Telegraph Days

I finished my first book by Larry McMurty, author of Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove, and many other fine novels. This one was Telegraph Days. The central character is Nellie Courtright. Yes, another book read by Bob, in which the central character is a woman. Nellie was brave, beautiful, bold, blunt, and above all, organized! It was that last character trait that she believed led her to become chosen by Bill Cody as the manager of Buffalo Bill's far flung enterprises.

She gets her start as a young businesswoman running a telegraph service for the town of Rita Blanca in no-man's land, not yet part of any state, but later to become part of Oklahoma. She becomes a writer, her first big story being about a gunfight in Rita Blanca, in which her younger brother, soon after becoming a Sheriff's Deputy, shoots and kills all the members of a notorious outlaw gang. She has run-ins with Wyatt Earp in Dodge City, Kansas and in Tombstone, Arizona, where, as a new reporter for the Tombstone newspaper, she gets right in the middle of the Gunfight at O.K. Corral. We also meet Jesse James, Wild Bill Hickok, Doc Holiday, and Billy the Kid. She finishes her career in Malibu, California, where in the early twentieth century, she meets all the biggest movie stars and moguls.

I shed a few tears at the end, when Bill Cody makes one last request of Nellie, while on his deathbed in Denver.