We’re experiencing a warm and rainy interval here right now, which is a blessed change.

Not changed is the climate in the library, where everybody wears a sweater or a jacket all the time (myself included, though my office is generally a little better than the circulation room).

So I called the maintenance guy and told him, “The thermostat says 70°, but no way this is 70°.”

He comes in with a fancy electronic thermometer, and gets 70° for a read-out. Everywhere he checked.

I don’t comprehend this. I keep my house at 68° when I’m in residence, and my house is far, far more comfortable than the library.

I blame trolls.

I’ve never been a big reader of western novels. I went through a very pleasant Louis L’Amour stage, in which I read pretty much his entire canon (and learned a lot of geography), but no other western writer ever earned my amour.

One kind of western that does tend to raise my interest, though, is the well-researched novel based on actual historical events. Loren Estleman’s Bloody Season is a good example, but I believe that Johnny D. Boggs’ Northfield is even better.

I grabbed it immediately when I saw it, in particular because it’s about one of the very few famous events (the 1876 attempted robbery of the First National Bank of Northfield by the James and Younger gang) to happen in the area where I grew up. I found it an impressive recreation (though the author persisted in spelling Watonwan County wrong. But that was the only consistent error I found).

You know those three-dimensional images they produce now, where cameras capture a scene from many different points of view, and the computer re-creates the scene in three-dimensional space? Northfield is kind of like that. Each chapter is written from the perspective of a different character, and there’s a fair amount of overlap, so that you get different angles on each stage of the story. Boggs never falters in creating interesting, believable, human narrators for these chapters, characters you will laugh at, admire, despise and weep for, in turns.

I think that this strategy sacrifices something in terms of reader engagement—I like to latch onto a character and stay with him to the end of the ride—but it gains in comprehensiveness. If Boggs is taking sides, it’s hard to tell how. I think the outlaws come out worst in terms of sympathy, but you can’t say the Minnesotans are romanticized or whitewashed.

There’s a very small Christian story thread in the plot, too, which I appreciated.

I don’t think the curious history buff can do better in terms of understanding whole Northfield debacle than reading this book.

When the Jameses and Youngers fled Northfield in a rain of bullets, they “lit a shuck” for Dundas, just down the road. My grandfather was briefly town constable of Dundas once upon a time, about fifty years later. He spent most of his life in Faribault, where the Youngers had stood trial and were sentenced to life in the state prison.

One of the posse members who shot it out with the Youngers at Hanska Slough was Dr. Overholt, who moved to Kenyon, my home town, the next year, and spent the rest of his life there. As he was an avid Prohibitionist, my great-grandfather must have known him.

Tenuous connections, but I do love running across familiar names and places in a book. So Northfield might mean less to you.

But I still think you’ll enjoy it a lot.

Some strong language and violence. Not for the youngest readers, but OK for serious-minded teens, I’d say.



Addendum: The paperback edition’s cover is clearly a picture intended for a book about the Earps and the OK Corral. What’s with that?