Sixgun Justice by Paul Bishop

OVER 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 Six- Guns 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 Evening Post) and later reprinted in the collection, Reveille (Fawcett/Gold Medal, 1962). What led me to Reveille was finding out at least two of the stories in Reveille—“Big Hunt” and “Command,” along with a third story, “War Party” reprinted in Massacre (Lion Books, 1950)—formed the basis for John Ford’s movie She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, which I was led to while researching a cavalry related feature for yet another weekly podcast episode. You get the idea....

JAMES WARNER BELLAH, THE AUTHOR AND SCREENWRITER WHOINSPIRED DIRECTOR JOHN FORD’S FAMOUS TRILOGY OF CAVALRY FILMS.

Having discovered James Warner Bellah’s work in both screenplays and novels, he quickly registered on my personal scale alongside Clair Huffaker. If you don’t know Huffaker, you should. Many of his lightning-fast novels were made into successful films such as War Wagon, Seven Ways To Sundown, and Rio Conchos, for which he also wrote the screenplays. His final western novel, The Cowboy and the Cossack, is perhaps the greatest non-traditional/ traditional Western ever written—and anyone who has read it will totally understand that seemingly contradictory statement.

Like Huffaker, Bellah was equally at home writing screenplays or novels. Unlike Huffaker, however, Bellah did much of his finest work in short stories. His tales appeared regularly in The Saturday Evening Post, the distant and condescending second cousin twice removed to the pulps.

It was Bellah’s terse Saturday Evening Post stories of Indian fighting cavalry life that brought him to the attention of director John Ford. The honest heroics and moral dilemmas were well-suited to Ford’s style of filmmaking, providing the heart and soul of his iconic cavalry trilogy—Fort Apache, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, Rio Bravo—which continue to influence the modern perception of the United States Cavalry during the Indian Wars.

According to Bellah, his story “Massacre,” on which John Ford’s Fort Apache was based, was inspired by the cavalry stand with Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn and the Fetterman Massacre, in which a small group of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors (including Crazy Horse) lured a detachment of U.S. cavalry under the command of Captain William J. Fetterman into an ambush—killing all 81 soldiers.

Ford looked to three of Bellah’s stories—“Big Hunt,” “War Party,” and “Command”—when making She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, which is arguably a bit disjointed because of it. The stories speculate on cavalry actions in the wake of the massacre at Little Big Horn. However, as with almost all of Bellah’s work, while history underlies the action, it is the psychology of the characters and their relationships which the focus strips bare.

Bellah’s “Mission With No Record” provided the basis for the third movie in Ford’s cavalry trilogy, Rio Grande. The original short story was loosely based on another historical incident—the campaign expedition of the 4th Cavalry Regiment under Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie in Mexico in 1873.

Bellah would go on to write an unsuccessful 1958 TV pilot titled Command based on She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, which starred Everett Sloane and Ben Cooper in the roles of Captain Brittles and Lieutenant Cohill. Despite its title, Command, the pilot had nothing to do with the 1954 movie Command, which was based on Bellah’s novel, Rear Guard.

After Ford’s cavalry trilogy, the director and writer continued to work together. In 1960, they came together for the aforementioned film, Sergeant Rutledge. Bellah co-wrote the screenplay for Sergeant Rutledge with Willis Goldbeck. Two years later, they would team up again to write the script for the Ford directed The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The movie was based on a 1953 short story by Dorothy M. Johnson. However, as with Sergeant Rutledge, Bellah would go on to novelize his screenplay for The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which expanded on the original short story.

Bellah served in both WWI and WWII. In World War I, he enlisted in the Canadian Army and served as a pilot in the 117th Squadron of Great Britain’s Royal Flying Corps. During World War II, he served in the United States Army, leaving the service with the rank of Colonel. In between the wars he worked as a journalist for the New York Post.

Bellah was the author of 19 novels, including The Valiant Virginian, which was adapted for the 1961 NBC television series, The Americans. His short story “Spanish Man’s Grave” has been mentioned as one of the finest American Western stories ever written. But his work wasn’t without controversy. In his last script, A Thunder of Drums—another cavalry themed story—his depiction of the Apache is considered realistic by some and vehemently protested by others.

Through his powerful short stories and his work with John Ford, Bellah was christened the Kipling of the U.S. Cavalry. At the time the Saturday Evening Post and his Hollywood scriptwriting paid far better than the pulps of the day or the burgeoning paperback original market. As a result, his output was mostly novella length or designed for short serials. This is somewhat ironic because had he written for the lesser paying but collectable pulps, instead of the high-paying slicks and movies, he would most likely be much better known, and his work would still likley be in print.

But as I discovered, Bellah is an amazing Western writer whose work is worth the effort to seek out. And while you do so, I’ll head down another rabbit hole in search of another new-to-me Western genre discovery.

—Paul Bishop is a novelist, screenwriter, and western genre enthusiast, as well as the co-host of the Six-Gun Justice Podcast, which is available on all major streaming platforms or on the podcast website: www.sixgunjustice.