Wolfville Days (Illustrated Edition)

This is the second of a series of books Lewis wrote about cowboy life in the Wild West cattle town of Wolfville, Arizona in the late 1800s. Each one is a collection of sketches set in a fictional frontier settlement in the Arizona desert. Ominously called Wolfville, it was no doubt meant to emulate the very real town of Tombstone.

The narrator of the sketches is a longtime resident of Wolfville, a man from Tennessee known as the Old Cattleman. The old man spends his time in the saloon or on the hotel verandah—usually drinking and smoking a corncob pipe—where the unnamed writer prods him into telling his yarns.

The yarns concern the dozen or so characters who live in or pass through Wolfville. Some of them cowboy for a living; one drives the stage; and one offers his services as the resident faro dealer at the Red Light saloon. One is the town’s doctor, and another is the town marshal. Mostly they seem to have a lot of time on their hands—time to sit around drinking and talking: http://buddiesinthesaddle.blogspot.com/2012/08/alfred-henry-lewis-wolfville-1897.html

This edition of the book contains the original illustration, rejuvenated, and nine additional illustrations unique to this edition of the book.

Alfred Henry Lewis (January 20, 1855 - December 23, 1914) was an American investigative journalist, lawyer, novelist, editor, and short story writer. He began his career as a staff writer at the Chicago Times, and eventually became editor of the Chicago Times-Herald.

During the late 19th century, he wrote muckraker articles for Cosmopolitan. As an investigative journalist, Lewis wrote extensively about corruption in New York politics. This was the subject of his book The Boss, and How He Came to Rule New York, which focused on the Tammany Hall society of the 18th century. He also wrote biographies of Irish-American politician Richard Croker (1843-1922), and of Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), seventh President of the United States.

As a writer of genre fiction, his most successful works were in his Wolfville series of Western fiction, which he continued writing until he died of gastrointestinal disease in 1914.