Customer Reviews

The Pioneers

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Anyone with any interest at all in Westerns has probably read Jack Schaefer's Shane, and possibly also Monte Walsh and The Canyon. But I personally think he was at his peak with short stories, and this collection goes a long way toward explaining why. Its contents include samples of every type of story he wrote--from the humorous ("Cat Nipped," in which Cpl. Clint Buckner, stationed in early Territorial Kansas, stakes his third stripe on his ability to find cats to protect the grain stores at his mouse-beleaguered post), "My Town" (how Sheriff Sandburr Sam Clagett and gunslinger Black Ace Burton became allies and co-protectors of an obscure Western hamlet), and "Takes a Real Man" (freighter Big Jake Bannack challenges a newly-come preacher to move oxen without cussing at them)), to the tragic ("Old Anse," the story of an old settler watching as his valley is consumed by the waters backed up by a new dam), to the poetic ("Something Lost," in which a lone prospector and a grizzly bear forge an unusual relationship in a high hanging valley), with stops along the way at stories of man and beast ("That Mark Horse," the tale of the bond between a big Eastern horse and the cowboy unexpectedly gifted with him; "Leander Frailey," the barber whose artistry could make men more than they ever were before; and "Hugo Kerchak, Builder," the story of the rise and fall of a German immigrant carpenter who settles in a Western town and helps make it more than a dot on the map), of rescue and revenge ("Out of the Past," in which a soldier whose life is saved by an Indian scout returns 16 years later to settle the score for his rescuer), and of common folks and their common concerns ("Prudence by Name," the story of a sodbuster's attempts to get a floor to install in his soddie and please his persnickety New England wife). Some of the stories are told in first person, some in third, and all are filled with people who stand out from the page as genuine human beings, with the faults and virtues inherent in humanity. Most of these pieces were unfamiliar to me before I acquired this volume, and may not be collected elsewhere. If you enjoy short Western fiction--especially the kind that offers humor or poetic description--these are your meat.