Saturday Morning Western Pulp Revisited - Frontier Stories, Summer 1950

I’ve featured this pulp before, but now I’ve had a chance to read it, thanks to a good friend who loaned me his copy. That’s it in the scan. The cover is by Allan Anderson, I think. His horses are pretty distinctive.

The issue leads off with the novelette “Tombstones For Gringos” by Les Savage Jr. Brothers Colin and Farris Shane are traveling with their ill and dying mother, looking for a new homestead. They find a good place, but it lies in the shadow of a mountain known as El Renegado because of some tragic events a couple of hundred years earlier. It seems that a Spanish captain (Spain ruled the region then) betrayed his men for the love of a woman, fled to the mountain with her, and the rest of the company was wiped out. Now the basin that lies in the shadow of the peak is cursed. And boy, everything that happens after that seems to bear out the curse. You’ve got family members killing family members (at least three cases of it), gruesome torture, and doomed love.

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because Savage’s original version of the tale was published many years later as “The Shadow of Renegade Basin” in the Leisure paperback of the same name, which is still available from Amazon Encore. Fiction House editor Malcolm Reiss bought the manuscript in 1948, probably because Savage was one of Fiction House’s star writers by that time and he bought everything Savage sent him. Reiss must have deemed Savage’s original version unpublishable, because he sat on it for a couple of years, then did some rewrites himself and finally published it in this issue of FRONTIER STORIES.

Since I have the book with Savage’s version in it, I skimmed through it after I’d read the pulp novelette, looking for the changes Reiss made. They’re really not extensive at all. He removed one plot element that he must have felt was too offensive (given the time period, he was right) and rewrote the ending to give it at least a tiny shred of hope, rather than the bleak nihilism of Savage’s version. I hate to side with an editor over an author, but Reiss was right to do what he did. The pulp version is better. I get that Savage was trying to push the boundaries of the genre, and he successfully did so in other novels and stories, but I think this one is a misfire.

Next up is another novelette, “Wheels of Empire” by Alexander Wallace. This one is set during the 1840s, the days of the great immigrant wagon trains, and is about a clerk from Boston who goes west seeking adventure, becomes a frontiersman, and clashes with a crooked trading post owner who swindles the immigrants who visit his fort. It’s a pretty good yarn with some nice action and a thoroughly despicable villain. Wallace was a Canadian author who published several dozen Western and adventure stories in various pulps from the mid-Forties to the mid-Fifties. I’ve read a few stories by him and enjoyed all of them.

Charles Dickson wrote only a few detective and Western stories for the pulps, and I don’t know anything about him. I don’t recall ever reading anything by him until I read his short story in this issue, “Ride the River”. Like most of the stories in this pulp, it’s as much a historical yarn as a traditional Western and is set during the mountain man era. The protagonist is a young fur trapper who sets out to stop a rival from stirring up an Indian war. This is a pretty well-written story, and I enjoyed it.

“Retreat to Glory” by Norman B. Wiltsey is billed as a short story, but it’s actually an article based on history like the dozens of others Wiltsey wrote for various pulps. It’s about a group of Northern Cheyenne jumping the reservation in Indian Territory and heading north toward their homeland. The army pursues them, of course. Wiltsey does an okay job recounting a fairly sad chapter in history.

“Dance of the Grizzly” is Theodore Cutting’s only credit in the Fictionmags Index. The protagonist is a young Indian who has to face a grizzly bear in an ordeal of courage in order to win the girl he loves. Cutting throws in a few decent twists, but overall this story never really engaged my interest.

“Apache Flame” is bylined John Starr, a well-known Fiction House house-name. But there’s more to the background than that. A line on the Table of Contents page states that this novelette and the following one, “The Mountains Said No”, are copyright 1938 by Fiction House. The twist is that no stories by those titles were published in any Fiction House pulp in 1938. I even checked the issues from December 1937 and January 1939 just for the sake of thoroughness. Which leads me to believe that these two stories were published originally under other titles and with other bylines on them. There’s a story called “Apache!” by Ray Nafziger in an issue of FRONTIER STORIES from 1938, which seemed a likely suspect, but the writing in “Apache Flame” doesn’t really strike me as being Nafziger’s work. Of course, I could be wrong about that. Chances are, we’ll never know which “John Starr” actually wrote this story, but it’s a really good one featuring another mountain man protagonist, this one teaming up with some Spanish settlers who hate him in order to rescue some young women kidnapped by vengeful Apaches. It takes place in what will one day be New Mexico, another thing that made me think of Nafziger, who lived there while he was writing for the pulps. No matter who wrote it, “Apache Flame” really races along with good characters and plenty of action. This is a top-notch yarn.

Another Fiction House house-name, Wilton Hazzard, is the byline on the novelette “The Mountains Said No”, which wraps up this issue. The mountain man protagonist of this one comes across a wagon train under attack by a Pawnee war party and helps the immigrants run off the Indians, only to find that the wagons are being guided by an old enemy of his. Our hero and his crusty old sidekick wind up joining the wagon train, of course, to try to get them through safely to the gold fields in California. This is an excellent story, really well-written and with plenty of action. There’s a theory that a well-known science fiction author is behind the house-name on this one, but I don’t know if that’s true. What I do know is that “The Mountains Said No” is a fine yarn and I really enjoyed it.

Overall, this is a good issue of FRONTIER STORIES with a few disappointments mixed in, but I like that the emphasis is on buckskin-era stories rather than traditional Westerns. I haven’t read many issues of FRONTIER STORIES, but I think I’m going to have to hunt up more of them.