Breckinridge Elkins, Robert E. Howard's comedic mountain man

Good grief, there is a Breckinridge Elkins web comic!  To be honest, I probably knew about this in my first time pass through this blog, but I had a chance to give it a good read lately and I really enjoyed it.  Not sure what else this guy has worked on, and it's amazing that the site is still up after a decade.  

Breckinridge Elkins is by far my favorite Robert E. Howard character, more so than Conan and Solomon Kane.  His mountain man stories are where Howard really started to come into his own as a writer and folklorist, and where he put most of his efforts in the last years or his life.  The Conan stories (the originals, not the pastiches or stories adapted into Conan stories) read like man managing his bipolar disorder through writing.  By the time we get to Elkins, it felt like he had passed a rough patch and was enjoying his professional life.

Then his dog died, his mother died, and he put a .38 in his own brain.  He was 36.

Breckinridge Elkins is a reminder that adversity can be overcome, life can be good, and it can also be fleeting.

Enjoy.

Smart, Horny, Foolish, Outdoorsy

I started writing in this blog years ago as a way to define what I liked most about westerns.  While my enthusiasm to write regularly has waned, my enthusiasm for westerns has not.  My definition of a “western” is quite wide, meaning almost anything taking place between the late 17^th century and the early 20^th century on a North American frontier.  It was while reading The Dakota Cipher, third in William Dietrich’s series about Napoleonic era rapscallion Ethan Gage, that I stumbled upon the recipe for a perfect western.  A perfect western should take place in the time and place described above, and have a hero who is smart, horny, foolish, and outdoorsy.   

Allow me to explain.  A good yarn should allow the audience to identify with the characters and at the same time have elements of wish fulfillment. 

I have a fondness for main characters that are smart and horny, because, well, that’s me.  It sounds pompous to say that I’m smart, but it’s true (despite what a lack of solid proofreading in this blog might suggest).  As to horny, a quick tour through this blog (particularly anything tagged Randy Cowpoke) will show that is an apt description as well. 

Foolish?  Let’s instead call that prone to acting with without thinking, and the start of the wish fulfillment phase.  I typically think before acting, drink very little, never gamble, and rarely exceed the speed limit.  Frankly, it’s boring, and in fiction I love when otherwise smart characters leap into danger without forethought as I long to do, especially when their boldness is rewarded when danger slaps them upside the head.

Let’s turn outdoorsy into at home in the wilderness.  The older I get the more handy I become in the woods, the desert, the mountains, the river, and with a kayak, tent, fire, and axe.  I’m still no mountain man and would probably go under after a week alone in the woods (mostly because of my cardiac issues).  In my dreams, though, I read the wilderness like the back of my hand as I stride through the plains and can capably fell deer and owlhoots alike with a smokestick, tomahawk, or my bare fists.

So let’s take a look at some of my favorite characters and how they stack up.

George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman

Smart, stupidly horny, undoubtedly foolish, but although his adventures often take place in far flung frontiers he is much more at home in the parlor. 

Any hero in a Louis L’Amour story

Smart and outdoorsy to a man, but rarely horny and seldom foolish.

Robert E. Howard’s Breckenridge Elkins

Somewhat horny, very foolish, so outdoorsy he barely fits between four walls, but Breck can hardly be considered smart (I’ve mapped him out as a D&D character many times, never with an intelligence greater than 7).

William Dietrich’s Ethan Gage

Now this is the stuff.  Gage is smart.  He’s a savant, a scientist of the Ben Franklin persuasion, known as a master of electricity in a world still lit by candles.  After a spell at Harvard he spent time as a fur trapper in the Great Lakes, learning woodscraft, sharpshooting, and tomahawking.  Gage then made his way to Paris during the Revolution, and picked up the habit of leaping into danger, usually also involving first leaping between the legs of whatever woman happened to available at the time.

Gage is “lazy as an aristocrat, but without the manners,” and finds himself in various adventures across the globe, often as not tied to ancient mystical conspiracies.  In one spectacular tale (the aforementioned Dakota Cipher) Gage tumbles in and out of Louisa Bonaparte’s petticoats before hightailing it to the wilderness of North America, running from cultists and British spies while searching for, of all things...

 

Don't fuck with Thor's hammer

Sadly, I don’t believe that Dietrich managed to take Ethan Gage back to North America over the course of the series, which was cut short at eight books out of a planned fifteen.  Gage does set a high bar for the smart, horny, foolish, outdoorsy hero that I love to read about.

Christmas Cowboy Poetry

My style of cowboy poetry leans heavily towards the Robert E. Howard bloodsoaked manliness kind, but for those of you in a milder tone this Christmas season you may enjoy a fine collection of Christmas themed cowboy poetry from the Bar-D Ranch.  

Best wishes for your Christmas
Is all you get from me,
'Cause I ain't no Santa Claus—
Don't own no Christmas tree.

But if wishes was health and money,
I'd fill your buck-skin poke,
Your doctor would go hungry
An' you never would be broke.

From Charlie Russell's 1914 Christmas card

For more go see the folks at Cowboy Poetry.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Made it this far?  Good.  Here's a Howard poem for you:

Sonora to Del Rio is a hundred barren miles
Where the sotol weave and shimmer in the sun—
Like a host of swaying serpents straying down the bare defiles
When the silver, scarlet webs of dawn are spun.

There are little 'dobe ranchoes, brooding far along the sky
On the sullen, dreary bosoms of the hills.
Not a wolf to break the quiet, not a single bird to fly;
Where the silence is so utter that it thrills.

Maybe, in the heat of evening, comes a wind from Mexico
Laden with the heat of seven Hells,
And the rattler in the yucca and the buzzard dark and slow
Hear and understand the grisly tales it tells.

Gaunt and stark and bare and mocking rise the everlasting cliffs
Like a row of sullen giants carved of stone,
Till the traveler, mazed with silence, thinks to look at hieroglyphs,
Thinks to see a carven pharaoh on his throne.

And the road goes on forever, o'er the barren hill forever,
And there's little to hint of flowing wine—
But beyond the hills and sotol there's a mellow curving river
And a land of sun and mellow wine.