Hopalong Cassidy On The Page, On The ScreenHopalong Cassidy On The Page, On The Screen

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction

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ix

PART ONE: CLARENCE MULFORD AND HIS WORLD CHAPTER 1

The Bar-20 Is Born

3

CHAPTER 2

Absence and Return

29

CHAPTER 3

The Age of Gold

CHAPTER 4

Trails North

CHAPTER 5

Twilight Falls

41 59 81

PART TWO: CASSIDY COMES TO THE SCREEN CHAPTER 6

From Page to Screen

CHAPTER 7

The Cinematic Cassidy Enters

CHAPTER 8

Emotions, Western Style

CHAPTER 9

A Man Called Les

CHAPTER 10

Exit Windy

CHAPTER 11

A Comic Comes and Goes

173

CHAPTER 12

A Clown Called California

193

93 101

121

141

157

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CHAPTER 13

A Short Season

CHAPTER 14

Bullets, Bandits, Business Deals

CHAPTER 15

End of an Era

CHAPTER 16

A Brief Revival

219 241

265 283

PART THREE: ALL FADES AWAY CHAPTER 17

Sunset and Evening Star Filmography

315

EPILOGUE

Top Ten Recommended Titles

ADDENDUM

Hoppy and Bing

APPENDIX A

The Published Works of Clarence E. Mulford

APPENDIX B

Hopalong Cassidy on Radio

APPENDIX C

Hopalong Cassidy on Television

APPENDIX D

Selected Cost Analysis Sheets

APPENDIX E

Financials Index

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CONTENTS

503 507

463

477

485 491 499

479

CHAPTER 1

The Bar-20 Is Born

It began in the waking dreams of a meek and scholarly-looking young man, a low-

ranking municipal paper pusher who visualized a frontier world he had never seen and then put words to his imaginings at the end of each day’s drudgery. Of all the young couples—eager or terrified, bold or shy, innocent or experienced, ready for a lifetime commitment or not—who applied for marriage licenses from the borough of Brooklyn, New York, in the early years of the 20th century, few could have suspected that the introverted young fellow with the bifocals and the slight but muscular build who processed the paperwork for them had made his lifetime commitment to his private world. None of those couples could have known that the mind of that unassuming young clerk was not in the teeming streets of Brooklyn but out on the open range, among the great cattle herds, in the flimsy shantytowns, roaming across a vast imagined West whose geographic center was a Texas ranch called the Bar-20 and whose human center was a red-thatched, gimplegged, liquor- swigging, tobacco-spitting young puncher called Hopalong Cassidy.

The only child of German-American parents, Clarence Edward Mulford was born on February 3, 1883 in Streator, Illinois, a town 98 miles southwest of Chicago. The ancestors of his father, Clarence Cohansey Mulford, came to the United States in 1643, and twenty Mulfords are listed as having fought in the American Revolution. His mother, born Minnie Grace Kline, was a firstgeneration American whose father had fled to the United States after involvement with the Students’ Rebellion in Germany.

The elder Mulford designed and manufactured low-pressure boilers for hot-water heating plants and at the time of Clarence’s birth he was operating his own steam heater factory in Streator. The family home was a brick house on the west branch of

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Clarence at 10 years old

the Vermilion River. Young Mulford played in the river’s yellow clay and made many trips into town across its shaky old bridge. He attended the Garfield School in Streator until 1890, when his father moved family and factory to the Illinois town of Galva. Over the next ten years, business kept the Mulfords on the move—to Chicago, then southwest to St. Louis where Clarence attended Wyman Craw School, then back to Streator where he completed his junior year of high school.

He was a quiet, introverted boy and a passable amateur artist, uninterested in team sports or girls. A dedicated student he wasn’t. He kept his desk so crowded with five-cent Wild West magazines that there was scarcely room for anything else.

He would spend study periods raptly reading some lurid exploit of Buffalo Bill or Kit Carson that he kept hidden inside his schoolbook. Every Sunday afternoon he’d visit his grandparents’ home just outside of Streator, borrow one of their bound volumes of Harper’s Weekly, and retire to the barn to read all the cowboy stories in the magazine.

In 1899 the elder Mulford gave up the risks and rewards of being his own boss and moved himself, his wife and 16-year-old Clarence to Utica, New York to accept a job with the International Heater Company that he kept until his death in 1910. For a time the family boarded in the home of Mrs. Mike Hopkins on West Street. When the landlady gave a party for Clarence and invited the

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neighborhood’s young men and women to meet him, Mulford locked himself in his room and refused to come out. Eventually he organized a small circle of friends into the Utica Recreation Club, which met twice a week in the hayloft of Mrs. Hopkins’ barn and whose members wore a pin Mulford designed. But his clear preference was for solitary pursuits like reading and working out with a punching bag in the barn to improve his physique. As early as his mid-teens he seemed to have retreated from the external world to the universe inside him.

After graduating from Utica Academy in 1900, Mulford decided not to endure four boring years of college as his father wanted but instead to strike out on his own. He left Utica, moved to Brooklyn and found a $10-a-week job with a monthly technical magazine, the Municipal Journal and Engineer, where his first assignment was to go to Manhattan and report on the construction of the Flatiron Building. Later he was promoted to exchange editor, a dreary job which required him to comb through newspapers and other periodicals and clip items suitable for reprinting in the Journal.

Soon after migrating to Brooklyn he joined the Central YMCA on Fulton Street, where he spent much of his spare time working out: punching the bag, running one to eight miles a day, lifting dumbbells and bar-bells until, despite his small size (5'5" and 130 lb.), he had become an impressive physical specimen.

When the Journal was sold, Mulford found work in the office of an engineering and construction company, but a dispute between two rival unions quickly forced the firm out of business. These humdrum jobs meant nothing to Mulford except a necessary source of income, for he had already begun to create on paper a universe all his own in which he preferred to live.

His first success as a writer came quickly and almost without effort. In August 1902, when he was 19 years old and working for the Municipal Journal and Engineer, he had turned out “John Barnett, Professor of Archaeology,” a 5,750word story. This story, like much of his later work, blended Western motifs with mystery and detection in the manner of Conan Doyle’s then hugely popular tales of Sherlock Holmes. Unsatisfied with the story, Mulford retouched it in January 1903 and completely rewrote it in December of that year and January of 1904.

On February 29 he entered it in a short story contest conducted by The Metropolitan Magazine. About 10,000 manuscripts were submitted to the editors, who took several months to choose the winners. In a letter dated September 13 they announced their decision to divide the $600 second prize among six stories of equal merit and offered Mulford $100 for “Barnett.” It was published in Metropolitan’s July 1906 issue with color illustrations by F.T. Johnson—not a bad fate for the maiden effort of any writer. But it wasn’t his first story to appear in print.

Shortly after turning 21, Mulford had taken the first steps towards creating the rangeland empire with which he would be identified for the rest of his creative life.

Between April 7 and 20, 1904, he wrote “The Fight at Buckskin,” a 6,250-word ON THE PAGE , ON THE SCREEN

5

story that became the first piece of the sprawling saga of the Bar-20. On May 14 he submitted it to Collier’s Weekly, which held the manuscript for what seems an intolerably long time before rejecting and returning it on February 23, 1905. On April 28 of that year Mulford sent it to Caspar Whitney’s Outing Company, a house that published a number of sports and outdoor magazines as well as a line of hardcover books in the same vein. The joyous news arrived on May 9: Outing Magazine had accepted the story. The offering price was a quite generous $90, but since Outing paid on publication, not acceptance, Mulford saw no money for several months. He was sent the proofs of the story on October 2 and returned them, corrected, the same day. “The Fight at Buckskin” was published in Outing Magazine for December 1905, with two illustrations in color by Frank Schoonover, one being the frontispiece for the issue. On December 15 Mulford received his check. For the 22-year-old Clarence, that must have been a merry Christmas indeed.

And not just because of a single sale. Between late April of 1904 and early June of 1905, Mulford had written half a dozen other Bar-20 adventures but had done nothing with them before receiving the good word from Outing on the sale of “The Fight at Buckskin.” Then, in a set of three mailings between July 3 and

While living in Brooklyn, circa 1901

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August 22, he submitted all six to the magazine, and was delighted beyond words when every one of them was accepted. He wrote his eighth Bar-20 tale between mid-September and late October, submitted it in November, and scored at Outing once again. He’d received only one check by the end of that year but he must have felt that his career as a Western writer was under way.

In each of five consecutive issues, from April to August 1906, Outing Magazine ran a Mulford story. The seventh Bar-20 tale appeared in its December 1906 number and the last of the initial set of eight in May 1907. Five of the initial eight were illustrated in color by Frank Schoonover and two others by N.C. Wyeth, the father of Andrew Wyeth. Each month which Outing ran a Bar-20 tale, Mulford promptly received a check. The only twinge of literary pain the young author is known to have felt during that golden time was when he lost his copy of the manuscript of the second story in the series, “The Vagrant Sioux,” while walking across the Brooklyn Bridge.

At this time Mulford was living on East 17th Street in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, in the home of James P. Kohler, secretary to the Mayor of New York. It was a connection crucial to Mulford’s life during the daylight hours when he had to make a living, for Kohler encouraged him to take the civil service examination and perhaps pulled a few strings behind the scenes in his young friend’s behalf.

From August 1, 1906 until July 28, 1907, Mulford shuffled documents in the City Registrar’s Office. After some vacation time he transferred to a Brooklyn position with the Registry of Deeds, a department of the Kings County Clerk’s Office. His job title was marriage license clerk, his starting salary $1,500 a year. He would hang onto that or another civil service slot for just short of the next twenty years and by the time he abandoned public employment his novels and stories had made him famous.

Before the beginning of his civil service career and the publication of his seventh and eighth Bar-20 stories, Mulford had made two other sales to Outing periodicals. During each of two February nights in 1906 he had written a 1,800word short story in the greenhouse of a friend at Coram, Long Island. He sent both pieces to another friend, E.H. Simmons, who in turn submitted them for him to Outing. The company paid him $12.50 for each of the two trifles, using “Concerning a Cook” in its Gray Goose Magazine for December 1906 and “The Cure of Billy” in Bohemian Magazine for January 1907. Neither work has ever been reprinted. Further, by the time they were published Mulford probably had little interest in them for, by then, he had done what every young writer dreams of doing and often dies without ever having accomplished. He had sold his first book. Outing had contracted to publish the eight Bar-20 stories in hardcover as a 68,000-word episodic novel to be entitled Bar-20.

Between February 25 and March 12 of 1907, using a room in the Kohler house as his office, Mulford worked on the set of 84 galleys, and on the page proofs of the book between March 8 and April 10. The novel was published on July 10, under his full name Clarence Edward Mulford, running 382 pages, with four ON THE PAGE , ON THE SCREEN

7

illustrations by Wyeth and Schoonover taken from the Outing Magazine versions of the stories, selling at a price of $1.50. Mulford sent his ten gift copies to his mother, E. H. Simmons, and other relatives and friends.

Reviews were few and reactions mixed. The Nation for August 23, 1907 described the book as “Twenty-five chapters of gunpowder smoke, of shanty towns in New Mexico or Texas, thick with dust, pierced with bullets, strewn with prostrate forms of cowboys,” and full of “terse descriptions of alkali plains, of Gila monsters, cayuses and the playful manners of the Bar-20 outfit.” The reviewer concluded: “The narrative is full of swing, so full as to swing past at top speed without making any particular impression beyond the fact that Bar-20 invariably worsts its enemies.” None of the handful who wrote about the book in 1907 could have foreseen that it would paint the first strokes in perhaps the vastest canvas of the West ever created.

Mulford was a competent if undistinguished writer whose style differed from the early 20th century’s stiff Victorian English only in being somewhat more vivid.

His plots are almost never unified but sprawl every-which-way over the terrain.

His skills at drawing character and relationship were weak, and especially feeble whenever he had to deal with a situation involving a woman. His notions of cowboy and ethnic dialect grate all too quickly on the nerves. But in grasp of detail and breadth of vision he was one of the most remarkable of all Western novelists.

The key to his grasp of detail was research, not on the ground but in books.

Early in his career Mulford began to assemble a huge library of materials on the history and development of the West, from Manuel Liza’s expedition up the Missouri River to the death of the great cattle trails. He kept three secondhand book dealers supplying him with histories, military reports, maps and pioneers’ diaries and would read them for hours at a time. His collection soon grew enormous, and he claimed to have discarded three times as many volumes as he kept. Among the books he consulted most often were Andy Adams’ The Log of a Cowboy (1903), the Western studies in Bancroft’s 39-volume collected historical works, and Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail (1901), for which Mulford prepared a personal index.

As if to demonstrate that he was born to be a bureaucrat, Mulford cross-indexed all this material in a system of handwritten 4x6 file cards that at their peak filled 34 drawers, probably the largest organized private collection of data on the West ever put together. The system consisted of about two dozen major headings—The Santa Fe Trail, The Oregon Trail, Western Towns, The Cattle Trade, Firearms, Military Posts, Indians—and each of these was broken down into categories and sub-categories. The Cattle Trade, for example, was divided into such major categories as Cattle, Ranches, Ranges, Round-Ups, Branding and Drives, each subdivided into narrower categories which in turn might consist of dozens of file cards. The twenty-eighth card under Old Western Cattle Trail, a subdivision of Drives, under the major subject The Cattle Trade, reads as follows:

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OLD WESTERN CATTLE TRAIL 28 Adams ARKANSAS RIVER. The ford of the old trail crossed this river about a mile above the present city of Dodge. Stage of water was at this instance easily fordable and there was no trouble getting the herd over. Chuck wagon went down stream and crossed the bridge opposite the town. This was the first bridge they had seen on the whole drive. Camped for the night on . . .

Visualize more than 17,000 file cards like this and you see why all the events in the background of Mulford’s books, the ranch life, the cattle drives, the poker games, the trail lore, the firearms expertise, are described with such meticulous accuracy. Correctness in factual detail was Mulford’s proudest boast as a writer, and he worked prodigiously hard to attain it.

In his earliest tales he wasn’t so painstaking but was content to work on the basis of casual reading and the recollections of friends. In one of them, he said, “I had Hopalong tell who was firing a gun at night by the sound of the clicks. He recognized the gun as a Colt single-action. I even wrote it, separating the intervals by dashes. I got a letter soon as the book was published, advising me caustically to listen to the clicks sometime. I did and I was way off.” The embarrassed young author resolved “never to record as a fact any item that I couldn’t check.”

Mulford’s card-index system resembles a monumentally complex statute and seems to reflect not only his bureaucratic mind but also his years of civil-service association with lawyers and judges. But it wasn’t the only index he prepared for personal use. Early in his adult life he adopted the habit of copying down noteworthy quotations from his general reading (largely newspapers and French writers) on sheets of onionskin paper ruled into rectangular boxes. These would be marked with symbols indicating their subjects, such as Ambition, Drinking, Enemy, Fool, Husband, Love, Marriage, Men, Optimist, Pride, Religion, Society and Women. In this form he preserved all sorts of genially cynical observations in the French manner and an assortment of truly awful one-liners. “You can feel a Panama hat yet it is never felt.” “Sometimes the state of matrimony has no capital.” “Girls who pine for husbands should spruce up a bit.” “Lawyers delight in lengthy briefs.” “No, Maude, dear, the stamp of approval is not to be obtained at the post-office.” “A woman will forgive a man anything but his failure to admire her.” Fortunately for his readers, he used very little of this material in his fiction.

Like thousands of intelligent young men and women in the late nineteenth century, Mulford was profoundly affected by Darwin’s theories of evolution through natural selection, and found the Darwinian vision of nature as a vast and violent panorama hopelessly at odds with traditional Christian teaching. However intense the battle of ideas and values may have been, naturalism won an early victory. Throughout his adult life Mulford considered himself a pagan and an unbeliever. His youthful obsession with muscle-building may have been rooted in ON THE PAGE , ON THE SCREEN

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An older Mulford checking gun, his elaborate card index files behind him.

Darwinian beliefs, the desire to make himself a stronger animal, more fit for the struggle of living. As a writer he found ways to integrate his views on philosophy and religion into the fabric of his fiction.

It was Darwin, and the social Darwinian thinkers like Herbert Spencer, and the documents of nineteenth-century paganism like the Fitzgerald translation of Omar Khayyam, that shaped Mulford’s vision of the Western hero. Although the background and interstitial events of his novels come from history, the people of his world are not at all like the workaday cowboys who actually lived in the West. Their ancestors are the brawling, larger-than-life heroes of the Greek epics, the Arthurian legends and Dumas. Their spiritual home, that mythical Texas ranch known as the Bar-20 which was so real to Mulford that he drew a detailed map of the spread and kept it among his prized possessions, is a sort of Camelot West, an idealized government-that-governs-least, the focus of free men’s loyalty to the death.

Its men are good pagans one and all, uncorrupted by formal religion but imbued with natural piety, invested with the qualities of Achilles, Lancelot and d’Artagnan, standing together in good times and bad, one for all and all for one, through days of backbreaking labor in burning sun and seething storm, through hours of roughhousing and practical jokes and the exchange of elaborate insults.

Like the epic heroes from whom they descend, they have an incredible capacity for suffering multiple wounds in battle, ignoring them and fighting on. They are wild, boyish, undisciplined, full of sass-and-vinegar, Nature’s Noblemen to the core.

They make the reader want to be among them, playing squire to these knights of the frontier.

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Well-known illustrator Frank Schoonover’s vision of Hopalong Cassidy, probably very close to Mulford’s concept of his hero.

Besides the accuracy of his backgrounds and the wild energy of his community of protagonists, Mulford offers the crowning gift of scope. His fictional universe is a vast saga of more than two dozen interlocking novels, written over a third of a century, in which the main characters go adventuring, procreate, grow old and see their natural or symbolic children enter the saga as adults and have their own adventures. A bit player in an early exploit can become a key figure fifteen or twenty years later and fade back into a minor role ten years after that. In his saga the ambience of the West evolves from the stink of cattle and horses and unwashed men in squalid little trail towns to the comfort of clean beds in hotels where one can order fine meals and whiskeys. The saga of the Bar-20 is a bit like Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga played out in a less polite and far more violent society. Readers who care for none of these finer points and crave nothing but action will find that Mulford at his best was one of the most talented action-scene writers the Western novel has produced.

Those who know the names of the Bar-20 characters from the later Hopalong Cassidy movies know nothing of Mulford’s people except their names. Cassidy at the beginning of Mulford’s first book is a tough-talking, red-thatched, tobaccospitting young man of 23—Mulford’s age the year most of the first Bar-20 stories appeared in Outing Magazine—and looking not in the least like William Boyd.

ON THE PAGE , ON THE SCREEN

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He’s in the bunkhouse, gobbling dinner and swapping insults with foreman Buck Peters and fellow ranch hands Johnny Nelson, Red Connors, Skinny Thompson, Lanky Smith, Pete Wilson and Billy Williams. The first word he is heard to speak is “Gu—,” which is Mulford’s version of “Good” spoken by a man through a mouthful of beef. Before the end of the scene Cassidy is in the middle of a food fight with his pals that to the modern reader must look like something from an Animal House movie. Welcome to the world that Mulford made! Sanitized movie cowboys keep out!

The first three chapters of Bar-20 stem from “The Fight at Buckskin” (Outing, December 1905) and tell of a daylong battle in a forsaken little Texas town. It begins when 18-year-old Jimmy Price, the Bar-20’s youngest puncher, is shot to death in Cowan’s saloon by Shorty Jones of the rival C 80 ranch. By day’s end many Bar-20 men including Cassidy are wounded, but Shorty and almost a dozen other C 80 hands are dead and the score is settled.

In Chapters IV and V, taken from “The Vagrant Sioux” (Outing, April 1906), the Bar-20 men make bets about whether a drunken Indian can ride a wild pinto.

The alcoholic warrior gets even for being bucked into a horse trough by joining some renegade redmen who ambush and severely wound Bar-20’s Johnny Nelson.

Cassidy and the rest of the hands chase the Indians into the wilderness and kill every one of them, although again many Bar-20 men including Cassidy and Buck Peters are wounded.

The next two chapters come from “Trials of a Peaceful Puncher” (Outing, May 1906) and tell how, after recovering from his wounds, Hopalong takes temporary leave from the Bar-20 and rides off in search of excitement, getting into trouble wherever he goes, thanks mainly to his habit of shooting up a saloon whenever someone makes an insulting remark about his limp. Eventually Buck Peters and Red Connors catch up with Cassidy and join him on his travels. In Albuquerque they encounter Thirsty Jones and his brothers, who shoot down Cassidy’s friend Sheriff Harris. Hopalong then kills Thirsty in a gun duel, getting wounded yet again in the process, while Buck and Red dispose of the remaining Jones brothers.

Cassidy is alone again in Chapter VIII, “Hopalong Keeps His Word” (Outing, June 1906). He visits Mexico to see his old girlfriend Carmencita and discovers that she’s gotten fat and wrinkled and is married to Manuel, whose brother Cassidy had killed on an earlier trip below the border. Manuel’s lust for revenge leads to a gunfight in the local cantina where several Mexicans are killed. Cassidy beats a hasty retreat back to the States, but on hearing that the Mexicans have put a $500 bounty on his head, he returns and cuts cards with the sheriff to determine whether he’ll surrender or go free. Guess who wins the cut.

In the next chapters, based on “The Advent of McAllister” (Outing, July 1906), we learn that most of the Bar-20 hands have gone off to stake claims in the Black Hills gold rush. Cassidy, Buck Peters, Red Connors and Buck’s old pal Frenchy McAllister go hunting for replacements. In Buckskin they get into a poker game at

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Cowan’s saloon with some hands who’ve quit the O-Bar-O to prospect for gold and, after winning all the others’ money, offer jobs at the Bar-20 which the losers eagerly accept.

In Chapter XI, “Holding the Claim” (Outing, August 1906), Cassidy stakes his own claim in the Black Hills but is instantly accosted by a gang of toughs who insist that the site is theirs. He prepares his cabin for a long siege and digs a trench outside so that the toughs can’t roll fire barrels downhill and burn him out. The gang attacks but Cassidy single-handedly drives them back and kills most of them.

Buck Peters, Red Connors and other Bar-20 men arrive in time for the tail end of the fight.

The next four chapters come from “Cassidy at Cactus” (Outing, December 1906). Cassidy and his pals split up and start to drift homeward after failing to strike gold. One morning, in the town of Cactus Spring, Hopalong and Red Connors find their horses missing from the municipal corral and replaced by two better steeds. Cassidy learns that the substitute horses belong to Slim Travennes, captain of the local vigilantes, who bears an old grudge against him and whom Cassidy suspects of having switched the animals in a plot to have him and Red hanged as horse thieves. They get the drop on the plotters, force Travennes to lead them to the hiding place of their own mounts, and hastily leave Cactus Springs but return with the rest of the Bar-20 crew and burn the town to the ground.

The following seven chapters Mulford expanded from “Roping a Rustler” (Outing, May 1907). Slippery Trendley has organized a large band of rustlers who plague the Bar-20 and its neighbors. The cattlemen form an alliance to stop the raids and send for gunfighters from all over the West, among them Buck Peters’ old friend Frenchy McAllister, whose wife Trendley had murdered twenty years before. Cassidy, Frenchy and Red Connors trail the rustlers across the desert and are trapped in a sandstorm that they barely survive. They split up, with Cassidy hunting along the Panhandle and locating the gang’s hideout. Word is sent back to the Bar-20 and an army of cowhands rides out to attack the camp, killing most of the rustlers and summarily hanging the survivors except one. Trendley is turned over to Frenchy, who avenges his wife’s murder in an unseen but no doubt painful manner.

In the last three chapters, which apparently never appeared in short story form, Cassidy and his friends return the stolen cattle to their owners and go off to the rodeo in the town of Muddy Wells. On the trail Hopalong meets a lovely young woman who claims to be from the East and seems intensely attracted to him.

Having bet heavily that Cassidy will win the rodeo’s shooting contest, Buck and Red connive to separate him from the woman before she causes him to lose interest in marksmanship. Their scheme fails, but a friendly hotel clerk tips Cassidy that the woman is not an Easterner but an expert at enticing gullible cowhands to spend all their money on her. Gunman Tex Ewalt, who has come to town for the rodeo, enters the shooting contest opposite Cassidy in hopes of “accidentally” killing him in revenge for an earlier set-to, but Hopalong’s display of ON THE PAGE , ON THE SCREEN

13

marksmanship so dazzles Ewalt that he slinks away in frustration. After the action and emotion of the Trendley chapters it’s an anticlimactic conclusion to say the least, but then Mulford never did have much of a sense of structure.

In mid-December 1906, about seven months after Bar-20 was published in book form, Mulford again set up shop in the Kohler house in Flatbush and began work on his first genuine novel, The Orphan. He finished the 80,000-word manuscript near the end of June 1907, but even before all the typing was completed he’d been mailing the work to Outing in chunks. The company quickly accepted the novel and published it on February 21, 1908, with four illustrations in color by Allen True, 399 action-crammed pages priced at $1.50. Mulford affectionately dedicated the book to his mother.

The Orphan, a 25-year-old outlaw with a $5,000 price on his head, makes camp one night near the town of Ford Station when two avaricious sheepherders stumble upon him and decide to kill him for the reward. He guns down one of them and the wounded survivor reports the death as cold-blooded murder, compelling county sheriff Jim Shields to go after the youth. The Orphan is tracked across parched terrain for days on end, then comes across trail signs left by the scout for an Apache war party and rearranges them so that the warriors will have a head-on encounter with the unknown pursuer. Then a second war party shows up, forcing outlaw and lawman into an uneasy truce as they wipe out the hostiles.

Being in combat together engenders a deep respect in each man for the other, and Shields agrees to return to Ford Station empty-handed. Several weeks later, learning that the punchers of the Cross Bar 8 are out to lynch the Orphan for having killed one of their own in a card game dispute, a still grateful Shields warns foreman Sneed that he’ll shoot anyone who tries.

Meanwhile the Orphan has halted the stagecoach on its run between Ford Station and Sagetown but steals nothing except half of genial driver Bill Howland’s smoking tobacco. At the Sagetown railroad depot Howland picks up three women passengers who turn out to be Shields’ young sisters Helen and Mary and their older chaperone. Apaches attack the coach on its way back to Ford Station but the Orphan rides into the action with guns ablaze and suffers a head wound as he and Howland wipe out the Indians. Paragons of Victorian womanhood that they are, the Shields sisters tenderly treat his injury. Helen uses her breast pin to secure the bandage around his head, an unsubtle hint that despite his outlaw reputation she’s smitten.

No sooner has the young badman ridden away than a Cross Bar 8 lynching party approaches the coach. Sheriff Shields shows up, faces down the men and greets his sisters. Pursued by the Cross Bar 8 mob, the Orphan spots the surviving Apaches in the distance, takes cover, and gleefully allows punchers and warriors to collide in a battle that leaves all the white men slaughtered. Now the Orphan declares war on the Cross Bar 8, shooting up the ranch buildings every night, chasing the Mexican cook out of the territory, wounding punchers from ambush,

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burning outbuildings, killing cattle on the range. Sheriff Shields sets up stakeouts to trap the Orphan, who is warned by Bill Howland. Instead of making another raid on the Cross Bar 8, he visits Helen at the sheriff ’s house and tells her about his lonely and friendless life, even though his encounters with Shields, Howland and Helen herself are clearly beginning to improve his view of human nature.

After several peaceful weeks, Tex Wilson and other Cross Bar 8 punchers get back at Bill Howland for having helped the Orphan by stopping his coach and beating him. They’re about to lynch him when Sheriff Shields and the Orphan get the drop on them. A bloodied but unbowed Howland knocks out each Cross Bar 8 man in turn, and the Orphan vows to shoot Wilson on sight the next time they meet. Suddenly Wilson starts trembling all over, recognizing the Orphan as the son of a rancher he’d lynched fifteen years before.

Resolving to help the young outlaw start over, Shields gets him a job on the Star C ranch. The Orphan’s ripening friendship with the other hands gives Mulford the excuse for a few chapters of insult humor. Weeks later, Shields tells Helen what he’s learned about the Orphan’s past: that his name is Gordon and that his reputation as an outlaw stems from his vendetta against the men who had lynched his father in Texas. Mrs. Shields invites the entire Star C outfit to Sunday dinner. The lovingly described feast of chicken, mashed potatoes, turnips, dressing and gravy, stewed corn and tomatoes, bread and jelly and sweet cider marks the Orphan’s reentry into the human community. Shyly he asks to keep Helen’s breast pin and she agrees, provided he promises never to shoot another man except in self-defense.

Sheriff Shields decides to help along the Orphan’s relationship with his sister by buying the A-Y ranch and hiring him as foreman. A month later the Cross Bar 8 is again shot up at night, but the Orphan convinces Sneed that this time it’s the work of Tex Wilson, hoping to trick the foreman into gunning for the young exbadman. Wilson sets up an ambush but the Orphan captures him, at long last recognizes him as the man who lynched his father and, after making him tremble for five minutes, shoots him down. Helen forgives him after learning why he broke his promise and we close with the good-hearted outlaw and the ministering angel clearly on their way to the altar.

The Orphan is not one of the Mulford novels that have withstood the ravages of time. Loosely structured, dripping with Victorian sentimentality amid the action scenes and frontier lore, dotted with casual racism—even the dedicated Mulfordphile misses little by ignoring it. Mulford revised and republished it many years later but never integrated the book into the saga that was his life’s work.

On June 26, 1907, he started to plan the first genuine Bar-20 novel, Hopalong Cassidy, and on October 7 he began writing in the Brooklyn house where he was then living. Progress was anything but smooth. After completing 36,000 words he junked them and started over, wrote another 40,000 words, then scrapped them too. He made a third start on February 8, 1908 and, after finishing 30,000 words, put the manuscript aside to allow time for the abortive earlier drafts to be ON THE PAGE , ON THE SCREEN

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forgotten. In May he returned to the novel, found the writing a pleasure and labored over the book for several more months, completing it in late March of 1909.

On April 14 he sent the top copy of the typescript to the publishing house of Doubleday Page and on May 4 he mailed the carbon to Century, which sent it back six days later. Mulford then mailed the carbon to A.C. McClurg & Co. In due course the mail brought him a doubly pleasant surprise: both Doubleday and McClurg wanted his novel. Since Doubleday demanded substantial changes and McClurg was willing to publish the book as it stood, Mulford went with the latter house, signing a contract on June 28. It was the first of many agreements between Mulford and McClurg over the next dozen years.

Hopalong Cassidy is one of the longest and loosest novels in the saga, 392 pages sprawling with character, incident and background, overflowing with large-scale action scenes and intimate character studies, unobtrusively sketched socioeconomic background, romance, vengeance, poetic justice and a hugely bigoted picture of Mexicans—an element that may reflect Mulford’s own prejudices, or a realistic portrait of the views of Texas cattlemen of the time, or some of both.

Jim Meeker and his daughter Mary have acquired the H 2 ranch adjoining the Bar-20. In southwest Texas each rancher grazes his cattle only on his own property, but Meeker, following the open-range practices of Montana where he came from, lets his cattle wander freely onto others’ land, creating tension with Bar-20’s Buck Peters. Shaw, the head of a rustling ring headquartered on impregnable Thunder Mesa, and Antonio, Meeker’s ruthless and greedy broncobuster, form a conspiracy to foment a range war between the two ranches as a screen for their cattle stealing activities.

After Buck forbids Meeker to graze H 2 cattle on Bar-20 range, Meeker advises Mary never to ride on his adversary’s land. She disobeys him and meets Bar-20’s top hand, young Hopalong Cassidy. The two feel a strong mutual attraction and meet quietly several times, although Jim Meeker becomes furious when he learns of the budding romance.

Buck Peters and the other ranchers form a committee to patrol the range looking for rustlers. While Cassidy and his pal Johnny Nelson are on patrol they catch Antonio grazing H 2 cattle on Bar-20 range. Antonio appears to be following Meeker’s orders but actually he’s implementing his own scheme to cause trouble between the two ranches. Cassidy has words with Antonio—including such gems as “You coffee-colored half-breed of a Greaser, I’ve a mind to stop you right now”—after which he lashes the wily Mexican across the face with his quirt and drives him off swearing revenge. When Antonio tells a false version of the incident at the H 2, Meeker goes out to confront Cassidy but is forced to back down thanks to the presence of Johnny Nelson. Meanwhile Shaw and his gang have been stealing cattle from both the Bar-20 and the H 2 and re-branding them with their own mark, the HQQ, back on Thunder Mesa.

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Dust jacket to first edition

Finally Buck Peters visits the H 2 and tries to settle his differences peaceably with Meeker, warning him that if range war breaks out only the rustlers will benefit. Meeker refuses to listen and directs his men to drive an H 2 herd up to but not across the boundary line between the ranches. With orders to hold the line against the H 2 herd, Cassidy deploys Bar-20’s Pete Wilson to guard a strategically located line house overlooking the boundary. Meeker uses his daughter, who wants to prevent violence at all costs, as bait to lure Pete out of the line house. While Antonio and some other H 2 men create a diversion by driving the herd across the line and provoking the Bar-20 men to resist, Mary rides up to the line house and pretends to be having trouble with her horse, tricking Pete into coming outdoors so that H 2’s Doc Riley can capture the site. Seeing that he’s been conned, Pete takes Mary prisoner and fires into the air for help. Cassidy rides over with some Bar-20 men and gallantly releases Mary. There follows a gun battle with the H 2 men, during which Jim Meeker is injured when his horse is shot out from under him. With Meeker as his hostage, Cassidy forces Doc Riley to surrender the line house and the H 2 hands slink back to their ranch in defeat.

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While Meeker is recovering from his wounds, he happens to catch Antonio prowling around without good reason one night and begins to suspect that the Mexican is in league with the rustlers. Realizing that he’s been exposed, Antonio flees to Thunder Mesa like the coward he is. The next day during a rainstorm, Cassidy and Red Connors find a Bar-20 dam sabotaged, repair the damage on the spot, and discover one of Antonio’s coat buttons near the scene. Now Cassidy too realizes who’s behind the range war. Then he comes upon a stray cow wearing the HQQ brand, realizes that the brand is a perfect cover for cattle stolen from both the Bar-20 and the H 2, and rides off to tell Meeker. On the way he encounters Juan, an H 2 hand and colleague of Antonio’s, finds a rustler’s running iron hidden in the Mexican’s saddle gear, and shoots him dead after one more torrent of ethnic insults. Meanwhile Curley, another H 2 puncher, catches Antonio on the trail with stolen cattle but Antonio murders Curley in cold blood. Doc Riley, Curley’s best friend, finds the body and swears revenge on Antonio.

Now that everyone realizes Antonio has been conspiring with the rustlers to keep the Bar-20 and the H 2 at war, Peters and Meeker launch a joint effort to wipe out the cattle thieves. The trail of the most recently stolen cattle leads Cassidy and Red Connors to the vicinity of Thunder Mesa and skirmishes with rustler

Cover to first edition, Fall 1910

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