East of the Border

by Johnny D. Boggs

Winner of the Western Heritage Award and the Spur Award Their names had become Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, Texas Jack Omohundro. None of them had any stage experience, but that didn't stop Cody from forming the Buffalo Bill Combination. All three would be appearing live on stage in a Wild West stage melodrama. Each of these three has his own story to tell of that exciting time, as they toured various cities in the East, and each tells his story in his own very distinctive narrative voice. Reviewers and audiences loved the performances, as is amply evident from reviews of the period, but Boggs takes you behind the scenes, privy to the hilarity but also occasionally the pathos of these legendary plainsmen as revealed in their own words. Johnny D. Boggs, born in South Carolina, published his first Western short story in 1983. Since then he has had more than twenty short stories published in magazines and anthologies. He has won the Spur Award from Western Writers of America and the Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.

Genres: Westerns

248 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Johnny D. Boggs is a Spur- and Wrangler Award-winning author of the American West and frontier. Born in 1962, Boggs grew up on a farm near Timmonsville, South Carolina, around the old stamping grounds of Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion (chronicled in his frontier novel The Despoilers). He knew he wanted to be a writer at an early age. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico with his wife, Lisa Smith; son, Jack Smith Boggs; and basset hound, June.

Reviews

[Jeff Tankersley]

Wild Bill Hickok, Texas Jack Omohundro, and Buffalo Bill Cody famously spent a six-month season in 1873-74, between western adventures, touring the East and Midwest in a theater troupe, acting out some famous adventures, performing trick shooting, regaling folksy yarns about the ways of the West, and getting mocked by the press while people in the audience just ate it up. Boggs builds a fun and light fictional account of those experiences in "East of the Border" (2004), kind of a three-part series of meandering anecdotal stories narrated by its actors Wild Bill, Buffalo Bill, and Texas Jack.

Verdict: An interesting, light, quasi-fictional tale (let's say, nonfiction in spirit?) of three legends of the west. Boggs is good at these and they are quite fun.

Jeff's Rating: 3 / 5 (Good)
movie rating if made into a movie: PG-13

[D. E.]

A JDB. Fictional/Non-Fiction Western Action Adventure (EOTB) (LW)

JDB. has penned a fictional/non-fictional western action adventure titled, "East of the Border" which begins sometime in early 1862 and ends in late 1864. Three men were approached to travel across the country doing stage shows. The men were Buffalo Bill Cody, Texas Jack Omohundro, and Wild Bill Hickock. The stage show was similar in nature to the other traveling shows of the day. The exception was this show toured the East. The three men have become part of our western history and are mentioned numerous times from the end of the Civil War until the turn of the century. JDB at his best. This is an excellent read for the genre.....DEHS

[Ann]

Get Ready for This One

This hilarious account of the collaboration on stage of Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickok and Texas Jack will have you hooting almost non-stop. Finally humanizing these luminaries of the Old West, the reader sees how these three friends meshed with each other as they played out their practical jokes, involved themselves in (for two of them) their relatively short lives and generally showed the world who they really were. They, and their friendships with each other, is an unforgettable story in its own right.

[Jay Wright]

The story is based on a true life occurrence. In 1872 Wild Bill Hickok, Texas Jack Omohundro, and Buffalo Bill Cody went east to put on a show. While this is a fictional account, the characters came to life. I liked the newspaper accounts that were actual articles covering the act. The problem is there is no real plot. The characters are memorable.

[Ron]

Imagine the Three Stooges on tour in a play about themselves, and you’ll get a hint of this antic novel about Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, and Texas Jack Omohundro. It’s the 1873-74 theatrical season, and while the country’s economy dissolves into another panic, Cody’s troupe of actors turn away eager crowds everywhere east of the Mississippi.

They present two plays, Scouts of the Plains and Buffalo Bill! King of the Border Men. Best described as lunatic melodramas, they feature the killing of large numbers of Indians and dances performed by the Italian entertainer, Guiseppina Morlacchi...

Read my review at my blog.

[Jessica Timmons]

What an excellent combinations of three of histories greatest frontiers men. Their is one word mentioned in the novel that I haven't heard before nor could I locate either, corkologians. What is it?