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A Nod to the Greatness of the American West
“What do we have? The Western!”
Robert Duvall
Rawhide-bound
My father and I bonded over the Western. I was into sports. He barely cared about them at all. He was a car guy—like a savant—I was vaguely interested, only to the point of having a cool car for the girls. But Westerns! We shared that love.
I became a strong reader because of Western pulp fiction. Dad bought every Louis L’Amour as it came out. He would consume it and then leave it on my bed for me. I cannot tell you how many school days I stayed home “sick” so I could read. It was a good education and Dad pretended to believe I was ill.
We watched all of the weekly Westerns on TV—Gunsmoke; Bonanza; The Big Valley; Have Gun, Will Travel; Rawhide; High Chaparral; Alias Smith and Jones; Maverick; Kung Fu (Yes, it was a Western with Karate in it); Wild Wild West…
We watched every John Wayne and Clint Eastwood Western movie. And there were others, too, classics like Shane, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and The Gunfighter.
Even our comedy choices were often Western themed. As a boy, I loved The Apple Dumpling Game, They Call Me Trinity, and The Shakiest Gun in the West.
One of my true regrets is that Dad and I did not share the greatest Western series ever made, Lonesome Dove, or talk about the greatest Texas author of them all, Larry McMurtry. Lonesome Dove hit TVs in 1989. Dad died in 1991. I was living in California and he, of course, in Texas. We had not seen each other since 1988. I do not recall talking about Lonesome Dove or McMurtry on the phone.
My comic book phase was also marked by a love for the Western. Sure, I read Archie and Casper the Friendly Ghost, but I consumed The Two-Gun Kid, Kid Colt, The Rawhide Kid, and Jonah Hex like a ravenous beast. My Uncle Troy (three years my senior, so more of a brother) and I snatched up those comics as soon as they hit the Ben Franklin’s Five-and-Dime rack.
Still a Cowboy at Heart
I still read Westerns. I was looking at my recently read books. They are in order from most recent:
The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes by Bryan Burrough—not a Western, but it is Texas!
The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party by Daniel James Brown—not a Western, but close.
Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West by Tom Clavin—a true west history.
Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity—far, far from a Western and, thus, rather frightening to be honest.
The Secret History of the World—nope, not a Western, and kind of scary.
Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier’s First Gunfighter—a true west history.
Blood and Treasure: Daniel Boone and the Fight for America’s First Frontier—a history of what was then the American West.
Welcome to the Universe: An Astrophysical Tour—way too much science, where the frontier is molecular and impossibly vast and makes my head hurt.
You can see I have branched out, but I have not been uprooted. The Western is still my unguilty pleasure. I am still the Abilene Kid (one of my poems in Moonshine Love), a rootin’, tootin’, straight-shootin’ sonofagun.
Now, I Write My Own Western Stories
If you look at my current writing project, The All-American Songbook, a collection of short stories inspired by iconic songs, you will find that of the seven released to date, two are Westerns—
(Click on either to get your own copy and join the ranks of the Western enthusiast.)
The other stories are not Westerns, but they have that restless spirit, the spirit of The JourneyMan in them and they are worth your time, or I wasted mine! Here they are…
Every one of these stories has a common thread of adventure and restlessness, along with the aches and pains and longings of being a human adrift in a sea of humanity. They ache with the echoes of the past and thirst for the living waters of hope and love.
What Do We Have?
We have so much to be thankful for as Americans—so much rich history, such diverse and deep roots that find their origins on the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. We are the melting pot and crowning achievement of the nations of the world. A more perfect union we might imagine, but can we ever achieve it? We walk on the moon and wade in the waters of Omaha Beach. We ride rockets and stallions. We sing the Blues and Rock and Roll and cling to the Rock of Ages. And…
We have the Western!
RIP Robert Duvall. Thank you for Gus.
