The Last Kind Words Saloon, or a Wistful of Dolours?

Good Reads Lennoxville Library

Quick now, and no cheating! (1) What are the most common causes of cattle stampedes? And how do you stop ‘em? (2) How do you treat a rattlesnake bite? (3) What are the chances of your stagecoach losing a wheel iffen you are being pursued by outlaws? (4) [bonus question] What does it mean to “ride shotgun”?

The fact that most from my generation can take a fair stab at answering these questions is a testament not only to the educational benefits of television (??) but to the enduring quality of American foundation myths. In the sixties, TV prime time positively bristled with sheriffs and cardsharps, cowboys and cutthroats, rattlesnakes and rustlers [somebody stop me!]…. I suspect there were several factors at play. After two world wars and an economic depression, the fifties and sixties comprised a period of unprecedented confidence and prosperity in North America. Moreover, the forties had seen the United States virtually deliver the globe from malevolent old-world style totalitarianism, so a certain degree of triumphalism was understandable. Add to that the comparatively new medium of television and an expanding audience of baby boomers, and there lay a perfect medium for the explosion of a time-honoured genre. There were hundreds if not thousands of westernthemed books, TV series, and movies created at that time.

Which brings me to Mcmurtry. Now, I had seen a copy of Larry Mcmurtry’s latest western layin’ around fer a little while and, fortuitously, a gap occurred between my headier reads like Finnegans Wake, The Divine Comedy, Love in the Time of Cholera. What was a fella to do? Remembering from long ago a pleasant summer read of Lonesome Dove—with the endlessly fascinating actions and interactions of Woodrow F. Call and Augustus Mccrea, and the minutely rendered western settings—i picked up The Last Kind Words Saloon, mounted up, and got ready for some herdin’, ropin’ and mebbe even some shootin’.

The main events take place in the late 1870s early 1880s, and the eponymous Last Kind Words Saloon is situated in Long Grass, a small town somewhere in Texas, or Kansas, or New Mexico— no one seems certain. Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp spend their days on the front porch idly reminiscing about past glories and speculating about new opportunities for employment. They note the arrival in Long Grass of Charlie Goodnight (famous cattleman), and his faithful *n-word sidekick Bose Ikard. They note the mysterious presence of the beautiful and voluptuous *whword San Saba who is seen in the local brothel, and how these newcomers all seem to glom around Englishman Lord Ernle who is fixin’ to start up the biggest cattle operation in the west. We are introduced to Jessie and Mary, the spouses of Wyatt and Charlie, and then miscellaneous journalists and telegraph operators and even a few low down, blood-thirsty *I-word native persons. Buffalo Bill Cody makes an appearance and even General Sherman. Long Grass, for all its obscurity, seems to be a magnet for the big-name western legends.

All these grand adventurers are at various points in various grand ventures—they are all on the make. And this leads us, in fact, to a defining aspect of this novel: Nothing seems to pan out! In the case of Doc and Wyatt, they try a few desultory attempts at western “gigs” and then are drawn by degrees to their rendezvous with destiny at the O.K. corral in Tombstone, Arizona.

At a certain point the discerning reader wakes to the fact that, well, just a consarned moment now, this ain’t no typical Mcmurtry fare! If you was expecting sump’n like Lonesome Dove, well, forget it. For Mcmurtry that arroyo has plumb washed out.

Mcmurtry tips his hand in an epigraph-preface: “The Last Kind Words Saloon is a ballad in prose whose characters are afloat in time; their legends and their lives in history rarely match. I had the great director John Ford in mind when I wrote this book; he famously said that when you had to chose between history and legend, print the legend. And so I’ve done.”

Historically speaking, the western genre actually emerged fairly directly from contemporary media accounts (mid- to late 1800s) of the exploits of the iconic western heroes and villains. The invention of telegraph and spread of newspapers throughout the U.S. gave eastern readers direct access to all the exciting news from the Wild West. But this was generally an exaggerated construction, a hyped-up version of the expansion of America emphasising a particular brand of democracy founded on “frontierism”. In fact, Teddy Roosevelt and historians such as

Frederick Jackson Turner in the latter part of the 19th century linked the American national character with the successful conquering of wilderness and barbarism, a process at work in the successive waves of adventurers and pioneers who spread across the continent. This is what later gave western literature and film an almost cookie-cutter regularity—folks going about their business, moving west, prospecting, setting up farms, building herds, driving cattle, striving to impose law, order, and civilization, usually under the strong hand of some white male hero.

However, in response to this genre there arose another: the revisionist or anti-western. Some examples date back to the Mccarthy era when films such as High Noon served to critique the vision of America implied by straight-ahead westerns. Recent films and series such as Unforgiven, Deadwood, No Country for Old Men, and even the recent Ballad of Lester Scruggs are of this lineage. In The Last Kind Words Saloon, Mcmurtry punctures the myths surrounding his larger-than-life figures, and actively desensationalizes their actions. Tellingly, for the cover art Mcmurtry chose Frederic Remington’s painting The Fall of the Cowboy to emphasize that this volume is to be taken as a requiem for way of life, one which invites us in a backhanded way to appreciate the unadorned truth of that era.

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