The Internet Source
for Western

Will Henry
[1912-1991]

Born in Kansas City on September 19, 1912, the middle-born of five children of a pioneer oral surgeon and a gifted artist, Henry Wilson Allen graduated from high school and briefly attended college in his hometown. (For his Class of 1930 Southwest High School reunion booklet, he described himself as "the unlovely class avoirdupois dope.") His father's library, which besides medical texts contained books by Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, A. Conan Doyle, Jack London, Talbot Mundy, H. Rider Haggard, and H.G. Wells, Allen said, "set my course."

He began writing at age eleven and sent his first complete work of fiction, a handwritten story, to Liberty Magazine which, he said, "inexplicably turned it down without comment." (Forty-three years later, the story, "now neatly typed up," appeared as "The Ghost Wolf of Thunder Mountain" in the Chilton Press anthology Sons of the Western Frontier.)

Allen left home in 1930, "in the gut of the Dust Bowl Depression," and "wandered the far mesas" from Missouri to Texas, from the Rio Grande to the Snake River of Idaho, working as a mucker, driller and powder man in a Colorado gold mine, as an Indian trading post clerk, gasoline pump-jockey, machineshop swamper, small-town newspaper columnist, and GM assembly-line worker before arriving in California in 1932.

After a period of tending to the polo ponies of Walt Disney, Darryl Zanuck, and Will Rogers, and other menial work, he found a job with MGM as a writer in the short-subjects department, worked there twelve years and compiled fifty screen credits. In 1937 he married "a slim elf of a Busby Berkley studio dancer," Amy Geneva Watson, whose stage name was "Dorothy Hope." Soon after their wedding they moved to the San Fernando Valley "where we lived happily ever after," Allen said.

In 1950, his first novel, No Survivors, was published by Random House under the name "Will Henry" (the name he subsequently preferred above his birth name) and in 1951, his second, Red Blizzard, appeared from Simon & Schuster as written by "Clay Fisher." Each of his first four novels (No Survivors, Red Blizzard, Wolf-Eye, a juvenile Western, and Santa Fe Passage) carried a different imprint: Random House, Simon & Schuster, Julian Messner, and Houghton Mifflin. In this period he was also writing television scripts for "Tales of Well Fargo" and "Zane Grey Theater."

Of his fifty-four books, the best-known are No Survivors (1950), The Tall Men (1954), Who Rides with Wyatt (1955), Yellowstone Kelly (1957), The Crossing (1958), From Where the Sun Now Stands (1960), Mackenna's Gold (1963), The Gates of the Mountains (1963), Alias Butch Cassidy (1967), One More River to Cross (1967), Chiricahua (1972), and I, Tom Horn (1975).

Eight feature films have been made from his books.

He earned five Spur Awards from Western Writers of America, Inc., was the first recipient of the Levi Strauss Saddleman Award, and received the Western Heritage "Wrangler" Award in 1972.

Wonderful news!
Dale L. Walker -- author of Bear Flag Rising and a 2000 Spur Finalist for his short fiction story, "In the Meadow" -- has been chosen as the recipient of the 2000 Owen Wister Award from Western Writers of America. The award is the highest honor bestowed upon a western author, presented for lifelong contributions to the history and literature of the American West.

For the complete story, read Nancy Hamilton's  interesting article in the current online issue of Roundup magazine.

Congratulations, Dale!

Read the RTW Interview with Dale

In 1980, not long after I began my five-year stint as Roundup editor, I wrote to Henry Wilson Allen (Will Henry, Clay Fisher) to solicit an article for the magazine. I had been told by his California writer friends, Thomas Thompson, Bill Cox, and Brian Garfield, that "Hank" was "reclusive" and never attended WWA conventions, although he had been a member almost from the beginning of the organization. They encouraged me to write to him and predicted he would write back.

He wrote back and over the years not only contributed a dozen luminous essays to Roundup but contributed something precious to my life: a friendship that grew into a ten-year correspondence voluminous, especially by today's e-mail notes standard plus a regular Saturday morning phone session, and a 1983 visit with Henry and Dorothy Allen at their home in Encino. (Incidentally, a handful of his oldest friends called him "Hank," a nickname he disliked but countenanced for those few. For all purposes he was "Will Henry," preferred to be addressed as "Will," and so signed his letters. As for "Clay Fisher," which name he employed on twenty of his books, he said the second penname was necessary at the beginning of his career because he was writing Western novels for more than one publisher. Late in his life he expressed the wish that all reprint editions of his books would eventually appear under the name Will Henry.)

I had two advantages at the beginning of the friendship. Will was, he said, "semi-full-bore-retired" from book writing (his last novel, Summer of the Gun, had been published in 1978), and I had read almost all of his books. He expressed amazement that I knew about such novels as The Feleen Brand (one of his rare paperback originals), The North Star, San Juan Hill, and The Seven Men at Mimbres Springs. "So YOU'RE the one who bought them," he said.

He was certain he had been forgotten, called himself "the Snail-Darter of the Western Writing World." His "vanishment" from the memory of the reading public was a fiction he clung to against all contrary evidence while I had fun playing straight-man in the game of Bucking Will Up. I would remind him that Bantam was keeping his major novels in print and had sold 15 million of them since No Survivors appeared in 1950. He would say yes, but in the new PAPERBACK edition of Will Henry's Pillars of the Sky, Bantam had bound in a tear-out coupon advertising a LEATHER-BOUND SET of the works of Will Henry? Noooo, not on your tintype LOUIS L'AMOUR. I'd say okay, but let's not forget that University of Pittsburgh professor Robert L. Gale's full-length book on Will Henry and his work has just been published in the prestigious Twayne U.S. Author Series. He would say that is true, but please remember mine was number 400-something, scheduled to FOLLOW similar treatises on such more NOTABLE literary lights as Adelaide Crapsey, Ruth Suckow, and Albion Tourgee.

When I wrote articles about him in Bloomsbury Review, Far West, Modern Fiction Studies, the El Paso Times, the Rocky Mountain News, and several other periodicals, he wrote touching letters of gratitude for "unwinding my winding sheet" and wondered if I minded playing the role of Watson to his Holmes.

I assured him I didn't mind at all, that I always fancied myself resembling Nigel Bruce anyway. "Oh, sure," he wrote. "And I look like Basil Rathbone? More like George Hayes. You remember 'Gabby'? Rode with Roy?"

He had not published a book in five years when I proposed an omnibus collection of his best short stories and essays. Will Henry's West, published in 1984 by Texas Western Press, he said, "resurrected" him and he wondered what sort of wily subterfuge, blackmail, or "masterly con job" I had employed to get a university press to issue the book.

"Dear Soapy" was the salutation on such letters, the name borrowed from Jefferson Randolph "Soapy" Smith, the nefarious Yukon gold rush confidence man. Will reminded me that my nicknamesake started his career with a street corner bunco game of selling bars of soap, some of which, Smith proclaimed, had $20 and $50 bills inside (none did, of course), and that this original Soapy charged homesick argonauts five dollars to send "telegrams" out of Skagway, this service rendered long before there was a telegraph wire there.

The name, Will said, was quite apropos: Soapy Walker was gulling the public about Willie Henry, "telling everybody that Willie Boy is not only here but the damnedest finest ruins of a writer of the Old American West as ever was."

(I reminded Will that Soapy Smith was shot dead for his efforts; he wrote that he knew it and that I should always keep an eye peeled for skulkers on my backtrail.)

The following excerpts from Will Henry's letters* have no special arrangement other than a chronological one. Selecting the passages was difficult because his letters, often three or four single-spaced pages typed on his venerable Hermes upright, are so quotable at such length. (He wrote quickly and surely, with only a few lines scratched out in ballpoint or X'd over. After-thoughts and postscripts were written longhand on the margins.

Will's end of the correspondence waned in 1989. He had various real illnesses and failing eyesight. I tried not to tax him, insisting, every time I wrote or sent a book or clipping, that he not write back but that we'd take up the matters on the telephone. I'd still get an occasional hand-written letter but mostly we talked on the wire, sometimes an hour at a time, every Saturday morning.

He was a peerless epistolarian (he thanked me for saying that in something I wrote but said he would rather I kept religion out of it). Some of his letters contained what he called "essaylets," the initial writing-down of something he later developed into a Roundup or other magazine article, or a response to an interview question; some letters were autobiographical, filled with Kansas City childhood memories or something that happened to him on the way somewhere. All his letters had something funny in them, something penetrating, acerbic, kindly, self-effacing, memorable; all were filled with heart and character.

March 2, 1981
We must make plans for the Mary Hallock Foote/Albion Tourgee Memorial Comfort Stop and Resting Station....I wonder if the latter was any kin to Perfidious Albion?

Attached, you will find a bio. It may need editing or even suppression. It is entirely bio-degradable.

March 20, 1981
There is nothing in God's world so stuffy as a western writer who takes himself seriously. What we call the West was so full of humor in reality that I myself do not believe the Great American Western can ever be written by an author essentially lacking in humor. And some of the most venerated (not by me) of our heavyweights never wrote a laugh in their lives.

....P.S. Everybody suddenly wants to be the Boris Pasternak of the Purple Sage. Who's going to write the westerns when all the western writers are writing "real" novels?

July 26, 1981
....My next piece for you is titled 'Will Henry and the Indians' and tells my fellow writers how I see the Horseback Indian of the Plains, my particular real AND fictive hero, and why I have romanced him so from No Survivors to The Winter of Mrs. Dorion, my novel-in-work for the past ten years. It's a straight bit, at least for me it is, and might be a welcome change of pace away from hack-biting....If I can remember, I'll stuff this same envelope with the rough-and-only draft and you can sample it for the tipi-smoke and the haunting ordure of dog chips....

I am reminded of a stray quatrain from The Hermit of Sharktooth Shoals (Yukon Jake), in which Jake has had his way on a hidden isle with The Lady That's Known as Lou and is returning her, or what's left of her, to the original owner:

That's about where I rate my various offerings, well, the better of them. You got to aim high.

Makes a man mist all up, don't it?

August 10, 1981
...I'm well aware I suffer the need to copper most of my public bets (books) with protestations of unfitness for the work. But I claim educational immunity. Like the sainted John Griffith Chaney [Jack London], I testify I've had no mentor but myself.... A fellow doesn't need to be smart, only lucky. He can be a semi-vegetable with an I.Q. of 75 and still write fifty books and know how to cook and sew and cut the grass without losing any toes, and fix the toilet, and blow his nose with either hand and, well, you know, the important things.

August 21, 1981
Glad BUTCH [Alias Butch Cassidy] and SHILOH [Journey to Shiloh] reached you safely. The latter is one of my own small private favorites. I also liked the movie, which was sneaked out one dark night from Universal Studios, and sent to Upper Chad and Lower Volta for original release.

October 18, 1981
Can you imagine the day when any western writer will honestly, and honorably, be afforded the same respect and homage and acceptance as a writer in any other known discipline? I simply can't....All the western writer can do is fight the good fight to the best of his gift, never giving up, never admitting publicly what I have just admitted here, going on to the end defending the myth and its magic from the spoilers.

October 28, 1981
...Samurai Westerns? Jesus Mary. All is finally lost.

November 21, 1981
Thanks for the Giles Tippette book, The Bank Robber. Just as good as you said it was. I don't think you better send me any more good writers I am getting depressed....Between these guys and Ben Capps and Elmer Kelton, I am commencing to cogitate on simpler fields. How do you think a book of the best-loved poems of Will Henry/Clay Fisher would go about now?

December 12, 1981
Bless you for your continued support of causes which lesser men would not stoop to conquer. Had you not picked me up out of the gutter of outstanding forgottenness just when you did, and helped me on across the street to that higher curb on the other side, I might still be canvassing the Streets of Laredo seeking to learn whatever happened to Harper Starr. ["Harper Starr" was a pseudonym Will used once, for the story "King Fisher's Road," in the 1962 anthology, Legends and Tales of the Old West].

Have a good Christmas, Patrón.

December 28, 1981
I agree with your high view of San Juan Hill. It is the type of book I think makes for the best in Will Henry. But we are outnumbered. The book never took off. It well might have done so had it been published NOT AS A WESTERN. True perhaps of several other titles of mine. Gates of the Mountains, eh? Death of a Legend. The North Star. From Where the Sun Now Stands. One More River To Cross.

But what the hell?

If you take the money, you take the terms.

And the term was "western."

January 29, 1982
I've wanted to do the Lady and the Cowboy story for twenty years. All of us who write on the old-time West, its codes and honor systems so laughable today, have longed to make just one statement of the life and times of a man, not unlike Tom Horn, who dreams to live and die a free man, a man riding either for El Paso, or whatever obscure cantina, to die in his sweetheart's arms, only to find them occupied.

....Something from the heart, like Pasó Por Aqui. But with range and rage enough to kindle care and affection for the character who is fighting both Time and the River, and who therefore cannot win but WILL win all the same.

I want to make a statement about the indominatability of the human spirit, damn it all. To say something for loneliness and bravery and honor and the simple will, by God, to be a man and to behave as a man, to make a difference to those whose lives his life touches.

This all may sound like blather, or the "rattle of a simple man." Said lout being your friend Will.

February 11, 1982
...I've always had to watch a tendency to get too nifty with my work.

February 19, 1982
I'm Xeroxing the handsome Roundup "Will Henry & the Indians" layout and sending copies to everyone I know who reads, or who can read, people like my veterinarian, my proctologist, furnace man, plumber, mechanic, grandchildren, tree surgeon, Congressman, Senators, Ronnie, the First Nancy, Ed Asner, Jane Fonda, Patty Hearst, Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, Premier Breznev, Eldridge Cleaver, Joshua Nkomo, Mickey Rooney, Idi Amin, Cheryl Ladd, Gordon Shirreffs, the Reverend Khomeini, Pia Zadora, Dear Abby, Armand Hammer, Gentle Ben, Secretary Haig, Fernando Valenzuela, and Harold Macmillan. These may hardly seem like aficionados offhand, but when you are on a roll you do not give up the dice.

March 26, 1982
I remember at Persimmon Hill the year I won [the Western Heritage Award] for Chiricahua and actually was pleased to see my left-hand tablemate was a poet up from the Carmel coast somewhere and my right side partner a person who had authored something nonfiction about the favorite recipes for survival cookery of the Donner Party....Each of these Best Seller threats had a modest little stack of their $1.69 tracts the whiles I disdained them from behind my triple towers of  Chiricahuas at $8.95. I never felt so superior to fellow humankind in my life. Each flanking author sold out within twenty minutes and went back to the motel full of pride and free of prejudice. I, with the late daylight fading and the facility janitor urging me out the doors for lock-up time, crept like a jackal from the lion's kill, my thirty copies of Chiricahua intact in stricken arms, save for one lone copy requested by a little old lady from Okmulgee whose clear choice would have been Louis L'Amour. But she didn't see him anyplace and so would I autograph my book to her grandson who was expiring in the charity ward of Okmulgee General and had expressed as a last wish a signed copy of anything by Louis.... Well, what can a decent man do? Of course she got her copy of Chiricahua, by Louis L'Amour. I also gave her my copy of Listen to the Dew by Lance Cleareye, my Carmel comrade-of-the-pen, which I re-signed "Louis L'Amour" for the gallant old gal of Okmulgee.

June 1, 1982
The American Book Sellers just wound up a four-day Armageddon session down in Anaheim. The news was that there isn't any book business, and it could get worse. Quaker Oats or Gulf Western or I.G. Farben seem to be the decision makers on what sees print today.

....I do wish I was not so old. There is so much to learn.

Funny. We only get interested when we get old. Lord, are you at home today? I would like another chance, please. Put me in a different chute in a different horse and I will ride him, this time all the way to the buzzer.

June 18, 1982
The thing that disturbs me about [a best-selling author] is the character of his readers. The man sells books by the hundreds of thousands to my five or ten or fifteen thousand. His readers are legion, mine are hermits and outlaws and rascals and scofflaws. His readers clamor for his work and order them direct from the publisher, mine encounter my discarded copies on the dank cement floors of men's rooms in blighted areas. We must assume his readers write him in six zero numbers. Mine reach me via ruled notebook paper in stub lead pencil with plenty of spit and sweat-marks joining the otherwise non-existent punctuation. And I suppose we must concede that his faithful are in the main hidalgos, while it is to my certain knowledge that mis coyotes come under the international wire each night.

August 17, 1982
Thanks for the dun for the Foote Memorial, Hallock be thy name. Unfortunately, I am working on a Porno Park and Full Frontally Nude Atari Game Esplanade here in Hollywood. Governor Brown, as Isadora Duncan, is opening the facility later this summer. Do plan to come.

November 16, 1982
I've always romanced the West. I still do. At the heart of it, it's because I love the land before my time upon it.

So I write my little songs, and my little circle of readers/romantics cheer me on, and I guess that's about the way it is going to end. If I had spent more time spreading the buffalo chips and less putting out The Word, I'd be well-off today, instead of just plain off.

February 4, 1983
The Elevation, finally, of Frederick Schiller Faust....Isn't it ironic that this brilliant, this inspired man, is going to be remembered for Destry Rides Again, a slim, outrageous western he would surely have rated close to last in his hundreds of works?

....Imagine what a true creative genius as he must have felt to know he would die, not as Frederick Schiller Faust, noted Man of Letters, but as Max Brand, author of that superlative all-time Best Western Masterpiece Destry Rides Again. I think that is what killed Fred. The battle wound only represented a great man's opportunity to go out with the proper Gotterdammerungian flair.

Rest easy, Old Fred, wherever you are: Woyuonihan!

[Faust was killed at Anzio on May 12, 1944, while serving as a war correspondent for Harper's.]

May 3, 1983
I saw the West early enough in the present century (1930) and when I was young enough (18) to behold it all pristine as a vision not alone larger than life, but hauntingly more precious. History, of course, has consistently been the base of my writing about the West, but the West was something far, and mysteriously more, than simply its history. It was a private world for me. I alone rode it in a time and to a distance known to no other horseman than myself....O, Dear Lord, how it rooted me. The West was for me another space. It lay beyond the normal space that others saw.

July 11, 1983
You could say I misspent my 33 years trying to re-invent the Western Story. Once a butthead, always a busted skull. I am going to quit running into that wall. No wonder I don't feel good.

September 13, 1983 I'm sending you a batch of photos in this mail including the one I believe you said you liked, the leafy and sun-dappled author escaped from his custodial nurse and hiding in the lilacs. I had in fact just stepped in a pile of cocker poo which accounts for the other fact that my expression is worried/querulous and, small wonder, one might add, knowing I got away from the home barefoot.

September 2, 1984
Has it occurred to you that SOAPY WALKER'S WEST would have been a better title? Perhaps something can be done with the paperback. Grateful, too, am I for your sending along the reviews as they come across your desk. I think you sense the running down of my days and are compensating with all you can of good news and assumptions of an infinite future. Good. My fame in hypochondriacal funk proceeds me always. You play a very fine Angel's advocate to this malaise.

Salaam. I touch the brow.

October 30, 1984
One must possess the nature and spirit to write. It takes a particular kind, made up of particular parts. The mind that bridges the real to take refuge in distant, unreal landscapes. The heart that leaps impossibly. The will that resteth not, nor turns aside....

April 14, 1985
I speak of what may be my best generic Western writing, The Feleen Brand. It is a unique book, born one day long ago when I was starving and in my cowardly way permitted Gus Lenniger to sell it to Bantam as an original pb....It is all Texas, pure Texas, and nothing but Big Thicket Texas. By the bye, the original title of the book, nixed by Bantam, was THE WIND IN THE SHINNERY. Ain't that handsome?

August 2, 1985
It's getting so I can't see that damned executive elite type on my old collectable Hermes standard 14 in. Office Model, so switch to this only slightly less ancient Olympia, ditto a cumbersome 14-inch carriage job. Both these glacial machines ought to be shot at my demise and buried with me. Together, with an old Underwood No, 5, they have typed all the Will Henry and Clay Fisher novels. Never a line written by electricity. I mean what you have got here for a friend is an atavism like unto Red Eye of Jack London fame.

January 1, 1986
Will Henry never wrote anything in less than 5,000 words (where 500 would more than do) in his entire life. He takes more lines than that to say hello to his dog every morning.

....I have not been at the cooking sherry again, but I should have been. It is a sorrowful thing to see a great mind coming apart. As it is to witness the whimpering and wabeling of a once proud man, 'Twas brillig and the slivey coves did wimble and grabe beyond the farlig grile. And that is absolutely my last word on the matter. What was the matter anyway?

April 8, 1986
Years ago out at MGM in the Short Department, you know, the old Robert Benchley films, etc., the time came for me to march on my producer and tell him what for in a mean and ferret-eyed manner, at which I was very good, I thought. I stormed into his sanctum w/o knocking, just kicked the ferking halldoor open and strode in accompanied by a cloud of martyrdom and hatred, utterly irresistible. "Listen!" I squeaked. "I am here to tell " He did not glance up from his desktop but kept right on scribbling away. "Later, Allen. Leave the door open when you go."

October 16, 1986
I forgot something in composing my 10th Annual Notice of Intent to Die, copy of which went to you yesterday. Copy? No, it was the original document. Would I send a copy to the man who, nigh single-handedly saved me from extinction? Who pays, IN PRINT no less, touching tributes to Will, a writer of some promise from the Fifties who, like Frost, thought he had miles to go before he dozed off in those woods so lovely, dark and deep?

Thank you again, old Soap. Hopo! Hookahay!

....I took a great deal of interest in your review of Blood Meridian. I am with you on Cormac McCarthy. Wonderful stuff. Much the best I've seen. The lack of story in it may be a manifestation of the strange new type of fiction...the writing is beautiful and the meanings fashionably obscure.

August 14, 1987
Some time back, I ran across an article by Knight-Ridder bookman Bill Cosford titled "How the Western Was Lost." Something did happen to the Western, you now. The category that built and maintained Hollywood did a General MacArthur...but what something? What happened, God's name, to the Western?

Told straight-out, partner, it was damned near laughed to death.

A fancy writer, since the film and print Westerns were brothers under the ink and celluloid, would call it something like symbiotic suicide. But it was really the ambush of an American art form by Hollywood Apaches. Or maybe it was Comanches. Or Kiowas. Or Arapahoes. Doesn't matter. They were all white guys grease-painted to be Indians, and when somebody laughed out loud, the massacre was on.

When they began to make film-fun of the Western, the end was not far. The fun was crude, rude, low-life camp. Even, let us grant the grudge in all fairness, some very funny, classic HIGH camp.

But, you say, humor is the basic thread of the Western and has always been a conceded characteristic of the art form, perhaps even necessary to the portrayal of the Old American West in fact as in creative fancy. Yes, say I, but humor in the sly, dust-dry, wonderful native way of the West is not to be confused, or fused, for that matter, with the invasion of cheapshot "funny" Western film, e.g. or i.e., "Blazing Saddles."

...."Maverick" was a superb series but it helped cripple the original heroic (serious) Western, and that classic, wounded, was then attacked from behind by the film wolf that was Clint Eastwood and the "Pale Rider" killer picture, a quasi-religious "Shane" knockoff, a cleaned-up version of the Psycho-on-Horseback film where the nameless rider comes out of nowhere, rides into town and kills everybody in sight, for no reasons, then rides back into nowhere, reloads, takes a leak, and rides on looking for another nowhere to ride out of.

The Hollywood "funny" Western, the book-and-film Psycho- killer Western were two of the trails that took the Western to its present last-ditch stand.

Trail three is the "Adult" Western, where the fornicators take the place of the gladiators. The grand old Western done in by diddling.

June [no date] 1988
I used to take refuge and find solace in the Ides of Pogo. But Walt Kelly died and Possumism lost weight and wandered. Where they lost me was when the doughty marsupial ran away and hid in the Great Okie Swamp leaving behind only his greatest line, "We have met the enemy and he is us." It is equaled only by Charley Brown's sneaking behind the sofa with Peppermint Patty, cupping his hand to Patty's ear to whisper, "We prayed in school today."

....Well, Louie [L'Amour] is gone. Now for whom the angle-iron clangs? We can assume I am the next-oldest in line for most ancient scribe of the bonafide western writing survivors.

February 14, 1989
[On new "revisionist" books on renowned Westerners]:
These authorities have already killed Custer fifty or sixty times, laid to rest and/or resurrected Billy the Kid at least a couple hundred times (or so it seems, Dear Lord!) and have lately taken to zero-ing in on poor old Wyatt. The Lion of Tombstone has suddenly been re-discovered to have been a liar, cheat, thief, sleazy crook, backshooter, and worse than all these, maybe a bedwetter.

So if, to go back to the original question, of whether or not Will does consciously draw heroic his portraits of the frontier notorious, such as Marshal Earp in WHO RIDES WITH WYATT, the answer is, testily, "You damned betcha."

Would you not love to see one of these smarttail belittlers of our rightful heroes made to ride knee-to-knee with the Boy General into the Red Hell of the Greasy Grass?

Or forced to walk-down the Clantons in the dirt anent the O.K. Corral, right up front and between Wyatt and Doc Holliday?

I wonder who would get wet then.

August [no date] 1989
The western writer must bend his every talent to plowing the straight furrow of excellence in his work. This, to the end that the scholars are given material to challenge their historic uppity sniffing at the "pennyweight pretentions" of the serious western American literature crowd our crowd. This redirection of effort and talent, I submit, has already taken place. There is more and better downrightly superior writing being offered in the western and frontier area at this time, than in previous living memory. We, the western writers, have pre-paid our dues with this remarkable creative upsurge.

The academic scholars and their orbital adjunct critics must now either get their lines wet, or stick to watching the worms wiggle in the baitcan.

They can no longer have it both ways.

Will Henry died at age seventy-nine on October 16, 1991, in Van Nuys, California, after a long battle with pneumonia and its complications. He is buried at Valley Oaks Cemetery in Westlake, about twenty miles west of his home in Encino.

To me he was, as Watson said of Holmes, "the best and wisest man whom I have ever known."

* Published with permission of the Henry Wilson Allen Estate.

Appeared in the April 2000 issue of Roundup. Reprinted by permission.