Wolfville Days

Wolfville Days (1902) is one of the collections of short stories in the "Wolfville" series by American author and journalist Alfred Henry Lewis. An anonymous narrator provides the frame: on a hotel porch and in a saloon, he listens to an "Old Cattleman" from Tennessee, corncob pipe in hand and drink at his side, tell tales of the old days in the desert town of Wolfville, Arizona. The fictional frontier town is largely modeled on the real Tombstone, and its inhabitants include saloon keepers, faro dealers, cowboys, stable hands, sheriffs, and doctors; regulars in the stories include Old Man Enright, Doc Peets, Cherokee Hall, Dave Tutt, Boggs, and Faro Nell. The book contains nineteen pieces, each standing as its own chapter, beginning with "The Great Wolfville Strike" and going on to cover a newspaper shutting down, gambling-table contests, frontier grudges, death, and funerals, all threaded together by dialect, exaggerated humor, and understated black comedy into the texture of everyday frontier life. Lewis himself worked as a cowboy in the West in his youth and later spent years as a Hearst newspaper reporter, so his West carries a reporter's observation and a well-judged mockery. The book is an accessible introduction to late nineteenth-century American cowboy culture, town life, and the tradition of Western humor.