The Hero of a Hundred Fights: Collected Stories from the Dime Novel King, from Buffalo Bill to Wild Bill Hickok by Ned Buntline (review)

In The Hero of a Hundred Fights, Clay Reynolds reprints four dime novels attributed to the authorship of Edward Zane Carroll Judson—better known to his nineteenth-century readers as Ned Buntline. Reynolds’s appreciative introduction and concluding endnotes serve to frame a collection of stories whose contrived plotlines and action-packed scenarios seem almost tame in comparison to his picture of their author’s life and times.

Reynolds’s peripatetic introduction tries to capture the likeness of a man whose “life was a landscape littered with contradictions” (xii). This proves to be no easy task: “the line between Edward Z. C. Judson and Ned Buntline was always blurred,” and Reynolds’s flashback/flashforward recounting of Judson’s outrageous escapades interspersed with a broadly sketched history of the dime novel seems at times as convoluted and barely believable as a typical Buntline plot (xii).

Buntline’s Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men; or, The Wildest and Truest Tale I’ve Ever Told, based on an actual encounter with William Cody in 1869, launched Buffalo Bill Cody as an American legend. Judson’s fictional account produced the typical plots and characters that would, according to Reynolds, come to define the dime novel Western. Reynolds stresses Buntline’s reliance on elaborate, melodramatic plot devices, and his foregrounding of dialogue and action. The King of the Border Men is no exception to this rubric, relying on the plot formula Reynolds identifies as “a Ned Buntline trademark: abductions, pursuit, rescue, re-abduction, re-pursuit, re-rescue, with a multiple set of villains” (1). For Reynolds, much of the interest in this novel and in this volume’s fourth, Wild Bill’s Last Trail, lies in Judson’s personal ambivalence toward another western legend, James Butler (“Wild Bill”) Hickok. Western scholars will likely also be struck by the cinematic quality of both novels, and by Buntline’s anticipation of the less-than-mythic final days of the Western hero (reflected in such films as Monte Walsh [1970] and Tom Horn [1980]).

Out of twenty-five dime novel Westerns that Judson wrote between 1849 and his death in 1886, Reynolds includes two that are chiefly notable because they are so unlike the typical Ned Buntline Western. While the mistaken identities that drive Hazel-Eye, The Girl Trapper, A Tale of Strange Young Life are transparently obvious, Buntline’s resourceful protagonist (“the girl trapper, rifle in hand”) rewards the reader’s patience (194). The third selection, The Miner Detective; or, The Ghost of the Gulch, reads like dime novel noir. Despite some question of Buntline’s authorship, this first-person narrative displays a sophistication that deserves Reynolds’s encomiums.

The editor’s genuine affection for Judson and his enthusiastic arguments for Ned Buntline’s contribution to the development of the Western archetype and the degree of his impact on the modern novel are completed by ten pages of endnotes (see especially note X, in which Reynolds avows that “the tale of Judson’s several marriages would make a better story than he ever wrote”) and a useful bibliography (421). Fans of western fiction and film will not be disappointed by this return to the thrilling tales of yesteryear.