ANDREW McBRIDE on WHAT MAKES A WESTERN A WESTERN?

I’ve been fortunate enough to receive wide acclaim already for my Sundown Press novel THE PEACEMAKER. Of 25 reviews and ratings 2 are 4 star, 23 5 star! This includes 5 star reviews from 2 of the most successful western authors. Spur award-winning and Pulitzer Prize-nominated author ROBERT VAUGHAN describes it as ‘a great book’. Meanwhile RALPH COTTON (also a Pulitzer-prize nominated novelist) writes: ‘For pure writing style, McBride’s gritty prose nails the time and place of his story with bold authority. …this relatively new author has thoroughly, and rightly so, claimed his place among the top Old West storytellers.’ I’m very grateful to both Robert and Ralph for their fantastic support.

As someone who has made (modest) earnings and gained some acclaim through writing westerns – and who loves the genre – I was interested in a discussion I saw recently on Social Media about ‘what makes a western a western.’ Especially when I realised that the question, which might seem easy to answer, is actually anything but.

I’m sure an initial response would be that western exists in the familiar zone of cowboys manning ranches and driving cattle to market, Native Americans facing their final conquest by the U.S. army, and settlers populating even the most remote regions of the U.S.A.; of Colt pistols and Winchester rifles, law and order finally replacing outlawry and a fastness of nomadic tribes, buffalo and beaver replaced by towns, trails, railroads and farms. What tend to be male-centric, action-heavy adventure stories dependant on the struggle between good and evil, law and lawlessness and what could be loosely defined as ‘civilisation’ and ‘savagery.’

Key elements are that the western takes place on a ‘frontier’ - that ephemeral region where densely-settled and well-policed areas gave way to sparsely settled semi-wilderness and then true wilderness peopled only by indigenous peoples. Where the furthest reaches of modern industrial civilisation met – and sometimes clashed with - supposedly more primitive societies.

But just when it seems the genre can be easily defined, it becomes amoeba-like, stretching out in all directions, shape-shifting across history, geography and even beyond the Earth!

After all, the ‘frontier’ elements I’ve described as defining the western existed elsewhere in the world, most particularly in the 19^th Century, as depicted in movies set on the South American frontier like ‘WAY OF THE GAUCHO.’

Rory Calhoun and Richard Boone in WAY OF THE GAUCHO

Could these be westerns in disguise?

Australian tales like ‘NED KELLY’ and ‘ROBBERY UNDER ARMS,’

NED KELLY (2003)

South African adventures like ‘UNTAMED’ or even ‘ZULU.’

UNTAMED

Or ‘THE SEEKERS’ set in New Zealand where British settlers clash with the Maori?

THE SEEKERS

Or even ‘THE SEVEN SAMURAI’ set in 16^th Century Japan, which re-surfaced as ‘THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN’ of course.

And now I read Kirk Douglas (in his autobiography ‘The Ragman’s Son’) describing ‘THE VIKINGS,’ a Dark Age epic set in Northern Europe in the 9^th Century, as ‘really a western!’

Kirk Douglas in THE VIKINGS

Not to mention ‘STAR WARS’…

I think this part of the discussion should come to a juddering halt. In my view, these films may have similarities to the western, but a western for me, has to be set in the geographical American West.

A landscape that stretched from the Mississippi to the Pacific. But even within that vast land mass the western is selectively located. The Pacific Northwest, Idaho and Utah rarely feature. (Even if Monument Valley, Utah is perhaps the most famous western location, most of the movies filmed there are set elsewhere – in ‘The Searchers,’ for example, Monument Valley stands in for the Texas plains.)

Monument Valley

The most favoured locations for westerns tend to be Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and the Great Plains states from Montana and North Dakota down to Texas.

Historically the bulk of westerns take place in a period of history that lasted barely two generations, from around 1860, as the American Civil War was about to begin, to 1890 when the Census Bureau announced the end of the frontier, meaning there was no longer a discernible frontier line in the west, nor any large tracts of land yet unbroken by settlement. The same year saw the last major clash between the Native Americans and their conquerors in the tragic encounter at Wounded Knee.

Inside these three turbulent decades the vast majority of westerns are set – from novels written by Louis L’Amour and Larry McMurtry, to movies directed by John Ford and/or starring John Wayne to TV westerns from ‘Gunsmoke’ to ‘Bonanza’ to ‘Deadwood’ to ‘The Virginian.’

But immediately we can see the western bulging out of that time frame. In its early seasons at least one of these keynote shows, ‘The Virginian’ was located after 1890 – the elegiac episode ‘West’ was set in 1897, whilst other episodes featured the Spanish-American War of 1898. The highly popular movie ‘BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID’ was set at the same time, when the Hole-in-the Wall gang plundered freely, taking the western into the early years of the 20^th Century.

Paul Newman and Robert Redford in BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID

‘RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY,’ often held to be one of the greatest westerns ever made, opens with shots of ‘horseless carriages’ on the streets of a western town. Sam Peckinpah’s violent masterpiece ‘THE WILD BUNCH’ is set even later, during the Mexican revolution of the 1910s, as is ‘THE PROFESSIONALS.’ Both are unmistakably what aficionados would regard as westerns. Clearly a western requires a lawless environment, where anarchy and outlawry is still prevalent, whatever the date on the calendar.

William Holden goes down fighting in THE WILD BUNCH

Quite where the mainstream western turns into a ‘modern western’ is a subject for debate. Perhaps a cut-off date might be 1920, separating films like ‘THE WILD BUNCH’ from movies set later, even up present day – movies like ‘BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK’, ‘LONELY ARE THE BRAVE’, ‘NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN’ and ‘WIND RIVER.’

The ‘modern western’ – WIND RIVER

What defines these movies is that they’re all set in the U.S. west of the Mississippi – but is that exclusive western territory? After all both ‘THE WILD BUNCH’ and ‘THE PROFESSIONALS’ take place largely in Mexico – and the roistering Rory Calhoun adventure ‘THE TREASURE OF PANCHO VILLA’ is entirely set there, yet contains all the elements of a western.

And what about Canada? Movies set north of the 49 are just as obviously westerns – such as ‘PONY SOLDIER’ ‘O’ROURKE OF THE ROYAL MOUNTED’ and ‘THE CANADIANS’ – where Tyrone Power, Alan Ladd and Robert Ryan play Royal Canadian Mounted Policemen trying to prevent Indian wars breaking out in the 1870s.

Mountie Tyrone Power in PONY SOLDIER

Perhaps in defining the western we can allow for some overspill into adjacent regions where similar conditions to the American frontier prevailed.

Nor is there anything set in stone about 1860 as the beginning of the ‘classic western’ era. It’s just that not many western films and TV shows take place earlier. But the pre-1860 west has occasionally featured. The California Gold Rush was the backcloth to movies from ‘THE OUTLAWS OF POKER FLAT’ to the TV movie ‘The Desperate Mission’ about the legendary gold rush bandit Joaquin Murrieta.

Dale Robertson and Cameron Mitchell in THE OUTLAWS OF POKER FLAT

The wagon trains crossing the continent from the 1840s onwards were the backcloth to ‘MEEKS CUTOFF’ and ‘WESTWARD THE WOMEN.’

Wagons head west in MEEKS CUTOFF

The fur-trappers immortalised as ‘mountain men,’ whose heyday was 1810-1840, feature in ‘KIT CARSON’, ‘JEREMIAH JOHNSON’ and ‘ACROSS THE WIDE MISSOURI’ etc.

Robert Redford as JEREMIAH JOHNSON

And in 1835-1836 there was the short but bloody Texas War of Independence, where movie-makers have tended to focus on the dramatic stand at the Alamo in films like ‘THE ALAMO’ – 1960 and 2004 versions – THE LAST COMMAND and THE FIRST TEXAN.

Films like ‘THE ALAMO’ highlight that movies can, of course, be two things at once. They depict a battle between two modern armies, both using artillery, so can be described as ‘historical epics.’ But, as the two most prominent Alamo defenders were legendary western icons Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, how could these films not be westerns also? Crockett particularly is regarded as the epitome of a frontiersman… which raises another issue.

Davy Crockett (John Wayne) takes his last stand in THE ALAMO (1960)

Crockett was born and died on the frontier… but his birthplace was eastern Tennessee, which was as much a frontier at the time of his birth in 1786 as Texas was when he died there in 1836.

The real David (‘Davy’) Crockett in 1834

The point is the frontier kept moving, and it started on the very easternmost seaboard of the U.S.A.

In 1625 the frontier – the beginning of ‘the West’ – stood in Virginia and New England. By the mid 18^th Century ‘the west’ had advanced to somewhere in the neighbourhood of western Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley. Around 1780 it was Kentucky and Tennessee.

But the frontier could switch north and south as well as continuing west. When young Davy Crockett went off to fight the Seminoles in September 1814 he marched south-east from his Tennessee home to the newly-opened up frontier of Florida.

Similarly, settlement advancing west across the Great Plains leap-frogged Oklahoma and left it behind as the ‘Indian Territory.’ When first opened up for mass settlement in 1889 there was an explosion of lawlessness and violence in Oklahoma that ran through the 1890s – long after surrounding areas of Kansas and Texas, and states further west like Colorado, had become relatively ‘civilised,’ tamed by the advance of settlement speeded up by the railroads.

If the classic requirements of the western are American ‘frontier’ elements you can certainly argue that movies like ‘DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK,’ ‘LAST OF THE MOHICANS’ (both set in New York State in the late colonial period,) ‘SEMINOLE’ (located in the swamps of Florida in 1835) and the TV Series ‘Daniel Boone’, (set in Kentucky in the 1770s) are westerns, regardless of how far east they’re located on the map.

Fess Parker played ‘Daniel Boone’ on TV

On the other hand movies set in the ‘classic western’ time frame but far from the frontier can’t be called ‘westerns’ in my view. If every movie set in the U.S.A. between 1860 and 1890 counted as one, that would mean ‘GONE WITH THE WIND’ (set in Georgia in the 1860s) was a western! Not to mention ‘THE RAID’ (set in Vermont in 1864) ‘THE AGE OF INNOCENCE’ (New York 1870s) and others. Personally I don’t think Quentin Tarantino’s ‘DJANGO UNCHAINED’ can be called a western – despite its ‘spaghetti western’ trappings the movie’s set in Tennessee and Mississippi long after their frontier days.

Jamie Foxx as DJANGO UNCHAINED

I came to the conclusion that a better definition of a ‘western’ might be to term them ‘frontiers’ – but I can’t see that catching on!

I don’t know if I’ve cleared up any confusion with this discussion or just created more. But feel free to disagree!

BLURB for THE PEACEMAKER:

Eighteen-year-old scout Calvin 'Choctaw' Taylor believes he can handle whatever life throws his way. He’s been on his own for several years, and he only wants to make his mark in the world. When he is asked to guide peace emissary Sean Brennan and his adopted Apache daughter, Nahlin, into a Chiricahua Apache stronghold, he agrees—but then has second thoughts. He’s heard plenty about the many ways the Apache can kill a man. But Mr. Brennan sways him, and they begin the long journey to find Cochise—and to try to forge a peace and an end to the Indian Wars that have raged for so long. During the journey, Choctaw begins to understand that there are some things about himself he doesn’t like—but he’s not sure what to do about it. Falling in love with Nahlin is something he never expected—and finds hard to live with. The death and violence, love for Nahlin and respect for both Cochise and Mr. Brennan, have a gradual effect on Choctaw that change him. But is that change for the better? Can he live with the things he’s done to survive in the name of peace?

 

EXTRACT:
Choctaw blinked sweat and sunspots out of his eyes and began to lower the field glasses; then he glimpsed movement.

He used the glasses again, scanning nearer ground, the white sands. He saw nothing.

And then two black specks were there suddenly, framed against the dazzling white. They might have dropped from the sky.

They grew bigger. Two horsebackers coming this way, walking their mounts. As he watched they spurted into rapid movement, whipping their ponies into a hard run towards him.

The specks swelled to the size of horses and men. Men in faded smocks maybe once of bright colour, their long hair bound by rags at the temple. They had rifles in their hands.

Breath caught in Choctaw’s throat. Fear made him dizzy. His arms started to tremble. He knew who was coming at him so fast.

Apaches.

And you killed them or they killed you.

**** 

To buy THE PEACEMAKER visit Amazon.com:

https://www.amazon.com/Peacemaker-Andrew-McBride/dp/153466937X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr


or Amazon.co.uk:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Peacemaker-Andrew-McBride/dp/153466937X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr

New Release -- The Curse of the Body Snatchers: The Adventures of Jack Moon by Keith Souter

Victorian London is a dangerous city to be alone in at night for 12-year-old orphan, Jack Moon—and his business in those forbidding streets would make a grown man cringe. But his best friend, Danny, has just died, and Jack has promised him a burial in a haunted cemetery beside the woman who cared for them. 

Living in a rat-infested warehouse, Jack ventures out into the London fog, where he is waylaid by Professor Stackpool, a phrenologist. Can he really read a person's character by examining their head? He claims Jack is a prime example! But at a public demonstration, he announces Jack is a typical London urchin, destined for a life of crime, and Jack revolts.

Benevolent Sir Lionel Petrie and his granddaughter, Olivia, are outraged. To prove Stackpool wrong, the kind judge gives Jack a job at his home. Olivia and Jack become great friends, but something sinister is going on—and Olivia is becoming gravely ill over and over again. 

Someone is out to kill Jack, but who? And why? When tragedy suddenly strikes, Jack vows to save Olivia, and he is forced to enter the world of séances, ghosts, and ghouls. Will Jack live to bring Olivia back to her grandfather? Can they all survive the CURSE OF THE BODY SNATCHERS?

EXCERPT:

     A creature screeched from somewhere inside the graveyard and I stopped and stood as still as I could. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled and I shivered, “Oh, God, please don’t let there be ghosts!”

     I’m even more scared of ghouls than Danny was, which is saying a lot. All of us workhouse kids are scared of spirits. Those devils that were supposed to look after us saw to that. I reckon they thought it was part of our education. Especially that old villain, Ezra Keats, the workhouse master. He and his wife, the matron, were a couple of real bullies. He really liked to scare all of us kids, but especially the Moon boys, as they liked to call us.

My name is Jack Moon. Danny and I were orphans. Don’t know who our parents were. We never had a family life, you see. The St. George-the-Martyr Workhouse in Southwark was our home for most of our lives, apart from a spell in the Totfields House of Correction. I wouldn’t wish either of them on my worst enemy. That was why we ran away a year ago and lived on the streets, my little brother and me.

     In fact, ‘brother’, was not strictly true, for we were not related by blood. Both of us had been foundlings, abandoned children taken into the care of the St. George-the-Martyr Parish on the same night. They told us there had been a full moon then, so that was the name they gave us both. Danny was about a couple of years younger than me, but they had kept us together, as they often did workhouse kids. We had slept in neighboring beds in the boys’ dormitory, ate beside one another in the refectory and sat together in the workhouse school. During work sessions we always worked together. We had been as close as brothers ever since, which was why I used to think of him as my little brother. I felt that I had to look out for him.

     And then. Danny died. Before he did, he made me promise that I’d bury him near Kitty, the woman inmate at the workhouse who had been the nearest thing to a mother that either of us ever had. How could I refuse?

       

New Release -- Lawman’s Gun (James P. Stone Series Book 2) by J. L. Guin

James Stone never intended to become a lawman—he plans to track down the murderers of his best friend and mentor, Eldon Greyson, alone. And he looks forward to that day of reckoning, because whenever it comes about, there are a thousand and one ways to make the killers pay. But Fate steps in and gives Stone a chance he never counted on…

When his work in Eaton, Kansas, as a temporary lawman is over, he jumps from the frying pan into the fire when he takes a position as a deputy U.S. marshal with a friend, Deputy U.S. Marshal Jackson Millet. Millet convinces Stone that working as a lawman will give him more opportunities to run his old nemesis, a man named Laird, to ground—and make him pay for Greyson’s murder so many years ago.

A confrontation between the two lawmen and two bank robbers let Stone know he’s close to Laird—and he chafes at the restrictions the marshal’s job has placed on him, wanting nothing more than to ride to the nearby E.L. Ranch and take on the outlaw he’s waited to long to face. 

But when Laird and his partner, Bill Dubin, brazen it out with a visit to the marshals, they’re in for a blazing gun battle the likes of which the little town of Tascosa has never seen. They won’t go down without a fight—and they’re determined not to die by a LAWMAN’S GUN…

EXCERPT

     Thorsen and Slager nodded, then the three walked along the side length of the building until they reached the boardwalk fronting the bank. Hobbs stuck his head out past the building for a quick look up and down the street. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, and more importantly, no one had raised an alarm about why three masked men stood in an alley next to the bank.

     Hobbs motioned with his six-gun barrel for Slager to go ahead. Slager crept around the corner, then stepped onto the boardwalk and to the bank’s front door. He opened the door wide, then unfurled the sack and pitched it onto the bank’s floor. After he'd pulled the door shut, he hurried back to the alleyway where Hobbs and Thorsen waited.

     The loosed wasps created immediate chaos inside the bank. Loud voices and cursing echoed through the wall. One man yelled, “What the hell!” Another man’s booming voice proclaimed, “Son-of-a-bitch!” Still another, the sergeant in charge of the guards, instructed, “One of you men, see if you can get that bag and throw it out the door.”

     Almost instantly, the front door flew open and a suited rotund man dashed through it swatting at his face with his hands. A thin woman screamed, then burst through the doorway, frantically swatting at three or four big, mahogany-colored wasps which were the size of hornets. The insects buzzed around her head, dodging her swats. The wasps eventually got through her line of defense. One landed on the collar of her loose, full-length dress and sunk a stinger into her neck.

     The woman squalled louder, then dashed into the middle of the street, the dress not hampering her reckless flight as her skirt billowed. The unfortunate woman ran headlong into the path of a big freight wagon pulled by six mules traveling at a brisk pace. The startled driver struggled to get the animals stopped. But at least two of the mules trampled the woman to silence. Her bloody body lay mangled before the front wheel of the wagon.

     The three sack-covered men watched four men in blue uniforms charge out of the bank with six-guns in hand while swatting wasps with their other, as they fled the bank. Hobbs nudged Thorsen and Slager forward. The pair rushed up behind the stunned soldiers; raised the butts of their six-guns, and bludgeoned them, knocking both senseless before they hit the ground.