in a volume of Trollope, a factual report from the North Pole, or in between the covers of pulp fiction is a fine observation.

Jacques Barzun’s histories have sung to me, but so has Robert E. Howard’s Conan.

Fine fodder is fine fodder.

What resonates here, be it fact or not, vibrates with the facts of a life lived, of observation that strikes a chord with a reader who has seen, encountered and thought such things himself.

The observations that soar, at least to this reader, are not the nuts-and-bolts facts but the heart and soul statements.

I wonder why it is that that when I plan a route too carefully it goes to pieces, whereas if I blunder along in blissful ignorance aimed in a fancied direction I get through with no trouble.

Or…

On such a trip as mine, there is so much to see and to think about that event and thought set down as they occurred would roil and stir like a slow-cooking-minestrone. There are map people whose joy is to lavish more attention on the sheets of colored paper than on the colored land rolling by. I have listened to accounts by such travelers in which every road number was remembered, every mileage recalled, and every little countryside discovered. Another kind of traveler requires to know in terms of maps exactly where he was pinpointed every moment, as though there is some kind of safety in black and red lines, and dotted indications and squirming blue of lakes and the shadings that indicated mountains. It was not so with me. I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.

I could quote on.

But the book deserves its own reading.

And we deserve our own journeys.

The Restless Gun “Duel at Lockwood”

 

This 2 season Western series ran from 1957-1959 starring John Payne as ex-gunfighter Vint Bonner.

The series is carved in that mini-morality tale of the week vein that many a mature Western tale of the period was forged.

In the first episode we see Vint having to deal with a young buck wannabe gunhawk played by Vic Morrow.

The writing is fine, the story arc predictable, but the short running time makes it all go down nice and easy.

The stand-out here is Morrow’s sniveling snarling gunhawk.

Not a bad way to spend 30 minutes.

Guild by Ed Gorman

 

“He’ll probably try to kill us both. Frank Cord, I mean.”

“You scared?”

 “A little.”

Guild said, “That's about how much I’m scared, too.”

Here we have, to my eye, a bit of a curiosity. It is Tuska’s pick for the best of this author, and there is indeed craft here. Pacing, setting, all the elements are here, and yet…I find the entire affair a bit toothless.

A bit, “I’ve mapped out all the discrete parts that should make a fine Western tale, now let’s Insert Slot A into Hole B.”

Our protagonist is a troubled bounty-hunter, his trouble is outlined for us at the beginning of the novel.

We are told the incident haunts him.

Beyond a mention of the incident here and there I never felt any haunting.

Truthfully, I never felt that any character here was alive. They all seem dress-up simulacra from other more vital novels.

We have confrontations simply because this part of the plot demands it.

We have passionless relationships that we are told are meaningful.

It seems strange to find so little to like in a novel that is clearly written with craft.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with the elements—it is all in the stew itself. All a bit watery.

Then again, perhaps the fault is all mine for failing to see the art here.

Have We Dimmed the Light in the Forest by Mark Hatmaker

 

“We must be polite. If we look at the skin of a white man, he said, you can see how thin and weak it is. Even such a small thing as words will bruise and cut it open.”—Conrad Richter, The Light in the Forest.

That quote is from the Pulitzer-Prize winning author’s 1953 novel, The Light in the Forest.

The novel is a tale of the Eastern Woodland frontier, particularly the story of a young white captive who has lived with Natives for years and is being returned “home.”

Before we plunge on, I must get the reader-rection out of the way. As fiction, I found it a bit stilted, a bit too Rousseau “Noble Savage” in dialogue but in all other particulars a fascinating read.

Richter has done his research here, there was a marked number of “white” captives who, once “freed,” escaped time and time again to return to what one would presume to be a harsher life, a harsher culture, one with less amenities, and yet…

The historical record gives us tale after tale of these dissatisfied “return to civilization” citizens. It was so rife and common Benjamin Franklin remarked upon the phenomenon.

For his tale Richter plunged heavily into firsthand resources, particularly Heckewelder and Zeisberger.

In more recent times, Sebastian Junger delves into the subject in his masterful Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging.

Let’s allow Richter to set the stage for what he was trying to do with the novel. This is from his preface.

The author wants to acknowledge further his gratitude to those readers who have sensed what he was trying to do--not to write historical novels but to give an authentic sensation of life in early America. In records of the Eastern border, the author was struck by the numbers of returned white captives who tried desperately to run away from their flesh-and-blood families and return to their Indian foster homes and the Indian mode of life. As a small boy he himself had tried to run off to Indian country without the benefit of ever having lived among the savages.

Not that the novel represents the novelist's particular beliefs or opinions. He can understand and sympathize with either side. His business is to be fair to them both. If the novel has another purpose, it is to point out that in the pride of our American liberties, we’re apt to forget that already we've lost a good many to civilization. The American Indians once enjoyed far more than we. Already two-hundred years ago, when restrictions were comparatively with us, our ideals and restrained manner of existence repelled the Indian. I thought that perhaps if we understood how these first Americans felt toward us even then and toward our white way of life, we might better understand the adverse, if perverted, view of us by some Africans, European, and Asian peoples today.

If ideals and restraint repelled then, imagine applying that vision to the 21^st-century now when many do not participate in life—we allow tiny screens to stand in as council fires, celebration dances, and face-to-face interaction—yet still “feel” strongly for ideals that can survive in our absence, where the clickety clack of a keyboard comment or thumbing an emoji icon “satisfies” as participatory exchange.

Richter, Junger and others are telling us that often much of what we may see as boons are chosen bars on a prison cell.

He opens the novel with this extract from Wordsworth.

“Shades of the prison-house begin to close,

Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy.”—Wordsworth

Richter asks us, to pay attention, to question all aspects of our “civilized” life to determine, “Is this really a boon, or is it mere fashionable ideal? A benefit or another brick in a self-constructed cell?”

To be clear—the question is never useful in the abstract spirit…

“What’s wrong with society today is…”

Or in the other-directed spirit…

“The problem with Ted is, he needs to…”

Questioning our own prison-houses our own prison cells, our own habits, well, these are the only questions that matter, as these are the only ones we can give answer to as to whether they are useful or not, and we are the only ones who can choose to tunnel out of this or that circumstance if we deem them idealized restraints.

Let us look to a few mundane examples from the novel to give a flavor for how these questions may provide an escape key if one is needed.

The boy was about fifteen years old. He tried to stand very straight and tall when he heard the news, but inside of him everything had gone black. It wasn't that he couldn't endure pain. In summer he would put a stone hot from the fire on his flesh to see how long he could stand it. In winter he would sit in the icy river until his Indian father smoking on the bank said he could come out. It made him strong against any hardship that would come to him, his father said.

To be clear I do not think such practices are necessary, but I do find that practices of purposeful hardening/robustification can a long way towards the improvement of both the physical and mental character.

Notice, the novel’s example was not to improve cold tolerance or heat tolerance per se, but to teach “strength against hardship.”

I know many a cold shower practicer, many a sauna user who tout the health benefits yet still bitch about politics, traffic, and the most baffling of all, the weather.

One would assume that robustifying to hot and cold was intended to robustify beyond the mere Instagram game of the practice.

It is either of value, or it is not.

Seems integration to the whole is the thing.

Seems the Spirit is the thing.

Never would he go to this enemy land. How could he exist among a race of aliens with such slouching ways and undignified speech! How could he live and breathe and not be an Indian!

Slouching ways and undignified speech are hallmarks of many of the accounts from true journals.

Thought Experiment: If we possessed a time machine, would we expect to see more slouching then or now?

More dignified speech, then or now?

I shall lift my head from my smartphone after keying in my dignified emoiji and ponder the question.

The Indian and deer would wither and die in such confinement, but the white men flourished in these stale sickly air of his house like fleas in his wall and borers in the cabin logs. He could arise refreshed from a suffocating bed of feathers high as a turkey roost off his mother, the Earth. He could even survive that instrument of torture called a bolster, which bent white people from the straightness of the Indian, curving their necks forward like a cranes.

I offer, how many complaints of a poor night’s sleep are relics of the “necessities of sleep” pillow configuration, blanket weight, mattress tone etc.

Not saying they are a net bad, just saying how many are surprised what a weekend’s backcountry camping does to the usual around the coffeepot, “I slept for shit last night” complaints.

Later Andy Goff, the shoemaker, arrived. The tailor’s fitting and fussing had been trial enough, the clothes he made were ugly as Alec’s. But the shoemaker was worse. The boots he pounded out there like half-hollowed logs. They gripped the boy's feet, wedged his toes, cramped his ankles. He felt that he stood in millstones. How could white men endure such things when they might run light and free and moccasins?

I know a man, a Good Man, who wears combat boots day-in, day-out. Be it for fashion cache or a blinkered, “I’m tactical ready, man!” I do not know.

I also am privy that he has complaints of foot problems, that he self-confesses to running and jumping poorly.

Again, no argument against footwear. I wear shoes.

Just reminding us how wide we should ask our questions about possible prison-houses.

On the seventh morning he must sit, a captive between his father and Aunt Kate in what they called the Great Spirit’s lodge, with the strong scent of the white people and their clothing about him. The whites were very childish to believe that the God of the Whole Universe would stay in such a closed up and stuffy place. The Indians knew better--that the great spirit loved the freedom of woods and streams where the air blew pure, where the birds sang sweet, and nature made an endless bower of praying spots and worship places.

An idea that pops up in true accounts again and again. It sings to me, everywhere is a praying spot.

Everywhere is a Gratitude Spot.

Everywhere is a Seeing Spot.

Each Step is a Sermon.

It is novels such as this one, true accounts such as those I have mentioned that fuel my own Stepping Sermon.

Be it Old School Rough n Tumble Combat, Old School Physical Culture Conditioning, every day is THIS day, or even my living out my boyhood Tarzan jones by looking to real ones who lived in contact with life lived raw.

We must ask our own questions.

We must experiment with life outside of the prison-house to determine the answers to those questions.

Keep those habits that sustain.

And kick off those that don’t fit like a pair of millstone boots.

Mabitsiar’u Pab’i tua’su Pats’i! [Comanche: Respect/Honor, My Brothers & Sisters!]

Desert Stake-Out by Harry Whittington

 

No Sample Quote Offered.

This is my second Whittington novel, Charro being the first.

He wrote many a crime novel in the Fawcet Gold Medal vein of construction; I have read none of these—these are perhaps where he excels.

It might be luck of the draw with the two Westerns I have read.

I emphasize, they are not bad.

But…they feel so by-the-numbers constructed with screenplay stage direction scenarios and pat characters being shoved into clockwork set-ups that I never feel truly drawn in.

The formulaic feel does a disservice to the not-bad level of writing.

When one reads one of the Edge series by George Gilman there is a feeling of, “Hey, this is kinda sorta better than it has any right to be,” considering its assembly line origins.

With Whittington, I get the feeling that the level of plotting and writing is more along the lines of assembly line without the commitment to the grand guignol excesses of Gilman.

He hints at toughness without actually getting there.

He describes the land in detail, but it is a postcard description, not a bone-dry feeling, or cold ache in your bones as one gets with Haycox or MacLean.

Whittington is a puzzle to me.

There is something there, but I have not found it yet.

Others who have, might better direct me.

Murphy’s Herd by Gary Paulsen

 

If Murphy had held any worry about being able to follow the riders or losing their tracks, during the next six days he needn't have been concerned. It was like following a bad wind, a plague over the land.

The fourth in Paulsen’s “Murphy” series—the first is reviewed on this blog.

Before we delve further, I need to say that this volume should be read last—had I known what I know now, I would have acquired the middle two of the series first.

With that being said—this is a brief exemplary work.

The first half plays as a love story, a tale of two no-longer young people making a second stab at life in one another’s company.

This section has charm to spare.

The second half goes to dark, desperate territory.

It does not do so with excess—Paulsen’s darkness is lean, his spare prose gets the job done.

Even when the story seems to veer towards formulaic tropes, the author has a twist in the tale to remind us he is in command the entire journey.

As series well worth greater attention.

The BFI Companion to the Western

 

This volume, edited by Edward Buscombe, is an interesting addition to any Western aficionado’s reference library.

It contains encyclopedic entries for historical personages, Western films and Western television series.

While not comprehensive in any aspect it tackles, what I do find of value is the British perspective on certain films; the BFI stands for British Film Institute.

Where there is some overlap between what the US considers canonical films, there are a few that do not move the BFI, but what is more valuable, to my mind, are films that in the States may have fallen through the cracks and some attention is devoted to making a case for seeking these out.

I have found more than a few of these Piccadilly taste pointers most enjoyable.

Overall, a fine addition to a Western film reference library.

Cimarron City “I, the People”

 

The first episode of this 1958-60 Western plays like a mini-feature film.

We enter Cimarron City, Oklahoma and view it thru the eyes of cattleman, Matthew Rockford played by George Montgomery.

The bulk of this inaugural episode belongs to guest star Fred MacMurray who plays a visitor to the town.

The story arc asks the question is the new citizen good for Cimarron City or not quite a good fit.

MacMurray is able is this role and there is a packed script here, if anything it feels too packed, as if any entire B-feature film was shoehorned into the 60-minute time-slot.

My first exposure to the series leaves me intrigued and will likely dip in for more.

I will add, opening scenes of Montgomery doing cowhand work show an actor who is not merely playing a part—he has an able get in there and get your hands dirty feel to him. Admirable.