The Popular Western in Print

Abstract

This chapter offers a genealogy of the popular western from the perspective of the women writers who have been active in the genre since the American cowboy became an object of national fascination in the late-nineteenth century. Although Owen Wister is credited with establishing the template for the twentieth-century popular western, he was not the first to tell the story of a love affair between an eastern gentlewoman and a western cowboy against the backdrop of the cattle wars. That distinction belongs to Colorado woman suffragist Emma Ghent Curtis, whose novel The Administratrix, published in 1889, includes all of the ingredients now familiar in westerns, including schoolmarms, cowboys, gunfighters, and shootouts. Nor was Owen Wister the only interpreter of the Johnson County “invasion” of 1892, when representatives of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association set out to murder 80 alleged cattle rustlers. Frances McElrath’s The Rustler, published, like The Virginian, in April 1902, highlighted the origin of the violence in class conflicts between large cattle companies and cowboys who aspired to own their own cattle herds. The first popularizer of the western in the twentieth century, B. M. Bower, published 60 novels and hundreds of short stories between 1904 and 1940, making her a household name in westerns in the early twentieth century. So why do we think that popular westerns have always been written by and for men? That belief was a relatively late development in the history of the genre. As the pulp magazines in which much western fiction was published transitioned from family-oriented publications to more narrowly targeted and highly gendered genres, western magazines bifurcated into the masculine action western and feminized romance western, with the former defined as the “original.” As these categories became naturalized over the course of the twentieth century, women writers of westerns were dismissed as imitators, effectively erasing the significant contributions of women writers to the western genre.