Six Guns and Scalping Knives

About the Book

A slim volume of lovely short stories about the Old West.

This terrific selection of vignettes pits good against evil, thief against lawman, Indian against cowpoke and love against the harsh realities of life on the prairie. Stone’s terse prose and strong editorial hand keep the exposition simple but the hearts of the stories beating and morally compelling. True, the characters are right out of central casting—there are lawmen, prairie girls, proud warriors, cardsharps and a horse named Satan—but the characters are nothing less than delightful renditions of the best Western archetypes. Trooper Cassidy dispatches thieves like they’re flies bothering a horse’s backside, and his bloody affair is rendered in a style so unadorned that the prose plays a kind of protagonist. Leaving out the overdetailed and breathless clamoring for historical attention that plagues so many genre novels, Stone lets the wonderful details rest in the background, waiting to be discovered by the reader as his tales knowingly hearken back to the 18th-century dime-store heroics of the cowboy novel and the existentialism of Hollywood’s best Westerns. Though the stories avoid any protracted epiphanies, little Debbie Pratt’s blood pact with a young Kiowa named Sun Dog is an allegory that not only hints at the possibilities (or impossibilities) of love between the Native and un-native Americans, it also subtly leaves readers with the image of the very real emotional gulf that separated the peoples of the dry prairie. Blessedly, the tales do not only vary in subject, but in narrative technique. Without mucking about with ornate Byzantine juxtapositions of chronology, Stone crafts tales in the third-person just as fluently as he does in the first. This gives the stories an unexpected range of perspective in tales like “Ben Duval Takes a Hand.” The eponymous riverboat gambler is a great riff on the stiff-lipped rover, and his stoic acceptance of loneliness is belied by an unspoken yearning to perhaps find a life away from the card table. The book’s final story about two Sioux braves, and their friendship and betrayal, resonates with an image that distills the hope, sadness and even metaphysics of America’s mythological landscape, and reminds readers that while the West was being won, it was often being lost.

This unpretentious, melancholic book takes readers out of the big city and into the stark meaning of the Monument Valley.

About the Author

Biography Jackson Stone is the pen name of John E. Sturm, a retired college professor, who lives in Florida. He has long been interested in Western History, particularly the far trade, Indian wars and cattle ranching. Sturm holds an EDD in School Administration from the University of Massachusetts. He has practiced his profession in the public schools of New Hampshire as teacher and principal. In the area of higher education, his career took him to Buffalo State College and James Madison University as a professor of education. During the latter part of World War II, he left Bowdoin College to serve as an infantry soldier for two years. A published poet, his other hobbies include pistol shooting, playing the electric organ, hiking in the state parks of Florida, and reading.