Customer Reviews

Blessed McGill (Texas Literary Classics)

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McGill is an inspiring hero, immensely capable, with a huge zest for life. He packs incredible adventures into his short life, yet tells his story in a delightfully laid back style. He combines an interest and tolerance of all ideas, religions and philosophies, with a violent intolerance of certain purveyors of them. McGill is a warrior/philosopher, born, raised and ideally suited to this harsh land. His story is one of violence, love, sin and redemption, but it is often hard to distinguish which is which.

This book is a "must read" for all lovers of powerfully written adventure stories, but may make all other westerns dull and unimaginative in comparison.

This is an incredible tale from beginning to end. Shrake has developed a character that is the first person born on the American Continent to achieve sainthood, and until the last pages of the book the reader is kept guessing how he could deserve such an honor. The book reads as a memoir written by McGill as he tells the story of his life while awaiting his death. He lives the life of an indian scalper, buffalo hunter, and gold miner in 19th century Texas from the time of the Texas War of Independence until after the US Civil War. The more you read of this man's account of his life, the less you can believe he could ever desert to be Sainted.

This book has long been out of print, and its re-printing is an excellent opportunity for new readers to discover a classic western. Any fan of Larry McMurty's books in the "Lonesome Dove" will love "Blessed McGill" and recognize that McMurty has probably gotten some of his writting style from reading this book.

As a student of Texas history in general and a reader of fiction about Texas and the Southwest in particular, I found Blessed McGill by Edwin "Bud" Shrake to be rich with descriptive color and accurate detail about the rugged lives and times of both settlers and natives in the 19th century. The characters are developed in depth.

His repeated use of sensory descriptions such as the smells of things adds a dimensional aspect not usually found in this kind of fare. In my opinion, the only other Western fiction writer who stacks up with Shrake is Elmer Kelton.

I saw Mr Shrake on Evan Smith's Texas Monthly Talks, & learned that he'd written books where much of the action takes place near and around where I currently live: east of Austin in the fertile riverlands around Bastrop.
That made me want to order two books & see what could be learned about the lives people led in this area before the turn of the century. What I discovered was probably an accurate "novelized" glimpse into the rugged, rough, dangerous country that bears no resemblance to the present-day idyllic countryside peopled with artists and university types! The stories about McGill and Custer's brother's horse were mesmerizing & I could hardly put them down, no doubt partially because areas that I am familiar with kept cropping up. All in all, both tales provided valuable insights into exactly why and how this part of Texas was the wild, deadly, lawless frontier back in the days before and after the Civil War. Good stories about real people on their own, the stories take on special interest if the geography is personally pertinent.

Bud Shrake has a great writing style. But, I have to say I found the extreme violence depicted in this book to be offputting. Prior to this novel I read Borderland which surely is his magnum opus. I heartily reccomend Borderland. After you read that novel all else by Shake will pale in comparison.

Steve Scott, "Author, Cafe Respect and Echo Park." (Rancho Mirage, CA)

I was not familiar with Shrake until a few days ago when a friend gave me a copy of Blessed McGill. Once inside, I found one of the greatest tales I'd ever read. Every sentence succinct and right on point. Every adventure, told with a startling calm, and there were lots, amazing, incredible tales of rugged frontier life, of Indians and settlers, good ones and the very evil--all amazing, all told in first person by this weathered man while calmly waiting in anticipation of Octavio's bullet. Most striking was his tolerance, whether it was mixed cultures, Indian raids, burning alive, blood soaked scalps, or fluctuating religions. Having been there, I loved his details, horrible as they were, of the barrancas of Copper Canyon in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Shrake's Blessed McGill reads like a very personal memoir of rugged life on an even more uneven playing field.

If you want to read a book that could pass as memoir--no, a book that you feel IS memoir throughout--"Blessed McGill" is your next read. Not a new book, but relatively unknown, it reads like a collection of short stories but is in fact a novel of a young man's journey through the southwest and Mexico not to mention his life in the third quarter of the 19th century. Although roughly divided into episodes, it is all held together by the power of Edwin Shrake's mastery of characterization seen in the persona of McGill.

Along the way in these pages, you'll meet various Indian groups in the U.S. and Mexico as well as non-Indian Mexicans and new American immigrants to the west. In addition to the drunkenness and violence on the restless frontier you'll meet a variety of languages, cultures and customs. People trying to carve meaning out of often intolerable conditions must perforce become as hard as the environment they endure. Many of these men and women will become your "kin" as you learn about them and come to care about them and wish them well. And, you'll mourn, too, for the ones lost along the way.

Most of all, I found myself in awe of the authenticity of the book, the language and circumstance ring as clear as church bells on Sunday morning, the characters true and credible as life itself, and sometimes with startling sweetness despite the scalping and skinning, the burning alive of unthinking ruthlessness in an untamed world. If you want gripping details, beautifully strung together sentences, and real people on the stage of an unfinished continent, Shrake's book is as good as it gets.