Blazing Guns On The Chisholm Trail – Borden Chase, 1948 ★★★

Cowboys' Work Is Never Done

When the tough get going, when is it better not to go along? That’s the question that underlies Borden Chase’s Blazing Guns On The Chisholm Trail, a western novel better known by its other name, the one they named the movie after, Red River.

While Red River the movie is regarded as one of the finest westerns made in an era marked by western movies, there is a knock on it playing things too soft, especially at the end. Director Howard Hawks liked his comedic male-bonding, and sometimes that is seen as intrusive. Reading the source novel gives one a chance to experience the story in rawer, sterner form. How does it compare?

The story is the same as the movie in key respects. Facing desperate times in his home state as there is no market for selling beef on the hoof, Texas rancher Thomas Dunson leads a cattle drive hundreds of miles north, through territory peopled by desperadoes and hostile Indians, to where he hopes to find a town with a railroad and a buyer. But his hard ways and unilateral leadership style alienate the cowboys riding with him, even young war veteran Mathew Garth, whom Dunson raised like a son.

As we meet him in the book, Dunson is a singularly unfriendly customer. John Wayne played Dunson so ornery in the movie it shook up what had been his nice-guy screen image for good. Yet there’s a wide gulf between the tough guy projected by Wayne and the version of Dunson who appears in the book. Book Dunson is notably darker in personality and lacks the rays of light Wayne brings to the character in the film. Chase starts the book by describing him as "thick-necked, low-jowled, with eyes that looked out at you like the rounded grey ends of bullets in a pistol cylinder." His thoughts, Chase continues, were "hidden things."

A short western that relies on hard-nosed action and prose as bitten off as a rancher's tobacco plug, Blazing Guns still covers more ground than the movie. A major theme of the book, only briefly suggested in the movie, is the importance of the cattle drive to the state of Texas, still reeling from the aftermath of the Civil War and desperate to start up its beef market to the North. At times Chase pushes the idea of the cattle drive as a matter of Texas’s very survival. A successful drive will open a trail to other Texans and their cattle. Dunson knows this, and Chase sometimes uses it to explain if not excuse his hard manner.

The Chisholm Trail as it is remembered today. Photo from the Kansas Historical Society website. (www.kshs.org).

Nadine Groot isn’t in the novel, at least not as the amiable sidekick with the false teeth Walter Brennan played in the movie. I missed Groot; he took the rough edges off Dunson and gave the story more of a rooting interest. A heavy named “The Donegal” is prominently featured instead; a cold-blooded killer of great size who tangles with Garth and who is used by the female love interest, Tess Millay. There’s a brief mention in the movie of “The Donegal” as a leader of a wagon train, but he’s never seen and easy to miss. In the book he provides needed if predictable menace; lacking depth or much interest beyond his casually homicidal antics.

The character in the movie who gets a lot of attention, in part because of the mysterious way John Ireland plays him and in part because of how abruptly he is handled at the end, is Cherry Valance, the hard gunslinger who takes a left-field liking to Garth and joins the drive. The story is that Hawks cut Ireland out of the film after shooting began because Ireland started going with Joanne Dru, the actress who played Tess and whom Hawks wanted for himself. Ireland still is in the movie up through to its end, but he doesn’t get much to say or do.

In Blazing Guns, Cherry gets more to do, and plays a stronger role, but like everyone else in the novel, he’s not as likable or as interesting as his film counterpart. The same is true for Tess, who is pretty cold and unabashedly trampy in manner. Dru gets a lot of stick for her film portrayal, but I thought she did a good job and presents a more rounded character than appears in the book.

Originally serialized in The Saturday Evening Post in 1946 and 1947, then published in 1948, Blazing Guns On The Chisholm Trail has been out of print a while. But it is back and available in a new Red River home-video bookcase set released by Criterion. If you love Red River the movie, it’s worth having for the two different versions of the movie (in both DVD and Blu-Ray form), the radio shows, and vintage interviews.

One such interview features Chase himself explaining how he never liked the movie much because it was too Hollywood for his taste. The cute meets, the chumminess, it just wasn’t his thing. You can sense that reading the book. Chase's writing style is very terse, even to the point of eschewing proper grammar. Sentences often lack a subject or verb. While others spent their formative years getting educated, Chase's bio tells us he spent his driving around gangster Frankie Yale; there's a school-of-hard-knocks quality to the writing here.

His descriptions work best when the subjects are Dunson, Garth, and that cattle drive, across a dusty wasteland of hostile Chickasaw and vicious weather. As difficulties mount, Dunson becomes more unyielding about pushing his men, knowing that if he relaxes, he risks losing everything. Chase apparently described the story as Mutiny On The Bounty transferred to the open plains, but the novel's Dunson makes Captain Bligh seem almost pleasant.

What Red River the novel lacks is a sense of personality, or maybe just empathy. You get that Dunson is tough on the first page, but the problem of his personality is not so much explored as stated and left alone. The story is a good one, and Chase's lean style is sometimes a plus, but a depth you get from watching the movie is missing here. Maybe it's not fair docking Chase some for putting together such a sturdy skeleton that someone else built upon so well, but there it is.