WILD WEST MONDAY - GUEST BLOGGER

Here's Celia Hayes with her favourite western adventure.

My Very Favorite Western Adventure

It’s a book that I read as a young teenager, and I still have the mass-market paperback copy that I bought for myself out of my allowance and baby-sitting money, for the munificent sum of $.95 (plus tax) at Vroman’s in Pasadena. It was a rambling and picaresque read, a little like Tom Sawyer, a bit like Tom Jones, and with lashings of Harry Flashman stirred in for good measure, all set during the great California Gold Rush of 1849; both on the trail, in the gold camps and in San Francisco when it was woollier and wilder than it would ever be again. Just for good measure, the story also encompassed Mississippi steamboats and a murderously vengeful bandit gang, along with the conventional Western elements: gunfighters, Indians, wagon trains, dance-hall floozies, a famously unsuccessful gambler fleeing his creditors, a black-jawed and taciturn hero, a very pretty girl with a talent for sharp-shooting, friendly Indians, unfriendly Indians, a hard-working farmer, his wife and their four children named after books of the Bible, Mormons and a soft-spoken Englishman who only appears to be harmless. All those classic Western elements are assembled, with a wide-eyed fourteen-year old boy observing it all… and his father, the aforementioned unsuccessful gambler, taking copious notes. All in all, it was a thrilling adventure and experiment in just exactly how many frontier archetypes and adventures could possibly be crammed into 440 pages.

Astonishingly enough, even though this book won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the year after it was published, inspired a short-run TV series, and is still recalled very fondly by people who read it … it has been out of print for some years. There isn’t even a picture of any book jackets at Amazon; that’s how long ago it seems to have fallen out of public awareness. It’s “The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters”, by Robert Lewis Taylor, and I seriously recommend it to any aficionado of the American frontier.

Thanks Celia and here's some Archive trivia concerning the TV series based on the book - For several episodes of the TV series, The Osmonds were cast as the singing sons of the Kissel family.