1885 Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902) invented the western, signalling the cowboy as an American hero and establishing patterns of plot and character that would last through the 20th century in film and fiction. Yet for all its mythical dimensions, Wister would always claim that the book was based on first-hand experience, gleaned over a decade of travel in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California, Texas – above all (and repeatedly) Wyoming.
Wister’s journal kept on the first of these excursions, to Wyoming in July and August of 1885, suggests boys camping out and doing a lot of shooting – of grouse, elk, bear, even sheep (wild, presumably). His first account of ranch life, on 4 August 1855, was a one-liner: ‘At a roundup – it’s very interesting, but beastly hot.’ Later he expanded on his reaction. After describing their skill in cutting and bunching the cattle, he had this to say about the cowboys:
They’re a queer episode in the history of this country. Purely nomadic, and leaving no posterity, for they don’t marry. I’m told they’re without any moral sense whatever. Perhaps they are – but I wonder how much less they have than the poor classes in New York.
Perhaps there’s just a hint of the noble savagery to come in that last sentence, but how different this first impression from Wister’s preface to The Virginian, where the typical cowpuncher is courageous, honest, polite and well-spoken to women, ‘the last romantic figure upon our soil’. As for what he portends for the country’s history: ‘He and his brief epoch make a complete picture, for in themselves they were as complete as the pioneers of the land or the explorers of the sea.’
Why the change? Wister was one of those well-born and well-educated easterners for whom vacations in the West were a way of discovering timeless values from which eastern civilisation had slipped. Another was his classmate at Harvard (and dedicatee of The Virginian), Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt, who had his own ranch in North Dakota, authored a series about ranch life in the Century magazine in 1888, in which he promoted the West as a test of American manhood, a rite of passage to full citizenship.
If Wister gave us the fiction of the West, Roosevelt provided its ideology.