The Bold Frontier Read Free

masterpiece of social speculation.”
    Then, in 1974, Pyramid Books got a two-year jump on the 200th anniversary of the American Revolution by issuing Jakes’s extraordinary 630-page novel, The Bastard, the first title in the American Bicentennial Series, also known as the Kent Family Chronicles. The series ran through 1980, covering seven generations of the Kent family in eight fat novels (The Rebels, The Seekers, The Furies, The Titans, The Warriors, The Lawless, and The Americans followed The Bastard), which sold an estimated 40 million-plus copies and which became a legend in the book industry. Not only did the series become one of the most successful paperback publishing enterprises in history, but the Kent saga also marked the virtual birth of a new and sustaining form of popular fiction—the paperback original, multivolumed, continuing-character, generation-spanning, romantic-historical family saga.
    Jakes followed the dazzling success of the Kent saga with another series that took up what seemed permanent residence on the bestseller lists, the North and South Trilogy. These novels (North and South, 1982; Love and War, 1984; Heaven and Hell, 1987) covered the antebellum period, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction era in two families, one Southern, the other Northern. The first two novels were adapted for a pair of highly successful television miniseries.
    The stories in this collection, covering as they do all of John Jakes’s writing career, from the 1950s to the present day, form an excellent representation not only of the author’s devotion to the timeless American West but of his unpretentious description of himself as a writer-craftsman aiming for the mass market with a singleness of purpose: to entertain.
    During the early years of his career, when his primary markets were the pulps, Jakes wrote what has become known as the “traditional” Western story. His more recent Western fiction tends toward the nontraditional, offbeat, historical tale.
    In “Carolina Warpath,” written especially for this collection, Jakes not only transports the reader to a wholly different “western” frontier—the British Carolina colony a half-century before the American Revolution—but introduces a hero as memorable as Natty Bumppo: Nick Bray. Bray’s up-country expedition, with his bulldog Worthless and his sidekick Huger Noggins, to rescue the woman he loves in the midst of hostile Yamassee country, is a tale reminiscent of James Fenimore Cooper.
    In “Dutchman” the time is 1917, when America has gone to war against Germany, and the story is a melancholy reminder of how blind hatred can transform ordinary people into something quite unordinary. In “Shootout at White Pass” Jakes takes us to the California Sierras and introduces us to a sheriff who dreams of retiring to Florida—if he survives a confrontation with a notorious outlaw who has come to town. The title, situation, and characters of this story all seem quite traditional, lacking only a High Noon -type shootout at the end. There is in fact a shootout, but it is nontraditional and pure John Jakes.
    Also nontraditional and Jakesian are “A Duel of Magicians” and “Little Phil and the Daughter of Joy.” The former, a self-contained excerpt from Heaven and Hell, tells of a search across the great southwestern plains for the abducted son of a white man and of a confrontation between a Cheyenne medicine man and a black “saloon magician.” The latter story, which appeared under Jakes’s pseudonym John Lee Gray in the first volume of an anthology of original Western stories, New Frontiers, is a wry and good-humored tale of a “soiled dove” named Jimmy, her determined plan to do away with Major General Philip Sheridan, and the heroic efforts of a cavalry scout to deter her.
    Even in his traditional stories Jakes gives his readers something more than stock characters and plots. A rare locale, for instance, such as the Sierra Nevada, also the scene of