June 26, 2024: WesternStudying: The Virginian

[75 years ago this week, the first network TV Western, Hopalong Cassidy debuted. Few genres have been influential for longer or across more media, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy Hopalong and other Westerns—add your responses & analyses in the comments, pardner!]

On how a hugely influential novel adheres to the stereotypes and how it defies them.

I’ve blogged about Owen Wister’s bestselling novel The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (1902) on two prior occasions, in this post on Walt Longmire and this one on blue jeans and cowboys. I hope those communicated my sense of the novel’s importance, so check them out if you would and come on back for some further thoughts.

Welcome back! Wister’s novel is generally credited with establishing many of the key elements of the iconic Western hero, and I would agree with that interpretation: the novel’s protagonist is a man with no name (he’s sometimes called “Jeff,” but that seems like a humorous nickname due to famous fellow Southerner Jefferson Davis rather than an actual name) who has a longstanding rivalry with a brutal villain that culminates in a duel where he guns down his rival, after which he wins the hand of his far more innocent love interest (a schoolmarm, no less). If I had to sum up that iconic and influential character and story type, it would be in one quote that would go on to become ubiquitous in the genre: “When you call me that, smile!” The protagonist says that now-famous line to his villainous rival Trampas after he has beaten Trampas at cards and been called “a son of a bitch” in response, and if that doesn’t all sum up the genre of the Western, I’m not sure what does.

As I’ve highlighted before in this space, particularly when it comes to the history of Black cowboys, those iconic images of cowboys aren’t particularly accurate to the historical realities. And interestingly enough, Wister’s cowboy character actually connects to some of those historical realities in ways that have been less well-remembered than the stereotypical details. For example, he not only works as a cowboy at the powerful Judge Henry Garth’s ranch, but performs that work so impressively that he is promoted to ranch foreman. And in that role, he is required to take part in events that reinforce the community’s power structures, such as the hanging of a cattle thief named Steve with whom he had been friends. As I’ll think about a bit more in tomorrow’s post, over time the gunfighter hero would entirely diverge from the working cowboy type, but in Owen Wister’s influential origin story those two roles were strikingly intertwined.

Next Western tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Westerns you’d analyze?