Review: "Buffalo Wagons" by Elmer Kelton

 

Buffalo Wagons by Elmer Kelton Ballantine Books, 1956   Reviewed by Mike Baker   Buffalo hunter Gage Jameson is watching the end of the Kansas buffalo and decides to partner with King Ransom, another buffalo hunter, and head down into Texas and the Llano Estacado—Comanchería—with an oversized crew of skinners. Half are there for skinning the plentiful buff, and half to avoid slaughter should the Comanche decide they ought to leave. Regardless, they’re mostly King’s men—and predictably, this will matter a lot later on. Meanwhile, they discover a Comanche camp and a pretty white girl the Comanche have taken as a slave. This book was written in 1956 by a white male Texan, so Kelton goes on a bit about how you might not want to stir that hornet’s nest—except she’s a white woman, which, in 1956 Texas, is pretty much… well, let me just say, during the discussion of whether or not to save her, they refer to her as a white woman seven times. Anyhoo, we’ll step over the giant elephant in the room and keep reading, because they save her from the filthy, depredating red savagesI and the peaceful skinning camps slowly descend into the bad-news party Kelton has been planning all along. Back-shooting shenanigans ensue. Buffalo Wagons wasn’t groundbreaking. It isn’t top-tier. It is, blessedly, solid. Look—traditional westerns are bodice rippers with horses and six-guns. We can crowd the analysis with American archetypes and the heroic loner. Blah fucking blah. They’re formulaic and generally predictable. Every now and then, Lewis Patten would kill the hero, or someone would go really dark like .44 or Hano’s Last Notch, but on balance, it’s the bad guy who turns out to be a good guy, gets the girl and plugs the bad guy—or plugs the girl, and the bad guy takes care of his own needs. I’m not saying pleasant twists and surprises don’t happen, but the basic formula never really falters. You might offer up Blood Meridian, or The Revenant, or Little Big Man—but that’s capital-L Literature, and those cranky bastards play by their own rules. Cormac McCarthy wouldn’t have known a good time if she dropped her drawers right in front of him. Traditional westerns exist—maybe just for me—to affirm my misguided belief that there is any justice in this life. Blood Meridian is for the young, who can afford to have their king-sized hope pie snuffled to shit. Traditional westerns go best with a beer and a cigar, a dusty porch, and a steak dinner. I saw a gaggle of Black ladies shuffle, exhausted and beaten, into a Primitive Baptist church one Sunday in 1994—only to leave, after a hellfire sermon full of God’s blessings to the steadfast and righteous, backs up and ready to eat giants for breakfast and nut-punch the Devil himself. That’s what a traditional western brings to my table. Your boss is a bully and a moron, traffic ate your lunch, your wife wants to say—fucking anything—to you first thing when you get home from the above-mentioned shitty job? No problem, son. Crack open Buffalo Wagons and ease into one man making his way across the merciless Llano Estacado like a motherfucking boss. You’ll see the end coming like a buffalo stampede—and thank God for that. It’s at least one goddamn thing that’ll work out today. *                *                * I A brief note to the self-righteous: the Indian Wars were a 200-year genocidal campaign against the First Nations by the American government, and a war of survival for settlers trying to make something better than what they had. The history is complicated and, generally, awful. My comment was meant ironically—except for the “depredating” part. See Josiah Wilbarger’s  Indians Depredations in Texas if you doubt me.

Check out Buffalo Wagons at Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback.

BARBED WIRE by Elmer Kelton

I have listened to few audio books. I never seem to have time; at work I tend to concentrate on work and lose the plot and action. In my car I tend to listen to, and curse at, traffic. But my wife gave me an MP3 a few days ago and it took me about two hours to download a book from the library, and I really enjoyed it.

The novel was a short western by Elmer Kelton. The title: Barbed Wire. It was originally published in 1957, and it has lost little of its impact over the fifty years since its first publication. It is a Texas range war story that is told, essentially, from the perspective of a fence builder—although it is told from several view points. The land is split between ranchers and dirt farmers; it is open range country, and the largest rancher—Captain Rinehart—wants it to stay that way.

The story unfolds as the Captain battles against the coming fences that will lock away the water, and cut the land into tiny rectangles of farms and ranches. It is the future; this separation of land that will allow herds to be bred exclusively, crops to be secured against the roaming cattle, and the protection and hoarding of water in a dry country. It is a future that terrifies the Captain enough that he is willing to let himself be mislead into action by his foreman.

Barbed Wire is an excellent western. It is only my second experience with the work of Elmer Kelton, the first was his novel Badger Boy, and I wasn’t disappointed. The plot is fairly generic, but its execution, characters and authenticity, mark it a few notches better than the norm. The prose is gritty and matches the western plot like a glove—

“It was a sorry way for a cowboy to make a living, Doug Monahan thought disgustedly. Bending his back over a rocky posthole, he plunged the heavy iron crowbar downward, hearing its angry ring and feeling the violent jar of it bruising the stubborn rock bottom. He rubbed sweat from his forehead into his sleeve and straightened his sore back, pausing to rest a moment and look around.”

The plot is executed with a tight linear momentum that takes the expected and makes it fresh and somehow new. The characters are tough and realistic, the action is paced with an equitable easiness—a pace that is far from melodramatic, but is exciting and seemingly authentic.

Ken Marks read Barbed Wire. His voice is mellow and southern, a perfect fit for the story. He is easy to understand and he brings the story vividly to life.