BUTCHER'S CROSSING by John Williams

John Williams (1922-1994) wrote four novels.  None of them, however, sold many copies during his lifetime.  I remember some years ago seeing and scanning stories about him with headlines such as The Best Writer You Never Heard Of, or something similar.  And that certainly applied to me.  I had never heard of him, and I couldn't read his books because they were out of print.  In fact, although there were critics who praised his work, his books sold few copies before disappearing -- literally in some cases -- into the trash bin of history.

He received his greatest, albeit fleeting, publicity when his epistolary novel set in Ancient Rome, Augustus, won the National Book Award in 1973. But it didn't sell many copies either.

Fast forward to 2013:

A dramatic change occurred when the New York Review of Books (NYRB) re-issued Stoner, a novel about a quiet, unassuming, and, in many ways, forgettable professor teaching literature at the University of Missouri, which had been originally published in 1965.

Suddenly, everyone had heard of John Williams, at least those who read books.  He had become an overnight success -- almost a half-century after he had written the book -- and almost two decades after his death.

A year later, NYRB re-issued Augustus.

However, these were not the first Williams novels to be re-issued by NYRB.  The first was Butcher's Crossing, originally published in 1960, and re-issued by NYRB in 2007.  It had not attracted the readership that Stoner did six years later, but it benefited from the popularity of that novel, even to the point that Butcher's Crossing is now in development as a movie.

The Butcher's Crossing title refers to a rag-tag collection of shacks and shanties located on the Kansas prairie.  In the late 1870's, its primary commercial activity is the collection and shipment of buffalo hides to the east.  

Will Andrews, a young Bostonian imbued with the teachings of Emerson and Thoreau, drops out of Harvard College and travels west in a quest for -- well, for something that he can't quite explain -- but obviously includes a search for self -- a self that he might discover in Nature.


At the gate of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish.  The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he takes into these precincts.  Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes.  Here we find Nature to be the circumstances which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature


In some ways Andrews pursues a course opposite to that of Stoner; while Stoner deserted nature (the farm) for academia, Andrews deserts academia for nature.

Eventually, because he wants to take part in a buffalo hunt (something that neither Emerson nor Thoreau would have approved of), and because he had some money, Andrews agrees to bankroll a hunt led by an experienced hunter named Miller.  To assist the enterprise Miller hires Charley Hoge, a one-handed, whiskey-swilling, Bible-thumper to serve as teamster and camp cook and Schneider, an experienced skinner.  Young Andrews principal job will be to assist Schneider, even though he knows nothing about skinning animals, but is expected to learn.

I'm not going to divulge any more of the plot, because I don't want to be guilty of spoilers and because it's too damn difficult to do anyway.  But I will tell you that the passage across the arid plains of western Kansas and eastern Colorado almost ends the hunt even before the hunters arrive in the Colorado Rockies where Miller is certain a huge buffalo herd will be found in a valley that he visited years before.

The hunters find the herd but they tarry too long in the Rockies and have to spend the winter there.  Winter in the Rockies means snow -- a lot of it -- and as a result the hunters find themselves engaging in another battle of survival against the forces of nature.

Just as it is impossible to explain in a brief summary why Stoner is such a great novel, so it is with Butcher's Crossing.  It is a western novel.  No, that's not quite right.  It is a novel set in the west.  Despite the fact that the story is populated by many stock characters -- even the prostitute with the requisite heart of gold -- they are offset by a pared down, austere, but clear and vivid prose that contains no gimmicks or grammatical games.

Joanne Greenberg, who is best known for her book I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, knew Williams and admired his talent long before most of the rest of us even had a clue.  She was quoted as saying that Williams "wrote like a Shaker would ski -- without a wasted motion." Perfect; I wish I had thought of that.

Anyone looking to read a traditional western in the mainstream of the genre should look elsewhere.  This is a book that shares more in common with Herman Melville's Moby Dick than anything ever written by Louis L'Amour.  If, on the other hand, you are an admirer of Cormac McCarthy, than this book would likely appeal to you.


"What will you do now, Mr. McDonald?" Andrews asked; his voice soft.

"Do?"  McDonald straightened on the bed.  "Why, I'm going to do what Miller said I should do; I'm going to get out of this country.  I'm going back to St. Louis, maybe back to Boston, maybe even to New York. You can't deal with this country as long as you're in it; it's too big, and empty, and it lets the lies come into you.  You have to get away from it before you can handle it.  And no more dreams; I take what I can get when I can get it, and worry about nothing else."

Buffalo (bison) skulls to be ground up for fertilizer

40,000 buffalo hides awaiting shipment from Dodge City, Kansas

******

[Butcher's Crossing] is a novel that turns upside down the expectations of the genre -- and goes to war with a century of American triumphalism, a century of rejuvenation through violence, a century of senseless slaughter. -- John Plotz, The Guardian

Harsh and relentless yet muted in tone, Butcher's Crossing paved the way for Cormac McCarthy.  It was perhaps the first and best revisionist western. -- The New York Times

The finest western ever written. -- Oakley Hall, author of Warlock

'The West' never existed.  It's a dream of 'the East.' -- John Williams

ROMAN:A Novel of the West by Douglas C. Jones

"On the day Roman Hasford's father came home from the war in June of 1865, it was raining.  The new green of the Ozark hardwood timber was like washed lettuce, dripping clear crystals in the slow but steady fall of water from a pale sky that held the sun close above the clouds and was about to break through at any moment.  It was not a bleak day.  It was a pearl-gray day, shining and gentle, with even some of the birds ignoring the weather and making their sparkling calls that seemed, like the leaves, to be washed clean by the rain."  

In two of Douglas C. Jones' earlier novels, Elkhorn Tavern and The Barefoot Brigade, the reader learned Roman Hasford's backstory.

Because his father was a soldier in a Confederate regiment fighting in Virginia and Tennessee, Roman, at age fourteen, began to assume the mantle of man of the house as he attempted to protect his mother and sister and their home from bushwhackers and jayhawkers who ravaged and plundered the area.

If that wasn't enough, large Union and Confederate forces clashed in a major battle, the battle of Pea Ridge, sometimes called the battle of Elkhorn Tavern, that was fought on and around the Hasford farm in the Arkansas Ozarks.

But now the war had ended and Roman's father had returned.  Roman couldn't help resenting the fact that he was no longer in charge and that he had to take orders from his father, while realizing that his father had every right to give those orders.  And anyway, after the danger and excitement of the last few years he didn't look forward to settling down to the peaceful pursuits of an Ozarks hill farmer.

Therefore, at age eighteen, seeking independence from father and with an urge to see and experience the wider world, he left home.  And as many young men did after the war, he headed west.  Well, sort of.  He settled in Leavenworth, Kansas, which was actually much more north than west from his home, but in every other way very much a western frontier town.

Leavenworth

Because he was intelligent and industrious he was able to make important connections in Leavenworth and was soon on his way to becoming a prosperous young businessman.  But not all was peace and tranquility.

Post-Civil war jayhawkers and bushwhackers were also experiencing difficulty in making the transition from war to peace and they continued to plague the border land. And to the west the Cheyenne were fighting a holding action against western encroachment and expansion.

Roman, at age twenty-two, even found himself with a small group of soldiers and scouts surrounded by a large group of Indians in eastern Colorado in what came to be called the battle of Beecher Island.  The irony was not lost on Roman that the Indians were led by a Cheyenne chief known to the whites as Roman Nose.

The battle of Beecher Island

As with Jones' other historical novels there is an intermingling of fact and fiction and an interesting mix of colorful fictional and historical characters.  Since Leavenworth was the site of the major frontier military post, it comes as no surprise that a number of real military officers make cameo appearances, including Winfield Scott Hancock, George Armstrong Custer, George Forsyth, John Pope, and Philip Sheridan.

Furthermore, the battle of Beecher Island is an actual historical event and, yes, the Cheyenne warriors were led by a chief known as Roman Nose.

Published in 1986, Roman received the Western Writers of America's Spur Award for Best Historical Western.  Later editions were published under the title Roman Hasford.


"Few writers can summon forth the agonies and joys of the rites of passage as poignantly as Douglas C. Jones, who in 'Roman' counterbalances that highly personal experience with a broader one of the coming-of-age of the American West .... as always Jones' vision is as singular as a thumbprint. -- Loren D. Estleman 

WYATT EARP: Frontier Marshal by Stuart Lake, Part I

As Western legends go, Wyatt Earp was a relative latecomer.  In 1927, Walter Noble Burns published Tombstone: An Illiad of the Southwest, but it wasn't the big seller his The Saga of Billy the Kid was a year earlier.  The latter book not only reintroduced Billy to the general public, but it ignored much of the historical record by romanticizing the young outlaw's persona to the point of transforming him into a veritable Robin Hood of the Southwest.

The Tombstone book, on the other hand, wasn't nearly as widely read, and thus Wyatt Earp remained a relatively obscure individual, but not for long.

The general public did become aware of him in 1931 when Stuart Lake published Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal.  It became a best seller and established the O.K. Corral in the public consciousness and created the image of Earp as an incorruptible paragon of saintly morality who fought for truth, justice, and the American way (No, wait, that was Superman.  No matter. Lake's Earp successfully fought the same battles, but without the benefit of super powers.)  What Lake began, Hollywood finished.  Four movies were based on the novel as well as a popular TV series that ran from 1955 to 1961.  Lake served as screenwriter and/or "expert" consultant on all the movies and the TV series and thus profited financially from his book right up until his death in 1964.

Lake wrote in the foreword of the book that "Wyatt Earp was a man of action. He was born, reared, and lived in an environment which held words and theories of small account, in which sheer survival often, and eminence invariably, might be achieved through deeds alone."

Furthermore, "[t]he man won from contemporaries who were his most competent judges -- from intimates, from acquaintances, and from enemies alike -- frontier-wide recognition as the most proficient peace officer, the greatest gunfighting marshal the Old West knew."

Okay, but if that recognition was frontier-wide why was Earp virtually unknown in 1931?  The answer is that not only was he not known frontier-wide during his days as a peace officer and, with the exception of some old-timers in the southwest, very few people had even heard of him fifty years after the showdown in Tombstone's O.K. Corral in 1881.  

It was Lake's book that made him famous -- and legendary -- and mythical.  As with all mythical legends some of what Lake wrote was based on fact, but much of it fell into the category of tall tale.  Like Walter Noble Burns, Lake never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

However, what made it believable to so many readers for so long is the fact that Lake had the co-operation of Earp in writing the book.  Not only was he able to interview Earp on several occasions and quoted him verbatim in long passages that go on sometimes for pages, but he also claimed that "[s]cores of eyewitnesses to the scenes portrayed have been interviewed to verify circumstantial details; thousands of miles have been traveled to unearth substantiating material; hundreds of time-worn documents and files of frontier newspapers have been examined for pertinent content; literally thousands of letters have been exchanged with competent old-timers in developing this work."

Then why in light of all that conscientious research described above is the book today shelved in the fiction section?  The answer is because that is where it belongs.

Wyatt Earp in 1923, age 75

My reprint copy of Lake's book, published in 1994, has this blurb on the front cover: "The only authorized biography of the legendary man who inspired two of the year's biggest movie events!"  That would be TOMBSTONE, starring Kurt Russell, and WYATT EARP, starring Kevin Costner.  Both films are fictional of course, but even at that they are more historically accurate than Lake's authorized "biography." 

THE DOOLIN-DALTON GANG, Part I

They were duelin', Doolin-Dalton

High or low, it was the same

Easy money and faithless women

Red-eye whiskey for the pain

Go down, Bill Dalton, it must be God's will

Two brothers lyin' dead in Coffeyville

Two voices call to you from where they stood

Lay down your law books now, they're no damn good

Better keep on movin' Doolin-Dalton

'Til your shadow sets you free

And if you're fast and if you're lucky

You will never see that hangin' tree

Well, the towns lay out across the dusty plains

Like graveyards filled with tombstones waitin' for the names

And a man could use his back or use his brains

But some just went stir crazy, Lord, 'cause nothin' ever changed

-- THE EAGLES

Songwriters
BROWNE, JACKSON / SOUTHER, J.D. / HENLEY, DON / FREY, GLENN

COFFEYVILLE.
On October 5, 1892 five men rode into Coffeyville, Kansas, a town located in the southeastern corner of the state.  Three of the men were brothers: Bob, Grat, and Emmett Dalton.  Coffeyville was their hometown.  Riding with them were Bill Powers and Dick Broadwell. They had come to do something that not even the James-Younger Gang had ever attempted to do.  They planned to rob two banks simultaneously.

When the smoke cleared and the dust settled that day four townsmen and four outlaws were dead.  Among the outlaws only Emmett, wounded more than twenty times, was still alive, but just barely.

Rumors persisted that there had been a sixth rider and that he had escaped. The rumors were based on testimony by a farm couple who said they saw six men riding into town just before the hold-up and statements by another person claiming that he saw a rider making a successful getaway during the shoot-out between the outlaws and the townspeople.

Emmett, who did survive, and who was tried and convicted and sent to prison, always maintained that there was no sixth rider.  But the rumor wouldn't go away.  Although nobody came forward to identify who that legendary rider might have been, subsequent events led many to believe that it was Bill Doolin. One theory was that he had been charged with the responsibility of holding the horses and that when all hell broke loose he didn't hang around but made tracks out of town.  Another had it that his horse came up lame before the men reached town and that he went off in search of another horse and missed the whole shebang.

Neither of those scenarios hold up under close scrutiny and it is more than likely that the mythical sixth rider is just that -- a myth.  But Bill Doolin was real.  He may not have been at Coffeyville, but he had been a member of the Dalton Gang.  And after the citizens of that community decimated that gang, Doolin didn't waste any time in organizing a new gang. He was assisted in this effort by Bill Dalton, another of the infamous brothers, and the result is what came to be known as the Doolin-Dalton Gang.

Bill Doolin

Bill Dalton

BILL DALTON (1866-1894).
Bill Dalton was not living in Kansas when his three brothers were riding the outlaw trail in that state and in the Oklahoma Territory to the south.  He had moved to California where he was married and was living a respectable life as a farmer, one who was also studying law.  He had even been elected to the California state legislature on the Populist Party ticket. Of course being a member of the legislature did not in and of itself make one respectable.

The Populist Party was an agrarian movement that blamed big business for the hard times that farmers, ranchers, and small businesses were experiencing in the years before the turn of the century.  And it was the railroads that were identified as being the primary culprits. Bill Dalton hated them with a passion.

But did he hate them enough to rob one?  Well, perhaps.  He had been joined in California by brother Grat who had left his stomping grounds to the east in order to put some distance between him and the U.S. marshals who were keeping a close watch on him.  He may have been accompanied by brothers Bob and Emmett, or they may have joined him later, but it isn't clear that that was the case.

A fireman was killed during a train hold-up in February, 1891, and Bill and Grat were arrested.  There is suspicion that Bob and Emmett were involved as well, but it was never proved for they were never caught.  Bill was tried and acquitted, but Grat was convicted. However, on the way to prison Grat escaped and eventually made his way back home to rejoin Bob and Emmett and other members of the gang in holding up banks and railroads, primarily in the Oklahoma and Indian territories. 

After the death of his two brothers and the capture of another in the Coffeyville fiasco in October, 1892, Bill Dalton came home and met Bill Doolin. 

In 1890, Congress passed the Oklahoma Organic Act which partitioned the Indian Territory by creating a separate territory to be called Oklahoma.  The new territory essentially encompassed everything in the former Indian Territory except the lands belonging to the so-called Five Civilized Tribes: the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole.  The intent was to eventually combine the two territories into a single state.  In 1907, the state of Oklahoma was admitted into the Union and the Indian Territory ceased to exist.

BILL DOOLIN (1858-1896).
Bill Doolin was born in Johnson County in western Arkansas.  In 1881, he became a cowboy in the Indian Territory where he worked with other men, who, like him, eventually found themselves riding the outlaw trail.  They included the likes of George "Bitter Creek" Newcomb, Charley Pierce, Bill Powers, Dick Broadwell, Bill "Tulsa Jack" Blake, Dan "Dynamite Dick" Clifton, and Emmett Dalton.

Doolin's first reported run in with the law occurred in Coffeyville, Kansas when an attempt was made by the local authorities to arrest him and his friends for public drunkenness.  Elsewhere such behavior might have been overlooked, but Coffeyville just happened to be located in a dry county.

In the melee that followed two lawmen were wounded while trying to confiscate Doolin and his friends' liquor.

Soon thereafter Doolin joined up with the Daltons.  He was probably too smart to participate in their hare brained scheme to rob the two banks in Coffeyville, despite the rumors that in fact he had been a sixth rider but had successfully vamoosed to fight and rob another day.


THE DOOLIN-DALTON GANG.
After the failed Coffeyville raid and the death of four of the outlaws and the capture of the seriously wounded Emmett Dalton, Bill Doolin began recruiting his own gang, and because one of its members was Bill Dalton, it is commonly known as the Doolin-Dalton Gang, but also as The Wild Bunch (not to be confused with the Butch Cassidy-Sundance Kid Wild Bunch) or the Oklahombres. Comprising the nucleus of the gang were men who, like Doolin, had been members of the Dalton Gang and had not participated in the Coffeyville raid.

In a three year spree, the gang robbed banks and trains in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and the Indian Territory.  After holding up the bank in Spearville, Kansas on November 1, 1892, the gang took refuge near Orlando in Oklahoma Territory at the home of the sister of gang member Ol Yantis.  Later that month a sheriff's posse tracked Yantis to that location and in a shoot-out they killed Yantis, making him the first gang member to be killed.  There would be other gang members -- many others -- that would suffer the same fate.  Of the eleven outlaws who rode with the gang at various times, only two lived into the 20th century, but only because they had been captured and were in prison when the new century began.

In March 1893, despite the fact that several bank and train robberies followed Spearville, Bill Doolin married Edith Ellsworth in Kingfisher, OT.  They would have one son. Not long after his marriage, Doolin was seriously wounded in the foot during a train robbery near Cimarron, Kansas.


THE BATTLE OF INGALLS.
What came to be called the Battle of Ingalls occurred on September 1, 1893. Today practically a ghost town, Ingalls in the 1890's was a wide-open town and a safe haven for fugitives on the run.  It was one of the places that the Doolin-Dalton gang felt secure.

But the territory's newly appointed U.S. marshal, 32-year old E.D. Nix, had different plans for the gang holed up in Ingalls.  Nix sent fourteen deputy marshals to Ingalls in an attempt to clean out the Doolin-Dalton gang.  

U.S. marshal E.D. Nix

In the ensuing gun battle three deputies were killed along with two citizens.  Three outlaws -- Bitter Creek Newcomb, Charlie Pierce, and Dynamite Dick Clifton -- were wounded, but managed to escape.  

Arkansas Tom Jones was captured after being stunned by dynamite that was thrown into the hotel where he had taken cover.  As it turned out, Jones (real name Roy Daugherty) outlived all the other members of the gang.  He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to fifty years in prison. However, he was pardoned in 1910 after serving fewer than twenty years.

Arkansas Tom

In 1917, he was tried and convicted for robbing a bank in Neosho, Missouri.  After being released in 1921, he robbed a bank in Asbury, Missouri that same year.  Tracked to Joplin, Missouri he was killed in 1924 in a gunfight with lawmen.  He outlived all the other gang members, but his life still ended much like the rest of them.


THE THREE GUARDSMEN.
In the wake of the Ingalls shoot-out, Marshal Nix organized an elite group of one hundred deputies whose primary job was to, one way or the other, wipe out the Doolin-Dalton Gang.  The most famous of the deputies were Heck Thomas, Chris Madsen, and Bill Tilghman, who were so successful in the pursuit of the gang that they came to be called "The Three Guardsmen."  

Nix gave the following directions to his deputies: "I have selected you to do this work, placing explicit confidence in your abilities to cope with those desperadoes and bring them in -- live if possible -- dead if necessary."

Heck Thomas (1900)

Bill Tilghman (1912)

Chris Madsen (date unknown)

It was the beginning of the end for the gang.

• In June 1894, Bill Dalton was killed by a posse at his home near Ardmore, OT.

• In April 1895, Tulsa Jack Blake was killed by U.S. marshals near Ames, OT.

• In May 1895, Bitter Creek Newcomb and Charley Pierce were killed near Pawnee, OT by bounty hunters.  

• In September 1895, Little Bill Raidler was captured by Bill Tilghman.  He was sentenced to prison and was paroled in 1903 because of ill health due to severity of the wounds he had received at the time of his capture.  He died the following year.  Like Arkansas Tom before him, he had lived into the new century -- and for the same reason.

• In March 1896, Red Buck Waightman was killed near Arapaho, OT by a posse led by Chris Madsen.

But what of Bill Doolin -- the gang's leader?  What was he doing while his men were being picked off one by one?  Well, as one would imagine, he was hunkering down.

He and Little Dick West hid out in the New Mexico territory during the summer of 1895.  Later that year, he and his wife traveled to Eureka Springs, Arkansas so that he could use the baths to ease the rheumatism in his foot caused by the bullet wound that he had sustained two years earlier.  Early the following year, he was captured in one of the bathhouses by deputy U.S. marshal Bill Tilghman.

Doolin was arraigned in Stillwater, OT on murder charges stemming from the gunfight at Ingalls in 1893.  He pleaded not guilty.  He was locked up in the Guthrie jail to await trial.  He and Dynamite Dick Clifton and twelve other prisoners were able to break out of the jail.

After his escape, Doolin was hiding out near Lawson, OT., where his wife and small son were staying with her mother.  On August 24, 1896 he was waylaid outside the home by a posse led by deputy U.S. marshal Heck Thomas.  When he refused to obey a command to surrender and began firing at the lawmen he was killed by a shotgun blast fired by Thomas.

As per usual, Doolin's body was placed on display in Guthrie and photographs were taken.  He was buried in the Boot Hill section of Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie.  His widow filed an unlawful death damage suit against the marshals, but it was dismissed.

Bill Doolin

• In November 1897, Dynamite Dick Clifton was tracked down near Checotah, IT and killed by a posse led by deputy marshal Chris Madsen.

• In April 1898, Little Dick West, the gang's last remaining fugitive at large, was tracked down in Logan County, OT by a posse led by deputy U.S. marshal Chris Madsen and was killed in a shoot-out.  He is buried in Guthrie near Bill Doolin.