The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline by Julia Bricklin

Author:Julia Bricklin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TwoDot
Published: 2019-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

Judson, according to this account and those of other hunters, had a generous ice cellar, and kept his home stocked with books, medicines, herbs, and even leeches. Sometimes he demanded privacy and even shot at trespassers; other times he invited strangers in, cooking them trout or a freshly killed chicken from his yard.21

Keeping up a homestead of this nature would be backbreaking for even the hardiest of settlers. So it shocked few locals in Judson’s corner of the Adirondacks when, sometime in July or August, he took another “wife,” in the form of Sarah Jane Brooks, from the nearby hamlet of Horicon. She was fifteen years old. There is no record of this marriage, but Judson held a celebration of some kind at J. J. Wilson’s Hotel, near her father’s home.22 Hunters returning from visits to the area reported her as “an active, intelligent housekeeper,” much in the same way they described Eva Marie.23 Within a month of coming to live with Judson, Brooks was pregnant, and within three months she was abandoned. Some months later, she married a local man, and the pair started a family of their own. The man raised her child with Judson as if he was his own.

In 1860, in spite of his hunting, baby-making, and boozy detours to post offices to deliver manuscripts, Judson was supplying some of his best work to the Mercury. Besides White Wizard, The Knight of the Black Flag, and Luona Prescott, Or, The Curse Fulfilled: A Tale of the American Revolution—tales of a bygone era—Judson started homing in on America’s obsession with westward expansion and conflict with Native Americans.

By 1850 there was a tremendous influx of immigrants in the southwestern plains region of Texas. These people were either destined for California in search of gold or in search of land and a home on the frontier. Stories of their experiences had been filtering back to Easterners for years, notably those of Comanche hostilities toward whites who increasingly encroached upon their lands—lands that had once belonged to other tribes before whites forced Comanches onto the Southern Plains. The Lipan Apache tribe remained. The Lipan Apache–Comanche enmity dated back to the early eighteenth century, and warfare would continue between the two peoples until 1875.24

To preserve some semblance of peace on the frontier, the government of Texas activated nine companies of mounted Texas Rangers. The Rangers remained the primary defenders of the Texas plains until military posts were established, when they assumed a secondary role in protecting the frontiers. For Judson, this situation provided the perfect backdrop for an account of an imagined activity on the Texas plains for the Mercury. Historian John W. Schmidt posits that Judson’s use of real-life Major Ben McCulloch of the Texas Rangers in his popular work Stella Delorme—The Comanche’s Dream may be his strongest forerunner of the Western format that he would later perfect.

The setting for the novel was the Rio Grande area of Texas, and the cast of characters included the Lipan Apache; a Comanche brave, Lagona; the heroine, Stella Delorme; and Major Ben McCulloch.

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