Sometimes it can be rather disheartening to be a collector of Robert E. Howard—especially if you’re first coming to him now. Buying a copy of Always Comes Evening will keep you eating soup for a month, and attempting to snag a Weird Tales with a Conan story in it will possibly mean giving up rights to your first-born. But there is one forty-five year old Howard appearance that will only set you back about five bucks—the “Apparition of Josiah Wilbarger” from the September 1967 issue of The West magazine.

1967, as I’ve mentioned before, was a magical year for me. The Lancer Conan books were taking up a lot of my reading time but I was still collecting other things—namely boxing magazines, books on archaeology and ancient civilizations, and periodicals that dealt with old West history. Western fiction bored me back then, usually still does, but true western articles have always hovered around the top of my reading list. So I remember picking up my copy of The West back in ’67; I remember that magazine distinctly, not because of the Robert E. Howard article but because the writing on the Bob Day cover listed “The Last Days of John Wesley Hardin” as one of the essays within.

Back then I read everything I could on Wes Hardin and that article was no exception. The author of the piece was Leon C. Metz, and that name should be very familiar to old West readers—he’s authored biographies on Pat Garrett, Dallas Stoudenmire, Hardin, and the man who shot Hardin in the back, John Selman.

I read Howard’s article, of course, but I wasn’t sure if this was the same guy who wrote the Conan stories—his name and the bloody style of writing matched but I only knew Howard from the Lancer series, so I wasn’t entirely sure. It wasn’t until I picked up a copy of Glenn Lord’s The Last Celt that I knew for certain; it’s listed in the bibliography section.

The “Apparition of Josiah Wilbarger” is a hard-as-nails true story. Wilbarger, along with four companions, is camped near present-day Austin when his group is set upon by Indians, and while two of the five escape, fleeing for their lives, Wilbarger and the other two are struck down by bullets and arrows and left for dead.

The Indians then get down to the grisly business of taking scalps and Howard describes the lifting of Wilbarger’s hair with relish. “He felt the keen edge of the scalping knife slice through his skin, and…he felt the knife circle his head above the ears…then his head was almost wrenched from his body as his tormentor ripped the scalp away with tremendous force.” By some miracle Wilbarger survives his ordeal and crawls a quarter of a mile away from the carnage and collapses beneath a post-oak tree. He’s saved because of a dream—but I’ll not spoil the rest of the story, except to add it has a supernatural ending.

A ghost story article by Robert E. Howard and an essay on John Wesley Hardin, and it all costs—usually—less than ten dollars; how can you go wrong? The article has been reprinted in the collections The Black Stranger and The End of the Trail under the title “The Strange Case of Josiah Wilbarger.” Check it out.

The last article in this series (Part Three) dealt at some length with the Texas feuds which followed the Civil War and grew out of it. Robert E. Howard saw them as manifestations of pride and independence, to a degree, anyway. I’ve quoted a story of his, “The Valley of the Lost” which has for its protagonist a Texan feudist, John Reynolds. The story describes Texan feuds as “short, fierce and appallingly bloody.” REH made a similar comment in a letter of March 1933 to August Derleth.

Texas feuds were short and bloody. They did not, as in Kentucky, drag on through the generations. The Sutton-Taylor, and the Lee-Peacock feuds were probably the most famous – the latter the more obscure because it was fought in the thickets and river bottoms of eastern Texas. It last[ed] from 1867 to 1871, during which time more men were killed than in the whole course of the famous Hatfield-McCoy feud of Kentucky.

As the 1870s drew to a close, the circumstances that had created the great cattle drives were changing. In 1869 a Chicago meat packer named Hammond had shipped beef to Boston in an air-cooled freight car. Some years later, the true refrigerated car was designed at the orders of Gustavus Franklin Swift, by an engineer named Andrew Chase. Chase produced a chilled car better insulated than its predecessors. Instead of being placed in compartments at the base or ends of the car, the ice was installed from the top, and the cold air produced sank downward.

(The major railroads all rejected the concept. They weren’t afraid that Chase’s car would fail to perform as he claimed. They were afraid that it would succeed. They had big investments in the traditional cars for transporting live cattle, and the holding pens in their rail yards, which would be superseded if refrigerated transport became a big new thing. It did. Swift created his own line, made his first run in 1878, and the bigger railroads missed their chance.)

The railroads were changing the map as well as their methods. Among the new cattle boomtowns was Ogallala, on the Platte River in Nebraska. The Indian agencies in northern Nebraska had to have beef in large quantities, to supply the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail reservations. The Bosler brothers held the contracts to do that, and made big profits. By the mid-1870s, too, the farmers were moving west in large numbers, disrupting the classic cattle trails – which had been established in the first place to avoid the complaints of the farmers. There had been a financial panic in 1873, but by 1875 the ranges along the Platte were opening up. More than 60,000 Texas cattle were driven to Ogallala that season, and in 1876 the number was much higher.

Part of Ogallala’s prosperity came about because Dodge City was still thriving as a cattle centre. The Western Trail to Dodge had largely replaced the older Chisholm Trail, and the younger, stronger beasts could continue from Dodge to Ogallala. The route through northern Kansas and south-western Nebraska was the driest part of the trip, especially the last thirty miles. But thirst was the worst problem. The Ogallala and Brule branches of the Sioux nation had been moved to reservations in northern Nebraska. The drovers didn’t have to fight off Red Cloud’s braves any longer. General Crook’s campaign of 1876 finished the last Sioux resistance, and the discovery of gold in the Black Hills of Dakota caused a rush. The price of Ogallala beef rose hysterically high, the usual result of any outbreak of gold fever. The Native Americans got shafted yet again as a result. For the Texan trail crews, though, it was good news.

Back in Texas itself, things were changing, and not necessarily for the better. The big cattlemen, the stereotyped SOBs who trampled on the struggling smaller operators, whether cowboys or farmers, were banding together in organizations to control grazing and water rights. They discouraged rustlers by hanging them high. (Rustlers, of course, were those the big men defined as rustlers.) Range rights became more fragile, grass and water scarcer.

By the 1880s “big business devouring the little” had progressed much further. Eastern and British capital was a factor in creating many a Texas cattle baron. The legendary Charles Goodnight had been a hired cowhand in his early days, and he became a big rancher in partnership with the Anglo-Irish businessman John Adair. Another western legend, Shanghai Pierce, had also been a hired hand, but before he died was boss of a million acres. How? In association with the Kountze Brothers, back east bankers and financiers. Trail driver Henry Campbell found backing from the Chicago banker Colonel Britton, which is how the Matador ranch was established. David Montejano’s book, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986, describes the situation in a succinct paragraph.

Success and failure, good and bad luck, the judicious investment and the foolish one combined to separate cowboys into two groups; those who owned cattle and fenced pastures and those who hired themselves out to tend the cattle and fences. The distinction became especially pronounced once the cattle boom attracted investors from “back east” and from London. English syndicates as well as American concerns made cattle and range investments representing millions of dollars. By the late 1880s British ranching interests controlled one of every four or five acres in the Panhandle.

REH knew about it too, and wasn’t delighted by the situation. Besides being a patriotic Texan, he was powerfully aware of his Irish descent. He saw this foreign investment – by the English particularly — as a new form of the never-to-be-sufficiently-cursed absentee landlord system. He let off steam about it in July 1933, in one of his letters to Lovecraft.

The big ranches fell into the hands of Eastern and British corporations. The owners knew nothing about local conditions and cared less. They wanted money to be made from beef, and some of them didn’t care how it was made. An unsavory breed sprang up – gunmen, hired by the owners and managers to protect their interests. Which is the least civilized: a man who goes out with a gun and openly fights for his property, or a man who hires a thug to do his shooting for him?

Read the rest of this entry »

Readers of Report on a Writing Man and/or “So Far the Poet . . .”—collections of writings by Tevis Clyde Smith—will remember the incomplete “Gods in Arcady.” This article appeared in an issue of The Junto, probably early-to-mid 1928, and describes a trip that Smith, Truett Vinson, and Bob Howard made to a ranch house (probably Smith’s uncle’s place on the outskirts of Brownwood). The piece describes the trio’s shenanigans as they “ramble in the woods” and, the next morning, cook breakfast and hike to some nearby caves. During a cloudburst, they stash their clothes and camera in a cave and “prance about naked in the shower of rain.” As published in the two volumes mentioned above, the piece ends mid-sentence: “In a moment the deluge is over, and I crawl back into the caves after our pants and the camera. I hand Truett his pants, and he turns around to put them on,”—and that’s it.

I’m happy to report that we now know what happened next. The following stray page was found in Glenn Lord’s papers this weekend:

[. . .] but before he can do so, the click of the camera startles him. We all laugh boisterously. I have taken an artistic view of his posterior.
We then take a number of boxing pictures, as well as several “Afghan photos.” The cliff serves as the Khyber Pass, and Bob and Truett convert their shirts into a stylish form of Oriental headdress.
Then we repair to the caves once more, and chuckle loudly over several articles in The Debunker. We see that one preacher accuses the Evolution Theory as being the cause of the World War. This is a new accusation to us, so we wonder what in hell is going to happen next.
On the way back to the ranch house, I recite several poems by Sassoon, Bob follows, chanting one of Jack London’s verses. We then reach the structure, eat dinner, and put up the dishes.
Somebody recalls the bath which Vic McLaglen took in The Loves of Carmen. (Not the bath which he attempted to take in the horse trough, but the one which he really did take.) So all of us remove our clothes, and douse each other with bucketfuls of water. We make wry faces as each bucketful descends on our sensitive skins, for the water is rather cold, and a whole bucketful tossed upon a naked hide will almost bring one to his knees from the shock. But it is enjoyable at that, and all of us douse bucketful after bucketful upon each other.
After a brisk rubdown, we dress, and listen to Truett as he reads to us from The Road to Buenos Aires. After hearing the best parts of the book, we lock the door once more, and tool homeward.

A few comments:

The photography session described above is reminiscent of another photo shoot that we recently learned about.

Information about The Loves of Carmen (1927) is here.

The Debunker was a journal published by E. Haldeman-Julius, of Little Blue Book fame, from the early 1920s into the 1930s. Its articles “ranged from atheistic, darwinist, to yellow journalism revealing white collar and governmental criminality and lies” (Violet Books). Both Booth Mooney and Harold Preece had articles published therein in the late 1920s.

The Road to Buenos Aires was written by French writer and investigative journalist Albert Londres and published in multiple languages in 1927. The book reports on the trafficking of French and Polish women to Buenos Aires, bound for prostitution. It is a vivid account of the trafficking, part factual reporting and part creative writing. The book cover reads as follows:

Paralleling the disclosures contained in the suppressed League of Nations report on the white slave traffic, this independent work is important and timely. Its matter is sensational but it is written in a remarkable spirit of detachment.
Only at the end, after the sorry tale has been told, and told in the manner of one man relating to another a series of strange experiences, does the author make his challenge.
It is a challenge to our whole Western civilization, to justice and humanity, to the moral sanitation of the world.

Would have been right up Bob Howard’s alley.

Word comes from Rob that Adventures in Science Fantasy has arrived in Cross Plains and the Project Pride folks will begin shipping the pre-orders any day now. This volume collects all of Howard’s science fiction stories including his most well know sci-fi yarn, Almuric. Of course Howard places his mark on this genre by knocking the central theme of sci-fi that science is the solution on it keister as author Mark Stackpole notes in his introduction.

Howard’s stories do not adhere to one definition of science fiction, which holds that science must be part of the solution of any problem. In fact, in most of these stories, the application of science is the genesis of the problem, and man’s heroic spirit is the solution.

In addition to Almuric, another story of note in this volume is “The People of the Black Coast.” Last July Brian wrote a two part piece on this tale of giant intelligent crabs menacing the protagonist and his female companion on a deserted South Pacific island. Needless to say, this is one yarn the faint hearted should avoid. It is amazing how Howard could take relatively mundane creatures (spider, worm, snake, etc.) and turn them into giant, terrifying monsters.

The most interesting thing about these stories is while they are a departure from Howard’s usual fare, these yarns are still Howard and he serves enough fast paced action and thrills to satisfy everyone’s appetite – unless, of course, you are a giant intelligent crab.

If you have not ordered your copy yet, fear not because copies are still available. Click here for ordering details.

Mere seconds after reading Rob’s post about his discovery of the newest Howard collectible I was frantically pounding my keyboard, searching the Internet, trying to locate a copy of Dime Sports, June 1936. To my great delight, and relief, I came across one within ten minutes, and a couple of clicks later it was in my shopping cart, and I was back to breathing normally.

Once I received the pulp I immediately turned to “The Score Board” and read Howard’s letter. I also thought it might be a fun task to read the stories and then report back to this blog with a complete summary of the tales so I hurriedly sat down and started to do just that—for about fifteen minutes. I realize that my life is boring, but it’s not that boring.

I mean this as no rude criticism of the contents of this pulp, or to the writers involved, but I’m just not a reader of sports fiction—usually. Hand me a biography of James J. Jeffries, Babe Ruth, or Red Grange, and I’ll be interested; hand me a collection of pulp baseball—or boxing—stories and I’m probably not going to be too excited. Of course there are exceptions—sports fiction by Jim Tully or Jack London are sure things, as, of course, is anything written by Howard.

Dime Sports, at least this issue, is a mixed bag of stories dealing with the sports of derby racing, track, crew, tennis, (tennis?), baseball and boxing. While I had no compunction to read any of these tales, I did find a few gems in the factual department.

First article I came across, “He Fought On,” dealt with Tom Molyneaux and his epic battles with Tom Cribb. All Howard fans should remember that it’s the spirit of Molyneaux that comes to Ace Jessel’s aid in “The Apparition in the Prize Ring” which originally saw print in the April 1929 issue of Ghost Stories.

Another boxing article, “The Bigger They Are—“, by John D. Swain, is a nifty short piece about the punching power of Bob Fitzsimmons. Also, Frederick G. Lieb writes of an interview he had with Joe Cronin, the manager of the Boston Red Sox, and this was very enjoyable. Lieb and Cronin have a discussion about how the Yankees are trying to “buy” the pennant—which I found quite interesting. Baseball fans still ponder this same question every time the season is getting underway; perhaps some things about baseball haven’t changed after all.

One other article might be useful in this old pulp—“Jiu-Jitsu Self Defense” by C. B. Colby. It’s a series of four drawings that show, step by step, how to knock the snot out of some guy that’s getting a little too tough for his own good. I’m thinking that Jiu-Jitsu might come in pretty handy if I ever catch some bumpkin trying to make off with parts of my Howard collection. Don’t ever mess with a Howard collector and his pulps.

Six weeks from today the faithful will gather early in the morning outside the Howard House Museum and the adjacent Pavilion in Cross Plans, Texas. While many will wake bleary eyed and hung-over or tired from a long trip, a stop by Jean’s Feed Barn will leave them fortified after a hearty breakfast and ready for Howard Days to begin.

This year’s Guest of Honor is world renowned Howard scholar Charles Hoffman. Charles is best known for a having written the Robert E. Howard: Starmont Reader’s Guide 35 with Marc Cerasini. He and Marc also edited the first two issues of the journal Cromlech, which was the very first periodical publication devoted to serious scholarship and criticism of REH. Additionally, Charles also wrote, “Robert E. Howard: Twentieth-Century Mythmaker” essay for the first volume of The Best of Robert E. Howard and numerous essays for The Dark Man and other Howard journals, not to mention contributions to his blog. Here is an excerpt from Rusty Burke’s post at the REHupa website announcing Charles as this year’s GOH:

Chuck is one of the most formidable essayists in Howard studies. His “Conan the Existentialist,” which appeared in Amra 61 (March 1974), was the opening salvo of what has come to be called “the new criticism” of Howard, criticism that took him seriously as a writer whose work had depth and substance along with the excitement and adventure. Prior to that essay, most Howard “criticism” consisted of book reviews (though some, like those of Schuyler Miller and Fritz Leiber, showed real insight) or introductions by fans who failed to take him seriously (John D. Clark famously proclaiming, “Don’t look for hidden philosophical meanings or intellectual puzzles in these yarns–they aren’t there.”). Chuck showed that Howard could not only provide rousing action, but rewarded closer reading as well. Patrice Louinet says, “‘Conan the Existentialist’ is the essay that made me want to study and write about Howard. It was a pure revelation.”

In addition to Charles, there are two full days chock full of panels, tours, swap meets and the Barbarian Festival. Below is a summary secedule of events:

Howard Days 2012 Summary Schedule

Friday June 8th

8:30 – 9 am: Coffee and donuts at the Pavilion, compliments of Project Pride

9 am – 4 pm: Robert E. Howard House Museum open to the public

9 am – 4 pm: REH Postal Cancellation at Cross Plains Post Office

9 am – 11 am: Bus Tour of Cross Plains

10 am – 5 pm: Cross Plains Public Library open

11:00: PANEL: Glenn Lord Tribute

Noon: Lunch hosted by Project Pride. Donations Welcome.

11:00 am to 4 pm: Pavilion available for REH items Swap Meet

1:00 pm: PANEL: Conan the Existentialist

2:30 pm: PANEL: Conan’s Birthday!

5:30 – 6:30: Silent Auction items available for viewing and bidding at Banquet site

6:30: Robert E. Howard Celebration Banquet and Silent Auction at the Baptist Church Family Life Center. (1 block north of the Library on Main St.)

Following the Banquet and Silent Auction: The Third Annual Robert E. Howard Foundation Awards at the Baptist Church Family Life Center.

9:00 pm PANEL: Fists at the Ice House

Afterward there will be some extemporaneous REH Poetry Reading at the Pavilion dedicated to Glenn Lord.

Saturday June 9th

9 am – 4 pm: Robert E. Howard House Museum open to the public.

9 am – 4 pm: Barbarian Festival held this year at Treadway Park, 3 blocks west of REH House

10 am – 3 pm: Cross Plains Public Library open

10:30 am PANEL: REH at the Gates of Academia

Noon to 4 pm: Pavilion available for REH items Swap Meet

Noon: The Robert E. Howard Foundation Legacy Circle Members Luncheon.

Lunch & Festival Activities at your leisure during the day

2:00 pm PANEL: The Illustrated Conan

3:30 pm PANEL:What’s Up with REH? at the Pavilion

5 pm: Sunset BBQ at the Caddo Peak Ranch

Please Note: The Robert E. Howard House Museum will be open again this year on Thursday (June 7th) from 2-4 pm. No docents on duty.

For a detailed schedule and everything you wanted to know about Howard Days, mosey on over to the REHupa website.

If you can’t make it to Howard Days this year, you can still contribate to the cause. Project Pride needs donations of Howard material for the Silent Auction. Typical donations include books, magazines, old pulps, comics, memorabilia, fanzines or other publications. Other Howard items such as t-shirts, bookmarks, wood carvings, original artwork or limited edition prints or posters are also great items to donate to the auction. Instead of selling your items on eBay, you can donate them to the Silent Auction and know the money will be supporting a worthy cause, plus it counts as a donation, so it’s tax deductible. Please send your donated items to:

Project Pride
P.O. Box 534
Cross Plains, TX 76443
ATTN: Howard Days Silent Auction

Make sure your name and address information is included since all donors are listed in a place of honor in the Howard Days Banquet program booklet.

The 16th issue of The Definitive Robert E. Howard Journal is currently in the works. I had planned to have the issue ready in time for Howard Days, however five weeks ago I suffered a serious injury from which I am still recovering. (This is why I have been mostly absent from this blog in recent weeks.) While it is doubtful the issue will be ready in time for a Howard Days debut, it will appear later in the summer.

Issue #16 features a stellar line-up of rare Howard fiction, articles and essays by leading Howard scholars and fantastic artwork by a group of talented artists who are also die hard Howard fans. Contents include: two pieces of hard-to-find fiction by Robert E. Howard, articles and essays by Dave Hardy, Brian Leno, Patrice Louinet, Rob Roehm and Jeff Shanks, with artwork by David Burton, Bill Cavalier, Bob Covington, Nathan Furman, Clayton Hinkle, Jim Ordolis, Richard Pace, Terry Plavet and Michael L. Peters.

Among the contributors listed is Dave Hardy, who has been having success recently with his fiction writing efforts. One of his novels, Crazy Greta, was just published as a digital book and several other stories are in the pipeline. For news on Dave’s upcoming fiction works, visit his Fire and Sword blog. As for Dave’s contribution to the new issue, he has written an in-depth analysis of Howard’s “Wild Water” titled “When the Dam Breaks: Violence and Wild Water.” Here are the opening paragraphs:

The entirety of Robert E. Howard’s fiction could perhaps be seen as an extended meditation on violence. The protagonists of Howard’s stories were gunslingers, boxers, and swordsmen. Conan is practically a synonym for violence. Violence is encoded in the name of the genre that Howard did so much to create: Sword and Sorcery. Note the sword comes first. Even Howard’s comedic characters are prone to slapstick brawling that would give pause to those other Howards, Moe and Curly.

Perhaps one might consider the corpus of Howard’s work an endorsement of violence. If that is the point of view one brings to Howard’s stories, then such a conclusion is understandable. A willingness to question the text of Howard’s tales yields a different conclusion. Resolving a plot with violence is not the same as resolving a problem with violence.

The essay is illustrated by Nathan Furman.

Check this blog during the coming weeks for more details, pricing, publication date and pre-ordering information.

Robert E. Howard knew and wrote a good deal about the blood feuds of his native Texas, and the old-time range wars that had been fought even before the Civil War. They became still more bitter and intense afterwards. Howard wrote to H.P. Lovecraft in January 1931:

I hope to some day write a history of the Southwest that will seem alive and human to the readers, not the dry and musty stuff one generally finds in chronicles. To me the annals of the land pulse with blood and life, but whether I can ever transfer this life from my mind to paper, is a question. It will be years, at least. Much of the vivid history of the Southwest is lost forever and the breed growing up now looks toward, and apes, the East, caring nothing at all about the traditions and history of the land in which they live.

Lovecraft at times became almost supercilious in his attitude to the violent frontier history of the Lone Star State. Well, much of it had been shockingly bloody, but so had much of England’s history, and Lovecraft admired England and the English to the point of affecting to regret the American Revolution. I’m not one to romanticize gunfights, but the solid fact is that in the old west there were very few activities that were free of physical danger, least of all the cowboy’s. He might meet armed cow thieves or fence cutters any day of his working life. He was understandably not willing to “ride the river” with a pardner who hadn’t shown that he was ready to fight. If he encountered rustlers, Comanches, or crooked lawmen who declared they were going to cut his herd on the excuse that they believed it had been stolen – well, he was better off with a hard-drinking braggart and bully beside him than someone who was yellow.

REH expressed it this way, in the same letter quoted above:

Western feuds have generally been fought over land – cattle – sordid commercial wrangles in outward appearance, but with the underlying reasons of stubborn independent pride. More men have been killed in Texas over fences than for any other one reason. When two men own each thousands of acres, it seems foolish for them to shoot each other to death because one insisted on setting his fence forward a foot or so, doesnt it? But its the old story of ‘the principle of the thing’. And after all, a man cant be blamed for defending what he thinks is his, or taking what he thinks is his. Say you and I own adjoining ranches and I claim that the fences werent run according to the survey. I claim a strip of your land four feet wide and half a mile long. You are just as certain that it dont belong to me. I come in the night and set the fence up four feet. You are patient and not quarrelsome, so you come back the next night and set the fence back where it was. I come again and start moving that fence once more. Well, there’s nothing left for you to do but take your Winchester and start throwing lead in my direction and you’re quite right, too. A man has a right to defend his property. Its not the money value or the grazing value of the land; its the sturdy resolve of the Anglo-Saxon or the Scotch-Irish-American not to be bullied out of his natural rights. And when both contestants are of the same breed, and both absolutely certain they’re right, well, by-standers might as well start ducking, because there’s only one way to settle a row like that, and if its taken to court, it wont do any real good, but merely make feeling more bitter on each side, whichever way the decision goes.

As he observed, land and cattle were the usual cause. Not always, though, and often not the direct cause. The Texas cattle barons of the early 1870s who cursed the Kansas legislators and their quarantine rules had no idea what other problems they were soon to face. Not because of rustlers, Comanches, northern politicians or cowhand unions. Because of one man by the name of Joseph Glidden, tinkering with an apparently harmless coffee mill.

Glidden was a prairie farmer in Illinois. He didn’t invent barbed wire – that was a man named Michael Kelly – but Glidden improved it until it was truly practical. He perfected the barbs, and the means of attaching them to double-strand wire, on a small scale at first, experimenting with a coffee mill. Then he designed machines that could economically mass-produce the wire. He applied for and received a patent in 1874. Other inventors challenged his application in court, but Glidden’s design won by November – not only through his lawyer, but also through its comparative efficiency and the number of sales orders.

Barbed wire across their ranges was about as welcome to the big ranchers as infidels eating pork in Mecca to the faithful.

The clashes between cattlemen and sheepherders on the big ranges had begun at about this time. Like Glidden, the sheepherders had to fight their cases in court as part of the Sheep Wars, and cattlemen had more money. A court case being a contest to see who can afford the best lawyer, the cattlemen mostly won.

Conflict between the two was in fact less intense and violent in Texas than in Wyoming and Colorado – but Texas did have the distinction of hosting one of the earliest such clashes. Shortly before barbed wire was patented, the famous Charles Goodnight’s cowhands met with incursions of sheepmen on that part of Goodnight’s range which comprised the north fork of the Canadian River, in the Panhandle. The clashes were made worse by ethnic prejudice; the sheepherders were Mexicans, and the Texans still remembered the Alamo. In the end, Don Casimiro Romero and Goodnight came to an agreement; sheep would graze on one side of the Canadian River Valley, cattle on the other. That dispute was settled peacefully.

It was in 1875, also, that the Hoodoo War broke out. Or the Mason County War, after the locale in central Texas. That wasn’t settled peacefully.

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During my Spring Break this year, Lou Ann Lord sent Paradox Entertainment seven large boxes of paperwork from the Glenn Lord files. Paradox is located in Beverly Hills—or “Down Below” as we call everything south of here; “here” being the High Desert of Southern California. With such a large cache of material so close, I used up three of my seven days going back and forth to help sort the stash. Two of the boxes were full of assorted papers with no rhyme or reason as to organization: newspaper clippings, photocopies of magazine pages, Glenn’s retypes of REH typescripts, notes on foreign REH editions, copies of Glenn’s various efforts for a variety of amateur press associations, etc. A big mess. The other boxes were comparatively neat and organized and consisted primarily of correspondence. This was separated into file-folders, each labeled with either someone’s name—“Price, E. Hoffmann”—or the dates the letters were received—“1979 / January—June.”

Paradox was, of course, most interested in the contracts; I had a different focus: here was the history of everything, letters from the agents, Kittie West and Oscar J. Friend, and Harold Preece and Tevis Clyde Smith and . . . So after Nikko, Paradox’s intern, had gone through a box and made notes on its contents, I went through it and pulled various items for scanning or photographing. I’d originally planned on just scanning everything, but it quickly became obvious that I just didn’t have enough time to do that. I did, however, look at every single piece of paper in all seven boxes. I quickly skimmed each sheet and made my determination: copy or don’t copy. So the Foundation will have Roehm’s version of what was most important in the boxes. I’m sure others wouldn’t agree with everything I selected, and some will whine at what I left out, but the good news is that it will all be available at a Texas University at some point down the road, at least that’s the plan.

Anyway, I’d work at Paradox for four or five hours, then collect the items I thought most important and take them home to scan (their scanner isn’t very good). I’d spend the rest of the day scanning what I had, plus most of the next day, and then return to do it all over again the following day. I found out early that I wasn’t going to be able to scan everything while making the detailed notes about what each scan actually was—I just didn’t have enough time—so now I’m sitting here with a pile of images that need to be dated and sorted. I have no idea how long that’s going to take.

I also discovered that I sometimes lack focus. Several times, something from the stacks would send me off looking for more information. Case in point: a Glenn-typed document beginning “Name: Robert Ervin Howard” and ending “Dime Sports Magazine / June 1936.” The document appeared to be a transcription of an unknown “about the author” letter that Howard had sent to that pulp around the time that “Iron-Jaw” was published (April 1936). Why had we never heard of this? Maybe, I thought, someone had sent it to Glenn and he discovered it was a fake; or maybe he could never verify it was the real deal; or maybe it was just lost in the stacks.

No one I know has that particular issue, so I started making phone calls and sending emails to various places with pulp collections. This took time away from scanning, but I really wanted to know about this letter. Two days later, one of my contacts came through and we now have a new, verified Howard letter for the correspondence collection.

The Score Board

[Dime Sports Magazine—June 1936]

So many of you fans seemed to like Robert E. Howard’s fight novelette “Iron-Jaw,” in the April issue, that we asked Mr. Howard to step up and introduce himself. Here’s what he says:

Name: Robert Ervin Howard

Ancestry: Scotch-Irish, old American pioneer stock.

Born: Peaster, Texas—which is about 45 miles west of Fort Worth—in the early years of this century.

Occupation for the past several years: writing. Occupations before that: picking cotton, working in grocery store, smashing baggage, working in tailor shop, working in dry-goods store, toting rod for geologist, working in drug-store, secretary in law office, ditto in gas office, jerking soda in oil-boom-town drug store, public stenographer, working in automobile agency, writing oil news for newspapers of Texas and Oklahoma.

Have sold many yarns to various magazines: sports, westerns, detectives, mysteries and adventures.

About the first half of my life was spent in various parts of West, East and South Texas and western Oklahoma, mostly following land booms and railroad booms. As a child I crossed the South Plains, not in a covered wagon indeed, but in a buggy, in what was about the last big colonization movement in Texas—the settlement of the Great Plains. (I did go down the Nueces in a covered wagon.) I also saw the beginning of the development of the Lower Rio Grande Valley. The last half of my life has been lived in the oil-belt towns of Central West Texas.

My personal appearance doesn’t matter, I suppose, but in case anybody’s interested I stand a little less than six feet, weigh a hundred and ninety-five pounds, like fried liver and onions washed down with lager, and my favorite pastime is holding down a ring-side seat and watching a good fight-card.

And that’s just one of the items that we’ve found in Glenn’s collection. Members of the REH Foundation can look forward to lots of previously unknown material in upcoming Newsletters.

This is the first post for 2012 of the online version of Nemedian Dispatches. This feature previously appeared in the print journal and is now on the blog. On a quarterly basis, Nemedian Dispatches will highlight new and upcoming appearances of Howard’s fiction in print, as well as Howard in other types of media.

In Print:

Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard
In this revised and expanded second edition of  author Mark Finn’s Howard biography, many of those old, outdated myths that have grown up around Howard and his fictional creations. Armed with twenty-five years of research and a wealth of historical documents, Finn paints a very different picture from the one that millions of fans of Conan have been sold throughout the years. This item is nearly sold out.

Lone Scout of Letters
Now available from Roehm’s Room Press, Lone Scout of Letters, a volume that  collects a wide variety of material written by REH”s friend, Herbert Klatt. This includes 12 letters to Tevis Clyde Smith and 1 to Howard. Also included is a sampling of Klatt’s work from various tribe and farm papers, letters outlining the planned memorial collection, and an extensive appendix containing all of the known material written by Truett Vinson, including Lone Scout items, letters, and articles from The Junto.

Days of High Adventure
Subtitled “A Selection of the Works of Robert E. Howard,” this book’s webpage states it is not yet ready for publication, but it is available for the Kindle. This collection presents a nice sampling of Howard’s fantasy, adventure and weird menace yarns. El Borak, Black Vulmea, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn and King Kull are all represented in this volume. Edited by Gavin Chappel, with a cover by Margaret Brundage.

Sword & Fantasy #10
This new issue from publisher James Van Hise features an article on Virgil Finlay by Sam Moskowitz, a portfolio of the 1953 Kelly Freas art from the Tops in Science Fiction reprint of “Lorelei Of The Red Mist” (just the art, not the story), a five page reprint of the James Blish anti-A. Merritt reviews from the 1957 Fantasy Times, a facsimile reprint of Donald A. Wandrei’s 1926 Overland Monthly article on Clark Ashton Smith “The Emperor of Dreams,” a 2 page article written by H.P. Lovecraft in 1929 discussing his own horror stories “In The Vault,” “The Hound” and “The Colour Out of Space,” reprints of the 1933 and 1934 letters by Forrest Ackerman and others regarding whether the fantasy stories of Clark Ashton Smith belong in the science fiction mag, Wonder Stories (even H.P. Lovecraft weighed in on the debate), a tribute to artist James Cawthorn (1929-2008), and more. Full color front and back covers by Mahlon Fawcett.

Audio Books:

El Borak and Other Desert Adventures
This is an audio version of the Del Rey book of the same name that collects Howard’s adventure stories set in the Middle East and featuring Francis Xavier Gordon, known as “El Borak,” Kirby O’Donnell and Steve Clarney. This trio of hard-fighting Americans, civilized men with more than a touch of the primordial in their veins, are heroes on a grand scale and their stories are a hallmark of great adventure. This audio book from Audible.com is narrated by Michael McConnohie; running time: 25 hours and 17 minutes.

Coming Soon:

Marvel Tales
Lance Thingmaker, the publisher of the complete collection of The Fantasy Fan, is back with a hardback book that collects the five issue run of William Crawford’s Marvel Tales. Each issue was chock full of fantasy from a who’s who of Weird Tales writers, with REH’s “The Garden of Fear” appearing in the second issue. A website for Lance’s books is coming soon, in the meantime, to order, contact the publisher. The price of the book is $50.00 (includes US postage), but if you mention the TGR Blog, you can save $10.00 and pay only $40.00 (includes US postage). The book is scheduled for shipping mid-May, with pre-orders shipping earlier.

Adventures in Science Fantasy
Pre-orders are now being accepted for the REH Foundation Press’ collection of Howard’s science fiction stories, which should ship around the first of May. The hardcover book will have a color cover by Mark Schultz and an introduction by Mike Stackpole who penned the Conan the Barbarian movie novelization.

Skullcrusher: Selected Weird Fiction, Volume One
Slated for September publication, Skullcrusher is the first volume of a two-volume collection of classic fantasy stories by REH. The stories in this collection feature all of Howard’s most famous creations — Conan, King Kull, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn — alongside others such as Cormac Mac Art, James Allison, Red Sonya, and Cormac Fitzgeoffrey — in a definitive anthology of sword and sorcery, weird adventure, and occult horror in the vein of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.

The Sword & Sorcery Anthology
Coming in June, a big collection of sword & sorcery stories from the world’s best  fantasy authors. In addition to Howard’s “Tower of the Elephant,” Jack Vance, C.L. Moore, Fritz Leiber, Charles Saunders, Karl Edward Wagner, David Drake and more writers are represented with some of their best yarns. An original story from Michael Shea rounds out this essential anthology. Edited by David G. Hartwell and Jacob Weisman.

Kamose the Magician – New Tales from Keith Taylor
Keith has just written three “Kamose the Magician” short stories  and is now working on a couple of novels. One is about Kamose and one is a “murder-at-a-tournament” medieval whodunnit set in Salisbury, England, in the year 1352. Looks like he is poised for a big comeback.