Ned Buntline. Wild Bill’s Last Trail. 1896. Amazon.com. 12 May 2012. E-book.

I was looking through a list of books available at my favorite online library, Gutenberg.org, thinking of downloading a couple of books to my Kindle for an upcoming vacation. I came across this title that ignited a series of excited childhood memories: James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickock, the famous and feted gunfighter of the American West; not to mention his notorious murder in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, holding a two pair “dead man’s hand” at the poker table; and written by Ned Buntline, namesake of the modified Colt .45 that Wyatt Earp used to keep the peace. Wow! A western bonanza!

All I can say, and I say this about very few books that I read, do not waste your time unless you are a big fan of Western fiction of all kinds.

First, this is a novel. It bears little resemblance to the historical Wild Bill Hickock. The tale is pretty much made out of whole cloth. The kindest thing that can be said is that Hickock became a legend partly because of embellished stories about him. This is one.

Second, thanks to Wikipedia, I learned more about Ned Buntline. Buntline actually spent most of his life in New York as a journalist and writer. He did spend some years in the West as a young man. He claimed to have designed and given the custom pistols that bear his name to Wyatt Earp. But Colt Manufacturing has no record of the Buntline Special or of him ordering pistols for anyone. Colt did occasionally make special order pistols with long barrels, but there is no indication that Earp ever used them. It is one thing to write legends about heroes—that goes back at least to Homer—but to shamelessly promote yourself by claiming a connection with the hero that is false…

Third, the book has an almost unreadable style. The plot is potentially intriguing, but the author’s expression is awkward. The sentences are short and focused as befit a journalist, but no one would confuse Buntline with Hemingway. And the dialogue is awful. I do not believe anyone every spoke the way his characters do. They have a certain journalistic style in their directness, but their vocabulary and sentence structure seem to channel Shakespeare or the King James Bible without doing justice to any.

Imagine one of the people in the American West who attempt to kill Wild Bill saying, “Have I done aught that requires my detention here?” While it is succinct, such Elizabethan diction would be totally bogus in post-Civil War America. A screenwriter who wrote such dialogue for a Western would be laughed out of the studio.

The actual plot itself, if the writer had picked another name besides Hickock, could have been effective with another writer’s skill. A fairly notorious gunslinger has gotten tired of living in the East and wants to get back to the Wild West. His ultimate destination is the gold mines of the Dakota Territory. He joins a band of cowboys going there.

Three different people are tracking our protagonist in order to do him in. There is the brother of a man he killed in a gunfight. There is the relative of a woman he jilted when he was back East. There is the leader of a renegade faction of Sioux who is known as a killer of white men and who has a particular hostility towards the cavalry. And to stir the pot, there is a girlfriend of this Sioux chief whose house is burned by a drunken mob.

These things have the potential for making a great story. It could have been made into a decent film, especially by a director like John Ford filming from the 1930s to the 1950s who treated Westerns with respect. And drop the Hickock pretense for sure. And Deadwood is in the Dakotas, not Montana.

This is actually a so-called dime novel (the original was only a nickel), a short piece of fiction cranked out in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century for school-aged children. Probably the best known dime novels today are the rags-to-riches stories by Horatio Alger. But Wild Bill’s Last Trail is not worth even the half the dime it cost.