Pushing the Frontiers of the Traditional Western

The Wretched and Undone is a love letter, blistering as it may be, to my childhood home of Texas. Inspired by real people and actual events, the novel is a searing, four-generation saga of the Anderwald family, who arrive from Poland to Bandera, Texas, on the eve of the American Civil War. It is a hard-nosed telling of truths about the time and place in history they encounter, where the landscape was brutally harsh and fairness and justice often lurked in the shadows.

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On its face, the impetus for this story and the setting of Bandera itself, the self-proclaimed “Cowboy Capital of the World,” had all the makings of a great Western. A small, dusty town on the outer edge of the untamed American frontier at the turn of the 20th century? Check. Cowboys, outlaws, lawmen, vigilantes, and a drifter or two? Check. Conflict and moral ambiguity? See under Civil War, endless bloody battles with the Comanche, and slavery. There were boundless opportunities to tell a traditional tale imbued with themes of justice, vengeance, survival, and rugged individualism, even in the face of lawlessness and chaos.

But the storylines and characters calling to me from the historical archives, contemporary memoirs, and family lore challenged and, at times, defied the strictures of the Western trope. I was compelled to listen.

It all started on a stroll through Bandera when I came upon St. Stanislaus Catholic Church perched on a hilltop. At its entrance stood a small monument dedicated to the Polish pioneers who founded the parish in 1855. Sixteen names followed, and over a century of tombstones stood nearby, bearing the same names generation after generation. Who were these intrepid souls who left everything they knew for a strange land on the precipice of cataclysm—a place where Catholics were not always welcomed with open arms?

There were also the curious stories of camels and their handlers at nearby Camp Verde, a desolate frontier fort even in its heyday as it was traded among the U.S. Army, the Union Army, and the Confederacy. Much has been written about the U.S. Army Camel Corps Experiment that launched in 1856 and lasted until the end of the Civil War, but most of the accounts focus on the animals themselves, with little about the men brought from Greece, Turkey, and Egypt to tend to them. While we do not know most of their names, we do know these men lived among the herds, often went unpaid for months, and several remained stranded in the American West at the war's end with no hope of returning home. How did the cameleers survive, and where did they go?

And then there were the accounts that were much harder to explain. On an icy winter night, while visiting my sister on her cattle ranch on the outskirts of Bandera, she shared the stories of a “woman in white” who wandered the property, drifting across the fields and hills or hovering over terrified guests in their beds. I learned that this woman, likely the victim of a murder-suicide a century earlier, was no stranger to the ranch or the residents of Bandera. Who was this woman, and why wouldn’t she leave?

Polish Catholic immigrants and Arab camel wranglers? Not the usual protagonists one would expect in a Western, but lifting up voices often silenced or not acknowledged and lessons still not learned to the present day was a critical path I intended to follow as a writer. And ghosts? The central tenets of the genre hold that conflict centers on man versus nature, law versus lawlessness, civilization versus the wild, not man versus forces beyond his control or understanding that disrupt the normative tension of good versus evil and challenge expected adherence to historical veracity.

Here, The Wretched and Undone dips confidently over the line of the Western and into Southern Gothic. The Civil War and its wake were rife with disturbing, alienated, morally ambiguous, and conflicted souls navigating a society burdened by decay and violence—hallmarks of the Southern Gothic genre—and these themes weigh heavily on the narrative. Yet even in this confluence of the Western and Southern Gothic, the characters in the novel, who are at once fatalistic and motivated by revenge, defy expectations. The Anderwalds and their extended family of immigrant outcasts, Arab camel wranglers, wounded warriors, and a songstress on the verge of madness endure, forgive, and remain hopeful despite all that befalls them, and together, not through the actions of a lone hero, rise from the ashes time and time again.

By incorporating paranormal elements and making way for the voices often muted during this period of history, The Wretched and Undone expands the thematic and narrative scope of the traditional Western by weaving in the bleakness and existential dread of Southern Gothic and the cynical tone and dark humor evocative of Texas Noir. Think Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian meets Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” meets the Coen Brothers “Ballad of Buster Scruggs.” As a result, the reader is offered a fresh take on the complexity and durability of family and community, found and otherwise, the resilience but not the infallibility of the human spirit, and the enduring power of hope.