Title: Preacher's Justice (“The First Mountain Man”)
Author: William W. Johnstone
Date: 2004
Publisher: Kensington
ISBN: 0-7860-1548-9
Length: 272 pages
Quote: “Preacher, who was twenty-seven years old, had been
trapping in these mountains since he was fourteen.”
Not especially evangelical or devout, Preacher was called
“Art” before he was kidnapped by some “Indians” to whom he preached a
sufficiently long and fervent sermon that they decided he was an inspired
lunatic and let him go. He has had an adventurous life—there are several
volumes in this series.
He's never felt sure enough of his ability to live “in love”
to want to settle down, but he has a girlfriend, an enslaved prostitute called
Jennie. Horrid though Jennie's life story is, in real history many women's
stories were even worse; the 1840s and 1850s were the period when idealization
of Pure and Innocent Ladies reached literally sickening levels (tuberculosis
was actually fashionable among people who scorned exercise, wholesome
food, and “rude health”) while poor and enslaved women, whom nobody believed to
be “innocent,” had no rights at all. If the best Johnstone can do for Jennie is
to write her off with a good clean murder rather than a slow horrible death
from a loathsome disease, which it is, Jennie has been one lucky little victim.
Preacher, of course, doesn't see it that way. He feels obliged to be detective,
judge, and executioner—and, this being a classic “shoot-'em-up Western novel,”
he'll take out a lot of people, all nasty characters who'll never be missed,
before page 272.
Racists, rapists, land grabbers, and busybodies get killed.
Other baddies get a nice healthy dose of humiliation; Preacher buys a sackful of
rusty “washers” to hand over to baddies who want to steal his money, a trick
that actually worked, in the 1850s, because relatively few people (or horses)
had the energy to carry around sacks of junk metal as well as sacks of gold
coins. Johnstone has written novels with higher body counts, but “Western”
publishers, and presumably readers, expect levels of violence that would be
unacceptable in fiction set in their own century.
The real explorers who trapped and traded in the Rocky
Mountains in the 1850s led lives of high adventure all right, though their
life-and-death combat was more often against weather, infections, and animals
than against other White men. An honest, detailed memoir would be much more
interesting than the “shoot-'em-up Western” genre, invented by writers who had
never been in the Rockies but had been in a fight somewhere. Perhaps especially
valuable for our time, when stupid people sentimentalize about wanting to
“protect” animals that eat humans, might be accurate accounts of how our more
sensible ancestors dealt with bears and cougars. Nevertheless, among living
writers in this genre, Johnstone rates high.
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