In Mayhem in B-Flat,
fearing conflict between Homer and le Singe, Miriam wonders if "[p]erhaps, after all,
she should try to get Homer to visit the distant Montana ranch with her, so they could
ride side by side among the foothills at dusk and listen to the cattle grazing and the
moan of the prairie wind." When the going gets rough in Paris, Evans allows,
"Frankly, my dear, I wish you were safe on your father’s ranch, where the worst
that could happen would be a tumble from a bronco." Montana is where Paul next sends
Evans and Miriam, along with almost the entire surviving cast of his Paris trilogy.
Despite their hopes, it turns out to be Paris-on-the-Yellowstone and then some, and Paul
demonstrates that the imaginative power which had returned to him with the Evans mysteries
was not confined to high-jinks in Montparnasse.1
Fracas in the Foothills, subtitled A Homer Evans Western Murder Mystery
and Open Space Adventure, for all its protracted title unsurprisingly opens back on
the Dôme’s terrasse, where Evans learns of a threat to Miriam’s father
Jim Leonard, a Montana cattle-rancher. Rain-No-More, a Blackfeet Indian (University of
California, ‘29) has come to Paris to warn his childhood friend "Bird
Cherry" (Miriam). Rain-No-More had recently surprised a Chicago gangster, lying in
ambush for Leonard, had scalped the villain and dumped him in the Missouri. He believes
that the gangster’s employer was the sheepherder Larkspur Gilligan, whose nickname
comes from the plant he sows surreptitiously, "which kills cattle in the spring, but
ceases to be dangerous before the sheep are brought up to the summer range," and he
is certain "that Gilligan intended to invade the country east of the deadline and
drive cattle from the entire valley of the Lower Yellowstone. That meant war, no
less." Miriam decides she must return to Montana immediately. Evans, as so often when
confronted with villainy, is "lost in thought" and "reverie."2
Only as Miriam is about to set sail on the Ile-de-France does Evans reveal that he has
decided to join her. Coincidentally, Chief of Detectives Frémont and the coroner Toudoux,
with wives and police sergeants, have been dispatched to America for a study tour - to
keep them from embarassingly uncovering further scandal at home. Evans convinces them that
they will best fulfill their assignment by joining him. Unable to "stifle the pride
he felt in his country," Evans wants all his friends "to feel the surge and flow
of life, to taste its possibilities." Having fretted about his "activity"
during his Paris adventures, concerned that his very sleuthing caused the mayhem he had to
unravel, Evans seeks a venue where the conflict will be mitigated. Though his new feelings
cause him to hesitate - "Was he catching the fever that drove so many of his
countrymen to pointless activity?" - before long he will thank Miriam for giving him
"‘a new lease on life,’" making him "‘understand that,
although the contemplative side of one’s nature must not be neglected (the American
disease, I may say), full play should be given at intervals to one’s zest for
action.’"3
On shipboard Evans meditates, "to renovate his consciousness." As his
repatriation looms, he finds himself without nostalgia for
the gaiety of Montparnasse, the quiet of his deserted apartment, or the Old World
sanctuaries and relics of former civilizations.... For the lands along the Yellowstone
were as old or older than the caves of the Neanderthal man, and if the races who had
inhibited them had not build cathedrals, at least they had kept the country’s
resources intact and the mysterious and vast landscape unspoiled before the coming of the
Europeans.
In place of dress buyers, minor diplomats, dilettantes, remittance men, rich
widows, professors, movie stars and his own companions, who made up the passenger list of
the Ile-de-France, he visualized the Mound Builders at work on their stupendous monuments,
great herds of buffalos grazing on the plains, the Indians on the warpath, or engaged in
their peaceful pursuits. He strained his ears for the sound of coyotes wailing to the
moon. He remembered the smell of sage and saddle leather; horses, cattle, deer and
antelope; the neatness of the foothills and the mesas, tier on tier; the rivers and
mountains; seasons that were definitely seasons; constellations sharp and quartz-like in
the cold, near and pulsing in the heat of summer.
It is a vision of the recovery of a refreshing plenitude. Evans is returning to find it
threatened and to confront that threat, an effort which translates his self-renewal from
vision to reality.4
The Frenchmen too are refreshed by their contact with the American West. Though
appalled by their first experience of the New World - "‘I shall lock up André
Maurois for criminal understatement in his published works about America, also Céline,
the Abbé Dimnet and Bernard Fäy,’ Frémont said’"- they are soon
enthralled by Evans’s tales of the early French explorers of the continent:
They had never heard of Louis Barrette, who had led the Cedar Creek gold rush, or of
those fur-trading pioneers, the Finleys, François and Jacques.... Tales followed of the
exploits of Joe Mallette, who brought freight across the prairies where wheels had never
made their tracks, of René La Brie and his arrowheads, Pierre Menard, trapper, of the
Vigilante trail. ...Homer recounted how Pere Wibaux had, with his cowboys, terrorized
Chicago....
Toudoux "‘begin[s] to know what it is to be a pioneer, to feel in my veins
the blood of those magnificent Frenchmen, whose names I failed to jot down, but who
conquered this inscrutable wilderness.’" They vow to "begin again, in the
clean open air.5
In Chicago, Evans takes on firearms to cope with Gilligan’s Chicago-scale
armaments. When his party’s private train coaches, provided by Hugo Weiss, are
nefariously uncoupled from the engine, Evans organises his forces on a war footing:
"‘if we are to form a military organization, we must proceed in a military
way.’" Homer’s party initiates a process of adaptation which is crucial to
survival in America, flexibility coupled with intuition. Miriam "teach[es] her
[female] companions to shift for themselves under the unforeseen conditions." Mme
Toudoux (with sang froid), Hydrangea Frémont (with Josephine Bakeresque flair)
and the others respond in character. Hard-pressed on all fronts by Gilligan’s forces,
which include outlaw Shoshones, Evans recalls Foch’s comparable orders to attack.
"Vive la France" respond the Frenchmen. Just as a second European
conflagration is getting underway, Evans’s campaign refights the Great War on
American soil - symbolised in the Jim Leonard "spread" - to make at least some
of the world safe from contemporary villainy and the deformation of history.6
When Leonard and the Blackfeet chief Shot-on-Both-Sides rescue the marooned coach
party, the two fathers are happily reunited with their children. Fracas is full
of fathers showing patent concern for the perpetuation of their kind, even the villains:
Gilligan himself is "a father first and a conspirator after... determined [that
Miriam] should be the mother of the future Gilligan clan" through marriage to his son
Terence.7
The subordinate cast of newcomers and their Blackfeet rescuers fraternize in "an
atmosphere of harmony and mutual understanding," an idyll of sociability: "In
short, relations between the natives and invaders of our great Northwest had never reached
such a level of cordiality and mutual trust." Captured by the spirit of renewal,
"Rain-No-More... entertained a hope that his tribe would survive, perhaps become
great again." The principals experience a deeper if no more heartfelt unification at
Leonard’s Opera Lodge near Three Buttes, itself a living part of its landscape:
The logs of the lodge, the two large bunkhouses, the barn, the stable and the various
corrals had been stained by the weather until they blended with the drab of the sage and
dry grass of the foothills and mesas until they
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seemed to belong to the country as did the relics of the Paleozoic age. In the
dead of winter, all was white and blown, valleys drifted level, high areas of
sidehill were swept clean by the wind. On the range, ...Jim Leonard’s cattle
fought the elements for their existence, ...drifting with the
blizzards, growing shaggy coats of hair to resist the biting cold.
Here and elsewhere in Fracas, Paul’s prose unites man and nature over time:
the plains on which [Leonard] had lived combated the elements and raised
his stock at a hard-earned profit... had felt "ragged claws scuttling
across the floors of silent seas" in the Archaean age, when the lower
Yellowstone valley had been part of the Pacific’s shining bottom; had
known the luxuriant giant shrubs and trees of the Paleozoic period; their muck
had spawned apocalyptic reptiles of appalling bulk; the plains had felt
the upward surge of the Rockies just westward; and through them had been
thrust by smoking lava their thousands of foothills, ovoid, rhomboid,
semi-spherical, distorted pyramids and truncated cones. Four great ice sheets
had leveled those prairies, filled old valleys, tossed aside rivers,
scooped out lakes, but the last of the glaciers had halted at the
Missouri,... and since then the valley had abounded in beasts, both wild and
tame.
Were the scenes of such upheavals to be desecrated by the blatting of
sheep and the furtive tread of sheepherders, while cattle were banished from
the land? Jim Leonard did not understand all that had happened in Eastern
Montana, but he had found fossils of inkfish and horseshoe crabs in the
cliffs of the highest buttes, had noticed the difference between lava
flows.... History... had roots in the present and hopes in the future, for his
country was unspoiled. Ten thousand years the Indians had used it, without
marring it or wasting its resources. Before them, the race of Mound
Builders had performed feats of engineering and community labor and left it
intact. The whites had exterminated the buffaloes, but had replaced them with
cattle. Now the herds of shorthorns were threatened in their turn....
The lower Yellowstone was the last refuge of the cattle industry, and its
principal rancher was Jim Leonard....
Such is the America Homer Evans returns to, Antaeus-like to renew his strength.8
Under "the cloak of gaiety, however, there was an undercurrent of
dread." The continuity of history itself is at risk. Evans "ski[s] far
into the foothills and spend[s] hours in self-appraisal.... This was to be his
most significant case, and [he] did not think for a moment that... [what] had
already occurred gave any indication of the scope of the combat that
threatened...." Answering his misgiving, Gilligan conveniently finds a
body, in which is lodget a fatal bullet from Leonard’s Winchester 40-40,
and which the supposed grieving father of the suspected ambusher
identifies as his son. (In fact, the body is not that of the ambusher, whom
Homer knows Rain-No-More scalped.) Then the dreaded larkspur is
found on Leonard’s land. Fortunately, Toudoux and his new "colleague"
Trout-Tail-II, the Blackfeet medicine man, save most of the affected cattle
with rattlesnake oil combined with Lydia Pinkham’s all-purpose Compound.
Evans realizes, however, that
[o]nce the cattle had been driven from the lower valley, the sheepman could
pull wires to have the Blackfeet chased from their ancestral hunting
grounds.... Then sheep would munch the valley clean, swarm north over the
Missouri as far as the Canadian border and the hour of the shorthorns
would have struck.9
Jim Leonard’s trial attracts "national attention" in
"[r]otogravure supplements from the Hearst-fuddled slopes of California to the
Howard-blighted pines of Maine." The anti-cattle lobby affirms
"that the cattle range was unfit for its traditional use" and trumpets
the supposed economic advantages to the nation of its obliteration. Evans
again
withdraw[s] himself for meditation on the larger aspects of the struggle
before him. As loath as he had been in the past of accept responsibility or to
use to the full his extraordinary gifts, in Opera Lodge he was... more
determined than he had even been before his in eventful life.... Future
generations would bemoan the cattle range, if it passed the way of the
buffalo. Could it be defended against the thoughtless folk then living?
The current struggle presents a last opportunity to regain what had been lost,
and if not to renovate America, at least to arrest its degradation.10
The enemy assaults mount. Evans is himself captured by mobsters. In his absence,
an airplane hired by Gilligan stampedes cattle. Gilligan has Leonard’s
trial brought forward, which prevents him from being able to protect his land.
Released from captivity by Rain-No-More (his surrogate son), Evans arranges
for the corrupt courthouse to be burnt down - naturally, without loss of life among
the innocent - securing a mistrial. (Paul has created a juggernaut of villainy
he is finding difficult to inhibit without slapstick.) Counter-offers are
made: Gilligan will make Evans a Senator from Montana; Evans an armistice if
Gilligan will agree to stay on his side of the sheep-cattle
"deadline." Each rejects the other’s offer and "The Sheep and
Cattle War" begins in earnest. It is the Great War complete with a zig-zag
line of trenches, pill-box machine-gun nests, forced marches, and cavalry.11
Gilligan and Evans both show themselves worthy generals in planning manoeuvres
for "The Fierce and Memorable Battle of the Redwater." Sheep being
gunned down from the trenches, Gilligan’s men construct a hollow square
of corpses for shelter; in a "flanking operation," Gilligan has his men
move a bridge across the Missouri, but they are scattered when Evans has an
airplane rain down rattlesnakes, causing pandemonium comparable to the wilder
actions in the Paris-based mysteries ("What follows defies description, but
here goes..."). Gilligan is captured and the threat of a second rain of
snakes terrorizes the men in the improvised fort into surrender. When a
separate assault on Opera Lodge by renegade Shoshones and gangsters is routed by
the women, the victory is complete.12
The final chapter of Fracas in the Foothills exposes faultlines in the
story’s execution. All charges against Leonard are dropped and
Weiss’s speculations result in a $750 million fortune for the rancher. Gilligan
agrees to pull up stakes and move to California, nonetheless getting the last
word: "‘I want to warn you not to draw any foolish moral
conclusions, like a bunch of psalm singers.’" To the pleasure of
fathers, various marriages conclude the story, but a little surprisingly not that of
Evans and Miriam. Earlier, even Gilligan had gathered that "there seemed
to be some kind of understanding between Miriam and the Nemesis called
Evans," and "Jim Leonard... had grown to love Homer Evans and to
understand that some day....[sic] Well." Well, we sort of expect that, and
there is always another Homer Evans story for them. There is also another,
more signficant inhibition: Paul refrains from claiming - or having Evans claim -
what had earlier been suggested as the theme of the whole effort, that the
defeat of Gilligan would if not redeem America at least arrest the forces of
historic degredation. Not claiming that is also understandable, but its having to be
forgotten in the pleasures of the moment is an index of the impossibility in
America of the book’s deepest and most heartfelt rhetorical commitments.13
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NOTES
1 Mayhem in B-Flat (New
York, 1940), 21, 201.
2 Fracas in the Foothills, A Homer Evans Western Murder
Mystery and Open Space Adventure (New York: Random House, 1940), 15, 18, 24. Paul
writes "Blackfeet" not "Blackfoot," and so will I.
3 Ibid., 104, 210. Evans still needs
"inspiration," which he predicates on hard thinking. The synthesis of thought
and action can only be fleeting, however, and he will occasionally regret that "In
this case I have indulged too freely my passion for violent action, at the expense of
ratiocination" (281).
4 Ibid., 60, 61.
5 Ibid., 85, 108, 138, 158.
6 Ibid., 114, 120, 124.
7 Ibid., 290.
8 Ibid., 160, 164, 226, 156, 207-8.
9 Ibid., 160, 161, 206-7.
10 Ibid., 215, 225, 229.
11 "Ah, les trenchées!" shout the
Frenchmen, a little more sanguinely than one would expect (361).
12 Ibid., 399, 410.
13 Ibid., 399, 410. Even Miriam Leonard’s relative
abstinence from manslaughter - only the worst villain, to put him out of his
mortally-snakebitten misery - doesn’t take her to the altar.
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