Lifting a glass with an Old Fashioned in it to celebrate finishing the last story in a cycle of Western short stories, fourteen of them, running to just over 50,000 words — enough for a respectable collection.  These are rip-roaring tales with plenty of adventure and sex and a parade of powerful female characters of the sort you don’t often find in Western yarns.

It will be a month or two before these stories are published, but tonight is a milestone for the author and worth a toast to the writing life, raised under the brim of a straw Resistol.

Click on the image to enlarge.

I’ve unpublished this story on Amazon for the Kindle, because I decided to include it in a new collection, Twelve Western Stories, which I’ll be publishing in a month or two.

The story concerns a hapless bounty hunter who partners up with an orphan girl on a grand but brief adventure.  It may remind you a bit of True Grit, but it goes somewhere else.

This was the first thing I ever e-published, and led directly to the new collection of stories.  My Facebook friend Polly Frost, whose own books and e-books can be had at this link, made me do it — or at least persuaded me that I had no excuse not to do it.

My neo-noir pulp thriller Bloodbath is still available for the Kindle on Amazon.

There is much that is tragic in the story of Native America’s conflict with the European interlopers, particularly in the treatment of the Indians of the temperate forest lands east of the Missisippi by the young republic; the displacement of the Five Civilized Tribes to an utterly alien environment reeks of racialism. Yet the pretensions of the Plains Indians to exclusive rights over the heartland of the continent cannot, it seems to me, stand.

Their claim, the claim of less than a million people, to possess territories capable of supporting not only millions more directly settled, but of still more millions outside America waiting to be fed by those territories’ products, is the claim not of oppressed primitives but of the selfish rich. Here were not shy, self-effacing marginalists . . . but proud warrior nomads, who had taken from the Europeans what they coveted as a means to support their way of life, the horse and the gun, and then refused Europeans any share of the lands which horse and gun equipped them the better to exploit.

Little wonder that the European immigrants who made their way onto the Great Plains in the 19th century, Slavs of Eastern Europe, Russians from the Steppe, peoples whose history was suffused with memories of oppression by galloping, sword-wielding, slave-taking Hun, Mongol and Turkish nomads, should have felt so little pity for those other Mongoloid nomads whose interest in life seemed to subsist in hunting, pillaging, and war. If the Indians’ fate was to meet head-on in battle people as tough as themselves, veterans of a civil war in which brother had fought brother, Virginians had slain New Yorkers, Ohioans had burnt out Georgians, so be it.

There may be a poignant last hurrah about the Little Bighorn. I do not echo it.

— John Keegan, Fields Of Battle