by Alan Lemay
Silently Lon inched his way forward, gun before him, ready to crack down at the slightest sound. He heard a stealthy step and paused. Someone bumped into him from the side. He swung. Then two powerful arms pinioned his own to his body.
"1 got him!" roared a voice close to his ear.
Lon jerked backward with a terrific wrench. The arms held. He tried to use his knee, but the man tripped him, and he nearly went down. He stamped hard with his boot that met something soft. The voice bellowed a curse.
A light flared up. Lon caught a glimpse of a match, with the craggy face of John Stoneham leering above it. He set his teeth and put forth every ounce of his strength as he tried to pull out of the grip of those terrible arms.
He saw Joan in the corner, her eyes wide with terror, her arms bound to her sides, and a gag twisted around her mouth.
A shadow trembled above him. Then a flash of red fire seemed to tear the earth apart. He went down-down! It seemed to him that he was sinking into the deep blackness of eternal night.
THE SMOKY YEARS
WINTER RANGE
ALAN LEMAY
This title was previously published by Dorchester Publishing; this version has been reproduced from the Dorchester book archive files.
Foreword
The Wolf Hunter
Just a Horse of Mine
Hell on Wheels
Kindly Kick Out Bearer
The Biscuit Shooter
Guns Flame in Peaceful Valley
And Him Long Gone
Saddle Bum
Delayed Action
Broncho Fighter's Girl
The Young Rush In
A Shot in the Dark
Lost Duchman O'Riley's Luck
Spanish Crossing
Alan LeMay; my father, the writer, was born June 3, 1899. If anyone was ever born to write, it was Alan LeMay. He sold his first story at the age of twenty: "Circles in the Sky." It was published as a short novel in the December 30, 1919 issue of Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine. Anyone who has papered his den with rejection slips will appreciate that accomplishment. But ahead of the writing had come a zest for life and an appreciation of history and heritage that might best be illustrated by the following excerpt from Adventure magazine, September 1, 1927 when he was an established author, experienced and well traveled, and had just turned twenty-eight.
Although Alan LeMay, whose serial of the Mississippi begins in this issue, is by no means new to our pages, he rises to tell us something about himself.
"I was born in Indianapolis. My forefathers are a good deal more interesting than myself. One of my great-grandfathers was killed by Indians at Deer Creek, Indiana, when he left the besieged blockhouse in an attempt to fetch water. Another was lost off the Horn in his own full-rigged ship, the Eagle. One of my grandfathers was wounded in the battle of Kenesaw Mountain; there were six of the family in that fight. My other grandfather was killed by a buffalo on the Kansas plains. One of them made a fortune in cattle, and lost it again. Four of the family, one a captain, fought at Bunker Hill; five were engaged in the French and Indian War - two on the French side of the fence, three on the other. A LeMay built the first edifice - a trapper's hut - where Chicago stands today.
"I am a graduate of the University of Chicago. I have acted as horse wrangler in Colorado, swamper in Wisconsin, fisherman off Florida, super-cargo on a schooner in the Caribbean, geologist in the Colombian coast jungles, sparring partner for a welterweight in Chicago. During the war I was a shavetail in the infantry at eighteen, but didn't get over. Since then 1 have been a first lieutenant, horse and reconnaissance, in the 124th Field Artillery, Illinois National Guard. I've also tried several other things, none of them for very long, but each, I was told, for long enough."
His pride in his pioneer heritage also shows in the dedication he wrote for THE SEARCHERS (Harper, 1954): "To my grandfather, Oliver LeMay, who died on the prairie, and to my grandmother, Karen Jensen LeMay, to whom he left three sons under seven."
From the start writing was what he did. The rest was for the experience. His wild odyssey of strange jobs and exotic travels was scarcely interrupted when he married Esther Skinner on August 9, 1922. They put off having kids, and kept moving. A writer is not tied to his employer's location, so he could live where he liked. Dad liked variety. My sister, Joan, was born in Aurora, Illinois, in 1926, but within six months the family moved to the French Quarter of New Orleans, and 1 was born in LaJolla, California, three years later.
The move to New Orleans immersed Dad in the Mississippi River scene for his research on PELICAN COAST (Doubleday, Doran, 1929) and other stories about river boats. The subsequent move West was to get closer to Western ranch atmosphere. He felt that he had to live within the culture that he wrote about, to learn the jargon, the mores, and the ambiance so important to authenticity. It also gave him the opportunity to live the action life he loved and wrote about.
During the late 'Twenties and early 'Thirties Dad sold a story about every two to four weeks to Adventure, Street & Smith's Western Story Magazine, Short Stories, Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, or McCall's. That was before television - people read stories, instead.
In the early 'Thirties we lived in San Diego while Dad explored the ranches in the outback, and got to know the local cowboys and Indians - San Diego County has more Indian tribes than any other county in the U.S.He also became a member of the Padres Writers' Club. This was where young hungry writers gave each other free criticism and encouragement. It was formed in 1925 and still exists today. Members included Stuart Lake, the writer who popularized Wyatt Earp.
During this same period, Dad's output of short stories started tapering off, and he wrote more serials and books. Early books included PAINTED PONIES (Doubleday, Doran, 1928), OLD FATHER OF WATERS (Doubleday, Doran, 1928), PELICAN COAST, and ONE OF US 1S A MURDERER (Doubleday, Doran, 1930). He considered all of these to be Westerns, although many had neither cowboys nor Indians. They have the action style that characterizes "Westerns." (Paul-Loup Sulitzer, author of MONEY, and France's most widely read contemporary author, calls his own books "financial Westerns," because they are fast-paced stories where the good guys make mind-boggling fortunes by whipping the bad guys into bankruptcy.)
When not sitting at his typewriter or dictating to his longtime secretary (a petite little woman who liked to be called "Gus"), he played hard at high-risk sports. Most things he played at were things where you could get killed, such as amateur boxing, light airplane flying, polo, and sports car road racing.
Movies were too expensive during the Depression, so people bought lots of pulp fiction for escape. My father's stories sold well, but not without a lot of late nights. 1 can still hear my mother saying: "We can't get that until Daddy sells a story." But overall we prospered. Dad loved horses, and in 1935 he bought Lula H (the "H" was for horse) and took up polo. The game had been quite popular since the 'Twenties, and there were teams all over Southern California: Coronado, Lakeside, Riverside, and Mission Valley - the last of which was the team that he joined. They usually had no spares; everyone played the whole game. The team was always listed as "undefeated" because every time they lost, they disbanded and re-formed under a new name. They were variously known as the Mission Valley Maniacs, the Sidewinders, Overholt's Outcasts, and the Rattlesnakes.
In 1935 he bought a ranch in Santee, ripped out the peach orchard, and put in a private polo field. The polo action moved there when the floods of 1937 covered the Mission Valley polo field (and all of the valley where the malls are today) with wall-to-wall river. Every Sunday afternoon there was a game at our ranch, usually locals, but occasionally the Riviera Club (Hollywood), which included Hal Roach and Darryl F.Zanuck. Once we entertained a team fro
m Argentina, and another time a British Naval team.
Dad had been an amateur boxer, and Roberto Lovell, the Argentine welterweight champion, trained at the ranch before his U. S. match in San Diego. 1 think of these times when 1 read F.Scott Fitzgerald: the surreal visitors, the lavish barbecues, and those Sunday polo parties at the ranch.
In 1939 Dad learned to fly, flew across the country and back alone in a single-engine light plane, and wrote a series of airplane stories. By 1941 he had had about two hundred titles published and was called to Hollywood to write for Cecil B.DeMille. Dad had divorced in 1937, and remarried just before going to Hollywood. He spent his honeymoon on DeMille's yacht, discussing scripts. The bride was not invited along.
His first picture for DeMille was NORTHWEST MOUNTED POLICE (Paramount, 1940), starring Gary Cooper, Paulette Goddard, Madeleine Carroll, and Robert Preston. This was an original screenplay for which he won Paramount's "Best Picture of the Year" award. Also with DeMille he did the screenplays for REAP THE WILD WIND (Paramount, 1942) with John Wayne, Ray Milland, and Paulette Goddard, and THE STORY OF DR. WASSELL (Paramount, 1944) with Gary Cooper, Madeleine Carroll, and Signe Hasso.
His work ethic somewhat clashed with Hollywood's. He was used to working long hours. Most Hollywood writers spent more time in story conferences, at lunch, or on the golf course than they did in lone contemplation at a typewriter. So Dad would arrive early at Paramount, rewrite yesterday's pages before the moguls arrived for the morning story conference, take a midday break in the studio gym, and have lunch before settling in to the second shift until evening. It took at least a twelve-hour day to get in his usual eight hours of concentrated writing.
Long hours of writing can be a grind, and his acrobatic mind needed a frequent change of pace. "No pace without a change of pace" he always said. He designed gadgets, remodeled every house he lived in, and even invented a game that was patented and sold well until the patent ran out. Called FotoElectric Football (patent 2,260,467), it showed dynamic trails of players dodging the defenses down the field as a slide was pulled out of a light box.
Moving to Warner Bros, he did the screenplay for TAP ROOTS (Universal, 1948) with Susan Hayward and Ray Milland, and an original screenplay for Enrol Flynn. The treatment for that one was called GHOST MOUNTAIN, but the movie was, instead, called ROCKY MOUNTAIN (Warner, 1950). Other Errol Flynn films he wrote while at Warner Bros. included SAN ANTONIO (Warner, 1945) and CHEYENNE (Warner, 1947). Another couple of Westerns featured Randolph Scott: THE GUNFIGHTERS (Columbia, 1947), based on Zane Grey's TWIN SOMBREROS, and THE WALKING HILLS (Columbia, 1949). Dad always called the Zane Grey adaptation TWIN HATS. He also did THE ADVENTURES OF MARK TWAIN (Warner, 1944) starring Frederick March and Alexis Smith.
In a brief stint with Republic - a company whose slogan was: "Always a good seat at a Republic Picture." - he did FLIGHT NURSE (Republic, 1953) and I DREAM OF JEANNIE (Republic, 1952) which was about Stephen Foster.
He and Dink Templeton then formed LeMay-Templeton Productions and did a quick series of three original screenplays: HIGH LONESOME (Eagle Lion, 1950), THE SUNDOWNERS (Eagle Lion, 1950), and QUEBEC (Paramount, 1951). On two of these he was writer/producer and on THE SUNDOWNERS writer/director. THE SUNDOWNERS featured Robert Preston and Robert Sterling and was the most successful. The other two introduced John Barrymore, Jr., who never quite lived up to the Barrymore image. This experience was about as much Hollywood as Dad felt anyone needed in his lifetime, so he went back to writing books.
Returning to real life, he took up road racing at the age of fifty-five, racing in both the S C C A and Cal Club road races. He first drove an M G, then a stock Jaguar X K-120, then a Lotus Offenhauser, and finally a Ferrari Monza. We spent weekends road racing at Pebble Beach, Torrey Pines, Salinas, Hansen Dam, Porter Ranch, Palm Springs, Santa Barbara, Willow Springs, Stockton, March Field, and on and on. There wasn't time for much else.
He had sandwiched in a book called USELESS COWBOY (Farrar and Rinehart, 1943) between pictures. Nunnaly Johnson bought the screen rights and made it into a movie called ALONG CAME JONES (RKO, 1945) with Gary Cooper, Loretta Young, and Dan Duryea. Dad wrote THE SEARCHERS in 1954, THE UNFORGIVEN in 1957, and his last book, BY DIM AND FLARING LAMPS, in 1962. THE UNFORGIVEN was made into a John Huston film, starring Audrey Hepburn, Burt Lancaster, Lillian Gish, and, of course, Chill Wills, who was in most of the films listed above. John Ford made THE SEARCHERS. 1 shall have more to say on that.
Not everything he wrote was published. Three things come to mind. One was a short story called "A Gift from Korea" that he wrote during the Korean War. To research it, he talked his way into a trip with the military to the front lines. He finished the story as the war ended. His agent liked it, but said the country was sick of that war, and didn't want to read about it. Another was a book, TEN NIGHTS OVER A BARROOM: THE STORY OF FORTY GIRLS WHO WENT WEST. It is notable for the tremendous research that went into discovering the true nature of Calamity Jane, Rowdie Kate, Virginia Slade, Cattle Kate Maxwell, Little Breeches, Big Nose Kate Fisher, Prairie Rose, Poker Alice, Faro Nell, Molly b'Dam', and other Western women who became legends.
The third piece, never intended for publication, was a poignant letter Dad wrote to his parents in anticipation of their first trip West on an airliner in December, 1936. He explained to them how the aeroplane might feel like it was bouncing around a little, but that was normal, so don't be alarmed. The letter was sent air mail; it arrived six months later with an understated rubber stamp on the cover: "Delayed Due To Service Interruption At Salt Lake City." The mail plane had crashed, killing all aboard, and the letter had spent a cold winter on some Wasatch mountain peak. The plane his parents were on, fortunately, fared better than the mail plane.
In 1963 Dad lived in Pacific Palisades with his wife, Arlene, and was at the top of his form. He had an office two miles away in the village. He would walk or jog there at dawn, write for four hours, work out at the nearby gym or meet a friend for tennis, take a nap, and then wake up for the afternoon's four hours of writing. He felt that he was in the best shape of his life. Then one day his right hand didn't work. He had brain cancer. They said they had to operate. They weren't very good at it in 1963, and Dad knew it. His last unsedated words were a defiant: "0 K, pull the trigger." He died April 28, 1964.
1 have always regretted that his early death kept him from enjoying two later developments. The first was computer word-processors. He wrote with everything but stone tablets and a chisel. He typed. He dictated, both live to Gus and mechanically on an old Dictaphone with a bakelite cylinder that had to be shaved with a lathe tool to erase. He wrote longhand. He said that some days a pencil worked, and other days only a pen would do. But a word processor, with its freedom of editing, would to him have been a discovery more profound than fire or the wheel.
The other development that he missed was the classic status achieved by one of his last novels. THE SEARCHERS had been adapted as a screenplay by Frank S.Nugent in 1956. It was well received at the time, but its greater recognition came two decades later. In the March 5, 1979 New York Magazine, Stuart Byron wrote an article entitled "THE SEARCHERS: Cult Movie of the New Hollywood." The gist was that the film had become a classic as rated by industry insiders, if not by the public.
Stuart Byron quoted Ernest Hemingway as having once said: "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called HUCKLEBERRY FINN." Byron claimed that in the same broad sense it can be said that all recent American cinema derives from John Ford's THE SEARCHERS (Warner, 1956). Throughout this article Byron gives total credit to John Ford, and only passing acknowledgment to the novel by Alan LeMay. A second opinion was written by Gary Arnold in "Heroes' Welcome for THE SEARCHERS" in the September 23, 1979 Washington Post. Recognizing Byron's treatment, Arnold said: "The admiring reassessments of THE SEARCHERS seem to preclude recognition of the seminal, utterly indispensable importance of Alan LeMay's original novel. This neglect illustrates the disparity in status between super
ior Western fiction and superior Western filmmaking. Ironically, LeMay, who died in 1964 of a brain tumor at the age of sixty-four, was once a prominent screenwriter. Recruited by Cecil B.DeMille, LeMay set aside a prolific early writing career, mainly Western fiction, to collaborate on the scripts of..." and then he went on to recite highlights of the Hollywood chapter. Gary Arnold further commented on the lack of recognition given to writers:
A critical anthology called FAVORITE MOVIES in cludes an appreciation of THE SEARCHERS by Jay Cocks, who refers to Nugent's `superb script' without mentioning that it happens to be an effective distillation and modification of a novel that was itself exceptionally effective. Indeed, the filmmakers felt impelled to sacrifice certain elements whose loss you profoundly regret once you become aware of them. LeMay devised stunning climactic and concluding episodes. They leave emotional reverberations that the movie never quite equals, despite the combined eloquence of Ford's pictorial genius and Wayne's towering physical presence at the fadeout.
When the film's final portal image closes, it appears to exclude Ethan Edwards from the society he has struggled to revenge, protect, and restore. The movie ends with a lingering impression of Wayne's Ethan Edwards beyond the threshold, a proud, lonely man. But there's also an unseen, forgotten man lingering out there in the cinematic ether: the storyteller who imagined THE SEARCHERS in the first place.
That sounds like something Dad might have said.
During the third winter of his wolf hunting on the open range Jed began talking to his horse; he soon gave it up, however, since it was apparent that the horse never listened. At the first word the animal always flicked back a hairy ear, but as Jed's nasal voice droned ahead without command the ear relaxed again, and the horse jogged on unnoticing.
