THE FLEECING OF FORT GRIFFIN

by

PRESTON LEWIS

Genre: Western Humor

Publisher: Wild Horse Press

Date of Publication: May 19, 2016

Number of Pages: 234

2017 Elmer Kelton Award from the West Texas Historical Association:

Best Creative Work on West Texas

Scroll down for the giveaway!

When the young Englishman Baron Jerome Manchester Paget arrives in 1878 Fort Griffin with a satchel full of money to start a buffalo ranch and find a bride, a horde of colorful swindlers from throughout Texas arrive to help themselves to a rich serving of his naiveté to frontier ways.

With a passel of oddball characters and more twists and turns than a stagecoach trail, The Fleecing of Fort Griffin pits the baron against crooked gamblers, a one-eyed gunfighter, a savvy marshal, conniving females, a duplicitous cavalry officer and a worldly stump preacher.

To stay rich, the baron must stay alive!  And to stay alive, the baron must rely on a fourteen-year-old orphan and a rooster that serves as his guard animal.  Even so, the odds and the cards are stacked against the Englishman and his bold vision of becoming the baron of bison in West Texas.

Written by Spur Award-winning author Preston Lewis, a master of western plot twists and humor, The Fleecing of Fort Griffin takes readers on an unconventional and uproarious journey through the Old West and some of its unsavory characters.

Praise

“… a work of colorful and humorous fiction,” Albany Review

“The Fleecing of Fort Griffin by Preston Lewis of San Angelo is one of the funniest westerns I’ve ever read.”  Glenn Dromgoole, Texas Reads

“If you’re looking for a delightful tale, check out The Fleecing of Fort Griffin.”  Bryan Eagle

Which character from The Fleecing of Fort Griffin is most or least like you?  There’s probably a little of me in all the characters in my books.  In The Fleecing of Fort Griffin, I most identify with the orphan Sammy Collins, who like me is an observer of everything, though he doesn’t quite understand it all.  That’s much the way it is with writing as things happen that you don’t fully understand, they just appear on the screen and you wonder where you came up with them.

Who’s your favorite character in Fleecing?   G.W. “God Willing” Tuck, the Baptist preacher who seems to prefer doing what is earthly rather than Godly.  His miracles always seem to help himself and his shills.

Why did you set you western caper in Fort Griffin?    Fort Griffin is my favorite town in all of the Old West, surpassing in my mind Tombstone, Dodge City and Deadwood for dramatic possibilities.  Fleecing is my third novel to be set all or partially in Fort Griffin.  The first was The Lady and Doc Holliday about the fabled romance between Holliday and legendary lady gambler Lottie Deno.  The second was Bluster’s Last Stand, the fourth book in my Memoirs of H.H. Lomax series.  Now Fleecing.

Why do you keep coming back to Fort Griffin?  First of all, it was the most important town in West Texas in the aftermath of the Civil War.  Second, several threads of Old West history were sewn into the fabric of Fort Griffin, starting with the Comanche heritage before white men arrived and then the military heritage from the post that was set up to deal with the Indian threat. Then it was an important place for the buffalo hunters who killed off the Great Southern Herd.  Then came the ranching and trail drive era.  From its settlement in the late 1860s until its ultimate demise after the fort was abandoned and the Texas Central Railroad bypassed the community for rival town Albany, Fort Griffin was a lawless community that drew some of the most famous and infamous men in Old West, including Pat Garrett, Doc Holiday, Wyatt Earp, John Wesley Hardin, John Selman and John M. Larn as well as such legendary women as Lottie Deno and Mollie McCabe.  It’s a great town to set a western tale in as it has about every type of frontier history, save for mining history.

What became of Fort Griffin?  Fort Griffin began a long decline after the railroad bypassed it, though the rural community held on until the 1930s when it finally lost its post office.  Today one building remains from the original town while some mock buildings have been built to represent those in the original town.  Today Fort Griffin State Historic Site offers a visitor center and ruins of the military post, including the mess hall, barracks, first sergeant’s quarters, bakery, powder magazine, and the original hand dug well.  The site is also home to the Official State of Texas Longhorn Herd.  Although Albany effectively killed Fort Griffin when it got the railroad, the citizens of Albany preserved the history of the pioneer West Texas Town.  Each summer the citizens of Albany produce the annual Fort Griffin Fandangle, the oldest outdoor musical in Texas, and keep alive the history of the once important West Texas frontier community.  Fandangle is produced on two weekends in June, using community residents to represent many of their own ancestors in the musical.  It’s a Texas institution.

Are you a full-time or part-time writer?  How does that affect your writing?  I now write full-time, but before I retired I wrote part-time.  I’ve come to understand that writers face two problems—time and money.  Some writers can handle money problems, and some can handle time pressures, but few can handle both.  For instance, I could not handle the pressure of having to make my living for me and my family fully from writing.  I might have done it, but I didn’t know and I could not leave my family at risk for my potential failure as a writer.  On the other hand, I can handle time pressures and can manage my time well enough to work a job full time and then carve out enough time to write fiction on the side.  Now that I am retired, I have all the time I need to write.

What are some day jobs that you have held?  Have any of them impacted your writing?  I started out in newspapers so I learned early how to write on deadline and how to force myself to write, even when things might not be coming easily.  Then in higher education communication and marketing I got a variety of writing experience from scripts to brochure copy to magazine features.  I created and edited a university magazine, which is a good experience in working and editing with other writers. 

What’s something interesting, fun, or funny that most people don’t know about you? I am reading my way through The Complete Peanuts, every comic strip Charles Schulz did on Charlie Brown and the gang for the newspapers between 1950-2000.

What is your favorite quote?  “I cannot live without books”—Thomas Jefferson and “Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please”—Mark Twain.)

What is your next project?  I am completing research on the trail drive era for the fifth volume in my Memoirs of H.H. Lomax series.  Tentatively titled First Herd to Abilene, this will put my protagonist promoting the first cattle trail to Abilene and actually leading the drive to Kansas.  In the process Lomax encounters, among others, Joseph G. McCoy, Jesse Chisholm, Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok.  This volume in the memoirs will cover the backstory of the Lomax and Hickok relationship referenced in Bluster’s Last Stand, volume 4 in the memoirs.

When do you have enough research?  Generally, never because there is always more information out there and more information that can help give greater authenticity or humor to you narrative.  However, at some point you have to start writing and make do with what you have.  Often research is a more fun than writing, but at some point, you must begin to put your story or concept into words and leave the research behind, even though research is sort of a paid vacation for novelists.

Preston Lewis is the Spur Award-winning author of 30 western, juvenile and historical novels, including The Fleecing of Fort Griffin, a western caper published by Wild Horse Press.  Fleecing won the 2017 Elmer Kelton Award from the West Texas Historical Association (WTHA) for best creative work on West Texas.

Lewis is best known for his comic novels in The Memoirs of H.H. Lomax series.

Bluster’s Last Stand, a novel about Custer and the Battle of Little Bighorn, is the latest volume in the well-received series that began with The Demise of Billy the Kid.  Subsequent books in the series—The Redemption of Jesse James and Mix-Up at the O.K. Corral—were both Spur Finalists from Western Writers of America (WWA).

Blood of Texas, Lewis’s historical novel on the Texas Revolution, received WWA’s Spur Award for Best Western Novel.  His True West article on the Battle of Yellowhouse Canyon won a Spur Award for Best Nonfiction Article.  In addition to his two Spurs from WWA, Lewis has earned three Elmer Kelton Awards from WTHA.

Lewis’s novels have appeared under the imprint of national publishing houses such as Bantam, Zebra and HarperCollins and of regional publishing companies like Eakin Press and Wild Horse Press.  His short works have appeared in publications as varied as Louis L’Amour Western Magazine, Persimmon Hill, Dallas Morning News, True West, The Roundup, Journal of the Wild West History Association and San Angelo Standard-Times.

A native West Texan and current San Angelo resident, Lewis holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from Baylor and Ohio State universities.  He earned a second master’s degree in history from Angelo State University.  He is a past president of WWA and WTHA.  Lewis is a longstanding member of the Authors Guild and an associate member of the Dramatists Guild of America.

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———————–

GIVEAWAY!  GIVEAWAY!  GIVEAWAY!

1ST PRIZE: Signed Copy of The Fleecing of Fort Griffin

+ Choice of Any One Book from the H.H. Lomax Series

2ND PRIZE: Signed Copy of The Fleecing of Fort Griffin

MARCH 20-29, 2018

(US ONLY; email addresses collected will be used by author for distribution list)

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