According to an anecdote, E. Z. C. Judson, better known as Ned Buntline, traveled west to Fort McPherson, Nebraska, to meet the famous pistoleer, Wild Bill Hickok, about whom he wished to write dime novels. He found him in his natural environment (a saloon), and rushed up to him, crying, “There’s my man! I want you!” Hickok pulled a revolver on him and told him to be out of town in 24 hours.

Perhaps it’s the memory of Wild Bill’s nickel-plated Colt Navy .36 that accounts for the jaundiced view of the man we find in the deservedly forgotten little novel, Wild Bill’s Last Trail.

Ned Buntline

I downloaded it to read on my Kindle because I’m a Wild Bill buff, and although I’ve read much about Buntline over the years (whatever they tell you in the movies, he never gave Wyatt Earp a long-barreled revolver) but had never savored the quality of his actual prose.

Well, it’s quality prose, in the sense that pretentiousness is a quality, and floridity is a quality too.

“…there’s a shadow as cold as ice on my soul! I’ve never felt right since I pulled on that red-haired Texan at Abilene, in Kansas. You remember, for you was there. It was kill or get killed, you know, and when I let him have his ticket for a six-foot lot of ground he gave one shriek—it rings in my years yet. He spoke but one word— ‘Sister!’ Yet that word has never left my ears, sleeping or waking, from that time to this.”

I must admit that, although I expected the purple prose and the improbable action, one aspect of the book surprised me. I had expected “white hats” and “black hats,” one-dimensional good guys and bad guys. But in fact, this is a Wild West where the deer and the ambivalent play. Wild Bill is arguably the real villain, and everybody who wants to kill him (there are many) seems to have a good reason. One sympathetic character—shades of Dances With Wolves—is not only a professional killer, but has made common cause with the Sioux and plans to join Sitting Bull.

The only explanation I can think of for all this is that Ned must have really held a grudge for the Fort McPherson incident. He also finds numerous opportunities to condemn Wild Bill’s drinking (Ned Buntline made a sideline of lecturing on Temperance—utterly hypocritically, as he drank plenty himself),

I might add that the climax manages to be at once melodramatic, historically inaccurate, and confusing. If you can figure it out on the first reading, you’re a better reader than I am.

Not a good book, Wild Bill’s Last Trail is an interesting historical curiosity.