The Bad Lands (Legends West, #2) (2024)

Bad Lands

Segunda novela de la trilogía del western que escribió Oakley Hall cada una sobre un tema diferente. Si en la magnífica Warlock el argumento giraba en torno a la figura legendaria del pistolero que es reclamado por el pueblo para pelear contra un grupo de indeseables, en esta ocasión el tema gira en torno a los territorios libres y su ocupación.

A medida que las guerras indias fueron acabando y las diferentes tribus iban siendo recluidas en reservas, el vasto territorio restante quedaba por fin libre y podía ser ocupado por una serie de colonos deseosos de tierras.
Los primeros en llegar podían escoger el sitio para su ganado y rancho pero a medida que se llenaban las tierras, los problemas empezaron.

El protagonista de la historia es un banquero y político de Nueva York que después de perder a su mujer e hija en un trágico accidente decide dejarlo todo y marcharse a las Bad Lands donde podría olvidarse y empezar de nuevo.

En Bad Lands podría elegir su territorio y montar un rancho, así de fácil era en 1883. Pero al mismo tiempo difícil cuando los vecinos tenían su ganado pastando libres por las tierras.

Es en este momento crucial cuando Andrew Livingston llega a las Bad Lands con la intención de hacer su rancho y comprar un montón de ganado. No es bienvenido, por supuesto, es un problema para los demás acostumbrados a dejar el ganado libre además de sumarse al problema de las alambradas que uno de los rancheros ya está colocando.

Una vez en situación, el escritor utiliza al político para ponerlo en medio del conflicto, en un principio amigo de todos, pero sin esconder que el día que tenga que escoger bando está cerca.

Lleno de grandes personajes que no parecen del lugar como el escocés Lord Machray, que es el primero en poner alambradas, el autor reproduce el conflicto de esa época, algo ya irrepetible, y reflexiona a través de sus personajes sobre la justicia in situ. En estos grandes territorios no había ley o estaba muy lejos, los rancheros debían impartir lo que ellos consideraban justicia. Y lo que un día parecía justo al día siguiente no lo era tanto, pero ya no tenía remedio.

Algo por debajo de Warlock, Bad Lands es también una gran novela que cuenta lo que fue una época del oeste y lo hace no sólo con pistolas y caballos. Pone en liza una serie de personajes que van creciendo a medida que avanza la historia. Una historia que, por otra parte, está escrita como si hubiese sido real con estos mismos protagonistas.

The Band Lands is the second installment of Oakley Hall’s “Legends West” series. The first is the cult classic, Warlock, which was published in 1958. That story is Hall’s reimagining of the events leading up to the gunfight at the OK Corral. It’s an often surreal novel that often reads to me like a play or a movie, but it’s also one rooted in considerable historical fact and details. Hall seems to be saying all along that Truth is Weird (which is probably why Thomas Pynchon loved it so much) and slippery.

The Bad Lands was published in 1978. I have no idea whether Hall originally intended to make a “series” of these unrelated novels (there is a third, Apache, which I have yet to read). What is similar, however, with Warlock, is a reimagining of a major event in the history of the American West, the Johnson County War. If you are unfamiliar with that event, it involved the “invasion” of Johnson County, Wyoming, by a band of “regulators” who were basically hit men for the Stock Owner’s Association. Michael Cimino would make an undeservedly infamous movie called Heaven’s Gate about that war. (Note: I recently watching the newly released Critereon version of Heaven’s Gate, complete with a cleaned up audio track (absolutely essential) and restored footage, and found it to be one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen.)

The timing of Hall’s book is interesting in that Heaven’s Gate would come out in 1980. Evidently, according to a footnote somewhere in Final Cut (a history of the making of the movie), Hall submitted The Bad Lands to United Artists – I suppose as a potential script. There was some legal wrangling, which seemed to evaporate after the movie bombed. Was Hall trolling for a shot at writing the script? Who knows?

The story, absent that connection, stands on its own. It’s not Warlock, but it’s pretty darned good. On surface, it's standard stuff. A well off widower from New York, Andrew Livingston, goes West to flee his sorrow. He likes the West and the Cowboy life and decides to become a rancher. His decision comes at a time when ranching is falling apart as a life. Competing ranches (one of which is headed by a colorful poetry spouting Scottish Lord), fencing in of the land, and an influx of settlers are all rapidly changing the landscape. Hall takes all of these common elements and goes deeper with dark speculations on the nature of existence, truth, and justice. There are good guys and there are bad guys, but in Hall's novel both will spend time in a gray zone where certainties are hard to grasp. The coming "war" will scramble things even more, as characters find themselves switching allegiances due to forces that are often, but not always, beyond their control.

For those movie buffs out there, is an excellent piece from the New York Times on the restoration of Heaven's Gate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/mov...

A good old-fashioned Western, based loosely on a range war in late 19th century South Dakota. The review to read is by Larry McMurtry back in 1978:
https://www.nytimes.com/1978/05/14/ar...
Excerpt:
"The novelist who attempts to deal with the conflicts that developed in the West around the time when the open range was closing must reconcile himself to certain lack of originality of plot. The cattle barons hated the small ranchers, not to mention nesters and sheepherders, and, throughout the West, old‐timers resented newcomers, particularly if the newcomers had more capital than they did. Because many of the newcomers were from England or Scotland, or even Germany and France, they sometimes came not only with substantial backing, but also with their own ideas about how things should be done.

“The Bad Lands” is set in the early 1880's, when the old established ranchers in Wyoming and the Dakotas were feeling more and more encroached upon, not only by rich Easterners and Scots but also by small ranchers moving north from Texas. The pressure resulted in what is known as the Johnson County Cattle War. Under pretense of stopping rustlers, the local cattlemen's association brought in a small army of gunmen to eradicate the small ranchers. Luckily, the small ranchers got wind of the scheme and outmaneuvered and eventually arrested their foes. ..."

I liked it too, about 3.5+ stars worth, rounded up. I would compare it to a middling McMurtry western of that period: readable and pretty good, with some very nice bits. Thanks to the University of Chicago Press for the free ebook copy!

Though I read them out of order, The Bad Lands, which Oakley Hall labeled the second in his “Western Legends” trilogy, completes my loving embrace of this portion of his work. Each of the books reworks a western myth, turns it inside out and upside down, and in the telling gives us a profound depth of understanding into our history and our assumptions. In Warlock, it was the O.K. Corral. In Apaches, it was the Lincoln County Wars and Billy the Kid. In The Bad lands, Andrew Livingston is a stand-in for Theodore Roosevelt, a tenderfoot from New York who comes west to try his hand at the life of ranching and herding cows, the romance of which life has intrigued him for lo these many. I don’t know much about Roosevelt’s adventures in the Dakotas except that he invested sizable chunks of cash and that they influenced his politics and his attitudes toward life, but Hall wouldn’t ever provide a one-for-one relationship between between the characters and events in his novels and in real life. He’s not that easy.

Livingston finds himself in the midst of a classic (cliche?) conflict between cattle barons and settlers. Between those who would fence the range and those who would keep it open. Between those who would prevail by their own rude justice and those who strive for conventional ideas of law and order. Between raw brutality and at least a pretense of humanity.

Hall, as usual, challenges the assumptions that popular literature and films bring to these kind feuds and gives us a cast of characters and a series of actions in which no one is free of either virtue or blame. As for the winners when all is said and done, as Livingston puts it, maybe there are no winners. Maybe there’s just history. Certainly, the statue that towers over everyone at the end of the book represents a man of gargantuan vices, though they tend to be sins of the flesh rather than those of the spirit. He may not be the kind of character we’d like to think bequeaths his heroic legend to our towns and our myths. Yet, of course, we honor and revere many such.

It may not be Dante, but it sure isn’t your conventional oater, folks. You can’t just plough your action-packed way through Oakley Hall. You have some thinking to do. And your thoughts may not guide you to pleasant conclusions.

But the reading pleasure is unsurpassed.

Un ricachón de Nueva York se marcha a las duras tierras de Montana huyendo de una tragedia familiar. Allí, en un territorio todavía no convertido en Estado y por lo tanto carente de toda ley que no sea la del más fuerte, se adjudica unas tierras donde pretende criar ganado. Pero los lugareños, que simplemente habían llegado antes, no son gente demasiado agradable o de fiar.

Una galería de personajes curiosos y representativos del viejo oeste americano, y de situaciones no menos representativas, son el soporte sobre el que descansa la historia del neoyorquino que emigra al salvaje oeste. Polvo, revólveres, sudor e intrigas pueblerinas narradas de forma absolutamente magistral.

Pretty impossible to ever equal the greatness of Warlock, but The Bad Lands ends on a very strong note after slowly building up for most of the story.

This is the second Oakley Hall novel I've read (after Warlock), and I find that his books are so different from other historical novels that I can hardly review this one without comparing it with that one. As in Warlock, there is that uncanny sense of rightness to every word the characters speak. The slang is often unfamiliar but somehow seems perfect to the period—I can't understand every word, but then if I were dropped into the 1880s, I wouldn't be able to, either, would I? Once in a while I do understand something, and it's always convincing and period-appropriate. One character exclaims "I'd rather ride through Hell in a celluloid suit," which makes sense when you reflect that before gasoline was a everyday substance, celluloid was about the most flammable thing anybody ever heard of. And it's not just the slang and the idioms. The dialogue, sometimes together with a briefly described physical gesture, has a quietly skillful way of telling you exactly what a character is feeling without the narrator having to spell it out. All the characters, even the minor ones, are extremely vivid.

Unlike Warlock, this isn't an epic, despite its eccentric division into five "books," none of which is long enough or complete enough to qualify as a "book"—my only complaint about the novel. Instead, it's a tragedy in the Greek mode, with all the characters coming together at the end in a life-or-death struggle in which some beautiful things are lost forever. As Warlock's story was based approximately on the gunfight at the OK Corral, The Bad Lands retells the story of the Johnson County War, moving it from Wyoming in 1892 to the Dakotas in 1884. The "War" was a violent conflict between big cattlemen accustomed to unfenced access to a huge range, and farmers and smaller ranchers seeking their own fresh starts on shared federal lands. The novel's hero shares the early life experiences of Theodore Roosevelt, although he's unlike Roosevelt in other respects. The antihero is similarly based on the Marquis de Morès, a French aristocrat turned rancher, although again, his personality is different in many respects, and he's Scottish instead of French.

There is action enough to keep anybody interested, and it's a hell of a story. My own awareness that things would not end well—which is more or less announced in a two-page prologue from the point of view of the hero in old age—led me to a sense of dread as I neared the end, but I was overly sensitive. It's just the tone of the book, amidst the sweat and the gunfights and the colorful figures, is similar to the bleak films of the 1970s (The Last Detail, The Conversation) just as Warlock, with its subtext of labor unrest and law versus vigilanteism, mirrored the common concerns of the 1950s. (The two books were written in those eras.) This book should and will satisfy anybody who's looking for a Western that's also great literature.

This might be my favorite Western. Oakley Hall can sure create amazing characters! Lord Machray had me laughing out loud with his amazing personality and poetry. He is one of my favorite characters in all of literature. Why had I not heard of Oakley Hall before? This book is very deep, very entertaining and I could not put it down. I was so sad when I finished it. I enjoyed Lonesome Dove, but The Badlands, to me, is much better and considers issues much more deeply. In the old west people had to confront their own beliefs about right and wrong and were often challenged to see their own hypocrisy. So relevant to today's world.

More than just a Western novel, "The Bad Lands" features explorations of morality, philosophy, human nature — you know, Man Against God, Man Against Man and Man Against Nature — all rolled into a tale that moves from the pastoral to the frenetically violent.

Oh, and there's lots of sex, too.

I felt like I didn't want this novel to end, though the seeds of the conclusion were sown early in the book and built to a pinnacle of tension. The denouement was a little jarring after the adrenaline rush, but the novel was framed effectively with the protagonist's need to try and capture the waning days of the Bad Lands in sketches before it was lost.

"The Bad Lands" pairs nicely with "Warlock," Oakley's other Western. I just wish he'd given us more.

Another great Oakley Hall western. I really enjoyed this tale, set in the Dakota Territory. Our hero is an upstart cattle rancher, and he faces problems from the existing cattle ranchers when he arrives. They are established and they want the resources for themselves. Then, even more ranchers show up and they want resources, too. It's an exercise in how NOT to manage land ownership. The book is generous, very easy to digest. It has plenty to think about and the characters are interesting, perhaps none more so than Machray, the colorful Scotsman. I didn't like it as well as Warlock, but only because Warlock is so great. I will have to read Apaches next.

A widowed New Yorker becomes a cattle baron, gets caught up in the range wars. Is it too much to say that a good western is by definition a threnody, a meditation on the death of a 'lawless' land, its absorption and eradication by civilization? No, it isn't. In any event, this is a very good book, by the author of the even slightly more fabulous Warlock, an insightful meta-commentary on the Western which also serves as a delightfully executed example of that genre. A genuinely fabulous epic; it's not quite Lonesome Dove, but it's better than whatever other book you were planning on comparing to Lonesome Dove.

I had not heard of this author before, but decided to buy this book from the University of Chicago Press Book Sale. The book is centered in the ND Badlands, which is about a 5 hour drive from my home and the main characters are based on Teddy Roosevelt and his time there, and the Marques de Mores. Despite that, I don't think the plot the real history of this place but incorporates other plots from other places in the West. It is an interesting book and it brings out the place and time (1884) well.

It's not Warlock, but that's like faulting a sibling for being a different person. Hardly fair. A quiet beautiful subtle novel that builds America up from its emotions. Intimate and honest. Feels like one of Merle Rideout's photo re-animations in Against the Day. Dusty snapshots of the Badlands, brought to life. 3.75

The writing is stellar here, though the plot is a little lighter than I had hoped for after reading WARLOCK. It does have a lot of elements that speak to current issues, but obviously it wasn’t written for that purpose. I want to read WARLOCK again, knowing how excellent it was by comparison.

Bad Lands

My 1st Oakley Hall book and it won’t be my last. Very well written but needed a little more of something (suspense, surprise, violence, romance, ?) to earn that 5th star. A good read.

Lot going on here that was over my head

Second volume of a western trilogy by Hall. Warlock is the first. Highly touted by Thomas Pynchon in his college days.

Hall's Ambrose Bierce detective novels are better. And more fun.

Another masterful western from Oakley Hall. I may have liked this a little more than Warlock

Great characters and story. Very enjoyable read. A western from the perspective of the fear of change.

Bienvenidos al salvaje oeste. Un joven banquero neoyorquino decide después de enviudar lanzarse a la aventura del oeste como ganadero, para ello se deberá enfrentar a múltiples contratiempos y amenazas. A destacar la construcción de los personajes a cada cual más interesante, en especial el de las mujeres y el incremento de la tensión narrativa para acabar en un final redondo. La máxima puntuación porque me lo he pasado muy bien leyendo esta novela.

"It seemed to him that men just naturally ruined everything they came upon. But it was easier to get mad at the cows...They beat the grass into trails, and, when the long rains came, those trails washed into gullies, and of course with the beavers trapped out and their dams gone - he had done that, he and his kind - then the gullybusters banged straight down into the creeks, and the creeks flooded, and the river looked like one big roaring mudhole. You could see the Bad Lands washing straight down to the Missouri and the Mississippi and out to sea. You could see the Bad Lands washing away right before your eyes, that had been a fine place once."

Oakley Hall's The Bad Lands is the second installment in his Legend's West Trilogy; a series of three individual yet thematically-related and thoughtful westerns about notable incidents which occurred in American West. The Bad Lands is a fictional account of the Johnson County War, a series of conflicts between established, "corporate" cattle ranchers benefiting from open ranging and an influx of smaller, newly-established outfits staking claims in the region (outfits which, themselves, were motivated by the Homestead Acts and the availability of more nutritious grasses up north after the decimation of the buffalo).

The main character is one Andrew Livingston, a Republican politician on a brief hiatus from New York politics after the tragic passing of his wife and one child. Inspired by romanticized stories of adventure out West, Livingston participates in a hunting trip and falls in love with the Dakota Territory while in pursuit of dwindling game. During his hunt, he decides to extend his stay and establish Fire Creek Ranch; a decision which immediately earns him an adversarial position opposite the corporate ranchers and their hired gun Jake Boutelle.

Livingston, a moneyed outsider, finds an unlikely ally in Lord George Eustace Balater (known locally as Lord Machray), a hedonistic, exuberant, and entrepreneurial Scotsman bankrolled by European interests. Lord Machray's grand ambition is to vertically integrate ranching, slaughtering, and transport, but he runs in to difficulty as the booming cattle business begins to bust, and he feels opposition from established butchers in Chicago. Though motivated by very different principles, Livingston and Lord Machray maintain a kinship against their institutional foes. Before long, Livingston is elected by the growing underclass of grangers, ranchers, and homesteaders to be President of their fledgling cattle association, an entity meant to oppose the established Stockraisers Association. Their opposition is met with force, and several shootouts ensue.

For those familiar with Warlock, The Bad Land's is more of the same. For the unfamiliar, that means a multitude of characters, pithy descriptions of time and place, and a healthy amount of dialogue between characters which propels the narrative forward. Additionally, Hall maintains the same ambivalence towards questions of good and evil, right and wrong, tradition versus progress, and so forth. Stylistically and thematically speaking, there is nothing exceptional here that is not found in the first installment. Make no mistake, that is not a negative.

The Bad Lands perfectly captures the spirit of the western territories at the end of the 19th Century. It captures the idealism, excitement, and commercial potential of the vast space, but it also hedges those values by refusing to shy away from the disastrous consequences that man has upon the land and upon his own soul. The book is a classic American story about how those who have very little take on those who have so much, and it questions the ethical foundations (or lack thereof) of both sides. Not only did Hall expertly craft a story based upon a little-known war in American history, he also modeled Livingston after Theodore Roosevelt during his period of burgeoning interest in ranching, hunting, and conservation (i.e. before he was elected as governor and then POTUS). Hall also references many poets, artists, and Enlightenment thinkers in this book which inspire further research.

The Bad Lands continues where Warlock left off. Because it is an exceptionally well-written novel about themes central to the Western as a genre, and about themes central to the self-conception of the United States, it further solidifies Hall's prominence in the cannon of the Western genre.

I recently read The Ox-Bow Incident and The Virginian, so it was not surprising that I would find in The Bad Lands some of the same themes and conventions. As in The Virginian, The Bad Lands introduces a tenderfoot Easterner into the rude west, and as in The Ox-Bow Incident, there is vigilantism that turns into violence and injustice. The particular dramatic background for The Bad Lands is a growing enmity between the established free-range cattle outfits in South Dakota and the surge of grangers/homesteaders/sodbusters and small-time cattlemen who want to encroach and fence off their property. This harks to the classic western novel Shane and to the history of Tom Horn and the Johnson County range wars in Wyoming.

After his wife and child die in a canoeing accident back east, 30-year-old New York banker Andrew Livingston decides in 1883 to buy up some land in South Dakota to raise 500 cattle. Almost immediately he is in contention with the other cattlemen in the area of Pyramid Flat, west of the Missouri River, in the area of the Bad Lands. Over the course of the year, trying to take care of his own livestock and aid the settlement of a homesteading family and taking on a partnership with a pair of newly arrived Texas cattlemen, Livingston finds himself more deeply immersed in the growing animosity between the established ranchers and the newcomers who simply want some of the available land (which has not, in many cases, been legally bought and registered with the land office).

Livingston, to his own shame, becomes involved in vigilantism when his own 20 horses are stolen, and he and other similar victims head off to find the thieves. While they capture one of the thieves, Livingston goes off on his own to pursue another who is sniping at them with a rifle. After scaring off the rustler, Livingston returns to find the young thief hanged, which he finds intolerable. An attempt to have the 100-mile distant sheriff come and intervene in future episodes of horse theft and cattle rustling only receives platitudes about the locals working things out amongst themselves.

When another band of vigilantes tries to roust his Texas partners, Livingston is drawn into a gunfight that leaves two of the vigilantes dead. The established cattle association then hires 50 mercenaries to kill and/or drive out Livingston and other small cattle ranchers and the homesteaders. Allying himself with the Scottish Laird Machray, who owns more cattle than even the established cattlemen and has fenced off land he’s actually purchased, Livingston is able to form his own association. After a nighttime siege on Livingston’s Texas partners, which leaves both dead and burned, the mercenaries are themselves attacked and eventually made to surrender. All are bound off for jail and a trial, which attempt at a lawful resolution only results in a year of imprisonment for some, and release upon recognizance for others: hence a stalemate of grudging acquiescence.

When Machray is shot and killed during the celebration of his new slaughterhouse, which will rival Chicago, Livingston calls it quits and moves back east, becoming a senator who advocates for better law and more liberal land grants to western homesteaders. The story’s conclusion comes fifteen years later when the mayor of Pyramid Flat comes to Washington, DC, to petition Livingston for financial assistance. Livingston pulls some strings and arranges the town be renamed Machray in exchange for funds and a new town park with fields, rotunda, and other amenities.

Oakley tells a good story, and there are several peripheral characters who come to life in this drama, including an old scout, an old vigilante, a quick-draw sharpshooter who leads the cattleman association vigilantes, a madam, and a seemingly amiable crippled neighbor whose righteousness drives him to cross the line into unlawful violence. The settling of the west, Oakley demonstrates, brings with it the destruction of the natural order, displacing people and animals, and ravaging the land. Oakley makes us see and feel the ambivalences, that despite the loss and lamentation, there is and was little that could have been done to halt the migration of hunters, cattlemen, ranchers, farmers, and settlers who moved to fill land they saw as their right. In the character of the boisterous, bombastic, larger-than-life Machray, Oakley conjures the mix of grandeur and greed that was necessary in shaping the frontier’s settlement.

Jeff Book Review #50
The Bad Lands, Oakley Hall (western)

Oakley Hall wrote "Warlock" in 1958, which I reviewed in #28 and liked a lot; it had an OK Corral / Tombstone setting. He wrote "Bad Lands" in 1978 with a Johnson County War setting, the classic homesteaders vs cattle barons type conflict in that short era after the Indians and buffalo were pushed out but before law and order or statehood came to Wyoming.

Bad Lands has one main protagonist, an educated Easterner who has ventured out west a little late, and some other smartly-written characters. There is a large, class-warfare kind of tension-then-conflict seen through the thoughts and actions of these folks. I liked and disliked all of these characters at different times while reading the book; the virtuous folks are all stubbornly crooked in their own way, and the obvious bad guys might be serving a greater purpose but for wicked reasons, or perhaps humanity's view on everything might just be all dorked up no matter what.

Verdict: Man vs Man, Man vs Nature, Man vs God, Truth vs "Truth", Law vs Justice stuff but not preachy or sanctimonious; pretty much what every good western has. Bad Lands falls way short of the great Warlock, though, and has too much unnecessary adult content.

Jeff's Rating: 3 / 5 (Good)
movie rating if made into a movie: R
next up: Choosers of the Slain, James Cobb

Pues tenía la duda de si ponerle las 5 estrellitas, porque claro, Warlock es mucho Warlock y las comparaciones pueden ser odiosas. Pero he disfrutado tanto de este libro y me ha tenido tan enganchado que no le podía poner menos, ¡si hasta me ha eclipsado la lectura de Alastair Reynolds!

Deseando tener entre mis manos Apaches.

A fairly enjoyable tale of the old West, concerning ranchers trying to protect their turf and newer settlers trying to find a foothold. A little slow in places, but overall a decent read.

Very slow and nothing here you haven't read in any Western. Gunfights, cattle, saloons and whor*houses--all of the usual suspects for a cliched Manifest Destiny type of story.