Forgotten Book: Massacre River by John Benteen
A quick and entertaining read, Massacre River by John Benteen (Ben Haas) is one of my favorite entries in the Fargo series. Soldier of fortune Neil Fargo is in U.S. occupied Manilla when he’s tapped by Chinese big shot Jonathan Ching to transport Ching’s seemingly virginal, but less than pure, daughter Jade to her betrothed in the north. Between here and there, the deadly and partially organized Moros are waging guerilla war against the Americans and the trek is near suicide. Fargo recruits hard drinking tough-guy O’Bannon to help put together an army and together they cut through the defenses of the Moro and their leader, General Luna. Luna turns out to be Spott Carter, crazed son of defeated (and equally crazed) Southern General Will Carter who controls an opposition force with lost gold from the confederate treasury. It’s a real pager turner.
But about the cover. When Fargo meets Will Carter, he brags that his men are in possession of several surplus weapons smuggled away after the Spanish-American war. They have the Hotchkiss two-pounder mountain guns as well as a Sims-Dudley pneumatic dynamite gun, and in fact it’s Fargo’s keen ability to use the weapon that saves his life and O’Bannon’s. Not knowing anything about it, I first pictured the dynamite gun exactly as the cover artist had rendered it. But then on page 101, having been drawn out by a mule, the machine takes the stage:
“The dynamite gun was quickly unlimbered at the edge of the range. Beside it was placed a box of the special projectiles it used. They were three feet long, looking not unlike rockets, with conical heads and a tail-piece projecting from the rear with vanes on its end that were the metal equivalents of the feathers on an arrow. […] Fargo supervised its placing and pointing. He opened the double breech. Then he inserted one of the of the rocket shaped shells into the upper of the gun’s two tubes. The Sims-Dudley was a smoothbore; the vanes on the tail of the projectile provided rotation for the projectile. Fargo seated it carefully. Then he took from the ammunition supply a firing cartridge. This he inserted into the combustion chamber in the lower tube. Then he closed the double breeches. The explosion of the firing cartridge in the lower tube would compress air and fire the shell from the upper one.”
Here’s the cover, along with an illustration of the real Sims-Dudley from Wikipedia, a reference the cover artist didn’t have in 1969.
Although it appeared earlier this year for the stalwart band of ruffians in Owlhoot, this review seemed just right for an entry in Patti Abbott’s entertaining series of Friday’s Forgotten Books. Patti sums up the day’s entries on her blog, so be sure to stop past, share a cup of tea, leave a comment, clean up your crumbs and tell her what a great job she is doing.
Meanwhile on the World Wide Web…
Been hoping to beef up the functionality of RichardProsch.com for a few months and finally got to it late last week. I installed a new WordPress theme and put together a couple initial posts. I also resurrected the old Twitter feed. Meridian Bridge has been all about the west; I’d like to open the new blog up to more general content.
Now, the idea of maintaining two blogs makes my teeth chatter more than just a little. Yet, while I’m not exactly obsessive-compulsive, I did feel like Meridian Bridge should be kept free from the kind of non-western posts I’d like to write.
For a short time I even considered shutting the Bridge down and posting exclusively to the new blog. Cooler heads prevailed (Ron Scheer and David Cranmer take note!) and for the foreseeable future I’ll be posting something of passing interest at least once a week to each site.
I hope you’ll drive past and give the new place a try.
My Personal West: Todd Franklin
My personal west started in front of the family Zenith in the mid-70’s. Every day at three o’clock, I turned the dial to channel 13 for The Lone Ranger. I rode with Kemo Sabe on my trusty steed, an orange sofa chair with a plaid pattern. In one hand was my “Made In Hong Kong” chrome painted plastic six-shooter and in the other, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
My love for the old west continued to grow after a couple of trips to Silver Dollar City, an 1880’s themed amusement park located in Branson, Missouri. At age five I was awarded my first job. I became a deputy sheriff when the sheriff of Silver Dollar City pinned an official five-point star on my chest. I was so proud of that tin star, that I wore it for a week, always keeping my eye out for outlaws.
After seeing movies like My Name Is Nobody and The Apple Dumpling Gang, I was hooked on westerns forever. At least that’s what I thought. My fickle child brain flipped in the summer of 1977 as my personal west changed into my personal space western, once I saw the movie Star Wars. The western was already slowly being replaced in my mind, by old reruns of Star Trek, but Darth Vader and friends made me forget about tumbleweeds and ten gallon hats. When my dad wanted to watch a western, I usually balked and pleaded for him to change the channel to Battlestar Galactica or any other space show.
For most of my childhood, I stayed space crazed until my later teenage years thanks to a movie that was labeled as the MTV Western. Young Guns – a movie about Billy the Kid and his Regulators during the Lincoln County War might have been a bit over the top, but it brought back my personal west. Because of this movie, I started to haunt my local library reading all I could about true life lawmen and outlaws of the old west. Later as I worked at an antique store, I became fascinated with 19th century photography and started to pick up western related photographs. These old photos became dim windows back into the past of men and women who lived such a rugged lifestyle.
Always the movie fan, I still love a good ol’ western, but reading a book about a true west tale, visiting the grave of an old west legend or finding an antique photograph is really the best of my personal west!
