Pulprack

Seltzer's Take on Tom Horn

The popularity of Owen Wister's The Virginian opened up the western story field as a viable literary market for writers. For its contemporary readers and critics, it raised the level of the western from the adolescent western fantasies presented in the dime novels about Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickock, Kit Carson and similar other frontier figures, and gave the form some respectability.

The literary western that developed from that point devoted itself to examining character and to a slower pacing than the action-filled pages of the dime novels. It is a pace that many readers today may feel is actually slumber-inducing; in other ways, the slower pace echoes the pastoral quality of the western ranch life that the author sought to represent.

Charles Alden Seltzer (Aug. 15, 1875 - Feb. 9, 1942) follows this slower pace in Ferguson's Trail, a 1902 novel. Whether Seltzer was attempting to ride the coattails of Wister's success is unclear at this point, but the publication of Ferguson's Trail undeniably followed during the same year of The Virginian's publication.

Indeed, Seltzer's novel is more successful as a love story than as a western. There are cowboys -- good and bad -- and murder, and lots of riding around. But the most successful scenes in the book are those between the Ferguson of the title and Mary Radford. She is a young woman who has moved from the East to live with her brother on his small ranch. She wants to soak up the western atmosphere so that she may -- interestingly enough -- write an authentic novel about the West and its people. She catches Ferguson's eye -- just as he catches hers -- and their banter is both humorous and sweetly romantic.

The "authentic novel about the West" that Mary wants to write basically is formed by the novel by Seltzer that we are reading -- this sounds like some sort of reflexive method of literary writing that the post-modernists would use many years later -- and seems based to some extent on actual events that had recently taken place in the West. As noted, The Virginian and Ferguson's Trail were both published in 1902. It was not long before that -- only July 18, 1901 -- that Willie Nickell was shot from ambush near Cheyenne, Wyoming. Stock detective and sometime Pinkerton operative Tom Horn was in jail during 1902 -- he was found guilty of the Nickell murder on October 23, 1902. So the wild and woolly activities of the "old West" were still making the news at the time Wister and Seltzer were writing their novels. Tom Horn was hanged November 20, 1903.

However, Ferguson -- who's hired by a ranch owner named Stafford to hunt down some rustlers -- acts like no stock detective I've read about. He does a lot of riding around -- which Tom Horn claimed to do, and his testimony was probably available to read in the newspapers of the period -- but Ferguson isn't very effective. First, he doesn't carry field glasses; so the two or three times that he comes upon suspicious activity, he's too far away to determine just who is up to no good, and he's also too far away to run down the person before the suspect would have a chance to get away. Second, he doesn't attempt to trail any suspects after spotting nefarious activity. Third, after finding a slain cow and her still-living calf, he doesn't round up the calf and return it to the ranch. He just leaves it there, bawling for its dead mother. That's money on the hoof that a paid stock detective has just left behind, folks; his employer wouldn't be too happy about that, I suspect. But then, Ferguson never tells Stafford about the discovery.

These seem the faults of a writer who isn't overly familiar with ranching and the West. Yet Seltzer eventually became a successful writer of westerns. As his bio from the March 22, 1930 entry in "The Men Who Make The Argosy" series of columns says, "Published a book of short stories called the Range Riders in 1911. A success. Followed it with a full length novel called The Two Gun Man in 1911. Another bell-ringer. Gone North will be the thirtieth published book. Twenty-three of these have been published as serials in Argosy."

Seltzer must have grown more accomplished in his genre after 1902. Still, reading Ferguson's Trail as a period romance novel works. If you approach this novel as an early entry in the western field -- which was just beginning to find its way as a literary form -- you'll have fewer criticisms than if you come to it with the eye of an experienced western reader.

Links:
You can read the entirety of Charles Alden Seltzer's entry in "The Men Who Make The Argosy," thanks to Peter Ruber. It is available elsewhere on The Pulp Rack website. Click here to read it.

A biography of Louis Benson Seltzer, one of Charles Alden Seltzer's children and a Cleveland newspaperman, is available for reading online. Titled The Years Were Good: The Autobiography of Louis B. Seltzer, you can read it by clicking here.