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Blessed McGill
A tale of high adventure of the first order, with some of the most memorable characters to be found in the literature of the Old West. Selected by A.C. Greene as on of THE 50 BEST BOOKS ON TEXAS.
253 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1987
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July 15, 2016
This is a review that I earlier posted. I just discovered that it had disappeared, so I am re-posting it.
Edwin "Bud" Shrake was a crime reporter, sportswriter, magazine writer, and screenwriter. He also wrote novels -- ten of them. A native of Texas, most of his novels were about that state, its history, and its people. Among his novels are several Westerns. They were what are now classified as "literary Westerns," meaning they were less formulaic and more serious than the "genre Westerns" churned out by Louis L'Amour and many others (I don't mean this as a putdown, because some of the skilled practitioners in the genre field have given me many hours of pleasure.)
Other examples of writers of literary Westerns would include the likes of Cormac McCarthy, Douglas C. Jones, and Larry McMurtry, also a Lone Star native. Another Texan, Elmer Kelton, churned out many a genre Western, but occasionally produced a novel that could be compared favorably with the works of the above writers. Two good examples of his work that are worthy of the literary label would be The Time It Never Rained and The Man Who Rode Midnight.
Blessed McGill, published in 1987, was Shrake's third novel and is generally conceded to be his best.
One Peter Hermano McGill, a half-Irish, half-Spanish adventurer who roamed the American southwest and Mexico in the years after the Civil War, narrates the story. Although McGill is self-educated, he is a good writer and a great storyteller who weaves his life story through flashback episodes that are not always related in chronological order. True, that narrative device has the effect of keeping the reader in the dark and guessing at times, but in the end, everything converges and the reader learns why the nickname "Blessed" is bestowed upon him; but I'm not telling.
Edwin "Bud" Shrake was a crime reporter, sportswriter, magazine writer, and screenwriter. He also wrote novels -- ten of them. A native of Texas, most of his novels were about that state, its history, and its people. Among his novels are several Westerns. They were what are now classified as "literary Westerns," meaning they were less formulaic and more serious than the "genre Westerns" churned out by Louis L'Amour and many others (I don't mean this as a putdown, because some of the skilled practitioners in the genre field have given me many hours of pleasure.)
Other examples of writers of literary Westerns would include the likes of Cormac McCarthy, Douglas C. Jones, and Larry McMurtry, also a Lone Star native. Another Texan, Elmer Kelton, churned out many a genre Western, but occasionally produced a novel that could be compared favorably with the works of the above writers. Two good examples of his work that are worthy of the literary label would be The Time It Never Rained and The Man Who Rode Midnight.
Blessed McGill, published in 1987, was Shrake's third novel and is generally conceded to be his best.
One Peter Hermano McGill, a half-Irish, half-Spanish adventurer who roamed the American southwest and Mexico in the years after the Civil War, narrates the story. Although McGill is self-educated, he is a good writer and a great storyteller who weaves his life story through flashback episodes that are not always related in chronological order. True, that narrative device has the effect of keeping the reader in the dark and guessing at times, but in the end, everything converges and the reader learns why the nickname "Blessed" is bestowed upon him; but I'm not telling.
January 2, 2018
One of the best books ever about Texas. Here's some of what I wrote about Blessed McGill (and Bud Shrake) in my book "Texas Literary Outlaws":
Blessed McGill takes the form of a long-lost journal left behind by Peter Hermano McGill, a nineteenth century “scalp hunter, buffalo shooter, gold seeker, brawler, gambler, and family man” (d.j.) McGill is raised as a Catholic, but he is more comfortable living alongside the Native Americans of the Southwest.
In his journal, McGill chronicles his various adventures as he prepares to meet his death at the hands of his boyhood friend, a Comanche Indian named Octavio. The novel is buttressed with an intricately layered philosophical structure, and in the wake of Peter McGill's “martyrdom,” he becomes the first American to be declared Blessed by the Catholic Church.
McGill’s story is related with a tight, humorous edge. Shrake sidesteps the usual pitfall of historical fiction—the tendency to overexplain. Instead, influenced by the Beat writers, Shrake plunges us into the immediacy of each moment. McGill’s seemingly offhand comments about the Indians’ dress, customs, gender relations, and religious beliefs add up to, as the New York Review of Books later termed it, a “sophisticated anthropology.” The historical detail in McGill’s “journal” comes across as so realistic that many people, including two Catholic priests and Shrake’s own editor, believed that McGill was a real person.
...Of the little writing on Blessed McGill, much has been made of its exceptionally vivid historical detail, and for good reason. Blessed McGill's well-told adventures are enough to recommend it, but the novel's transcendence emerges in Shrake's subtle manipulation of the form. In one sense, as Larry McMurtry noted, Blessed McGill is a successful black humor western. As such, it is an heir to Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, published in 1964.
Yet Blessed McGill also represents something more spiritually resonant than simple irony. It is, in fact, America’s first “Absurdist Western.”
As a philosophical precept, Absurdity gained currency among French existentialists following World War II. Scientific understanding had invalidated many religious explanations for natural phenomena, and humanity’s self-inflicted horrors—the Holocaust and Atomic Bomb among them—called into question the very existence of a supreme being. The universe was seen as indifferent and chaotic, mocking humans' longing for unity, order, and absolutes. Absurdity results as humans recognize that there is no meaning to life, yet continue to struggle on in any case. The chief strategy for dealing with the dilemma is to live fully in each moment, just as Zen Buddhism suggests.
Existentialism and absurdity quickly gained favor in the western world, and in the United States, the Beats and other writers integrated relevant portions of the philosophy into their works. The "absurd hero" developed as something of an archetype in American fiction, much commented on by literary critics, and is seen in the works of Saul Bellow, John Updike, and J.D. Salinger, among others. One of the most effective treatments is Bellow's picaresque 1955 novel, The Adventures of Augie March, a book that captivated Bud Shrake. Augie March, like Blessed McGill, is related by a first-person narrator in an easygoing style that conceals its strong sense of purpose.
In the character of Peter Hermano McGill, Bud Shrake brings the absurd hero to the American Southwest for the first time. Much of McGill’s journey involves leaving behind the religion in which he was raised, and spiritual struggles occur throughout the narrative. Christianity’s relevance is questioned early on. As a youngster, McGill witnesses a group of criminals attempting to hang a German farmer in the presence of his son. The farmer pleads for divine intervention, and the ruffians do in fact have great difficulty carrying out their task. At one point the tree limb supporting the noose breaks off, causing everyone to tumble in a heap. This inspires the farmer's son to speak up: “Thank you, God,” he says (25). But eventually, through a series of blunders, the farmer is killed in a bizarre accident (30). This leaves his son with only one thing left to say: “That God up there is useless.” No one contests the point.
McGill’s mother, devoutly Catholic, gradually retreats from the world to live out her life in a small room in a San Antonio mission. When she remarks how much she enjoys being cloistered, because it allows her to defeat the devil, McGill tells us, "Well, I thought, the old lady is cracked" (118).
Though he remains polite to his mother, McGill has little patience for Christians in general. During a buffalo hunt with some Comanche friends, McGill and the Indians are interrupted by a party of white hunters, who shoot at the Indians for sport. Two Comanches are killed and another nearly dies.
The Indians, with McGill in tow, stage a retaliatory ambush. The whites are quickly overrun. The lucky ones are killed immediately. The captives will be tortured to death. As it dawns on them what their fate will be, one, a sixteen-year-old boy, stares accusingly at McGill. "You're no Christian," he says. McGill recalls, “He had one of those churchgoing attitudes that confers its own order upon thing." (105). To McGill, there is no such order, and "God didn't have anything to do with it" (227). Instead, the whites had created their own fate by foolishly choosing to shoot at the Comanches.
McGill’s rejection of Christianity has its roots in something his father told him as a child: “Birth is real, death is real, and all between is a game” (3). Existentialism, by whatever name, turns out to be far more practical for frontier life than Christianity could ever hope to be.
McGill’s spiritual understanding undergoes a transformation, however, as a result of his participation in the Indians’ peyote ceremonies. Peyote, like the LSD Shrake had experimented with, creates insights that many users view as mystical or religious. When Peter Hermano McGill takes the drug, he has the same out-of-body sensation he had felt earlier during a near-death experience, complete with the same WHOOM WHOOM sound. As he looks upon the group he is sitting with, McGill notices a man he had formerly thought of “as a very scurvy-looking individual, with a long scar on his cheek and villainous eyes." But when McGill looks again, the man's face "seemed quite pleasant, radiant even, with the blanket over his head and his eyes looking out softly as the eyes of a Madonna" (183-184). As he returns to his body, McGill understands that "I knew there was unity if we would seek it…I knew that vanity caused all the trouble and made life what it is, and I had lost my vanity and had died but yet was living somehow" (185).
Thanks to the peyote, which McGill continues to use for the rest of his life, he understands that, contrary to being absent of meaning, the world is instead infused with meaning, as “I have seen there is unity in all things” (2). Both views—the meaninglessness of existentialism and the meaningfulness of a “cosmic consciousness”—evoke the same behavioral response.
As an existentialist, McGill had refused to impose a false order upon a world that he believed was devoid of a guiding consciousness. Meaninglessness had subverted hierarchy and order. Now that he recognizes the interconnectedness of all life, there is still no reason for him to impose a human-centric hierarchy ruled by a "God." A cosmic consciousness transcends hierarchy and order. In either case, Christianity is irrelevant. McGill reacts to his environment just as he did as an existentialist—by living fully in each moment. But a profound spiritual evolution has taken place, and McGill’s expanded awareness brings him a deep serenity absent from mere Existentialism.
Near the end of his chronicle, McGill's recognition of the universe's infinite unity helps him understand that "Every accident of my life had worked in combination to bring me here, and there was no way out" (231). In a novel stuffed full with ironic humor and absurdist insights, the final irony comes when McGill’s own sense of right and wrong, as it turns out, happens to finally coincide with that of the Catholic Church. That, in the end, is how he becomes Beatified as the Blessed McGill.
Shrake’s book is a rare enough accomplishment in American letters—an engaging adventure tale complemented by an integrated, cogently argued philosophical structure. Even more striking is how Shrake’s narrative style mimics his protagonist’s spiritual transformation.
Just as Peter McGill evolves from existentialism towards a “cosmic consciousness,” Shrake’s narrative transcends its beat-inspired “immediacy” to become a carefully calibrated universe in which the interrelated plot, theme, and tone exist in perfect harmony—all this without losing an ounce of the story’s energy.
Shrake’s accomplishment, while appreciated by a select few, has never been fully recognized by academic critics or a larger audience. In part this is due to the relative thinness of critical discourse in Texas, which focuses most of its attention on Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry.
I'll add one more note: Bud Shrake's best novels, Blessed McGill and Strange Peaches, strike many of the discerning readers I know in Texas as two of the finest books ever published about the state.
Blessed McGill takes the form of a long-lost journal left behind by Peter Hermano McGill, a nineteenth century “scalp hunter, buffalo shooter, gold seeker, brawler, gambler, and family man” (d.j.) McGill is raised as a Catholic, but he is more comfortable living alongside the Native Americans of the Southwest.
In his journal, McGill chronicles his various adventures as he prepares to meet his death at the hands of his boyhood friend, a Comanche Indian named Octavio. The novel is buttressed with an intricately layered philosophical structure, and in the wake of Peter McGill's “martyrdom,” he becomes the first American to be declared Blessed by the Catholic Church.
McGill’s story is related with a tight, humorous edge. Shrake sidesteps the usual pitfall of historical fiction—the tendency to overexplain. Instead, influenced by the Beat writers, Shrake plunges us into the immediacy of each moment. McGill’s seemingly offhand comments about the Indians’ dress, customs, gender relations, and religious beliefs add up to, as the New York Review of Books later termed it, a “sophisticated anthropology.” The historical detail in McGill’s “journal” comes across as so realistic that many people, including two Catholic priests and Shrake’s own editor, believed that McGill was a real person.
...Of the little writing on Blessed McGill, much has been made of its exceptionally vivid historical detail, and for good reason. Blessed McGill's well-told adventures are enough to recommend it, but the novel's transcendence emerges in Shrake's subtle manipulation of the form. In one sense, as Larry McMurtry noted, Blessed McGill is a successful black humor western. As such, it is an heir to Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, published in 1964.
Yet Blessed McGill also represents something more spiritually resonant than simple irony. It is, in fact, America’s first “Absurdist Western.”
As a philosophical precept, Absurdity gained currency among French existentialists following World War II. Scientific understanding had invalidated many religious explanations for natural phenomena, and humanity’s self-inflicted horrors—the Holocaust and Atomic Bomb among them—called into question the very existence of a supreme being. The universe was seen as indifferent and chaotic, mocking humans' longing for unity, order, and absolutes. Absurdity results as humans recognize that there is no meaning to life, yet continue to struggle on in any case. The chief strategy for dealing with the dilemma is to live fully in each moment, just as Zen Buddhism suggests.
Existentialism and absurdity quickly gained favor in the western world, and in the United States, the Beats and other writers integrated relevant portions of the philosophy into their works. The "absurd hero" developed as something of an archetype in American fiction, much commented on by literary critics, and is seen in the works of Saul Bellow, John Updike, and J.D. Salinger, among others. One of the most effective treatments is Bellow's picaresque 1955 novel, The Adventures of Augie March, a book that captivated Bud Shrake. Augie March, like Blessed McGill, is related by a first-person narrator in an easygoing style that conceals its strong sense of purpose.
In the character of Peter Hermano McGill, Bud Shrake brings the absurd hero to the American Southwest for the first time. Much of McGill’s journey involves leaving behind the religion in which he was raised, and spiritual struggles occur throughout the narrative. Christianity’s relevance is questioned early on. As a youngster, McGill witnesses a group of criminals attempting to hang a German farmer in the presence of his son. The farmer pleads for divine intervention, and the ruffians do in fact have great difficulty carrying out their task. At one point the tree limb supporting the noose breaks off, causing everyone to tumble in a heap. This inspires the farmer's son to speak up: “Thank you, God,” he says (25). But eventually, through a series of blunders, the farmer is killed in a bizarre accident (30). This leaves his son with only one thing left to say: “That God up there is useless.” No one contests the point.
McGill’s mother, devoutly Catholic, gradually retreats from the world to live out her life in a small room in a San Antonio mission. When she remarks how much she enjoys being cloistered, because it allows her to defeat the devil, McGill tells us, "Well, I thought, the old lady is cracked" (118).
Though he remains polite to his mother, McGill has little patience for Christians in general. During a buffalo hunt with some Comanche friends, McGill and the Indians are interrupted by a party of white hunters, who shoot at the Indians for sport. Two Comanches are killed and another nearly dies.
The Indians, with McGill in tow, stage a retaliatory ambush. The whites are quickly overrun. The lucky ones are killed immediately. The captives will be tortured to death. As it dawns on them what their fate will be, one, a sixteen-year-old boy, stares accusingly at McGill. "You're no Christian," he says. McGill recalls, “He had one of those churchgoing attitudes that confers its own order upon thing." (105). To McGill, there is no such order, and "God didn't have anything to do with it" (227). Instead, the whites had created their own fate by foolishly choosing to shoot at the Comanches.
McGill’s rejection of Christianity has its roots in something his father told him as a child: “Birth is real, death is real, and all between is a game” (3). Existentialism, by whatever name, turns out to be far more practical for frontier life than Christianity could ever hope to be.
McGill’s spiritual understanding undergoes a transformation, however, as a result of his participation in the Indians’ peyote ceremonies. Peyote, like the LSD Shrake had experimented with, creates insights that many users view as mystical or religious. When Peter Hermano McGill takes the drug, he has the same out-of-body sensation he had felt earlier during a near-death experience, complete with the same WHOOM WHOOM sound. As he looks upon the group he is sitting with, McGill notices a man he had formerly thought of “as a very scurvy-looking individual, with a long scar on his cheek and villainous eyes." But when McGill looks again, the man's face "seemed quite pleasant, radiant even, with the blanket over his head and his eyes looking out softly as the eyes of a Madonna" (183-184). As he returns to his body, McGill understands that "I knew there was unity if we would seek it…I knew that vanity caused all the trouble and made life what it is, and I had lost my vanity and had died but yet was living somehow" (185).
Thanks to the peyote, which McGill continues to use for the rest of his life, he understands that, contrary to being absent of meaning, the world is instead infused with meaning, as “I have seen there is unity in all things” (2). Both views—the meaninglessness of existentialism and the meaningfulness of a “cosmic consciousness”—evoke the same behavioral response.
As an existentialist, McGill had refused to impose a false order upon a world that he believed was devoid of a guiding consciousness. Meaninglessness had subverted hierarchy and order. Now that he recognizes the interconnectedness of all life, there is still no reason for him to impose a human-centric hierarchy ruled by a "God." A cosmic consciousness transcends hierarchy and order. In either case, Christianity is irrelevant. McGill reacts to his environment just as he did as an existentialist—by living fully in each moment. But a profound spiritual evolution has taken place, and McGill’s expanded awareness brings him a deep serenity absent from mere Existentialism.
Near the end of his chronicle, McGill's recognition of the universe's infinite unity helps him understand that "Every accident of my life had worked in combination to bring me here, and there was no way out" (231). In a novel stuffed full with ironic humor and absurdist insights, the final irony comes when McGill’s own sense of right and wrong, as it turns out, happens to finally coincide with that of the Catholic Church. That, in the end, is how he becomes Beatified as the Blessed McGill.
Shrake’s book is a rare enough accomplishment in American letters—an engaging adventure tale complemented by an integrated, cogently argued philosophical structure. Even more striking is how Shrake’s narrative style mimics his protagonist’s spiritual transformation.
Just as Peter McGill evolves from existentialism towards a “cosmic consciousness,” Shrake’s narrative transcends its beat-inspired “immediacy” to become a carefully calibrated universe in which the interrelated plot, theme, and tone exist in perfect harmony—all this without losing an ounce of the story’s energy.
Shrake’s accomplishment, while appreciated by a select few, has never been fully recognized by academic critics or a larger audience. In part this is due to the relative thinness of critical discourse in Texas, which focuses most of its attention on Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry.
I'll add one more note: Bud Shrake's best novels, Blessed McGill and Strange Peaches, strike many of the discerning readers I know in Texas as two of the finest books ever published about the state.
August 3, 2018
Great Texas book. I first read it in 1972. Liked it then and I like it now.
September 18, 2007
I wanted to make a few notes regarding Blessed McGill by Edwin Shrake. Shrake is a writer who is possibly best known as the late Ann Richards' main squeeze. He’s one of those writers along with Gary Cartwright and Peter Gent who came out of the sports world, moved to Austin, started smoking dope and hanging with Jerry Jeff and Willie and Waylon, and generally had a good ole cosmic time. See Texas Literary Outlaws for details. It has been suggested that the surplus of booze, pot, cocaine and other sundry drugs consumed by these guys held them back as writers. Maybe so—we can’t be sure they would have written any better if they weren’t so fucked up.
In any case, Shrake wrote several fairly serious novels (unlike his old pal Dan Jenkins, who wrote lots of humorous novels but certainly lacked any literary ambition). I’ve read one, But Not For Love (1964), which is OK but not great. You get the idea that he read The Gay Place and felt inspired to do his own urban Texas novel.
I found a copy of his cosmic cowboy Western, Blessed McGill (1968), and decided to give him another try. This book was excellent. It rambles back and forth in time, and tells the story of Peter Hermano McGill, son of an Irish father and Spanish mother in early Texas. He lives the life of a buffalo hunter and itinerant fortune seeker, becoming friends and enemies with various Indian bands and half-breeds that inhabit Northern Mexico, Texas and New Mexico in the years after the Civil War. One of his childhood friends is a boy who is half Lipan Apache Indian and half German (there were a lot of German immigrants in Texas). He grows up to be a highly feared outlaw Indian named Octavio, and his path crosses again with McGill’s in adulthood, with disastrous results.
You sense that Shrake was again influenced by another novel, this time Little Big Man> (1964) by Thomas Berger. I’ve never read it but have seen the movie. But whether Shrake was influenced or not, Blessed McGill stands on its own. What I like about it is the way Shrake builds a believable and complex world described by McGill. Supposedly he researched the hell out of this book, and it shows in the wealth of detail, but never does the detail feel false or expository. It always feels like something that McGill would notice and discuss.
Another thing I like about it is the way it is an adventure, an odyssey, that becomes literature. This strikes me as a rare combination. The obvious book that comes to mind is Moby Dick. But what Blessed McGill reminded me of more was Devil to Pay in the Backlands by João Guimaraes Rosa. Devil to Pay in the Backlands was a vaster, richer book, but the flavor is similar.
Finally, as I read it, I kept thinking what a great movie it would make. It would be a real Western epic.
I’m sure Blessed McGill is out of print, but it should be easy enough to find if you are interested. I recommend it.
In any case, Shrake wrote several fairly serious novels (unlike his old pal Dan Jenkins, who wrote lots of humorous novels but certainly lacked any literary ambition). I’ve read one, But Not For Love (1964), which is OK but not great. You get the idea that he read The Gay Place and felt inspired to do his own urban Texas novel.
I found a copy of his cosmic cowboy Western, Blessed McGill (1968), and decided to give him another try. This book was excellent. It rambles back and forth in time, and tells the story of Peter Hermano McGill, son of an Irish father and Spanish mother in early Texas. He lives the life of a buffalo hunter and itinerant fortune seeker, becoming friends and enemies with various Indian bands and half-breeds that inhabit Northern Mexico, Texas and New Mexico in the years after the Civil War. One of his childhood friends is a boy who is half Lipan Apache Indian and half German (there were a lot of German immigrants in Texas). He grows up to be a highly feared outlaw Indian named Octavio, and his path crosses again with McGill’s in adulthood, with disastrous results.
You sense that Shrake was again influenced by another novel, this time Little Big Man> (1964) by Thomas Berger. I’ve never read it but have seen the movie. But whether Shrake was influenced or not, Blessed McGill stands on its own. What I like about it is the way Shrake builds a believable and complex world described by McGill. Supposedly he researched the hell out of this book, and it shows in the wealth of detail, but never does the detail feel false or expository. It always feels like something that McGill would notice and discuss.
Another thing I like about it is the way it is an adventure, an odyssey, that becomes literature. This strikes me as a rare combination. The obvious book that comes to mind is Moby Dick. But what Blessed McGill reminded me of more was Devil to Pay in the Backlands by João Guimaraes Rosa. Devil to Pay in the Backlands was a vaster, richer book, but the flavor is similar.
Finally, as I read it, I kept thinking what a great movie it would make. It would be a real Western epic.
I’m sure Blessed McGill is out of print, but it should be easy enough to find if you are interested. I recommend it.
July 25, 2022
“A man needs to be in the mountains now and then to remind himself of his true size.”
What a fantastically underrated western. I’m still unsure as to why it has flown under the radar all these years, but I’m sure glad I stumbled upon it.
The sometimes shocking grit and matter-of-fact storytelling was oddly enthralling and it really felt like these adventures were true firsthand accounts one might read in a private journal. There was a command of the characters by Shrike that I really appreciated. While only 250 pages, the heft of this story felt much deeper than that.
Not for the faint of heart, but a stone cold telling of a time not far removed from now that might as well have been a different universe. Like so many characters in this and other stories of the mystical frontier, the West truly died hard and fast.
What a fantastically underrated western. I’m still unsure as to why it has flown under the radar all these years, but I’m sure glad I stumbled upon it.
The sometimes shocking grit and matter-of-fact storytelling was oddly enthralling and it really felt like these adventures were true firsthand accounts one might read in a private journal. There was a command of the characters by Shrike that I really appreciated. While only 250 pages, the heft of this story felt much deeper than that.
Not for the faint of heart, but a stone cold telling of a time not far removed from now that might as well have been a different universe. Like so many characters in this and other stories of the mystical frontier, the West truly died hard and fast.
June 27, 2008
Shrake's top of the line Westerns deserve a much larger readership. Great writing, wonderful characters, humor, pathos, and historical atmosphere so thick you could slice it...I searched the internet, after reading it, to see if Peter McGill really existed, the book is that convincing. We have also thoroughly enjoyed Borderland and Custer's brother's horse. I found this fine review of this book by Nelda Durham at texasranger.org.
Set in Texas during the Reconstruction, Blessed McGill is filled with eccentric, rough-and-ready characters from the Old West. Although most are purely the author’s creations, they come to life not only through the descriptions of their persons, but also through the vivid details of their exploits.
The tale’s main character is Peter Hermano McGill. The reader is immediately drawn into the story when McGill announces: “It is odd in the midst of so much life around me, new with the spring, to know that I must go meet Octavio, for he will surely murder me.”
From this point, McGill chronicles the story of his life. This includes his association from boyhood with Jacob Charles Gerhardt, who becomes the infamous bandit Octavio, sometimes known as Gotcheye.
Jacob Charles Gerhardt, his mother (a Lipan Apache), and his stepfather (a Dutchman) lived on a farm near the McGills. After the old Dutchman was killed by a group of ruffians and the young Jacob blinded in one eye (hence the name Gotcheye) by the same men, the McGills take the boy and his mother into their home for a while.
Young Jacob and his mother have to leave the McGill’s farm one day after Jacob murders a farmhand. They go west to join the Lipan Apache, the mother’s tribe.
When Jacob Charles Gerhardt surfaces again, he is the leader of a group of treacherous Lipians and is now the much-feared Octavio. The paths of McGill and Octavio cross many times. The men remain on friendly terms and even have some adventures together. Then horrible tragedy strikes and creates enmity between them. From that point, it is only a matter of time before one of them kills the other.
The book is fascinating not only because of the McGill/Octavio story, but also for the glimpse into a culture that no longer exists. The reader rides across Texas with outlaws, Indians, and cowboys. All the elements of the frontier are evident, including individual freedom and lawlessness.
The reader realizes that life is about to change for these people. Men like McGill feel it is coming and resent it. One interesting comment about the change has to do with the railroads:
The railroads are a curse. They are laying iron tracks across the grasslands. They are bringing noise, filth, fire, and ash. Most distressing of all, they are spreading white men throughout the country.
There is humor in the story when McGill travels east to Baltimore to Mrs. Merrilee Pritchett’s School for Young Ladies. He goes there to find the girl he loves (he once rescued her from Comanche) and take her back to Texas. He creates a stir from the time he gets off the train in full Western dress, Bowie knife included, and enters a newspaper office to inquire about directions to Mrs. Pritchett’s school. Realizing that he has material for a story that will sell newspapers, the editor sends reporters along with McGill to Mrs. Pritchett’s—and what a story they get!
The biggest surprise of the narrative is that after his death, McGill is made the first Roman Catholic saint in North America. Edward Shrake is such a convincing storyteller that there are those who have actually searched for the grave of Blessed McGill.
§
Set in Texas during the Reconstruction, Blessed McGill is filled with eccentric, rough-and-ready characters from the Old West. Although most are purely the author’s creations, they come to life not only through the descriptions of their persons, but also through the vivid details of their exploits.
The tale’s main character is Peter Hermano McGill. The reader is immediately drawn into the story when McGill announces: “It is odd in the midst of so much life around me, new with the spring, to know that I must go meet Octavio, for he will surely murder me.”
From this point, McGill chronicles the story of his life. This includes his association from boyhood with Jacob Charles Gerhardt, who becomes the infamous bandit Octavio, sometimes known as Gotcheye.
Jacob Charles Gerhardt, his mother (a Lipan Apache), and his stepfather (a Dutchman) lived on a farm near the McGills. After the old Dutchman was killed by a group of ruffians and the young Jacob blinded in one eye (hence the name Gotcheye) by the same men, the McGills take the boy and his mother into their home for a while.
Young Jacob and his mother have to leave the McGill’s farm one day after Jacob murders a farmhand. They go west to join the Lipan Apache, the mother’s tribe.
When Jacob Charles Gerhardt surfaces again, he is the leader of a group of treacherous Lipians and is now the much-feared Octavio. The paths of McGill and Octavio cross many times. The men remain on friendly terms and even have some adventures together. Then horrible tragedy strikes and creates enmity between them. From that point, it is only a matter of time before one of them kills the other.
The book is fascinating not only because of the McGill/Octavio story, but also for the glimpse into a culture that no longer exists. The reader rides across Texas with outlaws, Indians, and cowboys. All the elements of the frontier are evident, including individual freedom and lawlessness.
The reader realizes that life is about to change for these people. Men like McGill feel it is coming and resent it. One interesting comment about the change has to do with the railroads:
The railroads are a curse. They are laying iron tracks across the grasslands. They are bringing noise, filth, fire, and ash. Most distressing of all, they are spreading white men throughout the country.
There is humor in the story when McGill travels east to Baltimore to Mrs. Merrilee Pritchett’s School for Young Ladies. He goes there to find the girl he loves (he once rescued her from Comanche) and take her back to Texas. He creates a stir from the time he gets off the train in full Western dress, Bowie knife included, and enters a newspaper office to inquire about directions to Mrs. Pritchett’s school. Realizing that he has material for a story that will sell newspapers, the editor sends reporters along with McGill to Mrs. Pritchett’s—and what a story they get!
The biggest surprise of the narrative is that after his death, McGill is made the first Roman Catholic saint in North America. Edward Shrake is such a convincing storyteller that there are those who have actually searched for the grave of Blessed McGill.
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July 9, 2009
The chief problem with this book is what the author has made of his research. He has taken the facts from thorough readings of Southwestern historical literature and presents them in his fiction at face value. For example, at one point a Lipan Apache's appearance is described verbatim with Newcomb's description in 'The Indians of Texas'. Details of gun makes, religious customs of indians, streetplans of cities in reconstruction-era Texas - it is admirable for an author to describe these as correctly as possible, but it helps the story if the research is flavoring the characters and action, and doesn't sound like a proud schoolboy simply listing what he has learned about the Old West.
Anyway, I did enjoy the setting (more or less, where I currently live) and the diary-format and the premise of 'lost chronicle of North America's first saint'. It's just that none of the characters moved me or made me laugh. I was anticipating more sinister enjoyment from a "dark western" (as Larry McMurtry describes it on the backflap).
Worth a read if you want to absorb a lot of genuine Texas period detail in the form of a fictional story, but by no means a "Texas Literary Classic".
Anyway, I did enjoy the setting (more or less, where I currently live) and the diary-format and the premise of 'lost chronicle of North America's first saint'. It's just that none of the characters moved me or made me laugh. I was anticipating more sinister enjoyment from a "dark western" (as Larry McMurtry describes it on the backflap).
Worth a read if you want to absorb a lot of genuine Texas period detail in the form of a fictional story, but by no means a "Texas Literary Classic".
November 5, 2021
Funny, and a lot of fun. It takes a minute to get going and it took me a minute to find its rhythm. But once it did, I was in for the ride. In this case, that's an adventurous Western that manages to be exciting and violent without being mean. Mean is an issue with westerns. Sometimes it's fine, but other times it seems pathological.
Readers of True Grit and other Charles Portis adventures will find much to like here. It's regarded for having some level of accuracy in its tales and descriptions of Native Americans. I can't speak for that, but it does give people some dignity and avoids treating those people as a stereotype or monoculture.
This is the first book by Edwin Shrake I have read, but I will certainly read more.
"I admire and respect a really good and virtuous man or woman who behaves slightly less well than my mother thinks people should behave, and at odd times in my life I have dreamed of being able to be virtuous, but that is hard to explain to those I have associated with."
Readers of True Grit and other Charles Portis adventures will find much to like here. It's regarded for having some level of accuracy in its tales and descriptions of Native Americans. I can't speak for that, but it does give people some dignity and avoids treating those people as a stereotype or monoculture.
This is the first book by Edwin Shrake I have read, but I will certainly read more.
"I admire and respect a really good and virtuous man or woman who behaves slightly less well than my mother thinks people should behave, and at odd times in my life I have dreamed of being able to be virtuous, but that is hard to explain to those I have associated with."
May 11, 2009
Bud Shrake's Blessed McGill had been named a Texas literary classic and after finally reading it, I agree. The descriptive language of the author and the character development are superb. If it hadn't been written before Lonesome Dove, I would have sworn that McGill was cut from the same cloth as Woodrow McCall. A fine book for all. Bud Shrake died this week. Read his books and enjoy the this fine author
July 25, 2016
Fast paced tale that includes a lot of researched tidbits from Texas history that were woven into it in a way that mocks the heroification and tendency towards tall tales that Texas and the west in general lends itself to. A couple of scenes, particularly ones that included female characters were a bit forced.
August 24, 2016
An engaging and literate Western. This harrowing tale of Reconstruction-Era Texas is really a parable on religion...God = "The Good Enough Father". Shrake is excellent in describing plenty of rough and tough characters and a life that was hard to live during this time. Can't wait to read Shrake's other Westerns.
October 19, 2016
Great adventure where all of the stories could have been 50-100 pages longer. Occasionally too breezy for the great material, especially the last several chapters. Also, the Sainthood thing is unnecessary and silly. That being said, well written and researched, fun throughout.
May 4, 2015
A greatly underappreciated classic by a master storyteller.
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