The Rustlers of West Fork by Louis L’Amour (review)

Reviews 179 This is his first acceptance of responsibility, and the first time he gives a woman a second thought. Schofield has a subtle hand in dealing with history, and her placement of the novel in historical context is done without flash. She uses the great cattle drives over the Chisholm Trail, which took place between 1866 and 1886, as a backdrop for her story. As the setting of the novel occasionally requires, Mexi­ can history is also woven into the story. Two authors—Michael Malone, in Montana: Two Centuries ofHistory, and Arrell Gibson, in The West in the Life ofthe Nation—mention that the typical cowboy was Black or Hispanic, and Schofield incorporates this fact in her novel with the inclusion of Hispanic and Black characters. This book is worth its price. It is both entertaining and thought provoking. JIM BEASLEY University ofSouth Dakota The Rustlers of WestFork. By Louis L’Amour. Afterword by Beau L’Amour. (New York: Bantam Books, 1991. 244 pages, $22.00.) Long before the first Sackett was conceived, at a time when fame and fortune were still elusive, Louis L’Amour, under the assumed name of Tex Burns, adopted Hopalong Cassidy, a step-child that he would later disown. In the Afterword of The Rustlers of WestFork, L’Amour is quoted by his son Beau as saying, “A long time ago I wrote some books. Ijust did it for the money, and my name didn’t go on them. So now, when people ask me if they were mine, I say no.” The character, Hopalong Cassidy, was created by Clarence E. Mulford and written for Doubleday Publishing. The Cassidy stories were made into movies in the early 1940s. After Mulford’s retirement in 1950, Doubleday wanted more novels to support the movies and the weekly TV series that had been started, and Mulford recommended L’Amour to write them since he didn’t want to come out of retirement. The Rustlers of West Fork is the first of L’Amour’s Hopalong Cassidy stories. The stories were written following the Mulford style, but a disagreement developed between L’Amour and Doubleday when they asked for a rewrite. They needed to change Hoppy from the hard-drinking, rough-talking character that Mulford had created to the movie character, played by William L. Boyd, who would appeal to the younger generation. L'Amour begrudgingly rewrote the books. Hopalong Cassidy is not your typical Louis L’Amour character. Only one or two of his leading characters ever wore two guns, and none of them with the 180 WesternAmerican Literature flashiness of shooting them both at once to hit separate targets. In the Cassidy story, L’Amour used more of the typical Western genre terminology, such as “yeah” or “uh-huh” for “yes”, “git” for get, and leaving the “g” off the “ing” words. This issomething he didn’t do in his own novels. However, the story does reveal L’Amour’straditional use of true historical and geographical references. Though the Hopalong Cassidy books will never measure up to L’Amour’s later writing, they are stories that needed to be told. Louis L’Amour has become a legend of the Western genre, and Hopalong Cassidy is part ofthe birth ofthat legend. LEWISJ. DABB Smithfield, Utah The Heirs of Columbus. By Gerald Vizenor. (Hanover and London: Wesleyan/ University Press of New England, 1991. 189 pages, $18.95.) Readers of Gerald Vizenor know that his books are not so much books as they are ammunition in the metonymical arsenal with which he battles the absurdity of life in our time. Vizenor begins Heirs with a headnote from Jean Paul Sartre: “One does not redeem evil; one fights it.... We want [a book] to be explicitly conceived as aweapon in the struggle that men wage against evil.”The main evil in Vizenor’sworldview is the postmodernist genocide ofnative Ameri­ can cultures through “racialism, colonial duplicities, sentimental monogenism, and generic cultures.” To withstand this evil Vizenor invents a new breed of trickster: the Crossbloods, whose confrontations with absurdity are “comic and communal, rather than tragic and sacrificial.” Because these confrontations are humorous and imaginative, they are liberating. In Heirs, Vizenor’s...