The Big Front Yard And Other Stories - Plot & Excerpts
but it was published, in the September 1944 issue of New Western Magazine, under a new title … and these days it’s likely that many readers will miss the play on words in the new title. If you’ve read a few Westerns, you probably know that “hot lead” is a euphemism for a gunfight – but the protagonist of this story is a frontier newspaper editor in the days when newspaper publishing often required melting down and recasting the lead alloy used to set type on the printing press. (As it turned out, “Gunsmoke Goes to Press” was retained as a chapter heading in the newly titled story.) Clifford D. Simak seems to have had some following in Western literature of the era – in this case, his story was the topmost of the two listed on the front cover of the magazine, and it appeared as the first story in the magazine. Cliff’s journal shows that he was paid $120 for it during a period when the cover price of the magazine was fifteen cents. Several characters in the story bear the names of towns in the area of Wisconsin where Cliff grew up, and the protagonist bears as a last name the name of Cliff’s younger brother, Carson.
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