Buffalo Stampede

BUFFALO STAMPEDE

BUFFALO STAMPEDE

A WESTERN STORY

by

ZANE GREY

First Skyhorse Publishing edition published 2013 by arrangement with Golden West Literary Agency

Copyright © 2011, 2013 by Zane Grey, Inc.

An earlier version of Buffalo Stampede first appeared as a twelve-part serial titled “The Thundering Herd” in The Ladies’ Home Journal (2/24-1/25). Copyright © 1924, 1925 by Zane Grey. Copyright © renewed 1952, 1953 by Zane Grey, Inc. Copyright © 2011 by Zane Grey, Inc., for restored material.

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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

ISBN: 978-1-62873-445-4

BUFFALO STAMPEDE

Foreword

On April 1, 1923 Zane Grey left Long Key, in Florida, where he had been vacationing and fishing, to go to New York to continue negotiations with magazine publishers. He reached a tentative agreement with The Ladies’ Home Journal to write two serials a year for $30,000 each and he agreed with The Country Gentleman to do two serials a year for that magazine at the same price. In terms of newsstand competition such an arrangement presented no problem to the management of these magazines since both belonged to The Curtis Publishing Company, also publisher of The Saturday Evening Post. The challenge for Grey was could he actually write four 80,000-word books of comparable quality in one year? He thought he might, but as it turned out he couldn’t, and didn’t even try.

Returning to California, Grey learned from his wife Dolly that she had decided to take a long vacation herself. What Dolly had in mind was an automobile drive across the country to Lackawaxen in Pennsylvania, where she would stay for a few weeks, followed by a trip to Europe. The vacation would last more than four months. She would leave their three children behind in California with their father. In a way the entire trip was a protest against Grey’s womanizing.

Grey did not stay at the family home in Altadena but went instead to live in the Southwestern-style home he had built on Catalina Island because the fishing season had opened and he hoped to begin work at once on a new magazine serial. Mildred Smith would act as his secretary. Later, as a gift for her, he would build her a house that was a replica in miniature of his Catalina Island home. On April 30, 1923 he recorded in his diary:

I have begun to write again. Another romance! The epic of the buffalo. The Thundering Herd. Where do I find these romances? That query has been promulgated by critics and reviewers who have never been west. I see these romances, and I believe them. Somewhere, sometime, they happened. My reward and my faith in myself come from the many letters I get from simple readers—old women, and young girls and boys, to all with hearts full of romance, all true to the children in them.

The subject of the new story and how it was to be treated had been inspired by the many stories Buffalo Jones had told him about buffalo hunting in the 1870s, a process that had led finally to the decimation of virtually all of the buffalo. For Grey the tone of his story was an elegy to these great, noble beasts and a sadness over their wanton execution for the sake of greed and, secondarily, as a way of conducting a war of attrition against the Plains Indians whose livelihood depended on the great buffalo herds. He had started the story while Dolly was still in California and named his heroine Molly Fayre. He had written perhaps the first hundred pages by hand when Mildred Smith joined him at the Catalina home. It was then that he changed the heroine’s name to Milly Fayre. Every time he would write Molly in error, he would go back, cross out that name, and write Milly above it. In transferring this holo-graphic manuscript to type, Grey’s first name for his heroine, Molly, has been retained.

In a diary entry, written late in the night of June 4, 1923, Grey noted:

It is now far into the night.