SIX MONTHS LATER OWEN WISTER DEDICATED A NOVEL TO Roosevelt. “Some of these pages you have seen, some you have praised, one stands new-written because you blamed it,” Wister wrote. “And all, my dear critic, beg leave to remind you of their author’s changeless admiration.”
Wister was an Easterner by birth, like Roosevelt; a Harvard man, like Roosevelt, whom he had met there; and a visitor to the West who, like Roosevelt, had become enchanted by the land and its inhabitants. The novel was The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains; its title character was the archetype of what Roosevelt and Wister—and much of America by this time—imagined the Western cowboy to be: the strong, silent, brave, honest knight of the frontier. Wister’s narrator encounters the Virginian, who goes by no other name, on arrival in Medicine Bow, Wyoming. “Lounging there at ease against the wall was a slim young giant, more beautiful than pictures. His broad, soft hat was pushed back; a loose-knotted, dull-scarlet handkerchief sagged from his throat; and one casual thumb was hooked in the cartridge-belt that slanted across his hips. He had plainly come many miles from somewhere across the vast horizon, as the dust upon him showed. His boots were white with it. His overalls were gray with it. The weather-beaten bloom of his face shone through it duskily, as the ripe peaches look upon their trees in a dry season. But no dinginess of travel or shabbiness of attire could tarnish the splendor that radiated from his youth and strength.”
Wister wrote of things he had personally seen and experienced, yet he realized that what he described was now history. “Any narrative which presents faithfully a day and a generation is of necessity historical; and this one presents Wyoming between 1874 and 1890,” he explained in the preface. “Had you left New York or San Francisco at ten o’clock this morning, by noon the day after tomorrow you could step out at Cheyenne. There you would stand at the heart of the world that is the subject of my picture, yet you would look around you in vain for the reality. It is a vanished world. No journeys, save those which memory can take, will bring it to you now. The mountains are there, far and shining, and the sunlight, and the infinite earth, and the air that seems forever the true fountain of youth—but where is the buffalo, and the wild antelope, and where the horseman with his pasturing thousands? So like its old self does the sage-brush seem when revisited, that you wait for the horseman to appear. But he will never come again. He rides in the historic yesterday.”
Wister had composed the novel in stages; chapters had been published in magazines as he wrote. There he had employed the present tense. He could do so no longer. “Verbs like ‘is’ and ‘have’ now read ‘was’ and ‘had,’” he explained. “Time has flowed faster than my ink.”
Where had it gone? “What is become of the horseman, the cowpuncher, the last romantic figure upon our soil? For he was romantic. Whatever he did, he did with his might. The bread that he earned was earned hard, the wages he squandered were squandered hard—half a year’s pay sometimes gone in a night—‘blown in,’ as he expressed it, or ‘blowed in,’ to be perfectly accurate.” Wister suggested—hoped, anyway—that the type lived on in the American soul. “He will be here among us always, invisible, waiting his chance to live and play as he would like. His wild kind has been among us always, since the beginning: a young man with his temptations, a hero without wings.”
COWBOYS AND THE WEST HAD PREVIOUSLY BEEN SUBJECTS for pulp fiction; The Virginian was the first Western novel that could have been called literature. It was an instant hit, running through many printings, and in due course it inspired multiple film adaptations.
Andy Adams’s The Log of a Cowboy, which appeared a year after Wister’s book, tapped into the same nostalgia for life on the range. Subtitled “A Narrative of the Old Trail Days,” the novel was easily mistaken for a memoir. It was based on Adams’s experience driving cattle on the Western Trail from Texas to Montana, and it was dedicated to “the Cowmen and boys” of that earlier time.
Adams’s account is straightforward and stoic—like the model cowboy—but at the end he allows his narrator a moment of wistfulness. The crew is about to deliver the herd to its Montana destination. “Another day’s easy travel brought us to within a mile of the railroad terminus; but it also brought us to one of the hardest experiences of our trip, for each of us knew, as we unsaddled our horses, that we were doing it for the last time. Although we were in the best of spirits over the successful conclusion of the drive; although we were glad to be free from herd duty and looked forward eagerly to the journey home”—by train—“there was still a feeling of regret in our hearts which we could not dispel. In the days of my boyhood I have shed tears when a favorite horse was sold from our little ranch on the San Antonio, and have frequently witnessed Mexican children unable to hide their grief when need of bread had compelled the sale of some favorite horse to a passing drover. But at no time in my life, before or since, have I felt so keenly the parting between man and horse as I did that September evening in Montana.”
Adams understood that the horse was what made the cowboy, and gave the cowboy much of his appeal. This parting between cowboy and horse signaled the end of an era. Adams’s narrator closes by speaking as if from years later, and as if speaking for all the cowboys on that drive, or any other, about their horses. “Their bones may be bleaching in some coulee by now,” he says of the horses, “but the men who knew them then can never forget them or the part they played in that long drive.”
FREDERIC REMINGTON LIKEWISE RODE THE WAVE OF NOSTALGIA for a vanishing West. Remington was another Ivy Leaguer, from Yale, and he first made a splash as an illustrator for Harper’s Weekly, covering the army’s chase for Geronimo. His black-and-white images for publication gave way to watercolors and oils, and finally to sculpture. His subjects were cowboys and Indians and soldiers, typically on horseback; his work conveyed the drama of life on the last frontier. He connected with Roosevelt when The Century Magazine hired him to illustrate a serialized version of a book Roosevelt was writing on life in the West. The two became friends, sharing their fascination with the West and each admiring in the other what he couldn’t see in himself: Roosevelt the artistry of Remington, Remington the energy of Roosevelt.
Remington covered the Spanish-American War; his Charge of the Rough Riders at San Juan Hill captured Roosevelt in full gallop as his regiment stormed the heights. At war’s end the Rough Riders pooled resources to purchase a copy of Remington’s bronze sculpture The Broncho Buster for their valiant leader. Roosevelt was deeply moved. “No gift could have been so appropriate,” he told the men. “It comes from you who shared the hardships of the campaign with me, who gave me a piece of your hardtack when I had none, and who shared with me your blankets when I had none to lie upon.” He paused. “This is something I shall hand down to my children, and I shall value it more than I do the weapons I carried through the campaign.” For Roosevelt, this was saying a lot.
Americans at large appreciated Remington’s work almost as much as Roosevelt did. His work was in constant demand by magazine publishers and the general public; Harper’s called him the busiest artist in America. He preferred painting soldiers but realized the money was in cowboys. “Cowboys are cash with me,” he said.