6
saddlebag dispatches
O
VER THE YEARS, I’VE read a lot of Westerns, and I’ve listened to a lot of Westerns via audio books. I’ve also watched a lot of Westerns made for the big screen. And, with the rise of Western specific cable channels, I’ve caught up with a lot of TV Westerns I missed when I was younger. As a result, I’ve obviously developed a list of my favorite Western wordslingers and Western movies and Western TV shows, but the biggest surprise to me is the number of potentially great Western writers and their sagebrush tales still in my
to-be-read pile and the large number of potentially great Western movies and TV shows I still have to view. It’s clear, I have a long way to go before I run out of Wild West entertainment. Last month, I discovered Gordon D Shirreffs’s Manhunter series as well as his excellent novel Rio Bravo, which was made into the forgettable 1957 B movie Oregon Passage. In preparation for the SixGuns On The Radio episode of the Six-Gun Justice Podcast, I was enraptured by a fistful of old time western radio shows I’d never heard before. And for the first time, I watched Major Dundee starring Charlton Heston and Sergeant Rutledge—with an amazing performance from Woody Strode—both top notch films in my opinion. For me, reading, watching, and listening to Westerns is not only a great pleasure but always seems to lead to another genre discovery, another rabbit hole of curiosity to fall down in pursuit of the interconnected threads of western tales. What led me to the film Sergeant Rutledge was the novelization of the film by James Warner Bellah (who co-wrote the screenplay). What led me to Bellah’s novelization of Sergeant Rutledge were his brilliant cavalry related tales (originally published in The Saturday
JAMES WARNER BELLAH, THE AUTHOR AND SCREENWRITER WHO INSPIRED DIRECTOR JOHN FORD’S FAMOUS TRILOGY OF CAVALRY FILMS. FORT APACHE, SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON, AND RIO GRANDE.
