Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

Book Review – Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West

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First off, as I suspected even before I began reading the book, the subtitle “The Hidden History of the Cowboy West” is a bit hyperbolic. Perhaps a more accurate subtitle would have been “An Economic History of the Cowboy West,” but of course that wouldn’t have sounded nearly as sensational. The history here is not “hidden” in the sense that the author makes any startling new discoveries or revelations, but rather turns the spotlight on aspects of Old West history that few Americans have read or heard much about.

The book opens with a few chapters on how the open-range era began—the post-Civil War demand for beef, the development of the big Texas drives to move the cattle to market, and the subsequent growth of the boom towns and railroads in consequence. But the book’s main thrust is a fascinating look at the massive investments of capital (on the level of millions) in cattle ranches by wealthy stockholders from the East and across the Atlantic, with a particular focus on the investments made by English and Scottish aristocracy and nobility. And how a combination of too-rosy sales pitches, financial mismanagement, ignorance about ranching, and sheer overgrowth of the industry led to an ultimate collapse of the cattle boom, with the devastating winter of 1887 providing the death-blow. I found one theory of Knowlton’s particularly interesting: that one reason for the eventual collapse may have been the industrialization of a livelihood that was in essence agricultural. The emphasis on mass-production, faster delivery, higher profits and so forth went along with overlooking the variables of weather, disease, natural predators, and what would happen if the projected herd growth didn’t materialize—and in the end, the top-heavy cattle companies reaped the consequences.

It puts a thought-provoking new complexion on the concept of the range war that we’re familiar with from fiction and film when you realize that the “big ranchers” fighting the small rancher or homesteader were not necessarily just tough individual men trying to strong-arm their way to prosperity, but rather multi-million-dollar corporations with millionaire industrialists and foreign aristocracy for its investors, trying to keep their profits from being cut in on. [Read more…]

Now Available: The Complete Western Stories of O. Henry

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I forget how many years ago it was. I’d been reading O. Henry’s Complete Works and musing, not for the first time, on how Henry is seldom included in discussions of early Western authors. Heart of the West comes up every now and then, but Henry wrote many more Western stories beyond the nineteen in that collection—some of the others being even better, in my opinion.

It would be great, I told my mom, if somebody got the idea to put together a collection of all O. Henry’s western stories. A volume with all of them in one place would be a great addition to any Western enthusiast’s library, and I’d bet many would be pleasantly surprised by some of those lesser-known stories that were scattered throughout Henry’s other anthologies—“Friends in San Rosario,” “The Roads We Take,” “Madam Bo-Peep, of the Ranches,” and so on. Everybody knows titles like “The Caballero’s Way” and “Hearts and Crosses,” but who’s heard of “Art and the Bronco” or “The Red Roses of Tonia?” If only one of those publishers who specialize in vintage public-domain reprints would have the idea—

It was about this point that Mom said, “Why don’t you do it?”

Publishing this collection has been a daydream of mine ever since then. It’s been something I dabbled with in spare moments and shoved to a back burner in busier times again and again: researching the publication dates of the stories, finding original magazine illustrations, cleaning up and formatting the text, and producing a cover. I had some grand aspirations at first, involving in-depth introductions and glossaries and such, but in the end I kept it simple with just a foreword and some appendices. The main point is that all of O. Henry’s Western stories—over forty of them—are collected in one volume; something that to my knowledge has never been done before. There’s also thirty illustrations from original magazine publications. And it’s now available on Kindle!

The Way of the Western: Finale

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In 1956, author Donald Hamilton (primarily known among Western fans for his “Ambush at Blanco Canyon,” which became the movie The Big Country) wrote in the introduction to an anthology of Western stories that he edited:

…The free-riding ranch girl and the saloon-busting free-for-all are part of our stock-in-trade; are we going to discard them in the interests of mere accuracy?…The Western reader expects to be entertained by a good yarn first of all. If it’s authentic, so much the better, but the average reader isn’t going to give a story much higher marks because something like it actually happened…

…Let’s not get too enamored of absolute historical accuracy, and for heaven’s sake let’s us not start thinking of ourselves self-consciously as great creative artists inheriting a grand literary tradition stemming direct from Owen Wister…Let’s remember that we also have an inheritance from Zane Grey and the Beadle and Adams dime novels which were lousy literature and stinking history, but which entertained millions—and who’s too proud to be an entertainer?

When I read that introduction (you can read it in full here), I think my reaction was the opposite of what Hamilton intended. My first thought was that the ensuing decades have proved his view to be a short-sighted one. As cheerfully well-intentioned as it was, I think that attitude espoused by writers has ended up helping to marginalize the very genre Hamilton set out to champion.

Reading his remarks a few weeks ago helped to crystallize a train of thought I’ve been following recently, which sort of brings me full circle back to the beginning of my blog series on the Western genre begun seven months ago. In my introductory post, I talked about how I used to think that the Western’s own popularity, leading to its eventual over-saturation with flimsy, historically-inaccurate, copycat “shoot-em-ups,” was one of the main things that resulted in its downfall. But my view on this altered: I came to believe that the decline of the Western was primarily an ideological infiltration, in which mid-20th-century values became more and more reflected in the new Western movies and books of those decades, until any sense of the culture and mores of the original West was gradually eaten away.

I took a look at some of the ways this happened in subsequent posts, mainly by comparing classic Western films to earlier Western literature. We looked at how the average American settler was frequently portrayed as a weak-willed coward compared to gunfighter “heroes”, and how superficial portrayals of historical “facts” leads to caricatures and skewed impressions. We saw how quasi-accurate film adaptations of books can twist or change their authors’ original themes or intentions, and how even choices of artistic style can affect viewers’ impressions of history.

Now, after reading the Hamilton piece—subsequent to having gotten a pretty comprehensive survey of the Western genre in the 20th century by reading the anthology A Century of Great Western Stories—I’m beginning to piece in the role that Western writers have played in all this. I believe the mass of inaccurate and clichéd Western stories did contribute to the genre’s problems, though by no means did they play the central part that I once thought. [Read more…]