Trafford Publishing: The Law of the Paiute and Other Stories

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The Law of the Paiute and Other Stories

by Bill Parks

164 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #03-1079; ISBN 1-4120-0711-9; US$18.00, C$22.95, EUR14.50, £10.50

Fascinating short stories about the West - from the casinos of Vegas to the deserts of Arizona and the adventures in between, by a man who's lived much of what's written.

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About the Book

The Law of the Paiute and Other Stories is about interesting people and events which are exciting, adventurous, real, life-changing, and original. It was written by an author who had lived much of what he wrote about during his 97 years.

About the Author

Bill Parks was born on October 14, 1897, on a farm in Iuka, Kansas. After working on farms and ranches over the West as a young man, Bill enlisted in the US Army during World War I, serving in France for a year. After returning home, he worked as a farm and ranch had and later on other jobs such as lumber mill 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 prospector for gold and silver.
Bill first came to Arizona in 1924. While working in the winter of 1940/41 as a horse wrangler at Red Star Stable at Phoenix, he met and married Clara Lukens on April 12, 1941. Together they worked on farms and ranches until moving to Grand Canyon where Bill was a guide on the South Rom and out to the indian country, 1946 to 1962. They had two sons born at Grand Canyon in 1947 and 1949. The family moved to Prescott, arizona, in December, 1961, and Bill continued to return to the Canyon to work on weekends.
Although Bill hadn't gone beyond eight grade in school, he was self-taught in many things including geology and the proper use of the English language which served him well when he began to write short stories and later two novels which he had published; THE MESTIZO, a story of Old Arizona, published by Macmillan in 1955 and in England by Macdonald in 1956 and Foursquare Paperbacks in 1959, and recently republished by his wife Clara through Trafford Publishing. And his novel about the Navajo People in 1955, which was published by Clara through 1st Books in 2002, called THE SEVENTH HORIZON. This work was done posthumously for Bill, as he died at the age of 97 in June, 1995, at the Prescott V.A.M.C. Nursing Home. In addition to this other writing, Bill wrote a column for the Prescott Courier called UNDER THE SOUTHWEST SUN for 28 years. Much of Bill's life and adventures are told about in the memoir HORIZON HUNTERS by Clara Lukens Parks, published in 1999 by Wings of Atlanta Georgia. His book of short stories THE LAW OF THE PAIUTE AND OTHER STORIES is published posthumously through Trafford Publishing in Canada.
During his earlier career years of writing, Bill's friend and mentor, renowned author Rupert Hughes, told him that some day Bill Parks would have a name in American letters. It didn't happen that way, as life had a different but good plan for him, a wife who loved and encouraged him, two sons to love and to whom to introduce all the wonders of Nature. Thus, Bill had little time to promote his writing. He dedicated his first novel THE MESTIZO to "my friend Rupert Hughes" who had lived long enough to enjoy that distinction.

Excerpt

From The Captive:
The brown young man in the buckskins lay motionless at the top of the cliff, paying no attention to the deerfly which walked insolently about his face. His head was concealed from view of anyone below by a fragile bush, through which he peered. He was all youth and strength, from his black hair knotted with yucca fiber to his moccasined feet, but now his strength was relaxed. His complete disregard of the flies and the heat showed his patience and his tenacity of purpose. For he was here with a purpose.
He had returned here to the cliff's edge each day for three days, waiting for the cloud-and now the cloud had appeared. Not large, just a little cloud out over the Rio Grande Valley. But it could grow-the feel in the air promised its growth. Until the cloud did what it could do, the young man would have to wait. But he hadn't wasted the long hours spent on the cliff top.
His keen eyes had carefully photographed for his mind every feature of the terrain below. He could accurately visualize it in the night, the entire plan of the country below him. Not that his purpose could be accomplished in the night-it couldn't. What he had come here to do must be performed in the daytime, and under certain conditions. The cloud, not unexpected at this time of year, was one of the necessary conditions. Another of the conditions would have to be absolute lack of suspicion on the part of his intended victim-and he believed that the continuously unbroken cliff face would take care of that. The pueblo girl with the flock of sheep below glanced occasionally at the rim of the cliff top, but it was just a casual glance; she wasn't close enough to observe anything behind the bush which concealed the watcher. She considered the height of the perpendicular cliffs sufficient protection from any enemy, and she never came close enough to them to be vulnerable to an arrow.
Some time long in the past a section of the cliff had fallen and one huge square boulder had bounded down into the sloping plain, and its location was as near as she would approach the cliff. She had found the tilted boulder to be a welcome spot of shade at noonday, and into the thunderstorms of past summers it was always a refuge spot for the little band of sheep she looked after.
She had no help for this work; her sisters were grown and married, and a strange disease had taken their two dogs-an affliction of the mouth and throat, making froth, and with it a madness in the eyes. It was a thing they had got from the coyotes. Now the coyotes were bolder when they went abroad in the evening, and always in midafternoon she would start the sheep homeward toward the pueblo in the valley, and always her father would come out to meet her. He came not to be a companion to her, but to help guard the sheep from the evening coyotes.
This father was a frowning man, one of these bound up with the secret ceremonies, and he worked incessantly on the gaudy trappings for these affairs. When the gods came forth to strut in the public square they must come wearing special raiment. The girl, now in her fifteenth year, often felt that her father had less regard for her than for his handiwork in raiment. Her mother was dead, and she sometimes wondered what her father would do for someone to prepare his food after she had been married off.
That time would have come and gone the past winter, except that the clanship wasn't right for her and for the boy she approved of. This made it necessary for a marriage to be arranged for her, and she wouldn't know until later who the boy would be. It was the law of her pueblo and she accepted it because she had been brought up to accept it.
She knew that other Indian societies had different customs, the old women had told her much about them. Except the Navajo. Little was known about the Navajo-those captured by the Navajo never returned. No woman or children had been taken from this pueblo by the Navajo, but some of the other pueblos had so suffered. It was assumed that the captives went away to be slaves, and she had heard that all slaves of the Navajos were killed at the grave of the slave-owner if he were a person of importance in that tribe.
That Navajo world seemed an ominous world to her, but it also seemed far away-it was four days travel to it, the old women had said. Now as she glanced at the cloud over the valley she didn't dream that the gaze of a Navajo was on her. She watched the cloud, glad to see it grow, for after that first rain of summer the land always came alive with flowers. Until the flower buds came the sheep would have a hard time, they would have to range far for browse, as they had done today.
The cloud swelled, and drew other clouds to it, out over the wide valley. When it was big enough it would move, it would roll westward form the Rio Grande bringing rain with it. But in front of the rain would be the inevitable dust cloud, the dun-colored garment of Hay-o-py-o, God of Storm Wind. She did not like Hay-o-py-o, for she thought he did nothing for anyone. She couldn't guess that at that moment a Navajo young man was waiting for Hay-o-py-o to do something for him.
An hour later she had the sheep in the shelter of the huge tilted boulder. They were crowded around her and tightly against each other to escape the sting of blowing sand. The dust was so thick one could see no more than twenty feet. Perhaps that was why it was such a frightening shock to have the young man in buckskins appear suddenly at the edge of the flock. It was so paralyzing to her senses that she didn't make a move or a sound as he leaped lightly across the backs of the sheep and seized her by the hair.

Catalogue Information