Between 1889 and 1913 Alfred Henry Lewis--short-term cowboy, occasional lawyer, and career journalist--wrote a series of stories about a fictional frontier community modeled after Tombstone, Arizona, which collectively might be described as the Wolfville chronicles. The stories were published first in newspapers or in popular periodicals such as Collier's, Everybody's, and Munsey's and then collected into books. The prolific Lewis turned out much more than stories about the West: he was also a skilled big-city reporter and muckraking journalist who shined a public light on presumed malefactors in the heyday of sensational tabloid and magazine exposés. During the most conspicuous portion of his career Lewis was employed by William Randolph Hearst, to whom his first book, Wolfville (1897), was dedicated.

The narrator of Lewis's western stories is the Old Cattleman, a grizzled and garrulous septuagenarian. His dialect tale-spinning and social perspectives brought a semblance of the Wild West to...