Taking a journey: Western writer Johnny D. Boggs hits the trail once again with 'Longhorns East'

Cattle drives in England? True story, though not with longhorns.

In the first part of the novel “Longhorns East” the protagonist, Tom Ponting, is a British lad raised on a stock farm who might have been plucked from a Charles Dickens tale.

The year is 1840 and the 15-year-old Tom is hired to help drive 53 head of cattle more than 100 miles from Somersetshire to London’s Smithfield Market.

It will be Tom’s first time in the big city.

Santa Fe author Johnny D. Boggs gives the reader the flavor of London’s sprawl: “Hackneys rushed past, whips snapping. Silent men led burros laden with wares. Fine horses pulled fancy carriages, while men, women and children filled the streets and sidewalks. A horn blew, and a team of four white horses drew a coach that sideswiped a peddler’s cart, sending tomatoes, potatoes and cucumbers bouncing across the road …”

Boggs has a sharp ear for the language of the street. In one scene, a potential cattle buyer named Pearse is arguing with Tom’s drover-boss Sydney Ivatts.

Pearse: “You are nothing more than the pigeon-livered ragbag you have always been. I shan’t do business with you. Good day, sir.”

Ivatts calls back: “At least I am no malmsey-nosed hornswoggler.” Moments later, Ivatts yells, “The only job you’re fit for, Pearse, is jakes-farmer.” Jakes means outhouse.

Boggs’ research involved reading period newspapers to capture the rhythm of the language. That also meant listening to audiobooks of Dickens’ “Oliver Twist,” “Great Expectations” and “The Pickwick Papers.”

“My theory is a little bit of dialect goes a long way,” the author said. “Sometimes I think writers get too carried away with that and if you use too much of that you lose the reader.”

Eighty-seven pages into the novel, the reader is brought forward to America in 1852. Tom has already immigrated to the United States. He is now a successful cattle buyer, seller and driver living in Moweaqua, Illinois. His business partner is Washington Malone.

Tom reads a story in an old newspaper about the price of cattle at a New York market. He files away the nugget of information. It forms the basis for a bet that Tom makes with a merchant-friend back home. Tom bets he can deliver 150 head of longhorn cattle on a drive from East Texas to New York City by the Fourth of July of 1854.

On horseback, Tom, Malone and a patchwork of drovers help take the animals north to Moweaqua. After resting the cattle there over the winter, the drive, with a reduced herd, continues east to Muncie, Indiana, where the first of several freight trains link up to deliver the cattle.

Does Tom win the bet? Sorry, no spoiler.

The novel is peppered with Tom’s encounters with a slew of ordinary folks and a few famous ones. There’s a chance and brief encounter in a small Illinois town with a lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. Tom sizes up Lincoln: He may look like a tall lawyer, but he’s more like a farmer with arms and shoulders that could swing an axe.

Tom also meets Jesse Chisholm, for whom the Chisholm Trail is named.

Though the subject of “Longhorns East” is a cattle drive, Boggs doesn’t think of it as the novel’s theme.

“It’s more of a journey novel,” a journey through America in the 1850s, he said in a phone interview. “I was interested in doing a different kind of drive and in a different era. … We mostly think about cattle drives from Texas to Kansas, and after the Civil War.”

“Longhorns East” is a work of fiction primarily inspired by a work of nonfiction — the memoir of Tom Candy Ponting, and on Boggs’ additional research of this honest, fair, patient man.

Boggs’ last two novels have been about cattle drives — “A Thousand Texas Longhorns” and “Return to Red River.” They sold well and both won Western Writers of America Spur Awards, he said.