REVIEW: THE RIOT AT BUCKSNORT

By Robert E. Howard

While Robert E. Howard is best known as the guy that came up with Conan, the barbaric, unstoppable killing machine that changed the rules of fantasy forever, he was also the author of many tall-tale Westerns. Breck Elkins is a Conan with a Texas drawl, instead of a broadsword, he has his unstoppable fists. Too good-natured to be homicidal, Breck actually is the lunkhead so many assume Conan is. It’s not so much that Breck’s a bull in a china shop, but the world is too fragile for a lad of his strength. The fact that he doesn’t feel pain makes him a bit careless of regular folks, with their odd manner of reacting badly when a hot stove falls on them. Not that Breck would do that on purpose, but when he’s around he tends to throw stuff such as stoves, barrels of gunpowder, or mountain lions.

What might surprise you is how successful they were. REH never got Conan into a hard-cover collection in his lifetime, Breck Elkins was picked up by Herbert Jenkins, a British publisher eager to offer up Texan humor to the reading public of the UK. The resulting collection was titled A Gent from Bear Creek and fit a number of stories into a running storyline.

The Riot at Bucksnort takes a looser approach to Breck’s adventures. This set includes “Meet Cap’n Kidd,” perhaps the funniest of them all, detailing Breck’s encounter with a wild stallion, about the only creature that can match Breck in strength, and by far his superior in orneriness. The only ones that get the best of Breck and his ilk are the ladies, Glory McGraw in particular. Breck’s wooing of Glory formed the basis for A Gent from Bear Creek. Not that romance ever causes Breck to settle down.

Riot also contains a couple of tales featuring Pike Bearfield and Buckner J. Grimes, characters in a similar vein to Breck Elkins, though with their own quirks. All of the stories are mirthful yarns of Western slapstick, where gigantic hill-billies blunder their way across the landscape.

Perhaps the best way to convey what these stories are like is to give a little taste of fatherly advice on Bear Creek:

“Be keerful how you spend that dollar I give you,” he said. “Don’t gamble. Drink in Reason; half a gallon of corn juice is enough for any man. Don’t be techy—but don’t forget yore pap was once the rough-and-tumble champeen of Gonzales County. Texas. And whilst yo’re feelin’ for the other feller’s eye, don’t be keerless and let him chaw yore ear off.”

Words to live by.

-Dave Hardy

THE VIOLENT LAND

By Jorge Amado

You may have thought that chocolate comes from little elves in pointy caps who dance around as they pour giant (relatively speaking) vats of gooey fudge on tasty cookies. Well you’re WRONG! Actually chocolate grows on trees, unlike money, unless you are a chocolate farmer when prices are up in which case money does kind of grow on trees.

Anyway, Jorge Amado was from south Bahia, a state in Brazil, where the cacao (ka-kow) nuts grow. Instead of gold rushes they had cacao rushes back in the 1910s. It was a tough land, and ruthless cacao-barons would send their cacaoboys out to claim choice bits of jungle and hold it with guns and machetes against all comers. 

Amado tells of the rivalry of two families over a strip of jungle and the people around them: wives, sisters, hired guns, lawyers, and a con man from Rio. This is a colorful book about a colorful place and time. If you want to read a Western with all the adventure, triumph, tragedy, and wonder of the West, without the cliches, this is a good one to take in.

-Dave Hardy

THE LAST RIDE

By Robert E. Howard

If you asked who Robert E. Howard loved most intensely and with the fiercest passion (aside from his mother and father) the answer might be Texas. Which is why I am at a bit of a loss with this collection. 

If I had to describe the perfect Western author, he would combine Elmer Kelton’s deep sense of place with Louis L’Amour’s wholehearted commitment to adventure. That sounds an awful lot like Robert E. Howard. Imagine a Texas that resonates with magic and Western heroes who stride into battle like Conan. To be honest I don’t quite feel that with these stories.

The tales are good, they are filled with action and decent characterization. “The Last Ride” tells of a man seeking to redeem himself after living as an outlaw. “The Extermination of Yellow Donory” is about a young cowhand who is reckoned a coward and must redeem his reputation.  The Sonora Kid appears in “Knife, Bullet, and Noose” and “The Devil’s Joker”. The Kid lives on the edge of the law, in “Knife” he must survive a conspiracy to kill him and rob his employer, while in “Joker” he is forced to turn outlaw. “Vultures’ Sanctuary”, “Law Shooters of Cowtown”, and “Gunman’s Debt” are also included. 

While I find these stories enjoyable, I didn’t receive the absolute thrill I found on reading Solomon Kane or Conan, for example. Perhaps it’s because I only came across The Last Ride as an adult, not a wide-eyed teen. But I think there is something else here. Howard wrote amazing tales of Texas and located all sorts of lost treasures, ancient races, and hidden citadels in it. He also wrote any number of tall-tale westerns full of broad humor. But in his conventional westerns the fantastic is off limits and humor is sparse. Without two of best tools, REH doesn’t shine so brightly. Maybe had he lived he would have turned more seriously to writing westerns and have given them the full drama he gave to his historical tales of the Crusades or his EL Borak adventures.

 

-Dave Hardy

 

 

BOWIE’S MINE

By Elmer Kelton

Elmer Kelton is something of a favorite of mine. I have to qualify it a bit since my tendency is for headlong lunacy while Kelton is always cautiously aware of human frailty. However, in Bowie’s Mine he cuts loose with a band of raffish knuckleheads on the trail of the legendary lost San Saba Silver mine. The central character is a poor but honest farm boy who decides to have a bit of an adventure. It doesn’t quite work out as the clueless wonders he hooks up with can never pull off their capers as well as they claim.

A darn good western, full of dash, vigor, and rollicking good fun.

-Dave Hardy

STORY AT PULP SPIRIT #6

I have a new story on Pulp Spirit #6. It is Jayhawker Ague, Bushwhacker Fever. The story is a Western albeit not the usual. In the 1850s, one of the main markets for Texas cattle was Sedalia, Missouri. That was where the railroad to the Northern states ended, thus it was where ranchers could drive cattle to sell to beef-hungry markets.

Of course Missouri in the 1850s was in the throes of a war between anti-slavery settlers in Kansas and pro-slavery settlers from the South known as "Bleeding Kansas." The rival factions were known as Jayhawkers (anti-slavery) and Border Ruffians or Bushwhackers (pro-slavery). Years ago I read R.H. Wilson's memoir With the Border Ruffians. Wilson was an Englishman who came to America and lived in the mountains of Virginia, tried settling in Kansas, and was a rancher in Texas during the 1850s and '60s. It gave me my first idea that the West was a good deal different from movie-Westerns.

Incidentally, I have long believed that the bitterness of "Bleeding Kansas" lingers on. I vividly recall Attorney General Ashcroft, a Missourian, announcing after 9/11, "We've secured the border with Kansas. I mean Canada."

Well of course. In their day men like James Lane, John Brown, and William Quantrill were regarded much as Osama bin Laden, George Bush and other GWOT luminaries: heroes dedicated to a principal to some, blood-thirsty fanatics to others. Though lacking the scope of our modern GWOT-warriors, they left a trail of death and destruction.

In this story, I have focused less on the politics than the economics of slavery, specifically the monetarization of people.

Pulp Spirit is a companion to Planetary Stories, their homepage is PlanetaryStories.com.

-Dave Hardy

THE BUNYIP SEA @ STATIC MOVEMENT

My short story, "The Bunyip Sea" is online now at Static Movement. It's a sort of Australian Outback-Western about the search for mysteries in the hearts of continents or of men.

An Australian Western may seem like an odd combination, but it seems natural to me. I grew up watching Westerns and reading Western history (from "Roughing It" to "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" to "I'll Die Before I Run" etc). When I encountered the history of other frontier lands of the Victorian era: Australia, South Africa, the Argentine pampas, & more, I realized the patterns I had of the Western: cowboys, Indians, outlaws, lawmen, etc repeated in strange ways across the world. However exception America is, it is the product of the forces of colonialism, the conquest of lands, the destruction of the natives and the construction of new communities from disparate elements.

This particualr piece owes a fair bit the Alan Moorehead's account of the Burke & Wills expedition, Cooper's Creek, though Graeme Clifford's film (starring Jack Thompson) and an ancient Smithsonian article on Burke & Wills shaped my imagination as it relates to those gallant, doomed explorers.

Speaking of cimantic Aussie Westerns, by all means check out The Proposition, directed by John Hillcoat & written by Nick Cave. Excellent perfomrances by Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Emily Watson & Danny Huston to name a few.

-Dave Hardy

THE TIME IT NEVER RAINED

By Elmer Kelton

To my eye, Elemer Kelton never seemed fully comfortable with the traditional Western. His work is always deeply enmeshed in the complex and contradictory history of Texas. Kelton never tries to deconstruct the Western in the post-modern sense, but he never lets go of an often-deflating realism.

So, perhaps it should be no surprise that one of Kelton’s best Westerns ever is set in the 1950s. Charlie Flagg is an old-style cattleman who finds times changing too fast for him. Government regulations are encroaching, not only on illegal immigrants from Mexico and their employers, but more insidiously in the form of handouts and price supports. Relations between Anglos and Latinos are changing, for the better in some ways, but often painfully for all. Most painful for Flagg, his son is more interested in rodeo (and rodeo-bunnies), an ersatz dime-store version of the West, to take much interest in the work-a-day world of actual livestock raising. Above all an unending drought is killing land and livestock and driving the inhabitants to the wall.

Charlie Flagg stands through it all, perhaps the most heroic of Kelton’s characters, unyielding in his belief in right and wrong. This is no shoot-‘em-up, black-hat/white-hat Western. Rather it is the portrait of the closing of one era of the West and opening of another by a writer who knows the people, their times and their land intimately.

-Dave Hardy

THE BANDIT KING, LAMPIÃO OF BRAZIL

By Billy Jaynes Chandler

The Old West of gunslingers, outlaws, scheming politicos, and ruthless land barons was not confined to the 19th century, nor was it confined to the West or even the USA. One of the most fearsome backwoods outlaws of the Western Hemisphere flourished in 20th century Brazil.

Chandler recounts the life and times of Virgulino Ferreira (1897-1938), better known as Lampião. Ferreira was an ordinary young man, a cowboy on his father’s ranch in Alagoas, Brazil. This was the sertão, the arid backlands of Northeast Brazil. If you didn’t want to join the impoverished masses you guarded your rights zealously. Moreover society was formed into webs of alliance and hostility between political rivals and their clients. The Ferreiras got mixed up in a feud with a neighboring clan. While the elder Ferreira tried to make peace, his sons were more mettlesome. They joined the cangaçeiros, freebooting outlaw gangs that acted as enforcers for politicians who weren’t successful enough to get their gunmen appointed to the police. Virgulino, now known as Lampião, “the lamp”, became the most feared of these outlaws. His father was unceremoniously gunned down by the police.

For over a decade Lampião rampaged across the backlands. He became powerful enough to make the politicians dance to his tune. At one point Lampião’s men were deputized to battle marauding communist rebels. At other times he held cites and even whole states to ransom. Eventually a new regime seized power in Brazil. The dictator Getulio Vargas gave special impetus to the hunt for the outlaw. Lampião came to a grisly end in an ambush at Angicos, an end not only for Lampião, but for the free-wheeling days of the cangaçeiro lifestyle.

Bandit King is an absolutely fascinating account of a savage frontier in its last days and the outlaw of epic proportions who dominated it.

-Dave Hardy

THE BANDIT OF HELL’S BEND

By Edgar Rice Burroughs

When he wanted to take a break from Tarzan and Barsoom, ERB would occasionally try a Western. The Bandit of Hell’s Bend is one such. The theme is the classic one of stuffed shirt Easterners vs. Robust Westerners (a theme that I daresay underlies much if not most of ERB’s fiction). The foreman of the Slash Y ranch is Bull, a laconic and steady cowpoke in the traditional mode. But the Slash Y and its heiress, Diana Henders, must endure quite a bit before Bull’s finer characteristics are fully manifest. The dashing young cowpoke Colby seems to be the kind of vigorous man to save the ranch as outlaws and Apaches besiege it. Waiting in the wings to take over the Slash Y are a bumptious Yankee industrialist and Diana’s Eastern relations.

Hell’s Bend falls into the typical ERB silent hero, sterling heroine, & big misunderstanding plot category. While nowhere near as innovative as the pair of Apache Westerns ERB wrote (Apache Devil and The War Chief), Hell’s Bend is a decent old-school horse opera.

-Dave Hardy

ONE RIDE TOO MANY
By Frank Bonham

This nifty little anthology (edited by Martin Greenberg and Bill Pronzini, who edit anthologies on an industrial scale) brings together some of the best Westerns of Frank Bonham. The stories mostly date to the late ‘40s and appeared in such magazines as Dime Western, Argosy, Blue Book, and Liberty.

All too often the Western suffered from a lack of place and time. That may sound odd, after all don’t we know when Westerns take place and where? They happen in the old days, in the West. I can’t begin to say how many of those stories I’ve read that take place somewhere between the Mississippi and the Pacific and sometime after Colt developed the revolver. Instead of delving into the rich, varied, and lively worlds (emphasis on the plural) that the hugely divergent settlers encountered on the ever-changing American frontier, too many writers served up routine never-never lands stocked with cookie-cutter characters.

Not this collection. While Bonham sometimes shirks his duty on setting a specific place, his characterization is lively. Bonham brings to life some interesting customs and social conflicts that take these stories out of the routine. Some aren’t even exactly Westerns: “River Magic” and “Plague Boat” take place on the Mississippi and involve clashes between the riverboat men and the little-known subculture of the shanty-boat folk (they’re real, I looked ‘em up). “Trouble at Temescal” takes on the clash between Anglo squatters and the wealthy, but beleaguered Californio land-owners in the aftermath of the Mexican War. “Dusty Wheels-Bloody Trail” recounts the tribulations of a wagon train going from El Paso to Mexico City at a time when both the United States and Mexico were torn by civil war. Though burdened by some overly complex plot business, it’s still an effective tale.

There are tales that don’t rely on shooting, “Chivaree” looks at old time customs and how a man was expected to prove himself before he could be fully accepted. “One Ride to Many” is about modern day rodeo competitions and “I’ll Take the High Road” tells of the clash of cultures encountered by a young couple setting up in the dude-ranch business. There’s also a reminiscence by Bonham about his early apprenticeship to a rather shady pulp-fiction mentor.

If you like old-time pulp Westerns, but prefer to read something that’s a bit more than routine horse opera, One Ride too Many is recommended.

-Dave Hardy

ZEPPELINS WEST
By Joe R. Lansdale

When I tell people about the premise of Zeppelins West, they look at me kind of funny. I don’t know why, it’s really quite simple, Buffalo Bill Cody’s disembodied head is flying his Wild West show on their zeppelin to Japan with Wild Bill Hickok, Annie Oakley, and Sitting Bull in attendance. It’s more than just a show since they are there to locate Frankenstein’s monster, who is being held captive by a samurai warlord who is slowly reducing the monster into an aphrodisiac powder. The story doesn’t actually get weird until later on the hidden island of… well I don’t want to give away too much.

Lansdale has always been the kind of writer who blended genres. Here he has poured all of 19th century popular fiction into a blender and then yanked off the lid. The result is less a splatter than a whacked-out Rorshack test where the repressed returns like a crazy, sexy ex-girlfriend, a lot of fun but kind of scary too.

Believe me, this stuff is FUNNY. I can read a lot of stuff that folks call funny without cracking a smile. But Lansdale cracks me up every few pages. Buffalo Bill’s marital difficulties are narrated with an understated zest that would have done Mark Twain proud. The story of how the carnivores and the plant eaters got liquored up on fruit juice and decided on a new dietary law gets me laughing just thinking about it. Zeppelins is a fractured fairy-tale told in an off-color Oz.

I am going to assert right here that Joe Lansdale is one of the unique voices of American letters, a post-modern Mark Twain. If you don’t believe me, just read Zeppelins West.

-Dave Hardy

THE MAGIC WAGON
By Joe R. Lansdale

Take an orphaned youngster, a legendary gunfighter’s mummified remains, an ill-tempered travelling showman, a strong-willed black man, and a wrestling ape and what more could you ask for in a novel? Cannibalistic zombies on a haunted zeppelin controlled by a demonic inter-stellar squid? OK, sure who wouldn’t want that, but The Magic Wagon was only Lansdale’s first novel so give him a break.

Buster is the orphaned youngster, he is an adolescent growing up fast (as so many of Lansdale’s protagonists do). He accompanies Billy Bob, a trick shooter with a mean streak, and Albert, a black man with a mysterious and deep connection to Billy Bob. While Billy Bob amazes the crowd with quick-draw displays and Albert peddles patent “medicine”, the show also features Wild Bill Hickok’s mummified body (his hinged arms are rigged to hold his pistols at the ready) and Rot Toe the Wrestling Chimpanzee.

Touring the South as a travelling show isn’t much of a life, but it’s what this odd lot has. As the pressure mounts on them they visit Mud Flats, an East Texas town where the forces, psychological and spiritual that swirl around them will come to a head.

The Magic Wagon is an intersection of Lansdale themes. It is a Western, and a tale of the supernatural. It is a work of modern fiction that looks to old Dime Novels as a template for fiction and for the way men fictionalize themselves. In Lansdale’s world nothing is ever as it seems, lives are lived on a stage where masculinity and racial hatred are donned like costumes and worn until they can no longer be removed. The piney woods of East Texas are a nightmare landscape where outcasts roam and dark forces are waiting to prey on the unwary.

If the Western is dead, it’s mutant offspring still roams the world like a drifting serial killer. Works like Blood Meridian¸ Little Big Man, and The Magic Wagon let the maniacs out of the cages and into our psyches.

-Dave Hardy

FIREFLY
Created by Joss Whedon

Relatively few people have seen one of the best science fiction tv series of the 21st century. It lasted half a season before FOX dropped it, if you blinked you most likely missed it. It was called Firefly and it took space opera places it hadn’t been in a while.

Joss Whedon created a genre-busting universe that mixed the hard-boiled with the comedic, the horse opera with the space opera, the heist story with cannibals from outer space. If they’d given Joss Whedon another season, he’d probably have thrown in Bollywood. The result is delirious fun that takes viewers from high drama to low comedy in a flash.

Earth-that-was is gone, mankind dwells on far-flung worlds scattered across the ‘verse. Those at the Core are sophisticated, prosperous, and powerful. Those at the edge are poor, backward, and weak. Things came to a head when the Alliance, the ruling system of the Core, imposed its rule on the Independents. A bloody war followed and the ‘verse came under the rule of the Alliance.

Some fellows never come home from war, one such is Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), a happy-go-lucky veteran with a dark side. He and his sister-in-arms, Zoe (Gina Torres) own the Serenity, a “Firefly-class” tramp freighter named for the war’s bloodiest battle. Their crew consists of Wash (Alan Tudyk), the pilot & Zoe’s hubby, Kaylee (Jewel Staite), the engineer, and Jayne (Adam Baldwin), a hired thug. Inara (Morena Baccarin) is a “companion”, a very high-class courtesan, who lives on the ship and transacts her business on the backwoods planets they visit.

And I do mean backwoods. Though man is capable of terraforming planets to create habits, most of them look like West Texas on a bad day. In effect the ‘verse is an ever expanding trailer park. The hill-billies that dwell on the outlying planets make Serenity’s crew of hicks and misfits look sophisticated. While Mal is a most charming space captain, he is also a smuggler and part-time pirate. He also runs a cruise line, although his clientele are more likely to be fugitives from justice than fugitives from The Love Boat.

The pilot begins when the Serenity takes on three passengers, Shepherd Book (actually a preacher, though sheep wouldn’t be out of line in this ‘verse), a young doctor named Simon Tam, and a nebbishy traveler. In short order the Shepherd (Ron Glass) turns out to have a wicked punch and a mysterious past, Simon (Sean Maher) is a fugitive with his sister (Summer Glau) in a box, and the traveler is a federal lawman. Mayhem and comedy ensue.

The doctor and his sister, Simon and River Tam, are the heart of the series. They are fugitives from the Alliance, which is sophisticated enough to perform gruesome experiments on River that turned her into a telepath while making her quite insane. The tension between Simon and River’s claim for sanctuary and Mal’s antagonism for outsiders drives the action forward. But make no mistake, every character is essential to the whole. Mal and Inara are in love but unable to admit it, so they trade jibes about petty crime and harlotry. Kaylee, a space engine genius and trailer park queen has a crush on Simon. He is too sophisticated and too obsessed with saving his sister to see love when is staring him in the face. Jayne ups the ante on Mal’s antipathy for the wealth and privilege he envies in Simon, and pushes it all the way to outright betrayal. Zoe is a calm counterpoint to Mal’s impulsiveness. Wash is the ship’s jester and Shepherd Book is its conscience.

In addition to refurbishing the Western via space opera (or is Whedon refurbishing space opera via the Western?), Joss Whedon has created a dark satire on class and politics. He has appropriated the mythic terrain of Star Trek, Huckleberry Finn, and Blood Meridian. Like Huck or the James Boys, Mal has lit out for the territories. Instead of Judge Holden or Apaches, he meets the Reavers, cannibal space pirates.

This mix and match kaleidoscope approach allows some amazing explorations of the expectations of genre. “Jaynestown” is about a backwoods hell-hole that just happens to think Jayne is a hero. The story is a comic deflation of Eric Hobsbawm’s “social bandit” thesis, a thesis that explains the appeal of stories such as Robin Hood or tv shows about charming space-outlaws. Many tv shows parody themselves, few do it so thoughtfully. “Ariel” is a classic heist story, one that could have come from W.R. Burnett or Jean Pierre Melville. The story questions the basis of honor among thieves, and rather than taking it as a given, explains why a man must live by a code. “Our Mrs. Reynolds” and “Trash” form a duo of tales about an interplanetary gold-digger who outwits the crew in a hilarious pair of stories of low cunning and high crime. The last episode, “Objects in Space” is a tour-de-force, the ship is boarded and seized by an off-kilter bounty-hunter named Jubal Early. Beautifully composed images form a perfect backdrop for a story where the villain and River fight a battle of wills and wits that is deeply revealing of character. TV drama does not get any better than “Objects in Space”.

This is one of the longest Fire and Sword reviews, and nonetheless I feel I have slighted this series. I watch these shows again and again because they are a textbook for creating characters that live and a world that is not just a tinsel and paint backdrop. The four DVD set comprises a mere thirteen episodes and a double length pilot. Three of the episodes were never aired and the pilot was shown only after the series was cancelled. While I certainly enjoyed the series when it was aired, I found my appreciation reached new heights when I could see it as an integral whole, each part related and forming a true series. One can only wonder at what heights it could have scaled had this series been given the chance it deserved. We are fortunate to have Serenity, the theatrical follow up, but the richness of the original series is unparalleled. It is a lush world of wonders I yearn to inhabit. On DVD, I still can.

-Dave Hardy

THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE
Dir. by John Huston

John Huston took an eccentric book by a reclusive German anarchist about prospectors, bandits, priests, Indians, and oil men and turned it into a very watchable Hollywood film. That Huston compromised enough of the story to make it filmable while keeping the central meaning of the film is no small achievement.

The premise of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is unchanged from B. Traven’s novel. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart at his most unshaven, un-sociable, ugly best) is a down on his luck oil field worker, reduced to panhandling. He meets Curtin (Tim Holt) when an unscrupulous boss tries to cheat them of their wages. The two men have had enough. They quit working in the oil fields and take up the suggestion of Howard (Walter Huston, John’s father) to go prospecting for a gold mine. They duly set off for the Sierra Madre and find their gold. Not without a lot of backbreaking labor and the attentions of bandits (Badges? We don’t got no badges! We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!). All that stuff is just the garnish on the plate though. The real menace is the corruption that comes of being a in a lonely place with men you have no deep personal loyalty to, while there is a massive amount of gold piling up.

All that is much as B. Traven wrote it. However, Huston (necessarily, I believe) cut certain things. Gone is B. Traven’s relentless anti-clericalism, gone too is the real sense of desperation and talk of Bolshevik revolution in the oil camps. The biggest loss though are the many parables told by Howard of the destructive power of greed and the Indians’ struggle to deal with the white man’s lust for the gold hidden in the mountains. While it was no doubt a sacrifice that had to be made to the gods of bringing in the film at an appropriate running time, the loss is not negligible. Howard’s little morality tales are what give Dobbs’ progression from a tough, brave, and hard-working man into a murdering brute a tragic dimension.

Huston was not a pantywaist who just couldn’t handle a bit of talk. In one impressive sequence where clever villagers trap some bandits in their lies, Huston shot the entire part in Spanish. Not a subtitle to be seen, but anyone who’s been paying attention will figure out what it means when the voices rise in angry denials and the Federale captain shouts, “Carguen! Apunten! Fuego!”

Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a classic adventure tale, but one that has dropped its ideological baggage along the way. That’s a pretty fair compromise for Hollywood, and Sierra Madre is deservedly considered a film classic.

-Dave Hardy

THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE
By B. Traven

B. Traven? We don’t got no B. Traven! We don’t need no stinkin’ B. Traven! Which is perhaps apt of a novel overshadowed by its film adaptation and a novelist whose very identity is questioned.

Though it is better known as one of John Huston’s many films, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is B. Traven’s masterpiece adventure novel. B. Traven was a true mystery man, though scholars have linked him with the pseudonymous Ret Marut, a German anarchist who published a left-wing literary and political magazine during WWI. While Traven’s identification with Marut is questionable, they both shared far-left politics. Anarchist politics certainly infuse Sierra Madre.

The story begins in the oil-boom district around Tampico. An unemployed roughneck named Dobbs is enjoying anything but a boom. He is reduced to begging. When he can find employment he sleeps at a sort of hotel/barracks where men find a bed with a ragged blanket and an abundance of filth. After slaving for weeks on an oilrig, Dobbs and his pal Curtin are cheated of their pay. They are so broke they are willing to try anything, even gold mining.

This is the basis for the events that follow, Dobbs and Curtin, the oil roughnecks follow Howard, an old prospector, on a quest for a lost gold mine. Howard is no Pied Piper, he tells the younger men that gold mining offers only an adequate return of wealth in exchange it demands backbreaking labor that is too harsh for slaves. It will also demand a man’s very soul when he finds himself alone with his conscience and a whole lot of gold.

In many ways the novel is a series of parables. Howard relates stories to illustrate the pitfalls of wealth, beginning with the Catholic priests who ruthlessly exploited the Indians as slaves in the gold mines until the Indians rebelled and filled in the mine. Each of Howard’s stories follow the same pattern, someone thinks they have found what they desire in gold, only to discover they have lost their souls. The narration follows a similar pattern as Traven savagely attacks capitalism and the Church. The cruelty and greed of the clergy finds its hideous twin in the gang of bandits, ostensibly fighting to preserve religion under the republic, who mercilessly burn train passengers alive while shouting “Viva el Cristo rey!” Traven punctuates the atrocity by explaining that the men had learned the true meaning of religion from the brutal stories of martyrdom that the priests used to underline the power of the Inquisition. In Traven’s view, the cross is a sign of what the Church does to those who challenge its power.

Though not an overly artful story, Sierra Madre is not a work of socialist realism. It is an idiosyncratic work of propaganda, but with a respect for the demands of art. The adventure novel genre tends not to spend too much time thinking about the world it exists in (hence reams of self-righteous post-modern literary criticism on Edgar Rice Burroughs and Rider Haggard). In fact some would say it is the fantasyland of imperialism. While Sierra Madre may not be as thrilling a yarn as Princess of Mars, anarchists can claim a very respectable adventure novelist in B. Traven.

-Dave Hardy

BLOOD MERIDIAN OR THE EVENING REDNESS IN THE WEST
By Cormac McCarthy

More than one Western writer diagnosed the collapse of the genre as the effect of too many stories based on formula plots and mindless bloodletting. Others thought there wasn’t enough mindless bloodletting. Long after the river of ink dried up, Cormac McCarthy dynamited the dam and let loose a blood-red flood.

Blood Meridian follows a nameless boy who drifts from Tennessee down to Texas in 1847, the journey is described in a vignette that foreshadows the explosion of murder that will follow. In a tent revival in Nacogdoches the Kid meets Judge Holden, a huge, hairless man of immense erudition and mercurial disposition. When the Kid gets down to San Antonio he falls among the would-be adventurers who swarmed along the border in the 1850s. The Kid rejoins the Judge, now aligned with Glanton, the chief of a gang of scalp-hunters paid by the Mexican government to kill hostile Indians.

The narrative propels the Kid into a maelstrom of bloodshed, rape, murder, and mutilation become the norm when man meets his fellow man in the wastelands south of the border. The obscene atrocities perpetrated by the Apaches on Mexicans are matched and exceeded by the savagery of the scalp hunters. Blood Meridian hovers on the edge of the surreal, as sardonic dialog moves alongside raw bloodlust. Once you’ve seen “Ft. Smith Arkansas” in the same sentence as “congress with a goat”, it just seems natural. Just as a bush hung with dead babies becomes natural. The horror is heightened for readers who are aware that by and large the crimes described are taken directly from actual events. McCarthy has added the sinister figure of the Judge, to bear witness to man’s inner core of evil and let the guilty condemn themselves with their own tongues.

As the Western faded into the sunset, the last refuge of sentimentalists yearning for a past of tradition and Christian values that never was, one writer was willing to look at just how truly Satanic the frontier was.

-Dave Hardy

RED RIVER
Dir. by Howard Hawks

In 1948 Howard Hawks cast a little-known Broadway actor opposite John Wayne in a hard-boiled Western about a grueling cattle drive. The young man was Montgomery Clift, and his astonishing charisma was never shown to better effect.

The story is about Tom Dunson (Wayne) and his pal Groot Nadine (Walter Brennan in high mush-mouth sidekick glory). When Dunson leaves his love behind on a wagon train to settle new land in Texas, he didn’t expect the train to be wiped out by hostile Indians in hours. Instead of returning to find his love, he adopts a boy orphaned by the battle, Matt Garth (Clift). Dunson seizes his ranchland from Mexican hacenderos and Indians and builds a cattle empire. But in the process he becomes a man driven by an inner demon of stubbornness that will neither admit defeat or a mistake.

In the aftermath of the Civil War Texas ranchers found themselves with too much cattle and not enough buyers. They needed to re-establish their markets at out-of-state railheads. Accordingly Dunson and Garth set out to drive a massive herd (built with casual disregard of actual ownership of the cattle) to Sedalia, Missouri. They just have to cross a thousand miles and run the gauntlet of hostile Indians and vicious border ruffians.

What follows is a cowboy version of the HMS Bounty, with Dunson as Bligh and Garth as Mr. Christian. A wagon train of gamblers and “dance-hall girls” provides a prairie-bound Tahiti. Hawks keeps the sentimentality to a minimum, though occasionally his hard-boiled homage gets a bit ludicrous. The scene where Clift and Joanne Dru trade Bogey & Bacall-style snappy comebacks in the middle of an Indian attack is rather over the top.

Despite such deviations, including an ending that is far more optimistic than events warrant, Red River stands as a landmark of classic Western filmmaking, beyond formula sentimentality but not quite a revisionist rejection of the past. It is a masterpiece that surpasses its flaws.

-Dave Hardy

THE SEARCHERS
Dir. by John Ford

The Searchers is perhaps John Ford’s masterpiece among Westerns. It is a landmark among classic Westerns, standing in sharp contrast to the high points of the revisionist era such as Little Big Man. It is also one of, if not the greatest role by John Wayne. The cast was one of the best assembled for a Western, and there are magnificent performances by Jeffrey Hunter, Natalie Wood, Ward Bond, Harry Carry, Hank Worden, and Vera Miles among others.

The story concerns Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), an un-Reconstructed Reb who returns to visit his brother in Texas. While Ethan has been busy acquiring newly-minted double eagles from an un-named source, Aaron Edwards (Walter Coy) is busy raising a family on the West Texas frontier. Living with the Edwards family is Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter, know to SF fans as Capt. Pike of the Starship Enterprise). Martin is an orphan, his family was massacred by Indians and he was the sole survivor. Ethan was the man who found Martin (an echo of Tom Dunson’s relationship with Matt Garth in Red River).

Ethan’s re-entry to domesticity from the cauldron of war and banditry is short-lived. While he and Martin join a group of Rangers on a scout, Comanche raiders led by Scar (Harry Brandon) attack the Edwards cabin and kill the adults and carry off the girls. Ethan and Martin begin a search of epic proportions to find Debbie (played by Lana and Debbie Wood as a girl and young woman), the youngest child.

The Searchers is not exactly a sentimental film about getting a lost child home. Rather it is a story of how racism poisons that sentimental attachment to family. For Ethan comes to realize that Debbie will no longer be a child when they find her, she will be a woman. Moreover, she will be the bride of a hostile Comanche warrior. The same as the warriors who raped and murdered her older sister. Ethan is caught in a terrible moral trap, guilt for failing to save his family compels him to search for the lost girl. The same guilt commands that he kill her as an irredeemably tainted race traitor.

Martin is at least as driven to follow Ethan on his demented quest. He too is driven by guilt and terrible memories. He is as much Ethan’s rival as he is his helper. Ethan repeated makes it clear that Martin is no kin to Debbie or any Edwards. Yet Martin knows better. He turns his back on a happy life to follow Ethan, martyring himself paradoxically because he cannot become a tormented soul or an indifferent one.

The racism of the film’s characters stands out, arguably by design. Ethan introduces Martin by contemptuously referring to him as a half-breed of Cherokee ancestry. Laurie (Vera Miles), Martin’s love, demands to know why he should sacrifice so much for Debbie, who is no longer white, but has been, “sold and sold again to the highest bidder,” as though to be a Comanche captive is to be a whore. Cavalry officers dismiss the deaths of white captives in an attack as better off dead. However, for all that the film probably tones down white hatred of Indians and the racism of the era. Still, Ford was bold enough not to eliminate it. The Searchers is not a whitewash.

Ford shows us why the white settlers would hate and fear Indians, but provides hints about why the Indians would hate and fear whites. Scar’s own sons were killed by whites. We see a young woman’s body (Wild Goose, played by Beulah Archuletta), after the cavalry has stormed her village. Martin asks what did she do to deserve that. While The Searchers does not provide nearly as much from the Indian point of view as it does from that of the whites, it is there.

The elephant in the corner is the attitude of Debbie to the idea of “rescue”. While Debbie is portrayed as a rational young woman, other white captives seem demented, broken by the horrors of captivity. The problem is that by-and-large that simply wasn’t the case. The Comanches were apt to rape, mutilate, and murder adult women they took as prisoner. But children were raised as part of there families. Even older children were shown tenderness and could identify with people who were not some much alien captors as adoptive parents.

If anything, it was white culture that enslaved and broke the spirits of “redeemed captives”. The records show that people like Cynthia Ann and John Parker, Herman Lehman, Clint and Jeff Smith, and Adolf Korn suffered terrible pain from the loss of their Comanche families and faced great difficulty in adapting to white society. Some never did. What future would Debbie Edwards face? What would she have said to Ethan and Martin, alienated kinsmen, who were warriors of the hostile Texans bent on exterminating her people?

As much as anything else, the open ended nature of these questions, ones that The Searchers raises but can not answer, make this a film that you can watch again and again.

-Dave Hardy

THE CAPTURED
By Scott Zesch

As a youngster, Scott Zesch heard tales of Adolf Korn, his great-uncle. Adolf Korn would have been little different from other German youngsters in Texas, except that one day in 1870, Indian raiders carried him off. Eventually he returned to his white family, but he was a very different young man.

In searching for this ancestor who had been lost to his family, Zesch began following the trails of other white captives from Central Texas. He recounts, sometimes in horrifying detail, what Indian raids were like. But this is no “the only good injun is a dead injun” book. Because Zesch found that almost all captives came to prefer Indian life. Zesch offers some cautious hypotheses as to why these children (always children, adults fared badly at the hands of the Comanche and Apache raiders) identified so strongly with an alien culture that had forcibly abducted them. After considering the impressionability of childhood and the “Stockholm Syndrome” (where hostages come to identify with captors), Zesch returns to a simple thesis: Indian life offered a simplicity, ease, and freedom that the lives of hardscrabble settlers on the Texas frontier could not match.

The Captured compares the lives of Herman Lehmann, Clinton and Jeff Smith, Rudolf Fischer and many other white children who were abducted by Indians. Zesch offers us many insights into their lives as well as the lives of those they left behind and the life they adopted. They experienced Indian life in its last years of freedom before buffalo hunters destroyed the Indians’ livelihood and the US Army destroyed their people. Zesch’s accounts of Comanche and Apache raids find grim echoes in his description of Army attacks on Indian villages.

Eventually all the captives returned to their white families, at least for a time. But they all felt the pull of Indian life strongly. They had trouble adjusting to white life, they had learned to conform with Indian ways, easy-going and free. Some returned immediately to the reservation. Rudolf Fischer reluctantly visited his biological family, and shortly returned to his Comanche wife. Others stayed in Texas and even achieved a level of fame (both Herman Lehmann and Clinton Smith wrote autobiographies). Some, like Adolf Korn, withdrew from society altogether.

The Captured is a fascinating study, not just of a critical period in the history of Texas (and America), but also a window on the creation of character and personality when cultures clash inside a single person.

-Dave Hardy

THE BOY CAPTIVES
By Clinton L. Smith

Clinton and Jeff Smith had their lives irrevocably changed on February 26, 1871. They were captured by Apache raiders. What began as a terrifying experience ended up with the boys becoming Indians themselves. The lads were split up, Jeff went to the Apache and was adopted by Geronimo while Clint became a Comanche.

Like many other children captured by the Comanche, Clint was adopted into the tribe. After an initial testing period he was treated no differently from other Comanche boys and expected in time to become a full-fledged warrior. The objective in taking captives, besides the possibility of ransom, was to bring fresh blood into the tribe and replace numbers decimated by war and disease. Clinton Smith lived alongside Adolf Korn, a German boy who had been captured and adopted. Many other Germans, Americans, and Mexicans became Comanches in this way. The Comanches’ greatest chief Quanah, was the son of Cynthia Ann Parker, a captive/adoptee who was related to one of Texas’ most prominent families.

Clinton Smith recounts Comanche raids for livestock and sometimes for bloodshed. He became fiercely attached to the Comanche point of view, a feeling reinforced when the 4th cavalry attacked the camp he lived in. As result of Comanche reverses, they were forced to send Clinton Smith back to his family. His brother was captured by Mexican bandits, who shortly returned him for a reward. They became cowboys and managed to re-adapt themselves to white society.

The Boy Captives tells about Clinton smith’s coming of age at a critical time in Texas history. It is a remarkable recounting of both sides of the bloody war that ended the Comanches’ way of life, as such if you are interested in how Texas came to be it is essential reading.

-Dave Hardy