Local Color in Loco-land

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. W. C. Tuttle's Local Color in Loco-Land is a 1921 comic Western that satirizes the hunt for "authentic" frontier material. Told largely through the pompous, bookish voice of Orville Wellington Chatterton and the hard-boiled commentary of Willie Suggs, the story sends two literary outsiders into rough Montana country to study outlaws, cowboys, and danger firsthand. Their polished ideas collide with blunt locals like Ike Harper, Dirty Shirt Jones, Sheriff Magpie Simpkins, and other rough characters, turning every attempt at civilized inquiry into a joke about ignorance, bravado, and Western reality. Misunderstandings spiral through a hotel brawl, a jailhouse stay with "honest horse-thieves," a botched hanging, a chaotic nighttime escape, a stampede through cows, and a wild ride back toward Piperock. Mud, gunfire, and near-lynching replace the romantic adventure the men imagined. By the end, the story makes a pointedly comic case that imagination may be safer than experience when writing the Old West.