A Study in Contrasts: Houston and Lincoln

28. February 2013 · Comments Off on A Study in Contrasts: Houston and Lincoln · Categories: Old West, Random Book and Media Musings, Uncategorized · Tags: , , , , , , ,

It’s an old-fashioned study in contrasts, considering the two of them, Abraham Lincoln and Sam Houston; both political giants, both of them a linchpin around which a certain point of American history turned, both of them men of the frontier. The similarities continue from that point: both of them almost entirely self-educated, as lawyers among other things. From reading accounts by their contemporaries, it is clear that each possessed an enormous amount of personal charm. In modern terms, both would have been a total blast to hang out with, socially. In their own time each of them also acquired enormous numbers of bitter enemies. In fact, for a hero-founder of Texas, Houston attracted a considerable degree of vitriol from others among his contemporaries, and a level of published vilification which was not bettered until Lincoln appeared on the national scene as the presidential candidate favored by the north in the 1860 election. And both of them had ups and downs in their political and personal lives, although it’s hard to argue that Lincoln’s personal story arc was anything as eventful as that of Houston, who appears as the ADHD child of Jacksonian-era politics.

Sam HoustonBut they were also opposites in at least as many ways as they were similar. The family of Samuel Houston had at least some pretensions to property and gentility, whereas that of Lincoln had not the slightest shred of either. Born in 1793, Houston was just barely old enough to have served actively in the War of 1812. He seems on that account to have been representative of an earlier generation than that of Lincoln, a generation only a half-step removed from the founding fathers. He came to the notice of Andrew Jackson, and thereafter spent much of his life when not strolling up and down the corridors of power, loitering meaningfully in the vicinity. He served variously in the Army or state militia of Tennessee, as an Indian agent, in Congress and as elected governor of Tennessee. He was married three times, was an absolutely legendary drunk and lived with the Cherokee tribe for a number of years on two occasions. He was brave, impulsive and addicted to flamboyant gestures and attire, being talked with great difficulty out of wearing a green velvet suit to one of his inaugurations as the President of independent Texas. He was also, to judge from portraits and photographs a very handsome man, resembling a rather rugged Colin Firth on a bad hair day.

Houston’s enduring legend was established as the hero of Texan independence; just another one of those footloose adventurers, drifting in during the 1830ies. Like those whose names would be soon written in letters of blood and gold – Bowie, Crockett, and Travis, he was under a cloud and looked to Texas for redemption. Unlike the other three, he would survive the experience. Some of Sam Houston’s cloud was of his own making: he went from a disastrously and very publicly failed marriage, leaving his term as governor of Tennessee and going on what appeared to have been a prolonged bender in the Cherokee Territory before pulling himself together and going to Texas. In the mad confusion that was the founding of independent Texas in the spring of 1836, Houston was about the only senior military commander who kept a cool head, faced with Santa Anna’s invading army. He also — and this was no mean feat — kept his cool in the tomcats-in-a-sack political wrangling that proved to be fairly typical of Texas state politics, then and forever afterwards. He pulled together an effective army, and decoyed Santa Anna into East Texas, farther and farther, until his own commanders were on the verge of deciding he was a coward and would not fight at all. But he turned, when he had the terrain in his favor, and became that rarest of heroes; the one who dies of old age in his own bed. By then he had married Margaret Lea, who was half his age at the time, a shy and beautiful southern belle with a spine of steel; she stopped him from drinking, and kept him more or less on the straight and narrow for the rest of his life.

Abraham LincolnAbraham Lincoln was born in obscurity and might very well have stayed there, save for the unquenchable burning spark that led him once to walk twenty miles to borrow a book that he had not read before. One has the impression of a ferociously hungry intellect, pulling every scrap of knowledge, of history and poetry, politics and the law into a mind never entirely content. It has been speculated recently that he was subject to bouts of deep depression. He was also ambitious, and went into politics early, while still in his early twenties before teaching himself law and being admitted to the bar in 1837. He practiced law in Springfield, Illinois and increasingly involved himself in state political affairs.

The existing pictures of Lincoln give an impression of melancholy, of someone haunted by unbearable sorrow, whereas those of Houston in his prime seem to be of a scrappy fighter with three aces among the cards in his hand, and a fairly good idea of where he will find a fourth. Another difference between the two: Lincoln was not handsome. In the words of the country expression: he fell from the top of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. From the accounts of his closest early friends, he was the most endearing and entertaining company, a gifted raconteur and mimic, able to reduce his audience to helpless laughter, and a shrewd lawyer, particularly relentless in cross-examination. He married the lively and cultivated daughter of a notable and politically well connected family from Kentucky, the Todds of Lexington. Mary Todd had also been courted by Stephen Douglas, with whom Lincoln would debate over the slavery issue in 1858. Possibly that added a frisson to the debates; one cannot tell at this late date, though.

In 1846 he was elected to the US House of Representatives for one relatively lackluster term, before devoting himself almost exclusively to law for most of the subsequent decade. He returned to politics again, as the question of America’s ‘peculiar institution’ of chattel slavery went from a simmer to a full rolling boil on the stovetop of political consciousness. The Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854 seemed to be nothing more than a crude exercise of the power of pro-slavery expansionists, in permitting the spread of slavery to territories where it had been forbidden in the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The public debates, and lectures which followed, energized that portion of the Northern public which was against such expansion, or even the existence of the institution itself and brought Lincoln to more than just local attention. He was put on the Republican ticket in the 1860 presidential contest as a compromise candidate, a moderate who would attract voters in the western states. His election was seen as a low blow by the Southern slave-holding states, who began walking out almost before the voting was finished. Texas was among them, even though Sam Houston was governor of the state that he had variously served as general, congressman and president. Although he owned slaves, he was a unionist, and valiantly fought a delaying action against the secessionists. Lincoln even offered to send Federal troops to keep Texas in the Union: Houston declined, and rather than swear an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy, left his office and public life.

They might possibly have met face to face. They had a chance of course, being both in Washington at the same time, from 1846-1848: Lincoln in the House of Representatives, and Houston in the Senate. One of Houston’s biographers speculates that if Houston had only been a little younger, and had been considered more than briefly for the 1860 presidential slate of candidates the Civil War might have been averted or delayed for another few years. Or maybe not.

(The original version of this essay came about when I was trying to channel what Sam Houston would have thought of Lincoln, as part of writing Adelsverein: The Sowing, which deals with the Civil War as it was experienced in the Texas Hill Country.)

The Cowboy Way

23. February 2013 · Comments Off on The Cowboy Way · Categories: Old West, Random Book and Media Musings

I never have quite understood the appeal of the cowboy, when it came to the whole western-frontier-nostalgia-gestalt. How on earth did that particular frontier archetype sweep all others before it, when it came to dime novels, movies and television shows – given that the classic ‘cowboy’ functioned only in a very specific time period; say for about twenty years after the Civil War. Admittedly, the Western cattle industry seemed to be co-located with spectacular bits of scenery, and the final years of the frontier per se offered all kinds of interesting potential story lines, many of them guaranteed to thrill urban, eastern wage slaves living blamelessly dull lives� but still.

For the generic cowboy was a himself hired hand. Yes, indeed – working for wages as hard (or harder) than any store clerk or factory laborer, tending to semi-wild cattle – and, not to put too much of a fine point on it – herding cattle, even on horseback was unskilled labor in the 19th century. It was grueling, low-skill, low-paying labor, most often seasonable, and most intelligent and ambitious young sparks didn’t do it for a month longer than they needed to. It was the sort of work done these days by high-school kids and illegal aliens, mostly until better employment opportunities came along.

You have to wonder, especially when there were so many other truly heroic epic adventurers available to hang the hero worship on. How did the cowboy even begin to loom so large – especially when the cattle business (and it was a business!) didn’t really begin to thrive until all the excitement was practically over? What about the mountain men, living on their wits in the early days, alone among the variously tempered tribes of the Great Basin? And surely the miners in the various gold and silver booms; they worked just as hard at pretty mucky drudgery, for themselves in the earlies and for their employers later on. And what about my own personal favorites among the frontier archetypes, the wagon-train emigrants, setting out with their whole families along a two-thousand mile road through the empty lands? Stage drivers and teamsters were quite a bit more likely to have adventurous encounters with the lawless element, or particularly hostile Indians – although even the stereotype of the Western towns being particularly lawless falls down a bit in contemporary comparison to elements of big cities in the East. Why one particular line of work would inspire a century of dime novels, moves and television shows is enough to make you shrug your shoulders and say ‘que?!‘ to the camera, like Manuel in Fawlty Towers.

So how did all that glamour and mythic stature come to sprout from acres of Western cow pies? Damned if I know, although I can take some guesses. The popular press fairly exploded after the Civil War, creating a demand for tales of frontier adventure. Right time, right place; and it has often been noticed that the typical Western TV show or movie perpetuated ever since is more often set in about the 1865-1885s time frame. Telegraph and the transcontinental railroads are in place, the Indians are reserved (with sporadic exceptions necessary to the plot of the moment, of course) and all the little towns have wooden sidewalks and glass windows, suitable for a reckless cowboy to ride his horse down one and crash through the other. But still … a pretty limited visualization of the frontier west; surely there was more, even in the late 19th century for popular culture to fixate on?

I wonder if the attraction for the cowboy thing wasn’t based on a melding of one particular and very old archetype and a certain cultural folkway. The archetype was that of the independent horseman, the chevalier, the knight – able to go farther and travel faster than a person on foot. There was always a predilection in the West to look up to the man on a horse, to see them as beings a bit freer, a little more independent. The cowboy might be a paid laborer, but in comparison to man working in a factory, much more independent in the framing of his work day and much less supervised. And as was noted in the lively yet strangely scholarly tome Cracker Culture, the Scotch-Irish-Celtic-Borderer folkway which formed a substantial layer of our cultural bedrock rather favored herding barely domesticated animals (and hunting wild game) rather than intensive cultivation. Better a free life, out of doors and on horseback, rather than plodding along behind a plough, or stuck behind a workbench, even if it didn’t pay very much at all.

It was and remains fascinating to go back to the roots of the cattle industry, as I did for the Adelsverein: The Harvesting, and for the sequel, The Quivera Trail (Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a Lot of Sidearms) – just to discover how very, very different it was from what has always been popularly presented. Owen Wister didn’t get the half of it.

Log Cabin Days

16. February 2013 · Comments Off on Log Cabin Days · Categories: Domestic, Old West, Uncategorized
Eggleston House, Gonzales - two-pen, dog-trot house

Eggleston House, Gonzales – two-pen, dog-trot house

Among the books in my tall stack to read to provide background for my books about the pioneering days in Texas was one with the very dry title of Texas Log Buildings; A Folk Architecture … which proved to be a bit more interesting and informative than it looked at first glance. I am a sucker for knowing how things are constructed or put together; good, especially when I needed to write a description of putting up a log house, as in Daughter of Texas. Little details like how many days it would take to build one, what size it would generally be, and the layout… these small details count.

Period log and stone farmhouse at Becker VinyardsPreviously, the one description of the process that I could bring readily to mind was Little House on the Prairie, but it turns out that Pa Ingalls was not building that cabin to much of a standard. He may not even have been all that skilled as a carpenter, but since he was working on it mostly by himself, and in a place where the swiftness of getting a roof of some sort over his family counted for everything… allowances were made.

That was almost everyone’s first and most urgent need, upon settling on a new grant or homestead, that and planting some kind of crop in the ground; building a cabin, to meet immediate shelter needs. This book differentiates very clearly the difference between a log cabin, and a log house. A log cabin was small, twelve to fourteen foot square, windowless, with a dirt floor. They were scratch-built, hastily assembled to use as a temporary dwelling place, whereas a log house was larger, permanent, and much more carefully constructed; even quite elaborate as to comforts. For much of the 19th century, at least in Texas it was a matter of some embarrassment to still be living in a log cabin after a couple of years; rather like living in a trailer would be. In fact, many log houses were covered with siding and paint as soon as their owners could afford to do so. If they had lived in a little cabin before building the permanent house, the cabin was frequently reused as a smoke-house, or a stable.

Comfort - Corner of old log cabinPace Little House and a whole raft of western movies, I’d always visualized such houses and cabins built out of the whole, rounded logs, with simple interlocking half-round notches (called a saddle notch) cut close to the ends, and about a foot or so of the log hanging out beyond at the corners, rather like a ‘Lincoln-log’ house. This method of construction turns out have been employed by the relatively unskilled and/or those  in a tearing hurry. The majority of Texas log structures were built of timbers which had been at least roughly shaped on two sides, and carefully notched at the ends to make a square corner. With the exception of part log, part dugout shelters built in far western Texas, where trees were scarce, most log structures were also raised off the ground on corner piers, to prevent rot and termite infestation, and to take advantage of air circulation.

Log dog-trot cabin, at Old Fort Martin Scott

Log dog-trot cabin, at Old Fort Martin Scott

Logs were prepped before construction, either by rough-hewing — cutting a shallow straight face on two opposite sides, or “planking”— cutting a thick plank out of the center of the log. In a very small number of cases, each log would be square-hewn, on all four sides, resulting in a heavy, square beam. More usually, only the bottom log— the sill, and the topmost, the “plate” which supported the roof rafters would be squared. These logs would usually be the largest; if the structure was to have a wooden floor, the sills would be mortised, with the floor joists lap-jointed into them. Sometimes a third sill would be added, for extra support.

A log house went up pretty fast, apparently, once all the timbers had been cut and prepped: the book gives an estimate of two men working two days for a fairly simple, square (single pen) structure, and three men working three days for a more elaborate one.
Roofs were usually constructed with the gable-ends on the sides of a two-slope roof, with pairs of rafters lap-jointed or mortised together at the roof-ridge, at about a 45-degree angle. Long laths or slats run cross-ways between the rafters. Most log houses were roofed with cut shingles. Porches and sheds attached at a later date would usually have a shallower roof line, described as a “witches’ hat” in silhouette.

Doors and windows were cut in the walls after basic construction was completed. They were neither large nor numerous, since cutting them weakened the structure. The carpenters would set wedges into the spaces between the logs to prevent them sagging, and cut vertically until the desired size was reached. Then a door or window frame of planks would be nailed or pegged into place to stabilize the cut logs. Another reason for having a minimum of windows in many parts of Texas, especially in the early days was the ever-present danger of Indian attacks. A number of houses from that time actually had so-called shooting holes, two or three in each wall. Windows were secured with wooden shutters; before glass was available, filled with oiled paper or thin-scraped oiled rawhide, which admitted some light.

In all but a handful of log houses made from carefully fitted hewn timbers, there was a gap between each log which needed to be filled in order to make the house weather-tight. Since so many houses would have been built with new timber it was necessary to allow for shrinkage and warping, as well as the natural taper of the logs. The gaps might be filled with thin slats nailed or driven into place, flat pieces of stone and mortar, or clay mixed with animal hair, straw, or moss… or just plain mud. In a house built of logs which had been roughly hewn, bark left on the top and bottom helped the chinking material adhere to the rough surface in between logs.

About the most common floor plans for log houses in Texas was called a “dog-trot”, or “dog-run”; two single-pen rooms with a covered but open breezeway in between. Sometimes each room had it’s own fireplace; but many house built after the Civil War did not have fireplaces at all, since metal stoves had become so widely available for heating and cooking. Quite a few houses originally built with fireplaces, were retrofitted with stoves and the chimneys and fireplaces removed. Larger windows were cut when glass became cheaper and more widely available.

In later years, many log houses were added on to, or covered with siding; after all, there was a whiff of poverty attached to living in such a house, and sometimes it is hard to tell with a casual glance, that there is a log house underneath the siding and plaster, the porch added at the front, and the shed kitchen on the back. Having read this book, I am resolved to look very carefully at the oldest neighborhoods of some of the small towns around where I live… knowing that there may be a log house, lurking in the heart of suburbia.

Bass Reeves and the Last of the Lawless West

23. January 2013 · Comments Off on Bass Reeves and the Last of the Lawless West · Categories: Old West · Tags: , , ,

In the year of the Centennial of the United States, the last of the West left relatively unscathed by the forces of law and order was that part of present-day Oklahoma set aside as homeland for the native Indian tribes. This was a 70,000 square mile territory in which anything went … and usually did. Among what was called the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole) there were native law enforcement officers, who upheld the law among their own. But they had no jurisdiction over interlopers of any color, or tribal members who committed crimes in company with or against an outsider, and the Territory was Liberty Hall and a refuge for every kind of horse thief, cattle rustler, bank and train robber, murderer and scalawag roaming the post-Civil War west. Just about every notorious career criminal at large for the remainder of the 19th century took refuge in the Oklahoma Territory at one time or another, including the James and Dalton gangs.

The situation was exacerbated as stagecoach and railway lines etched thoroughfares across the territory. The settlements around stage stations and depots leaked disreputable characters into the population. Herds of Texas cattle crossing the territory on their way to railheads in Kansas contributed a lawless element, as well as temptation for horse thieves and cattle rustlers.Emancipated slaves from outside the territory or formerly property of the wealthier tribes, also chose to settle in the territory, but they fell under the distant jurisdiction of the US Court … in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Lastly, the borders of the Territory were violated frequently by land-hungry squatters. Officers of the law were stretched as thin as a pat of butter spread on an acre of toast; by 1875 the situation was intolerable to law-abiding settlers along the Territorial borders, and to the equally-law abiding members of the Civilized Tribes within it.

The man – and those whom he appointed to serve under his authority – who came to the rescue of the embattled and crime-plagued citizens like a 19th century super-hero appeared in the year of the Centennial. Isaac Charles Parker did not materialize from a phone-booth or a secret underground lair, but by means of accepting an appointment as judge for the Western District of Arkansas. He was in his mid-thirties, a legalist of unimpeachable moral character, long experience in Federal administration and government, and deep sympathies for the situation of the Indians. He was also a demon for hard work, which he commenced barely a week after he arrived in Fort Smith. In his first two-month session of his court, he heard 91 cases. Of those convicted, six were condemned to death. The sentences were carried out publically and en masse – as an encouragement to those considering a life of capital crime to re-consider their career options. In short order, Judge Parker earned the nickname of “The Hanging Judge.” He spent the next twenty-one years on the bench in Fort Smith; the scourge of evildoers, criminals and scoundrels and the highest law of the land. Only a presidential pardon could set aside a Parker court death sentence.

Besides conducting his court with efficiency and dispatch, Judge Parker took other steps in establishing the rule of law rather than the gun. His chief marshal, James Fagan, was authorized to hire two hundred deputy marshals, more than any other state or territory. Parker’s marshals were sent out in teams, acompanied by a wagon for supplies and captured criminals, a cook and a small posse of assistants. Generally, they avoided actually killing a wanted man; a live criminal arrested and brought back to Fort Smith meant a payment of $2.00 a head. The only payment for a corpse was if there had been a dead-or-alive reward posted by a civil authority or an express company – a rare circumstance, but not entirely unknown. And so it went, nearly until the end of the 19th century.

One of Parker’s law enforcement more effective hires was the first black deputy US marshall west of the Mississippi; Bass Reeves, who stood 6’2 in his socks. Bass Reeves had been born into slavery in Paris, Texas, owned by one George Reeves, who had Bass Reeves as his personal attendant when he went to fight in the Civil War. Sometime during the war, Bass Reeves took his leave of his master, and fled into the Indian Territory, where he spent the rest of the war sheltering among the pro-Union and abolitionist Cherokee. Officially freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, he settled as a farmer and horse-breeder in the town of Van Buren, Arkansas. He married, raised a family – and had a good reputation as a scout and tracker, was knowlegable in the customs of the Territory Indians as well as speaking several of their languages, although he was himself illiterate. He was also an excellent shot with pistol and rifle … with either hand. He was also soft-spoken, courteous to all, a dapper dresser, although he often put off his usual clothes, polished boots and fine black felt hat, to go under cover … which he did often. Like a one-man Mountie company, he always got his man … or at least, almost always. On one occasion, he posed as a poor ragged fugitive from a posse to spend the night at a lonely cabin where pair of outlaw brothers wanted by the authorities in Fort Smith was hiding out with their mama. Bass pretended to take their suggestion that they fall in together. That night after the brothers fell asleep, he handcuffed them both, without waking them up. In the morning, he marched them off to the camp where his posse was waiting for him … accompanied for the first couple of miles by the outlaw brothers’ outraged mother, cursing him up one side and down the other.

Reeves, like Judge Parker also had a flinty and Calvinistic sense of duty; one of Reeves’ famous hunts was for his own son, who had killed his wife in a fit of jealous temper. None of the other deputies wanted to take up the warrant – but Reeves did, without a flinch. Over his career in law enforcement, he was supposed to have brought in 3,000 fugitives from justice. When the state and municipal authorities took over responsibility for local law enforcement in 1907, Reeves took a position as a patrolman in the Muskogee Police department – and for the two years that he served, there were supposed to have been no crimes at all on his beat. He died in 1910. There was a local and low-budget movie made two or three years ago about him, of which I can only find bare traces on IMDB. Pity he couldn’t have big-studio interest, but there you go. Tarantino does an unsettlingly violent cartoon of a movie about a black man in the west and cleans up, but a movie about a real-live black two-gun lawman with an incredible life story has to settle for a miniscule budget and comparative obscurity.

(In my next book, The Quivera Trail, the most obvious villains turn out to be a clan of cattle thieves from the Territory, on a murderous vendetta against Dolph Becker and the men of the new RB ranch in the Texas Panhandle. Stay tuned…)

On Having Thrown In the Towel on Larry McMurtry

20. January 2013 · 4 comments · Categories: Old West, Random Book and Media Musings · Tags: , , ,

I hung on to reading McMurtry’s Woodrow Call/Gus McCrae cycle for for several reasons – sheer stubbornness and the fact that I had purchased all four of them for pennies on the dollar at various library book sales being chief among them – but eventually I just gave up on Dead Man’s Walk, Comanche Moon, Lonesome Dove and Streets of Laredo when it turned into a long and frustrating slog through the deserts of the metaphorical southwest. I gave up hope of reaching the end, rejoicing and acclaiming the author as one of the epochal bards of the Texas frontier after having completed Dead Man’s Walk, a third of Comanche Moon, and half a dozen chapters of Lonesome Dove. I decided instead to pack it in for the moment and explore the options of anaesthetized root canal work, or the whole season run of Bridezillas. Hey, at least there, I can root for some of the more sane family members and friends of the bridal party and hope that a much-harassed and totally-out-of-patience MOH will haul off and serve up the ‘Zilla-of-the-moment with a richly-deserved knuckle sandwich. The hope of some kind of drama strung me along for … well, it seemed like days.

I had hoped that something would happend, mostly because everyone else says such wonderful things about the Lonesome Dove cycle, including some of my very own dear fans who have, most flatteringly compared my books to his – on the basis, I think, that I wrote about frontier Texas, and had a hero who was an early Texas Ranger, and included lashings of war, local and historic color, tragic romance and the fading of the Old West. Of course, the lucky Mr. McMurtry got a whole couple of TV miniseries made from his books, (with surging royalties and residuals and all, and reissued paperbacks with stills of the stars on the covers, all of which would make his agent worth every penny of the 15% of which Mr. McMurtry earns out of his labors as a creative scribbler and raconteur of the Old West) and so it isn’t all just sour-grapes from an aspiring author, hardly blessed or even barely noticed by the literary-industrial complex … ohhh, do I get any recognition for having written a totally complicated and sort-of-run-on-sentence in the Grand Victorian Tradition? (Oh, guess not, not this time around – better move on, then.)

The first hurdle in my path of acceptance was that it was all build-up and character, but no actual delivery. I was sorta-intrigued, but not-really grabbed by interest, in the characters so delineated. I keep wondering why the deadpan flat, detached affect? Why should I care about various characters if the author doesn’t seem to give a damn about them, or even display much interest, other than in the strictly clinical? As a reader I was also a little exhausted by following the constant leaping one character’s POV to another, and another within the same chapter, and just when I had recovered from the last of them and remember who it was that I was supposed to be interested in – then I would trip and fall flat over a large chunk of expository back-story, which never seemed to lead to anything much happening. A friend of mine, also a fan of both McMurtry and I explained to me that this is very much a Texas thing, to meander and meander, and wander … eventually to come around in a circle again, without anything very much having happened. Apparently, the process of the story is supposed to be the main bit of enjoyment. So how was a couple of hours of heavy petting, leading nowhere other than a chaste kiss of the hand at the doorway supposed to be rewarding – when you have been led in happy anticipation to look for something a bit more energetic? When this happens, romantically, one tends to be a bit disappointed, think of the other party as a dreadful tease, write off the evening as a waste of time and make-up, and resolve to let the answering machine pick-up next time. With a best-selling, and to all appearances, very popular author, who started off Lonesome Dove with one of the very best opening sentences evah … well, maybe one should be a little more indulgent.

Alas – I had a bit of trouble with another aspect of the cycle, especially the earlier books, in being a bit of an amateur specialist in history. That is, amateur in the antique sense of a person who zestfully acquires knowledge for the sheer love of the field. I have no academic training, other than that required of English majors three decades ago, not even a minor in history, or any fancy qualifying initials after my name – only a burning passion to learn as much as I can about any particular aspect, and to get it right, and to weave that knowledge into my stories. Which is all very well, but has absolutely ruined me for watching westerns on television; don’t even get me started on the fantasy west, of pulp novels and TV series and movies. I’m too apt to notice that there is a zipper down the back of the heroine’s dress, that the traveling cowboy is camping with a lot more gear than he could have packed into a teensy bedroll on the back of his horse, and to wonder where in the heck in the old West that a a deep-rock gold mine could be located right next to a cattle ranch?

Plowing gamely through the first two books – Dead Man’s Walk and Comanche Moon turned out to be a bit of a disconcerting experience, as I keep running across names, historic characters and incidents of Texas history but as if someone had jumbled them all together in a small box, and then emptied them out in random order, omitted some pivotal incidents and people, exaggerated others for effect, and now and again threw in something completely bizarre, just rang off-key for me. The real Buffalo Hump wasn’t a hunchback, if the description of him at Meusebach’s peace conference is anything to go by. The real Bigfoot Wallace lived to die of ripe old age; he drew life from a jar of dried beans in Mexican captivity … which incident happened to the survivors of the Meir expedition, not the Texan attempt to take Santa Fe a few years later. Austin was never raided, looted and burned over by a Comanche raiding party – that happened to Linnville, in 1840 – and the aftermath of that involved a massed force of Rangers, local militia and volunteers giving as good as they got in the Plum Creek fight. And there really was a formidible whore nick-named “The Great Western”, so it all makes me wonder why McMurtry needed to make anything up, when what really happened historically would have made at least as much of a good story. And it is a bit of puzzlement, wondering how the early Rangers in the first two books are pretty consistently pictured as being neophytes, hopeless little golden carp in a sea of hungry sharks – a tasty mouthful for every passing predator … which reminds me of the character who was neatly scalped of all of his hair by Buffalo Hump going past at a gallop. I’m almost sure scalping someone took a little bit more than a single swipe with a knife from horseback, although if anyone had perfected the art of a ride-by scalping, it would have been the Comanche.

It sounded a bit improbable to me, anyway – and the hapless recipient of it appearing to be as disposable as any of the red-shirted crewmen on Star Trek, beaming down to an alien planet and being killed in the first act. And that sort of disposing of a character, and other characters, and having characters appear and disappear, and such strange and improbable turns of the plot, such as having a naked English noblewoman with leprosy and a pet snake sing a Verdi aria to bluff a party of hostile Indian warriors into letting a our heroes pass by … well, that was just too television for words, and I came to that realization with a certain shock of recognition. I know they’ve made the books into movies, or into miniseries, and that’s more right than readers and watchers could possibly have known – because it is more like one of the old television westerns than has been along in years! A jumble of historical events and happenstances, check – interminable, episodic adventures – check. Handful of basic, easily identifiable characters – check – some vicious and inscrutable villains (some of them with baroque torture chambers and suitable evil henchmen) – check. Rotating stable of supporting characters, and endless supply of disposable extras – check and check again. And a disconcerting tendency for certain startling shifts in the cast to occur between seasons …or between books . . . or even chapters within books. And there you go – it’s a TV western writ large; no wonder the Lonesome Dove cycle has so many fans. Having come to this conclusion, I may try again, sometime soon … but then again – when is Bridezillas on?

« Older articles
Newer articles »