Review: Apache Crossing - Will Ermine (Harry Sinclair Drago)

I admit, one reason I bought this book is because of the great Sam Cherry cover, which first appeared on the August 1949 issue of the pulp GIANT WESTERN. But also, I knew that Will Ermine, the author of APACHE CROSSING, was really Harry Sinclair Drago, a prolific and popular author of Western stories and novels under his own name as well as his best-known pseudonym Bliss Lomax, in addition to the novels he wrote as Will Ermine. I’ve read Drago’s work numerous times in the past and always enjoyed it, so I expected to like APACHE CROSSING.

The protagonist is a young cowboy named Pat Ritchie who breaks his leg while on a cattle drive through Indian Territory. His outfit has to leave him behind, and he winds up recuperating while staying with a gang of mostly sympathetic outlaws led by a frontier philosopher known as Little Bill Guthrie. Little Bill knows that Pat is tempted to remain with the gang once his leg is healed, but the boss outlaw doesn’t want the young cowboy to start riding the owlhoot trail. He tries to send Pat away, but a chance for a lucrative bank robbery comes up and the rest of the gang wants to use Pat to hold some horses in reserve for the getaway. He wouldn’t participate in the actual holdup, but in the eyes of the law he would still be an outlaw.

Of course, things don’t go as planned. There’s a big shootout in town and the gang has to scatter. Pat makes his way to Arizona, goes to work on a ranch there, falls in love with the rancher’s beautiful daughter, and hopes that his shady past will never catch up to him. I think we all know how that’s going to turn out. Throw in some rustlers plaguing the ranch, too, and you’ve got the makings of a riproaring traditional Western novel.

By the time this novel was published originally by Doubleday in 1950, Harry Sinclair Drago was already an old-timer, having started writing Westerns for the pulps in the early Twenties. Not surprisingly, that causes it to have a bit of an old-fashioned feel to it, rather than the hardboiled grittiness you find in a lot of post-war Westerns. Pat Ritchie is about as clean-cut and stalwart a hero as you’ll ever see, always trying to do the decent and honorable thing even when he’s hanging around with a bunch of owlhoots. Those outlaws, especially their leader Little Bill Guthrie, are the only characters in this book with any moral complexity. Drago’s portrayal of Little Bill is excellent. He was also a historian and produced several well-regarded volumes of Western non-fiction, and that gives his fiction a feeling of authenticity and realism.

APACHE CROSSING ambles along at a very pleasant pace with a fine mix of sympathetic characters, dastardly villains, vivid settings, and enough action to keep things interesting. I really enjoyed it, and I’m glad the cover prompted me to buy a copy. Recommended if you’re a fan of traditional Westerns.