“Nix on th’ pisen, Abner! I’m trustin’ yuh hombres same ways a white ca’f trusts a alligater, the which is onfrequent an’ some diluted with reflec’shuns an’ponderin’s on th’fra’lty o’ inhuman an’ animal natur’. Le’s hit the grit, Jack, an’ take a sniff o’ the prairie ozone, the same bein’ oncontomernat’d with th! breathin’ o’ snakes an’ pole cats. ” — Christopher Culley, MCCOY OF THE RANGES
They camped that night by a narrow stream, and lit a big fire to keep off prairie dogs and wolves.
—William K. Reilly (John Creasey), WAR ON THE LAZY-K
It may surprise some readers to learn that a segment of the British population (and a segment of the Australian population as well) are ardent fans of Western fiction. It isn’t much of a phenomenon, however. A love of adventure is part of the English nature, as witness the history of the British Isles and its peoples’ far-ranging exploration and colonialism. Given such a passion for the thrills and hazards of far-off places, it’s only natural that some Brits would find the colorful, exciting history of the Old West, coupled with the larger-than-life heroes and villains of Western myth, both fascinating and appealing. Many Englishmen traveled to the American frontier in the 19th and 20th centuries, for visits, hunting expeditions, and other reasons; and a large number of these stayed to establish permanent residence. The same lure led armchair adventurers to experience the Wild West vicariously.
A second factor is the Western story’s kinship with the Northern. Canada, after all, was once a British territory and is still a member of the British Commonwealth; citizens of the U.K. have a vested interest in how their Canadian cousins fared on the Far North frontier, past and present. Northern-adventure stories were enormously popular in Britain from the early 1900s until World War II, and although their popularity waned somewhat after the war, as it did in this country, this type of fiction is still well regarded among discerning readers.
Western films and radio and television programs were a third factor in establishing the genre in England. Films starring John Wayne, James Stewart, and Randolph Scott brought out long queues at neighborhood theatres. William Boyd’s Hopalong Cassidy was a favorite on early British TV And Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, and other singing cowboys toured the United Kingdom in the ’40s and ’50s with great success.
Most of the Western fiction available to British readers prior to 1930 was imported from the U.S. Pulp magazines such as Street & Smith’s Western Story had U.K. editions, and nearly every major publishing house, from Hodder & Stoughton and Collins on down to the lending-library publishers such as Ward Lock and Wright & Brown, maintained lines of Western-novel reprints by American writers. But the demand grew so great, and the aggregate returns so attractive, that publishers began bringing out originals in increasing numbers. Many of these new works were likewise written by Americans, some of whom forged substantial careers by directing their yarns exclusively or predominately to the British marketplace. Charles H. Snow, a prolific talespinner who had limited success in the U.S., was one; others include Charles Wesley Sanders, Gladwell Richardson, and, later, Lauran Paine.
British fictioneers, of course, were eager for a scoop from the Western beanpot. Far and away the most successful were those who emigrated to the U.S., took up residence in the West, and developed or nurtured abiding interests in its history. Such writers as L. L. Foreman, Arthur Henry Gooden, and Fred East (who wrote as Tom West) produced stories and novels that had a more or less convincing ring of authenticity. In the case of Foreman, the best of the British expatriate Westerners, his work earns the highest compliment of being indistinguishable in terms of style, background, characterization, and quality from that of his better-than-average American peers.
Those British Western writers who had less talent and ambition and who stayed home had a much more difficult time of it. The first original American Western pulp appeared in the U.K. in 1935, and a few others followed; but payment for stories was rock bottom. And as Steve Holland writes in his 1993 history of U.K. paperback publishing, THE MUSHROOM JUNGLE, “It was almost impossible for [British authors] to sell to the American magazines, as one author found. ‘[The Americans] have an exclusive way of their own of doing them,’ he told a fellow scribe. Hardly surprising, since the Western was exclusively an American genre of writing.”
British book publishers offered a more receptive, if not particularly lucrative, outlet for homegrown horse opera. George Good-child, who also wrote Northerns and a popular series of detective stories featuring Inspector McLean of Scotland Yard, was one of the more accomplished early purveyors. A generation later, Matt Chisholm (Peter Watts), Kingsley West, and J. T. Edson, among others, would generate readable and reasonably well-researched, if somewhat less than distinguished, Western novels.
An Australian, Leonard F. Meares, rivals Lauran Paine as the single most prolific author of Westerns. Under his primary pseudonym of Marshall Grover, Meares published the staggering total of 700-plus novels for the Australian and British markets over a period of less than three decades, some three dozen of which also saw print in the U.S. in the ’60s and ’70s under the name Marshall McCoy. (Paine, no slouch, has well over 500 book-length Westerns to his credit, plus another couple of hundred mysteries, romances, and nonfiction works.)
Still other U.K. oat-growers, a couple of whom enjoyed a certain vogue for a time, yielded crops of alternative abundance. These lads, through shoddy research, misconception, indifference, lack of ability, just plain folly, or a combination of foibles, never quite managed to properly simulate Old West locales or the people who inhabited them. The Western milieu they created is a curious and often hilarious one that exists in a series of fantasy universes, each one different from the other in sometimes subtle, sometimes radical ways.
One such individual was Christopher Culley, author of a score of novels and short-story collections in the ’30s and early ’40s featuring a tough Texas Ranger named Billy McCoy. Culley’s yarns are full of slambang action, plenty of romance, and lavish descriptions of a Western landscape that existed nowhere except in his own imagination. But his most memorable alternative trait was the invention of some of the more ridiculous “Western” vernacular ever committed to paper. One example from his 1935 collection, MCCOY OF THE RANGES, heads this chapter. Here are a couple of others from the same volume:
“Fella citizens,” roared Jake. “I’m riz up here in this mermentus time o’ crisis an’ misfort’on to purtest agin the doin’s o’ all dawggorn sher’ffs an’ sichlike interlopin’ ballyhoos, as is riz up in our midst, a-buttin’ in an’ disturbin’ o’ th’ public peace. An’ I’m purposin’ accordin’, as how we-all hits it fur the jail an’ turns loose this here ‘Walleye’ Johnson, an’ invites him cordial to a free-fer-all jamboree at th’ expense o’ this yer commoonity.”
“By hell, Sam’s gittin’ mighty dam’ careless, if he ain’t packin’ a gun’t shoots both ends an’ one side.”
“Comes o’ waitin’ thar, chewiri an’ talkin’! Now that galoot’s out I’ll betcha. An’ what’n hell are we goin’ t’duh?”
“Duh? Ride up an’ ax. An’ ef he ain’t there, wait on him comin’ in. An’ I guess firs’ thing we bes’ put thet gardarm greaser kid wh’ar he won’t tell no lies.”
Then there was Oliver Strange. An editor for most of his adult life in the periodicals department of a large British publisher, Strange was fascinated by the American scene; but when he wrote his first horse opera, THE RANGE ROBBERS (1930), he had never visited the U.S. nor done any serious research into the history, lifestyles, or geography of the West. THE RANGE ROBBERS was intended as a one-shot lark, but it was met with such favor by readers that his publisher encouraged him to bring back the novel’s protagonist, an outlaw gunfighter cum knight errant known as “Sudden,” in a series of books. Ten such books followed, nearly all published between 1931 and 1942. Seven of the 11 total appeared in this country, under the imprints of such respected houses as Dial Press and Doubleday. Proof positive that even the best editors have inexplicable lapses in judgment once in a while.
In an essay on Strange’s work in the second edition of TWENTIETH CENTURY WESTERN WRITERS, Fred Nolan describes the Sudden stories as “muscular,” as having “complex plots and tremendous verve and pace,” and as being “furiously readable.” Be this as it may, they also have, Nolan admits, “fairly predictable ingredients,” villains who are “black-hearted wretches straight out of Victorian melodrama,” and a manufactured lingo that is an “odd mixture of formal English and mythical vernacular.”
Strange’s lingo is even stranger than that. Every male character in his novels speaks a phonetically spelled patois composed of one part bastardized Western pulp of the Christopher Culley sort, one part Oliver Strange alternate-universe Old West, and one part pure cockney. As in these examples from SUDDEN TAKES CHARGE (1940):
“What’s the giddy game stickin’ us up this-a-way?” he demanded.
“Helluva note, ringin’ in a perishin’ tramp.”
“That’ll teach these glory-huntin’ sots not to come pirootin’ around here like they owned the place.”
“I’m a lone wolf from Pizen Springs an’ I’m here to blow this prairie-dawg community to hellangone. Emerge from yore holes, you varmints, or I’ll smoke yuh out.”
“Most unsocial beggar I ever met up with,” the deputy remarked.
“Remember, dyin’ on a empty stomach is a mighty dangerous thing to do.”
That perishin’ beggar of an alternate universe Western cockney also rears his giddy haid in Strange’s action scenes.
Sudden sprang in, his right [fist] drawn back for the blow which should end the battle; he had the fellow at his mercy and there was nothing of that in his hard face. The beast had maligned a good woman....
Sudden’s right fist shot up from below and landed just over the heart. It was a fell stroke, one which might have killed a weaker man.
The badgered man’s eyes bulged; in some mysterious manner one of the beggar’s guns had leapt from its holster and was pointed at the pit of his stomach.
The post-war paperback boom in the U.S. was matched by a similar one in England. Paperback originals were then not new in the U.K., as Steve Holland points out in THE MUSHROOM JUNGLE; they had been popular with readers of cheap genre fiction for many years. But in the late ’40s and early ’50s, the number of titles and quick-to-cash-in publishers mushroomed. Such houses as Gramol Publications, Gerald Swan, Amalgamated Press, Modern Fiction Ltd., Wells, Gardner, Curtis Warren, Scion, and Badger Books flooded the newsstands with thin digest-size and standard paperback originals of every type and hybrid of category fiction.
There were racy gangster and private-eye stories with lurid hard-boiled titles: DAMES PLAY ROUGH, STIFFS DON’T SQUEAL, TAKE IT AND LIKE IT, DEAD BONES TELL TALES, ANGELS BRUISE EASY, DUCHESS OF DOPE, NO MORTGAGE ON A COFFIN, THE CORPSE WORE NYLONS, and LADY, THROW ME A CURVE. Ostensibly written by virile types with such monikers as Spike Morelli, Darcy Glinto, “Griff,” and Brett Vane, they were set in alternate-universe American locales such as “Cincinnati City.” There were science-fiction and horror yarns: MAMMALIA, CHLOROPLASM, THE WHISPERING GORILLA, and (shades of a Saturday-afternoon cliffhanger serial) THE HUMAN BAT VS. THE ROBOT GANGSTER. There were love-and-lust heavy-breathers: STREETS OF SHAME, FLAMES OF DESIRE, BIG TIME GIRL SHE’S DYNAMITE. And of course there were Westerns.
The titles on the British paperback gunsmokers tended to be more pulpy than lurid: BUZZARD BAIT, SIX-GUN SAGA, RANGI WOLVES!, DINERO TRAIL, THUNDER GUNS. Each novel was short, no more than 40,000 words, and published in 64-page, 96-page, or 128-page formats, depending on publisher, length, and size of type (Amalgamated Press brought out its Western Library series in 64 page, dime-novel-style booklets with eye-straining type set in double columns). Each had standard pulp ingredients, with preference for ranch-and-range yarns about rustling and other nefarious doings; main and secondary characters alike were stick-figure stereotypes. The emphasis was on action, with as much gun-thunder crammed into their brief story lines as could be managed.
“As Westerns were the ‘easiest’ type of fiction to write,” Steve Holland notes, “they were subsequently rewarded at a lower rate of pay to the [other genres].” The average rate for originals was roughly $2.00 to $3.00 per thousand words. “One author received the princely sum of £10 [approximately $40-$50 at the exchange rates of the period] for his full-length novel, and that was not an isolated case.” Such oaters, therefore, were generally penned by the worst of the Grub Street hacks, as their plots, prose, and “Western” milieus clearly indicate. The best of the mushroom Western originals are simply forgettable. Ah, but the worst of them...
A cattlemen versus sheepherders farrago entitled GUNS OF GILA VALLEY and written by somebody masquerading as Tex McLeod, for instance, which is distinguished by such cockamamie passages of dialogue as:
“On yore laigs, buzzard!” he threw out. “Bust the breeze outa hyar onless you crave lead-pizenin’!”
“Try f’r a break,” came the harshly-worded warning, “an’ I’ll blarst yore inside tripes to hellangone!”
“Well, Sam, I’ll be dod-blasted!” he creaked.
“You may of had the edge on me thisatime, damn you, pelican. But I ain’t done with you yit—not by a lawng ways. Next time I lamp you, it’ll be the six-gun showdown. And I’ll come a-smokin’!”
“Git to perdition,” slurred out Fames. “Yore bushwackin’ pardners ketched their needin’s. And you’d land the same fate if I had my way...”
“Your fust mission [is] to ride undercover into Hellfire Valley and put the deadwood on the rotten scum what salivated Ken—Hog Wilder and his sheepherdin’ gaggle. What you say?”
“Keno,” crisped Del and held out his hand.
Keno. Any genuine brushpopper who said that would have had his backside hooted and booted clean off the range.
Then we have a range-war lead-spitter, SADDLE ’N RIDE, by Webb Anders, which has a similar brand of colloquy, some of the more cockeyed “Western” euphemisms, and the most unlikely posted sign in all of oaterdom.
“C’mon, spill ut, Nate. I’m honin’ to get the lowdown on this play. Sounds kinda’ interestin’.”
“Hold hard, durn it, they’s no great rush,” came back Boswell, tantalizingly taking his time in regaling his sidekicker with the titbit of news he had in his possession. “I’m comin’ to it. The way it’s gonna go is this, pal: Boothill has laid a big deadfall f’r thet pesky State lawdawg, Bud Austin, and the cowmen. An’ it’s one what cain’t hardly fail nohow.”
“G’wan,” muttered his friend. “I’m listenin’—with both lugs.”
Nate chuckled. “Yeah, it’s a brass-riveted double cinch this time awright, Jem boy. Yuh see, them blarsted cow-nurses done fixed reg’lar range patrols. T’other night.. .Lanny Keithson ketched a plug in the belly and cashed in his chips. Now Boothill didn’t fancy thet, he didn’t fancy it at awl. So he fanned in directly to see the bawss. Nex’ day, we shipped out a haff-gross cans of blarstin’ powder to the hangout in the saloon waggin.”
Ferrers did not happen to notice the rough-looking man who was standing at the far end of the counter, staring hard at him. Neither did he notice that man as he hurried away to rap on a door marked “PRIVATE—KEEP OUT, YUH!”
And then we have TIMBER LINE, which was written by one Oscar Kennard, surely the crown prince of British Western hacks whoever he was, and which is distinguished by a little bit of everything atrocious. Such as its hero, the tough and laconic Marden, whom Kennard characterizes thusly:
There was a streak in Marden’s make-up that was always warning never to put one’s whole trust in any one person, friend or foe.
He slept with only half his senses dozing.
Marden was alone on the shadowed veranda, alone with his thoughts and conscious of a strange unease to which he was not accustomed.
His heroine, Nina, “the little bandido brat,” is described in even more pithy terms.
Ordinary girls in this part of the territory did not go around with a hogleg so slickly oiled and tailored that an iron would near enough jump right up to the hand in moments of need. Ordinary girls weren’t familiar with details of gunfighting technique such as that.
When she looked up and across at Marden, [her] black eyes were gleaming excitedly, alight with the spark of emotion too turgid to remain concealed.
“The boy...belonged to a renegade bunch,” she said in a low voice. “He heist me [sic] an’ made a play at me. Durned near tore the clothes offen me back. Jest like any other woman would, I figured it was me he wanted. I was kinda resigned to the inevitable, y’see. An’ then I fairly gaped when I saw it was me fancy gear he wanted, not me. Feller, that’s a blow to any woman’s pride!”
Here is the villain of the piece, Sancho Proverde, head of “a mob of outlaw greasers”:
He...wore immaculate and richly embroidered velvet, white silk shirt, tight black pants held in place by a scarlet sash over which was the bulge of a pawky paunch.
Here are a couple of Sancho’s henchmen:
The door...opened and a lean, raw-boned man with crowlike shoulders and a flat black hat appeared. His clothes, too, were all black, rusty black and with an unkempt appearance. The only touch of colour about him to relieve this sombre exterior was the soiled white shirt he wore.
Marden kicked the gun away out of reach, taking no chance. The man had died too swiftly for his liking, but when he rolled him over he found that he certainly was dead....
He was an unprepossessing character. Even in death it was easy to see the case-hardened marks of the killer in his face.
And here, finally, a few more passages of Kennard’s glorious prose:
They fled, with Marden and Nina firing back over their horses’ rumps at the closely-bunched group of riders coming up astern.
He turned away and continued on to the big dim livery barn, redolent of horse smells, gloom and coolth, the scent of hay and corn and the rustle of contented animals.
“Lissen, son, I don’t mean you no hurt, mind, but if you do ketch up with a certain young filly who’s on the prod around these parts jest watch y’r step. That dame is dynamite!”
“Is that so...?” drawled Marden slowly. “Howcome you know so much about it, feller? What’s the lay?”
More bullets trundled across the room.
Trundling right along, we come to my favorite concocter of alternative British Westerns—John Creasey.
Yes, the very same John Creasey who published the labor-intensive sum of 540 novels between 1932 and his death in 1973 (another score or so saw print posthumously), under a plethora of pseudonyms. As a crime-story writer—the bulk of his output was in the mystery and detective genre—he was both popular and, at least in his J. J. Marric series featuring London police commander George Gideon, critically acclaimed. One of the Marric novels, GIDEON’S FIRE, received a Mystery Writers of America Edgar for best novel of 1961.
Early in his career, Creasey produced strings of novels in other areas of popular fiction: juvenile sports, aviation, and mystery stories, adult romances, and—shamelessly enough—Westerns. Beginning in 1938 and spanning a period of some 15 years, he was responsible for 29 bang-bang tales of the Old West published under a trio of pen-names: Tex Riley, William K. Reilly, and Ken Ranger. Only one of these, significantly, saw print in this country; just as significantly, the publisher of that lone U.S. title, WAR ON THE LAZY-K (1946), was Phoenix Press.
In a marathon speech in 1969 accepting another and even more prestigious award from the Mystery Writers of America, the Grand Master, Creasey alluded briefly and humorously to his Western writing. He knew next to nothing about the American West when he decided to enter the field, he said, and so read dozens of novels by unidentified “popular authors” of the ’20s and ’30s to familiarize himself with historical and geographical background and jargon. But when he sat down to write his first horse opera, his knowledge was still so skimpy he made an immediate and embarrassing mistake. The opening line of his maiden effort, he said, was “High in the noonday sky, a lonely coyote circled.”
This little anecdote is probably apocryphal, designed to draw a large laugh from his audience (which it did). The line does not appear in either of the two Westerns he published in 1938, ONE-SHOT MARRIOTT as by Ken Ranger and Two GUN GIRL as by Tex Riley, nor have diligent researchers been able to find it in any of his other shoot-’em-ups. It is possible that he wrote the line and his publishers, who knew more than he did, deleted it before publication. Judging from some of the other stupendous gaffes he perpetrated that did see print, he was supremely capable of a lonely circling coyote.
Plotting and pace were Creasey’s literary long suit, in whichever type of fiction he was indulging in; his Westerns are no exception. Their story lines, while built on such standard pulp premises as range wars (a preferred choice of his, along with the cattlemen-versus-rustlers story), were rather more complex than those of his U.K. counterparts and made sense within the established framework; and naturally they were loaded with fast and furious action. This is how one of his publishers, Wright & Brown, describes Tex Riley’s THE SHOOTIN’ SHERIFF (1940) in its jacket blurb: “Cattle on the run, guns smoking hot, the fight between justice and outlawry reaching a tremendous climax. There is not a dull page in this rousing story of [Texas] border country feuds and hatreds—the atmosphere of the Wild West is vividly presented.”
Well, yes and no. The fact is, no matter how many American Westerns by “popular authors” that Creasey read, no matter how much other research he did (if any), his version of the Old West in general and “Texas” in particular amounts to yet another never-never land—a sort of skewed British Westworld, in fact. The “Texas” in which all of his Westerns are set bears about as much resemblance to the real Lone Star State as Dover does to Dallas. And the errors he made, the misconceptions he held concerning flora and fauna, lifestyles, attitudes, accoutrements, and lingo, are multifarious and often quite funny.
In GUNS ON THE RANGE (1942), a Tex Riley smokeroo, Creasey describes the “Texas” border country thusly:
Three-four miles on the Three-X side of the Ria [sic] the grassland gave way to scrub, some purple patches of sage, in places juniper, dwarf oak, and occasionally wildly beautiful stretches of wistaria. Wild flowers grew in abundance, yet in places were cheek by jowl with cacti, sprung there no one knew how, but flourishing more than on the mesa beyond, or on the deserts further south. Sometimes the grotesque growths stood twenty feet from the ground, great spikes shot in freak directions.
There was a hush about everything, even the birds were quiet. But a blue cardinal flashed across their eyes, emitting its lovely song, and then other birds took up the cry, as if they recognized these men as friends, and knew that there was no danger from them.
The trees, some of them dwarf oak but in wide patches nothing but cedar and pine, the latter spiking like arrays of church spires toward the limitless blue heavens, drew much nearer.
Just how far off the mark are these descriptions? For an answer to that question, I sent them (and the Creasey quotes that follow) to noted Texas writer and Western historian Dale L. Walker. His response: “I take it by Ria he means Rio, as in Rio Grande, which doesn’t have much sage growing near it. ‘Wistaria’ must be ‘wisteria,’ a climbing vine-type shrub that does not grow in the southwest [or] anywhere in ‘wildly beautiful stretches.’ The ‘cacti’ (a word those old gnarly stove-up Westerners used a lot) he describes as being ‘twenty feet tall’ with ‘great spikes shot up in freak directions’ sounds like saguaro cactus, which does not grow in Texas. It is an Arizona cactus. I don’t know about blue cardinals; thought they were red. Even Catholic cardinals wear red hats. So do the St. Louis Cardinals.”
Creasey’s knowledge of “Texas” cattle was on a par with his knowledge of flora and fauna, as witness this observation in William K. Reilly’s SECRET OF THE RANGE:
There were two worlds, side by side, one arid and barren in midsummer supporting neither man nor beast, the other fertile, and dotted with two thousand head of J.K. beeves, mostly short-horns, but with some Frisians [sic] and Guernseys among them—the Kenworth family believed in experimenting.
They certainly must have. Friesians and Guernseys are dairy cattle!
Creasey seemed not to have much of a clue about horses, either —strangely enough, given the fact that the English have always prided themselves on their horsemanship.
His gray, a rangy horse not long from mustang stage but clearly produced from a horse which had been well bred and then escaped to the wilds of Texas to interbreed with wild horses, hit the trail steadily, making far more speed than its slowish, raking strides seemed to suggest. (WAR ON THE LAZY-K)
A lone rider, jogging easily along the trail, on a magnificent bay pinto not long from mustang stage. (Tex Riley, RANGE WAR)
Evidently he believed that “mustang” was a stage of growth somewhere between colt and full adulthood. He also seemed to think that “pinto” was a synonym for horse, such as bronc or pony. In RANGE WAR he refers to both “bay pintos” and “roan pintos,” and further deposes: “A posse, Bill knew, travelled only as far as its slowest pinto would allow.”
Guns likewise had him fuddled:
Bullets spat out at him, missing him by inches. Black had pulled up his bronc savagely, seeing Jim at his mercy.
And then Black’s gun fell on an empty barrel! (WAR ON THE LAZY-K)
Two bullets roared, shattering the silence. (Tex Riley, GUNSMOKE RANGE)
So did cowboy customs:
After a long silence, Jim took his tobacco bag from his pocket and slowly began to roll the makings. (GUNS ON THE RANGE)
For the reader not familiar with the term “the makings” (which is usually written with the “g” dropped, as “the makin’s”), it means the tobacco—Bull Durham, most often—and paper with which Westerners fashioned a cigarette. The weed Jim rolled must have been something to behold. Besides, Bull Durham sacks are danged hard to light.
Creasey on saloon girls:
He watched...the women, all painted bezoms, eyes glittering with drops, gowns tawdry and bedraggled at hems and shoulders, low-cut and revealing ample bosoms. (GUNS ON THE RANGE)
Dale Walker again: “ ‘Bezom’ I don’t find in my biggest dictionary. Did he mean bazooms? If so, wonder why they were ‘painted.’ Also wonder what kind of ‘drops’ made the bezoms’ eyes glitter. Visine, maybe?”
Creasey on Indians:
The coppery face, the hooked nose with the skin stretched tightly across it, and the narrow, slanting eyes were those of an Indian; and a man who knew that country well would have seen the touch of the Kiawa [sic] about him. Kiawas were the most bloodthirsty and cruel of the tribes of Texas, men who were not men, who dealt in pain and hate and torture, and little else. (WAR ON THE LAZY-K)
“Kiawas” may have been deadly foes constantly on the warpath in the “Texas” border country, but Kiowas migrated from the northern plains only as far south into Texas as the Staked Plains; and while they were often allied with the Comanches (as at the Adobe Wells battle), they were never found on the warpath anywhere near the Rio Grande and the Mexican border. Nor were the Kiowas particularly cruel or bloodthirsty.
The Caucasians who inhabit Creasey’s “Texas,” heroes and outlaws alike, are red-blooded and virile, to be sure. But to a man they speak a dialect which, in Dale Walker’s words, “no Texan, or Westerner afflicted not with brain-steam disease, ever spoke.”
“Yuh’n others seem t’ fergit things, Carradine. The Shereef’ve any County in the Yewnited States signs a declaration of loyalty to those States, an’ the Federal Gov’ment. More, he agrees to make statement of any time, the conditions of his territory get outside’ve the law. More...the Federal Gov’ment can an’ will relieve any Shereef knowingly disobeying the law of his badge an’ status.” (RANGE WAR)
“I’m workin’ fer Perkiss, an’ I started at sun-up. Leastways, to-day’s the first of June, I reckon, an’ the docket ’ve hire says I start that day. (GUNSMOKE RANGE)
“Say, yowse guy—where’s O’Daly?” (GUNSMOKE RANGE)
“It sounds mighty good, li’l man. Yuh’ll grow up one’ve these days ef yuh keep gettin’ idees thataway.”
“Now lissen! I’m tellin’ yuh ther’ was idees in this head’ve mine ’fore yuh were thought of, yuh big-headed cayuse yuh! Jumpin’ snakes, ther’s more idees in my li’l box than yuh c’d think in yers!”
“Orl-right—let’s hear yuhr idees, Mistah!”
“Waal, I’m thinkin’ thisaway...” (RANGE WAR)
“Why, yuh goddamned townee! I seen better riders’n yuh in knickerbockers, an’ as fer Shereefs—lissen. I won’t hev yuh talkin’ thata way——” (THE SHOOTIN’ SHERIFF)
“Ah, go douche yer head in a pail ev water!” (GUNSMOKE RANGE)
And last but not least, here is what Creasey considered hearty fare for cowboys riding herd and in the bunkhouse:
Pommel-bags were re-packed with flapjacks and beans. (RANGE WAR)
Charlie had prepared a [breakfast] tray on which were boiled eggs, hot scones, butter and coffee. (Tex Riley, RANGE JUSTICE)
Cow-nurses in “Texas” sure had it good, what with all those boiled eggs and hot scones dripping with melted butter. Except, that is, when the ranch cook turned mean and packed syrup into the “pommel-bags” along with the flapjacks and beans.