The Last Shootist

by Miles Swarthout

  This rash act got several smelter workers’ attention. “Hey, kid, what in hell do you think you’re—”

  But the man was too late. From his left-hand holster Gillom Rogers pulled the second Remington, the pearl-handled one, and flipped this nickel-plated .44 in the air with a backspin transfer, caught it by its barrel, and then threw this beautiful pistol, too, right into the furnace after the other weapon.

  “Hey! Fella! Stop that!”

  The trick shootist didn’t linger to hear those bullets popping. He limped back to his friends, who were watching him, amazed.

  “Gillom! Those were valuable guns!” Ease’s upper left arm was bandaged in another bandanna, and Anel was tying his bloody coat to the back of his saddle.

  “They were cursed. Those revolvers brought nothing but blood, death, and bad luck to me and Mister Books. Don’t need ’em in my life anymore.” The young man seemed calm as he checked his horse’s cinch, then remounted carefully from the right side again, forgiving his bandaged leg.

  Ease was confused. “Can you risk going unarmed?”

  “Si! No need pistolas,” Miss Romero agreed, remounting as several smelter workers carrying safety lamps high approached for a better look at these gunslinging intruders.

  “J. B. Books said I was a sorrow to my mother. Well, I don’t intend to be anymore. And I sure as hell don’t wanna be ridin’ the night train to the big Adios.” Gillom turned his buckskin gelding, pulling Sam’s black race horse along behind by its reins.

  Ease Bixler was having a little difficulty mounting with only one usable arm to clutch his saddlehorn. Gillom’s girlfriend gigged her paint pony over to pull him up onto his saddle.

  Gillom Rogers straightened in his saddle, feeling calmer, refreshed. It almost felt like being reborn.

  “C’mon, Ease! El Paso awaits!”

  With a clatter of hooves and whoops in the night, the three friends rode away fast, whipping their reins, galloping now, out from under a black cloud toward clearing southwestern skies and a pearly white gibbous moon.

  Afterword

  I knew the toughest thing to convince Western fans of would be the alligator pond shoot-out, so here’s a 1954 photograph of the famous alligator pond in El Paso’s downtown San Jacinto Plaza. Note the little boy on the left attempting to climb over the concete railing to get in and “play” with the alligators. Wonder if he’s still got all his fingers and toes? That concrete railing was an improved barrier from the original low chain-link fence I’ve described, which was erected in 1883 when the plaza was relandscaped to contain this tourist attraction. The original gators had grown large and were still in the plaza in 1901. There was a wooden plank from the pond’s concrete rim over the water so keepers could walk out to the fountain to do repairs or reach the animals for feeding. Yes, a group of dentists really was turned away by the police late one inebriated night way back when they tried to decide a bet about how many teeth an alligator actually had. El Paso history records that the alligators were eventually moved to quarters at their city zoo in 1965 after two were stoned to death and another had a spike driven through its left eye. Students also kept “borrowing” them to put in lucky professors’ offices or the pool at Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso) before swimming meets.

  * * *

  My late father’s, Glendon’s, famous novel has had an impact on the Western genre since it was first published by Doubleday, winning a Spur Award as the Best Western Novel of 1975. The Western Writers of America ranked The Shootist no. 4 in their sixtieth anniversary member survey in 2013 of the ten greatest Western novels written in the twentieth century. This Western classic is now available in its fourth paperback edition (different covers, different publishers) from Bison Books, the University of Nebraska Press. It’s available online from Bison’s website (www.nebraskapress.unl.edu) and is an e-book on Amazon’s Kindle.

  Where this Western title has really become well known, though, is as John Wayne’s final film. May 22, 2007, was John Wayne’s centennial, one hundred years of the Duke! The bulk of Wayne’s 176-odd films were Westerns, and all the studios and video distributors rushed out DVDs of most of his movies in a one-hundredth-birthday celebration, some in newly remastered special editions. The Shootist received a DVD edition from Paramount Home Video, in which I appear in their “Making Of” segment talking about this film. The film featured a sterling cast of famous actors who came together to support Wayne when word went round that his health wasn’t good and this might be his last movie. Many of those stars worked for less than their normal salaries in this eight-million-dollar picture, which wasn’t that large a budget even back in 1976.

  By all accounts it was a tough shoot, with Wayne having difficulty breathing at Carson City’s five-thousand-foot altitude. He had to be oxygen-assisted regularly and had a nurse with him round the clock. The Duke was cranky with his costars and demanding about script changes and the hiring of bit players. He’d never worked with action veteran Don Siegel before, and those two hard-headed guys soon had a showdown over who was actually going to direct the picture.

  John Wayne calmed down and filming went a little easier when the company moved down to sea level on the back lot of the Burbank Studios for some of the interiors and the Carson City street scenes. The novel is set in El Paso in 1901, when it was the last of the roaring border towns, but the script changed the locale to Carson City to match the mountainous exteriors they had filmed in Washoe Lake State Park north of the Nevada state capital. Big John caught the flu during filming, and he was already down to one lung from an earlier operation for cancer due to his lifelong smoking. The producers had accident insurance to cover his two-week absence and filmed around Wayne using body doubles and every trick in the cinematographers’ handbook. Finally Wayne returned to film the final saloon shoot-out on a very tense back-lot set.

  Robert Boyle received a well-deserved Oscar nomination for his $400,000 set design for this film, and Wayne was reportedly in close competition for another Best Actor nomination; however, he’d already won for True Grit seven years earlier, and the Duke’s conservative politics didn’t mesh well with more liberal, younger Academy voters, so it wasn’t to be. Released in September 1976, usually the slowest movie month of the year with students back in school and the beginning of football season, The Shootist didn’t do that well at the box office, grossing thirteen million dollars in the United States. Producer Dino De Laurentiis kept the international box office for himself, and cofinancier Paramount Pictures only had North American distribution, so the studio didn’t spend that much on advertising. Wayne found the energy to do twelve days of TV talk shows and press interviews around the country to promote the film as the mostly rave reviews came in. Variety called The Shootist “one of the great films of our time.” Another film critic called it “the finest valedictory performance by any major American actor in a role hand-tailored for him.”

  And indeed, The Shootist became John Wayne’s final film, outside of a few last TV commercials and antismoking ads. His last appearance was presenting the Best Picture Oscar in April 1979 at the Academy Awards. Duke looked like a walking cadaver then, after having most of his stomach removed earlier in the year because of his spreading cancer. John Wayne died on June 11, just a few months later, and the world mourned a film legend’s passing.

  Where The Shootist has really aged well has been in the aftermarket, on TV networks worldwide and in DVD and video sales. Film historians have widely praised this Western, deeming it a classic, and today it’s considered one of John Wayne’s ten best Western films.

  Several times since my father died of smoking complications, too, in Scottsdale, Arizona, in September 1992, the Swarthout estate has been contacted by book packagers wanting to put out quickly written paperback series of Shootist novels or a compilation of short stories by well-known Western authors about the adventures of John Bernard Books as a younger gunfighter. We turned them down, not wishing to tarnish this famous title v
ia hacked-out tomes. I wasn’t ready to attempt a sequel until I won a Spur Award myself from the Western Writers of America for The Sergeant’s Lady as the Best First Novel of 2004 (Forge Books). That frontier romance, set against the backdrop of the final months of Apache raids into Arizona Territory in 1886, was also based on one of Glendon’s forgotten short stories, which ran in the old Saturday Evening Post in July 1959.

  Glendon Swarthout never wrote any sequels to his sixteen novels, although the 1960s Where the Boys Are had editors beseeching him to write Where the Girls Were. The Shootist is one of his few novels that really sets up for a sequel. The endings, however, differed between the movie and the original novel. In the movie, the teenaged youth played by Ron Howard follows John Bernard Books (John Wayne) into the fancy saloon where Books has assassinated all the gunmen he’s invited to try to kill him but enters just in time to see a sneaky bartender blast the already wounded Books in the back with both barrels of a shotgun. Ron Howard picks up J. B. Books’s Remington .44 and kills that back-shooting bartender, giving him what he deserves. After a moment of indecision, the teenager throws the gun away, to John Wayne’s approval, before Wayne, too, dies on-screen. Gillom Rogers (Howard) then walks out of that saloon, having renounced gunfighting and further violence, and goes home with his mother, played by Lauren Bacall. No sequel possible to that filmed story.

  The novel, however, was not tailored for John Wayne. Glendon’s J. B. Books character was loosely based on the last few years of the notorious Texas gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, the only gunslinger to ever write his own autobiography. Hardin was known for his custom-made leather skeleton vest, onto which he had sewn leather holster sleeves to hold his custom .41 Colts, among a number of types of pistols Hardin used throughout his man-killing career (high estimate on John Wesley was forty-four kills, but no one knows for sure). Glendon changed the guns to matched .44 Remingtons, and the dust jacket illustration on the hardcover Shootist novel from 1975 shows these revolvers and their special holster vest.

  They tried to rig up such a vest for Wayne during costume fittings before filming The Shootist, but Duke was overweight and too awkward trying to pull big revolvers out from under his coat easily, so they dumped the special vest and he went back to a single six-shooter on the hip. In the novel, the teenaged boy has already worked out a trade with J. B. Books for his prized weapons in return for running the invitations to all those gunmen for this final shoot-out. Gillom Rogers (in the novel) enters the saloon, and at J. B. Books’s last request, he issues the coup de grâce to the famous shootist, who is already dying of prostate cancer and his bullet wounds anyway. The teenager then walks outside the saloon (doesn’t shoot the bartender first) and shows off these matched Remingtons to an awed crowd, thus becoming the last shootist. The novel’s different ending absolutely lends itself to a coming-of-age sequel about what then happens to this teenaged gunslinger carrying these famous six-shooters during the next six months of his exciting young life. I included the last scene of Glendon’s original novel as my prologue, so readers would know they’re reading a sequel to the novel, not to the famous movie ending they might be more familiar with.

  John Wayne wouldn’t have anything to do with the book’s original ending. My father and I didn’t know this when we had several debates with the film’s producers, Mike Frankovich and Bill Self. I was the original screenwriter on the film, and when we declined to change the story’s ending (no possible sequel!), director Siegel brought in his favorite on-set rewriter (credited as a “dialogue coach” on a few of Don’s earlier films) to make changes. Scott Hale made just enough changes (one-third) under the Writers’ Guild adaptation rules back in 1976 to qualify for a screen credit, and I was too green a screenwriter to protest much. So it too often goes in Hollywood.

  What was never explained to us was that John Wayne had made another Western in 1972 called The Cowboys in which he trains eleven schoolboys, aged nine to fifteen, and in the process of toughening them up into men while driving his Texas steers to market also teaches them how to fight and kill. The Cowboys was the first picture since the 1960s The Alamo in which Wayne’s character dies on screen, and these no-longer-young innocents go after Bruce Dern and his gang of cutthroats, slaughtering them graphically to avenge the murder of their father-figure trail boss. Well, Big John evidently got so many letters from outraged PTA mothers about his setting such a bad moral example and poor movie role model for their youngsters in The Cowboys that he wasn’t about to make that mistake again. So, as dictated by Wayne, Ron Howard throws John Wayne’s six-gun away, does not execute the famous shootist, renounces violence, and goes home with mom, to live happily ever after. And thus we have a sanitized but perhaps less realistic movie ending to a great Western tale.

  * * *

  Weapons owned by notorious outlaws and expert shootists were valuable to gun collectors even back in the nineteenth century, as long as their provenance could be proved, so fictional El Paso marshal Walter Thibido’s burning ambition to get his hands on Books’s matched Remingtons for resale is set up in the original novel. The guns mentioned in this sequel were authenticated by an excellent book, Flayderman’s Guide to Antique American Firearms (8th edition, 2001).

  The best histories of old El Paso recommended to me by Leon Metz, who wrote the finest biography of Hardin—John Wesley Hardin: Dark Angel of Texas (1998)—were C. L. “Doc” Sonnichsen’s Pass of the North: Four Centuries on the Rio Grande (1968) and El Paso: A Centennial Portrait (1972), containing essays by members of the El Paso Historical Society.

  El Paso Daily Herald journalist Dan Dobkins’s pointing Gillom Rogers toward the outlaw town of Tularosa to seek out another aspiring writer is also quite plausible. Eugene Manlove Rhodes was the real Western deal. Rhodes’s appearance, college schooling, and interests (horse breaking, poker, and great literature) are taken from several biographies of the man I tapped (Eugene Manlove Rhodes—Cowboy Chronicler by Edwin W. Gaston, Jr.). Gene did train one of his wild horses to be mounted only from the right side instead of the left to foil a saddle thief in Old Mesilla, as recounted in W. H. Hutchinson’s A Bar Cross Man. Rhodes made his living breaking horses as a young man in his camp up in the San Andres Mountains twenty-five miles above Tularosa. This actual horse ranch Gene described in one of his novels, Stepsons of Light, which I’ve reused. Periodic trips down to Tularosa for supplies Gene took to visit the widow he’d courted by letter, May Davison Purple, caused Gene to leave his daily horse chores on the mountain to whichever outlaw happened by that remote rest stop on the Owl Hoot Trail. Word spread and soon Gene was trading food and a safe hideout for horse wrangling duties to such big-leaguers as the Ketchum Brothers, two of the Dalton Gang (Dick Broadwell and Bill Power), and Bill Doolin, King of the Oklahoma Outlaws. Gene befriended these bad men and heard their wild stories, which was grist for his writer’s mill when he began publishing short stories in 1902 in famed historian Charles Fletcher Lummis’s Out West magazine from Los Angeles. In 1906, along with a new baby by May, the family returned to her parents’ farm in Apalachin in Upstate New York, where the bulk of Rhodes’s Western novels were written and first serialized in the old Saturday Evening Post and then compiled into books.

  Eugene Manlove Rhodes was the Louis L’Amour of his day, but his flowery prose and anecdotal digressions read somewhat dated now. Several of Gene’s novels were filmed after purchase by the Western actor Harry Carey, and the best of his novellas, Paso Por Aqui, was released after Gene’s death in 1948 as Four Faces West, starring Joel McCrea. I like to scout the actual settings of my stories, but Rhodes’s real San Andres horse ranch is difficult to get to anymore, located inside the government-restricted White Sands Missile Range in south central New Mexico. The Alamogordo Chamber of Commerce runs bus tours twice a year out to Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated, and evidently they pass by a large boulder (without stopping) upon which Gene’s family and fans have placed a bronze plaque to memorialize his burial spot in what’s s
till known as Rhodes Pass through those same mountains, but I didn’t make that special trip.

  Western historian and novelist Bernard DeVoto later wrote in a sympathetic Harper’s magazine essay that Rhodes’s Westerns were “the only body of work devoted to the cattle kingdom which is both true to it and written by an artist in prose.” Gene Rhodes’s fourteen novels and shorter novellas about the Southwest he knew so well stand as reflections of a cowboy author who lived during the last days of a freer ranching era and could easily evoke the Western spirit and rugged physicality of that region in his stories. The Bard of Tularosa’s inclusion is my tribute to one of the Western’s great originals. Old Tularosa has been remodeled now, too, but the best history of that bandit town (Tularosa: Last of the Frontier West, 1968) is again by historian C. L. “Doc” Sonnichsen, whom I had the honor of meeting at a Western Writers’ convention as a friend of my father’s.

  The notorious Ketchum Brothers are called the Grahams in this novel, and Blackjack did have his head yanked off in Clayton, New Mexico, on April 26, 1901, so Gene Rhodes would have just heard about that botched hanging. The best new history about this deadly outlaw family from West Texas is Jeffrey Burton’s The Deadliest Outlaws (University of North Texas Press, 2nd edition, 2012). Tom “Blackjack” Ketchum was so mean that when he was about to be hung, he asked Union County, New Mexico, sheriff Salome Garcia to dig his grave very deep and bury him facedown so that Frank Harrington, the train guard who shotgunned Blackjack during a solitary, fouled-up robbery (leading to Tom’s capture the next day and the eventual amputation of his right arm) could “kiss my ass.”

  Both Ketchum brothers spent time hiding out at Gene Rhodes’s mountain horse ranch in New Mexico various times and even asked the would-be writer to join them in a train robbery in the summer of 1897, but Eugene turned them down, saying he was “flush just then.” I had to change their last names since Tom’s older brother, Sam, whom we do meet in this story, actually died of blood poisoning in 1899, after being wounded in another train robbery with his brother Tom and Elzy Lay, a member of Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch gang. This novel is set in the spring and summer of 1901, two years after both outlaw brothers were dead, so the Ketchum boys had to become the fictional Grahams. Sam Ketchum probably wasn’t quite as friendly an hombre as I depict him, but he was certainly good with guns.