For this selection of portraits of unsung champions from our cowboy heritage, author Jack Schaefer coined a term "goodmen," the opposite of the "badmen" who so often have been objects of attention and fascination, when in fact "the average sweat-soaked flea-ridden cowhand...faced obstacles and dangers and death more often than any badman on record...."

Author of the Western classics SHANE and MONTE WALSH, Schaefer, who passed away in 1991, composed these paeans to “goodmen” to counter the outlaw mystique and give due credit to the adventures and exploits of HEROES WITHOUT GLORY. 

There was, for one giant example, a Yankee shoemaker who headed West in midlife to prospect for gold. Finding none, he became a fur trapper who developed a downright love for grizzly bears after rescuing two cubs whose mother had been shot for her hide. By the end of his rough and roaring life, James "Grizzly" Adams had partnered with the famed P.T. Barnum to display his "California Menagerie" --- bears and other critturs he'd befriended --- in parades and circuses back east.

"Schaefer exhibits in this collection the kind of rolling, colorful prose that made his fiction popular.... The totality is engaging, fulfilling its promise to make the 'goodmen' seem every inch as exciting and worthy of praise as any scurrilous outlaw --- or more so."

Valentine McGillycuddy, studying medicine in Detroit and battling an alcohol problem, was sent by his employers for "a year of life in the open" and fell in love with the outdoors. He did surveying for the US government up in the Dakotas just in time for Custer's last stand and the Indian wars. Assigned as the Indian Agent for the region, it was thought he could gain the trust of the Indians, having once administered medical aid to a wounded Sioux warrior and nursed the wife of Crazy Horse suffering from TB. Still, many of the Native peoples saw his methods as just another trick of the white men to force them to shed their ancient culture.

Bear River Tom Smith, born in New York, made his first appearance out West in 1868, in Wyoming. He was working in a railroad construction camp. Becoming involved in battles between workers and the company vigilantes, he got a reputation as a tough, fearless peacemaker who would charge straight into a barrage of bullets. That reputation followed him to Abilene, Texas, where he was eventually appointed marshal (after all the previous applicants resigned). He soon calmed the wide-open "fast town" by the simple but sometimes hard-to-enforce demand that everyone who came to Abilene must turn in their firearms at the first stop and take them back when they were leaving. Amazingly, his plan worked, and though Tom carried guns himself, he was best known for his sober demeanor, his intolerance for gunplay and the overwhelming power of his fists.

Schaefer exhibits in this collection the kind of rolling, colorful prose that made his fiction popular. Rather than giving us answers to thorny questions, such as why the white man and the Indian were so often and so bitterly at odds, he poses questions, leaving the reader to speculate. The totality is engaging, fulfilling its promise to make the “goodmen” seem every inch as exciting and worthy of praise as any scurrilous outlaw --- or more so.