Category Archives: Historical Westerns

Westerns based on true historical events

Cowboys Don’t Cry

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by Charles “Red” Berry

a Recommended Novel by The DeepeningFor those who like historically based novels based on true life, here’s one by a well-respected man who, in his youth, lived the life, then lived just long enough to tell about it. Readers and reviewers both agree that this is a novel worthy of your attention. –D. L. Keur, The Deepening

AVAILABLE AT UNMPress & AMAZON.COM

ABOUT THIS HISTORICAL NOVEL

Scout McBride was born into ranching life in the West Texas desert outside El Paso. He learned to ride a horse almost before he could walk, grew up communicating with animals around the harsh land, and spoke Spanish with his first friend, a boy from Mexico. It was a tough environment for one so young and as Scout follows a rugged path to becoming a man, he knows that to emulate the men he admires, he must keep one thing in mind: Cowboys don’t cry.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charles “Red” Berry (1933–2007) was an attorney in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for thirty-seven years. Following his retirement from law practice in 2002, Berry pursued his passion for creative writing and completed Cowboys Don’t Cry a few years before his death. He proudly defined the tale as a first novel infused with autobiographical touches

Doc – Mary Doria Russell: Book Review

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Doc is somewhat deceptively presented as a mystery – the violent death of a young mixed-race boy in a stable fire in frontier Dodge City during the boom years of the long-trail cattle drives. The solution to the mystery of the murder of John Horse Sanders involves the historical characters of Doc Holliday, gunslinging dentist and gambler, and frontier marshal Wyatt Earp in their early-pre dime-novel fame days. But that is not what Doc is really about. The murder mystery is an afterthought, a minor theme running through an exploration of characters in a fleeting but special time and in a unique and transitory moment. That would be Dodge City, at the height of the post-Civil War cattle boom, when endless herds of long-horned cattle walked the long way from Texas to wherever location the Union Pacific railhead had gotten to, and the herds of wild cattle and wilder young men on a spree after months of horseback drudgery and boredom hadn’t incensed the heck out of the sober local town fathers and their wives.

Doc, formally John Henry Holliday is a beautifully drawn and heartbreaking character, a southern aristocrat, exiled by his own failing health to the western prairies, trying to practice by turns the crafts that he loves, and is fairly skilled at: dentistry and card-dealing. By turns hot-tempered and melancholy – he is doomed to die painfully of the same tuberculosis that killed his mother and he knows it – that is, if drinking and gunfights don’t get to him first. He cares and doesn’t – but through it all, he is loyal above all to his friends, the Earp brothers, Wyatt, Morgan, Virgil and James. His companion and fellow-gambler, Kate Harony – the daughter of a Hungarian aristocrat and revolutionary fallen on hard times loves and is exasperated by him in equal measure. They move in the circle of what passes for society in rowdy, noisy, and occasionally violent Dodge City; a society of saloon-keepers, gamblers, whores and exiles . . . most particularly exiles. Everyone is exiled from those places which formed them, from Doc himself, to the Chinese laundry owner, Jau. None of them are particularly fond of Dodge City, practically all of the characters are haunted by memories of other places, other times – but it is where they have come to make a living, or perhaps even their fortune. Some of these characters are real, some not: the conscientious and dedicated Wyatt, and his rather naive younger brother Morgan, the traveling Jesuit priest – the former Prince von Augensperg, the vaudeville comedian Eddie Foy, Bessie Earp, who with her husband James manages a brothel, the tale-spinning Bat Masterson – all of whom, historically real or not, are delineated with sympathy and affection by the author. Their lives, their every-day business, the work that they do, the conversations they have with each other, those amusements and mundane concerns are made intensely real, and interesting on their own. If the expected ‘Western’ is a movie set, of false front storefronts along a dusty street, and decorated with a few suitable props – Doc brings you the real-life community, the rooms behind the façade and the real people who lived in them, once upon a time in the west.

“Doc was a dentist – not a lawman or an assassin, whom necessity had made a gambler; a gentleman whom disease had made a frontier vagabond; a philosopher whom life had made a caustic wit; a long lean ash-blond fellow nearly dead with consumption, and at the same time the most skillful gambler and the nerviest, speediest, deadliest man with a six-gun that I ever knew.” – Wyatt Earp, in an interview c.1896

West to the Sun – T.G. Good: Book Review

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It is a good omen for the cover of a book intended to tell the story of the great emigrant trails across the far western frontier, to feature an illustration of a covered wagon pulled by the appropriate numbers of the appropriate draft animal. The cover art for all too many works of fiction about the California/Oregon trails appear to feature a huge covered wagon hitched to two horses, an arrangement as impossible in practice as it was historically inaccurate. The unvarnished fact was that most emigrants crossing to California or Oregon prior to the Civil War hauled their worldly goods there in relatively small wagons, pulled by at least three yoke of draft oxen – for it was a brutally wearing journey, where there was often not much of a road at all, and horses were too fragile and expensive to serve as team animals. Having written my own novel about a wagon-train party, venturing to California in the early years, I can attest that having an accurate cover is a promising start for readers hoping to learn more about the wagon-train emigrants.

This young-adult historical  follows the Symons family – father Jedediah, mother Mary, eleven-year old Jeremiah, little sister Bitsy and an assortment of old friends and new-made acquaintances, as they leave their farm in Tennessee and take to the trail for Oregon. They do so with the advice of Jedediah’s brother Peter, a knowledgeable veteran of the far west, in the days when everything west of the Mississippi-Missouri was a trackless wilderness. In fact, the character of Uncle Peter affords a graceful means of acquainting young Jeremiah and his family with many of the old mountain men, such as Jim Bridger, and of relaying bits of western lore, and practical wisdom of the trail. The family is also religiously devout, in a way that is true to the historical record, although displaying a more 20th century degree of tolerance towards other faiths.

In a fairly straight-forward way, this account fills in many little details of the wagon-train pioneer’s journey: the politicking which went on, all along the trail as bands of travelers elected leaders, found fault with them and elected new leaders, dealt with lawbreakers, split apart into more congenial group and negotiated a safe passage for their families and wagons with potentially hostile Indians. “West to the Sun” is also a full and heartbreaking account of fatalities from accident and disease encountered by the Symons party. It was a rare wagon party which did not leave a member, or sometimes several members of it behind, in a lonely and unmarked grave along the Platte or the Sweetwater.

I would criticize this book on only one account, which would be that the narrative voice sounds a little too modern, occasionally dropping into 20th century turns of speech which struck me as more than a little jarring. This would have been a quite satisfactory read if Jeremiah had sounded a little more like a 19th century ‘voice’; if his narration sounded more like Tom Sawyer’s or Huck Finn’s – or even Jaimie McPheeters.