by John Jakes
THE
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
Contents
Preface by John Jakes
Introduction by Dale L. Walker
The Western; and How We Got It
Shootout at White Pass
The Woman at Apache Wells
Hell on the High Iron
A Duel of Magicians
Death Rides Here!
The Winning of Poker Alice
To the Last Bullet
Little Phil and the Daughter of Joy
The Tinhorn Fills His Hand
The Naked Gun
Dutchman
Carolina Warpath
Snakehead
Manitow and Ironhand
Mercy at Gettysburg
Credits
A Biography of John Jakes
Preface
My Love Affair with the Western
IT 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 s
tate 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.
—John Jakes
Hilton Head Island
January 15, 2001
Introduction
by Dale L. Walker
“The American West still shines with a timeless fascination. The literature of the West, both fiction and nonfiction, still fires the imaginations of millions around the world.”
—John Jakes
JOHN JAKES’S SPECTACULAR WRITING career is bracketed, literally, by Western stories. He began selling them in the early 1950s to such pulp magazines as Ranch Romances, Max Brand’s Western, .44 Western, Complete Western Book, 10-Story Western, and Big-Book Western. His editors thought so highly of these early stories that Jakes found himself featured on the cover of a Western pulp and proclaimed a “top-hand author”— high praise for so young a storyteller.
And:
Jakes’s first published book was a Western juvenile. The Texans Ride North, published in 1952.
His first adult novel, published by Ace Books in 1956, was Wear a Fast Gun, an excellent tale of a new lawman in a mythical Western town that opens with these two reader-snatching lines: “Eli Fallon, commonly called Reb, did not know a solitary soul in Longhorn when he first arrived there. But in less than sixty minutes, he had shot a man to death.”
One of his best science fiction novels, Six-Gun Planet, is as much Western as fantasy.
Five of the eight novels of his Kent Family Chronicles contain substantial frontier and western material: The Seekers includes the stories of “Mad Anthony” Wayne and the 1794 Battle of Fallen Timbers and homesteading on the Ohio frontier; The Furies has the 1836 Alamo battle and the discovery of gold in northern California in 1849; The Warriors has the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad; The Lawless has the western cattle towns; The Americans has Theodore Roosevelt’s ranching venture in the Badlands in the 1880s.
In Heaven and Hell, the third and final volume of his North and South trilogy, Jakes writes of life among the Plains Indians, of the 10th (Negro) Cavalry in Kansas, of Indian treaty problems and the betrayal of the tribes by the U.S. government, and of George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of the Washita.
His California Gold (1989), a 658-page historical Western in locale and spirit, opens thirty years after the great California gold rush and takes its protagonist, the young Pennsylvania wanderer James Macklin Chance, through all the great events of California history, including the Los Angeles real estate boom of the 1880s, the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, the era of railroad monopolies, labor wars, the citrus and oil industries, the birth of the film business, and even the environmental movement.
Before publication of The Bastard in 1974, before that string of eight books, the Kent Family Chronicles, that made him a household name and one of the most recognizable, beloved, and frequently read American authors, John Jakes had published forty-three novels and hundreds of short stories in a writing career that began in his sophomore year at DePauw University in Indiana.
John William Jakes was born in Chicago in 1932, the son of an executive with the Railway Express Agency. A voracious reader during the years he was growing up in the Midwest, Jakes enrolled in the creative writing program at DePauw in 1950 and in his second year there sold his first story, a tale of a man pitted against a diabolical device—an electric toaster—to Anthony Boucher of the prestigious Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. More amazing for even the most promising of undergraduate writers, he sold his first novel, a juvenile Western titled The Texans Ride North, to John C. Winston Publishers in Philadelphia in 1952.
Jakes graduated from DePauw in 1953, earned a master’s degree in American literature at Ohio State in 1954, and entered the Ph.D. program there. By now he was married (in 1951, to Rachel Ann Payne, his zoology lab instructor at DePauw), had a growing family and all the attendant responsibilities, and the academic life that a doctorate in literature would have provided seemed less alluring than more immediate gainful employment.
From 1954 to 1971, Jakes worked in advertising as a copywriter, as a product promotions manager for Abbott Laboratories in North Chicago, for ad agencies in New York and Ohio, and as a writing freelancer. By 1971, when he became a full-time fiction writer, he had risen to an agency vice presidency in Dayton.
In those advertising years he wrote fiction at home, in stints sometimes limited to two or three hours a night after a full day’s work, but any full-time writer would envy the product of those sixteen years. Under his own name and the pen names Jay Scotland and Alan Payne, Jakes produced forty books and two hundred stories.
He wrote mystery and suspense thrillers, detective novels, fantasy, science fiction, and historicals; he wrote movie novelizations, nonfiction books, juveniles, plays, and stories. He gained a substantial fan following for his Brak the Barbarian novels (which he calls “straight-faced clones of the R. E. Howard ‘Conan’ series”); his Six-Gun Planet (1970), set on the mythical planet of Missouri in which the Old West is replicated, preceded the 1973 film Westworld with
Yul Brynner, which employed the same essential idea; he wrote the libretto and lyrics for a musical version of Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows; and he wrote other plays and musicals that were performed by stock companies.
The year before the debut of the Kent Family Chronicles, Jakes’s On Wheels appeared, a science fiction novel about a future time in which overpopulation forces people to live in their automobiles in a sort of perpetual motion on the interstate highway system. One critic called this novel “a minor masterpiece of social speculation.”
Then, in 1974, Pyramid Books got a two-year jump on the 200th anniversary of the American Revolution by issuing Jakes’s extraordinary 630-page novel, The Bastard, the first title in the American Bicentennial Series, also known as the Kent Family Chronicles. The series ran through 1980, covering seven generations of the Kent family in eight fat novels (The Rebels, The Seekers, The Furies, The Titans, The Warriors, The Lawless, and The Americans followed The Bastard), which sold an estimated 40 million-plus copies and which became a legend in the book industry. Not only did the series become one of the most successful paperback publishing enterprises in history, but the Kent saga also marked the virtual birth of a new and sustaining form of popular fiction—the paperback original, multivolumed, continuing-character, generation-spanning, romantic-historical family saga.
Jakes followed the dazzling success of the Kent saga with another series that took up what seemed permanent residence on the bestseller lists, the North and South Trilogy. These novels (North and South, 1982; Love and War, 1984; Heaven and Hell, 1987) covered the antebellum period, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction era in two families, one Southern, the other Northern. The first two novels were adapted for a pair of highly successful television miniseries.
The stories in this collection, covering as they do all of John Jakes’s writing career, from the 1950s to the present day, form an excellent representation not only of the author’s devotion to the timeless American West but of his unpretentious description of himself as a writer-craftsman aiming for the mass market with a singleness of purpose: to entertain.