The Bold Frontier (2 page)

—John Jakes

Hilton Head Island

January 15, 2001

“The American West still shines with a timeless fascination. The literature of the West, both fiction and nonfiction, still fires the imaginations of millions around the world.”

—John Jakes

J
OHN JAKES’S SPECTACULAR WRITING
career is bracketed, literally, by Western stories. He began selling them in the early 1950s to such pulp magazines as
Ranch Romances, Max Brand’s Western, .44 Western, Complete Western Book, 10-Story Western,
and
Big-Book Western.
His editors thought so highly of these early stories that Jakes found himself featured on the cover of a Western pulp and proclaimed a “top-hand author”— high praise for so young a storyteller.

And:

Jakes’s first published book was a Western juvenile.
The Texans Ride North,
published in 1952.

His first adult novel, published by Ace Books in 1956, was
Wear a Fast Gun,
an excellent tale of a new lawman in a mythical Western town that opens with these two reader-snatching lines: “Eli Fallon, commonly called Reb, did not know a solitary soul in Longhorn when he first arrived there. But in less than sixty minutes, he had shot a man to death.”

One of his best science fiction novels,
Six-Gun Planet,
is as much Western as fantasy.

Five of the eight novels of his
Kent Family Chronicles
contain substantial frontier and western material:
The Seekers
includes the stories of “Mad Anthony” Wayne and the 1794 Battle of Fallen Timbers and homesteading on the Ohio frontier;
The Furies
has the 1836 Alamo battle and the discovery of gold in northern California in 1849;
The Warriors
has the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad;
The Lawless
has the western cattle towns;
The Americans
has Theodore Roosevelt’s ranching venture in the Badlands in the 1880s.

In
Heaven and Hell,
the third and final volume of his
North and South
trilogy, Jakes writes of life among the Plains Indians, of the 10th (Negro) Cavalry in Kansas, of Indian treaty problems and the betrayal of the tribes by the U.S. government, and of George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of the Washita.

His
California Gold
(1989), a 658-page historical Western in locale and spirit, opens thirty years after the great California gold rush and takes its protagonist, the young Pennsylvania wanderer James Macklin Chance, through all the great events of California history, including the Los Angeles real estate boom of the 1880s, the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, the era of railroad monopolies, labor wars, the citrus and oil industries, the birth of the film business, and even the environmental movement.

Before publication of
The Bastard
in 1974, before that string of eight books, the
Kent Family Chronicles,
that made him a household name and one of the most recognizable, beloved, and frequently read American authors, John Jakes had published forty-three novels and hundreds of short stories in a writing career that began in his sophomore year at DePauw University in Indiana.

John William Jakes was born in Chicago in 1932, the son of an executive with the Railway Express Agency. A voracious reader during the years he was growing up in the Midwest, Jakes enrolled in the creative writing program at DePauw in 1950 and in his second year there sold his first story, a tale of a man pitted against a diabolical device—an electric toaster—to Anthony Boucher of the prestigious
Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
More amazing for even the most promising of undergraduate writers, he sold his first novel, a juvenile Western titled
The Texans Ride North,
to John C. Winston Publishers in Philadelphia in 1952.

Jakes graduated from DePauw in 1953, earned a master’s degree in American literature at Ohio State in 1954, and entered the Ph.D. program there. By now he was married (in 1951, to Rachel Ann Payne, his zoology lab instructor at DePauw), had a growing family and all the attendant responsibilities, and the academic life that a doctorate in literature would have provided seemed less alluring than more immediate gainful employment.

From 1954 to 1971, Jakes worked in advertising as a copywriter, as a product promotions manager for Abbott Laboratories in North Chicago, for ad agencies in New York and Ohio, and as a writing freelancer. By 1971, when he became a full-time fiction writer, he had risen to an agency vice presidency in Dayton.

In those advertising years he wrote fiction at home, in stints sometimes limited to two or three hours a night after a full day’s work, but any full-time writer would envy the product of those sixteen years. Under his own name and the pen names Jay Scotland and Alan Payne, Jakes produced forty books and two hundred stories.

He wrote mystery and suspense thrillers, detective novels, fantasy, science fiction, and historicals; he wrote movie novelizations, nonfiction books, juveniles, plays, and stories. He gained a substantial fan following for his Brak the Barbarian novels (which he calls “straight-faced clones of the R. E. Howard ‘Conan’ series”); his
Six-Gun Planet
(1970), set on the mythical planet of Missouri in which the Old West is replicated, preceded the 1973 film
Westworld
with Yul Brynner, which employed the same essential idea; he wrote the libretto and lyrics for a musical version of Kenneth Grahame’s
Wind in the Willows;
and he wrote other plays and musicals that were performed by stock companies.

The year before the debut of the
Kent Family Chronicles,
Jakes’s
On Wheels
appeared, a science fiction novel about a future time in which overpopulation forces people to live in their automobiles in a sort of perpetual motion on the interstate highway system. One critic called this novel “a minor masterpiece of social speculation.”

Then, in 1974, Pyramid Books got a two-year jump on the 200th anniversary of the American Revolution by issuing Jakes’s extraordinary 630-page novel,
The Bastard,
the first title in the
American Bicentennial Series,
also known as the
Kent Family Chronicles.
The series ran through 1980, covering seven generations of the Kent family in eight fat novels
(The Rebels, The Seekers, The Furies, The Titans, The Warriors, The Lawless,
and
The Americans
followed
The Bastard),
which sold an estimated 40 million-plus copies and which became a legend in the book industry. Not only did the series become one of the most successful paperback publishing enterprises in history, but the Kent saga also marked the virtual birth of a new and sustaining form of popular fiction—the paperback original, multivolumed, continuing-character, generation-spanning, romantic-historical family saga.

Jakes followed the dazzling success of the Kent saga with another series that took up what seemed permanent residence on the bestseller lists, the
North and South Trilogy.
These novels
(North and South,
1982;
Love and War,
1984;
Heaven and Hell,
1987) covered the antebellum period, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction era in two families, one Southern, the other Northern. The first two novels were adapted for a pair of highly successful television miniseries.

The stories in this collection, covering as they do all of John Jakes’s writing career, from the 1950s to the present day, form an excellent representation not only of the author’s devotion to the timeless American West but of his unpretentious description of himself as a writer-craftsman aiming for the mass market with a singleness of purpose: to entertain.

During the early years of his career, when his primary markets were the pulps, Jakes wrote what has become known as the “traditional” Western story. His more recent Western fiction tends toward the nontraditional, offbeat, historical tale.

In “Carolina Warpath,” written especially for this collection, Jakes not only transports the reader to a wholly different “western” frontier—the British Carolina colony a half-century before the American Revolution—but introduces a hero as memorable as Natty Bumppo: Nick Bray. Bray’s up-country expedition, with his bulldog Worthless and his sidekick Huger Noggins, to rescue the woman he loves in the midst of hostile Yamassee country, is a tale reminiscent of James Fenimore Cooper.

In “Dutchman” the time is 1917, when America has gone to war against Germany, and the story is a melancholy reminder of how blind hatred can transform ordinary people into something quite unordinary. In “Shootout at White Pass” Jakes takes us to the California Sierras and introduces us to a sheriff who dreams of retiring to Florida—if he survives a confrontation with a notorious outlaw who has come to town. The title, situation, and characters of this story all seem quite traditional, lacking only a
High Noon
-type shootout at the end. There is in fact a shootout, but it is nontraditional and pure John Jakes.

Also nontraditional and Jakesian are “A Duel of Magicians” and “Little Phil and the Daughter of Joy.” The former, a self-contained excerpt from
Heaven and Hell,
tells of a search across the great southwestern plains for the abducted son of a white man and of a confrontation between a Cheyenne medicine man and a black “saloon magician.” The latter story, which appeared under Jakes’s pseudonym John Lee Gray in the first volume of an anthology of original Western stories,
New Frontiers,
is a wry and good-humored tale of a “soiled dove” named Jimmy, her determined plan to do away with Major General Philip Sheridan, and the heroic efforts of a cavalry scout to deter her.

Even in his traditional stories Jakes gives his readers something more than stock characters and plots. A rare locale, for instance, such as the Sierra Nevada, also the scene of “To the Last Bullet”
(New Western,
May 1953). Note the similarities in plot as well as locale between this story and “Shootout at White Pass”: both are about lawmen of a rather unheroic sort doing their duty in little mountain mining towns. Written forty years apart, these two stories demonstrate the maturation of Jakes as a writer and how the same basic fictional material can be turned to traditional and nontraditional ends.

Clever little surprises and imaginative situations distinguish all the other stories in this book.

In “The Woman at Apache Wells”
(Max Brand’s Western Magazine,
September 1952), a woman named Lola saves Tracy, an ex-Confederate soldier, from a bitter life of outlawry.

In “Hell on the High Iron”
(Big-Book Western,
March 1953), troubleshooter Mark Rome employs some unusual methods to overcome local opposition to the building of a railroad across frontier Kansas.

In “Death Rides Here!”
(10-Story Western,
October 1953), freighter Jeff Croydon fights to obtain a contract to ship barrels of Oklahoma crude oil.

“The Winning of Poker Alice”
(Complete Western Book,
February 1953), one of three short fillers based on fact and written by Jakes on assignment, poses a question about who is courting whom in the case of gentleman gambler W. G. Tubbs and Poker Alice Duffield.

In “The Tinhorn Fills His Hand”
(10-Story Western,
June 1953), gambler Graham Coldfield finds himself in a brace of deadly struggles against illness and a “disease of greed” on the steamboat
River Queen.

And in “The Naked Gun”
(Short Stories,
January 1957), a little girl named Emma puts an end to the career of mankiller George Bodie.

“I have always had a great love of the Western experience in America,” John Jakes has written, “and I have researched and written about it all my writing life. That love for the West and the Western story has not diminished in the forty years I have been writing professionally. The West and the spirit of the West will always haunt me and I will always write about it.”

This collection provides the best introduction to that Western haunting of John Jakes.

But westward, look, the land is bright.

—
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH

T
HE WORD
WEST
IS
central to American reality and myth. But
west
is a chameleon. Sometimes it means a geographic region, sometimes a direction, or then again, a period of time in our national experience.

But however it’s used, it brings with it a whole trove of secondary meanings. They speak an alluring language of hope; adventure; riches; escape; beginning again.

The sense of renewal and rebirth contained in
west
goes far back, to Europe and beyond. Thoreau speculated that “the island of Atlantis, and the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial paradise, appear to have been the Great West of the ancients, enveloped in mystery and poetry.” Even when the wealth of the Orient, imaginary and real, drew European explorers in that direction, the better, faster route was imagined to lie the other way, and for years, mariners tried to find this fabled western passage.

But it was a series of events on the North American continent in the nineteenth century that gave the word its final form and densely interlocked meanings:

West—the way you go to reach the unpopulated country. The gold. Free land. Breathing room.

West—where the buffalo roam. A vast space beyond the Mississippi.

And West—a period of time, of roughly thirty-five to forty years’ duration—say, from the strike at Sutter’s Mill to the massacre at Wounded Knee. Often, this time frame is called the “Old West,” a common shorthand for the years encompassing the final explosive thrust of the United States population, native and foreign-born alike, into and through all the empty lands from the Old Northwest to the Pacific.

Some would argue that the “Old West” is better defined by fixing its limits at either end of the heyday of the cowboy—a span much shorter than the first one; only a decade or so. There is something to that argument since, in large parts of the world, the American West is definitely not the sodbuster or the railroader, the owner of the Blue Hotel or the young reporter on the
Territorial Enterprise.
The West is the cowboy, and vice versa, period.