Fighting Western, Vol. 1, No. 5

This December 1945 issue of Fighting Western contains two complete novelettes and four short stories. The featured novelette "Law of the Buffalo Gun" by Edwin Truett follows a man calling himself Ars Smith, a railroad trouble-shooter for General Grenville Dodge's Union Pacific construction efforts. Smith and his partner Yakima Bill, a buffalo hunter, intervene when violence erupts in Hell on Wheels, a ramshackle tent settlement housing gamblers and saloon keepers. A surveyor named Farrel is murdered, and his brother seeks revenge against someone named McMurray. The second novelette, "Puno Omnis" by William Heuman, concerns Cole Barrett challenging the Great Western railroad. Additional stories include Frederic W. Bales's "The Father Bear's Cub" (grazing dispute), Joe Chadwick's "Curtain Call for a Has-Been" (frontier actor), and James P. Olsen's "The Dead Are Millionaires" (oil field trouble-shooter Duane confronting armed ghosts). The issue includes a special feature on "Happening" and pages of trade school advertisements.