The Plains of Laramie (16 page)

Lauran Paine who, under his own name and various pseudonyms has written over 1,000 books, was born in Duluth, Minnesota. His family moved to California when he was at a young age and his apprenticeship as a Western writer came about through the years he spent in the livestock trade, rodeos, and even motion pictures where he served as an extra because of his expert horsemanship in several films starring movie cowboy Johnny Mack Brown. In the late 1930s, Paine trapped wild horses in northern Arizona and even, for a time, worked as a professional father. Paine came to know the Old West through the eyes of many who had been born in the previous century, and he learned that Western life had been very different from the way it was portrayed on the screen. “I knew men who had killed other men,” he later recalled. “But they were the exceptions. Prior to and during the Depression, people were just too busy eking out an existence to indulge in Saturday-night brawls.” He served in the U.S. Navy in the Second World War and began writing for Western pulp magazines following his discharge. It is interesting to note that all of his earliest novels (written under his own name and the pseudonym Mark Carrel) were published in the British market and he soon had as strong a following in that country as in the United States. Paine’s Western fiction is characterized by strong plots, authenticity,
an apparently effortless ability to construct situation and character, and a preference for building his stories upon a solid foundation of historical fact.
Adobe Empire
(1956), one of his best novels, is a fictionalized account of the last twenty years in the life of trader William Bent and, in an off-trail way, has a melancholy, bittersweet texture that is not easily forgotten. In later novels like
The White Bird
and
Cache Cañon
, he showed that the special magic and power of his stories and characters had only matured along with his basic themes of changing times, changing attitudes, learning from experience, respecting Nature, and the yearning for a simpler, more moderate way of life.

GUNMAN

FEUD ON THE MESA

HOLDING THE ACE CARD

THE DARK TRAIL

BORDER TOWN

OPEN RANGE

GUNS IN THE DESERT

GATHERING STORM

NIGHT OF THE COMANCHEROS

GUNS IN OREGON

RAIN VALLEY

A LEISURE BOOK
^®

October 2009

Published by special arrangement with Golden West Literary Agency.

Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
200 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016

Copyright © 2006 by Mona Paine

“Vermilion Kid” first appeared in
Double-Action Western Action
(9/55). Copyright © 1955 by Columbia Publications, Inc. Copyright © renewed 1983 by Lauran Paine. Copyright © 2006 by Mona Paine for restored material.

“Boothill’s Ferryman” first appeared in
Double-Action Western Action
(4/57). Copyright © 1957 by Columbia Publications, Inc. Copyright © renewed 1985 by Lauran Paine. Copyright © 2006 by Mona Paine for restored material.

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E-ISBN: 978-1-4285-0751-7

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