[I recently came across Great
Stories of the West, edited by Edmund Collier. This is a selection from West magazine, which was edited by Collier,
and it contains the following stories.
Story
title
|
Author
|
Magazine
|
Issue
|
The Aska-Damn Dog
|
Raymond S. Spears
|
West
|
Jul 22 1931
|
Sheriff’s Son
|
James Clarke
|
West
|
Jun 1935
|
Pud Ackley, Cowboy
|
Walt Coburn
|
West
|
Jan 1933
|
A Lady Comes to Paradise
|
Edmund Ware
|
West
|
May 1933
|
Lin of Pistol Gap
|
West
|
May 14 1930
|
|
Minding Their Own Business
|
Raymond S. Spears
|
West
|
Jul 1935
|
A Corner in Horses
|
Stewart Edward White
|
West
|
Mar 1934
|
Finder Is Keeper
|
West
|
Jul 1933
|
|
One-Man Mule
|
Rollin Brown
|
West
|
Aug 1933
|
Champs at the Chuckabug
|
S. Omar Barker
|
West
|
Jan 1935
|
Drake Feeds the Buzzards
|
W.H.B. Kent
|
West
|
May 1935
|
Brockle-Face
|
West
|
Jun 11 1930
|
|
The Parson
|
West
|
Jan 1935
|
|
The Man with Nerve
|
Stewart Edward White
|
West
|
Sep 1933
|
 |
| Covers of West issues from which stories were included in Great Stories of the West ed. Edmund Collier |
I found the introduction interesting as it was a recollection
by Collier of some memories of editing West.
Sharing it with you.]
…
Perhaps the pulps are no great loss. Nevertheless they were
the seed bed for many writers who went on to fame and fortune. And West was one of the best. It was started
in 1926 at the request of the American News Company when Street and Smith left
them to do their own distributing and American News wanted a Western to replace
S. & S.’s Western Story.
Doubleday was a natural for the job. Some years before, they
had taken over on a printing bill a slick-paper magazine called Short Stories. It had a wonderful list
of authors of the literary kind, but few readers. Under the able editorship of
Harry E. Maule, who turned it into a general adventure magazine, Short Stories hit the jackpot. With such
writers as Kenneth Roberts, Harold Lamb, Talbot Mundy, Clarence E. Mulford, Erle
Stanley Gardner with his early Perry Mason stories, and many others of like
quality, Short Stories was a leader till pulp magazines were given their final
death blow by television.
When West came
along—also under Harry Maule’s direction—it was in a particularly good position
because it could get the spin-off of Western writers from Short Stories as well as from Doubleday’s book department, which
published many of the pulp-paper authors in hardcover books.
In those days, though the reader wanted plenty of action and
a dramatic story, he didn’t demand as much blood, thunder and killing as later
filled the pulps and perhaps contributed to their replacement by TV. He liked
atmosphere as well as action, but what he valued most was a character he could
follow from issue to issue. Hopalong Cassidy, Sad Sontag, Ben Pickering, Bat
Jennison, Slivers Cassidy, Black John Smith, Wild River Ben and Pokeasy Jones
were real and unforgettable characters to hundreds of thousands of readers who
probably seldom noticed the names of their creators.
My own first contact with Western fiction was when, as an
adolescent, I read Owen Wister’s The
Virginian. When I came to the end I turned back to page one and read it all
through again. That was well over fifty years ago. Since then the West has held
for me a strong appeal.
Somehow I managed to see some of it first hand—cavalry on
the border in Arizona, cow ranches in Montana and California, a wheat ranch in
Oregon, construction camps, redwood and yellow-pine camps, Forest Service in
the High Sierras—whatever I could do to see the West in the rough, satisfied my
youth.
All this, no doubt, gave me a rather special point of view
when, largely through chance, I found myself sitting at an editorial desk with
the heady responsibility of choosing what stories should be bought and which
should not ... a heady responsibility indeed, that
sometimes—literally—especially in the depression, meant life or death for an
author; and certainly meant life or death for the magazine.
Till I went to work on pulp magazines, I had never really
been conscious of the violence and gunfighting that one has to admit account
for most of their popularity. I knew the feel of a horse between my legs and an
axe in my hands. I knew the glory of sunset over the desert, the excitement of
getting cattle across a flooded creek, the taste of cold mountain water after a
long day in the dust of a trail herd—but it happened that where I worked I had
heard no talk of guns and gunfighting, in which there appeared to be no
interest. Interest lay more in how to avoid running a pound of meat off a
valuable steer.
...
In West, at least
while I was editing it, there was always this tension—the need to satisfy the
demand for action and gunfighting and the desire to portray Western atmosphere
and character and the pioneer spirit.
The present collection, I think, represents this tension.
Though editors and writers knew they couldn’t give up the “rough stuff’ without
losing their audience, they were always reaching for the stars, and sometimes
caught one. Stories of such technical excellence as Sheriff’s Son by James Clarke or A Lady Comes to Paradise by Edmund Ware could hold their own in any
company.
Raymond S. Spears, author of The Aska-Damn Dog, was Conservation Director of the American
Trappers Association and a learned ecologist. He had traveled the length and
breadth of the land with a knapsack on his back and had more authentic detail
at his fingertips than any man I have ever known. He was a natural storyteller,
and in view of his other activities, incredibly prolific. His Minding Their Own Business is one of a
series featuring in thin disguise Butch Cassidy and “The Wild Bunch" whom
he knew personally.
Ernest Haycox, whose Lin
of Pistol Gap is one of his most exciting productions, became the top
Western writer for Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post. Doubleday and
others published his novels in book form. His early death unfortunately
deprived us of the opportunity to read the great Western literature that it was
his ambition to write.
B. M. Bower and Chip of the Flying U need no introduction.
With Hopalong Cassidy and the Virginian, Chip was one of the three most famous
characters in Western fiction.
Walt Coburn was a cowboy and rancher set afoot by a World
War I wound. His love of ranch life and ranch people was immeasurable, and he
spent the rest of his life trying to show them as they really were. That he
succeeded is evidenced in Pud Ackley,
Cowboy.
James B. Hendryx, whose rollicking Black John Smith stories
are always a delight, outdid himself in The
Parson. Though his stories are pure fun, they benefit from the feeling of
authenticity that comes from firsthand experience. Hendryx took part in the
Klondike gold rush and soaked up enough material for a lifetime of fiction
writing.
Bennett Foster is another genuine Westerner whose skilled
writing gains body from his background. S. Omar Barker, also steeped in Western
tradition, is another who went on to the “slicks.” His humor never fails and
his inventiveness is amazing. His expert craftsmanship is there but never
intrudes—a professional from “who lit the chunk.”
Though Drake Feeds the
Buzzards by W. H. B. Kent may suffer slightly from being one of a trilogy,
it is complete in itself, and shows well the author’s individual style and
extraordinary power of dramatic intensity.
Stewart Edward White’s The
Man with Nerve is without doubt one of the best Western short stories ever
written.
These few gleanings we hope will remind old pulp fans of
days of good reading and convince newcomers that there was "gold in those
hills.”
As Stephen Vincent Benet expressed it in Western Star
There is a wilderness we walk alone
However well-companioned, and a place
Where the dry wind blows over the dry bone
And sunlight is a devil in the face,
The sandstorm and the empty water-hole
And the dead body, driven by its soul...
However well-companioned, and a place
Where the dry wind blows over the dry bone
And sunlight is a devil in the face,
The sandstorm and the empty water-hole
And the dead body, driven by its soul...
But, where the ragged acres still
resist
And nothing but the stoneboat gets a crop,
Where the black butte stands up like a clenched fist
Against the evening, and the signboards stop,
Something remains, obscure to understand,
But living, and a genius of the land.
And nothing but the stoneboat gets a crop,
Where the black butte stands up like a clenched fist
Against the evening, and the signboards stop,
Something remains, obscure to understand,
But living, and a genius of the land.
