Riders of Deathwater Valley continues the Keystone Ranch series. If you’ve been following the series, you’ll know that each novel works out some kind of parallel with one or another of the King Arthur legends. And those legends are legion! I doubt if I’ll ever run short of Arthurian lore to use in my westerns.

     Riders of Deathwater Valley uses the story called “Lancelot, or the Knight of the Cart”, written down by Chretien de Troyes in the 12^th century. In this story, Lancelot sets out to rescue Guinevere from an evil king. He has to cross a chasm on a bridge of swords, arriving in enemy territory unarmed. He is imprisoned in a windowless dungeon, saved by a mysterious damsel and challenged to single combat only to be spurned in the end by Guinevere, who thinks he has demeaned himself by riding in a common cart. It does not matter that he used the cart to get into the castle to save her: riding in a cart was so far beneath him that it cost him his knightly status.

     It wasn’t hard to find a disgusting mode of transportation for my cowboy character, Link. There are accounts aplenty of the scruffy bonepickers of the prairie who went about collecting the skeletal remains of buffalo and cattle. Their rough carts had an odor that could be detected for miles.

      As for the bad guys who steal horses and cattle and hide in a fortress-like valley, I had the historical example of Doc Middleton. The Middleton Gang rustled livestock in Wyoming, escaping to their obscure valley where it would take an army to drive them out.

Scott Momaday wrote that, once in our lives, we ought to touch the remembered earth. We ought to return to the place where our spirit was first nurtured and spend time remembering the colors of dawn and dusk, the taste of the air and water, the feel of the ground.

     The essays in Windmills, the River and Dust record my own places, the times of my life which have formed my best thoughts. There is humor in the essays, some reflections about society and my fellow humans, some information about “nature” and geography. And I like to think there is a good deal of variety, too. There are essays about flying to Alaska, watching a pueblo Indian dance in midwinter, restoring an old windmill, canoeing the Boundary Waters wilderness and witnessing the migration of the sandhill cranes.

     The book also reprints the entire text of my earlier book-length essay, “Following Where the River Begins.” Many people complained to me when it went out of print, so now it is back again. “Following” is an account of a professor taking students on a trip to see the upper Colorado River from its headwaters in Rocky Mountain National Park to the red canyons of Moab. Along the way there is smattering of sarcasm, a few adventures, and lots of scenery.

Professor David McIntyre returns to Alliance, Nebraska to teach a summer course at the community college. Upon arriving, he learns that one of his students from the previous summer, Cass Deering, has vanished without a trace. Not only that, but the man she had been living with was found stabbed to death.

            Here’s the odd thing: as Professor McIntyre talks with Cass’s friends and family, he realizes how closely the murder and disappearance follow the plot of a 19^th century English novel—a novel from the class she had taken from him! As he prowls around Alliance, unable to let the puzzle alone, clues begin to show up—clues that always seem to involve the Carhenge monument. But the full-scale replica of Stonehenge crafted out of old auto bodies has no answers for him, only the howl of wind through broken windows and the clatter of flapping sheet metal in the dark.

            As in The Tobermory Manuscript, David McIntyre is joined by his classy and attractive colleague, Professor Henriette Palmer of the history department. McIntyre calls her “Hank” for short. From facing irate landowners with shotguns to visiting a stripper, Professor Palmer bravely accompanies McIntyre where other women would tell him to go to hell. She’s even willing to drive his vintage Dodge pickup—if it means leaving McIntyre afoot on the prairie.

            A Title to Murder gives the reader the titles of eight English novels McIntyre was teaching the summer Cass disappeared. They have one thing in common: each novel is named after a woman. But only one of them will hold the final clue to Cass’s whereabouts, and the reader has to figure out which.

Following is a set of seven essays which chronicle a trip along the upper stretches of the Colorado River. Professor Work and Professor Tom Lyon took a group of college students on an exploration of the river from its headwaters in Rocky Mountain National Park down as far as Moab, Utah.

            Along the way, Professor Work kept a journal of the ecology and history of the places they passed through, along with a record of the group’s activities and social interaction. The result is a series of very personal essays about conflicts and dreams, aspirations and disappointments, loneliness and meditation.

            “This is a journey through one man’s inner landscape, a ramble from the valleys where the shadow of doubt seems perpetual to the heights which seem, like the mountains, to be imperceptibly shrinking each year.”

            “To those who know me and those who do not, I offer this essay along with a professorial admonition: go find your headwaters, but do not dwell in them; anticipate confluences, and rejoice in them; and wherever you are on the river, make it your river of most moment.”

            Following Where the River Begins won the 1990 Charles Redd Center for Western Studies Award.

When the Keystone series needed a “tournament” for the Keystone riders to participate in, the choice was obvious. Once again, historical fact coincided with an old myth. Less than a week’s ride east of the Keystone Ranch territory is North Platte, Nebraska where William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody and others organized a Fourth of July celebration in 1882. Generally called the North Platte Independence Day Blowout, it was one of the earliest Western rodeos and the springboard for Buffalo Bill’s famed Wild West Extravaganza.

            The Keystone cowboy they call “Link,” one of several foremen on the place, rides away to the south on a long and much needed holiday. He comes upon a strange stone tower inhabited by a strange stonemason, his odd daughter, and a weird hunchback who drives an empty hearse and spends his days digging graves for women who have not died.

            After spending several months here, Link finds himself changed in appearance. Hearing about the plans for the Fourth of July Blowout, he decides to ride to North Platte in disguise and challenge his Keystone cohorts in bronc riding and steer roping. But what of the peculiar young woman, the one who lives in the stone tower, the one who has fallen desperately in love with Link? What will his departure do to her?

This Keystone Ranch novel is the sequel to Ride West to Dawn.  The hero, Kyle Owen, has returned from an ordeal in the mountains but he is far from being okay. He’s moody, forgetful and often angry. When a woman from his past arrives to confront him and accuse him of deserting her, Kyle mind snaps and in anger he rides away to the east. He finds the solitude he thought he wanted, but long winters and utter isolation drive him to something near insanity. His own private prairie cañon seems haunted by the banshee of death itself.

            Ride to Banshee Cañon was partly suggested by the history of a Colorado immigrant who lived near Fort Sedgewick in the 1800s. Rather than build a house, he began digging a series of caves and tunnels which today are known as The Italian Caves. The novel also employs the idea of the Medicine Circle as found in legends of such tribes as the Cheyenne, Lakota and Arapaho. According to the teachings of the Medicine Circle, each compass direction has its own special effect upon a person. To travel north, for instance, is to travel in the direction of Wisdom. Those who travel the south road need to see life with more Innocence. East, the direction Kyle takes in this novel, is the route toward Illumination. It is where sunrise allows you to see the entire picture more clearly. Westward lies Introspection, the kind of looking-within experience that comes with dusk.

            The Keystone Series has a blacksmith who explains the meaning of these directions to the cowboys who have to make their quests of discovery. He’s been called a “gatekeeper” figure who sets each man on the right road while forging his massive chain. What the chain symbolizes is left to the reader to imagine.

Shane, The Critical Edition was created for serious students of Jack Schaefer’s western classic. First of all, it is an authoritative copy of the first edition of  1949, word for word. There have been many errors and omissions and changes in later editions (such as the removal of the swear words in a 1954 edition) over the years, which means that most editions are not exactly as Jack Schaefer intended.

            In addition to being a definitive text of Shane, the critical edition features an interview with Jack Schaefer, essays on the historical background of the Johnson County War, articles about the film Shane, book and movie reviews and commentaries by critics and scholars.

[Side Note: shortly after The Critical Edition went on the market,   a newspaper reviewer wrote “Here he is again, the stereotype of the man in black, his two six-guns tied down and ready for action . . . .”  However, in the novel Shane doesn’t wear black (nor buckskins, as does Alan Ladd in the film) and he has one revolver carried in a tight-fitting holster. Which goes to prove that you don’t actually need to read a book before you review it.]

This is the author’s first novel. It’s a re-telling of a story that has been told countless times through hundreds if not thousands of years of human history. In the story a mystical supernatural being appears and challenges a mortal to an odd “game” in which the mortal will kill the stranger and then, after a year has passed, will come find the stranger and offer himself to be killed.

            The mystical stranger is Death and New Life rolled into one. He—or She—represents the odd paradox that no one can “kill” death and that life is only possible if it undergoes death at periodic intervals. The old myth probably originated with primitive farming cultures who realized that the heads had to be cut from the grain in order that the tribe might eat, but it some heads were buried more grain would emerge. Re-birth, in other words.

            But you have to be worthy of re-birth. So young Pasque sets out from the Keystone Ranch in search of the giant stranger whom he has just shot three times with a Walker .44 revolver. He is tempted along the way, and he proves that he is courageous, chivalrous, and honest. He faces the gun of the magic giant with some trepidation, but he also has faith in his own inner strength.

This is the second book of the Keystone Ranch series. Like the others it is grounded in actual historical fact: this time the factual situation is that in 1894 the Carey Desert Land Act was passed in Congress, allowing any person to claim any amount of “non-usable” land provided they could create a way to irrigate it.

            Thanks to this law hundreds of entrepreneurs (including lawman Pat Garrett) began schemes to bring water down from the mountains to the arid plain and therefore claim ownership of thousands of square miles of Western land.

            In Ride West to Dawn a meek little man arrives at the Keystone in search of help. An irrigation ditch has been built above his settlement and he and his friends are now without water.

            Will Jenson is sent to investigate, but he encounters a giant of a man guarding the ditch and the giant not only stops him, he takes Will’s weapons and horse and leaves him in the wilderness to fend for himself.  When Will returns to the Keystone, ruined by alcohol and shame, Kyle Owens buckles on his guns and rides north to face this mysterious guardian of the ditch who has reduced his friend to a pitiful drunk.

            Kyle finds the ditch, the guardian, and two very strange women living in a stone house. Without spoiling the ending, let’s just say that three years will go by and finally the Keystone Riders will saddle up, take their long heavy rifles, and go looking for Kyle. They will have a shootout with the ditch guardian, who is a man they used to know.

In 1874 James “Rocky Mountain Jim” Nugent was murdered in Estes Park, Colorado. Years later, around 1905, Enos Mills was writing a history of Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park and told the story of Nugent’s death. Mills added an intriguing line: “It is known that Jim had a mass of written matter just before he was shot, but I have failed to find any of it.”

            In The Tobermory Manuscript, Professor David Lachlan McIntyre goes in search of this manuscript, which by now has been missing for a hundred and twenty-five years. Puzzles and more puzzles show up as McIntyre’s investigation takes him to London to interview the great-great-great grandson of the publisher who published Isabella Bird’s Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains in 1879 and then to Tobermory, where Isabella Bird lived with her sister. Tobermory is a village on the Isle of Mull off the west coast of Scotland.

Gunfight!  is a small collection of Western stories about gunfights. The authors

include Clarence Mulford, who created Hopalong Cassidy; Dorothy Johnson, who wrote “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”; Luke Short; John Cunningham, whose story “The Tin Star” was turned into the movie High Noon; Donald Hamilton, who besides writing westerns created the Matt Helm adventure series; and California renegade writer Gerald Haslam.

            The collection also features a short biography of each writer plus an editorial commentary on each story  and an introductory essay about the tradition of gunfights in Western American literature.

            [The cover illustration is interesting: it’s by N.C. Wyeth and portrays Hopalong Cassidy as he “really” looked when Clarence Mulford created him, before actor William Boyd came along and cleaned up Hoppy’s image.]

College courses in the literature of the American West were slow in coming, but by 1964 there was enough academic interest in the subject that the Western Literature Association was founded. At WLA meetings and in the pages of the journal Western American Literature the experts and aficionados argued and debated and eventually hammered out a canon of the literature. It became pretty clear who the top hands were when it came to writing good prose and poetry.

            But college teachers still did not have a textbook, a single volume that would show the development and flavor of Western American literature.  Several anthologies existed, but one dealt only with cattle trade stories while another included only stories by men (and white men at that). And none of the existing books explained the history of writing “out West.”

            Prose and Poetry of the American West begins with selections from Native American myths from such tribes as the Mandan, Kiowa, Zuni and Navajo. Then it presents journals written by the first Europeans to set foot on Western lands, the Spanish who were here in 1540, several years before the New England settlers.

            All in all, the book contains writings by over fifty authors arranged chronologically from pre-1540 legends to 1980s environmental essays. It includes essays, journals, fiction and poetry. It even offers a way to separate the literature of the West into four distinctive literary periods—The Emergence Period, the Mythopoeic Period, the Neo-Mythic Period, and the Neo-Western Period.

            At the time PPAW went out of print it was being used as a textbook at fourteen colleges and universities.