The Bold Frontier
BOLD
FRONTIER
By John Jakes
Previously published as
In the Big Country
Dedicated to the memory of some of the great ones
Cooper
Wister
Grey
Brand
Henry
Schaefer
L’Amour
Introduction by Dale L. Walker
The Western; and How We Got It
Little Phil and the Daughter of Joy
My Love Affair with the Western
I
T BEGAN IN 1939
when I saw my first Western movie—
Dodge City
starring Errol Flynn—at the Indiana Theater in Terre Haute. I was seven years old. I crawled under the seat when the guns blazed in one particularly noisy scene
(blazed
is a verb I learned from the pulp magazines).
Flynn turned out to be a moral leper. The history dished up by the script writers turned out to be doctored, if not altogether phony. Still, the picture inspired me to attend all the pseudo-historical epics Flynn made thereafter. The pounding musical scores of Max Steiner and others were always part of the thrilling experience. As I’ve written elsewhere, it astounds me that musicians with classical European training could so marvelously capture the spirit of the American West.
In the ’40s I saw almost every Western picture that came along: big-studio features, serials, and the one-hour Saturday afternoon programmers. I drew the line at “modern” Westerns with singing cowboys in sequined shirts.
I bought and devoured Western pulps such as
The Rio Kid Western, Frontier Stories, Texas Rangers,
and
Masked Rider Western,
a blatant rip-off of the Lone Ranger. By the ’50s I was established as a writer, selling Western short stories and novelettes, principally to Popular Publications.
In 1952 on my first visit to my then-agent, Scott Meredith, in New York, Scott chewed one of the Life Savers he was using to curb his smoking and said, “I was going to send you over to see Mike Tilden”—the editor who bought my stories at Popular—” but he thinks you’re this middle-aged Western guy. If he sees you’re just a kid, there goes that market.” So I never met the editor responsible for publishing much of my Western output.
By the end of the 1950s the pulps were gone and the market for Westerns was vastly diminished, if not almost nonexistent. Nevertheless, in the years that followed, I would occasionally write a Western and Scott would find some obscure market for it—a resuscitated
Short Stories,
for instance.
I never lost my love of the locales, the history— the genre itself—and so continued to incorporate Western sequences into my historical novels. There is material about the frontier in
The Kent Family Chronicles
—the old Ohio Territory, the Alamo, the gold rush, the building of the trans-continental railroad.
California Gold
is nothing short of a Western, though hardly a conventional one, since it begins in the 1890s and ends in the twentieth century. My good friend Dale Walker said it deserved a Spur Award but unfortunately only made this suggestion after the nomination deadline passed. Western Writers of America requires that the author nominate his own work. I have never liked to hustle my writing that way. I still belong to WWA, but with a marked lack of enthusiasm.
My only definitive novel in the Western genre,
Wear
a
Fast Gun,
was published in 1956 by one of those small companies that churned out titles for rental library racks found in drugstores. It has been reprinted once or twice. Technically, I also published a Western in 1952.
The Texans Ride North
was a young adult title of about thirty thousand words, dealing with the post-Civil War cattle drives. It was my first book, and I remain proud of it because in addition to having a good story (albeit with no cussing and no romance), it had historical background.
I’m delighted to see this collection in print, with the addition of stories that have not appeared in it before. I don’t recall the origin of every story in the book, but some are worth highlighting.
“The Woman at Apache Wells.” This is by far the most popular Western I’ve written, if I’m to judge from the number of times it has been anthologized. I recall very little about the creation of the piece, except that the title came first. Titles were always key elements of my pulp Westerns, although my original ones were often changed by the publisher.
A writer with an impressive list of screen credits maintains that the story deserves to be a movie. Perhaps one day it will be. I’ve never been sure why it appears so frequently in collections, but I’m happy that it does.
“Hell on the High Iron.” One of my novelettes for Popular. Mike Tilden changed my original, equally purple title, “High Iron—Hot Guns.”
“A Duel of Magicians.” A Western sequence from a novel, the final volume of
The North and South Trilogy.
The Cheyenne magic performed by Whistling Snake is authentic, and the tricks of Magic Magee reflect my own lifelong fascination with illusions and close-up magic.
Often I base the appearance of a character on a real person. Magee with his wonderful smile was created in the image of the late Flip Wilson, who unfortunately did not get the opportunity to play the role in the 1994
Heaven and Hell
miniseries. Due to time constraints, Magic’s tricks were shown only fleetingly in the picture. The duel with Whistling Snake was omitted entirely.
“To the Last Bullet.” My title for this opus was “Outcasts of the Big Snow,” which I preferred. But I also liked cashing Popular’s check, so I remained mute.
“Little Phil and the Daughter of Joy.” This is a story I wrote for my friends Martin Greenberg and Bill Pronzini, who edited an excellent but short-lived anthology series called
New Frontiers
(I came up with the title for them).
I wrote the story under a new pseudonym, John Lee Gray. It was 1989, and I wanted to see whether I’d learned anything about my craft since my pulp days. Also, I hoped John Lee would have a slightly different voice, and was pleased to find that he did.
“The Tinhorn Fills His Hand.” My title: “Last Deal for the Blackwater Tinhorn.” Just as purple but not necessarily better.
“Dutchman.” This story is based in part on incidents in the life of my maternal grandfather. Although he lived as a naturalized citizen in the Midwest, not California, and there was no physical violence connected with his story, at the time of World War I he experienced some of the same anti-German hostility and sad sense of rejection as the character Willi.
My grandfather, Wilhelm Karl Rätz, was born at Neuenstadt-am-Kocher, Germany, in 1849. Around 1870, he emigrated from Aalen, a small town forty kilometers east of Stuttgart. My only living relatives reside there today.
Grandfather died in Terre Haute in 1936 at age 87. He had Anglicized his name to William Carl Retz. I was never able to learn whether this was a matter of pride or protection. It makes no difference, I would have loved him as much either way. But a certain curiosity lingers.
My grandfather’s immigrant story was the inspiration for the first novel about the Crown family of Chicago,
Homeland.
“Carolina Warpath.” Three South Carolina historians inspired this 1993 novelette, though none is in any way responsible for the content.
In 1989 my wife Rachel and I took a course in the history of our adopted state from the beginnings to the Civil War. It was one of the most stimulating and exciting academic experiences of my life. The professor, Dr. Lawrence Rowland of the History Department at the University of South Carolina at Beaufort, introduced me to the rousing action of the Carolina frontier in prerevolutionary times. Here we had a veritable Old West in the East of the eighteenth century. Have you ever heard of “cattle-minders”— cowboys of the Sea Islands of the South Atlantic coast? I hadn’t. I vowed that I’d write something about the period someday.
Two other University of South Carolina historians who were helpful with sources and advice were my good friend, the late Dr. George C. Rogers, Jr., author of a wonderful little book called
Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys,
and Dr. Robert Weir, now retired.
Since original publication of the story, two editors, friends, and many readers have asked for more adventures of Nick and Noggins. If only there were more time …
My fascination with the state where I’ve lived for 22-plus years has never waned. Aspects of South Carolina’s colorful and dramatic past form the background of a new historical novel I’m writing at this moment.
“Snakehead.” This is the second story by the pseudonymous Mr. Gray. Following it, he seemed to return to hibernation.
“Manitow and Ironhand.” This one originated in an anthology of new Western short stories I edited with Martin Greenberg. It sprang from my first visit to my grandfather’s home town, Aalen, mentioned before.
In the Aalen bookstore where I signed copies of German editions of
The North and South Trilogy,
I saw for the first time the enormous amount of shelf space given to the German-language Westerns of Karl May. He gets the same treatment over there as Louis L’Amour receives in bookstores here.
I’d heard vaguely of May because his characters appeared in German-language Western movies, a couple of which showed briefly in America. One starred Lex Barker. Research into May’s books and biography produced “Manitow and Ironhand.” More information about May is found in the story’s afterword.
I was thrilled when “Manitow and Ironhand” won the 1994 Western Heritage Award as the year’s best short story. I didn’t have to nominate myself, or hustle shamelessly to win. The award came as a complete surprise.
“Mercy at Gettysburg.” Marcia Bullard, editor of Gannett s
USA Weekend,
commissioned this fifteen-hundred-word story for one of the magazine’s summer fiction issues. Appropriately, it ran on the weekend of July 4, 1994, and has gained in popularity ever since. For public readings, it’s the story I choose. It takes less than ten minutes to perform, and usually produces some tears in the audience. Admittedly it isn’t a Western, but to me it has something of the open-air Western feel about it. Hence I wanted to include it.
I’m grateful to New American Library, to my friend and publisher Louise Burke, and to my editor, Dan Slater, for seeing this collection through the editorial process. You can see that I love Westerns. I hope you enjoy what has resulted from that love affair of more than sixty years.