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.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Western, September 1951

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover art is by George Rozen, who has become one of my favorite Western pulp cover artists even though he’s probably best remembered for his covers on various issues of THE SHADOW.

I don’t know anything about Alexander Wallace except that he produced about three dozen stories for various pulps, mostly from Fiction House, between 1946 and 1954. His novelette “The White Peril” in this issue has an Indian as its protagonist, a young Crow chief called Blue Star, who has to battle a white gunrunner with plans to arm the Sioux, who are bitter enemies to the Crow. I don’t recall reading anything else by Wallace, but maybe I should because the writing in this one is very good. The story moves along well and I enjoyed it.

“Water Power” is a more humorous story than the others I’ve read by Ed La Vanway. It’s about a water witcher using a divining rod to head off a war between a cattle baron and some sodbusters. It’s pretty lightweight but okay reading.

Joseph Chadwick has become one of my favorite hardboiled Western authors. His novelette “Home to Boot Hill” features a first-person narrator, sort of unusual for Westerns of this era, a former Texas Ranger who fears he’s gone gun-shy. But he returns home to New Mexico anyway to help his old flame (who is now married) fight off attempts by the local cattle baron (yeah, another of those pesky cattle barons) to force her off her ranch. Nice gritty action and an offbeat protagonist make this one work all the way around. I liked it a lot.

Next up is the novelette “The Saddle Pards at Buzzard Butte”, an entry in a series I usually skip, Swap and Whopper by Syl MacDowell. These are slapstick comedy Westerns starring a couple of hapless saddle tramps, Swap Bootle and Whopper Whaley. (Think sort of Abbott and Costello in the contemporary West, but not quite.) I decided I was going to read this one and stick with it to the end, no matter what. And I did. It’s a bizarre concoction featuring a guitar, road construction, and a baseball game. To my surprise, I actually smiled a couple of times. MacDowell was a good writer. His more traditional Westerns are usually pretty entertaining. Although it’s not saying much, this is my favorite Swap and Whopper story so far. Will that make me go back and dig out all the ones I’ve skipped in the past? Not likely. But if I come across another one, I’ll at least give it a try.

C. William Harrison is a consistently good writer, so it’s no surprise that his short story “Granger—Draw or Die!” is an enjoyable yarn. It’s about a cowboy who gives up that life to become a farmer and his inevitable clash with the cattleman who’s his former employer. Well done, with some good characters and action.

I’m pretty sure I read H. Bedford-Jones’s novelette “Dead Man’s Boots” in the November 1936 issue of THRILLING WESTERN in which it first appeared. It’s reprinted in this issue, and since it’s been more than 20 years since I read it the first time, I tackled it again. It’s a fine story (I’m not sure Bedford-Jones was capable of writing anything else) about a gun-swift drifter riding away from trouble in the border country and right into more trouble involving a double-cross partnership between a crooked saloon owner and a cattle baron. (Lots of cattle barons in this issue.) While the plot is suitably twisty and there’s plenty of action, I’ve always felt that while Bedford-Jones’s traditional Westerns are good, they’re not quite as strong as his historical and straight adventure yarns. “Dead Man’s Boots” is a prime example of that. There’s nothing wrong with it except that it reads like the sort of story that dozens of other Western pulpsters could have written just as well. Maybe that’s holding HB-J to a higher standard than I should, I don’t know, but that’s the way this story struck me.

I always enjoy Ray Gaulden’s work, too. His short story in this issue, “Boom Town Trouble-Shooter” is a mining story involving a boom town (no surprise there, considering the title) and yet another crooked saloon owner. Gaulden packs quite a bit of plot and action into a story of less than 10 pages and does a good job of it.

Ernest Haycox’s short story “Skirmish at Dry Fork” is a reprint from the July 25, 1942 issue of the slick magazine COLLIER’S. But it’s right at home in THRILLING WESTERN, as well. It’s about a group of cavalry troopers who visit a town for a celebration on payday and their inevitable clash with a bunch of cowboys leading to a saloon brawl. Then a young soldier falls for one of the soiled doves who works in the saloon, leading to more trouble. Since this is an Ernest Haycox story, you know it’s well-written, and while Haycox’s work sometimes leaves me a little cold, I really liked this one. Some nice action and very good characters and a few poignant touches make it work really well.

“Six-Gun Specter” is a short story bylined Johanas L. Bouma, rather than the more common J.L. Bouma. It’s a tale about a young man with two outlaw brothers who’s trying to escape his family’s shady past. A stagecoach robbery and a beautiful young woman prove to be turning points for him. This is a pretty good story marred by a very rushed ending.

Robert Ferguson is the author of “Medicine”, a short story about an Apache attack on an isolated ranch in Arizona. Ferguson published only a handful of stories. This is the only one I’ve read, and I didn’t like it at all. Didn’t care for the writing, didn’t like the characters, and almost didn’t finish it. That happens sometimes. Might’ve just been me.

Overall, I’d say this is an above-average issue of THRILLING WESTERN, based on the good cover by George Rozen, the stories by Ernest Haycox, Joseph Chadwick, and Alexander Wallace, and the offbeat elements in some of the other stories. And I even kind of enjoyed the Swap and Whopper yarn! Maybe I will check out some of the others in the series.