Saddle up and take a ride West
It’s the spring of 1873 in the Wyoming Territory, and U.S. Marshal Tim Colter and his grizzled mentor and best friend, mountain man Jed Reno, are hunting down some train robbers when they come across a man dying of gunshot wounds. The victim turns out to be a Secret Service agent who as he breathes his last says, “President Grant … assassination … Dugan … trust nobody.”
Those words bring any thought of pursuing the train robbers to a screeching halt. Dugan is an ex-Confederate who fought with Quantrill’s Raiders during the Civil War and who has refused to give up the fight, though eight years have passed. Instead, he and his band of marauders murder and steal to support their cause. Now, with President Grant due to visit the Territory, it’s possible they intend to do to Grant what John Wilkes Booth did to Lincoln.
For the rest of “While the Town Slept” writers William Johnstone his nephew, J.A. Johnstone, bring us along for the ride as Colter and Reno try to track down the Dugan gang before they can intercept and kill the president. Along the way, they encounter the brawling, foul-mouthed Patsy Palmer, a Southern sympathizer; the 14-year-old orphan, Kip Jansen; and a female Pinkerton detective, Ginger Burricchia, who, having got wind of the plot of to kill the president, is attempting to discover the assassins’ plans and whereabouts.
Colter and Reno are forced to separate. The marshal takes off in search of Dugan, reluctantly bringing along Patsy Palmer while sending his friend back to Cheyenne to snoop around for news of the conspiracy. There Reno becomes involved with the attractive and skilled Agent Burricchia. Meanwhile, after his mother dies on the trail, Kip Jansen escapes his wicked stepfather, breaks his ankle traveling by night, and must survive crippled and alone in a harsh land totally foreign to him.
Like our modern-day thrillers, action and intrigue come thick and fast in this latest Western by the Johnstones. Colter narrowly escapes death in several gunfights while Patsy Palmer begrudgingly helps him survive. When they discover the now-delirious Kip, Patsy takes an immediate shine to the boy, as he reminds her of her young son who died fighting for the South. In Cheyenne, Reno and Burricchia slowly realize that the dying Secret Service last words “Trust nobody” was solid advice, as the plot to murder Grant extends well beyond the Dugan gang.
Several things about “While the Town Slept” recommend this book to the reader. The Johnstones know how to set a scene, whether it’s in Wyoming’s rocky hills or a Cheyenne bar room. Moreover, they are adept at mixing fact and fiction. As president, Ulysses Grant did visit Wyoming, though not in 1873. Allen Pinkerton did indeed employ female detectives, beginning in 1855 with Kate Warne, a widow who helped foil an assassination attempt against Abraham Lincoln when he was on his way to Washington to assume the role of president.
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Here, too, are mention of God and prayer, topics which oddly don’t always appear in such period books. Kip several times invokes God in asking for help, as does Colter. These brief scenes are reminders that in the “Wild West” religious faith was common among the settlers and cowboys.
I read very few Westerns, not from any dislike of the genre but simply from forgetfulness and from too many other books tugging at my attention. Yet one thought that recurred as I read “While the Town Slept,” that haunted me really, was of time. In these pages, for instance, is Jed Reno, a fictional character, yes, but representative of those mountain men who would have remained alive in 1873. Here as well are Cheyenne on the warpath, a land where lawless men still act with impunity, and an America where everyone travels by horseback, buggy, or train.
This was daily life in the West only 150 years ago. The technological canyon alone between those recent ancestors and our own age — the telegraph was their Internet; a wagon was their SUV — is immense. This sensation of change always just floors me.
Here’s a living example of what I mean. While operating the Palmer House Bed and Breakfast in Waynesville from 1984 to 2004, my wife and I three times lodged Mrs. Irene Harrison (1890-1999), daughter of the co-founder of the Goodyear Tire Company, Charles Seiberling. At 103 years old when she last stayed with us, Mrs. Harrison was 13 when the Wright Brothers flew their airplane at Kitty Hawk, 22 when she booked passage on the Titanic for her parents — they canceled the reservation at the last moment — and 28 when World War I ended.
Like Irene Harrison, the elderly are time machines made of flesh, bone, and blood. And like “While the Town Slept,” books about the past, built from the imagination, paper, and ink, also possess this power to whisk us back into the past.
If you’re looking for an excursion into the Old West, “While the Town Slept” will take you there.
(Jeff Minick reviews books and has written four of his own: two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
