Archive for the ‘Westerns’ Category
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Alternate history, that literary genre in which an historical event is tweaked, removed, or reversed, can be interesting. It is always great fun to play the “what if game” with the actual events of our shared past: “what if the South had won the Civil War,” “what if the Normandy invasion had failed,” or “what if John Kennedy had not been assassinated?” Much fascinating fiction has originated from those and similar questions. Jim Fergus plays a more subtle version of the game in One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd.” He wonders what might have happened if, in 1875, President Grant and Little Wolf, chief of the Cheyenne nation, had agreed to exchange one thousand white women for an equal number of Indian horses.
Grant is at first shocked and disgusted by Little Wolf’s proposition, but he has to admit that the idea makes sense. Since, in the Cheyenne culture, children belong to the tribes of their mothers, Little Wolf sees the “Brides for Indians” program as the best chance to assimilate his people peacefully into the white culture that seems destined to overwhelm his own. Grant, on his part, hopes that the women can influence their husbands into accepting, or at least tolerating, white ways and religions to the point that open warfare with the tribe can be avoided. Thus is born the secret “Brides for Indians” program, a program that will require Grant’s people to scour mental institutions, debtors’ prisons, and other jails and prisons in search of the one thousand women needed for Grant to meet his part of the bargain.
May Dodd, resident of a Chicago mental institution, is one of the first women recruited to go west to meet her new Indian husband. May has been institutionalized by her father for the unpardonable sin of bearing two children out of wedlock to a man beneath her social status. To her father’s way of thinking, no woman in her right mind could do such a thing – his daughter has to be insane. Rather than spend the rest of her life locked up, May, ever the adventurer, leaps at the chance to regain her freedom by becoming an Indian bride for the required two-year commitment.
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| Author Jim Fergus |
One Thousand White Women is told largely in the words of a series of journals May begins to record almost the moment she decides to make her break for a new life. Through these journals, we meet May’s colorful traveling companions and learn of their adventures and hardships as they begin their new lives as wives of men with whom they have so little in common. The women, although they will suffer the hardships of winter encampment, inter-tribal warfare, kidnappings, and one horrible night when their men succumb to the evils of alcohol, find that they are learning as much about what is good and proper in society as they are teaching. But is it all too late to save the Cheyenne from what the army has planned for them?
The audio version of One Thousand White Women is read by Laura Hicks who does a remarkable job with the various accents and languages she has to deal with: two of the characters are Irish, one is Swiss, one is from the Deep South, one is an ex-slave, and some are French. Hicks handles all of these accents well, in addition to voicing a believable version of the Cheyenne language. This one should appeal to a variety of readers, among them: alternate history fans, western fans, and those who enjoy feminist novels with especially strong female characters.
Rated at: 5.0
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| This is a 1982 edition of a western first published in 1963 |
James, over at Ready When You Are, C.B., is hosting a western reading challenge during the month of May and I’ve been looking through my books to see what I might want to read for the challenge. I have lots of westerns around the house, but I’m leaning toward reading one or two of these:
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| This is a 1985 edition of a book published in 1959 |
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| This is a 1967 first edition of what Ballantine Books called a “Western Original”
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| This is a 1975, third printing of a book first published in 1960 |
You will notice that all four of these westerns were written by West Texan Elmer Kelton. I first discovered Mr. Kelton’s work in After the Bugles, pictured above, and over the years ended up with several hard covers of his and even one e-book double that I recently purchased. Kelton, in my opinion, wrote (he died in August 2009) better westerns than Louis ‘Amour but he never seemed to get the public recognition that L’Amour got. Kelton, who was 83 when he died, seemed to get better and better as the decades passed, eventually winning “Best Western Novel of the Year” seven times. I’m always on the lookout for interesting western paperback covers like these but they are getting harder and harder to find.
If you like westerns, or if you want to break new reading ground, go over to Ready When You Are, C.B. to sign up; it’s a one-book challenge, so give it a shot.
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Tom Chaney makes the biggest mistake of his already despicable life when he murders Mattie Ross’s father and robs him of his horse and the cash in his pockets (including two unusually shaped, and easily recognized, gold pieces). Now he has to deal with Mattie Ross, the murdered man’s fourteen-year-old daughter, a girl who will not rest until she sees Tom Chaney hang for the murder.
Mattie makes the trip to Fort Smith, Arkansas, with two missions in mind: claim her father’s body and send it home for burial, and hire someone to help her capture his killer. The first task is a relatively easy one, but the second is more of a challenge. Mattie, though, knows exactly the kind of man she is searching for and, once he sobers up, U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn seems to be the answer to her prayers. He is a man with true grit enough to match Mattie’s own.
Rooster Cogburn has a history of his own, having ridden with the infamous Quantrill’s Raiders during the Civil War, but he is smart enough to keep the odds in his favor. Not only has he accepted a $100 contract from Mattie Ross to capture her father’s murderer; he also draws a U.S. Marshall’s salary and hopes to claim the bounties being offered on Chaney and others traveling with him. After LaBoeuf, a Texas Ranger/ bounty hunter, offers to split the bounties with Cogburn, the two men decide to team up – and to sneak out of Fort Smith early enough to leave Mattie far behind. It would not be that easy.
True Grit is first rate western adventure as seen through the eyes of Mattie Ross, now an old woman recalling the adventure of a lifetime she experienced at age fourteen. Young Mattie sees the world in black and white terms. She wants Tom Chaney to hang for the murder of her father or she wants him shot dead if it proves impossible to take him alive. What’s right is right, and she will not rest until she makes it happen, even if she has to shoot the man herself.
There is adventure in True Grit and there is humor. The more subtle humor stems from the way that the roughest and toughest characters in the book speak their dialogue. Even in the heat of battle, or while throwing personal insults at each other, Cogburn and the rest speak in Mattie Ross’s voice, including her vocabulary and grammatical style. It took me more than a few pages to figure out that the book is more a monologue than a traditional novel. The reader is hearing the elderly Mattie Ross recount her adventures, and each of the characters, from Rooster to Tom Chaney, speaks the way that Mattie would have spoken had she been in their shoes.
It is easy to see why True Grit made Charles Portis’s reputation; it is a shame, however, that Portis wrote so little else. This is one of those books that can be enjoyed by readers of all ages, and it is good to see that the new movie version has given it new life.
Rated at: 5.0
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I decided to get a quick start on my 2011 goal of re-reading Larry McMurtry’s four-book “Lonesome Dove series” in the correct chronological order in which the books occur– rather than in the order in which they were published. That meant starting with Dead Man’s Walk, a book that surprised me by being better this second time around than it was on the first. As I recall, I rated the book a four back in 1995, but I am giving this re-reading a solid five-star rating.
Written in 1995, ten years after McMurtry’s huge success with Lonesome Dove, Dead Man’s Walk was billed as a prequel to that masterpiece. The timing was good. Hardcore fans of Lonesome Dove were already intimately familiar with the 1989 television movie of the same name, and they were probably watching episodes of the new miniseries by that name that ran in 1994 and 1995. So, most fans would find it hard to resist a new book that featured teenaged versions of Augustus McCrae and W.F. Call, two of the most beloved characters in the Western genre.
Gus and Call are literally two “young pups” when it comes to the ways of the world, although Gus is already showing his delight in keeping company with the nighttime ladies who so willingly offer him a good time – as long as he has the cash to pay for it. When the two young men, trying to survive Texas on their own, randomly meet, they quickly form a bond that will last them for the remainder of their lives.
At loose ends, and hoping for a little adventure, the two join up with a raggedy bunch of Texas Rangers on two different missions, both of which the boys will be lucky to survive. It is the second trek into the Texas desert, during which the Rangers must cross the “Dead Man’s Walk” from west Texas to New Mexico that gives the book its title. But, before the boys and their fellow survivors begin what seems like a certain death march, they must first survive the attentions of the Comanche, Buffalo Hump, and the Apache, Gomez, two men who will haunt Gus and Call for rest of their lives.
Dead Man’s Walk pulls no punches when it comes to the raunchy lifestyle of the nineteenth century Texas Rangers or the torture-focused warfare the Apache and Comanche tribes waged against the white settlers encroaching upon their hunting grounds. To say that the book is not for the fainthearted reader is an understatement. What makes Dead Man’s Walk so intriguing, and atypical of the popular western genre, is that McMurtry does not take sides in the conflict between the settlers and the Indians. He presents the good and bad elements of both groups and leaves it up to the reader to decide the “rightness” or “wrongness” of the conflict.
In addition to meeting Gus, Call, Buffalo Hump and Gomez, the reader will delight in spotting the young Clara, as well. That she was “love at first sight for Gus” is certain; what was on flirtatious Clara’s mind remains to be determined.
Dead Man’s Walk is a great western adventure but, as usual with a McMurtry novel, character development does not take a back seat to plot. The book is filled with memorable secondary characters, good guys and villains alike, and its ending (although it might seem farfetched to some) works perfectly for those that grew up on old-fashioned television and movie Westerns.
This is good stuff.
(This is my favorite piece of Lonesome Dove trivia, although it will not surprise dedicated fans of the book. Lonesome Dove originally was a 1970 screenplay meant to star John Wayne as Call, Jimmy Stewart as McCrae, and Henry Fonda as Jake Spoon. Wayne pulled out of the movie, followed by Jimmy Stewart, and the whole thing fell apart. McMurtry decided to turn the screenplay into a novel, and the rest is history. Even stranger, James Garner was originally offered the Gus McCrae part in the television movie, but he had to turn it down due to his ill health…and along came Robert Duval to forever claim that character for himself. And then, Garner got to play the roll of Call in the miniseries for another of the books in the Lonesome Dove saga. How cool is that?)
Rated at: 5.0
