Blood Meridian (1985) - Cormac McCarthy - Overrated?

 

Cormac McCarthy is said to be one of the best authors ever produced in America, and Blood Meridian is said to be his finest novel. The man’s prose has been compared to that of  both Faulkner and  Hemingway, as different as those two styles are. The influence of both men on McCarthy is readily evident in Blood Meridian, as is the prose style utilized in the Old Testament and in Melville’s Moby Dick. It’s all there, and that’s what made Blood Meridian such a difficult read for me.

The back cover of this 25th Anniversary Edition  describes the novel this way:

“Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian is an epic novel that traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into a nightmarish world in which the market for Indian scalps is thriving."

And that does pretty much sum up this rather plotless novel. 

Once the Kid throws in with the Glanton gang, he rides from massacre to massacre gathering scalps to be sold for the bounty offered by the Mexican governors of Chihuahua and Sonora. At first only hostile Indians are attacked, but when no more hostiles are to be found, the gang wipes out a peaceful village populated by the peaceful Tigua Indian tribe. Even that doesn’t satisfy the bloodlust and greed of the gang, so they turn to wiping out small Mexican villages and mining camps - and passing off the scalps of their victims as having been taken from hostile Indians. Any encounter with the Glanton gang is guaranteed to be a violent one, and no one south of the border is safe from them.

There are a few notable characters in the gang, including its leader John Glanton and the Kid, but the most memorable of them all is a huge, hairless philosopher simply called the Judge. The Judge starts out as Glanton’s right-hand man but soon develops such a powerful influence and hold on Glanton, that it is really the Judge who dictates the gang’s downward spiral. Without his presence, it is likely enough that the gang would never have devolved into the nightmarish death machine that it became. The Judge is all-powerful, and McCarthy by making all characters so secondary to him, emphasizes his dominance. 

It was for stylistic reasons - not for the abundance of extreme violence and cruelty on display - that I found Blood Meridian to be such a difficult book to finish. Cleverly, McCarthy surrounds the sudden flashes of violence and bloodletting with much longer sections of mind-numbing travel and terrain descriptions. This gives the reader a feeling very similar to what the gang experiences between its murderous raids. Much of that prose reads like a cross between Faulkner and the authors of the Old Testament, and as beautiful as it probably is, it is still quite a chore to read a dozen or so straight pages of it before something else finally “happens.”

This one sentence is typical of that kind of writing:

“They crossed before the sun and vanished one by one and reappeared again and they were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burnt phantoms with the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and and slurred together and separated again and they augmented by planes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there began to appear above them in the dawn-broached sky a hellish likeness of their ranks riding huge and inverted and the horses’ legs incredibly elongate trampling down the high thin cirrus and the howling antiwariors pendant form their mounts immense and chimeric and the high wild cries carrying that flat and barren pan like the cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below.” 

So do I personally think Blood Meridian is one of the best American novels of all time? No, not by a long shot. For such a violent book, it feels very repetitive. Even the violence, which is at first is so shocking, loses its punch after a while, and the story really is just one of a gang riding around committing one atrocity after another. None of the characters, including the Judge and the Kid, are developed well enough to make them seem particularly real, and there is no big payoff at the end of the novel to make me feel that it was all worth the effort of working my way through McCarthy’s almost impenetrable prose.

(From what I understand, Blood Meridian rates high on the list of “novels started but not finished,” so I do get a tiny sense of satisfaction for having finished it on my first attempt - unlike the half-dozen or so tries it took me to get through Moby Dick. So there’s that.)

Stand Proud (1984) - Elmer Kelton

 I first read Elmer Kelton’s Stand Proud sometime back in the eighties,  and that was plenty long enough ago for this re-read to feel like I was reading it for the very first time. I remembered almost no details concerning the book’s plot, and had only a general memory of how much I enjoyed the story the first time around. It turns out that Stand Proud explores a theme that Larry McMurtry and quite a few other writers of westerns have explored in their own fiction over the years: what happens to violent men who outlive their usefulness to society once times have changed for the better. 

Frank Claymore is one of those men.

During the Civil War, Frank had been one of the young militia men who stayed home to protect Texas settlers from the deadly raids of the Comanche Indians who were still not willing to cede Texas to the newcomers. The situation was so desperate that the Confederacy had to stop conscripting men from that part of the state so that the small farms and ranches could survive the war years. Twenty-two-year-old Frank was one of those small ranchers himself, but all able-bodied men were required to put time in with the militia - and he put in more than most.

Frank came out of the war years with three things: a wound that would plague him the rest of his life, the location of a remote grassland valley that he would claim for himself, and a mortal enemy and competitor for everything he held dearest. 

And now, over 40 years later, Frank sits in a courtroom to be judged by a jury composed of small ranch owners who resent him and all he has claimed for himself. He is accused of murder, but is still determined to play by his own rules, damn the consequences. And it’s not looking good for him.

Each chapter of Stand Proud opens on a day of Frank’s trial, followed by a longer section from Frank’s past. This allows the reader to compare the young Frank Claymore to the elderly version, and to learn the truth, in detail, about what is being testified to in the courtroom. This construction works remarkably well to explain what kind of man Frank is and why someone as respected as he once was could find himself in a mess like this one so near the end of his life. 

Stand Proud is nothing like the stereotypical pulp fiction western readers unfamiliar with the genre too often think of when they think “western” novel. This is a character-driven story in which relationships and longtime grudges drive all the action, a story where disagreements are more likely to be settled by fists rather than by guns. Kelton’s later novels, such as The Time It Never Rained, The Day the Cowboy’s Quit, and The Good Old Boys brought ever more realism to his stories about the cowboying life and its relationship to an ever-changing Texas landscape. The Western Writers of America once went so far as to proclaim Kelton “the greatest Western writer of all time.” I might not go quite that far in my praise of the man, but I will tell you that his fiction has entertained me for a long, long time. And that I appreciate him. 

Where Coyotes Howl - Sandra Dallas

 

Sandra Dallas is known for her historical fiction about the ordinary people who chose to make new lives for themselves in northwest America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I have read several of Dallas's earlier novels, so I knew of her work well before finding her latest novel, Where Coyotes Howl, in the library. But I have to tell you that it is the book's wonderful cover that first caught my eye. (Proving yet again that cover art is a big, big deal in the publishing world.)

Where Coyotes Howl begins in 1916 when Ellen Webster, a young woman who accepted a schoolteaching position sight unseen, arrives in tiny Wallace, Wyoming, to begin teaching in the town's little one-room schoolhouse. This part of Wyoming is not at all how Ellen pictured it in her mind before leaving Iowa, and she is a bit stunned at what she sees in every direction: the horizon. But as seems to be the pattern with Wallace schoolteachers, Ellen will barely finish the first school year before leaving to marry a young cowboy whose eye she caught almost as soon as she stepped off the train on her first day in Wallace.

The novel focuses on what life was like for the "pioneer" women of the West even well into the twentieth century. Making a go of a small ranch/farm was never a given, and the prairie was dotted with the abandoned homesteads of those who failed to make it work for them. Whole families were likely to pack up and leave quietly every spring after having desperately struggled to survive the previous winter. But life in the West was especially precarious for women. For some it would be death during the birth of a child, for others being moved to an asylum after having lost their minds due to the extreme isolation that surrounded them during the long winters. 

Where Coyotes Howl is another memorable Sandra Dallas novel, one in which Dallas pulls no punches about the day-to-day struggle so many families endured in order to begin their lives anew with a decent chance of bettering themselves. It was a time when every neighbor was a valuable asset, a time when survival really did depend on "treating your neighbor as yourself." It was a tough world, one in which wives and mothers usually had to play the  toughest roles, a world that Sandra Dallas vividly brings to life in Where Coyotes Howl. 

Chenneville by Paulette Jiles

 

Union officer John Chenneville suffered a terrible head wound shortly before the end of the Civil War, and he remains in a Virginia hospital long after the war before he suddenly surprises everyone by regaining consciousness. But even after John finally makes it back to his Missouri home, he can remember very little of life there before the war, and details are slow to come back to him. For weeks, his health is deemed to be still so precarious, in fact, that John's uncle fears giving him some tragic family news: John's sister, her husband, and their baby boy have all been brutally murdered...and the man responsible is going to get away with it. 

A.J. Dodd is out there somewhere, and now all John Chenneville can think about is finding him - and killing him. It will be another year before John is physically able to begin the chase, one that will take him all the way from Missouri to Texas. Once Dodd figures out exactly who is so determined to find him, it is all he can do to stay one frustrating step after another ahead of his pursuer, but he does. 

Sometime on foot, sometime on horseback, John refuses to give up the chase despite the numerous setbacks he encounters. This, however, is more than just a test of the man's physical endurance. As the miles mount up, John will as often be threatened by murderous scoundrels as he will meet kindhearted people wanting to help him find Dodd. The problem is in telling one from the other.

In John Chenneville, Paulette Jiles has created a memorable character, one that becomes more and more real to readers as they come to know him. John is a good man, but he is a man whose pride and love of family demands that he avenge the death of his sister and her family. He has no other choice, and he knows it. He will think of little else until he confronts Dobbs face-to-face. But as the miles begin to take their toll, John can't help but wonder if he will ever find the man:

"He was deeply afraid of another disappointment, another dead end. He was afraid not of other men but of despair." 

 Call it historical fiction, call it a western, but what this is is a novel about a man who has had his future stolen from him, and who knows he will never be able to get it back. Now someone has to pay, and John Chenneville knows exactly who that is.

Paulette Jiles (Texas Monthly photo)

Review: Crow Mary by Kathleen Grissom

 

Set primarily in the 1870s and 1880s, Kathleen Grissom's novel Crow Mary is a fictionalized look at the very real Cypress Hills Massacre that occurred in Saskatchewan, Canada, in the spring of 1873. The ambush caught a small tribal group of Nakodas completely by surprise, and the ensuing slaughter of forty innocent men, women, and children forever changed the lives of Crow Mary and her white trading-post-owner husband who witnessed the whole thing. 

Once the drunken massacre is underway, it is impossible for anyone to stop it without being themselves killed. But after Mary witnesses five female survivors being taken inside the camp of the men who killed their families, she knows that she will either rescue them or die trying. After her husband forbids her to approach the camp, Mary knows that she - and her two pistols - will be doing it all alone. So she does. 

The novel begins with a short foreword written by Nedra Farwell Brown, a great-granddaughter of Crow Mary herself. Brown is understandably proud that her grandmother's story is finally being celebrated this way, and says this about Crow Mary: 

"My great-grandmother, Goes First, who became known as Crow Mary, was a beautiful, strong young woman who married a white man she did not know. That she faced this world with such bravery makes me proud to think that I carry her blood."

Crow Mary explores a period during which the native population on both sides of this country's northern border were being pushed into ever shrinking reservations and denied the ability to feed and clothe their families in the manner their ancestors had done the job for countless generations. They were told that they could no longer hunt outside the arbitrary boundaries of their new "reservations," and that  the government would supply them with the food they needed if it was not available to them within those boundaries. The politicians wanted to turn them all into subsistence farmers and cattle ranchers. But as it turns out, that would lead to the bloody fighting that marked the rest of the decade. 

Crow Mary and Abe Farwell tried to put things right after the Cypress Hills Massacre, testifying in trials on both sides of the border against the men who participated in the slaughter. Sadly, the chief result of their efforts was a lifetime of denunciation and hatred directed toward Farwell as being nothing but a traitor to his race; no convictions of the killers were handed down by either of the biased juries. Crow Mary is as much Abe's story as it is Mary's even though Abe suffered in a whole different way than his wife.

Readers interested in the history of this period will, I think, come away from Crow Mary with a clearer understanding of what a clash of cultures this all really was, and how tragically misguided and callus those in charge of policy were. Sadly, it all seems so inevitable, even in retrospect, that it triggers my general feeling of pessimism about the human race...are we any better today, really?

Short Story Sunday: "You Never See Apaches..." by Elmore Leonard

Clip from an Elmore Leonard Youtube Video

Elmore Leonard is best known for his crime novels, several of which were made into successful Hollywood productions over the years, but it was the author's Western short stories for 1950s pulp magazines that actually jump-started Leonard's literary career. Hollywood adaptations of Leonard's western novels include: Hombre (starring Paul Newman in the lead role), 3:10 to Yuma, and Valdez Is Coming. Fans of Elmore Leonard's shorter work were also been blessed with the publication of a compilation of all of the author's "Western Stories" by publisher William Morrow in 2004. That one-volume collection, The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard, is home to all thirty of the author's western stories. 

I don't read as many short stories these days as I used to. That's partially my fault, and it's partially my library's fault because my local branch has eliminated its Short Story section in favor of shelving short story collections in the General Fiction section. So you have to know what you're looking for, or you have to depend on blind luck for finding new collections of interest, and that's the same hit-or-miss kind of browsing you are faced with on websites such as Amazon nowadays. Honestly, I never thought any library would adopt such a bad system - but my complaining about it have done exactly zero good. 

Luckily, my own shelves are filled with several hundred unread short stories in compilations I've dipped in and out of for years. I just need to keep reminding myself that they are there. 

So this afternoon I pulled my Elmore Leonard book off the shelf and read his fifteen-page story titled "You Never See Apaches..." -  a story first published in Dime Western Magazine in 1952 as "Eight Days from Wilcox." And I was totally immersed in the story's tense atmosphere by the time I turned the first page.

...............................................................................................................

Angsman is a scout and tracker who has seen it all in his day. He's killed and almost been killed by warriors of various Western tribes since he was a young man - and he's no longer a young man. When three men come to him with a treasure map in hand and offer to make him rich if he leads them to  "one little X on a piece of paper," he knows it would be a mistake to tie-in with them. But the trouble, is that Angsman is bored, very bored, sitting around in Wilcox, and he's way past ready for a little adventure. 

Leonard creates three very different characters in the story for Angsman to deal with: the generally level-headed older man who was given the map by a prospector on his death bed, the young Mexican gunner who is smart enough to listen to the voice of experience, and another young gunslinger who thinks he's so smart (and fast) that he will live forever. Somewhat predictably it's the young gunslinger whose recklessness puts the other three men into a no-win situation in which someone is going to have to pay the ultimate price for daring to be where the Apache war leader catches them.

The plot itself is not a very surprising one in pulp magazines of the day. What is surprising is the talent Leonard exhibits for creating such believable characters in so few pages, plus the realistic dialogue between those characters, and the tenseness that the story's readers feel despite knowing what is likely to happen at the end of the day. I am a big fan of western novels and movies (having grown up on fifties and sixties television, how could I not be) and "You Never See Apaches..." pushed all the right buttons for me. I feel just like I once did after walking out of my hometown movie theater after a Saturday spent watching movies and serials all day long for 35 cents. 

I really miss Elmore Leonard.

Little Big Man - Thomas Berger

I only discovered Thomas Berger’s 1964 novel Little Big Man after watching its 1970 movie version starring Dustin Hoffman in the title role. But coincidentally, this week's second reading of the book coincided almost perfectly with the fiftieth anniversary of the first time I read it — and it turned out to be as entertaining as ever.

The novel’s main character, Jack Crabb, is the Forrest Gump of the second half of the nineteenth century. Despite dying at 34 years of age before he could complete his memoir, Crabb tells of his experiences and/or friendships with the likes of George Armstrong Custer, Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Wyatt Earp, and others. Much like the fictional Forrest Gump would do in his own part of the country decades later via novel and film, Jack was everywhere out West where anything of consequence seemed to be happening, including the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

The fictional editor responsible for getting Little Big Man’s memoir into print put it this way:

“It is of course unlikely that one man would have experienced even a third of Mr. Crabb’s claim. Half? Incredible! All? A mythomaniac! But you will find, as I did, that if any one part is accepted as truth, then what precedes and follows has a great lien on our credulity. If he knew Wild Bill Hickok, then why not General Custer as well?”

Jack Crabb’s big adventure begins when his father converts to Mormonism and decides to move the family cross country to Salt Lake City. Unfortunately for Mr. Crabb and his family, an Indian raid on the wagon train the family was a part of ended their move well before its intended destination. The good news is that not everyone in the family was killed in that raid; the bad news is that Jack and his older sister were carried away by the raiders. Jack’s sister, who had talked the Indians into taking Jack along in the first place, manages to escape early on, but she does so without including Jack in her escape plan. And that’s how Jack became the adopted son of an Indian chief and survived to have all the adventures captured in Little Big Man.

For the next quarter of a century, Jack will move between the white world and the Native American world each time he needs to save his life from one side or the other. Whenever he finds himself on the losing side of any battle between the Americans and the Indians, Jack manages to switch sides just in the nick of time in order to survive and begin a new set of adventures. He is so good at saving his own neck, in fact, that by the time his memoirs have attracted some interest, Jack Crabb is 111 years old and still feisty as ever. 

Bottom Line: Little Big Man is great fun despite the tragic events the novel vividly portrays as Jack Crabb negotiates the two very different cultures he spends time in. It is the story of America’s westward expansion and the simultaneous near elimination of a race of people who already called this country home. It is a farcical view of American history that still manages the kind of emotional impact that serious, nonfiction history books do not always achieve. Little did they expect it, but fans of Little Big Man were to be rewarded 35 years later with the publication of Berger’s The Return of Little Big Man. How did Jack manage to tell the rest of his story? I’ll leave that up to you to find out because it’s all part of the fun. 

Thomas Berger

The Ox-Bow Incident - Walter Van Tilburg Clark

As it turns out, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, who was a thirty-one-year-old English teacher at the time, struck literary gold in 1940 with the publication of his debut novel The Ox-Bow Incident. The novel was made into a major motion picture starring Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, and Harry Morgan in 1943, and today Tilburg’s novel is considered a classic of its type. 

Most readers will be familiar with plots similar to the story Clark tells in The Ox-Bow Incident even before they pick up the book for the first time. Tales about a group of cattle rustlers being chased down and lynched by a posse of local vigilantes have been played out in countless novels, movies, and television shows for near one hundred years now. The stories are usually rather gut-wrenching ones even when those being hanged from the nearest big tree really are the bad guys. But when mistakes are made, and innocent men are rashly killed by a mob of executioners, the stories truly are heartbreaking.

What makes The Ox-Bow Incident so different from most of the others is the emphasis Clark places on the motivations of the twenty-eight men who band together to chase down the men they believe have killed a local ranch hand while in the process of running off with forty head of cattle. The novel is both a character study and a hard look into the power of a mob to carry men to places they would never otherwise be willing to go. Even as the posse is being pulled together, the novel’s narrator makes this observation:

“Most men are more afraid of being thought cowards than of anything else, and a lot more afraid of being thought physical cowards than moral ones. There are a lot of loud arguments to cover moral cowardice, but even an animal will know if you’re scared.”

Then, a few pages later, the narrator points out how the local men are being pushed into riding with the posse by having it pulled together out in front of the local saloon rather than inside it:

“…a lot of these men must be fixed so that nothing could turn them off unless it could save their faces. The women were as stirred up as the men, and though a lot of them would have been glad if they could keep their own men out of it, that didn’t make any difference. When a man’s put on his grim business face, and hauled out a gun he maybe hasn’t used for years, except for jack rabbits, he doesn’t want to go back without a good excuse.”

It is inevitable. Twenty-eight men, led by two or three bloodthirsty types who always enjoy bullying and fighting anyway, are going to risk their own lives to chase three or four unidentified men into the blizzard that is fast descending upon them all. Most of them don’t really want to be part of a lynching, but only the town’s two preachers (one of them white, the other black) have the courage to speak up about what they are doing. The riders already assume the guilt of those they are chasing, and they do not intend to bring them back to town for a jury trial. The posse will be judge, jury, and executioner — and no one is going to stop them. Guilty or not, someone has to die tonight.

Bottom Line: While Clark’s moral arguments can get a little longwinded and a little repetitive as several of his characters attempt to find the moral courage to refuse to join the posse and to persuade others to do the same, the pace with which the posse finally forms helps build the tremendous tension readers feel as the book reaches its climax. What happens at that point, and what happens in its immediate aftermath, is heartbreaking for all concerned. Walter Van Tilburg Clark hit a home run his first time at bat.

Walter Van Tilburg Clark

Blood Brothers: The Story of the Strange Friendship between Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill - Deanne Stillman

I particularly enjoy reading history books that manage to put a more human face on figures from the past, books that offer the reader more than the usual dates and a dry regurgitation of a version of the “facts” we all suffered through as public school students. I know that not everyone is happy with what some have come to call “pop history,” but I enjoy being reminded that major historical figures were not so different from all of us today. Keeping that thought in mind makes what happened in the past all the more real and memorable to me. And that’s precisely the approach that Deanne Stillman takes in Blood Brothers: The Story of the Strange Friendship between Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill. 

Indian Chief Sitting Bull and scout Buffalo Bill Cody would seem to have had little in common other than being on opposite sides of the fighting that would eventually result in the near extermination of America’s indigenous population. After General George Armstrong Custer’s defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, a battle in which Chief Sitting Bull was mistakenly credited with having personally killed Custer, the US government would settle for nothing less than confining every Native American to one of the country’s ever-shrinking reservations. No one in their right mind could have predicted shortly after the 1876 routing of Custer’s troops by those of Chiefs Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse that Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill, a scout who helped soldiers chase Sitting Bull out of the country, would become close friends in just a few years. But that’s exactly what happened. The caption of a publicity photo the pair took together in Montreal in 1885 capitalized on that unlikelihood by putting it this way:

Foes in ’76, Friends in ’85.

As it turns out, both Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill Cody were national icons of their day. The men were among the earliest of America’s national celebrities, and they were treated as such by the media and the general population. Both were well aware of their images and, by the second half of their lives, both were comfortable (for different reasons) with the showmanship required to maintain those images. However, what began as a business partnership turned into what seems to have been a genuinely deep friendship that lasted right up to the moment of Sitting Bull’s cowardly assassination at the hands of Indian policemen and American calvary. Cody, in fact, was looking for Sitting Bull, hoping to talk him into peacefully surrendering to authorities, when the chief was killed by a shot into the back of his head. The premise that Sitting Bull’s life may have been saved if only Cody had not been purposely misdirected by a cavalry officer to follow the wrong trail is a haunting one. We will never know what could have been.

Bottom Line: Blood Brothers uses short biographies of Sitting Bull, Buffalo Bill Cody, and the woman that Bull saw as a daughter and Bill as a sister, sharpshooter Annie Oakley, to explore the remarkable friendship they had together and how each of them made the others better during a remarkable period in American history. It all seems to have happened so long ago, but then Stillman reminds us that these were just people doing their best with the hand that life dealt them, just like all of us are doing today. I still find it amazing that in the same decade my own grandparents were born, some in the US government still considered Sitting Bull to be so dangerous that they wanted him dead. They got their wish and we all know what happened next. 

Deanne Stillman

Butch Cassidy: The True Story of an American Outlaw - Charles Leerhsen

Even today, it’s hard to avoid the names Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when traveling around the Utah, Wyoming, South Dakota area like I did back in July, so when I spotted a copy of Charles Leerhsen’s 2020 Butch Cassidy biography in Wall, South Dakota, I was intrigued enough to bring it home with me. Pretty much all I knew about Butch and Sundance to that point came via the entertaining 1969 movie starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford as Butch and Sundance, respectively. We all know not to take movie biographies too seriously, however, and William Goldman, author of the screenplay, admitted that he knew only a handful of sketchy facts about the pair when he wrote the script. As it turns out, Goldman got the basic outline pretty much right and even captured the correct personalities of the two outlaws, but that was pure luck in the movie business of the day. Still, it was all a jumble of a few basic facts in my mind.

Robert Lee Parker, who tried several aliases before settling on Butch Cassidy, was born into a large and dirt-poor Mormon family in Utah on April 13, 1866. Amazingly, the last member of Butch’s “Wild Bunch” gang (a woman who may have sometimes held the horses for the gang while they were otherwise occupied) was not “put into the ground” until December 1961, only eight years before the movie making celebrity outlaws out of Butch and Sundance was released. Butch and Sundance, themselves, were shot down in Bolivia in November 1908. Butch was 42 years old.

A lot happened to Butch in those forty-two years. And Butch was a lot of different things to a lot of different people. He must have been one of the most charismatic men in the West during his day because even his victims often praised the way he handled his bank and train robberies, and the large ranchers who suffered cattle and horse losses to Butch’s rustling ways were often reluctant to charge him with the crime. Butch was just so damned likable, that it was hard for those who knew him to imagine him languishing in a jail cell. The Pinkerton Detective Agency used the threat of being robbed by Butch Cassidy to drum up business for the company, often knowingly attributing robberies to Butch and his gang when they knew the case to be otherwise. Butch refused to rob train passengers or bank customers, and went out of his way to limit violence during the robberies. The movie got that kind of thing pretty much right.

But, surprise, surprise. Butch was almost certainly gay or, perhaps reluctantly bi-sexual. Along with Sundance and Sundance’s partner Ethel Place (who was mistakenly re-named “Etta” on a Pinkerton wanted poster) he formed a threesome that raised a few eyebrows even at the time. Butch was not formally educated, but he was a reader and a natural loner who spent much of his downtime with his nose in a book. And by the time that Butch and Sundance were finally cornered and killed (there is some evidence that Butch killed Sundance before shooting himself in the head) in Bolivia, their celebrity-outlaw status was such that people refused to believe that they could be dead. Butch was the Elvis Presley of his day, and Butch Cassidy sightings in the US were reported for decades after his death. 

Bottom Line: Butch Cassidy: The True Story of an American Outlaw is both fun and informative, something that is a little rare in a biography. It explores the Parker family roots in some detail, chronicles the comings and goings of Butch during his forty-two years, speculates on what he was up to during the dead spots in his history, and tries to explain the man’s motivations as he alternated between periods of thievery and trying to go straight for good. Charles Leerhsen uses an irreverently humorous style to tell the story of Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch, and he does much to debunk the many myths and legends that have become associated with Butch and Sundance over time. Surprisingly enough, the “true story” may just be even better than the myths.

Charles Leerhsen

Legends & Lies: The Real West - David Fisher

David Fisher’s Legends & Lies: The Real West, an oversized book of 285 pages of text and historical photos, was published in 2015 as a companion piece to a television series of the same title. As such, I’m sure it provided much more detail and context than the television shows could have possibly offered. However, readers picking it up at this point, especially those who know even the basic history of the American west are likely to be at least a little underwhelmed by the book. 

That said, Legends & Lies does have separate chapters on the people that most of us so readily identify with the history of America’s westward expansion. Too, the chapters help the reader separate fact from myth even if they do not always provide enough context to explain effectively the motivations of everyone involved. This is very far from being the whole story, but I don’t think it pretends to be that. Legends & Lies, for the most part, delivers what it promises: a brief look at the “characters” that Hollywood and early television programming turned into mythical American heroes, be they “good guys” or “bad guys.” And, many times, they were both.

The twelve chapters are these:

1. Daniel Boone: Traitor or Patriot?
2. David Crockett: Capitol Hillbilly
3. Kit Carson: Duty Before Honor
4. Black Bart: Gentleman Bandit
5. Wild Bill Hickok: Plains Justice
6. Bass Reeves: The Real Lone Ranger
7. George Armstrong Custer: A General’s Reckoning
8. Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley” The Radical Opportunists
9. Jesse James: Bloody Politics
10. Doc Holliday: Desperate Measures
11. Billy the Kid: Escape Artist
12. Butch Cassidy: The Last Man Standing

Bottom Line: Legends & Lies is a good place to start for readers wanting to learn more about a period of American history that still fascinates so many people all over the world. The book is both a primer and a decent jumping off spot for more focused histories on the same topic. There is certainly nothing new here, and that is likely to disappoint readers hoping to learn more about the “lies” referenced in the book’s title. Frankly, this is pop-history and it is probably more suitable for a Middle School audience than it is for an adult audience. 

David Fisher

Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry

I have now re-read Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove two times since first discovering it in a Houston B. Dalton bookstore shortly after it was first published in 1985. In both instances, because I always fear that a book will not hold up to my earlier reads of it, I waited more than fifteen years between my re-readings of Lonesome Dove. A novel itself, of course, will not change, but readers, their perspectives, and their perceptions of the world do change — especially during this period in our history when we’ve allowed a loud group of political and social-media bullies to decide what new books should be published and which ones from the past should be erased from public consciousness. Thankfully, the mob has not yet come for Lonesome Dove or its readers.

I am happy to report that even after three reads, Lonesome Dove is as fresh as ever. It is still one of the funniest and one of the saddest books I’ve ever read; it is still home to some of my favorite fictional characters; and it still keeps me entertained throughout its (depending on which edition you read) near-1,000 pages. McMurtry’s story is a long and complicated one that explores the long relationships of a core group of Texans, men and women, who define the world and themselves based largely upon their mutual experiences and what they have learned from each other. 

“When Augustus came out on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake — not a very big one. It had probably just been crawling around looking for shade when it ran into the pigs. They were having a fine tug-of-war with it, and it’s rattling days were over.”

These opening sentences give a sense of Lonesome Dove, the little south Texas border town that former Texas Rangers Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call now call home. Gus and Call, along with a couple of other ex-Rangers, run a little outfit there they call the Hat Creek Cattle Company. Gus, Call, Pea Eye, and Deets have been on the southern border ever since the governor sent them south to watch the state’s border during the Civil War. Now, all these years later, the only real action along the state’s border with Mexico comes from the raiding parties that cross in both directions to steal cattle and horses from each other. And the retired Rangers enjoy doing that as much as anyone. 

Call, though, is feeling his age now…and he’s fast becoming bored with this life. Gus, on the other hand, spends much of his time drinking whisky wherever he can find shade, or at the Dry Bean saloon where he spends time with the town’s one and only whore, and he’s happy enough to go on doing so. Call yearns for one more big adventure in his life, and he wants it now, so when another ex-Ranger, Jake Spoon, rides into Lonesome Dove with stories about the unspoiled grazing paradise to be found in Montana, Call decides that the Hat Creek Cattle Company is going to be the first outfit to drive cattle north of the Yellowstone River. 

What happens next is epic. 

Bottom Line: It is impossible even to hint at everything that happens in Lonesome Dove, so I’ll quote McMurtry’s preface to the edition I read instead. The author addresses the novel’s theme this way: “…if one cuts more deeply, the lonesome dove is Newt, a lonely teenager who is the unacknowledged son of Captain Call and a kindly whore named Maggie, who is now dead. So the central theme of the novel is not the stocking of Montana but unacknowledged paternity. All of the Hat Creek Outfit, including particularly Augustus McCrae, want Call to accept the boy as his son.”  

Lonesome Dove is a not-to-be-missed masterpiece. 

Larry McMurtry

Ridgeline - Michael Punke

Three summers ago, a friend with longtime family ties to Wyoming suggested that we visit Fort Phil Kearney while I was wandering around that part of the country. About the only thing that sounded remotely familiar to me at the time was the name of the Civil War general for whom the fort was named. I knew nothing about the history of the fort itself or what had happened there. Fort Phil Kearney is in such a remote location even today that it is easy to envision how scary it must have been there when the fort was constructed by military personnel in 1866, but it was only after hearing the fort’s history from an excellent Wyoming State Parks ranger that I wondered why it was still such a well-kept secret. Why were there no movies or novels about Fort Phil Kearney and the “Fetterman Fight” that happened there on December 21, 1866? After all, the Fetterman Fight, right up until the massacre of troops at the Battle of the Little Bighorn almost ten years later, was the worst defeat the US army ever suffered in battle against united tribes of American Indians. 

Well, finally, someone has written a novel about Fort Phil Kearney, and as it turns out, it was well worth the wait because Michael Punke’s Ridgeline brings it all to life for today’s readers. Punke is, of course, best known for his novel The Revenant and the successful film version that followed some years later, and this seems like a natural for the Wyoming native who as a teenager was himself a National Park Service employee at the state’s Fort Laramie National Historic Site. 

No one can know exactly what happened on that bloody day — or why it happened the way that it did — but Punke’s combination of historical fact and logical speculation is certainly plausible. The basic facts are these

• Several Indian tribes, some of them longtime enemies, worked together to bring approximately 2,000 warriors to the battlefield.

• Tribal chiefs, with the help of a young warrior called Crazy Horse, concocted a precisely coordinated plan to lure soldiers from the fort into an ambush from which they could not possibly escape.

• Despite being directly ordered not to cross the ridge that placed them out of sight from fort observers, a combination of 81 calvary and infantry soldiers did exactly that. 

• Within an hour (some say thirty minutes) of having crossed that point, all 81 soldiers were dead.

The Indians knew they were fighting for their very survival as a people. A lesser threat would not have allowed longtime mortal enemies, as some of the tribes were, to put aside their differences even long enough to defeat a common foe. The soldiers were there because of  the country’s inevitable western expansion and its hunger for gold. The troops were a mixture of Confederate and Union veterans, and not all of them were even soldiers by choice. 

The story Punke tells, because he tells it in alternating sections from the points of view of both sides, has a little of the feel of watching two runaway trains approach an unavoidable head-on collision. It has a tragic feel about it, especially because all of the key characters in Ridgeline are based upon historical figures and what historians know about them. Among the Indians, there are: Crazy Horse, his friend Lone Bear, his brother Little Hawk, and chiefs Red Cloud and High Backbone. Soldiers include: the fort’s commander Colonel Henry Carrington, Captains William Fetterman and Tenador Ten Eyck, and Lieutenant George Washington  Grummond (the wild card in this story). In addition to the troops, a few families, including children, were also inside Fort Phil Kearney, and Punke uses two of the wives, Frances Grummond and Margaret Carrington, to illustrate some of the personality conflicts and jealousies that existed in the officer ranks. Scouts Jim Bridger (who played a key role in Punke’s The Revenant) and James Beckwourth also add to the mix.  

Bottom Line: Ridgeline is the kind of historical fiction that reminds readers that those who came before us were not all that different from the people we are today. Punke does not take sides. Instead, he gives the reader a sense of how — and why — something as tragic as what ultimately happened to this country’s native peoples happened. This is a memorable account of one little known fight between two very different cultures that had a much greater impact on American history than anyone could have realized at the time.  

Michael Punke

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)

Shadow of a Star - Elmer Kelton

Elmer Kelton was really something. Born on one ranch in 1926, and growing up on a different  one, Kelton had plenty of time to observe the cowboy life through his own eyes. He earned a journalism degree from the University of Texas, and served as editor for various agricultural and ranching publications for most of his life. But what makes Kelton so special is his success with writing western novels. Eight of his novels won the Spur Award given annually by the Western Writers of America in recognition for best western novel of the year. So, the group finally just decided to proclaim Kelton “the greatest Western writer of all time.” Heck, back in 1997 the Texas state legislature even proclaimed a special “Elmer Kelton Day” in his honor. In other words, Elmer Kelton may just be the Babe Ruth of westerns - underrated as I feel he still is even today. 

Shadow of a Star is Kelton’s 1959 western novel about Jim-Bob McClain, a young man still on the cusp of manhood who finally realizes the dream of his life: the sheriff he has admired for most of his young life hires him as his only deputy. In the truest sense of the term, Shadow of a Star is a coming-of-age novel, one in which this young man needs to get things figured out quickly so that he doesn’t die in the process. 

Sheriff Mont Taylor is showing his age now, and he’s recently had to fire his deputy because the man enjoyed the power that comes with wearing a badge a little too much. The ex-deputy doesn’t have that power anymore, but he has a new enemy: Jim-Bob McClain, the kid who replaced him. And he thoroughly enjoys watching Jim-Bob botch the first couple of incidents he’s called upon to handle - especially the one during which the young deputy’s gun is snatched from him as he attempts to handcuff a would-be prisoner. 

The climax of Shadow of a Star finds Jim-Bob McClain fighting to get a bank-robbing murderer to authorities before the locals catch up with him and lynch the man. Also on his trail, is a gang-of-three - including the prisoner’s elder brother - that intends to relieve Jim-Bob of his prisoner. Finally, within two miles of the town he’s so desperate to reach, both groups are closing in on him. And now, he realizes that he doesn’t have much of a chance of making those last two miles in one piece. His head tells him to give up; his heart tells him hell, no. 

Bottom Line: I don’t think that Elmer Kelton necessarily thought of Shadow of a Star as a YA novel, but that’s what I consider it to be today. Because it was written in 1959, it seems tame by today’s standards, especially when it comes to language, violence, and sexual relationships. Things happen, of course, but the details are largely left up to the reader’s imagination, making the novel, perhaps, more appropriate for today’s YA readers than for adults looking for a more gritty representation of the Old West. That aside, Elmer Kelton tells a good western story, and he gives a good feel for what that isolated lifestyle must have been like. Watching Jim-Bob McClain figure out who he is and what his badge represents to him and to the townspeople he protects makes for a satisfying experience for readers of any age.

Elmer Kelton: Texas Book Festival 2007