The Lost Wagon Train Read online

  First Skyhorse Publishing edition 2016 by arrangement with Golden West Literary Agency

  Copyright © 1936 by Zane Grey

  Foreword © 2016 by Joseph Wheeler, PhD

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Brian Peterson

  Print ISBN: 978-1-63450-813-1

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63450-822-3

  Printed in the United States of America

  Foreword The Lost Wagon Train: A Pact with the Devil and a Faustian Pact with God

  In 1936, it was not an auspicious time for Grey to write a new western novel.

  Nor was it surprising that Zane Grey felt himself immune to the deepening Depression, as each further financial shock wave reverberated across the nation and the world. Was he not the world’s highest-paid and best-selling author? Was his name not twice as large as the stars on movie marquees? Did not his name on the cover of a magazine spawn thousands of extra copies sold? The last twenty years, his own star had been ascending—if anyone could be said to be immune from the ravages of the Depression, it would have been Grey.

  But his wife and publishing partner, Dolly, felt in her very bones that her Peter Pan-like husband was wrong in his blithe assumptions. An astute money-manager, one of America’s very first female bankers, she was a realist to the core. In order to keep up with her husband’s grandiose lifestyle, she’d already had to mortgage their future by borrowing $100,000 (several millions in today’s money) against future book revenues. As the Depression deepened, publishers were demanding that their contracts be re-negotiated down; the same held true for advances. Furthermore, new contracts with magazine publishers were getting harder and harder to nail down.

  Instead of listening to his wife’s pleas for frugality, Grey hubristically decided that this was the time for his first around-the-world fishing expedition. Not content with his faithful Fisherman, one of the most beautiful yachts in the world, he decided to sell it and purchase, in its place, the Kallisto, a 180-foot schooner, propelled by powerful German-built support engines. He could get it for a steal: only $40,000. But, Grey, knowing how fierce and sudden South Pacific storms could be, felt that the Kallisto needed to be brought up to date so that it could withstand any storm. In his usual careless way, he didn’t seek out other bids for the job, and he didn’t even ask how much it might cost; he merely told the shipbuilders in San Pedro, California that it had to be ready for sailing by December 1930. When Dolly asked him how much the reconditioning would cost, Grey, who didn’t know himself, estimated that surely it wouldn’t exceed $100,000. Dolly was livid.

  That December of 1930, the Grey family celebrated Christmas early in their Altadena, California mansion. Afterwards, they all caravanned to San Francisco to see him board a South-Pacific-bound ocean liner. He’d be gone a year on an around-the-world cruise, during which time he’d garner headlines from worldwide media around the world as he fished, managing to break world fishing records in the process. Back in California, Grey’s daughter Betty Zane Grey was married. The bride and groom then boarded a ship for Tahiti, where they’d join Grey on the cruise around the world in his new yacht.

  Once the group reached Tahiti, Betty was forced to see her father endure an acrimonious lawsuit brought against him by Grey’s long-time ship captain, Laurie Mitchell. It got ugly. Rumors abounded, and a poisonous miasmic mist engulfed Grey in the media. Got so bad he couldn’t even cash a check. It was thus a relief when the Kallisto, renamed Fisherman II, finally sailed out of Papeete.

  The Fisherman II was a disaster from the very start: the slightest seas caused her to roll, and when it had encountered a storm en-route to Tahiti, everyone on board was sure it would sink. All that had occurred before it even arrived in Tahiti. Repairs were made, and it proceeded on to Papeete.

  Now, with Grey’s entire entourage on board, they’d barely left Tahiti, when the yacht was already rolling terribly. It continued to keep most of the passengers seasick as it continued on to Tonga. The continual rolling was so bad, Grey found himself unable to write. By May 11, they reached Suva, in Fiji. The crew got roaring drunk. There had been so much seasickness that few passengers and crew wanted to face the open ocean again. That decision was made for them by Dolly’s cablegram: to wit, The bill from the shipbuilders came in—$300,000! All the markets are drying up. There is no more money for the voyage. Turn around and come home!

  * * *

  It was during this period that Grey wrote The Lost Wagon Train.

  He completed this long (over 400 pages) novel by spring of 1931; it was serialized by Cosmopolitan magazine beginning with the July issue of that year, but it was not published as a complete text by Harpers until 1936. It’s interesting to speculate as to what effect Grey’s crumbling fortunes had on the selection of the subject and the evolution of its twisting, complex, gory plot.

  For the novel’s time-period: Grey reached back ninety years to 1861 (the beginning of the Civil War), for the setting: Northeast New Mexico (then a territory), in the general vicinity of the Canadian River, Old Santa Fe Trail, and Fort Union today.

  The book begins with a Devil’s Pact between the Kiowa Chief Santana and Stephen Latch. Note Grey’s description of Santana:

  He appeared to be of small stature, his stooped shoulders covered by a blanket. His raven-black hair was parted in the middle and one braid showed over a fold of the blanket. His visage expressed a tremendous power. It was a pointed face, wedge-shaped, the forehead broad, the chin sharp. In the shadow no lines were discernible, yet the face belonged to a mature Indian with a record of blood and evil. The firelight showed the basilisk eyes, black, cold, with a glitter in their depths.

  And of Latch:

  Stephen Latch’s fine dark face betrayed the havoc of a wild period. He looked to be about thirty years old and was the son of a Louisiana planter, ruined at the inception of the war. Latch had not been accorded a commission in the Confederate army and, bitterly alienated, he had fought a duel with the officer who had forestalled him. With blood on his hands and with all the Rebel hatred for the North in his heart, he had set out to wage his own battle against the Northerners. From a guerilla warfare it had speedily degenerated into border outlawry.

  Since the book concludes with Latch making a Faustian deal with God, the entire plot of the book represents a transition between a devil’s pact and a desperate Faustian attempt to placate and bargain with God.

  The Devil’s pact is fiendish, one that will consign Latch to a hellish end. Yet, as you will note when you read, the story proceeds like the unraveling of the twisted skein of a Greek tragedy, with the unceasing awareness of his earlier great evil always hanging like a black cloud over him. Latch turns out to be one of the most complex villains Grey ever unleashed in the pages of a novel. The pace is so unrelenting readers find it extremely difficult to put the book down before its incredible conclusion. Almo
st unbelievably, it is also a dual romance.

  The book is, in essence, a companion piece to Grey’s Fighting Caravans, written three and a half years earlier (1927-8). An epic of the first magnitude, it is arguably one of his greatest books. The book celebrates the now legendary years of wagon trains at the peak of western migration, the heroic and bloody years of 1856-71. As you read The Lost Wagon Train, you will feel you too are living in that tumultuous period when untold thousands of Americans dared death in their search for a better life out West. And, not coincidentally, the tragic story of the Native Americans, repeatedly lied to and forced to sign treaties that doomed them as a self-sufficient race. Once you finish this incredible story, you may afterwards find yourself changed forever. May you now have a new appreciation for what the great western migration meant to both the conqueror and the conquered.

  Here is a perfect place to insert Professor Charles Pfeiffer (one of the greatest Zane Grey scholars) and listen to his personal take at to whether or not Latch got his just deserts:

  Latch committed the Faustian offense of selling himself to a higher power to achieve a highly coveted end. He was willing to make a deal with God to trade the welfare of his daughter and her ignorance of his heinous crimes for his own life and eternal salvation. At the height of Estelle’s happiness at her sixteenth birthday party, Latch retired to his room and made or reaffirmed his compact with God. He barred himself in and:

  …sat at a window, seeing nothing of the glorious panorama spread out before him. ‘Wages of sin!’ he whispered. ‘Oh, God!—burn me in hell forever (italics mine)—but save Estelle!.’

  His physical life might be saved, but his soul was lost. He had committed an unforgivable sin.

  He lost interest in the ranch; never invited guests to the ranch; never went into the dining room that had been the symbol of his greatness—

  —matching that of the fabled Lucien Maxwell. He was ‘haunted!’ ‘He had a sleepless and eternal remorse.’ And as he drifted on ‘toward what he divined was dissolution. His only happiness was recalling those few brief days with Cynthia in Spider Webb Canyon:

  … Days that could be no more here or in the hereafter! For in the spirit world he would be denied the companionship and love of his wife. He had transgressed laws that even God could not forgive. In his prayers for Estelle he had bartered even divine salvation and he had to pay.

  —Charles Pfeiffer, Zane Grey: A Study in Values—Above and Beyond the West (Aurora, Colorado: Zane Grey’s West Society, 2006)

  * * * * *

  When you finish reading this unsettling book, it may take a while before your heart slows down to its normal pace so that you are capable of taking a long, hard, dispassionate look at the book—then, and only then, you’ll be ready to arrive at your own conclusions.

  At that time, I suggest that you ask yourself this question: Is Grey right? Would Latch be eternally damned in hell for all the evil he did? Or … might it be possible, difficult as it may be to envision, that a merciful God might, after all, end up forgiving him?

  —Joseph Wheeler, PhD, 2016

  CHAPTER

  1

  LATCH’S band of outlaws and savages hid in Spider Web Canyon awaiting the Kiowa scouts who were to fetch news of any caravans that were approaching.

  It was a summer night in 1861. Spider Web Canyon lay up in the first range of mountains rising off the Great Plains. The rendezvous had been a secret hiding-place of Satana, a fierce and bloody chief of the Kiowas. He and Latch had formed a partnership—a strange relation growing out of an accidental joint attack upon a wagon train.

  The altitude gave a cool touch to the misty rain which was falling. Camp fires burned under the great cottonwoods shining upon the bronze visages of the savages. A colossal wall of rock rose back of the camp, towering so high and bold that the rim could not be seen in the blackness of night. Across the canyon the opposite wall loomed dimly with a ragged spear-pointed fringe. Night hawks were swooping in the gloom, uttering their dismal nocturnal cries. Voices of men, thud of hoofs, fall of water, mingled with the incessant hum of insects. The fires burned or smoldered, according to the fuel of the moment. Circles and groups of Kiowas sat silently, stoically, their dark faces and inscrutable eyes significant of an impassive destiny.

  Satana, the chief, sat with the white men, next to Latch. He appeared to be of small stature, his stooped shoulders covered by a blanket. His raven-black hair was parted in the middle and one braid showed over a fold of the blanket. His visage expressed a tremendous power. It was a pointed face, wedge-shaped, the forehead broad, the chin sharp. In the shadow no lines were discernible, yet that face belonged to a mature Indian with a record of blood and evil. The firelight showed the basilisk eyes, black, cold, with a glitter in their depths.

  By reason of his color and costume Satana made the most impressive figure in that group. But Latch’s band numbered men as striking of aspect as could have been found round any camp fire west of the Mississippi at the beginning of the Civil War.

  Stephen Latch’s fine dark face betrayed the havoc of a wild period. He looked to be about thirty years old and was the son of a Louisiana planter, ruined at the inception of the war. Latch had not been accorded a commission in the Confederate army and, bitterly alienated, he had fought a duel with the officer who had forestalled him. With blood on his hands and with all of the Rebel hatred for the North in his heart, he had set out to wage his own battle against the Northerners. From a guerrilla warfare it had speedily degenerated into border outlawry.

  North from Texas had spread the deserters, the slackers, the criminals, the parasites that were to live off the vast traffic of the plains—pioneers traveling west, freighters hauling supplies to the forts and posts in New Mexico and Colorado, and gold-seekers bound for California. From the north and east had spread the adventurers and outlaws, the riffraff of the cities, the men who fled to escape the army, and a horde of rudderless individuals without names or hopes or purpose.

  From these Latch had picked his band. His gift of command, which would have served the Confederacy well, here found its voice and action. He could read and rule men, and he set himself to develop a following upon which he could depend for the ruthless nature of the strife upon which he had decided.

  Nevertheless, despite Latch’s cunning, his insight and iron will, his band augmented without his consent, and had left a bloody trail from the big river to the mountains. Liquor and gold were hard masters to contend with, and gambling inevitably led to bloodshed. It was a hard time. Three men, two of whom he had never heard named, had fallen to his own gun, and fights were daily occurrences. Intelligent discipline had been his aim, and sagacity as to deals a paramount issue. There were men in his gang as strong as he, and far more reckless and fierce. With them he had played a farsighted game, always knowing that those he could not win to loyalty he could kill.

  Then had come the fortunate union with Satana. The Kiowas under this chief were implacable toward the buffalo-hunters, the caravans, and the soldiers. Satana had been difficult to deal with, but gifts, and especially firewater, had brought him around, the last of his band to align himself with white men. It galled the scion of a once rich and proud Southern family to see himself despised by a savage for the betrayal of his own people. But Satana was necessary to a terrific purpose and plan. Latch would use the Kiowas and sacrifice them in the end. His great weapon was rum, whole wagon loads of which he had stolen from a wagon train, and had hidden in Spider Web Canyon. Only Leighton, his lieutenant, a Southerner of distant kin, and two others knew where these kegs of liquor had been secreted. Latch realized it would cost him much to keep the secret, and he entertained strong motive to hide the rum in some other place, helped by one or two men he could trust.

  “Steve, we want some whisky,” Leighton had just repeated.

  Latch concluded it was time to declare himself, come what might of it. Whereupon he turned to Leighton the better to see him in the firelight. He need not have done that,
for well he had known for years on end how that handsome face looked. But he experienced a slight shock this time.

  “Lee, I’m chief of this band,” returned Latch, deliberately. “It would not be wise to inflame the Indians now. If any of you drank they would discover it.”

  “They wouldn’t need to know,” said Leighton, sullenly.

  “These Kiowas can smell rum as far as you can a polecat.”

  “We’ll put it to a vote.”

  “Who will?” demanded Latch, sharply.

  “Some of us.”

  “You can name your supporters right heah,” went on Latch. “We’ll have this out.”

  “Sprall, Waldron, Mandrove, Creik, and Texas, to mention a few,” snapped the younger man. He was ready of tongue, yet sullen and unsure, either of his followers or of Latch. Several of their group stirred uneasily and one appeared about to speak. Satana’s sudden intensity of gaze betrayed his knowledge of the white man’s language.

  “All right, I’ll answer them as well as you, Lee,” declared Latch, forcibly. “I’m running this band and I’ll not have any more disobedience. You will abide by my rules and my orders or get out.”

  “We might start a band of our own,” said Latch’s kinsman, crisply.

  “That’s your privilege if you split heah and now. Otherwise you do as I say,” replied the leader, ringingly. “And I’ll thank you all to declare yourselves quickly.”

  Latch had by no means felt so secure of his position as his speech implied, but this was the moment to test his strength and he meant to see it through. These men were exceedingly difficult to control when sober. They were foot-loose, restless, careless, and hard. Once under the influence of the bottle, they would be impossible to manage. Latch made his stand, realizing fully that if Leighton and his cronies took the liquor they could take Satana and his savages along with them. The situation was critical, still hardly worse than it had been before.

  “What do you say, fellows?” queried Leighton.