Type of bind: Hardcover
Label: doubleday and company
Manufacturer: doubleday and company
Printing Date: 1963
Publishing house: doubleday and company
Sale Popularity Level: 2988943
Studio: doubleday and company
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers -
If you like droll, Mark Twain-wannabe writing, this work approaches the mark. Interest in this book comes from two quarters, I suspect -- (1) from fans of Bill Gulick, and (2) fans of the motion picture. I'm the latter. One Amazon List is about movies that were better than the book they were based on, and listed The Hallelujah Trail as just such a film. Such an assessment didn't bode well for reception of this book. But I bought it anyway to give it a whirl, and though it differs significantly from the movie, it was mildly enjoyable in its own right. I got to understand the back-stories of some of the characters better.
First thing to know: The Hallelujah Trail was NOT the original title of the book. It was called The Hallelujah Train, so this copy on Amazon is the original. On this account, you can find either title available for sale from Amazon marketplace dealers. I don't believe this book is currently in print.
Second, the book uses a framing device involving an investigative reporter and President Grant. The movie screenplay jettisons this artifice, without apparent harm.
Third, bathing, which is so prominent in the movie, is absent as a plot expedient in the book.
Fourth, dePatie-Frehling's maps don't really match Gulick's maps (yes, Gulick uses elaborate maps as well to try to explain the collision of the forces at play).
Fifth, Massingale is a suffragette first, a temperance activist second in the book. The suffragette component to her actions is omitted in the movie (probably for the better).
Sixth, you will become ever more impressed, page after page, at how the screenwriter improved both the action and dialogue, creating an ultimately more satisfying product in the process. In the book, Massingale doesn't stab the horses with her hatpin to make them bolt away from the exchange point; in fact, she's not even at the exchange point, she's with Col. Gearhart. The wagons are pulled by mules, not horses, and they're spooked by the champagne bottles exploding. The name of the final disaster was changed, for in the book Quicksand Bottoms is only an incidental fraction of the Oxbow region, and the various campaigns therein also differ. At tale's end, Oracle Jones lives alone at his homestead at Quicksand Bottoms, while Frank is a broken man up in Julesberg. How much more satisfying the movie version is, memorable for Brian Keith's reaction to the emerging casks. The book explains that Chief Five Barrels merely chooses some relatives to help him pick up some wagons of firewater. The movie transation concerning the "two brothers-in-law" is one of the dry comic highlights of the film. Wallingham is only mentioned in passing as "a good Republican," but the movie makes this a distinctive mark of the character.
You come away from the book appreciating the greater depth of the characters you've gleaned, but, even more so, appreciating the genius of the screenwriter's adaptation of the book. Some scenes are unique to the movie and not found in the book (as suggested earlier regarding the bathtub scenes), and explanations for some scenes are also different (e.g., Massingale massages Gearhart's neck because of an actual headache, not a hangover). In any event, director Sturges apparently moved pretty quickly from printed page to celluloid, since the book came out in approximately 1962 while the movie was released in 1965. The trip to the screen looks to have taken record time.
Recommended for those who love the movie who want to learn more about the characters and actions as originally conceived by Gulick. I'd hesitate to recommend the book to anyone else, however.
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