Book Review

By Derryll White

McMurtry, Larry (2006).  Telegraph Days.

It is sad to know that Larry McMurtry will not be producing any more books, as he passed away March 21, 2021.  Whether it was ‘Lonesome Dove’ or one of his books on Hollywood, or ‘Terms of Endearment’ and ‘The Last Picture Show,’ he was always worth reading.  For serious readers he also wrote things like ‘Books: A Memoir.’  McMurtry was never far from the American West.  He was born and died in Archer City, Texas.

In the mid-to-late 1800s there was a literary form termed ‘the penny dreadful.’ It was the first mass market pocketbook, selling for a dime or less and often celebrating the rough and lawless Old West.  Characters such as Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson, the James Gang and the Earp brothers, to name only a few, were built larger than life and America loved it. It was a memory that was already all but gone.  Larry McMurtry has delightfully embraced this form with ‘Telegraph Days.’

The story starts out serious, with an examination of the great migration West.  But very quickly the author begins to have fun with this novel. Nellie Courtright is from Virginia and 22 years of age.  He makes her an author (among other things) and with her pen, sitting alone in the telegraph office, McMurtry examines the myth of the Old West.

He does not hesitate to write himself in to the novel! Owner of one of the largest bookstores in America and a collector of fine and rare books, Larry McMurtry does not hesitate to make Nellie Courtright’s little first novel, printed in Dodge City in an edition of 49 copies, the bright star of outlaw books.

Nellie Courtright is an organized, independent woman who gives promise to the future of women in America.  Read this light romantic spoof and you will see America differently.  Publishers Weekly said, “As purposely over the top as an episode of South Park.”

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Excerpts from the novel:

WESTERING – It broke our mother’s heart.  All along the Western trails, in the years after the Civil War, families that got caught up in westering died like gnats or flies.  Santa Fe Trail, Oregon Trail, California Trail – it didn’t matter.  The going was deadly.  The brochures the land agents put out made westering seem easy – sparkling water holes every few miles, abundant game, healthy prairie climate with frequent breezes – but in truth there were no easy roads.  Death traveled in every wagon, on every boat.  Westering made many orphans, and picked many parents clean.

RANCHING – “This doesn’t make sense,” I said.  “Why would a dry goods salesman think he could make a go of a ranch in No Man’s Land?”

    But then I remembered Father and all those brochures he read extolling the beauties of the West.  If an educated man such as Perceval Staunton Courtright could get sucked in by a bunch of slick brochures, then there was no reason why a haberdasher from Nebraska would behave any more sensibly.

    People must love the notion of ranches, particularly people from the East who have no real idea how vexatious and uncomfortable ranch life can actually be.

PRINTERS – The print shop was uncommonly untidy and the old printer himself could be fairly described as a kind of human inkblot; but he was friendly to a fault – probably glad to see visitors walk in who behaved decently and could actually read.  The printer’s name was Tesseluck – I believe he may have been a Dutchman or something.  Now and then he would forget himself and suck on his own pen – all in all not an attractive habit, but we were in Dodge City, where mere friendliness counted for more than it might have in other places.

DISCRIMINATION – But he finally agreed to sketch me in, and even drew me in profile, which is what I preferred.  And when my little outlaw book was printed, I was on the cover for the first few editions.  But the book kept being printed and reprinted until more than a million copies were in circulation, in the process of which I slowly slipped off the cover, seldom to reappear, which proves nothing at all except that the world belongs to men.

BOOK COLLECTORS – Little did I suspect, at the time, what a rarity had been created that day in Dodge City.  Long after No Man’s Land became a part of the state of Oklahoma, when there were only a few old-timers left who could remember seeing the West as it had been and maybe made the acquaintance of such famous figures as Custer and Cody, Hickok and the Earps, people began to make collections of books about the Western life that was now long gone.  The bright star of outlaw books was that first little forty-nine-copy edition of my Banditti write-up.

THE HUSTLE – How I wished Bill Cody could have been there, for the main idea had been his, and he had had it long ago.  He had figured out first what others had figured out later, which was that the thing to do with the Wild West was sell it to those who hadn’t lived in it, or even to some who had.  Just sell it all: the hats, the boots, the spurs, the six-guns, the buffalo and elk and antelope, the longhorn cattle and the cowboys who herded them, the gunslingers and the lawmen, the cattle barons and the gamblers, the whores, the railroad men, and the Indians too, of course, if you could find them and persuade them, as Cody had.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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