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western

Carrington: A Novel of the West, by Michael Straight (1960)

Cover of "Carrington" by Michael Straight

For an obscure novelist, Michael Whitney Straight (1916- 2004) had an extraordinary life and career. A member of a distinguished family, his maternal grandfather was William C. Whitney, Secretary of the US Navy in the late 1800s, his mother was Dorothy Whitney, the famous philanthropist and his father William (who died of Spanish Flu in 1918 when Michael was only two) was a noted investment banker. Michael’s brother Whitney was a Grand Prix driver and one of the few American pilots to fly in the Battle of Britain and his sister Beatrice was an Oscar-winning actress.

Michael studied at Cambridge University, England during the mid-1930s and while there, he joined the Communist Party, became an associate of the “Cambridge Five” ring of British spies, was recruited into the KGB as an agent. Straight, despite his surname, was a bisexual and while at Cambridge, he had a brief love affair with English undergraduate Anthony Blunt who spied for the Soviets for many years and who later became custodian of the Royal Family’s art collection.

In 1937, Straight returned to the US and got a job in the Department of the Interior and even served as President Roosevelt’s speech-writer. During this period, he secretly had regular meetings with a Soviet agent. In the Second World War, Straight served as a B-17 pilot and after the war, he took over as publisher of New Republic magazine. In 1963, while applying for a public service job in Washington DC, Straight confessed about his Communist past and his Cambridge connections- revelations that would indirectly lead to the exposure of Blunt (although that man wasn’t publicly unveiled as a spy until 1979). Straight was married three times and fathered eight children. Even in his choice of wives, he seemed able to make connections- his second wife Nina was the half-sister of Gore Vidal and stepsister of Jackie Onassis.

Somehow during all this, Straight found time to embark on a career as a novelist after he left his job at the New Republic in the late Fifties. This proved to be perhaps less fruitful than Straight hoped as his output was limited to only three novels, a small handful of non-fiction works and a two-volume memoir (one part of which was published posthumously). Regarding his novels, his third one, Happy and Hopeless (1979) was a romance set in the White House during the Kennedy Presidency, a book that Straight had to self-publish. The other two were, perhaps surprisingly, both historical novels, both set in the Old West during the Plains Wars between the US Army and the Native Americans, Carrington (1960) and A Very Small Remnant (1963).

Carrington is set in Wyoming in the winter of 1866 during the early years of the Plains Wars. The title character is a true-life person, Lt Colonel Henry B. Carrington who commanded Fort Phil Kearny during the war against Red Cloud of the Sioux Nation. Growing tensions and a series of clashes led to the infamous Fetterman Massacre on December 21, 1866 in which over eighty US soldiers were lured, four miles from the Fort, into an ambush by over 1,500 Sioux and the entire force, including its commander, Captain William J. Fetterman, was wiped out. Carrington was blamed for the disaster, largely due to his unpopularity with many of his men and the perceived timidity and reluctance that he displayed during his leadership at the Fort. A later court of inquiry cleared him but his reputation and his army career was in ruins.

The most striking thing about this novel is that, considering the time it was written (1960) and the colourful life of its author, its style is curiously old-fashioned. Straight remains highly respectful of the historical realities of the era in which the book is set. Many historical novels and films often reflect more about the times in which they were written or made than how much they reveal about the times in which they attempt to portray. Film Westerns like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and Little Big Man (1970) arguably tell us more about the cultural and political upheavals of the Sixties than they do about the actual West. And Michael Blake’s 1988 novel Dances With Wolves is more a reflection on late 20th century New Age’s embrace of Native American mysticism than a convincing portrayal of the Frontier Wars.

The novel portrays Carrington in a sympathetic light but not idealised nor in total favourable terms. The officer that emerges here is initially a quietly confident man but soon revealed to be strickened with in-securities and a high-strung sensitivity to criticism. It reminded me of the central character in James Salter’s 1956 novel The Hunters, now recognised as a minor classic and possibly the only novel of any literary merit to emerge from the Korean War. In Salter’s book, the leading character is a pilot who arrives at his Air-Force unit in Korea determined to make his mark. But his own inner vulnerabilities, combined with poor luck and his own in-ability to assert his place among others, prevent him from achieving the success he desires. As well as his own private demons, he has to contend with a living one, in the form of an arrogant, brash younger pilot who rapidly gains the popularity, tally of MiGs and favour with senior officers that the eludes the former.

In Straight’s novel, Colonel Carrington is an idealist, favourably disposed to the Indians. The novel illustrates his thoughts as he lies awake just before dawn:

The Indians, passing under the window. That broken-down chieftain, slumped like a sack of meal over his broken-down pony. A beggar in the land of his fathers. And we in the army are substantially to blame. What a succession of men we sent to meet with them, to make peace! Grattan, that Irish bully out of West Point, who touched off the raids by his brutality. Chivington, who butchered Black Kettle’s band, men, women, and children, in the name of the Almighty. And last year those two incompetents Connor and Cole, marching up the Powder River without a moment of study or preparation, and crawling back, defeated and half dead.

Carrington is confident he can bring about a successful and enduring peace treaty with the Sioux. Again the reader hears his inner thoughts, ‘I shall meet all the Chiefs at Laramie; meet them in a spirit of charity and godd-will; understanding in place of arrogance, resolution in place of bluster; they will respond. No more the wrathful shock of iron arms.’

Within the first handful of pages, the reader learns that not only is the Colonel a staunch idealist with a firm self-belief, he is also insufferably vain. ‘The West is no place for glory hunters. Magnanimity is needed there; and tact; skill in engineering; administrative ability; a knowledge of resources; yes, and a sense of history in representing the President before the Indian nations. All qualities that I bring to the command; there isn’t an officer in the regular Army as well qualified as I am to carry the flag into Indian country.’

The flowery workings of Carrington’s inner musings are soon brought down a peg or two once he arrives at Fort Kearny. The novel depicts the subsequent chain of events from a number of other character’s perspectives, including junior officers, NCOs, privates and officer’s wives (the latter also living at the Fort). Carrington’s confident demeanour slowly but steadily peels away as the novel progresses. His self-belief is fragile and is whittled away by the grumblings of his subordinates who prefer to hate the Indians and who long to fight them. Carrington wants to succeed, he wants to make a lasting peace with the Sioux. But he cannot cope with the unexpected, cannot adapt to unforeseen obstacles.

The succession of meetings with Chiefs of the Sioux, and later their rivals, the Cheyenne, produce no worthwhile gains. Discipline and morale at the Fort goes on the decline, while the rank-and-file’s hatred of the Indians steadily grows, threatening to explode. In one scene, an meagre Thanksgiving dinner is interrupted by the mental collapse of the Carrington family’s African-American servant Dennis:

In the kitchen, the banging grew louder and louder until it sounded as though the stove would break apart. ‘Not so loud, Dennis!’ they called, and when he kept on they peered through the kitchen door. The old man was kneeling by the stove and battering it with his head.

Carrington has the desire to control the events unfolding around him, but not the strength. The Colonel wants to control the river but is instead carried along by its currents. Like the pilot in The Hunters, Carrington ultimately has to face up to a more dynamic rival, in the form of newly arrived Captain Fetterman. The latter is younger, stronger, more determined, more flamboyant, a man who dominates whichever room he enters, an Alpha male that easily undermines Carrington’s unsteady authority. Fetterman soon gains the men’s respect and popularity while Carrington looks more isolated and out of his depth with each passing day. And Fetterman is spoiling for a fight:

Fetterman looked across the valley. He asked: ‘What lies beyond that ridge?’

‘Indians! Two thousand warriors, waiting for you!’

‘Please God,’ Fetterman said, ‘they won’t have to wait long!’

As I already mentioned, this novel’s style borrows from Westerns of the 1920s and 30s, with traits of ‘Hard-Boiled’ crime fiction thrown in. The dialogue between characters tends to be sparse and blunt in a modern-style. Yet in other parts of the novel, the windy inner-musings of some of the characters read like literature of the 19th century.

The fore-mentioned Fetterman Massacre is not depicted in the novel, the reader is instead shown its aftermath when Carrington leads a party to cautiously investigate what happened to Fetterman’s command.

An outcropping of grey boulders marked the northern end of the slope. Ten Indian ponies were sprawled around it; the snow was stained with the blood of scores of braves. There, Carrington judged, the infantry had paused- only to retreat again as the cavalry swept past. But four old soldiers who knew the folly of retreat and the two frontiersmen had settled among the boulders and fought on.

Against such fighters the Sioux had taken no chances upon any encounter in the world to come. The first of the frontiersmen lay over a rock, his eyes beside him, the second was pierced by a hundred arrows. Griffin’s tendons were sliced. Cullinane had no hands or feet. O’Gara’s chest had been ripped open and his heart taken; he stared past the Colonel with a wry smile.

Carrington was unable to stop Fetterman’s foolhardy rush into the ambush. Positioned at the edge of the battle, Carrington is frozen with in-decision. He could muse on his future remembrance in the annals of history, but Carrington could not think nor act on his feet in the harsh, fast-moving present.

The Native Americans, when they fight, fight back hard and without mercy. Yet the author, like the central character, is respectful to them. Sadly, the depiction of the Sioux and Cheyenne Chiefs at the various peace-talks is the least convincing aspect of the novel. Straight’s attempts at the Native’s dialogue reads like the standard mode of Indian Chief speech from any Western of the 40s or 50s. ‘White man speaks with forked tongue’ was about the only stock phrase missing.

Straight’s skills as a novelist were limited. In technical terms, there is nothing innovative about this novel. Indeed, for a novel written at the beginning of the Sixties, it is curiously derivative of the forms and recipes set by Westerns of prior decades. However it is an interesting portrait of a man clearly out of his depth, a self-glorifying idealist who planned for greatness but his own ego prevented his feet from being on the ground long enough to understand and adapt to the realities of what lay in front of him.

This is a guest post generously contributed by Peter Hill ([email protected]).

Carrington, by Michael Straight
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966

McCabe, by Edmund Naughton (1959)

Covers of various editions of McCabe by Edmund Naughton

Edmund Naughton’s 1959 western, McCabe, is mainly mentioned as a footnote to Robert Altman’s first masterpiece, his 1971 film McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Reissued as a tie-in to the film when it came out, it’s been out of print for over three decades now and fetches some fairly steep prices. (My tip: the cheapest copies seem to be of the 1961 Oldham Press edition — the “Man’s Books” version, which bundles McCabe with two other macho titles in what appears to have been attempt to create a testosterone-rich alternative to Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.)

This is a real shame because it diminishes how much of Altman’s “revisionism” in his approach to the western movie derives from Naughton’s work. Superficially, McCabe follows a classic western formula: stranger comes town, a reputation as a gunslinger trailing behind him; he settles in and the town settles to him; then he is forced to decide whether to run and save his skin or stand his ground and take his chances. There’s a showdown scene as dangerous and gripping as the climax of High Noon.

Yet, writing just seven years after High Noon, Naughton is far less looking back at the traditions of the western than anticipating much of what came in the next 10-15 years, in films and, to a lesser extent, in novels. Naughton’s protagonist, John McCabe, is closer to an anti-hero like Catch-22’s Yossarian than Marshal Will Kane. Though a dead-eye shot who’s adapted his Colt to fire without a trigger, he has only killed one man and him mostly by accident. He lives mostly as a traveling gambler but reminds himself that he was chased off a riverboat as a greenhorn amateur. He tries to be fair to the Chinese and Indians in the little mining town of Presbyterian Church where he decides to set up a saloon and, later, a whorehouse.

And he is far ahead of his time in his attitude towards women — or at least towards Mrs. Miller, who arrives and takes over the job of running McCabe’s whorehouse. Though the two are partners in business and, fairly regularly, in bed, McCabe understands that he cannot take their relationship for granted:

McCabe was sensitive about being noticed in her room. He took care, thought, to be discreet, to attend to business, and there were nights when he didn’t want to go over there.

Those were the nights when he knew she would like there smoking naked on the bed with the wicks down in the kerosene lamps; and, if he came, she would look at him with eyes like violet stones in cold water — as if he were to blame for the man she had sold herself to that evening.

McCabe also exhibits a degree of emotion intelligence that’s still pretty rare in most male characters. He struggles with Mrs. Miller’s dispassionate approach to their nights together. Though frustrated that she quickly sees that he is close to illiterate and far less trustworthy with figures, he wishes they could share more than just a physical intimacy: “All my like I been walking around with a block of ice inside me, Constance, and I don’t hardly get the sawdust brushed off before you got me back in the icehouse.”

Covers of German, French and Italian translations of McCabe

Naughton’s view of good and evil is a far cry from High Noon, too. McCabe is a gambler, a schemer, a coward and, when pressed, a killer. Rev. Elliott, who has erected the church that gives Presbyterian Church its name, is bitter, bigoted, and anti-social: he would prefer that the rest of the town disappeared. When gunmen arrive to face off with McCabe, they are there as stooges of a distant corporation, carrying out a business transaction:

Snake River Mining Company can’t afford you: can’t afford a man it can’t buy out. Know that? Never tolerate that. Can afford Sheehan, damned fop they sent to you last week: margin of corruption it allows for in its budget. Company calculated the cost of Presbyterian Church; who collects doesn’t matter. More corrupt people are, easier they can be controlled; company can always send them to jail when they get to be a nuisance.

… At any rate, McCabe, they can’t afford you around. Bad example. Pile all these mountains on you, if they have to; so people thereabouts will believe it, if they deny you ever existed.

Naughton may have been the only writer of westerns to have learned more from George Orwell than Zane Grey — although one English reviewer cited a different influence, dismissing the book as the “Latest example of the neo-Freudian intellectual death-wishful Westerns.” Suffice it to say that McCabe merits more than just footnote status in reference to a much better known movie. It’s original, innovative, and as gripping as any thriller. And, as one reviewer put it, “You don’t have to like westerns to like this one.”

McCabe, by Edmund Naughton
New York: Macmillan, 1959

The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, by Charles Neider (1956)

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones'I first mentioned The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, back in 2010, in a post about “Classics Lost and Found,” a feature in the Independent. In that post, I wrote that it was only book mentioned in the article that could be considered truly neglected.

It’s really quite remarkable, in fact, that such a good book could be so easily forgotten. In a short review on Amazon, record producer Russ Titelman wrote, “As far as I’m concerned, it is one of the great unsung American masterpieces on a par with A Death in the Family and So Long, See You Tomorrow. It is spare, poetic and honest.” In the Independent piece, Clive Sinclair called it “better than any other book on the subject of men, horses and death, except Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry.” And in his introduction to the 1972 Harrow Books paperback reissue, Wirt Williams wrote that it “may be the greatest ‘western’ ever written”:

Why? Well, certainly, it offers so many of those elements indispensable to the form as popular fiction: a supergunfighter as hero, a powerful story, a colorful background, great authenticity of detail. But Hendry Jones has more than these and is much greater than their sum. It is, quite simply, a first-rate work of literature.

Neider started out with the intent of writing a fictional account of the life of Billy the Kid, and his title pays tribute to Sheriff Pat Garrett’s own book, The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid. But despite a long visit to New Mexico, during which he tracked down and interviewed a few of the surviving witnesses from Billy’s time, Neider was stuck until he decided to shift the setting to the central California coast and Baja Mexico, and cut any strong ties to the historical Billy.

Williams argues that what distinguishes the novel is “its mythic quality.” Neider certainly made a deliberate choice to make the story somewhat timeless. His hero has no name other than “the Kid.” His narrator, “Doc” Baker, a former member of the Kid’s gang, does say that his account is set “in that summer of 1883,” but he refuses to offer any biographical information:

Some people had told me I ought to tell about the Kid’s early life, who was his mother who his father, where he went to school, how he killed his first man, how he got to be so good with the gun, the great fighters he met and knew, the women he had, the men he killed, the way he cleaned out the faro bank in the Angels that time. But I see no point in going into all that.

But I have to differ with Williams. I think it’s the book’s specificity that makes it great. Every page shines with prose that’s clean, precise and poetic:

It was good to sit in that town after the hills and Punta, to sit in a plaza and listen. Cries on the bay; bark of a dog; rattle of carts’ clopping of hooves; voices laughing and shouting. It made us wonder how it would be to live in a place like that, with all the houses and faces and business and all the smells–grapes being pressed, eucalyptus trees, pine smoke, roses, meat curing, cheese drying, and the perfume you caught as you passed a lady on the street.

The book is told entirely in “Doc” Baker’s voice, and much of the reason the book works so well is due to Neider’s success in finding just the right tone, a combination of dry, matter-of-fact, life-hardened realism, a casual familiarity with violence, and a subtle touch of the poetic–enough to be effectively atmospheric, not so much as to become intrusive.

In fact, re-reading the novel recently, I suddenly realized why this prose seemed so familiar. Compare these two passages:

Jackson fired. He simply passed his left hand over the top of the revolver he was holding in a gesture brief as a flintspark and tripped the hammer. The big pistol jumped and a double handful of Owen’s brains went out the back of his skill and plopped in the floor behind him. He sank without a sound and lay crumpled up with his face in the floor and one eye open and the blood welling up out of the destruction at the back of his head. Jackson sat down. Brown rose and retrieved his pistol and let the hammer back down and put it in his belt. Most terrible nigger I ever seen, he said. Find some plates, Charlie.

and

It was at this point that Shotgun Smith fired a barrel into Modesto’s head. The boy dropped and Curly Bill dismounted and kicked his face with the high heel of his boot. Cal dismounted too, got a large rock and laid it under Modesto’s head for a pillow. Then Curly Bill, spotting Modesto’s piebald in the corral, roped her, led her close to the boy and shot her in the head. When she lay dead, steaming, the urine running out of her and the blood staining the ground, he got Modesto’s hat, which had fallen near the body, and put it under the mare’s head.

“You go and tell the Kid about this,” said Curly Bill to Modesto’s boss. “Tell him this is what he’s going to get too.”


The first is from Blood Meridian, the second from Hendry Jones. I don’t think I’m entirely off the mark in noting an awful lot of similarity between Cormac McCarthy’s Western voice and Charles Neider’s. Which is another reason why it’s hard to understand why The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones has fallen into neglect.

oneyedjacks

Finally, there is the reason why the book is most often mentioned these days–namely, that it was the inspiration for Marlon Brando’s one and only credit as a director, the 1961 film, One-Eyed Jacks. As you can read in more detail in the Wikipedia article, the screenplay took a tortuous path from source to screen and, other than being shot on the California coast and retaining some of the characters’ names, the film bares little resemblance to Neider’s book. If you wish to see it, though, there are several copies of the film available on YouTube.

hendryjonesreissues

There have been several reissues since the book was first published by Harper in 1956. It was released as Crest paperback (1960) aimed squarely at traditional readers of Westerns. In 1972, it was issued in the U. S. as a Harrow Books paperback and in the U.K. by Pan Books. Finally, University of Nevada Press issued it in 1993 as part of its “Western Literature Classic.”

Given that Cormac McCarthy’s books are the closest thing to the gold standard when it comes to best-selling serious fiction these days, I can only hope that some bright editor catches a clue and ushers a new release of The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones into print. Maybe even with an introduction by McCarthy … although that may be coming too close to home.

The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, by Charles Neider
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956

Winds of Morning, by H. L. Davis

• Excerpt
• Editor’s Comments
• Reviews
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Excerpt


Clallum Jake was a Columbia River Indian by residence, though he was heavier-built and more dignified than river Indians generally were. He lived most of the year on an Indian allotment sand spit that stuck out into the Columbia a few miles above the mouth of the Camas River, where he operated a seining ground during the salmon run, with the help of four or five squaws of varying ages and uniform homeliness. He was a hard-working old buck, and usually hung up from ten to a dozen tons of salmon in a season. He was also a sharp trader. Instead of selling his salmon to the cannery at some starveout price, he preferred to home-dry and peddle it to the upper-country Indians for such raw material as deer hides and the pelts of winter-killed sheep, which his squaws tanned and converted into genuine Indian-beaded buckskin gloves, moccasins, belts and handbags. Knickknacks of that kind found a ready and profitable sale at tourist stores and curio shops around the country, besides supplying the squaws with something to do so they wouldn’t be tempted to start fighting among themselves.

Nobody knew anything precise about the relationship subsisting between Clallum Jake and his squaws. Some public-spirited people in town had tried to find out about it from the squaws a few times, but the squaws knew only a few words of English, all brief and forceful, so the investigation had never got far. Clallum Jake had escaped it himself, being too dignified in appearance to be questioned about his domestic eccentricities by a set of town busybodies who might not have stood up very well under any searching inquiry into theirs. He could understand English moderately well when there was anything in it for him, though he usually professed ignorance of it to be on the safe side. He had no language of his own, or none that anybody could pin him down to, having wandered into the plateau country in the early days from somewhere down on the Coast, where all the native languages were different. In his trading with other Indians, he relied partly on his squaws and partly on a scattering of English mixed with Chinook jargon, the simplified mixture of mispronounced French, Indian, Russian and Eskimo that had once been the universal trade lingo among the western tribes all the way from the Bering Straits to the California line.

One Coast Indian trait that had stayed with him was clumsiness with horses. In spite of the fifty-odd years he had been riding, he still rode like a shirttail full of rocks, but with an air of weighty deliberation that made it look as if he was doing it in fulfillment of some plan too deep and far-ranging to let the general public in on.

Editor’s Comments

Thirty years ago, the University of Chicago Press quietly released a collection of three pieces of short fiction by a retired professor of English, Norman MacLean. Purely through word-of-mouth, A River Runs Through It became a best-seller and nearly won the Pulitzer Prize. More than anything, it was MacLean’s remarkable voice — spare, ironic, experienced but never claiming to be wise, with a soft-spoken good humor — that distinguished the book from anything else published in a good number of years before it. You had the sense that there was nothing the least bit fake in this book — as well as the sense that in waiting so long to tell his stories, MacLean was able (to turn Pascal’s quote around) to make them as short as possible.

I was often reminded of A River Runs Through It while reading Winds of Morning. The two books are set in roughly the same time and place — the Northwestern U.S. in the 1920s. Aside from that, they don’t share much else in common, at least on the surface. The stories are quite different. Winds is a little bit about unraveling the truth behind a murder, more about a young man and an old man herding some horses to a new pasture, and mostly about people and a place in the midst of changing from one era to another. What really reminded me of A River was the voice of Amos Clarke, H.L. Davis’ narrator.

The book is Amos’s recollection, told from a distance of thirty years or so, of one particular experience from his time as a sheriff’s deputy, back when he was barely twenty. Out delivering a summons, he stumbles onto a shooting that looks to be accidental. A ranch hand, Busick, has killed an old Indian, and Amos dutifully takes him into custody. Although it’s an open-and-shut case of manslaughter, Busick gets off — mostly through the collusion of a jury of local businessmen who’d rather have him working and paying off loans that stewing away in prison. Busick gives up his rights to a small patch of grazing land, however, and this sets off the main story in the book.

The sheriff instructs Amos to round up Busick’s horses and lead them up to public pasture with the help on an old man, Hendricks, left to look after them. Hendricks was an early homesteader in the area who built up a healthy estate, but who left under a cloud of rumors after one of his daughters accused him of molesting her. The big story percolating in the background as Amos and Hendricks head north with the horses is the hunt for a murderer. A wealthy rancher married to one of Hendricks’ daughters has been shot dead as he stood in the doorway of his house. In the sheriff’s mind, though, Amos’ job has nothing to do with that.

As it turns out, however, Amos and Hendricks find themselves getting closer, rather than further, from this murder. They stumble across a few threads that Amos’ curiosity and Hendricks’ knowledge of the area and the people in its enable them to follow and, ultimately, solve the case. But this is not the real story in Winds of Morning.

Though horses and wagons are still the main ways of getting around for most people, railroads, cars, and trucks are also regular fixtures. The first wave of homesteaders has receded, leaving a few successful big ranchers and businessmen, more struggling farmers and hired hands, and a lot of abandoned places. Power has shifted, subtly and permanently, from the hands of the rugged individualists like Hendricks to those with money and influence. Although still a wild and beautiful but potentially dangerous land, this West is full of signs that life is changing. Literally, in this passage:

There were some printed signs, mostly faded and weatherbeaten, scattered among the stumps. An old one proclaimed the area to be a part of the Prickettsville municipal water district, and carried a caution against trespassing that didn’t appear to have had much effect, since it was shot full of holes. A newer one from the government printing office stated that the territory thereto adjacent had been stocked with poisoned bait against predatory animals, and advised against permitting sheep does to run loose on it, which, since the buzzards always ate all government poisoned bait and scattered it over half the sheep ranches in the country before the predatory animals got near it, was a way of insuring that there would be enough to go around among the sheep dogs, and they could all poison themselves right at home instead of having to walk miles out into the timber to do it There were smaller signs of varying ages forbidding hunting, fishing, camping, or building fires without a suitable permit, cutting trees or pulling wild flowers, or picking huckleberries except in duly posted and assigned areas and under properly authorized supervision. None of them were supposed to mean anything till summer. They were put up to draw city vacationists, to whom such things gave a pleasantly excited feeling of being the objects of somebody’s attention.

Clarke suspects the change he sees going on aren’t for the better. At one point, he muses:

In old Hendricks’ younger days, there had been more value set on people. Nature had been the enemy then, and people had to stand together against it. Now all its wickedness and menace had been taken away; the thing to be feared now was people, and nature figured mostly as a safe and reassuring refuge against their underhandedness and skullduggery.

But Davis refuses to settle for a simple polemic against progress. This is not the Wild West of good guys versus bad guys, white hats versus black. From the very first scene, it’s clear that Amos is more inclined to try to understand than to judge the people he encounters, and he finds Hendricks shares much the same disposition. “A man can’t tell what’s layin’ around inside of him. There’s too many corners, and things reach out from ’em sometimes that you’d thought was all dead and buried.”

In part, this is because Hendricks is struggling with his own demons. Though innocent of his daughter’s charge of rape, he still took off and lost himself somewhere for a few years before returning to the Columbia River valley. He had his own sin he was trying to escape. One hard winter when most homesteaders were losing whole herds, he had taken up with an Indian squaw for the sole purpose of getting the use of some sheltered pasture, and he kept up the arrangement until he no longer needed the help.

“I couldn’t see how it hurt anybody much,” he tells Amos.

“You can’t tell what will hurt people sometimes,” Amos responds.

“I was out to pile up money in them days,” Hendricks reflects. “Gittin’ ahead in the world was what we called it. nobody ever figured out what they was gittin’ ahead of, I guess. There’s more things than that for a man to git ahead in, anyway. It’s took me a hell of a long time to fin it out….”

Though the pair spend much of the book piecing together the truth about the murder, this is never viewed as a matter of justice or punishment. The culprit, it turns out, is a young Mexican boy traveling with them. His motivation proves to have been his own misguided sense of justice, and they agree to let things rest at that.

“You can’t make up for what you’ve done,” Hendricks tells Amos. “When you do it, it stands against you. You pay for it, no matter what you do afterwards. Good and bad don’t cancel each other out. It don’t lighten a twenty-pound load on one end of a pole to hang twenty-one pounds on the other end. The pole’s got to carry ’em both.”

I hesitate to call this a Western for grown-ups, because that usually just means the sexual element isn’t completely repressed. But Winds of Morning is certainly written from a more mature and morally, economically, even ecologically realistic perspective than just about anything I’ve ever come across that had the label “Western” applied to it. Several dozen characters pass across the stage in the course of the book, and not one gets less than a fully-rounded treatment.

Even the landscape gets a fully-rounded treatment — and what book could qualify as a Western without plenty of landscape:

The river had changed color a little; it was not blackish, as it had been when we looked at it from the hillside, and not roily, as lowland rivers always were after a hard rain, but milky green, like snow water that has thawed too fast for the air to separate from it. The current was swift, but it held to its ordinary level as if the torrents of rain flooding into it had all been beneath its notice.

And, of course, there have to be horses. Amos and Hendricks have both spent their lives caring for, and relying on, their horses. The horses have come to command a certain amount of respect:

It was useless trying to ride the horses down such a place; they had enough work merely to keep their feet under them and keep going, so we dismounted and followed along behind. Halfway down, the slope steepened so we could hardly stand up on it, but the horses by then had discovered how to manage it without wearing themselves out. Instead of trying to walk with the rocks moving and shifting underfoot, they merely started a patch sliding, set back, and coasted on it till it stopped, and then moved on and started another one to coast on. Not many animals are smarter than a range horses, when he is left free to figure things out for himself.

There’s a limit to this respect, though. In fact, we find that horses may have formed a bit too much of Amos’ perspective:

Horses and women. Leave either of them alone with only a man to depend on for company, and they could develop an intelligence so quick and sensitive that it was uncanny to be around. Herd them back with others of their species, and they dropped instantly to a depth of dull pettiness and mental squalor that made a man wonder how he could ever have credited them with intelligence at all….

Personally, I haven’t met many women who’d say that being left alone with a man raises the net IQ. And though Davis tosses a romance in to top Winds of Morning off, it’s the weakness element in the novel, and the most expendable. Men, horses, landscapes, and weather are already enough to make this a rich, intelligent, and thorough enjoyable piece of writing.

A Book-of-the-Month Club selection at the time it was first published, Winds of Morning sold well, but vanished after one paperback run. The Greenwood Press reissued it for academic libraries in 1972 and a small Western press, Comstock Book Distributors, reissued it in hardback in 1996, but these editions are harder to find that the original Morrow release. Fortunately, there are plenty of used copies to be found on Amazon for as little as 99 cents, so there is no excuse for letting this terrific book gather dust. Heck, I’ll even offer to buy your copy if you’re not satisfied after reading it.

Reviews

• Manas Journal, 13 February 1952:

Once in a while — once in a very great while we find the temerity to comment upon what is commonly called the “artistic value” of a novel or drama. Having so long championed the view that ideas and ideals are always the Real, and that even the most impassioned recounting of experiences is valueless unless it points a way toward realization of an ideal, a reviewer cannot help but feel a bit of a turncoat if he first stakes out claims for a piece of writing chiefly because he warms to the way it is written. Yet H. L. Davis’ Winds of Morning tempts such extravagance, despite the fact that it is a Book of the Month selection and that BoM reviewers have praised it for much the same reasons.

Davis does have a marked sort of idealism, however, even though it is not addressed to any particular social or psychological problem. It is felt, for instance, in attitudes toward the creatures of nature and the beautiful land which supports them. It is present in the form of compassion and understanding when the subject is crime and criminals, and it emerges most of all in the respect shown for those who are courageously independent. Perhaps good writing always does something of this nature, if it is really good writing, at all.

Winds of Morning is not, in the usual meaning of the word, an “exciting” book. Being so well done it needs none of those emotional injections which often are made to reinforce the efforts of even skillful writers to convey a point of view or an interpretation of experience. Instead, without in the least giving the impression of trying, Mr. Davis helps the reader to feel that each moment of common, everyday life may hold a further awakening of the mind.

• Time magazine, 7 January 1952

The story begins with a young deputy sheriff who is sent out to herd an old hoss-wrangler and his strays through the wheat country and into open territory. On the trip, by a series of stumbling inadvertencies, he runs down a murder story and falls in love. He chews over old times and old ways in dozens of small passages of talk with the oldtimer, and with himself. He also takes a deep breath of the wilderness around him, and the reader breathes it with him.

“The noise of a late-lingering flock of wild geese going out to its day’s feeding in the wheat fields woke me the next morning,” Davis may write, with a mildness that is really intensely restrained affection. “The sky was already beginning to fill with light, and there were a few cold yellow sun streaks on the high ridges…”

Such passages give Davis’ prose, and his story too, a quality of imminence—as though at any moment they might break out in crashing event. They never do. The action of the book, though now and again it holds some excitement, has no importance; it rises quietly out of the big land, and sinks quietly back into it. The natural world, in fact, is the only real character in Winds of Morning; the people in the book appear chiefly as traits of that character. Ordinarily, this would be a fatal flaw. The measure of Novelist Davis’ success is that he will almost certainly make a great many readers decide that his favorite country deserves the affectionate priority he gives it.

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Winds of Morning, by H. L. Davis
New York: William Morrow & Company, 1952