Part II
6
Korine Powers
In a 2007 interview with True West magazine, Elmore Leonard discussed his short‐story “Three‐Ten to Yuma” (1953), the imminent release of James Mangold's film adaptation 3:10 to Yuma (2007), and the possibility of returning to the western genre: “People ask me all the time, ‘Will I ever write another Western?’ I say, I do not know. If they pay enough, I suppose I will” (Leonard 2007, p. 26). Leonard did in fact return to the western several times in his career, and his crime novels and hybrid “eastern‐westerns” are peopled with cowboys, outlaws, and, more often, western wannabes. Still, Leonard's response figures his westerns as things of the past, echoing a critical sense that they were simply practice for his more interesting crime novels.
Leonard biographies portray Hombre (1961) as a means to an end: the novel – and its subsequent film rights – allowed Leonard to quit his day job in advertising and quit the western, too (Challen 2000, p. 66; Geherin 1989, pp. 8, 30–31; Sutter 2018, pp. 749–750). Hombre was published during a perceived “end of the line for Westerns” in print and on film (Sutherland 2014, p. 225), and its success allowed Leonard to work on what would become his first crime novel, The Big Bounce (1969) (Sutter 2018, p. 750; Rzepka 2013 pp. 75–76). The preference Leonard's mother had for his westerns over the darker, obscenity‐laced crime novels that followed is perhaps the most damning evidence against them; as she lamented to her son, “Why do not you write those Westerns any more? … They were so nice” (Sutherland 2014, p. 225).1 The “niceness” baked into the genre is precisely the problem: Leonard's westerns are simpler, less improvisational, and clumsier than the crime novels that followed. Hombre, for all its positive qualities, is still a western written before Leonard's mastery of free indirect discourse and his ear for vernacular would make his name synonymous with crime fiction.
When Leonard's westerns are praised, it is often for their cinematic flair. Leonard's love for western films far outpaces his interest in western novels (Geherin 1989, p. 19; Rzepka 2013, p. 45), and Hombre is written with an ear for the voice of his characters in an onscreen world. Hombre's main antagonist, Frank Braden, was partially inspired by Richard Boone's performance as Frank Usher in The Tall T (1957), an adaptation of Leonard's “The Captives” (1955). According to Leonard, “Richard Boone, he recited his lines exactly the way I heard them when I was writing the story. And then when I wrote Hombre … I said, ‘You ought to be in this because one of the guys in this is you’” (Leonard 2007, p. 24).2 However, Hombre showcases more than Leonard's ear for cinematic dialogue; it also reveals an intimate knowledge of the western genre. Beyond adaptations of Leonard's own work, Hombre is filled with references to the filmic western, including Stagecoach (1939), Red River (1948), High Noon (1952), Shane (1953), and The Searchers (1956). These references are more than generic echoes; Hombre interrogates the underpinnings of the imaginary West within these films with a critical eye toward their racist ramifications. The familiar trappings of the Hollywood western – the lone cowboy, the tension between white Americans and American Indians, and the climactic shoot‐out – are defamiliarized by references to the systemic marginalization or elimination of people of color from the American origin myth.
At its core, Hombre is a novel about the authorship of the imaginary West and, with it, the racial dimensions of that process of authorship. In the aftermath of Hombre's final showdown at San Pete mine, Leonard exposes a rich vein of unanswered questions buried within the Golden Age westerns he echoes and subverts. Hombre foresees the revisionist western of the late 1960s and 1970s, and introduces questions about race, identity, power, and perception that come to dominate Leonard's later novels.
What's in a Name?
The plot of Hombre is lifted directly from Stagecoach: disaster strikes a ragtag group of people traveling by stagecoach across the Arizona Territory, and they are forced to work together and rely on a mysterious outsider to survive. In Hombre, the group includes Carl Allen, our narrator; Mr. Mendez, the driver; John Russell, an Anglo‐Mexican American man who willingly lives among the Apache; Kathleen McLaren, a girl on her way home after being kidnapped by the Apache; Dr. Favor, a corrupt San Carlos Indian Agent; Audra Favor, his “womanly” wife; and Frank Braden, who intends to rob Dr. Favor of his stolen gold. Nearly all these characters have counterparts in Stagecoach. John Russell invites comparisons to John Wayne's “Ringo Kid,” Kathleen McLaren's brash personality and unstable femininity echo the prostitute Dallas (Claire Trevor), and Dr. Favor is a villain sketched in the style of the embezzling banker Henry Gatewood (Berton Churchill). In Stagecoach, The Ringo Kid and Dallas stumble into criminal activity through no fault of their own, unlike Henry Gatewood. The Kid remarks that he used to be “a good cowhand, but … things happen.” Dallas agrees, “Yeah, that's it. Things happen.” These “things” are put aside in the final conflict, where the Ringo Kid chooses to save the stagecoach from an Apache attack rather than save himself from prison, and his selflessness moves Marshal Curley Wilcox (George Bancroft) to help him escape.
Hombre borrows Stagecoach's setup but replaces the film's issues of criminality with issues of race. Although a gang of bandits led by white men threatens Hombre's passengers, the novel remains deeply concerned with the threat of Apache peoples encroaching on its borders. John Russell, Hombre's protagonist, stands at the center of this racial conflict. At first, Russell appears to be a conflation of Eric Travisin and Barney Fry from Leonard's first published short story, “Trail of the Apache” (1951). Like Travisin, the white Indian Agent who becomes “more of an Apache than the Apaches themselves” (Leonard 2018, p. 592), Russell adopts Apache culture without being born into the tribe. But like Travisin's mentor Barney Fry, who is “discounted” for his “one‐quarter Apache” blood (p. 591), Russell is also a mixed‐race character precariously positioned in a world that often equates blood quantum with identity and racial loyalty. In Russell's case, Carl Allen, the story's narrator, suspects he is “one‐part Mexican, according to Mr. Mendez, and three parts white” (p. 176).
Of the three ethnicities Russell is aligned with throughout the novel, his Mexican ancestry gets the least obvious attention. Hombre often glosses over Russell's specific parentage, and critical scholarship and adaptations have followed suit. B.R. Myers and David Geherin both describe Russell as “a white man raised by Apaches” (quoted in Rzepka 2013, p. 8; Geherin 1989, p. 28), and Martin Ritt's largely faithful film adaptation of Hombre (1967) portrays Russell (Paul Newman) as a white man choosing between his inheritance from his white father and his life with the Apache people. However, John Russell's actual racial positioning within the novel proves complicated, as Allen's narration increasingly undermines and rewrites Russell's self‐stated identity.
Hombre foregrounds its interest in the process of authorship by using first‐person character narration, the only such narrative device in any of Leonard's 45 novels.3 Carl Everett Allen showcases all the “limitations” Leonard perceived in first‐person storytelling (Leonard 2012, p. 217). While Leonard's free indirect discourse typically allows him to disappear into the text in all but those rare cases where the third‐person narration is interrupted and “an authorial elbow is left sticking way out” (Rzepka 2013, p. 18), Allen is “all elbows.” Hombre is littered with parenthetical asides and rhetorical questions, telegraphed skips in the narrative, and moments when characters speak with one another and Allen can neither transcribe nor translate what they say. Allen's awkwardness is partially a hat tip to a literary genre full of clumsy writing (Rzepka 2013, p. 46), and partially a reference to the passive greenhorn narrators of western classics, like the Yankee Tenderfoot in Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902) and the 11‐year‐old Bob Starrett in Jack Schaefer's Shane (1949). Like these narrators, Allen is often ignored by other characters and avoids doing much of anything when the shooting starts. Indeed, Allen “thought about buying a gun” before his trip, but ultimately decides against it (Leonard 2018, p. 184). What Allen does instead is write: literally writing to his mother before his stagecoach trip in lieu of buying a gun (p. 184), and subsequently authoring John Russell's identity.
Allen's introduction to Hombre is penned in Contention, Arizona, and its “Hombre,” John Russell, remains a point of contention for the narrator. Russell's multiethnic identity is contested, misread, denied, and finally interpreted by Carl Allen at the end of the novel. This “contention” is obvious within the introduction itself. Allen refers to the protagonist exclusively as “John Russell” in his narration but names the text Hombre because, when forced to decide which name would best represent Russell, he “think[s] Hombre, which Henry Mendez and others called him sometimes and just means man, is maybe the best” (p. 169). Allen's hesitation between what name is best for the novel and what name is best for the protagonist is important, and not simply in terms of whether Hombre would sell better than a book called John Russell. The significance of names returns throughout Hombre, as it does in much of Leonard's work (Rzepka 2013, p. 37), and these names become shorthand for arguments about identity. John Russell is never really “just a name” (Leonard 2018, p. 171), as Allen claims; instead, his name is an argument about the character's racial identity and the origins of the mythic western hero. “Hombre” may embody the protagonist's identity better – and the black, Mexican, and mestizo vaqueros may offer a more accurate picture of the “real” western frontier (Clayton et al. 2001, pp. xvi–xvii) – but the name “John Russell” places the protagonist's mythic whiteness at the forefront.
However, collapsing Hombre's references to race into a debate about whether Russell is “really” white or Mexican or Native misses how carefully Leonard sketches out Russell's past. While Allen twice repeats that Russell is “three‐parts white” (Leonard 2018, pp. 176, 179), Hombre gives us reason to doubt him. In fact, the Hombre never indicates that he remembers or claims a white ancestry at all. He “has no memory of his father and only some memory of living in a Mexican village” (p. 179), and the novel never provides the reader with Russell's original last name. Russell's “whiteness” is certain only to the extent that his blue eyes are evidence of Anglo ancestry. Hombre tells us that Russell lived in a Mexican pueblo near Sonora as “Juan something” until he was abducted by Apache raiders at six years old (p. 196). From ages 6 to 12, Juan was called Ish‐kay‐nay, a name given to him by his adoptive father, Sonsichay (p. 196). At 12 years old, Ish‐kay‐nay was captured by the US Army, who sentenced him to a work detail under James Russell. Ish‐kay‐nay was then abducted again, this time by James Russell, who quit his business with the army, “took the boy with him and gave him his American name, John Russell” (pp. 179–180). The newly christened John Russell stayed in Contention for five years – a year less than his time as either Juan or Ish‐kay‐nay – before joining the Apache Police at the San Carlos reservation, and finally becoming a mustanger (p. 180). Ish‐kay‐nay is explicitly a child prisoner when James Russell gives him his new name and his new identity,4 and it is unclear to what extent Russell accepts “Russell” as a name at all. When Allen recounts the story of Russell earning the name Tres Hombres, he mentions that Russell was known to the Apache Police as “Juan or Juanito, but more often Ish‐kay‐nay to the older ones” (p. 196). Buried within a story about Russell's conventional western heroism lies the suggestion that Russell may think of and introduce himself as Juan when he is not Ish‐kay‐nay.
Russell's blood quantum proves less important than how the characters who surround him interpret his ethnicity. Allen's account of Russell's racial identity comes secondhand from Henry Mendez, a stagecoach owner who explicitly attempts to erase his own Mexican identity through assimilation: “From a distance you could never tell he was a Mexican. He never dressed like one. … He did not usually act like one” (p. 171). Hombre implies that Mendez perceives Russell's capacity to “pass” as an assurance of his own capacity to assimilate into white society, and Mendez's insistence that Russell is “three‐parts white” aligns with his insistence that Russell should present himself as white. While Mendez usually couches these arguments for integration within discussions of choice, “white” or “English” are the only acceptable answers. His question “‘Which name today?’” appears to offer Russell power over his own identity, but Russell's attempts to answer Mendez in Spanish or Apache are met with immediate rejection: “‘We use John Russell. No symbol names. No Apache names’” (p. 173). The illusion of choice hides a test that Russell repeatedly fails as Mendez pushes for Russell to speak English, to think in English, and to settle and build a home in Sweetmary in order to disguise his mixed‐race identity and assimilate. As Mendez says:
It's up to you. You can be white or Mexican or Indian. But now it pays you to be a white man. To look like a white man for awhile. When you go to Contention, you say, How are you? I'm John Russell. I own the Russell place.
(p. 178)
The only valid option for Russell is whiteness because it is the option Mendez would choose for himself. Mendez cannot bear to hear Russell's protestations against speaking English or his determination to sell the Sweetmary estate, along with the white homestead that Mendez imagines it includes, because Russell's integration into white society figuratively opens the door to his own integration. Yet the same desire for white acceptance that encourages Mendez to “help” John Russell also makes their friendship tenuous. When Frank Braden and Dr. Favor mistake Russell for an Apache and demand he sit outside, Mendez immediately accedes rather than taking the chance of racializing himself in the eyes of his white passengers (p. 200). Mendez will advise Russell on how to change his appearance and behavior to suit white tastes, but he will not defend Russell's right to integrate into white society if it means allying himself with a racial outsider.
In response to Mendez's insistence on conformity and self‐suppression, Russell's rejection of white society and its accompanying racism also becomes a rejection of Mendez's attempts to assimilate: “I cannot ride with them and maybe they cannot walk with me. Maybe they do not walk the way I walk. You sabe that, Mexican?” (p. 219). Referring to someone by their racial difference is unremarkable in western texts, but here Russell's demeaning gesture is meant to reaffirm their shared difference from the white passengers in the stagecoach. Russell's preference for a Mexican or Apache identity over a white one is unusual within the western. John Wayne characters like Breck Coleman in The Big Trail (1930) or Ethan Edwards in The Searchers might wear deerskin or learn Native hunting techniques, but those skills are always used to protect other white settlers from the encroaching Native threat. The idea that Russell might perceive himself as Apache – and perhaps prefer to be “an uncivilized person” rather than a member of white society – makes him dangerous to his fellow stagecoach passengers, and to Allen most specifically:
But maybe [Russell] even thought he really was Apache. That had never occurred to me before. It would have been something to look into his mind. Not for long. Not for more than a minute; just time enough to look around with his eyes, around and back at things that had happened to him. That would tell you a few things.
(p. 196)
Of course, Leonard's other novels allow readers precisely those kinds of brief glimpses into the mind and perception of his cast of characters, and particularly his heroes. Hombre does not, because doing so would unravel the conversation building around the western as a genre. Allen cannot look into Russell's mind for too long or he risks revealing that Russell still “wants” to be Apache, and, in his words, “‘Wanting to be one is just as bad as being one. Maybe worse’” (p. 206). Allen constantly renegotiates Russell's racial position in relation to his own allegiance to the white passengers, even in the face of their explicit selfishness, corruption, and shallow personalities.
Authoring the Hollywood West
Although Allen is writing in 1884, he has the same cultural and imaginative knowledge as a western movie fan. The language of film is carefully built into how Allen communicates with the reader and the kinds of assumptions he makes. He introduces John Russell in panning close‐up: “Picture the belt down across the chest with the sun glinting on the bullets. … Picture a stained dirty looking straight‐brim hat” (p. 172). In lieu of saying a shoot‐out was like “something out of a movie,” Allen describes the mounting action in terms of nineteenth‐century theater: “It was like watching a play. No, it was realer than that. (My gosh, it could not get more real!)” (p. 230). We recognize the thrill of a western moviegoer tensing for violence. In Hombre, though, these filmic cues are signs of Allen's inexperience, racism, and naivety. He introduces Henry Mendez in stereotype, remarking with surprise that he dresses like a white person, rather than like other Mexicans who dress only in white, “like their clothes were made out of bedsheets” (p. 171). Allen makes equally broad assumptions about Russell's Apache friends, assuming that they ignore the racist comments hurled their way at a bar because they “[do not] know any English” (p. 175). And, like the western films on which Allen's voice is modeled, Hombre's narration frequently grows uneasy when Russell draws attention to identities that exist beyond the confines of the cinematic American West.
In the wake of Russell's fluctuating relationship to white, Native, and Mexican identities, Leonard carefully notes the anxiety Hombre's white characters have about racializing other characters correctly. Built into these concerns are frequent, subtle references to the cresting Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and the suppressed history that lies beyond the white space of the imaginary West. In Russell's perceived and actual racial difference, Hombre points to issues of identity that go beyond the nineteenth century. When Allen sees Russell for the first time, he describes the “Mexican, Indian look” – “tell‐nothing‐but‐know‐everything” – in his “blue [eyes], light‐blue looking in his Indian‐dark face. Maybe that does not sound like anything, but I'll tell you it gave me the strangest feeling” (p. 174). That “strange feeling” evokes the instability of racial categorization in the same decade that Loving vs. Virginia (1967) would strike down antimiscegenation laws. From Russell's introduction on, the novel develops the precarities of race‐as‐construct with an eye toward human rights concerns that other westerns work to obscure.
In Hombre, race undergoes constant discussion and revision. Early and Lamarr Dean argue over whether Russell and his friends are drinking the Apache‐associated tizwin5 or the Mexican mescal before deciding that either way, “‘it's still not allowed’” (p. 175). The uncertainty about what the Apache men might be drinking is replaced with the vaguely expressed but unambiguous certainty that they should be forced out for their racial difference, until Russell violently intervenes on their behalf.
John Sutherland's (2014) brief essay on Hombre reads this discussion about the rights of Native people to drink in the bar as a reference to a Civil Rights “sit‐in,” and the white passengers' later attempts to push Russell outside of the stagecoach as an allusion to Rosa Parks (p. 225). In fact, Hombre's civil rights concerns draw the reader's attention to the realities of Leonard's America in 1961 and Allen's America in 1884. When Mendez argues that the stagecoach passengers will testify against the robbers, Lamarr Dean throws away Russell's gun and remarks, “‘This one does not look like any witness to me, Mister’” (Leonard 2018, p. 211). The quick nod to who “looks” like a witness introduces familiar genre concerns about frontier justice, but – on Russell's and Mendez's bodies – it also invokes the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified only 17 years before Hombre takes place. Prior to the amendment, several states, including many western states, had laws banning any black or mixed‐race person from being a witness “in any case in which a white person was a party” (Avins 1966, p. 474). Russell continually rejects the systems that reject him. When he confronts Dr. Favor about stealing from the reservation and Dr. Favor says he has no proof, Russell makes it clear that he does not need a witness or evidence: “We were not in any court” (Leonard 2018, p. 243). Russell, at least for the moment, denies Dr. Favor the right to a white‐controlled system of judgment by highlighting whom that system protects and whom it leaves exposed. Instead, Russell – and Leonard through him – evokes civil rights concerns to denaturalize the western monomyth and its contemporary repercussions.
Hombre's challenges to the genre are strengthened by Allen's loyalties to the western mythos, and the most powerful moments in the novel occur when Allen's narration grapples with Russell's unstable position as the cowboy protagonist. Ultimately, Allen's passive, filmic perception of the West is aligned with the Favors, who couch their sensationalist white panic and racism in stories lifted directly from early western films. Audra Favor, for instance, fears for the fate of white women among the Apache people and gossips about how Apaches sometimes “even eat the dogs” (p. 194). Her story about dog‐eating Natives threatening white women calls to mind D.W. Griffith's The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1913), a western precursor to his most famous racist parable, The Birth of a Nation (1915). Elderbush Gulch tells the story of two young orphans (Mae Marsh and Lilian Gish) whose lives – and new puppies – are threatened by wild “Savages.” The Natives are introduced performing a wild dance, and an inter‐title card with faux‐Native speech explains that they are preparing for the “Dog Feast. Sunka Alawan. ‘Wayatamin Sunka E YA E‐E YO’ (‘May you eat dog and live long’).” Like the western filmmakers and filmgoers, the Favors feel as though they “really know Native American peoples” through stories and experiences that stereotype the Apache people as dog‐eating savages (Hilger 2016, p. 18). In response to Audra Favor's sensationalist portrait of the Apaches, Russell recontextualizes the “dog‐eating” as a problem created by the US government's treatment of Native peoples. Russell, who denies allegiance to inherent/inherited identity, reminds the Favors of the Apaches' forced relocation and limited government rations (Leonard 2018, pp. 194–195).
Russell's criticism of the Favors, who have stolen government funds allotted to the reservation, is explicitly a criticism of the historical treatment of the Apache people by the government and by Hollywood storytellers. Westerns, as a rule, do not call attention to the interiority or humanity of Native peoples. Apart from Broken Arrow (1950), which featured Jewish American actor Jeff Chandler as Cochise and Debra Paget in redface and brown contact lenses as Tom Jeffords's (James Stewart's) fictional love interest Sonseeahray,6 few western films released before Hombre's publication portrayed American Indians as nuanced characters. More often, Native characters were voiceless sidekicks or played by white actors. Some films feature multiracial characters who deny their Native ancestry in favor of a white one. For instance, in The Searchers,7 Ethan Edwards is quick to call Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter) a “half‐breed,” but Martin just as quickly minimizes his Native roots: “I'm eighth‐Cherokee. The rest is Welsh and English.” His Native identity instead serves as both a joke and a threat: after accidentally purchasing a Comanche wife instead of a blanket, Wild Goose Flying in the Night Sky (Beulah Archuletta), Martin turns her name into an order (“Look”) and physically kicks her away from him. “Look” is introduced in the narrative, rejected, and subsequently slaughtered by the US Calvary in the space of Martin's letter to his white sweetheart, Laurie Jorgensen (Vera Miles). With his accidental wife dead and forgotten, Martin's happy ending embraces his European heritage, as he prepares to marry into the Jorgensen family and further distance himself from his Cherokee ancestry. Indeed, Jane Tompkins introduces her survey of the western in West of Everything by arguing that there are no Native people as people within the Hollywood western at all: “Indians are repressed in westerns—there but not there—in the same way women are” (Tompkins 1992, p. 9). Russell, in an inversion of Hollywood redface, uses his white‐presenting haircut and clothing to be read as white, thereby gaining access to a white cultural space in which he upsets popular, racialized readings of the West, and the western.
Russell responds to the genre's Griffith‐esque portrait of indigenous savagery by drawing attention to the savagery of the reservation, where the US government contained, starved, and neglected a group of people for their race. It is no accident that Russell and Dr. Favor come from the San Carlos Reservation, a place designed as “an alternative to genocide as a method of getting rid of the Apache” and called “Hell's Forty Acres” even by the white officials who worked there (Perry 1993, p. 121). The Favors are not stealing from a bank, but from the victims of “America's first concentration camp” (Sutherland 2014, p. 225). Allen, who understands that Russell is violating the rules of the genre even if he cannot articulate the nature of that violation, expects the Hombre to “explain it” to the stagecoach passengers (Leonard 2018, p. 195): in other words, to explain that he has lived among the Apaches but remains white. Allen, like Henry Mendez, wants to force Russell into an assimilation narrative that Russell rejects.
Yet this push for assimilation is not without its contradictions. While Allen cannot endorse Russell's unstable connection to whiteness, he also finds it attractive. Most of the stagecoach characters serve as foils or antagonists for Russell, but “the McLaren girl,” returning home after being abducted by Apache warriors, is a pointed and complicated exception. It is tempting to read Kathleen McLaren as little more than a would‐be love interest for Carl Allen, a western damsel who exists on the margins of Hombre's narrative as a body to be protected, endangered, and objectified. However, while Audra Favor is intentionally written in that mode – as Allen says, “If anybody ever says woman to me … I would think of Audra Favor” (Leonard 2018, p. 191) – McLaren's attractive qualities are associated with Russell throughout Hombre. In part, McLaren functions as the female body Allen can use to negotiate his homoerotic attraction to Russell, which has its own long legacy within the western. Films like Red River (1948), a favorite of Leonard's,8 reasserted their protagonists' heterosexuality by rewarding the morally superior of the two men with marriage to a “good woman.” Allen's attraction to McLaren is remarkable because his infatuation is explicitly linked to her ambiguous race and gender. McLaren's hair “was cut almost as short as a boy's and her face [was] dark from the sun. But she looked good anyway” (p. 177). McLaren's “darkness” and “boyishness” immediately bring Russell to mind, and that association is not lost on Leonard. Soon after he meets her at the beginning of the novel, Allen daydreams about getting close enough to McLaren to “know she wasn't any boy” while the two of them ride off together in a shared coach. “But both the McLaren girl and the coach disappeared the second I saw John Russell” (p. 178), Allen says. The contrast between Allen's initial filmic pan down Russell's body – lingering on his long hair, his “almost Indian‐fashion” hat, and the “darkness” of his arms and face (p. 172) – and the “new” John Russell, dressed and groomed like a white man, yanks Allen's attention away from the object of his romantic affection.
The connection between Russell and McLaren extends to her movements and speech, which also embody gender and race ambiguity. Allen notes that McLaren's body looks “like a boy more than a woman” because it appeared that she “would run and swim” (p. 190). She also speaks in the unflowered language of a straight‐talking western protagonist who follows her own moral code. Leonard biographers tend to draw attention to the development of his female characters following a negative critical response to The Switch (1978) and his marriage to Joan Shepard in 1979 (Geherin 1989, p. 55; Sutter 2018, p. 760), but Leonard's western women were often defined by their defiance of gender – and generic – convention.9 In Hombre, McLaren's direct language rather than her body labels her a threat, as Frank Braden notes ominously when she tells him to stop talking: “‘You live with them a while and you forget how a white person talks’” (p. 194), which is to say, how a white woman talks. McLaren's language would be fine if spoken in a man's voice, but it is wrong in the mouth of a female character in the western, where “women as a group represent the middle‐class forces of civilization and socialized self‐restraint for which the culturally liminal hero, white by blood but aboriginal by inclination and training, is making the frontier safe” (Rzepka 2013, p. 62). McLaren provides a space for Allen to safely negotiate his attraction to difference while still controlling how that difference is processed.
Ironically, McLaren better embodies the boundary‐threatening but ultimately conservative identity of the conventional western hero than Russell does. Rather than being the focus of another male hero's journey, like Debbie Edwards (Natalie Wood) in The Searchers, Kathleen McLaren enters Hombre already rescued, and with her own ideas about what “frontier justice” should look like. While McLaren has been attractively “changed” by her experiences, she defends neither the Apaches nor Russell. Instead, McLaren becomes a vehicle for making Russell into the kind of character Allen wants him to be. It is McLaren who argues for saving the Favors and who lobbies to bury Russell at Sweetmary at the end of Hombre. Both arguments eventually lay the groundwork for how Allen will rewrite Russell as a white rather than Native or Mexican “hero.”
Killing Hombre, Whitewashing John Russell
Unlike the greenhorn narrators he is modeled after, Allen never develops a significant relationship with the mysterious stranger whose story he chronicles. By the end of the novel, John Russell barely knows Allen's name, and Allen appears to resent and rely on Russell in equal measure. Allen is a departure from characters like William de Both in Leonard's “Trail of the Apache,” who learns how to be a better soldier and man from Eric Travison. He is neither hero nor apprentice. Then again, as Allen's interjections frequently remind us, neither is the reader:
It is easy to talk about something like this. It is also interesting to plan and imagine what you would do, but only as long as you aren't there. I would not sit where we were, just waiting there again, no matter what anybody gave me.
(p. 229)
In short, Allen recognizes that his readers are like him; they desire action but only so long as they do not have to endanger themselves. His fumbles as an author and as a secondary protagonist within Hombre showcase the limitations of the imaginative space of the white West(ern). At its core, Allen's narration highlights a lesson that appears more overtly in later Leonard fictions like Get Shorty (1990), which teaches us that film is culturally powerful but “basically fake” (Rhodes 2008, pp. 157–158). Hombre powerfully highlights what is missing from the text: transcriptions or translations of the exchanges in Spanish and Chiricahua‐Mescalero, justice for the inhabitants of the San Carlos Reservation, and a thoughtful understanding of John Russell's motivations. In their place, Allen gives the reader a conventional western ending that rings false. While Allen insists, “I wasn't [Russell's] father. He was full grown. So let him talk for himself if he had anything to say” (Leonard 2018, p. 196), he ultimately does father Russell's legacy, as he interprets the Hombre's actions for Leonard's readers and assumes an unearned authorial depth of understanding.
At the conclusion of Hombre, Russell gives Allen two final orders: the first is to shoot the Mexican outlaw in the back if he reaches for his gun, and the second is to ensure that the Favors' stolen money is returned to San Carlos (p. 272). Allen fails to accomplish either task. John Russell dies as a result of the first failure and the second ensures that the “stolen government money” – viewed by Allen as stolen from the government rather than the starving Apache people Russell endeavored to save – is “handed over to a United States marshal” (p. 278). The date of the stagecoach departure that begins the plot, 12 August 1884, makes it clear that the money would have made no difference, as Hombre takes place on the cusp of Geronimo's third and final 1885 reservation “break‐out” in opposition to the poor living conditions in San Carlos (Sutherland 2014, p. 225). Geronimo would ultimately surrender in 1886 and be treated as a prisoner of war and tourist attraction for the remainder of his life (Hilleary 2017). John Russell, by contrast, is buried in Sweetmary with a Catholic Mass (Leonard 2018, p. 278). Allen's failure to act on Russell's orders leads to Russell's death, allowing the Hombre to be reincarnated in Allen's image. Allen, like Dr. Favor cooking his books, “uses his ink pen” to hide the small thefts of information he makes in the margins of Hombre (p. 209).
Earlier in the novel, Allen remarks that the saguaros in the Arizona desert look like “grave markers in an Indian burial ground, if there is such a place as that” (p. 220). In Hombre, that “place” does not and cannot exist. What is real instead is Russell's martyrdom, and his rescue of the white stagecoach passengers becomes his defining act through which the rest of the novel is understood. Allen tells his readers: “Russell never changed the whole time, though I think everyone else did in some way. He did what he felt had to be done. Even if it meant dying. So maybe you do not have to understand him. You just know him” (p. 278, emphasis added). This closing line fits the western hero as generic type, but in Hombre it gestures to the gulf between the names “John Russell” and “Hombre.” As Allen gives final voice to Russell's legacy, he chooses the whiter name and narrative. However, the gaps in Allen's narration – the judgments and “elbows” in his authorship – allow Leonard to highlight the violence that lies between Allen's “knowledge” of Russell and Russell's sense of himself. Hombre closes on an image of Russell sketched in white ink.
In an interview with Charles Rzepka, Leonard describes his New York agent begging him to write American Indian stories instead of Mexican ones: “[They'd say,] ‘Please, no border stuff. They do not want Mexicans.’ And I was dying to do the Mexicans in a lot of border stories” (Leonard 2009, n.p.). Hombre is a “border story” – white, Mexican, and Apache10 – served in John Ford wrapping; a tale about the borders of race and identity, and how westerns struggle to contain and define them. Leonard understands that the Virginian, Shane, and the Ringo Kid can disappear into the sunset because they are reflections of the imaginative framework of white heroism that has become synonymous with the western genre. Russell, who gestures too openly to the multiethnic historical reality of the nineteenth‐century frontier, and, more particularly, the racial realities of the early sixties, cannot survive the creation of his heroic identity in the eyes, and in the pen, of his fictive biographer. In killing Russell and pulling the polished white veneer off the western myth, Leonard's novel predicts and outpaces the development of the revisionist western. The many‐named John Russell precedes the complicated protagonists of Italian westerns, like the Man with No Name (Clint Eastwood) from Sergio Leone's “Dollars Trilogy” (1964–1966), who also went by several names, including “Joe,” “Manco,” and “Blondie.” Russell also foreshadows the protagonists of Sergio Corbucci films like Django (1966), where the hero barely escapes the film with his life, and The Great Silence (1968), where he dies at the hands of the villainous “Loco” (Klaus Kinski). Russell's death precedes American westerns where the not‐quite‐heroes meet violent ends, like Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969)11 and George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Hombre, at the end of Leonard's “western period,” predicts that the western genre is not dead, but its western hero might not survive the genre's new, more complicated focus on “constructive reform” (Slotkin 1998, p. 555).
Hombre also foregrounds future Leonard novels beyond his subsequent and sporadic “returns” to the western. Russell's complicated racial identity is echoed in several of Leonard's mixed raced and mixed cultured characters, such as the Detective Raymond Cruz in City Primeval and the complicated drug dealer‐turned‐terrorist James Russell of Djibouti (2010). In the latter novel, the name James Russell marks an American identity, but not necessarily a white one. Perhaps we see Russell best in Killshot's (1989) multinamed, French‐Canadian and Ojibwe hit‐man, Armand “The Blackbird” Degas. Armand, more an Indian victim of racism than a white antihero, still dies at the end of Killshot, but free of narrative interventions that assume he must become entirely one or the other. Carl Allen is left behind, but “Contention, Arizona” lingers on Leonard's many subsequent pages.
References
1. Avins, A. (1966). The right to be a witness and the fourteenth amendment. Missouri Law Review 31 (1): 471–504.
2. Bear, Charla. (2008) ‘American Indian boarding schools haunt many,’ National Public Radio, 12 May. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16516865 (accessed 12 February 2018).
3. Challen, P.C. (2000). Get Dutch!: A Biography of Elmore Leonard. Toronto: ECW Press.
4. Clayton, L., Hoy, J., and Underwood, J. (2001). Vaqueros, Cowboys, and Buckaroos. Austin: University of Texas Press.
5. Faulk, O.B. (1969). The Geronimo Campaign. New York: Oxford University Press.
6. Geherin, D. (1989). Elmore Leonard. New York: Continuum Publishing.
7. Hilger, M. (2016). Native Americans in the Movies: Portrayals from Silent Films to the Present. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
8. Hilleary, Cecily. (2017) ‘Geronimo: From America's Most Wanted to tourist attraction,’ Voice of America, 13 Nov. https://www.voanews.com/a/geronimo‐from‐americas‐most‐wanted‐to‐tourist‐attraction/4098738.html (accessed 20 March 2019).
9. Hombre (1967). film. Directed by Martin Ritt. Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox.
10. Leonard, E. (2004). The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard (ed. G. Sutter). New York: HarperCollins.
11. Leonard, E. (2007). 3:10 to Yuma, on track?. Interview by Henry Cabot Beck. True West (1 October).
12. Leonard, E. (2009). Elmore Leonard interviews, Part 4'. Interview by Charles Rzepka. Crimeculture (29 September) http://www.crimeculture.com/?page_id=275 (accessed 20 Mar. 2019).
13. Leonard, E. (2012). “Doing what I do”: An interview with Elmore Leonard (1991). Interview by Anthony May. Contrappasso Magazine (2): 214–256. Ebook.
14. Leonard, E. (2018). Westerns (ed. T. Rafferty). New York: Library of America.
15. Loving vs. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, (1967).
16. Perry, R.J. (1993). Apache Reservation: Indigenous Peoples and the American State. Austin: University of Texas Press.
17. Rhodes, C. (2008). Politics, Desire, and the Hollywood Novel. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
18. Rzepka, C.J. (2013). Being Cool: The Work of Elmore Leonard. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
19. Slotkin, R. (1998). Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
20. Stagecoach (1939). film. Directed by John Ford. Los Angeles: United Artists.
21. Sutherland, J. (2011). ‘Elmore Leonard.’ Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives, 606–608. New Haven: Yale University Press.
22. Sutherland, J. (2013). Crime fiction craftsman whose writerly roots lay in westerns. Financial Times (23 August) http://www.ft.com/content/701bc100‐0a87‐11e3‐9cec‐00144feabdc0 (accessed 20 December 2018).
23. Sutherland, J. (2014). ‘Hombre.’ How to Be Well Read: A Guide to 500 Great Novels and a Handful of Literary Curiosities, 225. London: Random House Press.
24. Sutter, G. (2004). A conversation with Elmore Leonard. In: The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard (ed. G. Sutter), viii–xi. New York: HarperCollins.
25. Sutter, G. (2018). Chronology. In: Westerns (ed. T. Rafferty), 745–773. New York: Library of America.
26. The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1913). film. Directed by D.W. Griffith. Los Angeles: Biograph Company.
27. The Searchers (1956). film. Directed by John Ford. Los Angeles: Warner Bros.
28. Thrapp, D.L. (1988). The Conquest of Apacheria. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
29. Tompkins, J. (1992). West of Everything. New York: Oxford University Press.
Notes
1 John Sutherland is the principal source of this quote, and he includes this anecdote in multiple writings on Leonard, including his Lives of the Novelists (2011, p. 607), his essay on Hombre in How to Be Well Read (2014, p. 225), and his obituary for Leonard in the Financial Times (2013, n.p.). Paul Challen recites a similar story in his Leonard biography Get Dutch! (2000), wherein Leonard recalls his “loosen[ing] up on obscenities” after reading George V. Higgins's The Friends of Eddie Coyle: “Now I started to use them, instead of holding back because of my mother. I mean, I thought, ‘My mother is going to read this.' My mother saying, ‘Why did you use that language?' And she would lower her voice—and I would say, ‘I do not use that language—they do—that's the way those guys talk!'” (p. 76).
2 Boone did in fact go on to appear in Martin Ritt's adaptation of Hombre (1967) as Cicero Grimes, a swarthier, Italian-coded version of the novel's Frank Braden. Frank's transformation into Cicero points to the powerful influence of Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dollars (1964) on the ethnic face of the western in the mid-1960s.
3 We might read Carl Allen's awkward use of first person as Leonard looking back on his own career, specifically his posthumously published crime short story “One, Horizontal” (1950), which uses the same narrative mode and which he wrote just before he started writing – and publishing – westerns.
4 This second abduction serves as a subtle but important reminder that the popular western story of the white child abducted by Natives obscures a history of Native children being forcibly stolen and then adopted by white parents, or enrolled in American Indian boarding schools as an extension of Native genocide (Bear 2008, n.p.).
5 Tizwin or tiswin is not an Apache-exclusive alcohol, but it is explicitly associated with Apache history, as the inability to make or access tiswin is cited as one of the reasons Geronimo left the San Carlos reservation on 17 May 1885, a year after Hombre is supposed to take place (Faulk 1969, p. 52). Incidentally, the first western Leonard ever wrote (written before but published after “Trail of the Apache”) featured a drinking contest to the death and was originally titled “Tizwin” before eventually being published as “Red Hell Hits Canyon Diablo” (1952) (Sutter 2004, p. viii). Geronimo earns a passing mention as “an upstart medicine man who's gainin' influence” (Leonard 2004, p. 70).
6 Broken Arrow is a fictional account of the formation of the peace treaty that ended the Apache Wars in 1872 and the original Tom Jeffords who served as the US Agent of the Chiricahua Apache Reservation (1872–1876) within their historic lands (Thrapp 1988, p. 168). Hombre takes place in 1885, after Cochise has died and the 1872 grant is revoked, forcing the Apache to relocate to “Hell's Forty Acres,” the San Carlos Reservation (Perry 1993, pp. 119–120).
7 Leonard watched The Searchers, but he did not care for it. While recounting a press question about the film, Leonard said, “I thought The Searchers was the most overrated Western ever made! All it was, was scenery and bad actors. The acting was awful, and nothing happened in it” (Leonard 2007, p. 26).
8 “And I liked Red River a lot—that was a real Western with cattle in it. Not many had cattle, you know” (Leonard 2007, p. 26).
9 As Charles Rzepka notes in Being Cool (2013), other examples of Leonard women who defy the “western damsel” type include Amelia Darck in “The Colonel's Lady” (1952) and Martha Cable in Last Stand at Saber River (1959) (pp. 63–64).
10 There is an argument to be made that Leonard's special interest in stories about Apache characters has its roots in his desire to tell stories about Mexican and multiethnic characters. In Leonard's words, “I liked the Apaches because of their reputation as raiders and the way they dressed, with a headband and high moccasins up to their knees. I also liked their involvement with things Mexican and their use of Spanish names and words” (Sutter 2004, p. ix, emphasis added).
11 Peckinpah and Leonard would eventually work together on an ultimately unproduced film adaptation of City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit (1980) in 1981 (Sutter 2018, p. 761; Challen 2000, p. 95).