Frontier Stories

Frontier Stories presents 18 short-stories about the Old West. Almost all of them involve deadly encounters between cowboys, miners, cavalry, and settlers with outlaws and IndiansUtes, Paiutes, Sioux, Cheyenne, Pawnee, and Crow. The narrators of his stories are interested observers. Warman's West is almost bereft of females. But in one story, a white woman, who keeps a boarding house in Cripple Creek, Colorado, shoots a suspicious man who turns out to be a deputy on duty during a miner's strike. In another, a prostitute figures in the story only because she visits Bob Ford's dancehall collecting for the burial of another woman just before he is shot.

Before fame and fortune found Cy Warman, he had been a struggling writer in Colorado. After a short career working for the railroad, he was editor of the Creede, Colorado, newspaper, The Chronicle. There he knew both Bob Ford and Soapy Smith, and on a fateful June day in 1892, he was one of the first to rush through the door of Ford's dancehall to find him shot dead.

Warman was a collector and teller of stories, some of them told in the manner of yarn swapping at a gentlemen's club, some with the energetic flair of a news writer. How much is fiction and how much nonfiction is hard to say. He knows his audience's fascination for the Old West when it was chiefly occupied by Indians, cowboys, outlaws, and the first railroad men (https://bit.ly/2J19iZJ).

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