Westerns

Originally published in the Ketchikan Daily News, September 2011; written by Tammy Dinsmore

I like westerns. I read many westerns (mainly books by Louis L’Amour) as a young adult. When my dad finished reading them, I would borrow them and read them myself. The Sacketts by Louis L’Amour were my favorites.

We don’t get a lot of westerns these days, so I was pleasantly surprised when the library received several this summer to add to the library collection.

Doc: a novel by Mary Doria Russell is a book about Dr. John Henry Holliday (aka Doc Holliday). This is not the same story as “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” or the movie ”Tombstone.”

The author starts the book by giving us some background on Doc Holliday. Born with a cleft palate and cleft lip, his mother fed him with an eyedropper until he was eight weeks old. Then his uncle, who was a doctor, performed surgery to correct the defects. John Henry was still left with a speech impediment, so his mother home schooled him and worked on his speech and by the time he was eight years old he was able to hold his own with other boys and was then sent to a boy’s academy. He excelled in academics and learned piano from his mother.

He was devastated when his mother died of Tuberculosis when he was just fifteen.

When his father remarried just 3 months later, he decided to live with his Uncle and then to follow in his uncle’s footsteps and become a doctor. He was advised by his uncle to become a dentist instead and went on to study Dentistry at the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery.

Just shy of 22, he is diagnosed with the same dread disease that had taken his mother. Given only six to eighteen months to live if he stays in Georgia, he decides that the dry air of the west will do him good and so he goes to Texas. He earns a living by gambling and it is this profession that takes him to Dodge City where he meets Wyatt Earp and where their friendship begins. Neither man wants notoriety, they just want to live their lives quietly, but later events just won’t let that happen.

Another western new to the Library is The Long Hitch by Michael Zimmer.

Mase Campbell, wagon master for Kavanaugh Freight, is murdered in the street just before the start of a freight wagon race from Corinne in the Utah Territory to Virginia City. Buck McCready, who was rescued from the Indians by Mase when Buck was just ten years old, wants to investigate the murder but is instead hired by Kavanaugh Freight to head up the wagon train for the race. Buck is sure that someone traveling with the wagon train is the murderer and he may be right.

These two novels are just a couple of the new westerns available for checkout now. In addition, we have many of the westerns written by Louis L’Amour, Zane Gray, Elmer Kelton and many more.