The Hopalong Cassidy of the movies and television was a clean-cut hero in a white hat who did not drink, smoke, or swear. The original, invented by Clarence E. Mulford in 1907, was something else entirely: a rough, red-headed, hard-drinking, foul-mouthed cowhand with a limp — closer to the real thing, and far more interesting.
Mulford was a meticulous researcher who built the Bar-20 ranch and its crew of gun-handy cowboys with the care of a novelist mapping a whole society. His West is violent and profane and funny, a world of range wars and rustlers and hard men bound by a rough code. Hollywood later scrubbed Hopalong clean and made a fortune; the founding novels are grittier, saltier, and truer to the frontier that made them.
This volume gathers the founding Bar-20 saga — nine complete novels from 1907 to 1922 — with a critical study and a life of Mulford, restoring the character his own creator barely recognized once the studios were through with him.
Read it beside the classic Westerns worth reading and the myth and history of the cowboy.
Read The Fundamental Hopalong Cassidy →
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