The Dodge City Chronicle

Zine
Title:	The Dodge City Chronicle
Publisher:	Agent With Style
Editor(s):
Date(s):	2001-?
Series?:
Medium:	print
Size:
Genre:
Fandom:	Gunsmoke
Language:	English
External Links:
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The Dodge City Chronicle is a gen fiction anthology of Gunsmoke fiction by Christine Jeffords.

Issue 1

cover of issue #1. Artist is not credited by publisher.

The Dodge City Chronicle 1 was published in 2001 and contains 206 pages. It has no interior art.

The story summaries below are by the author.

• Author-torial (2)
• Foreshadowing ("Set three years before the series premiere. Doc Adams finds an injured man down by the Arkansas River, and makes a friend." (4)
• Matt Finds a Deputy ("Set a month or two before the series begins. Recently promoted Marshal Matt Dillon, looking after Dodge with no assistance at all, meets a young man named Chester Goode...") (22)
• Resignation ("A coda to the half-hour episode "Bloody Hands" (2nd season). How Matt, Chester, and Kitty reacted to the news of Linda's murder by Stanger and Matt's decision to take him on.") (39)
• Turning Points ("A coda to "Kitty's Outlaw." Matt decides he should have given Kitty the chance to explain her relationship with Cole Yankton in depth, and is astonished at what he learns.") (46)
• Encounter ("Written for the seventh delphi GS Message Board Challenge ("Louie Pheeters thinks he has seen a ghost"), the frame is set in 13'h season, but the main story occurs in 3"'. Coming home from a last fall fishing trip, Chester comes upon an isolated sod house whose resident farm wife proves a surprise in more ways than one.") (53)
• Masquerade ("Set during the first hour (7th) season. Matt and Chester interrupt a stage robbery and capture one of the outlaws, who turns out to have a secret they'd never have suspected.") (72)
• Standoff ("Set during the transitional season (8th) in which Chester and Festus were featured together. While Matt's off to Topeka to fetch a prisoner, the man's partners seize the jailhouse and take Chester as a hostage. Quint and Festus must deal with this situation before Matt can walk in on them.") (114)
• The End of the Mile ("A coda to "Crooked Mile," one of my favorite BW's (10th season), which, though superficially about Quint finding and losing a love, takes as its subtext his friendship with Festus. How Festus tried to help Quint past Susan Degler's death, and what happened next.") (143)
• Thad's Reunion ("Set during the hiatus over the summer of '67 (between 12th and 13th seasons). Thad Greenwood's older brother, Clayton Lowell Greenwood, brings his family to Dodge to settle, and revelations result.") (153)
• Medicine Man ("Tied to the historical flight of the Northern Cheyennes from the Indian Territory, as chronicled in the book Cheyenne Autumn (see the Author's Note). Doc and Festus are captured by the fugitive Indians, and Matt and Newly set out in pursuit.")
• Corrie ("Written for the sixth GS Board Challenge ("Put yourself, or some version of you, in the GS Universe"), and set in 16th season. A stubborn young woman clashes with a Texas drover, revealed to be her brother, who's determined to get a half share of the ranch their father established.")
• Storm From the North ("Set in 17th season. A surprising young stranger who calls himself Reason Carlyle -- and claims to have been reared 1200 miles to the north by the Plains Cree -- rides into Dodge, and Festus is convinced he's trouble.")
• After 'The Foundling' ("Suggested by Annick. Matt and Kitty deal with the emotional residue of Kitty's surrender of infant Mary to Maylee Baines.")

Author's Notes for Issue #1

This zine is something of a novelty; the stories in it were originally written (c. 1999-2001) for an online Gunsmoke group that I belong to. Except for "Matt Finds a Deputy" (which has since gone OP) and "Storm from the North," none have appeared in print form before, though they've been privately circulated among members of those groups.

I should warn you first off that I'm not good at romance or romantic relationships; whenever I write one I always feel as if someone's being deceived, perhaps because I'm not really sure I believe romantic love exists. So, although I don't doubt that Matt and Kitty have a strong bond, I very seldom write about it, as many of the other writers in the group do (and much better than I could). I'm more comfortable with, and better at, straight adventure and man-to-man relationships--friends, partners, brothers; my SIMON & SIMON stories were accounted some of the best in the fandom.... That much said, inside these covers you'll find all my completed GS stories (I'm currently working on another, "Friends in Buckskin," and also one that crosses Matt & Co. with Heyes and Curry of ALIAS SMITH & JONES, so there may well be another volume at some point in future)... Since people often ask a writer "where she gets her ideas," I'll tell you where I got these. "Resignation" came from watching my Columbia tape of "Bloody Hands," which inspired the following jotting on my "Story Ideas" page: "At the close of the episode, we see Matt riding back to Dodge to deal with Joe Stanger. Did Stanger, who accused Matt of losing his nerve, realize his danger? Was Matt forced to kill him? Or, since he'd killed Linda, did a lynch mob get up? (Vide Steve Forrest in "The Long Night": "You can't shoot a woman...'n' she knows it...")" "The End of the Mile" similarly came from watching my tape of the episode it takes off from: I asked myself why Matt sent Festus in to be with Quint, what Festus said to his friend, and how Quint reacted. I also wanted to explore something of that relationship in a way the episode couldn't, to explain what it was all about and why it worked the way it did. "Standoff' grew from a visual image: Chester shackled to the bars of one of the jailhouse cells, as described in the story, with a gun to his head. "Storm From the North" also started from a visual, in this case a Lynd Ward illustration on page 41 of May Y. McNeer's The Canadian Story (if you want to know what Reason looks like, that's where you'll find him), and from Festus's line in "My Brother's Keeper," in which he tells Dr. Chapman, "I talk a little bit of Cree..." "Malt Finds a Deputy" was specifically designed to answer the question of how Chester was lamed and how he and Matt got together. Similarly, "Thad's Reunion" was written as an explanation for the Thad character's sudden disappearance from the series; it takes off from two of his lines in his introductory episode ("They call my brother Clayton Lowell Greenwood..." and "I left my brother back home and he's got a wife and a couple of little kids...," which suggested that he was older; Thad doesn't directly mention a farm , but since Lowell wasn't present when their father died, I figured, where else could he have been? Many townsfolk of that time owned outland as a hedge against business reverses, and in a dying town like Greenwood Flats it seemed especially reasonable that the family would). Like most of my best work, it "told itself'--it was written in less than a week, just working out the next day's happenings in the shower at night or while falling asleep. "After 'The Foundling'" is my take on the situation portrayed in fellow-boardmember Annick's vignette of the same title, according to her invitation to all and sundry to try their hands at it; with me, it turned into a sort of bookend piece with "Resignation."

"Turning Points" got started from two threads on the delphi GS board: "Will the real Kitty please stand up??" and "Was Kitty ever...a lady of the evening?" Several of us offered our takes on the question of Kitty's past experience, especially as related to the Cole Yankton character in "Kitty's Outlaw." Two of them seemed especially plausible to me when combined, and after I'd said so in a post of my own, and sketched how I thought they fit together, I added, "I think I've just talked myself into doing a coda to 'Kitty's Outlaw'...see what you people do to me?!" "Foreshadowings" I wrote after seeing, for the first time in my memory, the 30-minute episode "The Hunter," in which Matt tells Kitty how, three years before, he "was just out from Missouri...[and) kinda green" when he passed through Dodge, ran afoul of some buffalo hunters, and was beaten and "left for dead down by the river." I wondered how his "greenness" could be justified against the many later revelations the series gives about his background (raised in Texas, a cowboy in his youth, close to going outlaw, then a deputy with Adam Kimbro before he was even old enough for the job) or even the fact (established chronologically prior to "The Hunter" 's airing in " Home Surgery") that he had been in the War. I also wanted to explore how he survived the experience. "Corrie" and "Encounter," as mentioned above, were written for the board's ongoing series of story challenges. As for "Masquerade" and "Medicine Man," the Author's Notes will tell you their history.

Issue 2

The Dodge City Chronicle 2

• Author-torial 2
• Medicine Man 3
• Corrie 38
• Storm from the North 119
• After "The Foundling" 178