Essays From West of 98: American Idol

It’s high noon in the frontier town. A tall, handsome hero strides into the dusty street where his outlaw nemesis awaits. The two men draw. The outlaw is fast but the hero is faster. His aim is straight and true. The outlaws falls to the ground. The townspeople celebrate, but the humble hero needs no acclaim. He rides into the sunset accompanied by a beautiful woman that he loves.

It is a familiar scene with countless variations on screen and in the printed word. They call it the “Western.” Over the decades, it has brought fortune and fame to many: Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, Tom Mix, Randolph Scott, John Ford, John Wayne, Howard Hawks, Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood, and many others owe much of their fame to the Western. Ostensibly, the Western tells the tale of the American West: the hardships of the frontier, settlement of new towns, and “good” triumphing over both wilderness and evil.

But was it real?

Several essays back, I wrote of Teddy Blue Abbott’s famous cowboy memoir “We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher.” Abbott wrote a rare first-person account of the cattle drive era and the fun, hardships, hard work, and general mundanity that he and other cowboys experienced. It was a striking contrast to much Western literature that predated Abbott’s memoir that was published in 1939. Prior to that date, the Western canon had some shreds of reality but a whole lot of pulp fiction that bordered on outright fantasy.

The golden era of the cattle drive lasted only a few years, but it has spawned over 150 years of stories that continue even today. It is a fascinating phenomenon that began with aspiring writers and looking-for-a-quick-buck types who filled Eastern magazines and dime store novels with wild frontier tales. These stories entertained post-Civil War audiences in grimy, booming cities who were fascinated by the land of opportunity and adventure that seemed to abound “out West.”

Then along came Owen Wister.

Wister was a well-heeled Philadelphia gentleman who became lifelong friends at Harvard with another Easterner from a wealthy family, a New Yorker named Theodore Roosevelt. Wister, like many others, had been captivated by Roosevelt’s brief-but-legendary time as a rancher in the Dakota Territory, and the stories that Roosevelt published in dozens of magazine articles and several books. Roosevelt suggested that Wister start writing tales of western cowboy life and they were picked up by the popular Harper’s Weekly magazine. A few stories were even illustrated by Roosevelt’s friend Frederic Remington (yes, that Frederic Remington).

In 1902, Wister published a full-length novel called “The Virginian” and its dedication page gave effusive praise to Theodore Roosevelt himself. Set in Wyoming in the 1880s, it tells the tale of a cowboy hero whose name is never mentioned. The hero is tall, dark, and handsome. He faces down outlaws and he gets the girl. It is an enjoyable read, but if you have read many Westerns, it is nothing you have not read before.

And yet, those other Westerns exist BECAUSE of Wister’s novel. It became a best-selling sensation and is considered the first modern Western novel. It was adapted to film five different times and loosely adapted into a popular television series. Grey, L’Amour, and all the others picked up their story formula from Wister’s novel. The hero’s gunfight with outlaw Trampas was the first known “showdown” in cowboy fiction.

I love Westerns. Just ask my teachers who objected to me reading Louis L’Amour novels in class. But I have a lot on my mind about the Western, the cowboy ideal, and the Western’s influence, good and bad, on the concept of community. Is the cowboy hero a goal to which we should aspire? Or is he an idol that we worship to the detriment of our people, our community, and our own mental health? And is that partially Theodore Roosevelt’s fault?

Stay tuned in the weeks to come. Because I find this topic to be critically important to my own understanding of rural America and to its past, present, and future.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and podcast. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to West of 98 wherever podcasts are found.