Writer from nowhere
How Jack Schaefer found the West in himself
HEwas the man who rode into our little valley out of the heart of the great glowing West.” Thus ends Jack Schaefer’s first novel Shane, the gripping tale of a mysterious, laconic gunslinger that was adapted into the beloved 1953 Western movie. Schaefer was an itinerant newspaperman from Ohio when his book was published in 1949, having first been serialized in Argosy magazine under the title
Rider From Nowhere. But the greatest secret of Shane is that as its author labored over the story — destined to be counted among the best Western fiction of all time — he had never traveled farther west than Cleveland.
As a literary critic once said of Schaefer, who moved to a ranch outside Santa Fe in 1955 and died in town in 1991, “Jack Schaefer found the West in himself, and then found himself in the West.” That’s according to his son Jonathan Schaefer, a longtime Santa Fe resident and trustee of the Jack Schaefer Literary Trust. In 2016 and 2017, the younger Schaefer collaborated with University of New Mexico Press to reissue a dozen new editions of his father’s Western novels, essays, and short stories, including several works that also saw film adaptations.
After Shane, Schaefer wrote another short novel, First Blood, which was made into the 1953 film The Silver Whip, starring Robert Wagner as the cocky young stagecoach driver Jess Harker. The 1963 epic Monte
Walsh was adapted for a 1970 film with Lee Marvin, Jeanne Moreau, and Jack Palance, and then in 2003, it was remade into a more faithful TV adaptation starring Tom Selleck. Other films based on Schaefer works include Tribute to a
Bad Man with James Cagney, 1956, based on the short story “Hanging’s for the Lucky”; Trooper Hook, 1957, featuring Joel McCrea and Barbara Stanwyck and adapted from the story “Sergeant Houck”; and 1964’s Advance to the Rear, taken from the 1957 novel Company of Cowards.
At his book-stuffed adobe home in Santa Fe, Jon Schaefer said he was around five years old when his father began writing a story told from the vantage point of a Wyoming boy named Bob Starrett. “Don’t I look like Brandon de Wilde?” Jon joked, referring to the young actor who played the kid’s role in the film Shane. In his introduction to the novel’s reissue, film historian and Santa Fe New Mexican reporter Robert Nott remarks that Schaefer’s choice of narrator brought a freshness to the Western genre’s familiar tale of a “rider from nowhere.” “By letting such an innocent character bear witness,” Nott writes, “Schaefer imbued the story with a freshness that eased readers into an otherwise age-old story.”
Shane also demonstrates Schaefer’s strong focus on the social bonds between men, as in the unforgettable scene when Shane and Bob’s father, Joe Starrett, take their axes to uproot an old tree stump. The final tableau of their efforts is a romantic ode to the marriage of manual labor and male bonding, “an old stump on its side with root ends making a strange pattern against the glow of the sun sinking behind the far mountains and two men looking over it into each other’s eyes.”
Born in Cleveland in 1907, Schaefer studied English at Oberlin College and began a graduate degree in literature at Columbia University in 1929. He abandoned academia for a career in journalism after his thesis committee denied him the opportunity to write about the development of movies — an interest, his son said, that he later pursued as a screenwriter for MGM in the 1950s. But the author’s background in classical literature, which included multiple courses on Greek and Roman mythology, served Schaefer well in crafting his archetypal heroes of the West. As his son said, “That’s why the little boy in
Shane thinks of Shane as almost a god.” After Columbia, Schaefer worked variously as a reporter for the United Press wire service, editorial page editor for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and
Baltimore Sun, and editor at the New Haven JournalCourier. In Connecticut, Jon remembered, his father also worked at a reform school for violent teenagers. He said Schaefer routinely visited the Collection of
Shane demonstrates Schaefer’s strong focus on the social bonds between men, as in the unforgettable scene when Shane and Joe Starrett take their axes to uproot an old tree stump.
Western Americana at the library at Yale University. There, Jon said, “He started at the beginning of the United States and he really studied it.” Albuquerque
Journal writer Ollie Reed Jr. writes of Shane, “That Schaefer could turn out such a Western before he ever saw the West is a tribute to his dogged research, devotion to facts, and storytelling ability, all honed by his newspaper work.”
Schaefer’s work also evinces a mastery of modernist fiction sensibilities. The author writes in his introduction to the coming-of-age novel First Blood that after Shane, “well-meaning friends had been constantly telling me that it was all very well to want to write books, but did they have to be ‘Westerns,’ those potboilers low on the totem pole of literary critical esteem?” He remembers that he tried writing an “Eastern,” as he dubbed his next project, but struggled with its rejection by publishers. Then, he writes, “primed by much reading and research, emphasis on stagecoach travel in the early days of the Far West,” he began mulling over the character of a hotheaded overland driver named Jess Harker.
The rhythms of the sentences in First Blood are snappy and noir-inflected at the outset. But as the adventure deepens and tension mounts, the book’s climax takes on not only Schaefer’s abiding preoccupation with the bonds that are forged between men, but also a distinctly experimental streamof-consciousness: “I was traveling through a clean sweet night with the two men who were like two parts of me, bigger and wider and deeper than I ever would be, but parts of me, and they had been pulling me in opposite directions because they had been moving away from each other, driven along their own separate paths by the necessity that resides in its own form in every moving man, and now they were together again and I was with them.”
In 1955, after taking an inspirational train trip West on an assignment, Schaefer moved to a 300acre ranch south of Santa Fe called the Turquoise Six. Historian Marc Simmons remembers his first visits to Schaefer at that ranch in Simmons’ introduction to Monte Walsh, Schaefer’s sprawling post-Civil War saga of the rise and fall of ranching on the open range: “It was from Schaefer that I originally heard the name of his neighbor Archie West, at age twentyfive a cowboy legend in those parts. He would ride by the Turquoise Six and stop for coffee on his way south to work cows in the Galisteo Basin. Independent, tough as rawhide, soft-spoken, and supremely confident, Archie, like the big-hatted hero of some Western movie, was the kind of man you wanted at your side in any emergency.”
Jon Schaefer recalled, “Archie became a really good friend of Jack’s. He would run cattle on his land. They got very close, and so Jack would go over there and say, ‘Let me see what you can do with a rope.’ Because he was from Cleveland!” When it was published in 1963, the dedication of the 500-plus-page Monte Walsh read simply, “For Archie.”
Schaefer was pleased with most of the film adaptations of his work, his son said, including George Stevens’ direction of Shane. When he was asked, late in life, if he had enjoyed the movie, Schaefer replied — referring to the five-foot-six Alan Ladd in the title role — “Yeah, I did, all except for that runt!” But he was horrified by the mid-’60s Paramount TV series Shane, starring David Carradine. “Please take my name off that piece-of-crap show,” he told one executive.
The author’s other works have mostly been forgotten by literary critics, though Old Ramon, the touching 1960 young-adult story of a boy, two dogs, and an elderly Hispanic shepherd in the Mojave Desert, won a Newbery Honor award. (The new UNM edition of Old Ramon is handsomely illustrated with line drawings by Harold E. West, father of Archie.)
In Schaefer’s old age, his son said, he became increasingly preoccupied with the ills of humanity, particularly the effects of overpopulation in the West. Perhaps that’s why Schaefer’s last published work, based in part on articles he wrote about animals for Audubon magazine, is titled An American Bestiary: Notes of an Amateur Naturalist (1975). But he never grew tired of Santa Fe, even as he watched the town grow from one stoplight in the mid-’50s. “He loved it,” Jon Schaefer said. “He would say that in Northern New Mexico, the civilized people are the Pueblo Indians. … And then he’d say that the superbarbarians are — guess who?”
At the author’s graveside service after his death in 1991, Simmons writes, Schaefer’s friend Archie West read aloud from the last two pages of Monte Walsh, which tenderly describe the title character’s cowboy burial. The inscription on Walsh’s fictional grave reads, “A Good Man with a Horse.” “I want it to last,”
one character says of the inscription, which might well also address the enduring quality of Schaefer’s mostly unsung literary output. “I want it to outlast any of us. And our kids. And our kids’ kids.”
The Big Range, The Canyon, Company of Cowards, First Blood and Other Stories, Heroes Without Glory, The Kean Land and Other Stories, Mavericks, Monte Walsh, Old Ramon, The Pioneers, Shane, and Stubby Pringle’s Christmas are all available from University of New Mexico Press.