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Trail's End: Western Novel
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.
232 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 5, 2021
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November 24, 2018
A frontier town tale of two marshalls.
Seth Craddock, a bad dude, takes on the role of marshall in lawless Ascalon, Kansas, a 'Tophet at trail's end,' three previous incumbents having been shot dead (as had the newspaper editor, the county treasurer and countless others), no one was prosecuted because the local attorney is "so crooked he couldn't lie on the side of a hill without rollin' down it like a hoop."
Shortly after Calvin Morgan also arrives, 'a man with a clean heart, a clean purpose in his soul' to grow wheat on the bone-strewn prairie, good only for cattle up to that point. He soon attracts the enmity of Craddock and his outlaw cohorts.
John Ford would have made much of the lively support cast such as Judge Thayer, with his honest ambitions for the town, his noble daughter Rhetta, who prevents Morgan from going 'blood mad' at the height of his thirst for revenge, and the hotelier Conboy with his indelicate, catchall phrase of "No niggers in Ireland" always at the ready and apropos of nothing.
In Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled crime novel Red Harvest the protagonist goes 'blood simple' when the violent corruption of the town seeps into his veins, a wonderful phrase appropriated by the Coen Brothers for the title of their first film. Morgan suffers much the same fate, only he had some wholesale help to bring him to his senses.
The two books are similar in more ways than you might expect. Maybe it's not that surprising really, Red Harvest is pretty much a Western in disguise.
Seth Craddock, a bad dude, takes on the role of marshall in lawless Ascalon, Kansas, a 'Tophet at trail's end,' three previous incumbents having been shot dead (as had the newspaper editor, the county treasurer and countless others), no one was prosecuted because the local attorney is "so crooked he couldn't lie on the side of a hill without rollin' down it like a hoop."
Shortly after Calvin Morgan also arrives, 'a man with a clean heart, a clean purpose in his soul' to grow wheat on the bone-strewn prairie, good only for cattle up to that point. He soon attracts the enmity of Craddock and his outlaw cohorts.
John Ford would have made much of the lively support cast such as Judge Thayer, with his honest ambitions for the town, his noble daughter Rhetta, who prevents Morgan from going 'blood mad' at the height of his thirst for revenge, and the hotelier Conboy with his indelicate, catchall phrase of "No niggers in Ireland" always at the ready and apropos of nothing.
In Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled crime novel Red Harvest the protagonist goes 'blood simple' when the violent corruption of the town seeps into his veins, a wonderful phrase appropriated by the Coen Brothers for the title of their first film. Morgan suffers much the same fate, only he had some wholesale help to bring him to his senses.
The two books are similar in more ways than you might expect. Maybe it's not that surprising really, Red Harvest is pretty much a Western in disguise.
Displaying 1 of 1 review