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Simmering Sands. The Simmering Sands were created by Harold de Polo (Ollie Bascomb, Whitcher Bemis, Chan Buzzell, Inspector Frayne) and appeared in eight stories in Western Story Magazine from 1921 to 1930, beginning with “Nobility at Simmering Sands” (Western Story Magazine, Mar. 5, 1921).

The Simmering Sands is a remote town in the American southwest. It was named by a “whimsically ironic prospector” and is an unhealthy place: “the sun, directly overhead, looked like a gigantic orange ready to burst into flames; the sands under it, on which the buildings of the hustling mining town had been spread, seemed as if some consuming furnace beneath them must eventually break through and burn the wooden structures to ashes.” Despite all this, the town is full of characters, like the “irrepressible” harmonica player Ah Wong and the laconic prospectors “Hardpan” Nichols” and “Rainbow” Morrison. But the town has a problem with crooked gamblers, requiring the wandering cowboy Aloysius Boggs to come to town in disguise to deal with them.

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