Robert E. Howard's Western Yarns

[finarvyn]

I love REH's westerns quite a bit, and his supernatural western stories are my favorites. I particularly liked his books The Last Ride and Vultures of Whapeton.

  

One thing that did occur to me is that if REH wrote in the 1920's and the wild west was in the 1880's (he was roughly 40 years later), that would be like an author today writing about the 1970's. Close enough in time for an author to either live through the era to be able to directly talk to folks who lived then, but far enough in time where it would feel like a historical story. That could certainly explain some of the feeling of authenticity that REH's western have, as compared to modern-day authors writing about something that was over a century ago.

[finarvyn]

I also picked up a copy of The End of the Trail but have found that the font size is smaller than I am comfortable reading.

[deuce]

Dec 3, 2016 9:10:21 GMT -5 finarvyn said:

I also picked up a copy of The End of the Trail but have found that the font size is smaller than I am comfortable reading.

Hey Fin!  Yeah, that's a good collection but the print is kinda small.  Probably the best all-around collection out there is Western Tales:

howardworks.com/westerntales.html

It has all of REH's "serious" Westerns, including his "Weird Westerns" and juvenilia/very early work.

[deuce]

The cover painting for The Riot at Bucksnort...

[deuce]

Ken Kelly's artwork for REH's The Last Ride...

[Ningauble]

The second volume of The Adventures of Breckinridge Elkins just came up for pre-order at www.rehfoundation.org/2017/03/02/pre-order-volume-2/

[deuce]

Howard's ode to John Ringold, also known as "Johnny Ringo", and best-known today from the movie, Tombstone.


John Ringold

There was a land of which he never spoke.

A girl, perhaps, but no one knew her name,

And few there were who knew from whence he came

For from his past he never raised the cloak.

No word he spake except to sneer or joke,

Or, deep in drink, to curse men, life and Fate;

Often his fierce black eyes, Hell-hot with hate,

Gleamed wolf-like through the shifting powder smoke.



His trail lay through saloon and gambling hall,

Lone, sombre devil in a barren land.

Perhaps, when drunk, he dreamed of mansions old,

Ballrooms and women, proud and fair as gold—

Trail’s-end, upon the strangest stage of all,

The sun, a lone mesquite tree and the sand.

~ REH ~

[deuce]

From John A. Dinan's The Pulp Western:


"At one time or another every pulp pro did a Western: Edgar Rice Burroughs, William Hope Hodgson, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Robert E. Howard are a few of the more famous pulp writers who turned out a western or two. Although these men wrote quality Western stories, they qualify by no stretch of the imagination as Western pulp writers.


Burroughs wrote (among others) two highly praised Westerns dealing with the Apache; and Howard, more noted for his Sword-and-Sorcery fiction, wrote some twenty-five Pecos Bill-type Westerns about a "gent" named Breckenridge Elkins, five humorous first-person Westerns reminiscent of O. Henry, and eleven others, including one which I consider nearly perfect--The Vultures. The Vultures's only shortcoming is in development of characters; but as Faust and the other Western pros knew, editors were simply not in the market for this commodity. This story, reprinted in recent years by Fictioneer Books, could make one of the best Westerns of all times. L. Sprague de Camp's biography of Howard states that he had decided at the end of his life to write only Westerns. Those Westerns Howard did complete showed the master touch.


But Howard was not a Western fiction writer. The Western pulp wordsmith was one who wrote mainly for--and earned his reputation and bread and butter in--the various Western pulp magazines."

[Char-Vell]

Today I read 3 chapters of Vultures of Wahpeton over lunch. I thought I'd read it before but apparently not.


Now I'm imagining a parallel universe version of Beyond the Black River with Steve Corcoran -vs- Comanches.

[linefacedscrivener]

"The Last Ride" was published in the October 1935 issue of Western Aces as "Boot-Hill Payoff." The story was co-authored by Robert Enders Allen, and until Glenn Lord came along, not many knew who Allen was or how he came to co-author with Howard.

The man called Allen wrote to Glenn Lord in July of 1965 (The Howard Collector Winter 1965) telling him "Yes, I am the man who also wrote under the name of Robert Enders Allen." His name was Chandler Whipple. 

Whipple explained how he and Howard had come to be co-authors: "One day Otis Kline stopped in to see me at Popular Publications, where I was then working as an editor, and asked if he couldn't try to sell something of mine that I had failed to market. I gave him 'The Last Ride'. He told me he thought he could get Bob Howard to turn it into a saleable piece, and I told him to go ahead."

Kline did, and he got it published with Western Aces, taking his agent's fee and Howard and Whipple split the rest of the sale 50-50. 

Taking a look at the letter, I went to Google Whipple to learn more about him and came across a website called Legends of Dodge City that had the yarn in a pdf version, as well as an audio version of the story. I thought I would share the link here:

worldfamousgunfighters.weebly.com/books.html

[charleshelm]

Very interesting. Thank you sir.

[hun]

Cool essay by James Reasoner on REH's Western Trail Towns:

When Robert E. Howard was growing up in Cross Plains in the 1920s, it was entirely possible that some of the older men in town might have gone on cattle drives in their youth, as the great trails from Texas to the railheads in Kansas opened up after the Civil War and changed the focus of the Lone Star State’s economy. Whether a young Bob Howard ever listened to these old cowboys spin yarns about those days, we don’t know, but he certainly might have.

J. Marvin Hunter’s classic book Trail Drivers of Texas appeared in 1927, and this volume might well have caught Howard’s interest, too, although we have no record of him ever reading it.

What we do know, however, is that Howard wrote several Western stories in which the trail towns which served as destination points for those great herds of Longhorns play an important part, beginning with “Gunman’s Debt”, which went unpublished during Howard’s lifetime but is one of his best Westerns. It’s set in the small Kansas settlement of San Juan, and although Howard tells us that the rails and the trail herds haven’t reached it yet, it’s clear that they’re on the way. San Juan is new and raw and more than a little squalid:

Three saloons, one of which included a dance hall and another a gambling dive, stables, a jail, a store or so, a double row of unpainted board houses, a livery stable, corrals, that made up the village men now called San Juan.

Howard’s protagonist finds an old enemy there, and before the story is over he’s accused of murder and finds almost every hand against him, so that he has to battle his way free even if it means wreaking total destruction on the town. This is an example of the trouble that waits for Texas men in these Kansas settlements, and that animosity is a theme Howard will return to in later stories.

It plays a large part in “Knife, Bullet, and Noose”, a compact gem of action featuring Howard’s early character Steve Allison, also known as the Sonora Kid. After working as the trail boss of a cattle drive to Abilene, Allison is stuck in town waiting for the money a cattle buyer has promised him, but he also has some vengeful enemies there who are out to kill him. His sense of duty to the herd’s owner won’t allow him to leave until he collects the money, so he has to stay alive until then with would-be killers all around him.

“Law-Shooters of Cowtown” puts the trail town setting right in the title, and Howard gives us a vivid picture of the place in the opening lines:

Clamor of cowtown nights… boot-heels stamping on sawdust-strewn floors… thunder of flying hoofs down the dusty street… yipping of the lean trail drivers, reeling in the saddle, hilarious after the thousand-mile trek… cracking of pistols, smash of glasses, flutter of cards on the tables… oaths, songs, laughter in all the teeming saloons and dance halls, louder yet in the plank-barred Silver Boot.

The protagonist of “Law-Shooters of Cowtown” is buffalo hunter Grizzly Elkins, who played a supporting role in “Gunman’s Debt”. Howard must have had mixed feelings about buffalo hunters, since they serve as villains in some stories and heroes in others. Or maybe he just made use of a variety of Western characters however he needed them for a particular story.

Grizzly Elkins (related to Breckinridge, surely) finds himself having to get out of town while a multitude of enemies want to do him in. He succeeds, of course, but not without a lot of brawling first.

“The Dead Remember,” the last of Howard’s stories in which a trail town plays a significant part, isn’t really a traditional Western, although it’s set in Dodge City and involves a cattle drive. But its supernatural aspects nudge it over into the realm of the Weird Western. It’s also non-traditional in the manner in which Howard spins his tale, using a letter and several statements from a coroner’s inquest to tell the story, which is one of Howard’s last and in my opinion also one of his best.

The theme that runs through all these stories is that the trail towns of the 1860s and ’70s were dangerous places. Dens of iniquity, even. In fact, they remind me very much of the cities into which Conan frequently ventures, hotbeds of wickedness in which a lone man often finds himself surrounded by enemies who want to end his life. The same thing applies to the Middle Eastern cities full of intrigue and menace that threaten the lives of Francis X. Gordon, Kirby O’Donnell, and other Howard heroes. You can even find some resemblance to the urban jungles in which two-fisted detective Steve Harrison batters his way through his cases.

All of which, to me, fits right in to the theory that part of Howard’s genius lay in fusing elements of fantasy and history with the hardboiled and frequently noirish sensibilities of much of the crime fiction during the pulp era. Howard claimed not to care much for detective stories, but their hard-nosed attitude permeates his writing anyway.

As Raymond Chandler said, “Down these mean streets a man must go,” and that’s true for Robert E. Howard’s heroes as well, whether the setting is Abilene or Shadizar the Wicked.

Original source:
www.blackgate.com/2023/10/09/a-black-gat-in-the-hand-james-reasoner-on-trail-towns-in-the-traditional-westerns-of-reh/