Stephen Crane's Sources and Allusions in “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” and “Moonlight on the Snow”

Abstract

Without a doubt the idea of the frontier played a crucial role in the Ameri can mind in the late nineteenth century. Whether one was reading dime novels about legendary heroes, watching wild west shows, or participating in the debate about the significance of the frontier in American history, the frontier as an imaginative setting was clearly part of popular culture. In response to this interest, the Bachelier syndicate sent Stephen Crane in 1895 on an extensive tour of the West and Mexico in order to write feature articles on local events and conditions. As these articles and his Western fiction demonstrate, Crane was ambivalent about the movement of civilization across the American continent. Whereas he admired the rapid modernization of the West, he deplored a detestable superficial culture1 of the East. In two of his Western stories, The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky and Moonlight on the Snow, written several years after his 1895 tour, Crane expresses his ambivalence about the significance of the development of the West by incorporating literary and historical allusions to well-known people, places, and events in contemporary popular culture. At the same time, the two stories dramatize his private anxieties regarding the tension between his professional lifestyle as an itinerant author and his responsibilities to his companion Cora Taylor.2 In The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, Crane relies on America's growing awareness of a commonly shared popular culture. Readers would have rec ognized the historic and literary context of the first and last names of the Texas marshal, Jack Potter. Both names had a longstanding connection with Texas in fact and fiction. Reuben Marmaduke Potter, a key figure dur ing the Texas Revolution and the Mexican War, immortalized San Antonio