An Inexpensive Howard Appearance
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.



















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