Pulprack

Man From Wyoming

Man from Wyoming by Dane Coolidge. The great value of this volume is in the marvelous 22-page Foreword by editor Jon Tuska. In this essay, Tuska -- founder, with Vicki Piekarski, of the Golden West Literary Agency -- provides a short critical biography of author Coolidge (1873-1940) that serves as an excellent introduction to this writer and his work.

According to Carolyn Hyman's entry on Coolidge in The Handbook of Texas Online, Coolidge "was born in Natick, Massachusetts, on March 24, 1873. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1877, and Coolidge subsequently grew up on his father's orange farm at Riverside, California. He received his B.A. from Stanford University in 1898 and studied at Harvard University in 1898-99. During the summers Coolidge collected animals for Stanford University, the British Museum, the United States Biological Survey, the United States National Zoological Park, and the New York Zoological Park. In 1900 he worked as a field collector for the United States Natural History Museum."

Coolidge traveled extensively through the American Southwest. (Click here to see how such travel during that time wasn't always a minor undertaking.) His career as a naturalist and his travels certainly informed his fiction. If a landscape appears in his stories, you can be sure it is a realistic description, not something simply cobbled together out of the writer's fancy.

Man From Wyoming first appeared in the May 1935 issue of Western Novel and Short Stories. Coolidge based the novel on a book he had written earlier, The Scalp-Lock, which Dutton had published in 1924. The later story relies on truth for its fiction. It is based in part on robberies committed by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and it borrows as well from the exploits of the sometimes-enigmatic stock detective Tom Horn.

Coolidge conflates these elements into a story that captures the beyond-the-law quality of life that could exist on the frontier: hard men would exploit the lack of law enforcement for their own advantage; if someone stood in the way of those hard men, the obstacle would feel the brunt of their ire.

In the novel, Clayton Hawks' father sends his son from Boston to look into some rustling problems on the family's Wyoming ranch. If Clayton can solve the problems, the ranch -- the Lazy B -- will be his. Once arrived, Hawks learns that the man responsible for managing the ranch -- William Bones -- hasn't been running things with an iron hand. In fact, Hawks eventually decides that Bones may have been benefiting from the ranch's mis-management. Things get worse for Hawks when his fiancé abandons him for the attentions of an extravagant ranch hand, Jim Keck, whom Hawks suspects of being responsible for the rustling.

Enter the mysterious Seldom Seen -- the Tom Horn figure -- hired by the association of ranch owners to scout out, scare off or hunt down the members of the rustling gang. Hawks grudgingly allows the stock detective to use the Lazy B as his base of operations during his undercover work. The threads of the novel's plot quickly come together in a murderous crescendo of violence.

Coolidge does a pretty good job of depicting Hawks as a self-reliant man angered by the unreliability and untrustworthiness of the men he must deal with, the behavior of his fiancé, the problems with the ranch that he confronts, and the frustration he feels at having his hands tied by events and the situations surrounding him. At times, however, there is the sense that Coolidge has left out something -- some bit of exposition that might better explain an action that Hawks takes, or some bit of inner monolog that would clarify the motives of some of the characters. But overall, the author builds a convincing picture of Hawks -- a strong man caught between a rock and a hard place in an unforgiving environment.

Links:
You can find a partial listing of Coolidge's magazine work at Bill Contento's "Miscellaneous Magazines from fictionmags" by clicking here.

You can also view some photos taken by Coolidge during his travels in Death Valley in 1916 by clicking here and here.

Man From Wyoming is available in both hardcover and paperback from Amazon. Click here for the Five Star edition in hardcover. Click here for the paperback edition from Leisure Books.