by Hamilton Craige

This article was originally published in June of 1933 in Writer's Digest. Extensive research discovered no copyright renewal. I cut out the section that listed various magazines that were publishing westerns at the time.

Who reads Western stories? And why?

More people read Westerns in the pulp field than any other class of reader, for the Western story, since its beginning, has been the one perennially popular medium, not even excluding love fiction. There are more Western pulps and more Western stories published by the pulps than any other one kind of story. Let us examine the type of reader generally attracted by the Western.

Specifically, I believe, the following type of people account for 90% of the Western story audience; the remaining 10% being widely scattered.

• The cowboy.
• Young men, not overly educated, from 16 to 20.
• The clerk.
• The outdoor man generally, also not overly educated, with occasional rare exceptions.

Women read Westerns, too, but we are referring here mainly to the "man" story, with the romance, if any, subordinate to the action. In a lesser degree the Western Romance has always been popular, being in some demand right now.

It may come as a surprise to some writers that I have listed the cowboy first. In a librarian's report from Texas of a few months ago the cowboy—coming in to buy his mental pabulum from any distance up to 400 miles—was listed as being a reader of Westerns exclusively—he asked for nothing else. The somewhat unusual angle is: he bought and read Westerns—book-lengths and magazines—for much the same reason that the clerk buys them—as a means of escape. Escape from life as the cowboy, generally speaking, lives it, is a more or less monotonous round. But the real reason why all of the above four classes of readers prefer Westerns, and other classes as well, is because, of all the varied themes employed in fiction, that of the West remains essentially the most glamorous fiction topic that we have left. I grant you that there is glamor in pioneering with regard to industry or the adventurer with his theodolite. But the Old West is not so very old; it is inextricably blended with American tradition; the present-day cowboy, on the surface at least, can and will oblige by occasional excursions a la Billy the Kid.

The reason, then, why pulp readers read Westerns to a greater degree than most other types of fiction is because, not merely do they become the heroes or the heroines of the story they are reading (which is true of any compelling story), but because of this glamor referred to—this romance, and by romance I do not necessarily mean —Love.

Glamor, romance, derring-do, in the nth degree are peculiarly the attributes of Western stories par excellence—Thar's pay-dirt in them-thar cantles," gents!

~

In writing the Western Story consideration must be given to the basic plot. I append three bedrock plots of the Western "man" story, susceptible of infinite variations, of course:

1. The lone cowboy fighting against odds.

2. The "Ranger" or detective hero cleaning up gang.

3. The "Bad Man" who turns out to be a, or the, hero,

4. The ne'er-do-well who comes West and makes good.

The above may seem ridiculously simple, but from the germ contained in them let us elaborate Number One.

A specific example of the elaboration of this bed-rock notion is found in Wister's "The Virginian." A man of mystery, "Jeff" (which is his sole name) appears as the hero who circumvents the machinations of one "Trampas," who, together with the Virginian, Jeff, is employed on the same ranch. The whole point of the story centers around the Virginian's battle with Trampas to keep his employer's cowboys on the job, Trampas endeavoring to persuade them toward rustling, and the hero, by psychology as much as by action, confounding the villain at every turn.

Number Two—An excellent example of this particular motif—the Ranger or detective-hero cleaning up gang—is Frank Spearman's "Whispering Smith?". Smith, a Western railroad detective, overcomes a gang of crooks endeavoring to prevent the operation of a railroad. As in "The Virginian," the hero is something of a mystery, the author utilizing the common device of making his hero apparently as mild as milk, but actually a dangerous antagonist in a fight. Considerably more action than in "The Virginian," with, as in the former, a definite thread of romance, of course.

Number Three—Zane Gray's "Forlorn River" exhibits a gunman, known only as "Nevada," who, in this story, and in its sequel, "Nevada," foils the activities of rustlers whose leader is the foreman of his best friend. The identity of "Nevada" remains a secret even to his friend, being disclosed only in the sequel, "Nevada," the two being really only one book.

A variation of the above may be found in Charles Alden Seltzer's classic, "The Two-Gun Man," in which the hero, an actual gunman employed as a line-rider on a ranch, foregoes the error of his ways by reason of the influence of the heroine (borrowing, in turn, a little of the Number Four— ne'er-do-well—makes-good-plot). In "The Heritage of the Dessert" Zane Gray employs a combination of all of the above, with the hero being detective, lone cowboy, and quasi-reformed gunman, all in one, but— as in nearly all Westerns, cleaning up the evil-doers practically single-handed, which emphasizes the struggle against odds.

To take one of the first four basic plot-germs, we can weave therefrom one of our own: the lone cowboy, appearing in a Western cow-town, sees a Post Office reward poster—of himself! He is not really a cowboy, but, as in Plot No. 2, a detective, who had his picture put there to deceive the gang he has come there to clean out. As in Plot No. 3, he appears to be a "bad" man, but appearances deceive. And, as in Plot No. 4, he has been more or less of a failure where he comes from, being in actuality—no rich man's prodigal— but a failure in everything else who has at length got him a job with the Department of Justice, and cleans up.

~

Turning back again to Plot Germ Number One, as exemplified by "The Virginian," here is an entirely different story woven from the same plot: Cowboy hero has trouble with other cowboy of same outfit, because other cowboy hints he has something on hero, as to his past. Heroine spurns hero because of what villain discloses, or, rather, hints, and hero, who is temporary foreman, has difficulty in making cowhands take orders because he allows villain to face him down before girl. Truth was: he had taken blame for misdemeanor of friend in old life, and that was why he never disclosed his last name (as in Virginian). Beneficiary turns up, clears hero, who could not get up to resent villain in girl's presence because he was wounded, although this was unknown.

A direct variation of Basic Plot Number Two, exemplified by "Whispering Smith." Railroad detective, finding that railroad he works for is hiring gunmen and is otherwise crooked, takes part of cattlemen against it, and in so doing has to contend with imported killers in railroad's pay. Prevents train—carrying gunmen—from being wrecked by irate cattlemen, incurs the latter's ire, but wins out when real owners of railroad oust previous crooked owners, who had got in on a crooked deal.

Number Three, the "bad man" motif, as elaborated in Zane Gray's "Forlorn River," and "Nevada," may be twisted into an entirely different story by having—instead of a notorious gunman posing as an honest cowhand (and yet doing it for a good purpose) —an honest cattleman who poses as a gunman, or, rather a bandit, to impress an Eastern girl, with quasi-humorous § sidelights, ending in the boastful ranchman making good. (Say, there's a real slick paper plot for you if you can write well!)

~

A very necessary bit of equipment in the writing of marketable Westerns, of whatever class, is an understanding of the Western Hero; the Western Villain; the Western Heroine.

The Western Hero, in virtually every story ever written of the West, must be all white, or nearly so—never gray, or black. His type is the reckless, devil-maycare, gun-slinging hombre, with a heart of gold (and you can get some of the latter, too, if you can depict him), a tenderness for women and children, and especially horses, but, often, with a bad habit or two, which is the prerogative of a he-man. He must be able to take his liquor and let it alone, usually shepherding some weaker vessel (an important point) who serves usually as the hero's foil.

In such cases you employ a secondary hero, who serves in this capacity, giving the hero numerous opportunities to get him out of trouble, and serving, but in this case sparingly, the hero, in turn. But never should the Western hero have anybody else fight his battles; these are his own affair. A very good story came in to me, as editor, one time, which had to be rejected for just one thing: the hero, a Westerner, of course, employed a prize fighter to fight a battle for him, which of course damned that story out of hand. But in this connection, a thing often overlooked by the writer of Westerns is in having his hero fight exclusively with his guns. Give him an occasional knock-down-and-drag-out battle— with his fists.

The Western Heroine complements the hero in every respect. Even if she has but a subordinate part, the emphasis should be sufficiently heavy to make her stand out: calm, poised, able to handle a gun, but feminine to the last word.

But the Villain presents a somewhat more complex idea. The Western Villain must be, of course, dyed-in-the-wool. At first sight, anyway. "P'izen-mean," and devoid of the least suspicion of the milk of human kindness, the kind of hombre that would shoot a man for the pleasure of seeing him kick, if he had a kick left in him— and yet—at times he may have some redeeming qualities, but only in a story of a trifle higher caliber than the downright action story.

The moment that he is saved from death, say, by the hero, he ceases to be a villain, by reason of his better nature coming to the fore. I do not recall any violations of this except in a story by William McLeod Raine, in which the principal villain is so hard-boiled that, when the hero saves him, he froths at the mouth. With all respect to Mr. Raine, I should say that the reader just does not believe that any villain would react in that precise way. I don't believe that he would. Coals of fire, for example, can turn any common-or-garden villain into a subsidiary hero, as we ought to know.

There is also the whimsical villain, but he is really only a half villain, as in a story— I think by Rhodes—in the Saturday Evening Post. In this story—a bit unusual— the villain was the hero, being an actual train robber who in his time off discovered and thwarted the machinations of certain crooks, to return to his train robbing, or bank robbing, as the case might have been. Further, the attire of the villain is always up to snuff, by comparison with the hero, who looks, by comparison, like a tramp.

And practice makes one more or less certain: the villain, in a Western, must not be a coward. He is a bad man, but brave; otherwise the hero's achievement in overcoming him would be lukewarm. Exceptions to this may be: a principal villain who directs the activities of gunmen, perhaps. I have used this myself. By and large, then, the Western villain can be: a rustler; a bandit; a venal sheriff; a crooked judge or politician; a cattle 'baron'; a sheep man (although sometimes, but rarely, the sheep man may be the hero); and, extremely rarely, a woman, even in a "man" story, but this is cited merely in passing; it should be taboo.

~

Nothing is so necessary as a good beginning. Your basic plot will shrivel up and die without good mechanics in the way of catching the reader by his mental coat sleeve, and holding him there long enough so that he will read on. Specific examples of excellent beginnings (and I am not alone in this opinion) may be cited below.

1—"The Virginia," by Wister:

"Some notable sight was drawing the passengers, both men and women, to the window ; and therefore I rose and crossed the car to see what it was. I saw near the track an enclosure, and round it some laughing men, and inside it some whirling dust, and amid the dust some horses, plunging, huddling, and dodging. They were cow ponies in a corral, and one of them would not be caught, no matter who threw the rope. We had plenty of time to watch this sport, for our train had stopped that the engine might take water at the tank before it pulled us up beside the station platform of Medicine Bow. We were also six hours late, and starving for entertainment. The pony in the corral was wise, and rapid of limb. Have you seen a skilful boxer watch his antagonist with a quiet, incessant eye? Such an eye as this did the pony keep upon whatever man took the rope. The man might pretend to look at the weather, which was fine; or he might affect earnest conversation with a bystander ; it was bootless. The pony saw through it. No feint hoodwinked him. This animal was thoroughly a man of the world, His undistracted eye stayed fixed upon the dissembling foe, and the gravity of his horse-expression made the matter one of high comedy. Then the rope would sail out at him, but he was already elsewhere; and if horses laugh, gayety must have abounded in that corral…"

It is true that by comparison with the average "action" Western of today, the excerpt quoted at some length above may seem a trifle leisurely, to be sure. But, unless you demand instant death and destruction, I think it should hold your interest sufficiently for you to read on. It is true: the hero has not even been introduced, but I think you feel that presently he will be; the introduction is rich in promise, and it is beautifully done. But, as an example of "action" introductions, let us try this:

2—"Short of Murder," by Hubert Roussel:

"Salty Waters leaped from his chair and dropped his cards as the door of Sheriff Turner's office crashed violently open under the impact of a boot. Before the flying door banged against the wall Salty had his six-shooter half out of its holster."

3—"South of the Law Line," by Walt Coburn:

"The Mexican bartender was nervous. The smile on the thick lips beneath his neatly pointed moustache was fixed and mirthless and his fat hand shook as he set out bottles of tequila and mescal for the half-dozen heavily armed and villainous-looking Mexicans that lined the bar."

Numbers 2 and 3 are fairly representative of the "action" beginning, leaving the reader in little doubt as to what is to come in the way of knock-down-and-drag-out. They are not cited as examples of style, as they are not stylistic, but to serve as sharp contrasts for beginning No. 1. The following is midway between Nos. 1, 2 and 3.

4—"Vrairie Flowers," by Jas. B. Hendryx:

"The Texan drew up in the center of a tiny glade that formed an opening in the bull-pine woods. Haze purpled the distant mountains of cow-land, and the cowpuncher's gaze strayed slowly from the serried peaks of the Bar Paws to rest upon the broad expanse of the barren, mica-studded bad lands with their dazzling white alkali beds, and their brilliant red and black mosaic of lava rock that trembled and danced and shimmered in the crinkly waves of heat."

S—"Black Buttes," by Clarence E. Mulford:

"The T-Bar trail-boss swore steadily, monotonously, his rain-drenched face ghastly in the incessant play of the lightning. The disagreeable odor of the cook's drowned fire stung his nostrils; the wrecked wagon, its contents scattered over the trampled, muddy ground, deepened the frown on his face. He was afoot with these few remaining men of the trail outfit; God only knows where the others were or what had happened to them."

The two above are about on a par as to this particular kind of opening, and both printed in "action" magazines. They are to some extent provocative, the second more so than the first. As an example of "slickpaper" Westerns, the following are typical:

6—"Brone Fighters Girl,' by Alan LeMay:

"Polly Collins sat on a corral fence in Las Cruces, looking at the rodeo stock; and many a young bronc rider found it hard not to stare at her discreditably. Her soft silver-dust hair, setting off her deep olive tan, and her dark, restless eycs always made the riders highly aware of her, whenever she had been among them. But just now she was happy—not blithely, but tremulously and uncertainly; and the new, gentle, entirely wistful radiance this gave her transformed her into something very lovely, so that they thought they must have forgotten what a honey she was, in the year that she had been away."

7—"One More River," by Ernest Haycox:

"Jim Irons finished the long day's journey underneath a crystal-flecked sky, through silvered shadows. He passed the ruby disk of a camp fire on either side, where two trail herds lay bedded for the night, and came against the black outline of Lang's Crossing store. The rumble of the river was in his cars when he turned to the porch of that famous sod structure, the rumble of a risen current and an impassable ford."

An examination of thirty-four different slick paper beginnings disclosed nothing more exciting than the two examples just above. In an endeavor to cite examples that would be comprehensive, I have included them, and particularly because Number Six begins with the romantic element: the girl.

But returning to the pulps for a moment, the two beginnings quoted next are, I think, sufficiently diverse as excellent examples of action as smooth as the paper they were printed on was the reverse:

8—"Dry Gulched," by Fredric H. Young:

"When old Bill Cummings found the body of Ike Parks, his partner of the Lazy B spread, sprawled in a small clearing in the thickets of the Black Basin brakes, it terminated a three-day search for the missing man. Bill's untiring quest had carried him from the bottoms of the crookedest gorges to the utmost peaks of the Beargrass range, and ultimately out to the treacherous brakes.

"His voice had dwindled to a dry croak from shouting Ike's name up and down the hazardous slopes of the range, only to have it flung back in mocking echoes by the huge slabs of red-and-gray rock that punctured the surface of the mountain. And now he had found Ike, sprawled with his face in the dust, a huge, dark-red splotch marking the center of his broad back."

9—"Gunman's Gold," by William Owen Clark:

"The big man with the cow-puncher's hat grinned as he stepped through the doorway of the "Miner's Delight." In the northern mining-camp he might have seemed a trifle out of place, with the spurs jingling from his boot-heels, but he occasioned little more comment than if he had been wearing a silk tile, for example, or the coat of a Chinese mandarin.

"The cowboy would not have evoked the slightest notice—at an other time. But as he came in, three men who stood together in talk nodded together, and a question was asked and answered, without words. One of the three, a short, blocky man, with a villainous, pock-marked countenance, and wearing two heavy guns, scowled, making as if to intercept the cowboy, but stepping back again as if thinking better of it or as if prevented by his companions, who seemed to be reproving him as the three turned backward to the bar.

"It was a place of peril for the man in the steeple-crowned white Stetson, if he had but known it— and perhaps he did."

In these two final examples, which are perhaps better than average for the pulps, suspense is the feature rather than action, as such. Just as in the two earlier examples (Numbers 2 and 3) the emphasis is on action, or upon the imminence of action, without frills. There is sufficient variety in these various openings to indicate the wide range of choice. If you are aiming your story at the pulps, for example, the quotations given are, I think, sufficiently typical to serve as models, and the same for the "slick paper" vignettes. But any and all are based on those basic plots—situations, rather—to be spun out or elaborated or woven as ingenuity moves you, but the main point is this:

Start from scratch, let us say, with as simple a situation as Plot Number 1, and you will find, if you have any imagination at all, that you may have to race, after a little, to keep up. Rustlers can be changed to bandits, or interchanged; a fork in the trail will give you two opportunities, where but one existed before; your lone cowboy may, after all, be anything—under his hat. There may indeed be pay-dirt somewhere for you, if it is only a grain—gold in "them-thar cantles"—a vein that may turn into a lode, a bonanza, even—not down to bedrock, but from the bedrock up.