1891 Great literature or not, Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902) is generally credited as the story that gave the movies their idea of the western – its protagonist, the soft-spoken cowboy who brings law and order to an American frontier town, the model for that universal hero played by Gregory Peck, James Stewart, Alan Ladd, Henry Fonda, Clint Eastwood and many others.
What’s less known is that Wister may also have given Hollywood the idea for the typical frontier town – that dusty jumble of board fronts (and boardwalks) meandering between one or two more substantial stone or brick buildings like a bank.
On his visit to Wyoming and Yellowstone Park in the summer of 1891 – the journey that decided him to write about the West – he described the town of Douglas, Wyoming. And since his journal is so often fresher, more direct and less studied than The Virginian, it’s worth quoting from the relevant entry, for 11 June:
The Town …is a hasty litter of flat board houses standing at all angles, with the unreal look of stage scenery. … On a bottom bench of sand and sage above the town, a large brick schoolhouse that will mostly be empty as long as it lasts … The town reminds you of a card town, so aimless and insubstantial it seems … There are no mines here. Farming is impossible. … There was absolutely nothing that could possibly make Douglas a real place.
Wister got it right: the town is now all but abandoned. Once the terminus of a railroad, Douglas stands ‘like a pillar of salt’, now that the terminus has moved 50 miles west. But following the strange logic of the western, Hollywood replicates the town’s physical appearance while repopulating it with children, schoolmarms, sheriffs, easy women and bartenders – without ever hinting at the economic underpinning of all this activity. It’s not mining. It’s not farming. It’s not even ranching, since not a blade of grass grows in the desert roundabout for the cattle to nibble on.