ELMER KELTON (1926-2009)

"My dad wanted to make a cowboy out of me, but every time he turned around to see where I was, I was reading a book."

Crane, Texas (1940s)
"In an oil-patch town like Crane a boy who excelled in English and won spelling bees was automatically suspect."

No writer ever knew West Texas better than Elmer Kelton.  No, that's not quite correct.  Let me start over.  No writer ever knew west Texas as well as Elmer Kelton.

After all, he was born on a west Texas ranch where first his grandfather and than his father was the foreman.  He grew up near the town of Crane on the McElroy Ranch located in Upton and Crane counties where his father, R.W. "Buck" Kelton, was employed for over thirty years.  His mother was Neta Beatrice "Bea" (nee Parker).

Kelton wrote in his autobiography, Sandhills Boy: The Winding Trail of a Texas Writer (2010), that:

"Dad gave me every chance to learn to be a cowboy.  I was probably the greatest failure of his life.  I was always better talking about it, and writing about it, than I ever was at doing it .... By the time I was eight or nine years old, I fantasized about someday writing the Great American Novel."

A good listener, Kelton was quoted as saying that "Cowboys, especially in the days before television, were pretty good storytellers.  As a kid I loved to sit around and listen to them talk.  I soaked it up like a sponge."

After high school he attended the University of Texas at Austin and was a semester shy of graduation when he was drafted into the army during WWII and served in the infantry in Europe from 1944 to 1946.  A Bronze Star was among his ciatations.

After the war he finished his degree in journalism at the University of Texas.  Beginning in 1948 he wrote for over forty years about farming and ranching in west Texas for various agricultural newspapers and journals, before retiring in 1990.

Kelton's mother, a former school teacher, encouraged him to be a writer, but his father was rather dubious about his son's career choice.  His response was "That's the way with you kids nowadays, you all want to make a living without working for it."

When asked if he had any advice for young writers, Kelton said: "Keep your day job.  Read, read, and keep on reading.  Write, write, and keep on writing."

Kelton took his own advice.  He kept his day job.

During those four decades as an agricultural journalist he wrote fiction in his spare time, in the evenings and on the weekends.  He began writing short stories for pulp magazines and published his first novel, Hot Iron, in 1955.

He went on to write more than forty novels, all westerns, and, with few exceptions, set in west Texas.

His first real recognition was due to the publication of his novel, Buffalo Wagons (1957), which received the highest honor that a western novel can receive, that being a prestigious Spur Award from the Western Writers of America.

That was just the beginning, for six of his later novels would also win the award.  They are: The Day the Cowboys Quit (1971); The Time it Never Rained (1973); Slaughter (1992); The Far Canyon (1994); Eyes of the Hawk (2001); and The Way of the Coyote (2002).

In addition, three of his novels have received Western Heritage Awards from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.  They are: The Time It Never Rained (1973); The Good Old Boys (1982); and The Man Who Rode Midnight (1987).

Note that The Time It Never Rained is the only Kelton novel to be honored by both organizations.  This is only fitting since it is his most popular and most critically acclaimed work, as well as being his personal favorite.

In 1995, The Good Old Boys was made into a TV movie on TNT, starring Tommy Lee Jones, who also directed and co-wrote the script.  To date, it is the only Kelton story to be adapted for film.

That same year Kelton's peers in the Western Writers of America organization voted him the "All-time Best Western Author."  I don't know where the two biggest selling authors, Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour, placed, but it was somewhere behind Willa Cather who finished a distant second.

When asked in an interview how he felt about the vote, he said, "I'd hate to have to stand up and defend that in front of a jury.  I appreciate the compliment, but I can't say that I believe it."

Kelton's primary theme in his novels "has always been change and how people adpt to it or don't adapt."  Never is this more apparent than it is in his most acclaimed novel, The Time It Never Rained.

It is the story of an actual drought that occurred in west Texas during the 50's, one that lasted seven long years.

During those years the ability of ranchers to adapt was severely tested year after year.

Kelton not only wrote about the drought in his novel, he lived it.

He said that "I could never have written it without my experience as a reporter.  That drought was my daily running story as an agricultural writer for seven years."

Charlie Flagg is the story's primary protagonist.  Kelton said, "I have heard Charlie described as a mythical character representing old-fashioned ideals of rugged individualism and free enterprise.  To me there was nothing mythical about him.  He was real."

And so were you, Mr. Kelton.

 

THE MAN WHO RODE MIDNIGHT by Elmer Kelton

Back in 1973 Elmer Kelton published his most critically acclaimed novel, one that won both Spur and Western Heritage awards.  It is The Time It Never Rained, which one admiring critic conceded wasn't "the Great American Novel," but may very well be "the Great Texas Novel."

It was the story of Charlie Flagg, a tough-minded Texas rancher who in the 1950s was hanging on with all he had as he tried to survive the worse drought to hit that part of Texas since the Dust Bowl days of the '30s.

Wes Hendricks, the primary protagonist of The Man Who Rode Midnight is cut from the same cloth and could be viewed as the reincarnation of Charlie twenty years down the road.  In his seventies, Wes is not facing drought, though like Charlie he is forced to run sheep on his west Texas hill country ranch because they are profitable, which allows him to stay in the cattle business which isn't profitable.  It is a sacrifice that any self-respecting cattleman would regret, but a man has to do what a man has to do.


"I hated sheep at first, but they growed on me.  I decided they can't be all bad if they make you more money than cattle.  Besides, an old cow'll sometimes try to kill you.  So will a horse.  An old ewe may be dumber than dirt, but you don't find any malice in her."


But Wes does have to confront another problem, one even more relentless and intractable than prolonged drought; his foe is progress.  In his youth Wes had swung a wide loop as a cowboy, bronc buster, and rodeo rider.  He was one tough galoot.  After all, he was "the man who rode Midnight."  All he wanted now was to be left alone so that he could live out his days on his ranch.  But then progress intervened.

The little town of Big River is dying and on its last legs and its citizens are behind a proposal by developers to dam the river and create a lake that would attract tourists.  The only fly in the ointment is Wes; said lake would cover his ranch.

Pedernales River in Texas Hill Country

Wes is offered much more money than what his ranch is worth but that isn't the issue.  He doesn't want to sell for any price, not even when the local sheriff who has vested interests threatens him.


"Strange, the way life changes things on you.  That time I rode Ol' Midnight, they taken my picture.  My name was in the papers.  People went out of their way to shake my hand and talk to me.  I was a hero for a while, and people liked to brag that they knew me.  Now all that's gone; it don't mean a damned thing anymore.  I'm just an old man standin' in everybody's way."


Other characters in the story include Wes' grandson, Jim Ed, a city boy who grew up in Dallas, but comes to live with his grandfather after flunking out of college during his senior year.  He has been sent by his father to try to convince Wes to sell and to take up residence in a retirement home.  Jim Ed, nicknamed "Tater" by his grandfather, a name he detests, finds himself falling for a young woman from a neighboring ranch named Gloria Beth Dawson, nicknamed Glory B., a name she embraces.


Jim Ed shoved aside a coiled rope and a bridle to make room on the seat.  He had to move an assortment of stock medicine, wire pinchers and general working tools to make footroom on the floor.  He bumped his head on a rifle racked against the rear window.

"What's that for?" he asked.

His grandfather replied in a gravelly voice, "You never know when you may run into a son of a bitch that needs shootin'."


Like The Time It Never Rained, The Man Who Rode Midnight is not a "western novel," but a novel set in the West.  The winner of a Western Heritage Award, the themes of The Man Who Rode Midnight examine a generation gap, the conflict between old and new ways, love of land, uncompromising values, romance, and even aching despair over faded love.

Some evenings Wes takes his fiddle and moves away from the house in order not to disturb his grandson and each time plays the same haunting melody, one that his grandson does hear, and eventually recognizes.

As I look at the letters that you wrote to me
It's you that I am thinkin' of
As I read the lines that, to me, were so dear
I remember our faded love
I miss you darlin', more and more every day
As heaven would miss the stars up above
With every heartbeat, I still think of you
And remember our faded love
As I think of the past and all the pleasures we had
As I watched the mating of the dove
It was in the springtime that you said goodbye
I remember our faded love
I miss you darlin', more and more every day
As heaven would miss the stars up above
With every heartbeat, I still think of you
And remember our faded love

And remember our faded love
Written by Bob Wills, James Robert Wills, Johnnie Lee Wills. copyright Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.


The world according to Wes Hendricks:

"There's somethin' way out of balance in the world.  People over in Africa are starvin' because they can't buy food.  People here are starvin' because you can't sell it."

"But that's the way with dreams: the bad ones just haunt you, and the good ones never come true."  

"People moved away from the country in them days; they didn't move to it .... Now it's in style for people to quit the city and move to the country, only they want to bring the city with them.  Time they get through changin' it into everything they come here to run away from, there won't be nothin' left of the country .... They'll pave over the last blade of grass someday, and drown the last tree in an artificial lake so some damnfool from town can race a motorboat.  You ought to at least remember what it used to be like."

"Things ain't like they used to be ... Times, I wonder if they ever were."

"There ain't no better cure for a socialist than a little dose of capital."

"There's no limit to what a man can do once he makes up his mind he ain't allergic to sweat."

Elmer Kelton (1926-2009)

BLESSED MCGILL by Edwin Shrake

Edwin "Bud" Shrake was a crime reporter, sportswriter, magazine writer, and screenwriter. He also wrote novels -- ten of them. A native of Texas, most of his novels were about that state, its history, and its people. Among his novels are several Westerns. They were what are now classified as "literary Westerns," meaning they were less formulaic and more serious than the "genre Westerns" churned out by Louis L'Amour and many others (I don't mean this as a putdown, because some of the skilled practitioners in the genre field have given me many hours of pleasure.)

Other examples of writers of literary Westerns would include the likes of Cormac McCarthy, Douglas C. Jones, and Larry McMurtry, also a Lone Star native. Another Texan, Elmer Kelton, churned out many a genre Western, but occasionally produced a novel that could be compared favorably with the works of the above writers. Two good examples of his work that are worthy of the literary label would be The Time It Never Rained and The Man Who Rode Midnight.

Blessed McGill, published in 1987, was Shrake's third novel and is generally conceded to be his best.

One Peter Hermano McGill, a half-Irish, half-Spanish adventurer who roamed the American southwest and Mexico in the years after the Civil War, narrates the story.  Although McGill is self-educated, he is a good writer and a great storyteller who weaves his life story through flashback episodes that are not always related in chronological order. True, that narrative device has the effect of keeping the reader in the dark and guessing at times, but in the end, everything converges and the reader learns why the nickname "Blessed" is bestowed upon him; but I'm not telling.

Bud Shrake

THE TIME IT NEVER RAINED by Elmer Kelton

Elmer Kelton wrote in the prologue of The Time It Never Rained:

“Men grumbled, but you learned to live with the dry spells if you stayed in West Texas; there were more dry spells than wet ones.  No one expected another drought like that of ’33.  And the really big dries like 1918 came once in a lifetime.

“Why worry? They said.  It would rain this fall.  It always had. 

“But it didn’t.  And many a boy would become a man before the land was green again.”

The novel is set in west Texas during the 50’s when the region endured and barely survived a drought that lasted seven long years.  And Kelton was there – not as a rancher, but as an agriculture journalist.  He covered the desolation on a daily basis and was intimately acquainted with what it meant for the people who were forced to cope with its devastating manifestations.

As a sideline, Kelton had been writing fiction since the late 40’s and his stories were first published in pulp magazines.  When those went out of business, he was able to get his first novel, Hot Iron, published in 1955.  

Twice he began a novel about the drought but his publisher was not interested.  It was too different – too unconventional.  Its plot simply did not contain the elements ordinarily found in the Western novels of the day.  There was a lot of gray and very little black-and-white.  It was a story about change and how people attempted to adapt to it, but not always with success.  

In other words, there was not enough action; it was too tame as far as the publisher was concerned.  One might even say, too literary.

In the early 70’s, after several more of Kelton’s novels were published, he scrapped his first two efforts and began a third draft of a novel about the drought.  The Time It Never Rained was the happy result.

The Western Writers of America would eventually name Kelton as “the number one Western Writer of all time.”  Willa Cather finished a distant second.   

Seven of Kelton’s novels have received the Western Writers of America’s prestigious Spur Award and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum has bestowed its coveted Western Heritage Awards on him for three of his novels.  These are the equivalent of Pulitzer Prizes in the Western book world.

Kelton went on to write over forty novels, two published posthumously after his death in 2009, but the most honored is The Time It Never Rained, for it received both the Spur Award and the Western Heritage Award.  Kelton never wrote “The Great American Novel,” but some critics have called The Time It Never Rained “the Great Texas Novel.”

Kelton’s protagonist is Charlie Flagg, “[who] was past fifty now, a broad shouldered man who still toted his own sacks, dug his own postholes, flanked his own calves.”  His ranch would have been considered a mid-sized one in West Texas in the 50’s.  It consisted of fifteen sections, almost ten thousand acres, but he owned only three of the sections.  He leased the others.

Cattle and sheep ranching in West Texas on any size scale at all required many acres even in the best of times.  It took four acres to feed just one sheep and twenty to feed one cow.  During the dry times, even those ratios would not suffice.  Therefore, ten thousand acres was not a large ranch.

Charlie was an ornery cuss. He was also a libertarian at a time when that particular philosophical label was not in vogue.  While the other ranchers in the area accept government assistance during the drought, Charlie will have nothing to do with it.

Charlie says that when a man took government assistance “he sold his freedom bit by bit, and was paid for it on the installment plan,” and that “the politician promiseth, and the bureaucrat taketh away.”   “What I can’t do for myself,” he says at one point, “I’ll do without.”

He uses his grandfather as his role model as he tries to explain to his son why he is unwilling to accept government assistance:

“He went through cruel hard times when there was others takin’ a pauper’s oath so they could get money and food and free seed, but he never would take that oath.  He come within an inch of starvin’ to death, and he died a poor man.  But he never owed any man a debt he didn’t pay and he never taken a thing off the government.”

And what about Charlie?  Does he prevail?  Rather than disclosing the answer to those questions, I would recommend that everyone read this atypical Western novel and discover the answers for themselves.

And what about today?  It would seem that the more things change, the more they remain the same, as indicated by this headline: In 2013, Texas Drought Could Be Worst Ever In Some Areas, Climatologist Says

Elmer Kelton

The world according to Charlie Flagg:

"It's as old as mankind...the hope of gettin' somethin' for nothin' or gettin' more out of the pot than you put in it.  Nobody's ever made it work yet.  Nobody ever will."

"It's a good life, son, but sometimes a damn thin livin'."

"As a way of makin' money, ranchin' is awful highly overrated."

"Only real difference I see between ranchin' and poker is with poker you got some chance."

"A ranch without any cows is like a man walkin' down the street without any pants on.  He's just not respectable."

"I reckon we just keep the ewes so we can afford the cows."

"Some people say we ought to let the coyote alone, that we got to have them for the balance of Nature.  But most of these people live in the cities, where they threw Nature out years ago.  They ain't goin' to give up their automobiles and paved streets and sewer systems to get Nature back, but they're damn sure free with advice on what the other man ought to do."

"I say man has got to be considered a part of Nature's balance, too.  You can't raise coyotes and sheep together any more than you can have paved streets and coyotes together.  You can't eat a coyote or wear his fur."

"A bad habit or two is good for a man or a beast.  Did you ever know a man who didn't have any bad habits?  I have, and I always hated the son of a bitch."