Judged by Twelve - a classic western adventure

Fort Smith - Edge of the Indian Territories

A last stop for Outlaws, Desperados and Bandits who made the lawless city a land of terror.

A young Judge Isaac Parker is assigned to the Western District by President Ulysses Grant with a mission. Clean it up to make way for the St. Louis – San Francisco railroad.

The train is coming, civilization on its heels and its Parker’s job to prepare the border whether it’s ready or not.

Against the corrupt Garrison leader. The Saloon Owner. The gangs of bad men that use the tiny town as a base of operations to loot, pillage and plunder.

Parker’s got help. A crusty Marshal. A freed slave turned tracker in the territories and a wide-eyed idealist turned deputy who only wants a safe place to raise his family.

It won’t be easy. Work on the frontier never is. Judge Parker’s got a fight on his hands and if he has to hang every last bad man in the land to make America safe, he will. Unless they get him first.

Download this gripping tale of the old west that will shoot your socks off. Fall in love with the Marshal, root for Rufus and learn why they called Judge Parker the Swinging Judge.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I grew up on Westerns. My grandfather didn’t enjoy them, he was more of a NASCAR fan, but my grandmother did. She was industrious, as a lot of southern women who grew up in the depression era were. I remember a Sunday afternoon matinee on one of the three networks they got on their television that showed a Western each week. After church, she would take my brother and I to Big Chef for burgers and fries, and then back to her house for homemade chocolate pie or some other treat.

Then we’d sit on the couch to watch a movie at 2:00. Even as she watched, she was busy knitting an afghan or sewing a quilt, or shelling peas from her garden. In the fall and winter, we would spend an hour gathering pecans from their six pecan trees, and she would shell them while we watched the westerns. Her favorite was Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and when it came on, she would roast the pecans with sugar and butter so we had special treats to snack on during the movie.

If it sounds like a simple pleasure, it was. I thought it was a simpler time. I grew up in a small town in Arkansas, a railroad town divided into the right and wrong side of the tracks. It didn’t have much cowboy history, though at some point it was a frontier and bootleg town. Maybe I’ll write about that some day, though our neighbor to the west, Hot Springs was far more interesting on that point.

The cowboys we watched were black hats versus white, the Lone Ranger and Tonto dispensing justice and serving the righteous cause.

Even if now I know it was all a lie, that history is messy, and dirty and often wrong, and sad to say even fiction at some point, I still miss the feeling I got sitting beside my grandmother, snuggled up to watch a good guy win.

I’m not sure how I came up with the idea for Fort Smith.

Those who enjoy such things will recognize Kevin Costner’s influence, DEADWOOD and TRUE GRIT. The Marshal is part John Wayne and Han Solo, if there could ever be such a thing and since George Lucas based Star Wars on Wagon Train, I suppose there could.

The Judge is given an impossible task and is flawed, caught between aspiring to civilization and being forced to adopt outlaw ways to achieve his goal. The ever-present threat of the railroad men, both the money backers and the guns they hire are constant.

I know, it seems like a lot to throw into a story, but I was really trying to capture something I could share with my kids. I wanted to make popcorn and write a story that they could watch with me, now that they’re older. I wanted then to know that it’s not a black and white world. It’s all gray, and the end may not always justify the means. That cowboys were real, and mythic and sometimes the men who tamed the wild west had to sacrifice some of their humanity to do so.

But most of all, I wanted to share this story with readers who like history, and westerns, frontier towns and saloon songs.

Saddle up, and let’s ride.