Trafford Publishing: The Mestizo

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The Mestizo

by Bill Parks

208 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #03-0165; ISBN 1-55395-802-0; US$20.00, C$21.99, EUR16.50, £11.50

The Mestizo was the biggest customer in sight: a true gambling addict. He stayed with his game, win or lose. Here was a wild animal. A vicious animal. The nobility of the clean Yaqui strain was not in his blood. He had killed more than once, and not in self defense. Yet here he was surrounded by people who were not afraid of him; here he was playing, having his fun. But the blood lust was latent, waiting.

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about the book about the author sample excerpts or Table of Contents catalogue info

About the Book

With gold in his saddlebags from a prospecting trip into Mexico, and chased by a posse including the mestizo Panchito, Dan Greenwood was planning to rebuild his ranch, the Crazy Q, but he was facing two kinds of trouble: romance on the ranch from a flirtatious visitor and violence brought to the desert by the mestizo, who had a score to settle with Dan. This is a colourful tale of Old Arizona set in 1889,with romance, violence, and a climax that is literally explosive. American newspapers in 1955 gave this novel glowing reviews; one compared it to the "best of Eugene Manlove Rhodes", an early Western novelist.
The descriptions of the desert are real and mesmerizing, while the characterization is vivid, memorable, and authentic to the era. The author knew the desert first hand, and his rich experience shows through in his remarkable description.

About the Author

Bill Parks was born on October 14, 1897 on a farm on Iuka, Kansas. After working on farms and ranches across the West, Bill enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War I, and served in France for one year. After returning home he worked as a farm and ranch hand and later on other jobs such as lumbermill hand, cotton picker, street car motorman, crane operator at Boulder Dam (now Hoover Dam), as a motion picture extra and on his own as a gold and silver prospector.
Bill first came to Arizona in 1924. In the winter of 1940/41 , while working as a horse wrangler at Red Star Stable in Phoenix, Arizona, he met and married Clara Lukens. Together they worked on farms and ranches until moving to Grand Canyon where Bill was a guide on the South Rim and out to the Indian Country from 1946 to 1962. They had two sons while in Grand Canyon, and the family moved to Prescott, Arizona in December, 1961; Bill returned to work at the Canyon on weekends.
Bill wrote a column, Under the Southwest Sun, for the Prescott Courier for 28 years until he died on June 15, 1995. He wrote a novel about the Navajo people called The Seventh Horizon, published posthumously by his wife in 2002 through 1st Books Publishing. It is available from amazon.com. Much of his life and adventures are in the memoir, Horizon Hunters, by his wife, Clara Lukens Parks, also available at amazon.com

Sample Excerpts

Page One. . .
The desert slept under the mesmeric sun. The far surrounding peaks also slept, or perhaps merely rested from the fatigue of being. Occasionally the horizon stretched itself, yawned idiotically, then returned to shimmering immobility. Sometimes a lonely mountain in the distance reared fantastically, seemed to take cognizance of its neighbours and then subside on its base in consummate relaxation.
Relaxation- that was the mood of the desert, a mood which caught and held every living thing in it. And that was the strangeness of it: all green living things seemed lifeless, all dead or inanimate things seemed stealthily alive or crawling.
The noon sun, like a near and breathless ball of fire, looked down on the earth with a blazing intentness. Its rays seemed to fill the sky beyond the sun, making the entire sky a sapphire nothingness. A sky that seemed viciously conscious of its power of reflection.
Assailed with all this blistering light was the Mission San Xavier del Bac, a bright landmark in the desert. Although in direct contrast to everything in the landscape, in some curious way it seemed to have a right to be there. Yet it might have lacked confidence in its own entity, so queerly did it tremble with the fallacy of movement engendered by the writhing heat waves.
About two miles away a rider paused and dismounted to adjust the damp blanket under his saddle, then stood surveying the scene, well aware that behind him a tiny pencil of dust had appeared over the horizon and was persistently lenghtening itself in his direction. But there was no panic in his brown eyes. Rather, there was satisfaction, for he was about to achieve his temporary goal. That was why he had avoided the thickets of the Santa Cruz and kept to the open desert. He had to reach the misssion ahead of his pursuers, and he had given them no opportunity to ride around him. It had taken some ingenuity- and what was ahead of him would take more.
One hand raised to scratch his soft black whiskers, the other hand stroked the salt-wet neck of his dejected pinto roan. Ninety miles of travelling in thirty hours had sapped most of the vitality out of the horse, even though his rider had walked many of those miles at intervals during the journey. Only expert horsemanship could have brought him so far in such unfavourable weather for riding. Presently the man spoke to the animal apologetically:
"Well, Calico, old boy, you've done your chore, and you've done it noble. I'll ride you only to the mesquites down by the mission, then we'll call it quits."
His voice was lazy, his manner unhurried. Even with fatigue evident in his expression, and with a grim prospect ahead of him, his air was that of a composed and fearless individual. He was about thirty years old, with an adventurous boy's face that had gone right on into manhood with the inclination to take life on a dangerous basis, cheerfully heedless of the risks involved, in order to get the best out of life.
Tightening the cinch, the rider gathered up the reins and swung his lithe body into the saddle. His medium-weight body was so well knit that every movement was graceful and competent. He turned for a long backward glance, holding one arm across his nose and close to his lowered hat brim to isolate his vision from the blinding sunlight. The dust hung in the still air behind the moving posse, delineating perfectly its progress in the distance. Evidently it was coming on at a crowding trot, determined to close the gap.
Conclusion . . .
Neotoma waited until evening before he allowed his curiousity to draw him back to the site of his former home. He didn't understand the mystery of the disappearance of part of the dump, and the appearance of the gaping hole in the ground where his home had been. But he felt satisfied that danger had withdrawn, allowing him complete freedom to investigate.
Presently he began to assemble bits of wood and twigs for a new home, and while about it he came upon a shining piece of metal in a mesquite bush. He liked the bright aspect of it, the perfection of its geometrical shape. He took it to his new home, for its first ornament. He did not know that it was a deputy sheriff's star, and that in the confusion of events its owner had unwittingly earned this bit of metal. How could he know? He was only Neotoma.
He knew only that his desert was quiet again. A rainless, classic wilderness, in the summer enslaved by a phantasmal lassitude. An enchanted desert during the winter, beautiful and fantastic. A strange desert, which a multiple history had built from ancient ocean beds, lava pourings, magmatic intrusions, and major contortions. A weirdly silent desert, where fearful things sometimes happened to the unwary. But for Neotoma it was none of these things- it was simply the place where he lived.

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