The Bold Frontier Read Free Page A

“To the Last Bullet” (New Western, May 1953). Note the similarities in plot as well as locale between this story and “Shootout at White Pass”: both are about lawmen of a rather unheroic sort doing their duty in little mountain mining towns. Written forty years apart, these two stories demonstrate the maturation of Jakes as a writer and how the same basic fictional material can be turned to traditional and nontraditional ends.
    Clever little surprises and imaginative situations distinguish all the other stories in this book.
    In “The Woman at Apache Wells” (Max Brand’s Western Magazine, September 1952), a woman named Lola saves Tracy, an ex-Confederate soldier, from a bitter life of outlawry.
    In “Hell on the High Iron” (Big-Book Western, March 1953), troubleshooter Mark Rome employs some unusual methods to overcome local opposition to the building of a railroad across frontier Kansas.
    In “Death Rides Here!” (10-Story Western, October 1953), freighter Jeff Croydon fights to obtain a contract to ship barrels of Oklahoma crude oil.
    “The Winning of Poker Alice” (Complete Western Book, February 1953), one of three short fillers based on fact and written by Jakes on assignment, poses a question about who is courting whom in the case of gentleman gambler W. G. Tubbs and Poker Alice Duffield.
    In “The Tinhorn Fills His Hand” (10-Story Western, June 1953), gambler Graham Coldfield finds himself in a brace of deadly struggles against illness and a “disease of greed” on the steamboat River Queen.
    And in “The Naked Gun” (Short Stories, January 1957), a little girl named Emma puts an end to the career of mankiller George Bodie.
    “I have always had a great love of the Western experience in America,” John Jakes has written, “and I have researched and written about it all my writing life. That love for the West and the Western story has not diminished in the forty years I have been writing professionally. The West and the spirit of the West will always haunt me and I will always write about it.”
    This collection provides the best introduction to that Western haunting of John Jakes.

The Western; and How We Got It
But westward, look, the land is bright.
    — ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH
    T HE WORD WEST IS central to American reality and myth. But west is a chameleon. Sometimes it means a geographic region, sometimes a direction, or then again, a period of time in our national experience.
    But however it’s used, it brings with it a whole trove of secondary meanings. They speak an alluring language of hope; adventure; riches; escape; beginning again.
    The sense of renewal and rebirth contained in west goes far back, to Europe and beyond. Thoreau speculated that “the island of Atlantis, and the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial paradise, appear to have been the Great West of the ancients, enveloped in mystery and poetry.” Even when the wealth of the Orient, imaginary and real, drew European explorers in that direction, the better, faster route was imagined to lie the other way, and for years, mariners tried to find this fabled western passage.
    But it was a series of events on the North American continent in the nineteenth century that gave the word its final form and densely interlocked meanings:
West—the way you go to reach the unpopulated country. The gold. Free land. Breathing room.
    West—where the buffalo roam. A vast space beyond the Mississippi.
    And West—a period of time, of roughly thirty-five to forty years’ duration—say, from the strike at Sutter’s Mill to the massacre at Wounded Knee. Often, this time frame is called the “Old West,” a common shorthand for the years encompassing the final explosive thrust of the United States population, native and foreign-born alike, into and through all the empty lands from the Old Northwest to the Pacific.
    Some would argue that the “Old West” is better defined by fixing its limits at either end of the heyday