The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories

Two years before The Virginian, Owen Wister (1860-1938) gathered eight of his frontier tales as The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories, published by Harper and Brothers in 1900. The title story sends a foreman barely out of his teens to take charge of a crew of older, hard-drinking ranch hands, and the ‘jimmyjohn’ of the title is the demijohn of whiskey at the center of the trouble. The collection also contains ‘Hank’s Woman,’ the 1892 story that marked Wister’s first venture into Western fiction, and ‘Padre Ignacio,’ a quiet study of an aging priest’s crisis of faith in 1850s California. These stories trace the workshop years in which Wister assembled the characters and codes that defined the literary Western. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.