AUTHOR FAVOURITES: WINTER’S WAR by MATTHEW P. MAYO

Matthew P. Mayo won the Spur Award for TUCKER'S RECKONING. He tells me one of his favourite of his own novels is WINTER’S WAR. A characteristic of Matthew’s work is a great opening, and WINTER’S WAR certainly has one. Here Niall Winter, ranching in the Wyoming Rockies, finds his ranch burned down and his wife kidnapped by an enemy from his past. Niall goes in pursuit, even as a blizzard rages.

Life in winter could be brutal on the cattle ranges of the 19^th Century West, particularly in mountain country and/or on the northern Great Plains. Indeed one particularly severe winter, known as the ‘Great’ or ‘Big Die-up,’ more or less destroyed the so-called ‘Open Range.’

The Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming suffered a drought-stricken summer in 1886. Then November became a month of relentless snowfall – it snowed every day. The ranchers had neglected to stockpile feed. So when snow and blizzards hit, cattle had to use their hooves to dig through the snow to uncover what meagre grasses they could find. The already thin animals grew weak from hunger. After a brief reprieve when a ‘Chinook’ blew in, temperatures plummeted again to -50F and the greatest blizzard in living memory struck the northwest.

Starving livestock invaded the outskirts of towns, eating whatever shrubs and bushes they could find. Over half of the cattle alive in October, 1886 were dead by April, 1887, probably about a million animals. Rotting carcasses were scattered all over the landscape and dead animals fouled the creeks and streams. 

Many ranchers went bankrupt, and the rest struggled to hang on. So ended the days of the ‘open’ unfenced range and a whole way of life.

A cowboy rescues a calf from a blizzard

For more on the great ‘Die-up’ see Jacquie Rogers’ excellent blog on the subject:
http://unusualhistoricals.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/disasters-great-die-up.html

A number of western movies have snowbound and/or wintry backdrops, among them: ‘Track of the Cat,’

‘Day of the Outlaw,’

and ‘The Hateful Eight.’

Reviews of WINTER’S WAR:

‘A fine hardboiled revenge Western.’

‘Mayo's skewed vision of the world … shows us the mythic West with the sharp, clear eye of a realist looking through rippled glass.’

‘An original voice.’

‘Gritty, and peppered with enough fierce and spunky characters to populate two novels.’

https://www.amazon.com/Winters-War-Matthew-P-Mayo-ebook/dp/B008KFX9UU/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr

AUTHOR FAVOURITES: WRONG TOWN by MATTHEW P. MAYO

Matthew P. Mayo – who won the Spur Award for TUCKER'S RECKONING - tells me a favourite of his own books is WRONG TOWN, first of the ROAMER books.

Circumstance (not helped by his homely face) has made Matthew’s hero ROAMER into what his name suggests – a lone drifter. Roamer’s day begins with him being attacked by a grizzly bear – and then gets worse! With the zippy beginning and black humour characteristic of Matthew, WRONG TOWN takes Roamer from wrestling a grizzly for breakfast into a Rocky Mountain town where he’s locked up for a murder he didn’t commit. And then a lynch mob comes after him…

We authors are always being told our books need ‘grabby’ beginnings. WRONG TOWN certainly has an opening line that’s hard to beat: ‘My eyes snapped open in the strange gray light of early morning as a grizzly grunted hot breath in my face.’

There are plenty of instances of lynching in the real Old West, where official law and order officers were rare. Sometimes they had racial (not to say racist) motivations. Between 1848 and 1860, white Americans lynched at least 163 Mexicans in California alone. On July 5, 1851, a mob in Downieville, California, lynched a Mexican woman named Josefa Segovia. She was accused of killing a white man who had attempted to assault her after breaking into her home. On October 24, 1871, a mob rampaged through Old Chinatown in Los Angeles, killing at least 18 Chinese-Americans, after a white businessman had inadvertently been killed, caught in the crossfire of a Tong battle within the Chinese community.

Sometimes lynching’s were carried out when groups of individuals banded together to deal with outlawry in areas where there was no official law. Or, as in early 1860s in Montana, where the ‘official law’ turned out to law-breakers themselves. HENRY PLUMMER, Sheriff of Bannack, was suspected of being part of a gang of road agents plundering the area. He was dragged off to a hanging tree by The Vigilance Committee of Alder Gulch in 1864.

Henry Plummer

In 1884 cattlemen in Montana organised against rustlers operating in the Musselshell River region. Led by prominent rancher, GRANVILLE STUART, this group of vigilantes, known as "Stuart's Stranglers", were responsible for the deaths of at least 20 thieves in July 1884, by hanging, shootings or fire.

Granville Stuart

Many outlaws fell foul of ‘lynch law,’ particularly the gang led by the RENO BROTHERS. They robbed and killed across the Midwest in the years immediately after the American Civil War, and carried out the first train robbery in U.S. history at Seymour, Indiana on October 6^th 1866. Later three of the gang were captured and taken by train to gaol. On July 10, 1868, three miles outside Seymour, the prisoners were taken off the train, and hanged from a nearby tree by a group of masked men calling itself the Scarlet Mask Society or the Jackson County Vigilance Committee. Three other gang members were captured shortly after. In a grisly repeat, they too fell into the hands of vigilantes and were hanged from the same tree. The site became known as ‘Hangman’s Crossing, Indiana.’

Frank Reno

Finally FRANK RENO and three more gang members were captured and held in the New Albany, Indiana gaol. On the night of December 11, about 65 hooded men forced their way into the gaol and dragged the prisoners from their cells and lynched them – making a total of 10 Reno gang members lynched in the course of 1868.

Grizzly bears deserve a blog all to themselves. Movies about grizzly attacks include THE REVENANT and MAN IN THE WILDERNESS, both about HUGH GLASS, a ‘mountain man’ mauled by a grizzly in 1823.

Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘The Revenant’

Lynch law features in many a western including books/movies like THE OX BOW INCIDENT

and WARLOCK.

Reviews:

‘Mayo is a breezy yarn-spinner… steeped in authenticity and boiled in action’

‘Terrific’

‘An original piece of work’

‘In the great tradition of noirish Westerns’

https://www.amazon.com/Wrong-Town-Roamer-Book-1-ebook/dp/B007L74538/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1486939723&sr=1-1

AUTHOR FAVOURITES: BLOOD MOUNTAIN by PETER BRANDVOLD

Peter Brandvold writes westerns under his own name and as FRANK LESLIE, including two best described as ‘horror/westerns.’

When I asked Peter about his favourite of his own books he exhibited the Doug Hocking trait of picking two! One of the two is BLOOD MOUNTAIN which he describes as: ‘Teeming with young energy.’ I suspect many of us authors feel the same way, admiring our early work for its energy even if we’re still working out how to do the job properly – a bit like having affection for your young, if sometimes foolish, self.

BLOOD MOUNTAIN tells of a group of settlers attacked by merciless outlaws in the bleak northern Rockies. To find a fitting image I thought of some snowbound western movies like ‘DAY OF THE OUTLAW’ (1959)

and ‘TRACK OF THE CAT.' (1954)

The aspect of Scandinavian settlers heading west in a wagon train brought to mind the BONANZA episode ‘Journey Remembered.’

BLOOD MOUNTAIN is described as: ‘Stark realism combined with a classic good-against-evil Western story.’

Reviewers:

‘Peter Branvold is one of the best western writers around.’

‘Full of surprises, I hated to put it down.’

‘I LOVE Peter Brandvold! I stay up late, eyes wide, unable to stop reading his novels… He is a master craftsman.’

‘Peter Branvold has captured the very essence of the old west.’

Find it here: https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Mountain-Peter-Brandvold/dp/0425169766/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1481012123&sr=1-1&keywords=blood+mountain+peter+brandvold