War Comes to the Big Bend

by Zane Grey

  First Skyhorse Publishing edition published 2014 by arrangement with Golden West Literary Agency

  Copyright © 2012 by Zane Grey, Inc.

  An earlier version of War Comes to the Big Bend first appeared under the title “The Desert of Wheat” as a twelve-part serial in The Country Gentleman (5/4/18-7/13/18). Copyright © 1918 by The Curtis Publishing Co. Copyright © renewed 1946 by Lina Elise Grey. Copyright © 2012 by Zane Grey, Inc., for restored material.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Brian Peterson

  Print ISBN: 978-1-62087-835-4

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63220-177-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  Foreword

  by

  Jon Tuska

  Mark Twain once observed that the Civil War completely changed the United States, mostly for the worse. It would seem in retrospect that the end of every war has had similar consequences. Zane Grey certainly felt that way about the affects of the Great War, and to show and protest these affects became an impulse behind several of the novels he wrote, beginning with the serial he titled “The Desert of Wheat.” The Country Gentleman, a slick paper magazine published by The Curtis Publishing Company, had serialized “Wildfire” in 1916, thus allowing Grey to graduate from pulp magazines to the highest paying market for fiction. For what was titled “The Roaring U.P. Trail” he was forced again into serial publication in a pulp magazine, Blue Book, but with “The Desert of Wheat,” a story about wheat farming in the state of Washington, The Country Gentleman was very interested since such a story would obviously appeal to its readership. The story also differed from the fiction Zane Grey had been writing since the beginning of his career in that it would be set in the 20th Century, opening in what Grey termed “this tragic year of 1917.”

  By sending his novel first to a magazine publisher, Grey opined that he would finally escape the relentless editorial supervision that Ripley Hitchcock, his editor at Harper & Bros., had customarily imposed on what he wrote. In spite of his ambivalence, however, Grey had ironically dedicated The U.P. Trail (Harper, 1918) to Hitchcock, the last Grey book that Hitchcock would edit. Now by means of this new strategy, Grey thought, he would be allowed more freedom to write what he wanted to write. To a degree this proved to be the case, but in several essential ways his texts were still subject to severe restrictions. The first harsh critic he ran into with his new novel was Dolly Grey, his wife, who from the beginning had exercised her own editorial supervision over what he wrote. Grey had become an obsessive womanizer and among his girlfriends were two who served as his secretaries at the time, Mildred Smith and Elma Schwarz. One of the affects of the Great War that Grey most detested was what he felt had happened to American women. It was a subject on which he considered himself an expert and in the character of Lenore Anderson he strove to create his ideal of a young American woman. When it came to a scene where Lenore is sexually forward in trying to persuade the hero, Kurt Dorn, from going to war—he has been drafted but Lenore’s father could readily secure Dorn an exemption from military service—Dolly was especially adamant in her objection. “I’m worn out struggling with that awful chapter of yours where Lenore hands herself over to Kurt on a platter—so now you’ve got to at least share the agony with me. My God—what hit you when you wrote that chapter? It sounds just as if you’d had a liebestod session with Mildred Smith. . . . I groaned and cussed and got violent & furious and disgusted. And I’d been looking forward to this particular passage because you’d spoken so much about it. I don’t know what to do. Do you want to rewrite it? Or shall I try?”

  Grey did rewrite the scene, but frankly his rewrite is inferior to the original scene and Lenore Anderson’s character is significantly compromised in terms of the more realistic way in which Grey wanted to present her. His original version has been restored as it was written in the holograph that was among the manuscripts later donated by Dolly Grey to the Library of Congress.

  In order to convey to the reader Kurt Dorn’s masterful knowledge about raising wheat, Grey took a long section from a textbook, gave it to Elma Schwarz, and in a handwritten note instructed her: “Don’t type all of this printed stuff. Read it over, and then type enough to make a brief, comprehensive idea of smut.” Elma Schwarz did not do a very good job, and even with Grey’s editorial interventions the monologue still retains its textbook quality.

  Most, if not all, of the geographical places in Grey’s fiction are real, and he set this story in the Big Bend region of the Columbia River basin. This and virtually all of the actual places in his narrative were subject to editorial intervention. Just why this was done is no longer clear, since geographical realism is scarcely a vice, but they have been restored, according to Grey’s original holographic text. For some reason the physical descriptions and place names used for the scenes set on the front lines of the Allies in France were retained in the previously published versions of the text and of course have been retained here. Editorial intervention frequently deleted what Grey had to say about essential feelings his characters have, just as any of his references to John D. Rockefeller’s business practices were struck, rather important when you consider that Grey was both deploring such practices while showing that socialism was worse than unrestricted capitalism. Another cogent example of deletion is the line concerning Lenore with which Chapter Eighteen ends in the manuscript but which was excised editorially: “She had sacrificed her brother, but she would keep her lover.” This represents one of the most intrinsic conflicts in the story and ought not reasonably have been circumscribed.

  Dissatisfied with the films based on his work that were being produced by Fox Film Corporation, and others that had been produced by Selig, Goldwyn, and Harry Sherman Productions, Zane Grey organized Zane Grey Productions. The films produced by this company were released by the W.W. Hodkinson Corporation through the Pathé exchanges. Riders of the Dawn (Hodkinson, 1919) based on “The Desert of Wheat” was the second film Zane Grey produced. The film’s title gave the impression that it was a traditional Western, and in some ways it is, despite being set after hero Kurt Dorn returns from the Great War. Roy Stewart, a star of low-budget Westerns and society dramas, was cast as Kurt Dorn, and Claire Adams played Lenore Anderson, the girl to whom Dorn proposes marriage once he is out of uniform. Dorn has not been maimed by the war, as is the case in the novel. The two settle down on a wheat farm. A gang of radicals, intent on creating labor strife, is secretly led by Lenore’s rejected suitor, Henry Neuman, played by Robert McKim. To combat these radicals, an equestrian vigilante group is organized, calling itself the Riders of the Dawn, and foremost among them is Kurt Dorn who is so effective that he is made a marked man by the villain’s minions. William H. Clifford and L.V. Jefferson did the scenario, and even though this was a Zane Grey Production, very little of Gr
ey’s original story survived other than some character names and wheat farming. No other film was ever made based on this story. To distinguish the restored version of Zane Grey’s novel and yet, unlike the film, to avoid giving a false impression, it has been titled War Comes to the Big Bend.

  Chapter One

  Late in June the vast northwestern desert of wheat began to take on a tinge of gold, and lent an austere beauty to that endless rolling smooth world of treeless hills, where miles of fallow ground and miles of waving grain sloped up to the far-separated homes of the heroic men who had conquered over sage and sand.

  These simple homes of farmers seemed lost on an immensity of soft gray and golden billows of land, insignificant dots here and there on distant hills, so far apart that Nature appeared accountable for these broad squares of alternate gold and brown, extending on and on to the waving horizon line. A lonely, hard heroic country, where flowers and fruit were not, nor birds and brooks, nor green pastures. Whirling strings of dust looped up over fallow ground, the short dry wheat lay back from the wind, the haze in the distance was drab and smoky, heavy with substance.

  A thousand hills lay bare to the sky and half of every hill was wheat and half was fallow ground, and all of them, with the shallow valleys between, seemed big and strange and isolated. The beauty of them was austere, as if the hand of man had been held back from making green his home site, as if the immensity of the task had left no time for youth and freshness. Years, long years were there in the round-hilled, many-furrowed gray old earth. And the wheat looked a century old. Here and there a straight dusty road stretched from hill to hill, becoming a thin white line, to disappear in the distance. The sun shone hot, the wind blew hard, and over the boundless undulating expanse hovered a shadow that was neither hood of dust nor hue of gold. It was not physical, but lonely, waiting, prophetic, and weird. No wild desert of wastelands, once the home of other races of man, and now gone to decay and death, could have shown as barren an acreage. Half of this wandering patchwork of squares was earth, brown and gray, curried and disked, and rolled and combed and harrowed, with not a tiny leaf of green in all the miles. The other half had only a faint golden promise of mellow harvest, and at long distance it seemed to shimmer and retreat under the hot sun. A singular beautiful effect of harmony lay in the long slowly rising slopes, in the rounded hills, in the endless curving lines on all sides. The scene was heroic because of the labor of horny hands, but it was sublime because not a hundred harvests, nor three generations of toiling men, could ever rob Nature of its limitless space and scorching sun and sweeping dust, of its resistless age-long creep back toward the desert it had been.

  Here was grown the most bounteous, the richest, and finest wheat in all the world. Strange and unfathomable that so much of the bread of man, the staff of life, the hope of civilization in this tragic year 1917 should come from a vast, treeless, waterless dreary desert.

  This wonderful place was an immense valley of considerable altitude called the Columbia Basin, surrounded by the Cascade Mountains on the west, the Coeur d’Alene and Bitterroot Mountains on the east, the Okanozan Range to the north, and the Blue Mountains to the south. The valley floor was basalt, from the lava flow of volcanoes in ages past. The rainfall was slight except in the foothills of the mountains. The Columbia River, making a prodigious and meandering curve, bordered on three sides what was known as the Big Bend country. South of this vast area, across the range, began the fertile, much watered region that extended on down into verdant Oregon. Among the desert hills of this Big Bend country, near the center of the basin, where the best wheat was raised, lay widely separated little towns, the names of which gave evidence of the mixed population—Odessa, Russ, Ephrath, Krupp, Wheeler, Moses Coulée, Ruff, Moody, Wheatland, etc. It was, of course, an exceedingly prosperous country, a fact manifest in the substantial little towns if not in the crude and unpretentious homes of the farmers. The acreage of farms ran from a section—six hundred and forty acres—up into the thousands.

  * * * * *

  Upon a morning in early July, exactly three months after the United States had declared war upon Germany, a sturdy young farmer strode with darkly troubled face from the presence of his father. At the end of a stormy scene he had promised his father that he would abandon his desire to enlist in the Army.

  Kurt Dorn walked away from the gray old clapboard house, out to the fence where he leaned on the gate. He could see for miles in every direction, and to the southward, away on a long yellow slope, rose a stream of dust from a motorcar.

  “Must be Anderson . . . coming to dun Father,” muttered young Dorn.

  This was the day, he remembered, when the wealthy rancher of Walla Walla was to come to look over old Chris Dorn’s wheat fields. Dorn owed $30,000 and the interest for years, mostly to Anderson. Kurt hated the debt, and resented the visit, but he could not help acknowledging that the rancher had been lenient and kind. Long since Kurt had sorrowfully realized that his father was illiterate, hard, grasping, and growing worse with the burden of years.

  “If we had rain now . . . or soon . . . that section of Bluestem would square Father,” soliloquized young Dorn, as with keen eyes he surveyed a vast field of wheat, short, smooth, yellowing in the sun. But the cloudless sky, the haze of heat rather betokened a continued drought.

  There were reasons indeed for Dorn to wear a dark and troubled face as he watched the motorcar speed along ahead of its stream of dust, pass out of sight under the hill, and soon reappear, to turn off the main road and come toward the house. It was a big, closed car, covered with dust. The driver stopped it at the gate and got out.

  “Is this Chris Dorn’s farm?” he asked.

  “Yes,” replied Kurt.

  Whereupon the door of the car opened and out stepped a short broad man in a long linen coat.

  “Come out, Lenore, an’ shake off the dust,” he said, and he assisted a young woman to step out. She also wore a long, linen coat and a veil besides. The man removed his coat and threw it into the car. Then he took off his sombrero to beat the dust out of that.

  “Phew! Walla Walla never seen dust like this in a million years. I’m chokin’ for water. An’ listen to the car. She’s boilin’.”

  Then, as he stepped toward Kurt, the rancher showed himself to be a well-preserved man of perhaps fifty-five, of powerful form beginning to sag in the broad shoulders, his face bronzed by long exposure to wind and sun. He had keen gray eyes, and their look was that of a man used to dealing with his kind and well disposed toward them.

  “Hello. Are you young Dorn?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” replied Kurt, stepping out.

  “I’m Anderson, from Walla Walla, come to see your dad. This is my girl, Lenore.”

  Kurt acknowledged the slight bow from the veiled young woman, and then, hesitating, he added: “Won’t you come in?”

  “No, not yet. I’m chokin’ for air and water. Bring us a drink,” replied Anderson.

  Kurt hurried away to get a bucket and tin cup. As he drew water from the well, he was thinking, rather vaguely, that it was somehow embarrassing—the fact of Mr. Anderson being accompanied by his daughter. Kurt was afraid of his father. But then what did it matter? When he returned to the yard, he found the rancher sitting in the shade of one of the few apple trees, and the young lady was standing near, in the act of removing bonnet and veil. She had thrown the linen coat over the seat of an old wagon bed that lay near.

  “Good water is scarce here, but I’m glad we have some,” said Kurt, and, as he set down the bucket and offered a brimming cupful to the girl, he saw her face, and his eyes met hers. He dropped the cup and stared. Then hurriedly, with flushing face, he bent over to recover and refill it.

  “Ex-excuse me. I’m . . . clumsy,” he managed to say, and, as he handed the cup to her, he averted his gaze. For more than a year the memory of this very girl had haunted him. He had seen her twice—the first time at the close of his one year of college at the University of California,
and the second time in the street in Spokane. In a glance he had recognized the strong, lithe figure, the sunny hair, the rare golden tint of her complexion, the blue eyes, warm and direct. And he had sustained a shock that momentarily confused him.

  “Good water, hey?” declared Anderson, after drinking a second cup. “Boy, that’s wet, but it ain’t water to drink. Come down in the foothills an’ I’ll show you. My ranch is called Many Waters, an’ you can’t keep your feet dry.”

  “I wish we had some of it here,” replied Kurt wistfully, and he waved a hand at the broad swelling slopes. The warm breath that blew in from the wheat lands felt dry and smelled dry.

  “You’re in for a dry spell?” inquired Anderson with interest that was keen, and kindly as well.

  “Father fears so. And I fear it, too . . . for he never makes a mistake in weather or crops.”

  “A hot dry spell! This summer? M-m-m. Boy, do you know that wheat is the most important thing in the world today?”

  “You mean on account of the war,” replied Kurt. “Yes, I know. But Father doesn’t see that. All he sees is . . . if we have rain, we’ll have bumper crops. That big field there would be a record . . . at war prices . . . And he wouldn’t be ruined.”

  “Ruined? Oh, he means I’d close on him. M-m-m. Say, what do you see in a big wheat yield . . . if it rains?”

  “Mister Anderson, I’d like to see our debt paid, but I’m thinking most of wheat for starving peoples. I . . . I’ve studied this wheat question. It’s the biggest question in this war.”

  Kurt had forgotten the girl and was unaware of her eyes bent steadily upon him. Anderson had roused to the interest of wheat, and to a deeper study of the young man.

  “Say, Dorn, how old are you?” he asked.

  “Twenty-four. And Kurt’s my first name,” was the reply.

  “Will this farm fall to you?”

  “Yes, if my father does not lose it.”

  “M-m-m. Old Dorn won’t lose it, never fear. He raises the best wheat in this section.”