UNBRIDLED COWBOY is the autobiography of Joseph B. Fussell. No, you’ve never heard of him. He was one of the unremembered ones. Add all the Joe Fussells together, do the division, and what you come out with will be the classic American Westerner.

He’s part cowhand, part lawman, part outlaw, part settler (a small part) and all fiddlefoot. One of the reasons the Western as a popular genre has fallen out of favor is that many Americans no longer believe that characters like Joe Fussell were real people. Too bad. That false belief does no good for anyone.

Fussell’s manuscript has been edited by his grandson, E.R. Fussell, a lawyer. I like the way Joe’s attitude seems to have passed down. The preface begins with this anecdote: “In May 2005, I emailed my cousin Joe Johnson in San Clemente, California, from my law office in Le Roy, in western New York state. ‘Cuz,’ I wrote, ‘I’m editing Gramps’ book. Any suggestions? Bob.’ His four-word reply — ‘Reduce Mexican body count’ — showed up on my screen the next day.”

Joe’s attitude toward violence does appear at first glance to be pretty casual, but look more closely and you’ll see someone who is offended not just by the physical harm it does, but by the immorality of its thoughtless application. Of course, he’s wounded — in more ways than one — when he is whipped harshly by the principal of his school, but he also knows that he had it coming. Later, he chats about a man he worked for who liked to play practical jokes on people, but retired into pouting whenever he was the recipient of someone else’s idea of humor. There is something Joe knows is unfair about that, something that deserves a little comeuppance.

During one of his wandering spells as a youth, Joe witnessed what he assumed was plain-as-day murder along the Trinity River bottom until he put the whole story together. A large black man, who had just killed a hog with a single rifle shot, was standing over his prey when another shot rang out and the man collapsed. Joe’s boss, a Mr. Smith, rode up, slipped a rope under the dead man’s arms, hauled him up from the ground, and rode off with him, leaving behind the man’s rifle and the hog as a warning to other would-be thieves.

Smith “was considered scrupulously honest and honorable in all his dealings as long as the other fellow did the same. But woe unto the man who tricked him or resorted to unfair practices. He was known to cast aside all sense of reason and to kill without thinking of the consequences.”

Brutal? That would be hard to deny. Kind of reminds you of George Carlin’s great line: “You know the good part about all those executions in Texas? Fewer Texans.”

But in an odd way, there’s something clean about justice that operates on that level. It’s certain and there’s no doubt about why it’s being administered. Don’t break the rules. You can probably get away with bending them, maybe with twisting them a little — but you can’t break them. You know what’ll happen if you do. When those guys said, “Thou shalt not,” they meant “Thou shalt not.”

Joe’s wandering ways eventually led him from the Hell’s Half Acre of Ft. Worth to California. He lived from 1879 to 1957, nearly 80 years of rough times, through the Great Depression and both World Wars. He was always determined to have things his own way, stubbornly, even foolishly so at times. This hard-headedness frequently made him the victim of his own determination, but the last thing we want from a Western wanderer is wishy-washy fence-sitting. When he believed something needed to be done, Joe generally believed it needed to be done right now. A slave to indecision he was not. He would have driven Hamlet crazy. Crazier.

UNBRIDLED COWBOY is a real find. Fussell is a terrific storyteller. His style is amiable and colloquial. You can almost hear the pauses as Joe stops for a moment to take a sip of coffee. He’s also pretty damn funny. His most unusual Westernisms will be used in the dialogue of novels for years to come. Here he is on his earliest adventures with tobacco:

“I could not imagine how mother knew I’d been smoking. It did not occur to me that she, or one of my sisters, could look through a window and see smoke pouring through the cracks of the privy as though the place might be on fire, nor did it soak through my mind that my breath would have stunk a dog off a gut-wagon.”

I don’t know what a gut-wagon was, nor does this passage encourage me to want to find out. Not firsthand, anyway.

Anyone with an interest in the American West will get a kick out of Fussell’s memoirs. Just remember to wear your old clothes when you sit down to read. You’ll have more than 70 years’ worth of dusty trails to cover. —Doug Bentin

Buy it at Amazon.