504 Making It New: 1900–1945more than a hundred “Buffalo Bill” novels, nine of them written in 1892 alone. This
tidal wave of fiction, working together with Buffalo Bill’s own immensely popular
Wild West Show, helped confirm the formulaic character of the Western and a
dominant literary identity for the West and the Western hero – the one a place of
sublime landscapes and splendid adventure, the other a splendid adventurer. And, in
the first half of the twentieth century, three novels in particular were to underwrite
the romance of the West, and, in the process, acquire enormous popularity. They
were The Virginian (1902) by Owen Wister (1860–1938), Riders of the Purple Sage
(1912) by Zane Grey (1872–1939), and Shane (1949) by Jack Schaefer (1907–1999).
Owen Wister, who was born in Pennsylvania, wrote The Virginian after he had
traveled to Wyoming to improve his health. This rejuvenating experience encouraged
him to construct a moral geography in which the East represented custom and
culture and the West energy and individualism. Wister, himself a member of the
Eastern elite, was torn between these opposites – which clearly mirrored the opposing
elements in the historical American dialectic of wilderness and civilization. And in
his portrait of the Virginian, he created a synthesis: to illustrate the claim made in
the novel that “the creature we call a gentleman lies deep in the hearts of thousands
that are born without chance to master the outward graces of the type.” The mythic
status of the Virginian is emphasized by the fact that he is given no name: he is
purely and simply, as the subtitle puts it, “a horseman of the plains.” Although
nominally a cowboy, he is rarely seen doing cowboy work. The narrative revolves
around incidents intended to prove his courage and nobility, and a romantic plot in
which his innate gentility enables him to woo and win a young, cultured schoolteacher
from Vermont. The narrator, who arrives from the East in the opening chapter,
supplies a suitably heroic perspective as he records, in awe and wonder, the epic
stature and skills of this man who is at once a rugged individualist and a perfect
gentle knight. And, in the closing sequence, this hero of the West is also seen to be a
hero of America. “With a strong grip on many enterprises,” he marries the
schoolteacher and becomes an entrepreneur, so contributing his vitality, energy, and
natural morality to the onward march of progress. “If this book be anything more
than an American story,” Wister declared in the preface, “it is an expression of
American faith.” It was an expression of faith that touched many readers. It sold
more than fifty thousand copes in just two months and helped determine the
character of the mainstream Western hero as a romantic individualist, and of the
mainstream Western story as an epic of freedom, progress, and Manifest Destiny.
A more prolific writer than Wister, Zane Grey also grew up in comfortable
circumstances in the East and became an enthusiast of the West after a restorative
trip there, to the Grand Canyon. In his fiction, the Western wilderness becomes a
force that leads to redemption. The typical plot involves a jaded and perhaps frail
member of Eastern society traveling westward and there experiencing renewal. He is
revitalized and reoriented toward a new set of values that bear a close resemblance
to social Darwinism, the ethic of the survival of the fittest. So, in Riders of the Purple
Sage, which rivals The Virginian for popularity among classic Westerns, the man
whom the wilderness makes strong and independent is Bern Venters. Many thingsGGray_c04.indd 504ray_c 04 .indd 504 8 8/1/2011 7:54:06 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 06 AM