Author Chap O'Keefe backgrounds his latest book
THE STORIES BEHIND FRONTIER BRIDES

Keith Chapman

Hmm, I thought glumly, that'll soon be misconstrued. Before you can say "six-gun" the detractors will be saying all westerns are kids' books, since good adult books don't need strong storylines!

I've also heard wrong conclusions drawn about the content of Black Horse Westerns purely from the style of their binding -- usually when the potential reader can remember as a child receiving a gift of vaguely similar appearance.

How can these misunderstandings be overcome?

Some years ago, a newspaper reviewer compared the books I write with movies: "You could as well have been watching a movie as reading a book . . . O'Keefe writes westerns with the coolness of a hired gun." The child-audience question moved me to wonder, what if the books were given censorship classifications like movies? Then all doubts about who should be reading what might be removed.

The film classifications in New Zealand, where I live, include "G" for general exhibition, "PG" for parental guidance recommended and "M" for mature audiences 16 years and over.

Thus director Michael Cimino's sprawling but artistically impressive Heaven's Gate, inspired by Wyoming's Johnson County War, has an M classification. This adult western contains nudity and graphic violence, including a close-up of a woman who puts the muzzle of a gun in her mouth and pulls the trigger, and a gang rape at the ranch of a brothel-madam heroine.

"Throughout the entire West during the mining and logging days of the middle nineteenth century there was a serious shortage of marriageable young women. In 1865, therefore, the youthful president of the University of Washington, Asa Mercer, proposed to remedy this situation by inducing hundreds of 'widows and orphans' of the Civil War to move to the Northwest. His main concern was that they be female and between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five. . . ."

The passage concluded, "The disappointed Seattle men who were unable to find wives after financing Mercer's scheme virtually forced him from the community."

The "Cargo of Brides" story immediately caught my imagination. There's nothing new in the arranged marriage/mail order bride theme, of course. Like most of the best ideas in modern fiction, it has been done before, probably many times, in different dress. The award-winning New Zealand movie The Piano of a few years ago came to mind as a good example.

The trick here would be to use the idea in a traditional western.

And the freshness always required in such an exercise might well lie in that when it comes to relationships between the sexes, many of the classic western novelists treated their cowboy heroes as nineteenth-century equivalents of knights in shining armour, and their heroines as similar successors of thoroughly innocent, medieval maidens of noble birth. Indeed, some of the "golden age" writers even insisted on having villains who were never so dastardly as to insult a lady. Why, they said, if a villain mistreated a woman in the Old West, his own hardcase peers wouldn't let his crime go unpunished.

Even in the age of the TV western, female saloon hostesses were presented as feisty gals, equal to squashing the roughnecks who took liberties when seeking their favours.

The truth was probably closer to the unlovely picture drawn by the uncle of New Mexico suffragist Nina Otero-Warren.

Miguel Otero (1859-1944), a one-time territorial governor, writes in his memoirs: "Wholesale trafficking in female human flesh . . . during those frontier days was more horrible than the atrocities committed by the wildest Indians. In order to keep the dance halls filled with girls, the owners would stake some woman to go back East and bring in a fresh lot of girls . . . ."

But back to Asa Shinn Mercer, the female-seeking man from Seattle. The New York Times of Saturday September 30, 1865, reported that he had gained no less than Presidential approval for his bride-enlisting scheme, then went on:

"Notwithstanding his constant endeavours, Mercer found many difficulties to overcome, and many discouragements to combat. Editors of prominent newspapers to whom he had confided his plans, refused to give him any countenance or support, or even to allow him to say through their journals what he intended to do. The local newspapers of Massachusetts did not favour him; and some of the people thought him a curious individual, with a curious scheme; they accused him of seeking to carry off girls for the benefit of miserable old bachelors; and they threw their influence against him and all that he did. These individuals ridiculed the women who were willing to go to Washington Territory. . . .

"But Mr Mercer prospered; he was known to many persons. The few girls he had taken to Washington Territory had sent word to all their friends that they might trust him implicitly, and that they could not possibly do better than come to the West, of which the writers gave glowing accounts in their letters. Thus was success won."

Alas, the entrepreneurial Mercer's success didn't last. He blamed the New York Herald and its "cross-eyed" editor, James Gordon Bennett. The drive had gone well, Mercer informed his backers, until Bennett ran an "exposé". The Herald suggested most of the girls who responded to Mercer's overtures were destined for waterfront dives on Puget Sound. If a girl were to gain a husband, she must steel herself to her man being "ugly, unnumbered, illiterate, and probably diseased".

Asa Mercer . . . recruited brides.

Mercer found himself with fewer than a hundred nubile recruits. Arriving in Seattle, he had a hard job pacifying the angry men who, after waiting almost a year for delivery of the women they'd ordered, found themselves without brides and their sponsorship money all spent.

A few weeks later, Mercer married one of his imports, Annie Stephens, and they fled to the Rocky Mountains. The Mercers later settled in Oregon, Texas and the Paintrock Valley in northern Wyoming, where Asa and his sons developed a farm and cattle ranch.

The challenge was to use this promising material in a way that would entertain my readership.

Beginning in 1993, I'd written for the independent British publisher Robert Hale Ltd. In the traditional western genre, Hale put out more than a hundred novels a year as glossy, 160-page hardback books that mostly go into lending libraries around the world. They are also very collectible, make great gifts and can be bought at British online booksellers, like Amazon UK. The emphasis in Hale's Black Horse Western series is on a brisk read with hard action, colourful characters, suspense and a dash of mystery. Oh, of course — and a strong storyline!

I couldn't see Asa Mercer, or rather a fictional substitute for him, as a likely hero or villain. He was probably what today would be regarded as a misguided do-gooder who failed and wasted his backers' investment. His girls — mostly young school ma'ams — were also unpromising material for a BHW.

So the hard work of developing premise into novel began. I shifted the main settings from Seattle and Massachusetts to a cattle town in New Mexico, and New York, circa 1880. And I did additional research for chapters set in and around the territorial capital, Santa Fe.

Most importantly, I created a new cast of characters.

In came a ranch-foreman hero down on his luck and lured into becoming a "fall guy"; a pretty but impoverished young heroine left alone in a harsh world on the death of her mother; a high-handed cattleman with an eye to consolidating his position as top dog in his country.

The back cover of the finished book sets it down succinctly:

Will Kearny reckons he has a job for working life, ramrodding iron-willed Pete Thwaites' Rocking T outfit. But after winning a bruising fight with the brutish troublemaker "Bull" Jusserand, Kearny is dealt an inexplicable blow. Old Pete abruptly quits the struggle for survival and sells out to his sworn enemy — Jusserand's boss, the range hog Franz Sturman. Mystery deepens when Seabury Reece, Sturman's tricky lawyer, traps Kearny into riding herd over a 'cargo of brides' from back East. What is the secret of lovely Christine Smith, the sad-eyed, odd girl out among what proves to be a hell-raising bevy of fallen women? Before Kearny finds the answers, he has to make room in his full hands for a roaring six-shooter!

Like Asa Mercer, I found "difficulties to overcome" with Frontier Brides.

The Hale company has long been wary of sex scenes in its books. After I wrote The Gunman and the Actress, I'd received the publisher's comment, "Incidentally, I would be grateful if in future westerns you could restrict the sex scenes as we are just not quite sure how the librarians throughout our territory react."

When I submitted the new book's MS to the Hale office in London, back came the response, "Basically we would like to publish Frontier Brides and although it is of above average length we can cope. On the other hand I think there is a little too much sex/violence and I wonder whether you would be agreeable to the deletion of the first eight pages and chapters 3 and 5? I believe there would be very little extra needed to the text to cope with these omissions."

Much as writers love to please their publishers — and hate to tempt rejection letters — I felt that the material was important to the integrity of the novel and couldn't be deleted entirely. I asked if Hale could agree to run with toned-down, slightly shorter versions of all three sequences, and sent the substitute pages.

The first eight pages (revised to six and a half) set up time and place and Sturman's motivation. The episode was also livelier and more appropriate story than a chase after stolen cows which would have been the beginning of the story without it.

Chapters 3 and 5 were crucial in some form to Frontier Brides. They introduced and established Christine as the leading lady. Without an explanation of her background, and a relating of her misfortunes in New York, her later presence in New Mexico and a sub-plot's mystery became inexplicable. The reader would ask, "What has possessed this girl to throw in her lot with such unlikely company?" The query would be very much in line with the kind of objection Herald editor James Gordon Bennett had raised to Mercer's scheme.

Worse, I didn't think I could supply Hale's "very little extra needed" to paper over the cracks of wholesale deletions without cheating the reader. Summarizing important information with bridging text is a beginner's mistake. Science-fiction guru James Gunn has written, very definitively, "The experienced writer visualizes the action of the story happening in front of him like a stage play, and reports it to the reader as it happens. He writes in scenes. He doesn't tell — he shows."

None of the scenes that was revised was gratuitous in terms of the story. This is not a book of that "adult western paperback" type in which an anonymous author puts the publishing house's stock hero through a series of adventures including a sexual encounter every 20 pages, appropriate or not.

Fortunately, Hale were "happy to accept" my revised versions of the worrying pages and Frontier Brides went ahead.

So for now I hope I can put aside all thought of fleeing to the Rocky Mountains and spending the rest of my life as a rancher!