Crooked Trails — Story, Setting & Ideas

Nested Voices and the Reliability of Memory

The collection relies heavily on embedded narrators. In “How the Law Got into the Chaparral,” the Deacon introduces the narrator to Colonel Ford, who then tells his story. In “Massai's Crooked Trail,” the chief of scouts recounts events he investigated years earlier, quoting both his own orders and the words of the accused. This layering creates distance: the reader is always aware that the tale has passed through several minds. Remington does not smooth over contradictions. When the wrongly arrested man explains his actions, his account is presented without editorial comment, leaving the reader to weigh his fear against the circumstantial evidence. The effect is to foreground the difficulty of establishing a single, authoritative version of events—especially on a frontier where written records are scarce and memory is shaped by self-interest.

Tracking as Narrative Structure

Tracking is both a plot device and a structural principle. In the Massai episode, the narrative follows the scouts as they follow a mare and colt, then a moccasin track, then a suspect. Each turn reveals new information and forces a reassessment. The trail leads to a tiswin camp, then to a blood-feud, then to a demand for surrender. Remington describes the physical signs—the cut throat of the colt, the bullet in the old woman—with the precision of a field report. But the tracking is also metaphorical: the narrator is trying to follow a story that keeps doubling back. The chief of scouts admits he “had to study nights to keep it arranged in my head.” This self-consciousness about the difficulty of reconstruction is a hallmark of the collection. The reader, too, must piece together motives and movements from fragmentary evidence.

Recurring Images: Horses, Guns, and the Border

Certain images recur across the excerpts. Horses are central: the mare and colt whose tracks set the investigation in motion; the act of turning a mare loose to avoid suspicion. Guns appear matter-of-factly—a shot heard, a bullet found. But the most persistent image is the border—not just the national boundary between the U.S. and Mexico, but the line between law and lawlessness, between white and Indian jurisdictions. In “How the Law Got into the Chaparral,” the Texas Rangers operate in a space where Mexican, Comanche, and Texan violence overlap. In the Massai story, the scout corps mediates between the U.S. Army and Apache bands. Remington does not romanticize this border; it is a place of constant negotiation, where a man can be arrested, released, and turned loose based on the shifting interpretation of tracks.

Movement Between Scenes: From Club to Campfire

The excerpts show a deliberate movement between enclosed, civilized spaces and open, wild ones. The first story begins in the San Antonio Club—a “cosey bachelor apartment” with cigars and armchairs. The second shifts to a “ghostly Montana landscape” at night, with the murmur of many men around a campfire. This juxtaposition is not accidental. Remington uses the frame of the club to signal that these stories are being told in retrospect, by old men looking back. The campfire scenes, by contrast, are immediate and sensory: the reader hears the hum of voices, sees the sombrero tipped over an eye. The movement between these settings underscores the collection's central tension: the attempt to contain the chaos of the frontier within the orderly form of a story. The club is safe, but the stories it contains are not.

Readers will find that Crooked Trails rewards attention to its framing devices. Each story is a report from a witness, not a god's-eye view. Remington's background as an illustrator is evident in his eye for telling details—the way a man sits, the cut of a throat, the sound of a camp at night. The collection does not offer a single thesis about the West; instead, it presents a series of investigations, each incomplete. Approach these tales as you would a trail: follow the signs, note the turns, and be prepared to revise your assumptions.

Remington’s Crooked Trails taught me how men follow faint signs across open land—how memory bends like a worn path. I think of that often, holding another volume, The taking of Cloudy McGee — Edition Insights, which seems to listen to the same quiet rustle between what is said and what is tracked. A kindred whisper.