From the shelves of the Paco library

Owen Wister’s novel, The Virginian, was first published in 1902. It is generally considered the first serious novel about the Old West, and is still, in my opinion, one of the best. It contains showdowns and other scenes of violence – including a shoot-out and an “extrajudicial” execution – but is most interesting as an exploration of cowboy psychology. The hero – who is referred to throughout most of the work simply as “the Virginian – is a strong, reticent, self-sufficient man, confident in his competence as foreman of the Shiloh ranch in Wyoming, but possessing depths of feeling and compassion that, although not worn on his shirtsleeve, nonetheless manifest themselves in the consistency, fairness and courage of his actions.

The book includes many themes, and even some expressions (“When you say that, smile”) that ultimately became clichés in both the literary and movie renditions of the western frontier; however, one encounters them here, not as tropes, but in the freshness of their original appearance: the strong, silent and lonely cowboy; the schoolmarm from back east who struggles to adjust to the vast emptiness of the plains and their sturdy, sometimes frightening, inhabitants; the thwarted bad man, whose heart smolders with the desire for vengeance; the good man gone bad, whose friendship with the hero is trumped by the necessities of justice. As with many westerns, the stark and unforgiving land, to which men have come to carve out a life at the edge of civilization, creates an environment in which moral choices are few and simple – often terrifyingly so.

The author wrote from personal knowledge of the terrain and the cowpunchers who have come to symbolize the romance of the American frontier, having spent summers in Wyoming in the 1880s and ‘90’s. It was a fascinating, but fleeting, world, as Wister notes in his introduction:

Any narrative which presents faithfully a day and a generation is of necessity historical; and this one presents Wyoming between 1874 and 1890. 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 you to it 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 his historic yesterday. You will no more see him gallop out of the unchanging silence than you will see Columbus on the unchanging sea come sailing in from Palos with his caravels.

But the spirit that gave rise to the wild life of the cowboy is never completely absent:

[H]e 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.

As the saying goes, the Virginian was a man to ride the river with, and this novel makes the trip amply worthwhile.