The Last Shootist (39 page)

Glendon Swarthout never wrote any sequels to his sixteen novels, although the 1960s
Where the Boys Are
had editors beseeching him to write
Where the Girls Were. The Shootist
is one of his few novels that really sets up for a sequel. The endings, however, differed between the movie and the original novel. In the movie, the teenaged youth played by Ron Howard follows John Bernard Books (John Wayne) into the fancy saloon where Books has assassinated all the gunmen he's invited to try to kill him but enters just in time to see a sneaky bartender blast the already wounded Books in the back with both barrels of a shotgun. Ron Howard picks up J. B. Books's Remington .44 and kills that back-shooting bartender, giving him what he deserves. After a moment of indecision, the teenager throws the gun away, to John Wayne's approval, before Wayne, too, dies on-screen. Gillom Rogers (Howard) then walks out of that saloon, having renounced gunfighting and further violence, and goes home with his mother, played by Lauren Bacall. No sequel possible to
that
filmed story.

The novel, however, was
not
tailored for John Wayne. Glendon's J. B. Books character was loosely based on the last few years of the notorious Texas gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, the only gunslinger to ever write his own autobiography. Hardin was known for his custom-made leather skeleton vest, onto which he had sewn leather holster sleeves to hold his custom .41 Colts, among a number of types of pistols Hardin used throughout his man-killing career (high estimate on John Wesley was forty-four kills, but no one knows for sure). Glendon changed the guns to matched .44 Remingtons, and the dust jacket illustration on the hardcover
Shootist
novel from 1975 shows these revolvers and their special holster vest.

They tried to rig up such a vest for Wayne during costume fittings before filming
The Shootist,
but Duke was overweight and too awkward trying to pull big revolvers out from under his coat easily, so they dumped the special vest and he went back to a single six-shooter on the hip. In the novel, the teenaged boy has already worked out a trade with J. B. Books for his prized weapons in return for running the invitations to all those gunmen for this final shoot-out. Gillom Rogers (in the novel) enters the saloon, and at J. B. Books's last request, he issues the coup de grâce to the famous shootist, who is already dying of prostate cancer and his bullet wounds anyway. The teenager then walks outside the saloon (
doesn't
shoot the bartender first) and shows off these matched Remingtons to an awed crowd, thus becoming the last shootist. The novel's
different
ending absolutely lends itself to a coming-of-age sequel about what then happens to this teenaged gunslinger carrying these famous six-shooters during the next six months of his exciting young life. I included the last scene of Glendon's original novel as my prologue, so readers would know they're reading a sequel to the novel,
not
to the famous movie ending they might be more familiar with.

John Wayne wouldn't have anything to do with the book's original ending. My father and I didn't know this when we had several debates with the film's producers, Mike Frankovich and Bill Self. I was the original screenwriter on the film, and when we declined to change the story's ending (no possible
sequel
!), director Siegel brought in his favorite on-set rewriter (credited as a “dialogue coach” on a few of Don's earlier films) to make changes. Scott Hale made just enough changes (one-third) under the Writers' Guild adaptation rules back in 1976 to qualify for a screen credit, and I was too green a screenwriter to protest much. So it too often goes in Hollywood.

What was never explained to us was that John Wayne had made another Western in 1972 called
The Cowboys
in which he trains eleven schoolboys, aged nine to fifteen, and in the process of toughening them up into men while driving his Texas steers to market also teaches them how to fight and kill.
The Cowboys
was the first picture since the 1960s
The Alamo
in which Wayne's character dies on screen, and these no-longer-young innocents go after Bruce Dern and his gang of cutthroats, slaughtering them graphically to avenge the murder of their father-figure trail boss. Well, Big John evidently got so many letters from outraged PTA mothers about his setting such a bad moral example and poor movie role model for their youngsters in
The Cowboys
that he wasn't about to make that mistake again. So, as dictated by Wayne, Ron Howard throws John Wayne's six-gun away, does not execute the famous shootist, renounces violence, and goes home with mom, to live happily ever after. And thus we have a sanitized but perhaps less realistic movie ending to a great Western tale.

*   *   *

Weapons owned by notorious outlaws and expert shootists were valuable to gun collectors even back in the nineteenth century, as long as their provenance could be proved, so fictional El Paso marshal Walter Thibido's burning ambition to get his hands on Books's matched Remingtons for resale is set up in the original novel. The guns mentioned in this sequel were authenticated by an excellent book,
Flayderman's Guide to Antique American Firearms
(8th edition, 2001).

The best histories of old El Paso recommended to me by Leon Metz, who wrote the finest biography of Hardin—
John Wesley Hardin: Dark Angel of Texas
(1998)—were C. L. “Doc” Sonnichsen's
Pass of the North: Four Centuries on the Rio Grande
(1968) and
El Paso: A Centennial Portrait
(1972), containing essays by members of the El Paso Historical Society.

El Paso Daily Herald
journalist Dan Dobkins's pointing Gillom Rogers toward the outlaw town of Tularosa to seek out another aspiring writer is also quite plausible. Eugene Manlove Rhodes was
the real Western deal
. Rhodes's appearance, college schooling, and interests (horse breaking, poker, and great literature) are taken from several biographies of the man I tapped (
Eugene Manlove Rhodes—Cowboy Chronicler
by Edwin W. Gaston, Jr.). Gene
did
train one of his wild horses to be mounted only from the right side instead of the left to foil a saddle thief in Old Mesilla, as recounted in W. H. Hutchinson's
A Bar Cross Man.
Rhodes made his living breaking horses as a young man in his camp up in the San Andres Mountains twenty-five miles above Tularosa. This actual horse ranch Gene described in one of his novels,
Stepsons of Light,
which I've reused. Periodic trips down to Tularosa for supplies Gene took to visit the widow he'd courted by letter, May Davison Purple, caused Gene to leave his daily horse chores on the mountain to whichever outlaw happened by that remote rest stop on the Owl Hoot Trail. Word spread and soon Gene was trading food and a safe hideout for horse wrangling duties to such big-leaguers as the Ketchum Brothers, two of the Dalton Gang (Dick Broadwell and Bill Power), and Bill Doolin, King of the Oklahoma Outlaws. Gene befriended these bad men and heard their wild stories, which was grist for his writer's mill when he began publishing short stories in 1902 in famed historian Charles Fletcher Lummis's
Out West
magazine from Los Angeles. In 1906, along with a new baby by May, the family returned to her parents' farm in Apalachin in Upstate New York, where the bulk of Rhodes's Western novels were written and first serialized in the old
Saturday Evening Post
and then compiled into books.

Eugene Manlove Rhodes was the Louis L'Amour of his day, but his flowery prose and anecdotal digressions read somewhat dated now. Several of Gene's novels were filmed after purchase by the Western actor Harry Carey, and the best of his novellas,
Paso Por Aqui,
was released after Gene's death in 1948 as
Four Faces West,
starring Joel McCrea. I like to scout the actual settings of my stories, but Rhodes's real San Andres horse ranch is difficult to get to anymore, located inside the government-restricted White Sands Missile Range in south central New Mexico. The Alamogordo Chamber of Commerce runs bus tours twice a year out to Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated, and evidently they pass by a large boulder (
without
stopping) upon which Gene's family and fans have placed a bronze plaque to memorialize his burial spot in what's still known as Rhodes Pass through those same mountains, but I didn't make that special trip.

Western historian and novelist Bernard DeVoto later wrote in a sympathetic
Harper's
magazine essay that Rhodes's Westerns were “the only body of work devoted to the cattle kingdom which is both true to it and written by an artist in prose.” Gene Rhodes's fourteen novels and shorter novellas about the Southwest he knew so well stand as reflections of a cowboy author who lived during the last days of a freer ranching era and could easily evoke the Western spirit and rugged physicality of that region in his stories. The Bard of Tularosa's inclusion is my tribute to one of the Western's great
originals
. Old Tularosa has been remodeled now, too, but the best history of that bandit town (
Tularosa: Last of the Frontier West,
1968) is again by historian C. L. “Doc” Sonnichsen, whom I had the honor of meeting at a Western Writers' convention as a friend of my father's.

The notorious Ketchum Brothers are called the Grahams in this novel, and Blackjack
did
have his head yanked off in Clayton, New Mexico, on April 26, 1901, so Gene Rhodes would have just heard about that botched hanging. The best new history about this deadly outlaw family from West Texas is Jeffrey Burton's
The Deadliest Outlaws
(University of North Texas Press, 2nd edition, 2012). Tom “Blackjack” Ketchum was so mean that when he was about to be hung, he asked Union County, New Mexico, sheriff Salome Garcia to dig his grave very deep and bury him facedown so that Frank Harrington, the train guard who shotgunned Blackjack during a solitary, fouled-up robbery (leading to Tom's capture the next day and the eventual amputation of his right arm) could “kiss my ass.”

Both Ketchum brothers spent time hiding out at Gene Rhodes's mountain horse ranch in New Mexico various times and even asked the would-be writer to join them in a train robbery in the summer of 1897, but Eugene turned them down, saying he was “flush just then.” I had to change their last names since Tom's older brother, Sam, whom we
do
meet in this story, actually died of blood poisoning in 1899, after being wounded in another train robbery with his brother Tom and Elzy Lay, a member of Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch gang. This novel is set in the spring and summer of 1901, two years
after
both outlaw brothers were dead, so the Ketchum boys had to become the fictional Grahams. Sam Ketchum probably wasn't quite as friendly an hombre as I depict him, but he was certainly good with guns.

Gillom's first ride on the Southern Pacific out of Deming to Benson was typical of long-distance trains at the turn of the century, which were infested with cardsharps and their cheating cronies. Doc Davis was a notorious crooked gambler of the late 1800s known to ride those same rails fleecing suckers. The mighty S & P Railroad had to sell tickets to these card cheats, but the conductors were by then warning inexperienced travelers against playing cards with these devious gambling professionals.

When the Citizens Reform League got rolling in El Paso in 1904, by year's end they had leaned on the city council to outlaw houses of prostitution and saloon gambling. Many of the resourceful pimps and whores and gamblers got on trains and headed west—to Bisbee, Arizona.

Bisbee was still a wide-open mining town with legal gambling in fifty saloons operating round the clock and prostitutes available in “the reservation,” the parlor houses and cribs and dance halls at the upper end of Brewery Gulch. Bisbee's elected law enforcers were controlled by the three big mining companies, and nothing was allowed to interfere with their immensely profitable dirt digging. After the infamous Bisbee Massacre of December 1883, when the Goldwater & Castaneda General Store was robbed and five innocent people killed, the citizens formed their own Safety Committee of local vigilantes and caught and hanged all six murdering store robbers. The .45-.60 were thereafter in business and began to run troublemakers out of town after a formal warning, with the nonlegal approval of the county sheriff and the mining concerns. Gillom Rogers runs into these urban vigilantes, and they are the reason well-organized Bisbee suffered nowhere near the robberies, shootings, and murders of nearby wooly Arizona towns like Tombstone, Nogales, or Tucson. Sheriff Scott White (who ruled Cochise County at that time) explaining the local political situation to young Gillom and Ease after their two shoot-outs and how Arizona was trying so hard to become a civilized state in the Union separate from New Mexico is accurate regarding congressional frontier politics of those years.

The names of Bisbee's saloons (except the Bonanza), restaurants, stores, and the construction of their showplace, the luxurious Copper Queen Hotel, are also factual to the town at that time. Traveling variety shows did pass through their big new Orpheum Theatre, which featured the fanciest restrooms in the whole Territory, a sight to see and enjoy. M. J. Cunningham
was
the cashier of the new Bank of Bisbee and owned the first automobile in town, although it was a big Stanley Steamer instead of a smaller Locomobile, because the bigger car would have been much more difficult for two men to push up a slippery dirt track.

The Arizona gunman known for making a “silhouette girl” out of his new wife after killing her husband over their affair was Buckskin Frank Leslie, thought by some to have also been the unknown murderer of his gunslinging pal, Johnny Ringo. Drinking and then tracing his wife's profile in wooden siding with bullets was Buckskin Frank's fun thing to do, but luckily their marriage didn't last that long.