The Mammoth Book of Westerns Read online

  Edited by Jon E. Lewis

  With a foreword by Rick Bass

  Constable & Robinson Ltd.

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK as The Mammoth Book of the Western,

  by Robinson Publishing Ltd., 1991

  This revised edition published in the UK by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2013

  Copyright © Jon E. Lewis, 1991, 2013

  (unless otherwise stated)

  The right of Jon E. Lewis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication

  Data is available from the British Library

  UK ISBN: 978-1-78033-915-3 (paperback)

  UK IBN: 978-1-78033-916-0 (ebook)

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  First published in the United States as The Mammoth Book of The Western

  in 2011 by Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc.

  This revised edition first published in 2013 by Running Press Book Publishers,

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher.

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  US ISBN: 978-0-7624-4941-5

  US Library of Congress Control Number: 2012944637

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  Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing

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  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  Introduction

  The Outcasts of Poker Flat

  BRET HARTE

  Way Out West

  MARK TWAIN

  A Sergeant of the Orphan Troop

  FREDERIC REMINGTON

  The Caballero’s Way

  O. HENRY

  The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky

  STEPHEN CRANE

  On the Divide

  WILLA CATHER

  Bad Penny

  B. M. BOWER

  All Gold Canyon

  JACK LONDON

  The Last Thunder Song

  JOHN G. NEIHARDT

  Under the Lion’s Paw

  HAMLIN GARLAND

  The Ranger

  ZANE GREY

  Wine on the Desert

  MAX BRAND

  At the Sign of the Last Chance

  OWEN WISTER

  Early Americana

  CONRAD RICHTER

  The Wind and the Snow of Winter

  WALTER VAN THILBURG CLARK

  When You Carry the Star

  ERNEST HAYCOX

  The Young Warrior

  OLIVER LA FARGE

  The Big Sky

  A. B. GUTHRIE

  Command

  JAMES WARNER BELLAH

  Burn Him Out

  FRANK BONHAM

  The Colt

  WALLACE STEGNER

  A Man Called Horse

  DOROTHY M. JOHNSON

  Great Medicine

  STEVE FRAZEE

  Emmet Dutrow

  JACK SCHAEFER

  River Polak

  MARI SANDOZ

  Blood on the Sun

  THOMAS THOMPSON

  Beecher Island

  WAYNE D. OVERHOLSER

  Desert Command

  ELMER KELTON

  The Bandit

  LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

  There Will Be Peace in Korea

  LARRY McMURTRY

  C. B. & Q.

  EDWARD DORN

  The Man to Send Rain Clouds

  LESLIE MARMON SILKO

  The Waterfowl Tree

  WILLIAM KITTREDGE

  Days of Heaven

  RICK BASS

  Hole in the Day

  CHRISTOPHER TILGHMAN

  The Hundred Best Western Novels

  The Hundred Best Western Short Stories

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The editor has made every effort to locate all persons having any rights in the selections appearing in this anthology and to secure permission from the holders of such rights. Any queries regarding use of material should be addressed to the editor c/o the publishers.

  Introduction and this arrangement © 1991 & 2012 by J. Lewis-Stempel

  “The Ranger” by Zane Grey. Copyright © 1929 Zane Grey. Copyright renewed 1957 by Lina Elise Grey. Originally published in Ladies Home Journal. Reprinted by permission of Zane Grey, Inc.

  “Early Americana” by Conrad Richter. Copyright © 1934 by Conrad Richter. Reprinted from The Rawhide Knot and Other Stories by Conrad Richter. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  “The Wind and Snow of Winter” by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Copyright © Walter Van Tilburg Clark, 1994.

  “When You Carry the Star” by Ernest Haycox. Copyright © 1939 by Ernest Haycox. Copyright renewed 1966 by Jill Marie Haycox. Reprinted from Murder on the Frontier by permission of Ernest Haycox, Jnr.

  “The Young Warrior” by Oliver La Farge. Copyright © 1938

  Oliver La Farge. Copyright renewed 1966 by Consuelo Baca de La Farge. First published in Esquire. Reprinted by permission of the Marie Rodell-Frances Collin Literary Agency.

  “The Big Sky” excerpt by A. B. Guthrie. Reproduced by permission of Hougton Mifflin. Copyright © A. B. Guthrie, 1947.

  “Command” by James Warner Bellah. Copyright © 1946 James Warner Bellah. Reprinted by permission of Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc, 845 Third Avenue, New York, New York 10022. First published in the Saturday Evening Post, 1946.

  “The Colt” by Wallace Stegner. Reprinted from Southwest Review, 1943 by permission of the estate of Wallace Stegner. Copyright © Wallace Stegner, 1943.

  “A Man called Horse” by Dorothy M. Johnson. Copyright © 1949 Dorothy M. Johnson. Copyright renewed 1977 by Dorothy M. Johnson. Reprinted by permission of McIntosh and Otis, Inc. First published in Collier’s, 1950.

  “Great Medicine” by Steve Frazee. Copyright © 1953 by Flying Eagle Publications, Inc. First published in Gunsmoke, 1953. Reprinted by permission of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc, 845 Third Avenue, New York, New York 10022.

  “Emmet Dutrow” by Jack Schaefer. Copyright © 1951, renewed 1979 by Jack Schaefer. Reprinted by permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc. First published in Collie
r’s.

  “River Polak” by Mari Sandoz. Reprinted from Hostiles and Friendlies, 1959, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright © Mari Sandoz, 1959.

  “Blood on the Sun” by Thomas Thompson. Copyright © 1954 by Thomas Thompson. Reprinted by permission of Brandt & Brandt Literary Agency.

  “Beecher Island” by Wayne D. Overholser. Copyright © 1970 by Wayne D. Overholser. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Desert Command” by Elmer Kelton. Reprinted from The Wolf and the Buffalo by Elmer Kelton. Copyright © 1980 Elmer Kelton. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Bandit” by Loren D. Estleman. Copyright © 1986 Loren D. Estleman. Reprinted by permission of the author and the Ray Peekner Literary Agency.

  “There Will Be Peace in Korea” by Larry McMurtry. Reprinted from Texas Quarterly, Winter 1964. Copyright © Larry McMurtry, 1964.

  “C. B. & Q.” by Edward dorn. Reprinted from The Moderns, edited by Leroi Jones, 1963. Copyight © the estate of Edward Dorn, 1962.

  “The Man to Send Rain Clouds” by Leslie Marmon Silko. Reprinted from New Mexico Quarterly, 1969. Copyright © Leslie Marmon Silko, 1969.

  “The Waterfowl Tree” by William Kittredge. reprinted by permission of the author from Northwest Review, Vol. 8, No. 2 1966–7. Copyright © William Kittredge, 1966.

  “Days of Heaven” by Rick Bass. Reprinted from Ploughshares, Vol 17, Fall 1991. Copyright © Rick Bass, 1991.

  “Hole in the Day” by Christopher Tilghman. Repritned from In a Father’s Place, 1990 by permission of the author and Markson Toma. Copyright © Christopher Tilghman, 1990.

  FOREWORD

  Just as in a story there are nodes of extreme meaning or imagery, where every description, every line of dialogue, every everything, has enhanced meaning – a kind of luminosity of significance – so too are there in a country nodes, blossomings of terrific output and productivity. In the United States, places like Oxford and Jackson, Mississippi; Key West, Florida; Stanford and the Bay Area in California; New Orleans, Louisiana; New York, Iowa; Seattle, Washington; my own home in Missoula, Montana, have produced incredible cultures of literature.

  Sometimes these nodes seem to have been activated by the arrival or development of a single writer, other times by a community, and by the slow accruing culture of place. (And even in those instances where a literary community or legacy appears to have been catalyzed by the arrival of some lone individual, one cannot ignore the possibility that there existed already some nascent quality – landscape, weather, culture, community – that so attracted that individual in the first place.

  It’s said often that there are really only two stories in the world: a man or a woman goes on a journey, or a stranger rides into town. Certainly, the open spaces of the American West exist as a beckon and a beacon.

  This has always been and remains one of the great values of the American West. Its chief characteristic – more so than even frequent and widespread aridity – is its spaciousness. This great distance between things engenders a kind of exhilaration, as well as a kind of loneliness, and is one of the great generators of writing and storytelling in the West.

  There are of course different kinds of loneliness, and different kinds of exhilaration. I suspect the dramatic amplitudes of these emotions in the West are extraordinarily conducive to not just the generalities for creating art, but, more specifically, the writing of stories, stories being perhaps the most portable of art forms.

  There is no typical story of the West, or certainly should not be. There can be and are similarities of yearning – of the human heart responding in a certain fashion, to the physical spaciousness, and the communal hardships – but within the milieu of that yearning, the reservoir of any story contains infinite possibilities. The spirit of a Western story, then, will have a certain quality to it, but one should not be surprised by the wild variation – the lush diversity – that will exist in the actions and choices of characters placed within such a dramatic structure, dramatic topography, dramatic space, of the West.

  More so than in many other places in the world, I think, almost anything is possible in a Western story.

  It’s a sideways anecdote, but I’m reminded of a piece of natural history. The elk that are such an iconic symbol of the West – Cervus elaphus – were once a plains creature, grazing the tallgrass prairies of the Midwest, and indeed, inhabiting even parts of the Eastern seaboard. Destruction of habitat, however, and overhunting, conspired, as it did with the buffalo, to force them up into the mountains, and deep into the forests, often choosing hiding cover over their earlier (and still extant) desires for the rich grasses that grew under the bright sun of the unshaded plains.

  And having evolved out on those plains, the elks’ voices became shaped over time into the high flute-like squeal – that anthem to wilderness – that so thrills those who hear and hunt them. The faster-travelling sound waves of that high pitch is the perfect frequency for transmitting sound across a landscape unbroken by hills, mountains, boulders, forests. With no obstacles to deflect the sound waves or cause them to ricochet and be lost, a high bugling fits the landscape.

  In a forested landscape, however, a deeper voice would be best – like the subsonic slow sound waves rumbled by forest elephants, the slower sound waves rolling over fallen logs and bending their way around trees, rather than bouncing off the trees and being lost.

  Some day, the voices of the elk will probably become deeper, adapting to life in the forest. Ten thousand years? Twenty thousand? For now, however, there is a lag, an echo, in the voice of the then and the voice of the now. What has not changed, however – and will not, for as long as wild country remains – is the quality of wildness in the elk’s voice. It’s hoped that readers will find and enjoy in this collection a similar quality in these stories – sometimes brooding and lonely, other times celebratory and fantastic – but always Western, and of-their-place.

  Rick Bass

  INTRODUCTION

  The Western, it can safely be said, is one of the truly great genres of world literature. Ever since James Fenimore Cooper published The Pioneers in 1823 stories set in the American West have enthralled generations and millions of readers. Even in the 1980s when the Western was supposedly heading towards the sunset (not for the first time in the Western’s life the reports of its death were exaggerated) Louis L’Amour sold more books than almost anybody else on earth. And was read from Abilene to Zanzibar.

  While the Western might have a global readership, it is a singularly American art form. No other country has a Western. But then, no other country had a West: that vast spectacular landscape – and even bigger sky – that lies between the Mississippi river and the Pacific Ocean. And no other country has such an epic history of pioneering settlement.

  There were other frontiers in other times (South America, Africa) but it was the luck of the West to be rolled back at almost the precise moment that publishing entered the steam age. Mass books could be printed for a mass market. Mass urbanisation played its part too; it was almost as if the nineteenth century huddled city poor yearned for stories about a place of beauty and unpopulated individualism, the diametric opposite of where they were right then.

  Mythology, epic history, a willing mass readership – unsurprisingly, writers flocked to the Western like butterflies to a prairie rose. Alas, some of the butterflies turned out to be common or garden moths. The Western might be one of the most durable literary forms; it is also one of the most despised, being commonly considered suitable only for pre-pubescent boys and men who read with their finger under the words, where good characters wear white Stetsons and evil ones pockmarked scowls, and where the only good “injun” is one whose moccasins are pointing skywards.

  Of course such fiction exists. But it is not the best of the West, and never has been.

  Although stories set in the Wild West existed before the acknowledged father of the Western, Fenimore Cooper, dipped his quill into the ink pot, it was
Cooper who turned these frontier yarns into a distinct fictional form with definite shape, characters and themes. In the Leatherstocking Tales, of which the most famous is The Last of the Mohicans from 1826, Fenimore Cooper created the figure of Natty Bumppo, frontiersman and hero. Cooper also gave the Western its lasting focus: the tension between the Wild West and the encroaching Civilised East – a tension played out down the literary years in the conflicts of outlaws v. deputies, cowboys v. homesteaders.

  After Fenimore Cooper the Western took two paths: one popular, one self-consciously literary. In its popular form, beginning with the “dime novels” published by New York company Beadle & Adams from 1860 onwards, the main elements of Cooper’s Western fiction became highly formalised, with standard issue characters and plot situations (invariably resolved by violence), and the vaunting of individual heroism. The popular or “formulary” Western became as rigid in its rules as a Noh play. Few readers cared. On the contrary, the more complex civilisation and strait-jacketing factory routines they experienced in their own lives, the more they read an escapist simplified version of the West, where a man or woman could revel in wilderness freedom and any problem be solved by quick resolute action. Time magazine once famously called the Western the “American Morality Play”, and suggested that it is, above all, a form of fictional reassurance. The good guys will win, history is on our side.

  There is, undoubtedly, truth in Time’s observation. But the moralism of the Western can be overplayed, so too the notion that it always stands for the same political point of view – usually interpreted as right-wing. The Western, actually, can be made to fit almost any political philosophy from red (Jack London) to redneck (J.T. Edson). If the Western has a natural political centre of gravity it is anti-big capitalist (typified by the banker and the rail magnate). Populism, in a word. A sentimental attachment to the misfit is another hallmark of the genre.

  For nearly a century, the heroic West dominated the reading habits of America and Europe. Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902), Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), “pulp” magazines like Street & Smith’s Western Story (from 1919 onwards) sold by the million, and it took the paper shortages of World War II to seriously dent the circulation figures of cheapend Western fiction. But the pulps came back in the late 1940s for what was the Golden Age of the popular western.