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Ernest Haycox (1899–1950) was born in Portland, Oregon. He served with the Army on the Mexican border in 1916 and in France during the First World War, then studied journalism at the University of Oregon, selling his first stories while still a student. Through the 1920s he wrote for the pulps, above all Adventure and Short Stories, before moving up to Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post. His “Stage to Lordsburg” (1937) became John Ford’s Stagecoach, and he is remembered as the writer who brought character and realism to the Western.
This collection gathers eleven of his early stories so far, from 1921 to 1930. Beside the Westerns he is known for, they include a run of stories about the American Revolution, written for Adventure in the mid-1920s.
On this page: The American Revolution · Joe Breedlove · Standalone Stories
Stories are listed in order of publication. Each year is the date of the magazine issue transcribed. All are short stories.
Ordinary soldiers in the war for independence
Five stories from Adventure, each set at a real turning point of the war: Bunker Hill, the Battle of Long Island, Germantown, and the winter at Valley Forge. Haycox tells them from the ranks, through a Tory doctor who changes sides, a young officer sent behind British lines, and sergeants and farmers with more on their minds than glory. There are no recurring characters, so they can be read in any order.
A drifting cowboy and his cantankerous partner
Joe Breedlove drifts south through hard country, settling other people’s trouble with quick thinking more often than a quick gun. In the first story he meets Indigo Bowers, a hot-tempered rider on the run, and the two become partners. In the second, Indigo wanders into a thirty-year feud between two rival towns, and a peace banquet ends in flying furniture. Read them in order.
Border towns, card games, and frontier justice
The two earliest are from Overland Monthly in 1921: an old corporal watches a young recruit fall in love on the Mexican border in 1916, and three town officials settle a woman’s fate over their weekly poker game. The later two are hard-edged Westerns, one about a sheepherder who sets two dangerous men against each other, the other about a miner caught in a town run by a brutal marshal.