Dead Shot Available in One Week

 My first Western, Dead Shot: The Memoir of Walter Ferguson, Soldier, Marshal, Bootlegger becomes available next Friday, November 22. This date was chosen as a courtesy to my dozens of readers, as I know the holidays are a busy time and you might like to get this order off your plate before Thanksgiving makes life hectic. (Canadian readers should ignore the Thanksgiving part. Yours has come and gone. I hope you had a good one.)

Over the past weeks I’ve posted about how and why I wrote Dead Shot,. Today I thought I’d talk a little about why Westerns matter at all, since the core of the book, Walt’s time on the range, took place 120 – 150 years ago.

Western stories – in particular Western movies – have shaped American culture and politics since their advent. The image of the lone cowboy riding into town to right injustice has become so iconic a lot of people in this country – too many, frankly – think that’s how things were and, even worse, should be today. To them, everyone should not only have the right to carry a gun, but should carry one. They believe that’s what it takes to be safe in a world far less dangerous than they would have you believe.

The people who lived on the frontier, where guns were often a necessity, would have liked nothing better than to see fewer of them. Rifles and shotguns were critical for subsistence hunting in a land where the closest meat market might be two days’ ride with no guarantee the meat purchased wasn’t already half spoiled.

Guns were also needed for personal protection. The frontier was a place where a farmer’s wife could watch him disappear over the horizon for a simple run into town for supplies with no assurance she’d ever see him again, no way to check on him, and no way to notify anyone if he didn’t return. Pa would be wise to arm himself on the way to and from town, even if he left the gun in the wagon while he was there.

Why would he leave the gun in the wagon? Because a lot of towns, maybe even most of them, eventually had ordinances that prohibited carrying firearms inside the town limits. People checked their guns the same way we check our coats now. The folks in those towns were painfully aware of the misery caused by every swinging dick in town coming heeled.

That element isn’t very romantic, though, so it’s often overlooked, especially in what I call the good haircut Westerns of the 30s through most of the 60s. You know what I mean: men came into town after three weeks on the range with their hair cut and combed, with maybe a day’s growth of beard. That right there should have been a tip-off that the image about to be conveyed would be inaccurate, no matter how compelling the story.

(I make two exceptions to the above rule: Shane and the original The Magnificent Seven. The grooming in both is still pretty good, but the depictions of the lives lived are also unvarnished.)

The turning point came with The Wild Bunch; Westerns would never be the same after Sam Peckinpaugh’s masterpiece. Clint Eastwood then became virtual curator of the genre with a series of classics, including The Outlaw Josie Wales, High Plains Drifter,  and his Western tour-de-force, Unforgiven.

There were others. Off the top of my head Young Guns, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Appaloosa, Open Range and especially Monte Walsh worked overtime to dispel the image built up over the previous forty years. On television, Lonesome Dove stands alone. Some were better than others. None glamorized the West, though they often displayed the heroism required to survive on the frontier.

Walt Ferguson’s story includes many scenes based on actual events. Action scenes that might lead one to believe this is just another shoot-em-up. I hope that’s not the general takeaway. I wrote the book to be entertaining, but I also wanted to show that Walt’s exploits were only necessary because the frontier was such a dangerous place.

One last excerpt from the book sums up Wat’s feelings toward his time on the frontier. The “current economic situation” he refers to is the Great Depression.

The frontier is gone now and will never return. That is as it should be, and while I miss it, I do not yearn for its renaissance. The world can never remain too constant or it will become stagnant, and a stagnant pool cannot sustain life except maybe mosquitoes and Lord knows we need no more of them.

What I do not speak much of, and why I am not sorry the frontier is gone forever, are the hardships. As bad as things are during the current economic situation, people who were not there have no idea of the depredations and suffering endured by those who made the trip west when the prairie had never felt a plow blade and was run by Indians. Even without the Indians it was a dangerous and unforgiving place where starvation and disease were constant threats. A relatively minor injury, easily treated by a doctor today, could prevent a man from working and cast his family into ruin.

My heart went out to the homesteaders who broke their backs and buried their children in small family plots. They had no thoughts of riches, only of a better life than the one they left. Maybe to give their children a leg up. They linger across the prairie in unmarked graves covered with stone to keep the scavengers away. The men like me who wore guns get all the attention nowadays but those unnamed millions deserve the credit. I could never have done what any of them did.