MY PERSONAL WEST—JACQUIE ROGERS

MY PERSONAL WEST

JACQUIE ROGERS

Six-Gun Justice asked a posse of contemporary western scribes why it is they write about The West, and what qualities of history, culture, or geography inspire them to spin yarns set west of the 100th meridian.

Jacquie Rogers lives in the Seattle suburbs with her husband, who is more easily herded than her cat, which isn't saying much. She's a former programmer, deli clerk, campaign manager, and readaholic. She writes historical and contemporary western romance. Here is her answer...

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So many people and events shape our lives.  Sometimes its hard to put my finger on why some things interest me and some things just don't.  The Old West doesn't just interest me, it fascinates me. I'm a bit obsessed, actually.

To harken back (ahem, mumble-mumble) years to my childhood in Owyhee County, Idaho, where it was (and still is) a wonderful place for a kid to grow up. My parents owned a farm. We milked around 150 head of Holsteins and grew wheat, barley, sugar beets, silage corn, and alfalfa. I had a magic magnifying mind right from the get-go. Why couldn't we live on a ranch? Why couldn't we have spring roundups?

Ah, I wanted a horse in the worst way. Finally, the Christmas when I was six, my dad bought me a Shetland pony. Before that, I thought he loved me, but giving me a horse possessed of the very devil, well, I had my doubts. The pony's name was Smokey.  He was what they call a proud gelding, a condition where the castration gets rid of all the baby-makins, but not the hormone factory.

You make the best of things, though, and Smokey grudgingly trudged all over every inch of Graveyard Point, a hill about a mile and a half from our place.  My riding partner was my step-aunt (only two years older than me), and what a sight we made when she rode her thoroughbred named I-Pass with Smokey trotting along behind, me pulling leather. You see, Smokey was so fat the saddle, no matter how tightly cinched, rolled from side to side about 30º each way. It was all I could do to stay upright.

Smokey and I did have a few adventure. One time, the danged cows had wandered clear to the other end of the dairy herds pasture, which was a half mile long, right about milking time. It was my job to fetch them. I was probably about eight years old, when one day, I got this bright idea to drive them in on my trusty steed. I would be riding on the range just like my cousins. So I saddled up Smokey, and away we went 

Two things: 1) The pasture was fenced with barbed wire (pronounced bob war) and it was electric; and 2) The pasture was being irrigated that day.

Those Holsteins simply werent impressed with Smokey and me. I yipped and hollered. I waved my rope. I rode Smokey right up, head to head. Not really, because those cows stood about a foot taller than my pony. Speaking of heads, not a one of them even raised her head. They just kept chomping along, ignoring us.

Back at the barn, Dad, helpful man that he was, saw my horse and I were having some difficulty, so he cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed, sboss! Right then those evil cows finally stopped grazing, because they now knew it was dinner time, and they took off for the barn. 

This was good, except by then, I'd given up and was riding back to the barn. When you see 150 critters bigger than you and the horse, it strikes fear in an eight-year-old's heart. I kicked old Smokey into a trot (easier said than done), but for some reason, those stupid cows started chasing my stupid horse. Smokey picked up to a gallop (probably the first time ever), tossing me from side to side on his roly-poly hide. He took off for the fence, running along it as fast as his stubby legs would go.

Remember that barbed wire?  Just as Smokey got there, splashing water six feet in the air and soaking us both, the saddle slipped toward the fence side. I knew I was gonna die.  

Smokey galloped along the fence about a sixteenth of an inch away. I was about to be cut to ribbons and electrocuted to boot. I had to fling my left leg over to the right and ride sidesaddle. Then the saddle slipped some more, racing by the sharp barbs about an inch from my nose.

I finally made it to the barn, the pony's sides heaving, me in dire need of a stiff shot of Jack Daniels. Dad laughed so hard, his eyes were teary. Smokey and I had failed Cowpunching 101.

MY PERSONAL WEST—GARY MARTIN DOBBS

MY PERSONAL WEST

GARY MARTIN DOBBS

Six-Gun Justice asked a posse of contemporary western scribes why it is they write about The West. What qualities of history, culture, or geography inspire them to spin yarns set west of the 100th meridian?

Here is the answer from Western wordslinger Gary Martin Dobbs...

The West is as much a dream as a reality. It is a vast and mythic place—called a dream landscape by Kiowa poet, Scott Momaday—the West belongs to each and every one of us, regardless of where we were born. For the West, to my mind, is not so much about a geographical position but more about people—people like you and me—for it was ordinary people living in extraordinary times that populated the West.

The West has always played a big part in my life. It’s always there in the back of my mind, calling me, taunting me, seducing me with its promises. It is something that has always appealed to me. I wouldn’t give spit for New York or any of those big cities, but put me out in the wilderness beneath a star studded sky and I’m Heaven. 

At first it was the movies that introduced me—snotty nosed British kid that I was—to the West and from there it was the novels of the likes of Louis L’amour and Max Brand. Later still, I became infatuated with the darkly surreal westerns of fellow Brit George G. Gilman. Throughout my youth I shared my love of westerns with my grandfather, the real Jack Martin, and we would pass books back and forth or watch the movies, particularly those of John Wayne, together.

These days I write western novels so the West has always been a big part of my life and will continue to be so until I’m dragged to Boot Hill myself. But it’s more than the West—it’s America itself. Now I know the country sometimes takes some flak, there are those who claim the US is nothing more than an aggressive giant, but I don’t swallow that at all. I love the ideals America was built upon and the way the constitution continues to protect Americans from the excesses of government. To me the word America is synonymous with the word freedom and the beating heart of the country is still the West—A romantic view maybe, but it’s my view, and I've always been an incurable romantic.

Those names—Arkansas, Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Bitter-Creek Gulch—they have a certain poetry about them. They roll off the tongue and to me, the mere mention of these places conjures up feelings of excitement. To me the West is magical and will always be as it was before the frontier was closed—the hills are still bursting full of gold, the rivers and streams run bright and clear, the plains stretch out unspoilt as far as the eye can see and you can have a fist fight without having your DNA taken, processed and then stored in the database of some shadowy governmental department.

The West—there’s a promise there. The West has always been full of promise. So, God bless America. God bless the West.

MY PERSONAL WEST—MEAN PETE BRANDVOLD

MY PERSONAL WEST

MEAN PETE BRANDVOLD

Fill a stein and grab a bloody haunch! That, in a heraldic nutshell, is my approach to writing. Simple as a Zen painting and elemental as a pissed-off bobcat.

In other words, when I pour that first cup of morning mud thick enough to float a lumber drey, wrestle onto the floor amongst my snarling curs, and pick up my Macbook Pro which I prop atop my knees while said curs cozy up against my ribs and growl themselves into rabbit-rending dreams—yes, I write on the floor, close to the beasts and cold, hard earth!—I do not pad meekly but bull headlong into that netherworld of my own fevered conjurings of wild-assed adventure.

I throw my head back and bellow as loudly as I can—albeit to myself, so as not to arouse the carrion eaters—“Fill a stein, merry listeners. Pull up a cold rock by my hot fire, grab a bloody haunch of roasting venison, and prick up your ers for the story I'm about to sing.” Unless you’re trying to be Agatha Christie, that’s really the only way to do it.

Why whimper?  Whimpering writers cause whimpering readers. Admittedly, as on most subjects, I have narrow views on writing and literature. I think a story, whether it be short or long, should be a little wild and scary, sort of like the tattooed, Harley-riding jake your parents live in dread of your sister marrying. It should blow some cigarette smoke in our faces, flex its ghastly biceps, make us gasp in shock and giggle in delighted horror at the cheerio it just spun in our driveways.

Not that good fiction—I ain’t so looney as to say I write anything close to lit-ra-chah—shouldn’t also be thoughtful and reflect on our place in the cold, lonely universe in which there may or may not be a god and a reason for our being here enduring all the bullshit.

But it should also entertain the bejesus out of us. Cause our hearts to race.Interrupt our sleep with bizarrely vivid dreams. It should cause us to daydream if for just a few minutes each week in our office cubicles of telling the boss to stick it in her ear, we’re joining a carnival.

As a writer of relatively traditionalists—I really hate that word, because I don’t see myself as traditional at all—westerns, I write to entertain. But I got into this racket after beating a circuitous path through several improbable canyons.

I grew up wanting to be the Hemingway of North Dakota. Or at least the John Updike of the Great Plains. I loved poetry, Tolstoy, and Guy de Maupaussant. I was an English major at the University of North Dakota and finagled a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona with a passel of what one would call 'literary' short stories.

They weren’t half bad, either. One was published in a university quarterly and even anthologized later, and though it first appeared nearly twenty-five years ago now, I've recently received letters about it.

I say they weren’t half-bad, but I don’t think I could revisit even the best of them now without falling asleep. And that’s how I feel about most of the mainstream literature, and even most of the genre fiction, sorry to say, that is published today.  It puts me to sleep. And that’s a bad, bad thing. Because writing—even literary writing—should entertain or at least send some blood to our organs.

As a wide-eyed young English major fresh off the lonely prairie and wanting to read and write adventurous things, tales that made me feel eager and vibrant, I found myself nodding off over most of the novels I was assigned in college. There were many I liked, even some that inspired me.  

Moby Dick and the old Icelandic sagas, for instance—The first was a wonderful if sometimes slow-moving and overly detailed story of one man’s war against the universe; the latter yarns were, as Michael Dirda described them in his Barnes and Noble.com review of one of my old favorites, The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson, “spaghetti westerns with swords—only more thrilling.” But so many more I slogged through, blubbering.  You can take Faulkner and George Eliot, and throw them in the same river.

After reading reams of those colorless and only marginally meaningful stories in the small magazines, I was deluded into thinking that that was the kind of stuff I needed to write to be taken seriously. That good writing had to be slowly plotted, overly ponderous, filled with self-conscious devices, and downright boring.

I was among those who sneered at anything that smacked of unheeled entertainment. Even at those I’d grown up reading, those wonderful storytellers who’d first inspired me to spin my own yarns all those years ago on the prairie. Writers like Alexandre Dumas, Rafael Sabatini (Captain Blood!), Ray Bradbury (The Illustrated Man), Jack Williamson, Leigh Brackett, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Max Brand, C.L. Moore, Robert E. Howard, H. Ryder Haggard, and countless others of the pulp variety. Good, old-fashioned entertainment.

But wait a damn minute—isn’t that the stuff that inspired us to sing around our cave-mouth campfires all those eons ago in the first place? Entertainment? The stuff that made us laugh, cry, scream, dribble down our legs?  That set the boys wrestling, the damsels dancing, and the dogs howling?

Now, I’m not saying it all has to be pulp. Or that when I sit down on the floor with my savage woolies to write my own brand of western entertainment that I don’t try to include more than just thundering .45’s, bulging corsets, and fisticuffs—Not at all.

I think a story should entertain first and foremost.  But it should also cause us to reflect, however briefly and genuinely, without being maudlin, on what it’s like to be humans in a world that is largely unknown and unknowable to us, and filled with tragedy and suffering.

If we genre writers draw our characters well, make them more than just types, but give them flesh and blood and their own unique way of speaking and living and loving, and give a little voice now and then to our own cares, our own angst, then readers will naturally find the depth that is there in the yarn between the shootouts and mattress dances, the depth that reflects the writer and the larger world that we and our tales grow out of. Writers who do that, specifically western writers who do that--are my favorites of the genre.

H.A. DeRosso does that. Just read his novel .44 and his novella The Bounty Hunter, and tell me he doesn’t. Often, T.V. Olson does it, too. Others include Dean Owen,  Merle Constiner, Donald Hamilton, Giles Lutz, and Giles Tippette. My good friend Kit Prate does it as well.  See her wild and sexy Hot Night in Purgatory (as by Steve Travis) as well as Jason Kilkenny’s Gun. You’ll never find more harrowing violence or deeper, more compelling western characters. Jack Vance and C.L. Moore do it in western’s brother genre, science fiction.

What about Louis L’Amour? I don’t care for the jake. He started out as a fair to middlin’ pulp writer and then, taking himself too seriously, became a pompous blowhard. Oh, he was all right when I was fresh from swaddling clothes and before I discovered better, more compelling western scribes like those I listed above, and Mickey Spillane.

But to me he’s the western equivalent of Agathie Christie. His heroes are wooden and sexless. His women are even more wooden and sexless. His plots are as bland as Bonanza, and they rely too heavily on coincidence and the infallibility and moral impeccability of his heroes. And the biggest sin of all—they’re bloodless!

I like sex and violence in my yarns. Lots of it. Interspersed with the tender moments, mind you. But I like the stuff that makes my eyes pop and my loins happy.  I’ll take a hearty dose in every chapter, please! If I want to be put to sleep, I’ll take a pill. That’s just who I am.

I’m sorry if I’ve offended you, caused you to shake your heads and stitch your brows in reproof. Or even to slam my books closed with the ear-splitting blam! of a .44 triggered in the tight confines of a whore’s crib. On second thought, I’m not sorry. Not a bit.

Evoking a visceral response is what I set out to do. And I suggest if you’re trying to write, you do the same thing. Kick off your slippers and go barefoot. Add a little firewater to your mud. Crowd in amongst the beasts and shout at the tops of your wicked lungs: “Fill a stein and grab a bloody haunch!”

MY PERSONAL WEST—WAYNE D. DUNDEE

MY PERSONAL WEST
WAYNE D. DUNDEE

Like most of my generation born and raised somewhere back East (which I loosely consider to be places east of the Missouri River), my initial perceptions of The West—mainly the mythical Old West—came from movies and the popular TV shows of the 50s and 60s.

I grew up in northern Illinois/southern Wisconsin—my dad tended to move us around a lot—and at our house—wherever it happened to be—back in those pre-cable days, what we watched on television was often dependent on what the antenna reception allowed us to watch. Nevertheless, we enjoyed a fairly steady stream of shows like Wyatt Earp, Have Gun Will Travel, The Rifleman, Wagon Train, etc.

Cheyenne was the universal favorite, along with the rest of the Warner Bros. lineup—Lawman, Bronco, Sugarfoot, Maverick. And, of course, Gunsmoke was never to be missed, even if it meant somebody (guess who) had to go outside and twist the antenna pole until the reception was clear, or at least discernable.

Although I never found either Roy Rogers or Gene Autry particularly appealing, I also watched a lot of the more kid-oriented fare such as The Lone Ranger, Buffalo Bill Jr., The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, Fury, and (one of my all-time favorites) The Range Rider. Plus, on Saturday and Sunday afternoons you could always find a variety of Sagebrush Theater-type shows presenting old black-and-white Westerns from the 30s and early 40s with stars like Buster Crabbe, Johnny Mack Brown, Tex Ritter, Tom Mix, Ken Maynard, and so forth—including The Three Mesquiteers series with a very young John Wayne as Stony Brooke.

Speaking of Wayne, both of my parents were big John Wayne fans, so a Duke movie (either on the tube or at the local theater) seldom went unseen. After I started being allowed to go to movies without my parents, I first held hands with a girl during The Horse Soldiers (1959) and stole my first kiss during North To Alaska (1960). I don’t know if those pre-teen milestones factored into my ongoing fondness for either John Wayne movies or Western movies in general, but the recollection sort of snuck in as I was writing this. At any rate, John Wayne westerns have always been (and remain) at the top of my favorites list.

As far as Western books that helped shape my perceptions of The West—and subsequently influenced my own writing in the genre—in grade school I was reading a lot of Whitman Book tie-ins to many of the aforementioned TV shows. By high school I’d begun reading more grown-up fare to be found in paperbacks off the drug store spin racks—Louis L’Amour (naturally) and others.

My all-time favorites from that period were Gordon D. Shireffs and Robert MacLeod. I also liked John Benteen’s Fargo series as well as Jory Sherman’s Gunn books. A little later, when I first toyed with the idea of maybe writing some Westerns myself, I discovered T.V. Olsen and he totally blew me away.

In summary, for the first fifty years of my life, my sense of The West was primarily of the Old West, as I imagined it based on the influences of the aforementioned TV shows, movies, and books.

Prior to 1998, other than two or three business flights to L.A. and a handful of personal excursions into eastern Iowa, I’d never been west of the Mississippi River. In ’98, however, the Illinois-based company with which I’d been employed for many years offered me the opportunity to assume a managerial role at one of their outlying facilities in Ogallala, Nebraska. I took it for a lot of sound, mature, career-oriented reasons—but I also took it because (as both I and my beloved wife understood all too well) the never-quite-grown-up little kid in me who’d devoured all those Western movies and TV shows and books was excited as hell for the chance to go West.

Upon visiting Ogallala and the surrounding area prior to officially accepting the job, I stood in wagon ruts of the Oregon Trail, I saw Chimney Rock, I saw the Rocky Mountains in neighboring Colorado, I visited sites where Pony Express stations once stood, and I got my first look at the stark, endless, magnificent Nebraska Sandhills. I was hooked—here was where I belonged.

During that initial visit, I began to feel The West on a first-hand basis. The vastness of the land, the sweep of the big sky unencumbered by trees and tall buildings that only left slices of its grandeur to be appreciated. The simplicity and work ethic and frontier spirit is still very much alive in the people at the hinge of the panhandle and beyond. It was all there. I felt it immediately and in the weeks and months that followed, as I traveled and explored and thirstily drank in everything I possibly could about my new surroundings, I felt it more and more.

In subsequent years, as my travels and explorations have taken me throughout central and northwest Nebraska as well as into South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Kansas, I’ve been able to combine my earlier perceptions/imaginings about the historical/mythical West with the land and people of the West as I’ve now personally seen it. It is, simply, great.

I’ve been places and seen and done things that were boyhood dreams I never really expected to fulfill. Becoming a published author in the Western genre is among them. Having gained some insight into the current West and its people by virtue of living here now for over a dozen years, I hope my experiences from that time and the added perceptions they hopefully have given me, show in my writing.

The West is bigger, grander, wilder—and its people, past and present, grittier and more spirited—than anyone can fully encompass or capture on paper or film. But some of us keep trying. We stand in awe, but we try. And for those who’ve never walked the land or gone down its trails, we hope we’ve managed to successfully convey some sense of that wonderful wildness.

Wayne D. Dundee is the author of nearly four dozen novels and over thirty short stories. Most of his early work was in the crime/mystery genre and featured his PI protagonist, Joe Hannibal. Titles in the Hannibal series have been translated into several languages and nominated for an Edgar, an Anthony, and six Shamus Awards. Dundee is also the founder and original editor of Hardboiled Magazine.

In the past decade he has also become very active in the Western genre. His work in this area has been honored with six Peacemaker Awards from the Western Fictioneers writers' organization.

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MY PERSONAL WEST—CHARLES ALLEN GRAMLICH

MY PERSONAL WEST

CHARLES ALLEN GRAMLICH

Six-Gun Justice asked a posse of contemporary western scribes why it is they write about The West. What qualities of history, culture, or geography inspire them to spin yarns set west of the 100th meridian. The answer from award-winning author Charles Allen Gramlich (aka: Tyler Boone) is below...

From a young age I was a reader, and westerns, particularly Louis L’Amour westerns, were a mainstay of my diet. L’Amour was good with his history but his work had an unintended side effect on me. Until I was almost fifteen years old my idea of the West was as existing out there, meaning Texas, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado. I didn’t know how close the real west was to my backyard.

Fort Smith, Arkansas, less than thirty miles from my hometown of Charleston, Arkansas, was a major hub for western travel during the period between 1817 and 1896. The Trail of Tears ended at Fort Smith, just before the Cherokee and many other Native Americans crossed the river into what was then called the Oklahoma Territory. There’s still an historic site overlooking the original Fort Smith where the Trail ended.

The Oklahoma Territory was more wild and wooly than Tombstone or Dodge City in its day, and the court that had to enforce the laws in the Territory was centered at Fort Smith. Between 1873 and 1896, Eighty-six men were hung on the gallows in Fort Smith, seventy-nine under the reign of Judge Isaac Charles Parker, known as the Hanging Judge. Parker often hung five or six men at a time. He tried to hang a total of 160 (four of them women), but for various reasons only managed to get seventy-nine. I’ve seen the reconstruction of the gallows in Fort Smith, at the museum there, and even in the bright sunlight of over a century later it still gives you a chill.

Some of the outlaws hung in Fort Smith back in the day included the notorious Crawford Goldsby (better known as Cherokee Bill), who rode with the Cook Gang and was said to have murdered seven people. The deserter William Finch was hung there, after he killed two soldiers who were bringing him to trial for desertion. And Calvin James had his neck stretched in Fort Smith after he killed a traveling companion for four gallons of whiskey. On July 1, 1896, the entire Rufus Buck gang was hung together after going on a wild spree of murder and rape. Considering the reputation of the jail in Fort Smith, which was known as Hell on the Border, you have to wonder if some of the condemned were ready to go to the gallows rather than stay in that jail. Cherokee Bill was said to have remarked on his way to the rope, This is about as good a day to die as any.

Belle Starr lived in the Oklahoma Territory for some time, and once appeared before Judge Parker. She and her husband, Sam Starr, a Cherokee, were found guilty of horse theft and Belle spent nine months in prison for it. That may well have been the least of Belle’s crimes. In 1889, Belle was ambushed and killed with a shotgun while out riding in the Territory. The crime was never solved, although many suspected her son. Belle’s daughter was Pearl Starr, who was also the daughter of Cole Younger.

It’s amazing how little many of us know about the history of the places where we live. I passed quite a few years before I understood that the Old West was all around me right there in Arkansas. Only a thin veil of time separated me from that world, a veil that history and my own imagination could pull aside for me.

Charles Gramlich has an M.A. and PhD in Experimental Psychology. He is an ex-member of REHupa, the Robert E. Howard United Press Association, and is an Editor of The Dark Man, the Journal of Robert E. Howard Studies. Written under the pen name, Tyler Boone, his recent western novel, The Scarred One, has garnered solid five-star Amazon reviews.

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CONTRIBUTOR ~ RICHARD PROSCH