All Hat, No Cattle

by Russell Rowland

The Bucker, by C.M. Russell (via)

From the time that the American West was ‘settled,’ the events of that pioneering time have often been elevated to a form of romantic heroism seldom seen in world literature. Even the outlaws of the West became big, bold figures who bravely faced down adversity to accomplish feats noble and enviable.

The Western identity has been suffering from this misguided attempt at revisionist history ever since. Rather than telling the story of the West in a way that was authentic and accurate, writers often surrendered to the stereotypes that were born in those early days. And sadly, these stereotypes continue to be swallowed whole and regurgitated by writers and artists and moviemakers who have never even been out West, much less immersed themselves in its culture.

As a result, the past century and a half of Western literature has been shaped by two competing movements. The first is easy to identify. Ever since 1902, when Owen Wister, an Eastern aristocrat, published The Virginian, the ‘Western’ has been a staple of American culture. And although there have been notable Western writers who were true westerners, much of the accepted formula was determined by works such as The Virginian, written by outsiders who were familiar only with the most romantic notions of the West. Wister was a graduate of Harvard Law, where he became friends with Teddy Roosevelt. Much like Roosevelt, Wister spent several summers in the West as a young man, although there is no evidence that he worked the land or lived as a Westerner, as Roosevelt did. So he was basically a tourist, and like most tourists, he got a chance to see the West at its best. It’s not hard to imagine how this informed his writing, as well as his take on Western culture.

Owen Wister (via)

Young Teddy Roosevelt (via)

But although Wister was a former banker and a lawyer, he was also an accomplished writer. And he was smart enough to know that the best way to appeal to his readers was to have his title character be a common man with uncommon skills. In the opening scene, the narrator watches from a train as a bunch of cowboys helplessly try to catch a wild horse. After watching this mayhem for a while, one of the cowboys  “climbs down from the fence, with the undulations of a tiger, smooth and easy as if his muscles flowed beneath his skin.” Moments after he enters the corral, “like a sudden snake, I saw the noose go out its length and fall true; and the thing was done.”  This is our introduction to the Virginian, and as the book progresses and he continues to perform such feats, with that same cool demeanor, it’s not hard to imagine how this book planted the seed for the careers of John Wayne, or Clint Eastwood. Wister also had a real gift for turning a phrase, and it didn’t take long for The Virginian to become one of the most popular novels of its time.

And the Western was born. As were many of the characteristics of what soon became a staple of twentieth century culture. Stories of a lone figure with a mysterious past, coming up against forces seemingly greater than any man could overcome, became the norm for the Western. And of course a sweet gal didn’t hurt, and a loyal horse. A shootout was always good. And absolutely vital were villains who interfered with all things pure—yes, the bad guys.

Which leads to the second aspect in the development of the Western. There’s no question that the Western would not have become what it was without the ultimate enemy of the settlers—those dastardly Indians. But that aspect of the Western identity required some serious revision. It could be said that the first examples of fiction from the West were the ‘true’ accounts of what happened out here.

It’s not hard to imagine how this revision took shape. While the government quietly plotted their strategy of forcing the Indians to leave the land they’d occupied for centuries, they told the public that the Indians had readily agreed to these arrangements. What they didn’t tell them was how they manipulated these agreements with the use of starvation, disease (often spread purposely, such as the infamous small pox-infested blankets), or forced separation from their families and their homes. They often moved the men of a tribe to one desolate area and the women and children to a completely different desolate area so that neither group had enough food, and of course they also didn’t have each other. So when the settlers of the West came across a bunch of pissed-off Indians, they were confused. Didn’t they agree to this deal? Didn’t we adequately compensate them with food and land and supplies? They must be crazy!

The government didn’t need a conspiracy to turn people against the Indians. They just took their land away and slaughtered those who wouldn’t agree to their terms, and the natural reaction from the Indians took care of the rest. Thus a wholesale genocide was swept under the rug and a whole race of people was marginalized in just a matter of years. It would be interesting to know how many residents of the West know that hundreds of thousands of Indians were murdered during this time, and that several tribes, each with their own unique culture, were completely annihilated.

So the formula for the Western was established, and it worked quite nicely for decades. The movie industry picked up on it, and John Ford and William Wyler made film after film (many of them very good) where men fought against the elements and the Indians (usually played by white actors) to create a life for themselves in the wild, lawless West. Those who argued the veracity of these stories were ignored, and the Indian perspective was very skillfully extracted from the American culture. While we bought their charming turquoise jewelry, beaded necklaces and woven rugs, we made absolutely certain that they weren’t heard. America didn’t just steal the land and the dignity of these people. For decades, we also stole their stories, their voices.




At Fort Laramie (via)

Thankfully, from the beginning, there was another slow, quiet movement underway in the development of literature from the West. It took longer to emerge because it was never as profitable as the prototypical Western. But from those early days of the ‘settlement’ of the West, a few dedicated people were making an effort to tell the real story.

Many of the best literature from those early days came in the form of memoir, although some of the best of these works didn’t find their way to publication until years, sometimes decades, later. Stories like Letters from a Woman Homesteader (1919), by Elinor Pruett Stewart, revealed more of the harsh realities of life on the frontier, especially for those in the majority, those whose life out West didn’t go as planned. Pruett came West as a young wife and mother, but her husband died soon after they arrived. Pruett’s frank account of her ordeal is a good example of how the best of these early accounts didn’t turn their stories into romantic adventures. She talks honestly about how frightening and lonely life was in those early days.

Another seminal account of early life in the West was We Pointed Them North, by E.C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott, a cowpuncher who speaks frankly about his fear of carrying a gun, his affection for the Indians (he, like many cowboys from that time, married an Indian woman), and the proliferation of gambling and prostitution that was a part of life in the Old West.

Eventually, this kind of honesty found its way into the fiction. And interestingly enough, in both the better memoirs and the more authentic fiction, it was often the women who were brave enough to take these risks. It makes you wonder whether the pressure to be ‘Western’ was felt less by the women, especially those who were simply writing for the sake of writing. Mari Sandoz published Old Jules and introduced readers to one of the more unlikeable characters in Western literature. But it was based on her father, a man who struggled to survive in the best way he knew how. He was a jerk, but the way she told the story helped us understand why he acted the way he did.

The first writer from the West to earn a Pulitzer Prize was Willa Cather, whose brilliant novels about people in the Nebraska farmland made no effort to hide the painful realities of life on the land, or the effect on its people. She wrote openly of alcoholism, suicide, rape, physical abuse and psychological struggles, especially the effects of loneliness on a person’s psyche.

Willa Cather (via)

Cather’s masterpiece, My Antonia, is the story of a young boy who grows up on a Nebraska farm, and in this novel Cather captured the complicated relationship between farmers and the land, and with each other, in prose that was spare but extremely powerful. Her quiet writing style hurt her late in her career when people began to dismiss her as sentimental and nostalgic. But there’s little argument that Cather broke new ground in the effort to explore what it was really like to live in the West. And thankfully, her reputation has returned to its rightful place over time. Her work is frequently cited by writers of all genres as among the best of her generation.

Once Cather established that it was okay to tell the truth, others followed suit, and the publishing world (often reluctantly) began to feature Western writers that were telling much more realistic stories about life in the West.

But there was a resistance to this approach from the beginning, as if anything that contradicted those early myths—anything that wasn’t romantic and noble—was not going to appeal to the reading public. This put Western writers in a strange predicament. If a writer decided they wanted to portray elements of the West that were unexplored—the underbelly—they were discouraged by publishers or marginalized by reviewers. Meanwhile, writers of genre fiction have always struggled to be taken seriously by the literary elite. It seemed that Western writers couldn’t win.

In due course, some of the better writers managed to get their work out there thanks to the undeniable quality. But even then, acclaim was hard to come by. The best example is Wallace Stegner’s classic novel Angle of Repose. When this novel was released in 1972, the New York Times decided it wasn’t worthy of a review, despite the fact that Stegner was already a well-established novelist. The Times must have been very surprised when Angle of Repose won that year’s Pulitzer Prize. They then reconsidered their decision not to review the book, although as if to justify their initial decision, the review was not glowing.

This challenge to be taken seriously has diminished, but it has never left. Larry McMurtry, a student of Stegner’s esteemed creative writing program at Stanford, also won a Pulitzer for his sweeping novel Lonesome Dove (which was loosely based on We Pointed Them North). McMurtry has shown an admirable versatility over a very long career, with novels as varied as The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment, and has won an Oscar (for his adaptation of Annie Proulx’s story “Brokeback Mountain”), but you seldom hear him mentioned among the best American novelists.

So what is it about this stereotypical Western identity that creates such contrasting reactions of intrigue and dismissiveness? What is so intriguing about the mythical version of life in the West that people seem unwilling to let go? What is it that this image of the West provides?

“Independence, adventure, the opportunity to reinvent yourself, to hide from your past, and the chance to explore nature—all of these are aspects of the Western identity that appeal to people everywhere. The idea that there’s still a place to reinvent yourself—an option if things fall apart where they are."

The answers to these questions may lie in the themes that are so consistently present in the original westerns. Independence, adventure, the opportunity to reinvent yourself, to hide from your past, and the chance to explore nature—all of these are aspects of the Western identity that appeal to people everywhere. The idea that there’s still a place to reinvent yourself—an option if things fall apart where they are. The choice of going somewhere and keeping your past a mystery, taking on a different name, or no name at all, like The Virginian, appeals to peoples’ desire for escape.

But there will always be artists who insist on the truth, and insist on pulling their readers away from escape. And thankfully, there will always be readers who seek that kind of truth.

Perhaps one way to look at the history of Western literature is to compare it to an ever-changing musical program. In the beginning, while they allowed a few women to come up on stage and warble a few tunes, the featured players were akin to a barbershop quartet—a bunch of (white) guys dressed in costumes, singing songs that sounded good but had little substance—pure entertainment. While the audience clapped politely for the warm-up acts, the most boisterous applause was reserved for these featured performers, the guys who brought a smile to everyone’s face.

But gradually, it became hard to ignore the fact that some of these women could really sing, that they weren’t just doing this as a way to keep themselves entertained when they weren’t breaking their backs working. The men were forced to make room on the stage. When Willa Cather broke through and joined the chorus, the music became more complex, more nuanced. There was dissonance, dramatic tension, and even dark passages.

And the choir grew, adding more altos, sopranos, and an occasional minority voice. Native Americans were invited to raise their songs again after being muted for decades. N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, and Louise Erdrich (for my money, the most consistently excellent novelist in America today) not only broke down the barrier, but did it with a mastery of their craft that catapulted them way past being considered ‘Native American’ novelties, but first-rate novelists, period.

And the stage became broader yet. Minorities that hadn’t even been acknowledged as part of Western history found a place in the chorus. The Japanese wrote about their internment, the Latinos about their role in Western agriculture, the stories of the Buffalo soldiers and black cowboys emerged. The Chinese miners and railroad workers. Even the stories of white Westerners became less homogenized, with an honest exploration of prejudice against the Irish (especially in the mines), the Germans, the Russians. Soon, those who suffered religious persecution stepped forward, and we heard stories from the Mormons, the Hutterites, the Catholics, and the Jews.

Finally, it has become an opera, with elaborate costumes, full orchestra, a chorus of color and language, ethnic foods and dance, mail order brides and…gasp…homosexuals!

What seems to be happening is what ideally happens everywhere. While the West retains its unique qualities, the cultural elite seems to be making the transition toward seeing Western artists as simply artists rather than regional artists. But in order to complete this transformation, it’s important that we in the West continue to make changes of our own. It does Westerners no good to look for blame for the way we’ve been portrayed all these years. It’s tempting to single out those who continue to perpetuate these myths for their own profit, to chastise them for pushing our identity backwards just when it’s gaining some forward motion. But it’s more useful to focus on what we can do to keep up this momentum going.

Until we invite all voices into the chorus, without compunction, there will always be an element of the West that feels inauthentic, concocted. And as long as we continue to mythologize those who were responsible for the atrocities that happened here, it will be hard to take our apologies seriously. Imagine if the people of Germany had cities named for Himmler, lakes honoring Goerring, statues of Hitler. In the West, we think nothing of having Custer County in Montana, or Sheridan, Wyoming, named for one of the men most responsible for breaking every treaty we signed with the native tribes.

More than anything we have a responsibility to tell the truth. And to support the artists that are making an effort to depict the West as accurately as possible. That is our job, and thankfully artists all over the West are committed to that end.

 Russell Rowland, who has an MA in Creative Writing from Boston University, has published two novels, In Open Spaces, which made the San Francisco Chronicle's bestseller list and was named among the Best of the West by the Salt Lake City Tribune. The New York Times called it a novel of “muted elegance.” Its sequel, The Watershed Years, was a finalist for the High Plains Book Award. Rowland also co-edited, with Lynn Stegner, the recent anthology West of 98: Living and Writing the New American West, a collection of essays and poetry from writers in every state West of the Mississippi exploring what it means to be westerner in today's society. Rowland's unpublished novel, High and Inside, was recently named a finalist for the Dzanc Mid-Career Novel Award, and “All Hat, No Cattle” is part of a collection of essays he's writing about the West and Western literature. He is looking for a publisher for this collection as well.

 

Buy In Open Spaces at IndieBound or at Amazon

 

Buy The Watershed Years at IndieBound or at Amazon

 

Buy West of 98 at IndieBound or at Amazon