Owen Wister’s
Virginian
and the Modern Western
On June 30, 1885, a well-to-do twenty-four-year-old Philadelphia banker set forth on a long train journey bound for Wyoming. Though he surely didn’t know it at the time, this trip, which took him to a ranch in the mountains north of Laramie on the day after July 4, changed Owen Wister’s life. He became fascinated by the West and its people and, in time, made several more trips, not only to Wyoming, but to Arizona, California, Washington, and other parts of the West. These experiences inspired him to write a variety of stories and sketches about the region. Finally, in 1902, he published a novel that would become one of the first great best-sellers and play a major role in redefining the myth of the West for the twentieth century.
The Virginian
apotheosized the cowboy as the American hero. Highly successful as a book, Wister’s story was quickly adapted to the stage and then to film. It was, more than any other work, the prototype of the modern western.
In retrospect, Wister seems the least likely person to become the creator of an archetypal western novel, for he was an eastern aristocrat of distinguished lineage. His father was a noted Philadelphia doctor and his mother, Sarah Butler Wister, was one of the most highly cultivated women of her generation—a friend of many writers, artists, and intellectuals. Henry James found her one of the most fascinating women he had ever met.
Wister’s maternal grandparents were one of the nineteenth century’s most remarkable couples. His grandfather, Pierce Butler, was a wealthy Philadelphian who, with the inheritance of a Georgia plantation from his grandfather, became one of the largest slave-holders in the country and a southern sympathizer. When the Civil War broke out he was even briefly arrested for treason. The Butler family may well have been one of the inspirations for Margaret Mitchell’s famous character Rhett Butler in
Gone with the Wind.
Wister’s grandmother, Fanny Kemble, was a famous English actress, with whom Pierce Butler had fallen madly in love, devotedly following her as she toured America and proposing to her over and over again until she finally agreed to marry him. Butler and Kemble had two daughters, one of whom, Sarah, became Wister’s mother. However, their marriage did not last. Kemble’s visit to the Butler plantation horrified her; she recorded her experiences in letters and later, in 1863, published them as
Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation.
This highly critical account of slavery indicates the extent to which the relationship between Kemble and Butler was doomed to disaster. In 1849 they were divorced, and Kemble resumed her career as an actress and her cosmopolitan lifestyle.
Owen Wister shared the literary interests of his grandmother and his mother, though initially he was more interested in music, for which he also had great gifts. In the traditional fashion of the Eastern upper classes, he attended private school and then enrolled at Harvard, where he was very active in theater, music, and elite social clubs. Through these activities he became friends with other young men who would later play an important role in American culture, most notably the future president and fellow western enthusiast Theodore Roosevelt.
When he graduated from Harvard in 1882, Wister wanted above all to become a musician and composer and to continue his musical studies in Europe. However, before his father was prepared to pay for further study, he insisted that Wister have his talent appraised by knowledgeable judges. With the help of his grandmother, who knew many world-famous musicians, Wister tracked down the great pianist and composer Franz Liszt in Bayreuth, Germany, where Liszt’s friend Richard Wagner had his own personal music theater. Liszt heard Wister play and agreed that the young man had sufficient talent to make a career in music.
With Wister’s talent certified by Liszt and other prominent European musicians, his father reluctantly agreed to support his son’s further studies, but Wister decided instead to return to Boston, and then Philadelphia, to embark on the career in finance that his father had originally preferred. Nevertheless, music remained one of Wister’s primary interests for the rest of his life. Wagner was his musical idol, and he frequently performed extracts from Wagnerian operas on the piano for his family and friends. It’s not impossible that Wister’s fascination with Wagner’s great mythic tetralogy
Der Ring des Nibelungen
had some influence on
The Virginian’s
representation of the American cowboy as a mythic hero. Wister continued to play the piano and also to compose music, although only one of his compositions achieved any lasting recognition—ironically, a cowboy song, “Ten Thousand Cattle Straying,” which he wrote in 1903 as incidental music for the stage production of
The Virginian.
The director John Ford later used this song as part of the background music for his classic western
My Darling Clementine
(1946).
Wister’s business career began auspiciously enough under the patronage of one of the principal partners of Lee, Higginson and Company, Boston’s leading firm of investment bankers. Wister had come to know Henry Lee Higginson during his time at Harvard. (Higginson had also studied music and was the founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.) With such connections, Wister’s success as a broker seemed assured, yet he found the work boring and frustrating. He turned to the genteel social and cultural life of Boston, where he moved in the most elite circles. He also resumed his friendships with other Harvard acquaintances, one of whom was Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., later a justice of the Supreme Court.
Wister turned not only to society but to a variety of artistic and intellectual pursuits in search of the imaginative stimulation he desperately needed. He completed a novel and proudly showed it to his older friend, the distinguished novelist and critic William Dean Howells. Howells recommended against its publication. Wister was more successful in other musical and literary activities, but he did not find in them whatever he was searching for. Soon, as a consequence of his unhappiness and frustration, he began to show symptoms of the nervous ailments that would plague him for many years.
Today Wister’s illness would probably be diagnosed as some kind of depression, but in the 1880s doctors were puzzled by his symptoms, which seemed so prevalent among upper-class Americans in the later nineteenth century. In Wister’s case his illness led to periods of exhaustion and inability to work, and at times to even more extreme symptoms, such as facial paralysis. Within two years, it was clear that Wister needed to do something else. His father suggested that he embark on a career in law, and Wister duly prepared to enter Harvard Law School in the fall of 1885.
By this time, Wister’s health had deteriorated. Convinced that he was on the verge of complete collapse, he consulted a family friend, the prominent physician and novelist S. Weir Mitchell. Mitchell, who specialized in nervous disorders, suggested that Wister try to restore his health by seeking a complete change in scene. That is what took Wister to a ranch near Rock Springs, Wyoming, in the summer of 1885, a trip that completely changed his life.
II
Wyoming in 1885 was, indeed, a significant change of scene from the upper-class circles of Philadelphia and Boston. It was not yet a state and would not become one for another five years. The Union Pacific Railroad on which Wister made his journey had been completed only in 1869. The Wyoming Territory, a world of mountains and high desert, was predominantly cattle country with a human population of around 65,000. To Wister, this new landscape seemed not only socially and ecologically different; it had about it a mythic aura. One of his first reactions, characteristically enough, was to see in the craggy cliffs and twisted rocks around him a resemblance to the setting of Wagner’s opera
Die Walküre.
Wister’s first encounter with Wyoming made an indelible impression, and he translated this experience into literary form in the opening section of
The Virginian.
Like Wister, the novel’s anonymous narrator disembarks from the train at a rough new western town and is both dazzled and confused by the experience. He then makes a long journey overland to the ranch he has arranged to visit. Wister disembarked at Rock Creek (now Rock River) about 40 miles north of Laramie. In the novel he changed this to the more distinctively western Medicine Bow, which he later visited and, in a way, immortalized. Today Medicine Bow’s web page boasts that it is “the setting of Owen Wister’s book
The Virginian,
and the home of the Historic Virginian Hotel.”
The Virginian’s
narrator ends his long and tiring cross-country journey at Judge Henry’s ranch, just as Wister finally arrived at the large V. R. Ranch owned by Major Frank Wolcott, a former Kentuckian. Wister lived at the ranch and increasingly participated in its life. He made the 180-mile round trip to Medicine Bow for supplies. He enjoyed the August roundup and went on a hunting trip. Three weeks of this simple and strenuous life seemed to restore him to health. Most of his troubling symptoms disappeared, and by autumn he felt ready to return east and begin his studies at Harvard Law School.
But Wister’s first western journey was a point of no return for him. As his most recent biographer, Darwin Payne, puts it, “He had found a spiritual home, very different from Boston or Europe, which could now nourish and sustain him for many years” (Payne,
Owen Wister,
p. 90; see “For Further Reading”). In addition, Wister had begun to amass a fund of material that would transform his writing. So responsive was he to the new experience of the West that he began to keep an extensive journal, something he had never done before.
Back in the East, Wister finished a year of law school successfully, but his illness returned in the course of his second year, and that summer he went west again, this time to the Pacific coast and California. He then returned to Wyoming for another hunting trip and to visit the newly designated Yellowstone National Park and the Teton Range. This second trip enabled him to complete his final year of law school; after a third trip to Wyoming, he began to practice law in Philadelphia.
Law proved to be no more satisfying to Wister than banking. As he had done earlier, he turned to music and literature in his spare time; he partly completed an opera about Montezuma but could find no producer interested in the work. Eventually he sensed that his own western experiences had provided him with the kind of stories that America’s increasing fascination with the Wild West seemed to call for. He decided, in 1890, to try writing about the West and found that the material virtually poured out of him. Within a year he had completed and sold two western stories to Henry Mills Alden of Harper and Brothers. “Hank’s Woman” and “How Lin McLean Went East,” apppeared in 1892, the latter in the prestigious Christmas issue of
Harper’s Monthly.
This first sale gave Wister confidence that he could succeed as a writer, and he gradually gave up the practice of law and devoted himself full-time to writing. He responded to the increasing demand for his western material with a steady stream of stories, most of them first published in magazines like
Harper’s
and then collected into books. His first book,
Red Men and White,
appeared in 1896, and in the next four years he published two more story collections,
Lin McLean
in 1897 and
The Jimmyjohn Boss, and Other Stories
in 1900.
Before Wister, Bret Harte and Mark Twain were the two most popular late-nineteenth-century American writers about the West. Twain was best known for his humorous sketches, beginning with “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” and culminating in the longer narrative
Roughing It.
Harte’s fame was based on his bitter-sweet, picturesque vignettes of gamblers who become heroic and whores with hearts of gold in stories like “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” Both set most of their stories in the mining camps and shanty towns of California and Nevada, which they knew well from their personal experience. Wister’s early stories show the influence of these authors, effectively combining Twain’s humor with Harte’s sentiment. But Wister added something new to the mix, his own knowledge of the cowboy and the cattle kingdom, a final western frontier that the American public had recently discovered through such popular creations as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and the dime novel.
Wister’s early stories are mainly brief vignettes. Even when they involve the same character, like his series about Lin McLean, they remain anecdotal—delightful in language and picturesque in scene, but without the depth and complexity needed to sustain a longer narrative. Then, in 1892 Wister first introduced the character that would become known as the Virginian in his story “Balaam and Pedro.” This story, based on an experience of cruelty to a horse that had greatly upset Wister during one of his western sojourns, was the most powerful one he had yet written. Deeply upset because he was unable to prevent the abuse or to mete out some appropriate punishment to the abuser, Wister imagined a western character strong and courageous enough to act justly in such a situation; this character became the Virginian.
The combination of a narrator encountering a new situation and a hero who transcends the picturesque and still embodies the distinctive skills and humor of the cowboy proved a magical one for Wister. He found that the stories he created about the Virginian began to add up to something more than a series of related sketches. Sometime in 1901 Wister decided that he could use the Virginian stories he had already written, along with some new material, to create a continuous narrative. In the end, he created not only a novel, but one of those archetypal characters who, like Sherlock Holmes or James Bond, would assume a life of his own and become associated with a whole new area of literature and popular culture. In 1902 Macmillan published the novel as
The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains.
Its enormous success made Wister one of the best-known American writers.