THE TRUTH ABOUT THE WILD WEST

Radio Record, 1 July 1938, Page 32

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE WILD WEST

HAVE often wondered-and so, probably, have you-how false a picture of life in the "Wild West" the average "Wild West" author paints. Were the hombres nearly as tough as Clarence Mulford had them -or was it all a part of a Big Spoof Literary. to keep children, young and old, amused after homework? If it was, then surely the spoof was as big. as anything of its kind since Sir John Mandeville claimed to be the Rosita Forbes of the Thirteenth Century. There are few people these days who doubt that hell really popped in the mining towns of the south and west 50 years ago. . To my satisfaction, at least, Dan de Lara Hughes, latest of the autobiographic horde, has cleared up the whole _ question very nicely. If you are to believe him, the Wild West was just as ‘rough and tough as it was paintedbut not half so concentrated. If, as I did, you once read ‘"westerns" to while away a wet; week-end-and then gave up the habit when the palate could no longer respond to heroes who shot seven rustlers dead Without refilling the six-gun-treaid Dan’s "South From Tombstone." I think at last he tells in it the truth about cowboys and rustlers. Here and there the truth may be a little highlycoloured, but it all helps in making an old-timer’s reminiscences read even more excitingly than Mulford at his most imaginative. "South From Tombstone" is g good book by any standards; good because it has what so few books of its kind have to tell-the story of a brisklymoving, red-blooded life. Hughes was brought up by his mother in the wildest town on the Mexican Border-a town,in which it was not uncommon to find two or three corpses every morning to mark a shooting in the saloons the night before. Hig youth was reckless. He took part in the exploits of a gang. that nearly ‘murdered the schoolmaster, carried the paybag through wild country over-run by Indians and bandits. fought cattle rustlers and train robbers, was tricked ‘into "peonage’-mediaeval slavery‘in pre-reyolution Mexico; prospected for minerals in the unexplored Sierras: and found, in the end, that civilisation was more ruthless and less clean, when once it came, than ever lawlessness had been. The whole strange, sometimes bru-

_. tal, story bears the stamp of authentic: ity, and has a peculiar, dual "personality." "You can read it ag a rattling good shocker at one sitting, or ponder on it as ironic history. . Its climaxa brief,- contemptuous picture of the modern West-is deeply moving. It left me with a-grave doubt. I didn’t know whether to prefer the Navajo _ Indians or Roosevelt’s civil servants! "South From Tombstone," by Dan de Lara Hughes (Methven, London). Our copy from the publishers.