What follows is a guest post by John Bullard. It is the first of three parts and contains spoilers for Robert E. Howard’s “Beyond the Black River”.

Robert E. Howard’s Conan story, “Beyond the Black River” is considered to be one of his best stories by his fans. It tells of an attack by Howard’s favorite historical peoples, the Picts, against the encroaching colonization of the Aquilonians on the Picts’ deeply forested land between the Thunder River to the East, and the Black River to the west in his fictional Hyborian world setting. It is well-known that Robert E. Howard used historical events, people, places, and the stories of people he knew to help inspire his writing, giving his stories a grounding in realism that stories just made up from whole cloth may sometimes lack. In “Beyond the Black River”, Howard used his knowledge of Texas’s history and people, as well as his family’s history, to make the story as realistic as possible in a fantasy setting.

Prior to writing about the Picts in the Conan series, Howard had written the Picts in three different ways. In the King Kull stories, the Picts were a fairly civilized warrior-culture, living on the outskirts of the kingdoms of Kull’s world. In his stories beginning with the character Bran Mak Morn, the Picts’ king who was fighting the Roman conquest of Northern Britain, the Picts had started to devolve into short, dark-haired aborigines, finally becoming subterranean dwarfish dwellers in several of Howard’s horror stories set after Bran Mak Morn’s time.

However, in the Conan stories that were written with the Picts appearing in them, Howard wrote the Picts as being very like America’s First Nations peoples. One of Howard’s favorite writers was Robert W. Chambers1, now known more for his weird fiction than his historical fiction. Chambers wrote a series of books dealing with the American Colonies and their fight with the Eastern Woodland Tribes. Five of Chambers’ books were in Howard’s personal book collection.2 Because the setting of “Beyond the Black River” is in a deep forest with names reminiscent of the Eastern Woodland tribes (“Conajohara”) appearing in the story as well as the Picts being written like First Peoples (feathers in their hair, war paint on their faces and bodies instead of the blue tattooing of the historical Picts, canoes), many feel that Howard wrote “Beyond the Black River” (hereafter referred to as BBR) as an homage to Chambers and the American Colonial/Revolutionary settings of his novels.

But many Howard Scholars, including Rusty Burke and Patrice Louinet, believe that BBR is based more on Howard’s knowledge and love of Texas history, especially the pushing out of the Comanche and the civilizing of their Central and North Texas lands by the white settlers rather than the American Colonial frontier wars with the indigenous tribes3. I also feel this is correct, and especially that Howard also added in people and incidents from Texas and Southern history that he knew of to create his story that used Chambers’ writings as a beginning point but “Tex-ified” it, making it Howard’s own story of Texas’s frontier warfare. However, up to now, there has been very little done to prove this point. This paper will show that the contents of the letters Howard wrote to his author pen pals do indeed prove this theory out as many of the incidents and personal tales from those settlers that Howard wrote about in his letters make up many of the events in the plot of BBR but with the characters of Conan and the Picts taking the place of the Texan settlers and Comanches.

Howard’s Problem with Writing Texas History into His Stories

Howard found his first professional successes mainly writing weird fiction and boxing stories for the pulps. As his need for an income grew, he started branching out into writing other genres: detective stories, historical stories, adventure stories. His stories won him the admiration of other pulp writers, mainly in the weird fiction field, where most of his early work appeared. He would become pen pals with many of these writers, most famously H.P. Lovecraft, but also August Derleth, Carl Jacobi, Emil Petaja, Clark Ashton Smith, and others. In his letters to his fellow writers, he would often explain Texas and its history, and his family’s ancestral history of migrating westward to Texas. He would tell of the people he knew and the places he had been, and of any interesting information that he thought the recipient would be fascinated by. Many times, these mentions became stories that Howard wrote. Some examples are his relating a ghost story he heard from his family’s Black cook Mary Bohannon, that became “Pigeons From Hell”4; a fight he saw that became the Sailor Steve Costigan story, “Sluggers on the Beach “5; and the historical gunman Hendry Brown’s adventures as a sheriff in Kansas used in “The Vultures of Wahpeton”6. Howard Scholar Patrice Louinet, in his “Hyborian Genesis Part III”7, successfully argues that Howard’s 1934 trip to New Mexico also showed up in the settings of the Conan stories “The Servants of Bit Yakin”, and “Red Nails”.

Howard’s recounting of Texas history and characters enthralled his pen pals, and in several of the surviving letters, they encouraged him to write about this history in his fiction. Here are some of H.P. Lovecraft’s urgings to Howard:

“Most assuredly you must write that history of the Southwest. No one with your keen knowledge of the subject, and your positively genius-touched ability to ‘put it over’, has any right not to!” (Howard, Jan. 30, 1931),

and:

“Incidentally, you could make of Texas life a magnificent background for fiction if you chose to turn from phantasy to the realistic type of literature which is rooted in the soil.” (Howard, Jan. 21, 1933).

Yet, prior to the second half of 1934, Howard was unsure of how to incorporate his knowledge of the settling of the Texas frontier into his stories. In a letter to August Derleth from late December 1933, Howard writes:

“How did you like “Old Garfield’s Heart” in the latest Weird Tales? There wasn’t much to the plot, but the background and environment were realistically drawn. I guess I ought to sit down and write a lot of yarns laid in this country, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to sell them. To the best of my knowledge nobody has ever truthfully depicted the cross-timbers belt, and so I doubt if I would find a market. It couldn’t be conventional wild west stuff, because this isn’t a wild west atmosphere. A few hundred miles to the west lies the country that is ordinarily featured and fictionized in rustler-cowboy-gunman dramas, but this stretch is unique. And being outside the conception of the average reader or critic, being, so to speak, neither east nor west, in the conventional sense, realistic portrayal would probably be rejected — not falling into some conventional classification.”(Derleth, late-Dec. 1933)

In a letter to Carl Jacobi from the Summer of 1934, he wrote this:

“You ask me why I do not use Texas settings more in my stories. I really should, since Texas is the only region I know by first hand experience. Three of my yarns in Weird Tales have been laid in Texas: “The Horror From the Mound”, “The Man on the Ground” and “Old Garfield’s Heart”. Sometimes too thorough a knowledge of a subject is a handicap (not that I claim to be an authority on the Southwest, or anything like that; but I was born here and have lived here all my life.) for fiction writing.”(Jacobi, Summer 1934)

Yet sometime after writing the letter to Jacobi, Howard seems to have had a breakthrough in how to incorporate his knowledge of Texas history into his stories and began writing what is generally considered to be one of his finest stories sometime during the Summer or possibly early Fall of 1934. There exist two drafts and the final printed version of the story. When Howard finished the story, he was able to sell it to Farnsworth Wright in early Oct. 1934 (Louinet, Hyborian Genesis Part III) of that year:

“My latest sales have been a 23,000 word Oriental adventure yarn to Top-Notch, and a two-part Conan serial to Weird Tales; no sex in the latter. I wanted to see if I could write an interesting Conan yarn without sex interest.”(Derleth, Mid-Oct. 1934)

In a December 1934 letter to Lovecraft, Howard wrote:

“My latest sales to Weird Tales have been a two-part Conan serial: “Beyond the Black River” — a frontier story; …in the Conan story I’ve attempted a new style and setting entirely — abandoned the exotic settings of lost cities, decaying civilizations, golden domes, marble palaces, silk-clad dancing girls, etc., and thrown my story against a background of forests and rivers, log cabins, frontier outposts, buckskin-clad settlers, and painted tribesmen. Some day I’m going to try my hand at a longer yarn of the same style, a serial of four or five parts.”(Lovecraft, Dec. 1934)

In Novalyne Price Ellis’s memoir of Robert E. Howard, One Who Walked Alone, she writes he told her BBR was definitely a story about Texas frontier life:

“I sold Wright a yarn like that a few months ago.”…”I’m damned surprised he took it. It’s different from my other Conan yarns…no sex…only men fighting against the savagery and bestiality about to engulf them…He was excited about it because it was about this country and it sold! He had a honing to write more about this country, not ordinary cowboy yarn, or a wild west shoot ‘em up, though God knew this country was alive with yarns like that. He wanted to tell the simple story of this country and the hardships the settlers had suffered, pitted against a frightened, semi-barbaric people – the Indians, who were trying to hold on to a way of life and a country they loved…But a novel depicting the settlers’ fear as they tried to carve out a new life, and the Indian’s fear as they tried to hold on to a doomed country; why girl, all that would make the best damn novel ever written about frontier life in the Southwest…”I tried that yarn out to see what Wright would do about it. I was afraid he wouldn’t take it, but he did! By God, he took it!”(Louinet, Hyborian Genesis Part III)

Rusty Burke interviewed Novalyne in 1989 about Robert E. Howard and published their conversation in Day of the Stranger: Further Memories of Robert E. Howard. In their talk, Rusty specifically asked Novalyne about what Robert had told her of BBR:

BURKE: In One Who Walked Alone…You also mention a story he had just sold Weird Tales about the struggle of civilization versus barbarism, into which he had put a lot of “this country”…

ELLIS: Yes.

BURKE: … I assume you meant Texas.

ELLIS: Yes.

BURKE: I infer that the story was “Beyond the Black River”.

ELLIS: Oh, yes.

BURKE: This has been something of a point of contention. It’s been suggested that, because Bob took some place names and some character names and incidents from a Robert W. Chambers novel, that the setting of that story was New York State, and the Picts were the Iroquois. Others of us argue that writers write from their own experience, and that what Robert W. Chambers thought of when he wrote about “the woods” would not be what Robert E. Howard thought of when he wrote about “the woods”. That Bob would have meant Texas.

ELLIS: Oh, definitely! That was a Texas story!

BURKE: I wonder if you could go into what Bob tried to do in putting Texas into his stories. He says a couple of times to you, in the book, that a writer has to write about what he knows. I wondered if you could discuss that just a moment, what Bob tried to do in his stories with settings.

ELLIS: That was one of the things that he urged me to do. He said that my stories were not real to him because they were set anywhere–I didn’t think much about that–and it was very important to him to get his local setting. You talk about barbarism, and Texas. The old Texas stories that fascinated Bob were the stories about Indians and their first encounters with the white people who came in.8

BBR Synopsis

In BBR, the story starts out with the main viewpoint character, Balthus walking through the deep forest of the newly established province of Conajohara on his way to the frontier’s Fort Tuscelan to either get some land to settle or join the military. He becomes uneasy as he starts feeling the presence of hidden Picts in the foliage watching and preparing to attack him. An attack is thwarted by Conan, who, acting as a ranger on long-range patrol, suddenly appears and kills a hidden Pict who was shooting an arrow at Balthus. The two men make it to Fort Tuscelan, placed on the newly-won province’s farthest border, the Black River, to report in. There, the coming threat of the various Pict tribes being united under a Pictish wizard, Zogar Sag, to attack the fort and the settlers in the land between the Black and Thunder Rivers and drive the settlers out, is revealed. Conan and Balthus lead a small group of men on a suicide mission to try and assassinate Zogar Sag, which fails. Conan and Balthus then race back to warn Fort Tuscelan of the coming attack. They reach the fort too late but continue on to warn the settlers. The duo is joined by a dog, Slasher, whose master was killed by the Picts. Conan and Balthus split up to warn more settlers, which places each on a different destiny to fulfill in the story.

The Beginnings of the Writing of BBR

Howard had a great passion for the history of the settlement of Texas. He enjoyed telling his pen pals all about the violent history of his home state, and especially in the area he lived in. Howard focused especially on the settlement and pacification of the north-central area of Texas between the Trinity River to the east, and the Brazos River to the west. In a letter to Lovecraft in August 1931, Howard wrote:

“A student of early Texas history is struck by the fact that some of the most savage battles with the Indians were fought in the territory between the Brazos and Trinity Rivers. A look at the country makes one realize why this was so. After leaving the thickly timbered littoral of East Texas, the westward sweeping pioneers drove the red men across the treeless rolling expanse now called the Fort Worth prairie, with comparative ease. But beyond the Trinity a new kind of country was encountered — bare, rugged hills, thickly timbered valleys, rocky soil that yielded scanty harvest, and was scantily watered. Here the Indians turned ferociously at bay and among those wild bare hills many a desperate war was fought out to a red finish. It took nearly forty years to win that country, and late into the ’70s it was the scene of swift and bloody raids and forays — leaving their reservations above Red River and riding like fiends the Comanches would strike the cross-timber hills within twenty-four hours. Then it was touch and go! Much as one may hate the red devils one must almost admire their reckless courage — and it took courage to drive a raid across Red River in those days! They staked their lives against stolen horses and white men’s scalps. Sometimes they won, and outracing the avengers, splashed across Red River and gained their tipis, where the fires blazed, the drums boomed and the painted, feathered warriors leaped in grotesque dances celebrating their gains in horses and scalps — sometimes they did not win and those somber hills could tell many a tale of swift retribution — of buzzards wheeling low and red-skinned bodies lying in silent heaps. But that was in the later days. In the old times the red-skins held the banks of the Brazos. Sometimes they drove the ever-encroaching settlers back — sometimes the white men crossed the Brazos, only to be hurled back again, sometimes clear back beyond the Trinity. But they came on again — in spite of flood, drouth, starvation and Indian massacre. In that debatable land I was born and spent most of my early childhood. Little wonder these old tales seem so real to me, when every hill and grove and valley was haunted with such wild traditions!”(Lovecraft, Aug. 1931)

The language in this letter about the fighting for control of the area of Texas between the Trinity River and the Brazos River definitely matches Howard’s conception of his fictional Hyborian world, specifically the area covered in BBR—the land between the eastern boundary of the Thunder River, and the western boundary of the Black River, beyond which was land controlled by the Picts. Although the two lands are different in their physical make-up (the real-life Texas territory as described in the letter, and the fictional territory as described in BBR as being a heavily forested region), the second sentence of the second paragraph is a veritable general synopsis of the plot of BBR. In addition, the first letter of each name and the geographical layout of the fictional rivers match the historic Texas rivers—Thunder/Trinity in the east, Black/Brazos in the west.

Although written after the writing and publication of BBR, in another letter to Lovecraft, Howard restates some of the themes of the settlement of Texas that he incorporated into writing BBR:

“…[T]he case of the Texan colonists is clear, open and admits of no argument. They came to Texas at the invitation of the Mexican government who wanted the revenue that would result from the development of the resources of the domain — a development never accomplished by the Mexican settlers of the region — and the Mexican government also desired a strong buffer between the purely Mexican settlements and the Comanches. The inability of both the Spaniards and the Mexicans to successfully oppose the Indian tribes of the north has never been given the recognition it deserves as a factor in the development of the Southwest. First the Lipans and the Apaches, and after them the Kiowas and Comanches repeatedly destroyed the outposts of Latin-American civilization and drove back the tide of settlement. The Comanches were justified in their contempt of the Spaniards and Mexicans. The average Comanche warrior was braver, stronger physically, more honorable, quicker-witted, and more intelligent than the average Mexican peon.”(Lovecraft, Jul. 1935)

Again, you see Howard’s theme of the encroachment of civilization on the native peoples’ land, and their pushing back against the unwanted immigrants from history that he incorporated into his story.

The Inspiration for BBR: Fort Parker = Fort Tuscelan

What had inspired Howard to write a story of the violent, bloody pushback of civilized settlers by an aboriginal race? Howard, in his story fragments for “Wolves Beyond the Border” written before BBR but dealing with settlers having to fight a Pict attack while Conan was leading the civil war to overthrow the Aquilonian king Numadides, first mentions the destruction of Fort Tuscelan by the Picts in exposition given by the main character. In Howard’s next story, BBR, the destruction of the fort is the main driving factor of the story. What had captured his imagination to focus on the destruction of a frontier fort by the original indigenous natives retaking their land? A first clue can be found in the August 1931 letter to Lovecraft. In this letter, Howard mentions James Parker and his search for his niece, Cynthia Ann Parker, who was taken by the Comanches in their attack and destruction of the Fort Parker Settlement in 1836:

“The very county of my birth — Parker — got its name from old Colonel Parker, who spent actually years haunting its hills and valleys in search of the daughter stolen from him by the raiding Comanches — Cynthia Ann Parker.”(Lovecraft, Aug. 1931)

Due to his misidentifying the relationship between Cynthia Ann Parker and James, who was in fact her uncle9, and also was not a colonel, it can be inferred that Howard had only just learned of this history. He learned more of the incident that led to the kidnapping of Cynthia Ann, and which forms the basis for BBR, as shown in his later letters. In a January 1933 letter to August Derleth, Howard more fully relates the story of the Comanche raid that destroyed the Fort Parker settlement and her kidnapping:

“In the year of 1833 a band of settlers, about thirty-four in number, headed by John Parker, came from Illinois and formed a colony on the Navasota River, in Limestone County, Texas — then, of course, part of Mexico. In 1836, when the Texans were fighting for their freedom, the Comanches were particularly bold in raiding the scattered settlements, and it was in one of those raids that Fort Parker fell. Seven hundred Comanches and Kiowas literally wiped it off the earth, with most of its inhabitants. A handful escaped, through the heart-shaking valor of Falkenberry and his son Evan, both of whom fell a year afterward on the shores of the Trinity in a battle so savage and bloody that the Comanches who survived it retold it as long as they lived. But there Fort Parker passed into oblivion, and among the women and children taken captive were Cynthia Anne Parker, nine years old, and her brother John, a child of six.”(Derleth, Jan. 1933)

Although Howard had written BBR in the second half of 1934, he gives even more details on the destruction and aftermath of Fort Parker in a letter written in May, 1935, to H.P. Lovecraft, and his language in this letter mirrors a lot of the language and incidents in BBR which will be discussed later in this paper. Why was Fort Parker on Howard’s mind during the early 1930’s? An answer may be because of the time and place involved. For why the time was important for Howard being inspired to write about Fort Parker, we can look at the dates of his mentions of Fort Parker against what was happening in Texas. Howard first mentions Fort Parker in 1931 and starts talking about it and the fall-out from its destruction from 1933 until well into 1935. In Texas during this time period, the state was planning a big celebration for its Centennial founding as a nation to be held in 1936. One of the many projects that was undertaken around the state was to rebuild Fort Parker on its former site as it was at the time of the attack in 1836 for the Texas Centennial Celebrations in 1936. The landowners of the site gave the land to the state of Texas in 1933, and reconstruction of the fort began in 193610. The importance of place inspiring Howard is that Fort Parker was near the modern town of Groesbeck. Groesbeck lies in-between the Trinity and Brazos Rivers, and more importantly for Howard, is 36 miles away from Marlin, the city that the Howards had been constantly traveling to and staying in for Mrs. Howard’s treatment for years. Howard surely must have heard of the excitement and plans for the rebuilding of Fort Parker, and began learning of its history, and the repercussions its destruction caused while either staying in Marlin or talking with his friends who lived there.

Fort Parker was clearly the prototype for Howard’s fictional Fort Tuscelan. Fort Tuscelan is described as being like the typical American Frontier fort of the Eastern seaboard:

“Fort Tuscelan stood on the eastern bank of Black River, the tides of which washed the foot of the stockade. The latter was of logs, as were all the buildings within, including the donjon (to dignify it by that appellation), in which were the governor’s quarters, overlooking the stockade and the sullen river…Balthus noted that the gate was ranked by a tower on each side, the summits of which rose above the stockade. He saw loopholes for arrows…The tousle-headed youth stared about him eagerly and curiously, noting the rows of barracks along the walls, the stables, the tiny merchants’ stalls, the towering blockhouse, and the other buildings, with the open square in the middle where the soldiers drilled, and where, now, fires danced and men off duty lounged.”(BBR)

Fort Parker was built in 1834/5 and was constructed out of timber, very much like the timber forts of the Eastern American colonies with walls and blockhouses and towers. Here are photos of the reconstruction of Fort Parker. See how it matches the description of Fort Tuscelan:

In the May 1935 letter to Lovecraft, Howard further writes of the destruction of Fort Parker and the escape of its survivors, and this letter provides the final bit of evidence that Fort Parker was Howard’s inspiration for BBR:

“It was less than a month after San Jacinto that James W. Parker wrote his red chapter into Texas history. He lived, with others of his kin, at old Fort Parker, near the Navasota River. Early in the morning five hundred Comanches appeared before the fort, led by a Mexican agent who had been stirring up the tribes against the white people… He was not known to be an Indian agent by the people of the fort. Waving a white flag, he disarmed suspicion and by his wiles got the gate opened. The rest was red massacre. The braves swarmed through like a steel-tipped wave before the Texans could prepare their defense. What followed should have pleased the gentlemen of the Patriot even more than Santa Ana’s massacres did, for the ideas of the Comanches regarding chivalry approximated those of a European general’s, or a modern intellectual’s. Women and children as well as men were cut down, scalped and mutilated and in that holocaust Fort Parker perished. Some few were taken captive by the Indians, among them Cynthia Ann Parker and her brother, John.”(Lovecraft, May 1935)

In the quoted paragraph, Howard writes about the Mexican agent that had been stirring up the tribes against the Anglo-Texians leading the attack on Fort Parker, exactly like Zogar Sag stirring up the Pict tribes and leading the attack on Fort Tuscelan. This is the smoking gun. In the Fort Parker survivors’ stories of the attack, there is no Mexican Agent that stirred up and led the Comanche and Kiowa. The attackers were only acting on their own initiative.11 That Howard knew the truth of this is shown by the January 1933 letter to August Derleth, where there is no mention of a Mexican agent leading the Indians. This invented part of the story of the Fort Parker attack by Howard to Lovecraft that matches the plot of BBR shows that Howard had used the historical incident and built on it to write the story of doomed Fort Tuscelan. The fact that Howard would relate the story out of the blue to Lovecraft in this letter changing the historical version to match his fictional version of BBR when he didn’t need to shows that Fort Parker was his inspiration for the story.

Howard writes of the survivors of the massacre’s plight:

“It is of Jim Parker I would speak, and I can not tell his story better than in his own words. Visualize that scene for an instant: the Fort has fallen; a thick column of smoke rises and wavers against the morning sky. A little band of fugitives huddle together amongst the thickets near the bank of a sullen creek winding through almost impenetrable brush. They are unarmed, half-naked, some wounded, all dazed by the suddenness of the disaster. Their brains are still sick from the sights they have seen, the cries that tortured their ears. Faintly they still hear the bestial, exultant yells of the Comanches. They have seen their relatives butchered before their eyes, shot, speared, their scalps torn from their still living heads. On all sides the wilderness stretches, scarcely marked by the brief occupation of humanity. It is hundreds of miles to the nearest settlement, and every foot of the way is beset with hardships and perils.”(Lovecraft, May 1935)

Howard’s eloquent writing in the May 1935 letter to Lovecraft with its description of the fall of Fort Parker and what happened to its unlucky inhabitants and survivors, certainly seems to echo what happened to the defenders of Fort Tuscelan in BBR, and to some of the settlers who were unlucky enough to meet raiding Pict parties not participating in the attack on the fort. Conan and Balthus, hurrying to alert settlers of the oncoming horde, come upon the aftermath of a young settler couple that ran into the Picts:

“Ahead of them presently they saw a small blaze through the trees, and heard a wild and ferocious chanting. The trail bent there, and leaving it, they cut across the bend, through the thickets. A few moments later they were looking on a hideous sight. An ox-wain stood in the road piled with meager household furnishings; it was burning; the oxen lay near with their throats cut. A man and a woman lay in the road, stripped and mutilated. Five Picts were dancing about them with fantastic leaps and bounds, waving bloody axes; one of them brandished the woman’s red-smeared gown.” (BBR)

The Fort Parker survivors’ flight to safety also shows up in the flight of the settlers fleeing at Balthus’s warnings, but we will return to this point later. Even though this letter to Lovecraft describing the fall of Fort Parker came out in the same month with the Weird Tales issue with the concluding part of BBR in it, the letter shows that Howard had learned about the Fort’s destruction and absorbed it to write about the doomed Fort Tuscelan and the settlers of Conajohara.

In the next installment, we will begin to examine some more of the actual incidents from Texas history, stories of the conflicts between the Comanches and Anglo Settlers that appear in Howard’s letters that made up many of the incidents in “Beyond the Black River”.

John Bullard is a retired attorney who lives in Texas, and has been slaving away for the last 2+ years on updating The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard for The Robert E Howard Foundation Press, which barring any more newly found letters or changes on letter dates, should finally be done this year. He became a life-long Howard fan upon reading his first Howard story in an anthology of horror stories in 1974. While working on the Letters, he started seeing the subject matter of this series and has written it up for the education and edification of other Howard-ophiles.

Notes

Letter to H.P. Lovecraft, ca. Dec. 1932: “But my favorite writers, both of prose and verse, are British or Americans. They are …R.W. Chambers…” “The Robert E. Howard Bookshelf”, Compiled by Rusty Burke, web.archive.org/web/20120204120421/http://www.rehupa.com/OLDWEB/ bookshelf.htm See Rusty Burke, Introduction, page xxi, The Best of Robert E. Howard, Volume 1 Crimson Shadows, (2007), Del Rey, and Patrice Louinet, Hyborian Genesis III, pp. 373-375, The Conquering Sword of Conan, (2005), Del Rey. Letter to H.P. Lovecraft, ca. Sept. 1930 Letter to H.P. Lovecraft, ca. Sept. 1934 Letter to H.P. Lovecraft, ca. Sept. 1934 and letter to August Derleth, ca. Mid-Oct. 1934 Patrice Louinet, Hyborian Genesis Part III, pp.369-370, and 381-383 Burke, R, Day of the Stranger: Further Memories of Robert E. Howard, Compiled, and with notes, by Rusty Burke, (1989), Necronomicon Press, pp.7-8 Cinema lovers will recognize this as the basis for the book and John Wayne/John Ford masterpiece film, “The Searchers”. See Christopher Long’s “Old Fort Parker State Historic Site”, and “Old Fort Parker: Step Back in Time to Texas in the 1800s” by Rachel Parks for dates of reconstruction of the site. Fehrenbach, T.R., (1974), Comanches The History of a People, pp. 283-292; Gwynne, S.C., (2010), Empire of the Summer Moon, pp. 12-22, 178-180; “Fort Parker”, Art Leatherwood, (June 12, 2010), Handbook of Texas Online

Sources

Letters

H.P. Lovecraft’s Letters

To Robert E. Howard: Jan. 30, 1931, Jan. 21, 1933

Robert E. Howard’s Letters

To August Derleth: Jan. 1933, Late Dec. 1933, Mid-Oct. 1934

To Carl Jacobi: Summer 1934

To H.P. Lovecraft: Aug. 1931, December 1934, May 1935, July 1935

Texts

“Beyond the Black River”, Draft A, Robert E. Howard Foundation Glenn Lord Typescript Collection

“Beyond the Black River”, Draft B, Robert E. Howard Foundation Glenn Lord Typescript Collection

“Beyond the Black River”, Weird Tales, May and June 1935 Issues, e-text provided by Paul Herman

Burke, R., (1989), Day of the Stranger: Further Memories of Robert E. Howard, Compiled, and with notes, Necronomicon Press

Burke, Rusty. (2007), “Introduction”, The Best of Robert E. Howard Volume I Crimson Shadows, Del Rey

DeShields, James T., (1886), Cynthia Ann Parker: The Story of Her Capture, Independently Published e-text, 2019

Ellis, Novalyne Price. One Who Walked Alone, Donald M. Grant Press, 1986

Fehrenbach, T.R., (1974), Comanches The History of a People, Anchor Books, 2003 Edition

Gwynne, S.C., (2010), Empire of the Summer Moon, Scribner

Louinet, Patrice. (2005), “Hyborian Genesis Part III”, The Conquering Sword of Conan, Del Rey

Parker, James W.; Plummer, Rachel, (1926), The Rachel Plummer Narrative, Palestine, TX,

Roehm, R. (Ed.) (2007), The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard Volume Two: 1930-1932, REHFP

Roehm, R. (Ed.) (2008), The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard Volume Three: 1933-1936, REHFP

Emails

From Bobby Derie, Sept. 4, 2019, to author.

From Keith West, Sept. 9, 2019, to author.

Websites

Color Photos of Fort Parker taken off the Internet credited to hiveminer.com

Aerial Postcard Photo of Fort Parker taken from the Texas Collection, Baylor University https://blogs.baylor.edu/texascollection/2016/01/29/documenting-the-parker-family-story-at-the-texas-collection-part-1/

Burke, Rusty. “The Robert E. Howard Bookshelf”, Robert E. Howard United Press Association, https://web.archive.org/web/20120204120421/http://www.rehupa.com/OLDWEB/index.htm

Handbook of Texas Online, Art Leatherwood, “FORT PARKER,” accessed August 27, 2019, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/uef13 .

Handbook of Texas Online, Christopher Long, “OLD FORT PARKER STATE HISTORIC SITE,” accessed October 07, 2019, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/gho01 .

Internet Archive: Rachel Plummer Narrative https://archive.org/details/rachelplummernar00park

“Old Fort Parker: Step Back in Time to Texas in the 1800s”, Rachel Parks, http://www.forthoodsentinel.com Nov. 18, 2010

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