Read John Ermine of the Yellowstone Online
Authors: Frederic Remington
John Ermine of the Yellowstone
FREDERIC REMINGTON
Illustrated by Frederic Remington
Introduction by Robert L. Dorman
Introduction and Suggested Reading
© 2010 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.
This 2011 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.
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ISBN: 978-1-4114-3830-9
CONTENTS
III. THE COMING OF THE GREAT SPIRIT
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
“IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BUNCH SAT WEASEL”
“HE CALLED THE BOY TO HIM AND PUT HIS ARM AROUND HIM”
“WILL YOU PLEASE CARRY MY PARASOL FOR ME?”
“HE BORE THE LIMP FORM TO THE SANDS”
“A TREMENDOUS BANG ROARED AROUND THE ROOM”
I
NTRODUCTION
W
ITH
J
OHN
E
RMINE OF THE
Y
ELLOWSTONE
,
FIRST PUBLISHED
IN
1902, artist Frederic Remington captured his vision of the Old West in words rather than paint and bronze. Set against the dramatic backdrop of the Indian wars, it is the tragic story of
a man caught between two racial worlds, the Native American tribe in which he had been raised and the white civilization that he serves in its mission of conquest. Featuring the author’s own
illustrations,
John Ermine
offers a vivid depiction of frontier army life as well as a classic tale of unrequited love. It was the last work of fiction that Remington wrote and remains his
most enduring literary achievement, helping to establish the western as a favorite of modern American readers.
Although he will forever be identified with the American West, Frederic Remington (1861–1909) was born in Canton, New York, near the St. Lawrence River. He attended military schools as a
youth and discovered his artistic talent by sketching soldiers and fellow cadets. From 1878 to 1880, Remington studied art and played football at Yale, but dropped out after the untimely death of
his father, a Civil War veteran whom he revered. In 1881, Remington made the first of his many trips to the West, visiting the site of the recent Battle of the Little Bighorn. He sold his first
western-themed illustration to
Harper’s Weekly
magazine in 1886 and soon became one of the most sought-after illustrators in the country, published regularly in major national
magazines. Remington provided illustrations for his own articles and stories as well as those of leading writers on the West like Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister. He accompanied the army’s
expeditions against Geronimo in 1886 and the Sioux in 1890, and in 1898 he traveled to Cuba to cover the Spanish-American War. Besides producing many acclaimed paintings and sculptures during his
foreshortened career, Remington also published eight books, including the fiction collection
Sundown Leflare
in 1899 and his first novel,
The Way of an Indian
, which was written in
1900 but did not appear until 1905. In 1902, Remington wrote and published
John Ermine of the Yellowstone
in three furious months as a rejoinder to Owen Wister’s best-selling western
The Virginian
(1902), which he considered to be too romantic and unrealistic. Afterwards, Remington abandoned fiction writing to focus on painting and sculpting until his death from
appendicitis in 1909. His portrayal of the West has influenced artists, writers, and filmmakers down to the present.
What annoyed Remington most about Wister’s
The Virginian
was its happy ending. His own vision of the West was essentially tragic. All of the heroic types that the frontier had
created, and which Remington sought to immortalize in oils and bronze—the cowboy, the cavalry soldier, the Indian brave—were fleeting, he believed, soon to be civilized out of
existence. In
The Virginian
, the title character is a drawling Southerner who is a natural aristocrat, a born leader of men despite his humble origins. But his superiority in the frontier
Wyoming setting, governed by the rugged code of the West, is challenged by the arrival of the genteel New England schoolmarm, who represents the advent of modern civilization. In the end, the two
are married, and the implication is that the Virginian will adapt and prosper in the post-frontier world of railroads, commerce, and manners. This reading somewhat oversimplified Wister’s
plot, but it was Remington’s reading. He rejected the possibility that the frontiersman could exist outside the ephemeral circumstances of frontier freedom and lawlessness. He must ride into
the sunset and perish.
To make this argument in
John Ermine
, Remington chose to inject
race
into the scenario, ostensibly an absolute category in the minds of turn-of-the-last-century Americans. If put
into racial terms, the transition from frontier to civilization would seem to be unbridgeable. His novel’s hero, John Ermine, is a young white man who was raised by Crow (Apsáalooke)
Indians under the name of White Weasel and sees himself fully as Native American—“my Indian heart,” as Ermine refers to himself. After being apprenticed to an oracular white
recluse named Crooked-Bear, who teaches him the basics of European-American culture including English, Ermine volunteers to serve as a scout for the U.S. Army. He functions well in the setting of
the army camp, displaying his own natural superiority, until the arrival of the commander’s daughter, Katherine Searles. His efforts to woo her end not in marriage but in tragedy. The Native
American world that produced formidable hunter-warriors like John Ermine, Remington insists, must vanish in a West made safe for the commander’s daughter. Realistically, men like Ermine were
too hardened, fierce, and violent to live among decent people. Wister’s Virginian—who lynched his best friend and later killed his nemesis in a gunfight on his wedding day—was no
different.
Remington’s racial views were not very logical, as they rarely are, but they were typical of the era. John Ermine was Caucasian, yet he was brought up as a Crow. What was he? It was the
perennial “nature versus nurture” debate: is the self fixed and innate, or is it the product of its environment? To this day, Americans continue to struggle with the issue of racial
identity, and in more recent decades some classic works of western fiction and film have explored the theme with regard to white captives or adoptees of Native Americans, including director John
Ford’s masterpiece
The Searchers
(1956) and novelist Thomas Berger’s
Little Big Man
(1964). In his own novel, Remington at first emphasized the captive Ermine’s
whiteness: “He was born white, but he had a Crow heart, so the tribesmen persuaded themselves. They did not understand the laws of heredity.” Remington also seemed to imply that
Ermine’s white, northern European racial makeup accounted for his superiority over his fellow Crows, which would have been in accord with the mainstream belief in a hierarchy of races with
whites at the top. The social science of the time saw this hierarchy as the product of evolution; races in the upper ranks were more advanced than the primitives at the lower levels. However, those
primitive or “savage” races, like Native Americans, were in the present-day much like white Europeans must have been in ancient times, as anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan argued in his
influential book
Ancient Society
(1877). Yet some believed, as did Remington, that there remained a latent racial essence that linked white Anglo-Saxons (particularly males) back to their
savage forbearers. Under the right circumstances, such as an encounter with primitives or primitive conditions, this deeper racial nature—hardy, lusty, warlike—could be released.
“The slumbering untamed Saxon awoke in him”—so it was described in Wister’s landmark 1895 article, “The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher,” partly ghost-written by
Remington during their previous years of collaboration.
1
To Remington’s mind, Wister betrayed this atavistic racial ideal when his
Virginian married the schoolmarm and became a pillar of the community. He would have none of that for John Ermine. Despite the fact that “all the race had evolved” and an
“interval of many centuries intervened between him and his fellows,” Ermine still displayed the “qualities of mind which distinguished his remote ancestors of the north of
Europe” even after living among civilized whites at the army camp.
Wister actually was closer to popular attitudes regarding the experience of the primitive, as the booming sales of his novel revealed. Indeed, when
John Ermine
was adapted to the stage in
1903, it was refitted with a happier ending. (Remington privately fumed about this, but the play closed after a short run in any event; a 1917 silent movie version had yet another alternate
ending.) Americans wanted to believe that one could descend to the level of the savage, release one’s blood thirst and urge for conquest, then return to civilization and resume normal life.
The experience was thought to be rejuvenating, for the individual and the race as a whole, and in American literature the theme already enjoyed a tradition reaching back to James Fenimore
Cooper’s
Leatherstocking Tales
of the 1820s. This paradoxical desire to domesticate the primitive grew in significance as the daily lives of middle-class Americans became more
urbanized and bureaucratized by the turn of the century. It was expressed in diverse ways, from the increasing popularity of hunting, camping, and other forms of outdoor recreation, to President
Roosevelt’s call to pursue the “strenuous life,” including imperial adventures abroad. The budding wilderness preservation movement, led by John Muir, owed something to it, as did
the creation of such youth organizations as the Woodcraft Indians (1902) and the Boy Scouts of America (1910). Better yet, the primitive could also be experienced vicariously, by consumerism.
Middle-class shoppers could adorn their homes with authentic Native American crafts purchased at big city department stores, which became all the rage by the late 1890s. And they made best sellers
of later novels in the vein of
John Ermine
, including Jack London’s
The Call of the Wild
(1903) and Edgar Rice Burroughs’
Tarzan of the Apes
(1914).