AUTHOR FAVOURITES: THE POACHER’S DAUGHTER by MICHAEL ZIMMER

Michael Zimmer tells me he has 4 favourites of his own westerns! One, THE POACHER’S DAUGHTER, won the Western Heritage Wrangler Award.

Montana 1885. After young Rose Edwards is widowed by vigilantes who hang her husband for an alleged theft, she turns outlaw. Later she finds herself the reluctant hero of the local Native American population, aiding them in their struggle against encroaching settlement. 

Clashes between Montana cattlemen and settlers on one hand, and outlaws and Indians on the other, form the background to Michael’s tale. Michael is rightly proud of the authenticity of his work.

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.

Montana rancher Granville Stuart

The novel is dedicated to the free-spirited and independent women of the Old West.

There were a number of female outlaws in western history. They include ROSE DUNN, the ‘Rose of the Cimarron,’ ‘Cattle Annie’ and ‘Little Britches’ (ANNIE MCDOUGAL and JENNIE STEVENS) PEARL HART, FLORENCE QUICK and ‘Cattle Kate’ (ELLA WATSON) who was lynched by Wyoming vigilantes in 1889.

Probably most famous however is BELLE STARR, (1848-1889) nicknamed ‘The Queen of Bandits.’ She – alongside the James-Younger Gang, the Doolin-Dalton Gang and others - was a product of the combination of two anarchic elements: the American Civil War as waged by guerrilla bands in and around Missouri, and the lawlessness of the adjoining Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) which became a refuge for outlaws, many of them disaffected confederates, from the 1860s to the 1890s.  

Belle Starr was a farm girl, born MYRA MAYBELLE SHIRLEY in Missouri, whose brother was killed in the Civil War. She knew the James-Younger Gang, although a story that the father of her daughter was COLE YOUNGER was disputed by Younger himself.

She married at least three outlaws: JIM REED, SAM STARR and JIM JULY STARR - all three of whom were killed in gunfights. The Starrs' were members of a notorious Cherokee outlaw clan operating in Indian Territory. Although Belle occasionally donned male attire and took part in raids, she was mostly the 'brains' behind a lot of their criminal activities - organising, planning and fencing for the rustlers, horse thieves and bootleggers she worked with, as well as harbouring them from the law.

In 1883 she was arrested by the famed black lawman BASS REEVES and brought before 'hanging judge' JUDGE ISAAC PARKER. Charged with horse theft she served 9 months in prison and was deemed a model prisoner.

On February 3, 1889, she was riding home near Eufaula, Oklahoma when she was ambushed and killed. Her death resulted from shotgun wounds to the back, neck, shoulder and face. Suspects range from her husband, Jim July Starr, to her two children, as well as neighbour EDGAR J. WATSON. It was rumoured Belle knew Watson was an escaped murderer with a price on his head and he killed her to shut her up. But the murder remains officially 'unsolved.'

Many of the actresses who specialised in playing 'feisty' women in western TV shows and films have portrayed Belle, among them Isabel Jewell, Jane Russell, Marie Windsor, Jeanne Cooper and Jean Willes.

Marie Windsor as Belle

Rather more unlikely actresses in the role include Gene Tierney,

The real Belle (left) and Gene Tierney

Elizabeth Montgomery and - perhaps oddest of all - Italian actress Elsa Martinelli!

Elsa Martinelli as Belle

The setting of the Montana cattle country reminded me of books/movies like 'These Thousand Hills' and 'The Missouri Breaks.'

‘These Thousand Hills’ (1959)

Reviews of THE POACHER’S DAUGHTER:

‘It detonated like dynamite in my hands’

‘A wonderfully endearing heroine with a gentle heart and steel in her spine’

‘Zimmer ratchets up the tension to piano wire tautness’

‘One of the best westerns I have ever read.’

https://www.amazon.com/Poachers-Daughter-Western-Story-ebook/dp/B01LBK1PPG/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