It was the 1970's and there were not many books with this reputation, left over from a pretty good movie. It wasn't ass good as the film, nor "Gone to Texas". ( )

ebook version

The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales is the sequel to Gone to Texas, the book that inspired one of my favorite movies, The Outlaw Josey Wales. Josey is as he was in the first book, but this time he rides with a half breed vaquero and a one armed Indian, in pursuit for rescue and revenge.

I enjoyed this story but not as much as the first book. Still, if you read Gone to Texas, you should also read its sequel. ( )

A sequel to The Outlaw Josey Wales (previously published as The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales in 1973 and reprinted in 1975, by a different publisher, as Gone to Texas) and published the same year as that novel's movie adaptation by Clint Eastwood (actor, director), Philip Kaufman and Sonia Chernus (screenplay), The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales is a short, competent, pulp-fictional pot-boiler with fairly explicit (and thus, depending on one's sensibilities, stomach-churning) violence and pithy, though didactic recitations of the Mexican ruling class's oppression and abuse of the Indian and mestizo under-class that can't help but recall B. Traven's Jungle series. To my mind, that is mostly a good thing, especially given Carter's economy with words.

Set in the late 1860s, The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales is precipitated by the brutal murder of a supporting character from the previous novel (which I've yet to read), and is set largely in Mexico, near the Sierra Madre mountain range (another congruence with Traven's work, given that he also wrote The Treasure of the Sierra Madre). Wales, a Tennessee mountain man moved to Missouri who served with a pro-Confederacy band of guerrillas, is summoned from his hidden Texas ranch by a one-armed Indian beggar, Pablo (he lost his arm in the mutilations carried out by the forces of the putative "Emperor Maximilian" on captured Mexican troops), who brings him news of his friends' murders at the hands of a band of Rurales led by another would-be Napoleon, Capitan Jesus Escobedo, a self-styled aristocrat who despises the liberal, reformist presidency of the full-blooded Zapotec Indian, Benito Juárez (namesake of Mussolini). Wales sallies forth with only Pablo and a Falstaffian vaquero, Chato Olivares, beside him; because Wales is a mythically doughty warrior -- see also Hawkeye, Tarzan, Conan the Barbarian, etc. -- he has more than a fighting chance of success.

Carter's prose never quite rises to the heights attained by Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert E. Howard, but his action scenes, and most of the scenes preparing for action, hold one's interest; I could've done with less amateurish use of the exclamation point and capitalized words (describing Wales's unspoken, unpromulgated code of conduct, Carter writes: "But injury to the Code meant -- WAR!" [p. 38] -- and this is one of the less egregious deployments of the exclamation point and all caps, believe it or not). Also of interest here are his admiring descriptions of Apache warfare (the book is dedicated to the Apache), which parallels Traven's sheets of prose praising the Indians in his Jungle novels; the reader interested in the period and the geography should keep his eyes peeled for a very special guest star.

Ultimately, like Traven, Carter himself may well be more interesting than anything he's written: Forrest Carter was the nom de plume of an Alabama segregationist named Asa Earl Carter who was a white supremacist DJ who was fired for being too racist (he also broke with the Alabama Citizen's Council because he refused to tone down his anti-Semitic screeds, whereas the ACC preferred a strictly anti-Negro focus); he went on to become Governor George Wallace's speechwriter, and also founded an independent Ku Klux Klan group and the pro-segregationist monthly The Southerner. As "Forrest Carter" he wrote a fictional "memoir" titled The Education of Little Tree, which purported to relate the life of a part-Cherokee Indian; Oprah Winfrey withdrew her recommendation of the book after she learned of the author's past, thirteen years after blessing it with her imprimatur.

Reading The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales, one can't help but wonder at the mental gymnastics that its author had to perform in order to write it: Carter's sympathy for the Indians of the American Southwest and Mexico -- principally the Apache, but also the Cheyenne and the Zapotec -- blends into a general sympathy for the underclasses, and he expressly names the Jews as a part of the underclasses; one wonders if he was trying, towards the end of his life (he would die in 1979), to make amends for his earlier, public stances supporting white supremacy and anti-Semitism. That, or, as in Robert E. Howard's approving descriptions of "savage" blacks, Carter liked the Apache because they were free of the taint of (white) civilization, and thus were stronger, more vigorous, less effete and intellectual. Or some combination thereof.

In any event, reading The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales, it's hard not to envision the titular character as played by Clint Eastwood, notwithstanding such non-Eastwoodian details as the thick black mustache that Wales sports. ( )