Virginian (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (56 page)

1
(p. 19)
“old Virginia”:
This is a reference to pre-Civil War Virginia, before the emancipation of the slaves. In 1861 Virginia seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy.

2
(p. 21)
Columbia to the Rio Grande, from the Missouri to the Sierras:
The Columbia River runs from southwestern Canada, through Washington and Oregon, and into the Pacific Ocean. The Rio Grande separates the United States from Mexico at the Texas border. The Missouri, also known as the “Big Muddy,” is the longest tributary of the Mississippi River and the longest river in the United States; it begins in the Rocky Mountains in Montana and meets the Mississippi River in central Missouri. The Missouri was mapped by American explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in their expedition of 1804-1806; explorers and pioneers used the river as a route to the Northwest. The Sierras, also called the Sierra Nevada, are a major mountain range of western North America, running along the eastern edge of California and extending from the Mojave Desert in the south of the state all the way to the Cascade Range of northern California and southern Oregon.

3
(p. 22)
a space across which Noah and Adam might come straight from Genesis:
In a letter of July 6, 1885, Wister wrote the following of his journey to Wyoming: “Suddenly you come around a turn and down into a green cut where there are horsemen and wagons and hundreds of cattle, and then it’s like Genesis” (Fanny Kemble Wister,
Owen Wister Out West,
p. 31).

4
(p. 32)
“Cow-puncher, bronco-buster, tin-horn”: Cow-puncher
and
cowboy
are western terms that mean “cattle-driver”; a
bronco-buster
breaks wild broncos; a
tin-horn,
or tin-horn gambler, is a low-stakes gambler, especially one who acts in an ostentatious manner.

5
(p. 32)
“Works for the Sunk Creek outfit”: Outfit
can refer both to a ranch and a ranch’s crew. Wister wrote of his use of locations in a letter dated September 18, 1931: “Almost all of the geography of
The Virginian
is imaginary, except where real names are sometimes used. I meant to indicate—but very vaguely—the Big Horn Mountains by the ‘Bow Leg’—and I never meant Judge Henry’s Ranch to be any definite ranch. I imagined it being somewhere in Johnson County. ‘Bear Creek’ was not intended for any definite creek.... ’Drybone’ I had for Old Fort Fetterman” (Wister,
Fifty Years of The Virginian:
1902-1952).

1
(p. 38)
the voice of the drummer,.
.
.saying “The Prince of Wales barked his shin just now”:
The drummer is using the title Prince of Wales, bestowed by the British sovereign on the male heir to the throne, derogatorily to mock the narrator’s eastern dress and manner.

1
(p. 43)
Sardines... potted chicken... devilled ham...the empty sardine box lies rusting over the face of the Western earth:
Melody Graulich, in her introduction to
Reading “The Virginian” in the New West,
writes: “Cattle are shipped to Omaha and packed into cans that are then shipped back to litter the Wyoming landscape” (p. xi). Like condensed milk (see footnote on p. 24), meat was canned for preservation and transport. Menhaden, a cheaper fish of the herring family, was often canned in place of sardines.

2
(p. 49)
Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon,
Idaho,
Montana, and Wyoming:
Only some of these were officially states at the time of the novel. Arkansas became the twenty-fifth state in 1836. Texas, the twenty-eighth state in 1845, was an independent republic before statehood. New Mexico and Arizona achieved statehood in 1912 as, respectively, the forty-seventh and forty-eighth states (although Arizona was sometimes called Arizona even while it was still in the Territory of New Mexico). California was relinquished by Mexico after the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to become the thirty-first state in 1850. Oregon (1859) was the thirty-third state, Idaho (1890) was forty-third, Montana (1889) was forty-first, and Wyoming (1890) was forty-fourth.

3
(p. 52)
Bow Leg Mountains:
The name is meant as a vague reference to the Bighorn Mountains of northern Wyoming (see note 5 to chapter 2).

4
(p. 53)
“Drybone”:
According to Wister (see note 5 to chapter 2), Drybone is loosely based on Fetterman City, built around Fort Fetterman, a military fort in a bleak, isolated area of eastern Wyoming.

1
(p. 63)
Cruelty to Animals:
Philanthropist and animal rights advocate Henry Bergh established the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) in 1866. The character of the Virginian first appeared in a short story entitled “Balaam and Pedro” (which figures as a chapter in the novel), an account of the brutal treatment of a horse that Wister witnessed on one of his trips to the West (see the Introduction, p. xviii).

2
(p. 63)
Her legs were blue:
This is probably an allusion to “blue-stockings,” a derisive term for women interested in intellectual or literary pursuits, especially at the expense of their marriage and children. The term derives from the bluestocking clubs of the eighteenth century, evening parties in which literary subjects were discussed. (The women wore informal attire that often included blue worsted stockings.) English author Elizabeth Montagu ran one such literary salon.

1
(p. 72)
“take a hunt with me about August or say September for then the elk will be out of the velvett”:
Velvet is the soft downy skin that covers the developing antlers of a deer or elk. Deer are said to be “in velvet” when in this stage and are generally considered too young to hunt.

2
(p. 72) “He
is working on the upper ranch near Ten Sleep”:
The town of Ten Sleep was established only in 1932, but the area itself was a significant pass-through for Indian tribes (including Cheyenne, Crow, and Sioux, among many others) trading along the routes that passed between Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. It is now the home of Big Horn National Forest, founded in 1887.

3
(p. 73)
the expedition ended in an untravelled comer of the Yellowstone Park, near Pitchstone Canon:
The first national park in the United States, Yellowstone National Park, in northwestern Wyoming, was established in 1872. It is known for its myriad hot springs and geysers (including the famous geyser “Old Faithful”), formed by volcanic activity.

4
(p. 73)
young Lin McLean and others were witnesses of a sad and terrible drama that has been elsewhere chronicled:
Prior to writing
The Virginian,
Wister published stories about McLean in a collection entitled
Lin McLean
(1898).

1
(p. 75)
She could have been enrolled in the Boston Tea Party, the Ethan Allen Ticonderogas, the Green Mountain Daughters, the Saratoga Sacred Circle,
and
the Confederated Colonial Chatelaines:
Wister is making up names for patriotic groups based on historical events. The Boston Tea Party, one of the events that helped precipitate the American Revolution, was an act of protest by Boston colonists against what they saw as the British Parliament’s unjust taxation of tea; on December 16, 1773, patriots known as the Sons of Liberty dressed as Mohawk Indians, boarded several British East India Company ships, and dumped 300 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. Ethan Allen ( 1738-1789) was an American soldier of the Revolution who led an irregular patriotic force known as the Green Mountain Boys. They captured Fort Ticonderoga, New York, from the British in 1775. (D. P. Thompson based his 1839 novel
The Green Mountain Boys
on this group.)

2
(p. 75):
She traced direct descent from the historic lady whose name she bore, that Molly Stark:
Molly Stark was the wife of John Stark (1728-1822), a Revolutionary War military officer who directed General George Washington’s advance force at Trenton (1776) and fought at Princeton (1777). Wister uses her as a false lineage for Molly Wood, who is loosely based on his own wife, Mary Channing, also nicknamed “Molly” and also from the East. Both of these Mollies came from upper-class families, and both rebelled against conventional domestic roles.

1
(p. 79)
“If you go to monkey with my Looloo girl”:
According to Winfred Blevins in his
Dictionary of the American West,
a
looloo
is an “eccentric hand in poker that under local rules is a top hand. When three clubs and two diamonds was a looloo in Butte, Montana, one celebrated afternoon, it even beat the four aces held by a stranger to town.” In any case, the Virginian’s song serves as a kind of warning to strangers.
Looloo
also corresponds to
lulu,
a slang term for a remarkable person or thing.

2
(p. 82)
it is said that Molly Stark, in her day, was not a New Woman:
The term “new woman” was applied to feminists of the late nineteenth century. Feminist causes of the day included suffrage, employment and education opportunities, and a more open approach toward sexuality and the conventions of marriage and family.

3
(p. 84)
To use the language of Cattle Land, steers
had
“jumped to seventy-five”:
This is a reference to the crash of the “Beef Bonanza” ( 1867-1881 ), a period of boom for the cattle trade industry. After several years of harsh winters and drought, the industry collapsed in the late 1880s, causing drastic fluctuations in beef prices.

4
(p. 84)
Cheyenne Club:
The Cheyenne Club, built in 1880, was Cheyenne’s local social hotspot, hosting many of Wyoming’s most privileged residents and visitors. The city of Cheyenne was initially founded in 1867 as a “tent city” for workers building the Union Pacific Railroad. It eventually became a popular stopping place on the railroad. Trains brought homesteaders of Scandinavian, German, and English descent as well as wealthy entrepreneurs, making Cheyenne a prosperous city. When the cattle industry collapsed in the late 1880s (see note above), many of Cheyenne’s wealthy residents left town and the Cheyenne Club closed down. (See G. Edward White’s
The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience,
p. 122.)

5
(p. 85)
“Step along, you Monte hawss!”:
The Virginian’s horse might have been named after the Spanish card game monte, a betting game.

1
(p. 95)
“I was raised in Massachusetts myself, and big men have been raised there, too,—Daniel Webster and Israel Putnam”:
Both Webster and Putnam are Massachusetts heroes for McLean. The famous lawyer and orator Daniel Webster represented Massachusetts in both the House of Representatives (1823-1827) and the Senate ( 1827-1841 ); he later supported the Compromise of 1850, which included various measures that sought to keep the Union together despite the growing conflicts between free states and slave-holding states. Massachusetts-born Israel Putnam ( 1718-1790) fought in both the French and Indian War (during which he was a prisoner of war for a time) and the American Revolution; he became a Revolutionary general and was in command at the battle of Long Island. In Connecticut, where he had moved in 1740, Putnam served on the Connecticut General Assembly and was an organizer of the Sons of Liberty (a secret organization that protested taxes imposed on the colonies by Britain under the Stamp Act.

1
(p. 109)
“sorry for poor Maggie Tulliver...and for Tawmmy, too”:
Maggie and Tom Tulliver are central characters in
The Mill on the Floss
(1860), by English novelist George Eliot. Tom is uncomplicated and unimaginative, while his sister Maggie is energetic, intellectual, and dramatic.

2
(p. 110) Sir
Walter Scott’s
Kenilworth: Scottish author Sir Walter Scott’s novel Kenilworth (1821) is set in the Elizabethan age; its cast of characters includes such renowned English poets as William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser. The novel climaxes with the great pageant at Kenilworth, given in 1575 by Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, in honor of a visit by Queen Elizabeth I.

1
(p. 120)
Christian Endeavor:
The United Society of Christian Endeavor, founded in 1881 by Francis Edward Clark, was an interdenominational organization for Protestant youth in Canada, Mexico, and the United States.

2
(p. 120)
Pike’s Peak:
Pike’s Peak rises 14,110 feet in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains in El Paso County, Colorado. Southwest of Pike’s Peak is the legendary Cripple Creek gold district.

1
(p. 121)
Northern Pacific:
Built in the mid-nineteenth century, this was one of the northern transcontinental railroads of the United States, traveling between St. Paul, Minnesota, and Seattle, Washington. The line has since merged with other railroads and is now part of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway system.

2
(p. 122)
Medora:
Medora, located in the badlands of central North Dakota, today borders Theodore Roosevelt National Park, which commemorates President Roosevelt’s love of the American West. Elkhorn Ranch, just north of Medora, was one of Roosevelt’s cattle ranches.