The Eyes and Ears of Texas

Growing up with John Wayne in the movies and Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, Maverick, and the classic Have Gun—Will Travel, I have noted with some gloom the decline in popularity of the great American story form known as the “horse opera.”

There are no longer any Western or cowboy (and injun) shows on television, and the movies only occasionally offer up some of the same—some thick slabs of Larry McMurtry sentimentality, or sporadically something like Lawrence Kasden’s Silverado, Tombstone, or my favorite, Walter Hill’s Geronimo.

In fiction there is not much more than Louis L’Amour and Larry McMurtry—though early Elmore Leonard covered the Western terrain and, of course, Elmer Kelton, author of more than 40 novels, honored by his peers as the greatest Western writer ever. Kelton, who passed away last summer, has a new volume out, Texas Sunrise: Two Novels of the Texas Republic (Forge Books), which, as the title indicates, containsMassacre at Goliad and After the Bugles.

Thomas and Joshua Buckalew, who emigrate to Texas (still part of Mexico), soon find that a rising level of antipathy between the new settlers and Mexican authorities quickly incinerates into the so-called Texan revolution, eventually resulting in the  mythmaking Alamo and the less widely recognized Goliad Massacre, around which the first novel is centered:

After the Bugles, the sequel to Massacre, begins at the crucial battle of San Jacinto—which secured Texan independence—where the Buckalew brothers now experience the hardships of war’s aftermath and the unabated hostilities of the region’s conflicting cultures.

The story is quintessentially Americana—one of the things that recommends it. And as long I am at it, let me remind you of Paulette Giles’s wonderful tale (set in East Texas), The Color of Lightning, and the early novels of James Carlos Blake—The Pistoleer, The Friends of Pancho Villa, Red Grass River, and especially In the Rogue Blood.