Western Hero Research Articles

The Westering Experience in American Literature: Bicentennial Essays ed. by Merrill Lewis and L. L. Lee

Reviews 285 present a pleasant view of a sensitive and articulate man at the end of his career. Neihardt tells about his brief work as a hod-carrier in Bancroft, Nebraska, and as a reporter in Omaha; of his early decision to attempt an epic poem about mythological divinities in Spenserian stanzas; of his meet­ ing with various Omaha Indians, who called him Little Bull Buffalo; of fishing on trout streams in the Black Hills with only a stray dog as com­ panion; of early steamboats on the Missouri; of his marriage to the sculptress Mona Martinsen and of their home in Bancroft; and, with an admirable lack of bitterness, of his fugitive father who had deserted the Neihardt family and maintained contact only with desultory correspondence. Patterns and Coincidences is a low-keyed book with few dramatic scenes and no heroes. But details of events in a remote past are skilfully recalled and the pages are deftly written. A final impression remains. Neihardt talks about poetry, indeed about all literature, with devotion, with affection. He was understandably a success on the lecture platform for years. This reviewer regrets that he never had the opportunity to hear Little Bull Buffalo roar. JOHN T. FLANAGAN, University of Illinois, Urbana The Westering Experience in American Literature: Bicentennial Essays. Edited by Merrill Lewis and L. L. Lee. (Bellingham, Washington: Bureau for Faculty Research, Western Washington University, 1977. 224 pages, $4.95.) In this admirable collection of essays developed from papers read at the 1976 Western Literature Association Conference, editors Lewis and Lee have assembled a milestone volume of critical essays in diverse, chiefly revisionist, examinations of the American Dream and its texturing myths. Max Westbrook’s excellent prologue sets the tone by relating the western hero to the American ideal of resisting tyranny to achieve a higher justice. The first group of essays explores critical perspectives; the second presents varying views of heroes, themes and processes; and the third focuses on Canadian and Chicano studies. The essays raise provocative, open-ended questions about the usefulness of the West to human experience, the validity of the hero, the definitive meaning of “West” as a literal or metaphoric journey, and the critical problems arising from the requirements of history and fiction. The section on critical views connects westering with mainstream American literature and removes it from the constrictions of regionalism, notably in John Ditsky’s concept of directionality. Don Walker’s witty 286 Western American Literature disposal of the contention that historians create a truer picture of the cowboy than fiction writers do supports his thesis that dissatisfaction with western literature arises from literary, not historical, criteria. Jack Brenner’s complementary essay pointing out problems and dilemmas for the western writer explains the West as a West of words, part of the “struggle toward consciousness” we realize through the “style and gesture” of language. The collection is actually a study in paradoxes and ironies, words that recur in most of the essays. The ironies of myth and fact appear, for example, in Jack Davis’s study of the Indian Oakatibbe and the inability of white men to appreciate the “advanced social techniques” of a culture in harmony with the environment. Martin Bucco’s ingenious analysis of east-west movement in Dreiser’sAn American Tragedy asks how far we have actually travelled, and George M. Armstrong’s skepticism about our learn­ ing from the past in his study of Beulah Land ends by suggesting that progress is a myth. Other essays, including studies of travel literature, also note the need to reassess the frontier myths. The paradox is balanced by repeated suggestions that westering was a unique experience, not to be ignored in American studies. The ironies focus ultimately in the western hero as delineated in various essays: the Virginian, Billy the Kid, Canadian Jesuits, the anti-heroes of Edward Abbey, the Mexican pachuco. Dick Harrison’s tragic hero, isolated by the violence that enabled him to establish order, points a basic irony, balanced by Max Westbrook’s competently drawn hero of commanding presence who reminds that “virtue in a democracy is voluntary.” The weaknesses of the collection noted by the editors — the neglect of women...

Schoolboy, Cowboy, Mexican Spy by Jay Monaghan

286 Western American Literature disposal of the contention that historians create a truer picture of the cowboy than fiction writers do supports his thesis that dissatisfaction with western literature arises from literary, not historical, criteria. Jack Brenner’s complementary essay pointing out problems and dilemmas for the western writer explains the West as a West of words, part of the “struggle toward consciousness” we realize through the “style and gesture” of language. The collection is actually a study in paradoxes and ironies, words that recur in most of the essays. The ironies of myth and fact appear, for example, in Jack Davis’s study of the Indian Oakatibbe and the inability of white men to appreciate the “advanced social techniques” of a culture in harmony with the environment. Martin Bucco’s ingenious analysis of east-west movement in Dreiser’sAn American Tragedy asks how far we have actually travelled, and George M. Armstrong’s skepticism about our learn­ ing from the past in his study of Beulah Land ends by suggesting that progress is a myth. Other essays, including studies of travel literature, also note the need to reassess the frontier myths. The paradox is balanced by repeated suggestions that westering was a unique experience, not to be ignored in American studies. The ironies focus ultimately in the western hero as delineated in various essays: the Virginian, Billy the Kid, Canadian Jesuits, the anti-heroes of Edward Abbey, the Mexican pachuco. Dick Harrison’s tragic hero, isolated by the violence that enabled him to establish order, points a basic irony, balanced by Max Westbrook’s competently drawn hero of commanding presence who reminds that “virtue in a democracy is voluntary.” The weaknesses of the collection noted by the editors — the neglect of women and blacks— are outweighed by the strengths. The wide range of views presented offers the reader a rich and fascinating account of the “lovely ironies” John Ditsky, in his thought-provoking epilog, calls “the glory of American writing.” This work is indispensable for serious writers and critics of western American literature. LUCILE F. ALY, University of Oregon Schoolboy, Cowboy, Mexican Spy. ByJay Monaghan. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. 246 pages, $10.95.) Though it covers only a few teen-age years, this is a pleasant and surprising autobiography. One might expect that a historian’s intellectual development would begin in the dust of old books and then mature on a steady diet of esoteric documents. That is not the case here. Rather, the reader is caught up into a narrative that on the one hand would satisfy the most uncritical Saturday matinee westerner, and yet on the other hand Reviews 287 reminds us of significant challenges that are inherent in dealing with the Western experience. Even those who have never heard of Jay Monaghan will enjoy reading this book. It is a narrative of adventure that will hold its own against the best selling popular pulp. Cowpunching, freighting, mule skinning, fighting, crossing back and forth between revolutionary armies, confronting desper­ adoes, renegade Indians, and stampeding cattle — this remarkable man presents us with a string of adventures, narrow escapes, and remarkable experiences that are at once wonderful and credible. This book is in some ways everybody’s dream of Western adventures suddenly come true. It is the West of Owen Wister, Theodore Roosevelt, and Frederick Remington validated by individual experience. It is a book that one smiles over often, finding a personal satisfaction that one’s own favorite heroes are not just fictions on a page, but flesh and blood people. For instance, writing in the third person, Monaghan reports of himself, “The boy looked at Dee’s lean frame and haggard cheeks. His mustache, a mere black line, hooked down at the comers of his mouth. This face reminded the boy of the Specimen Jones drawn by Frederick Remington in Owen Wister’s Red Men and White. Dee’s helper, named Charlie, appeared much younger and fuller­ bodied, more like one of the western characters W. H. D. Koemer painted. The boy admired the drawings of both artists, and he set to work with a will helping these two models of men he knew very well...

Stephen Crane, Eastern Outsider in the West and Mexico

J A M I E R O B E R T S O N University of New Mexico Stephen Crane, Eastern Outsider in the West and Mexico Though one of Stephen Crane’s Western stories was accompanied by a full page illustration by Frederick Remington,1 Crane’s use of the West as an artistic source was far different from Remington’s. As Edwin Cady has pointed out,2 Crane was tom between the neo-romanticism of Remington, Roosevelt, and Wister that so strongly influenced American life in the 1880’s, and the realism of William Dean Howells. Unlike Howells, Crane was attracted to the neo-romantic ideal of the strenuous life, but unlike Remington, Roosevelt, and Wister, he could never wholly endorse the Eastern notion of active frontier life as the realization of the ideal American life. For one thing, Crane didn’t go west until 1895, when whatever real West had existed was no more. He spent only about five months in the West and Mexico and was therefore more a tourist, perhaps, than the neo-romantic Easterners mentioned above. Unlike them, however, he was acutely aware that he was a visitor and that his insights into the West and Mexico of 1895 were always those of an outsider. Crane was attracted to the West, but he never succumbed to the dream world of 1“A Man and Some Others” appeared in the Century, 53 (February 1897), 601-607, with an illustration by Frederick Remington on page 600. 2Edwin Harrison Cady, “Stephen Crane and the Strenuous Life,” English Lit­ erary History, 28 (December, 1961), pp. 376-382. 244 Western American Literature the dime novelist or even the world of Owen Wister’s The Virginian. His Western heroes participate in the convention of popular Western fiction that individual courage gives meaning to life, but that conven­ tion is always ironic for them. Crane uses the Western myth to show that the courageous confrontation of the unknown — an unknown that for him as for Emily Dickinson is often death — can lead to an insight into what he believes is the chief characteristic of any person’s individual development: a humble awareness of one’s own insignificance. His most interesting Western characters see the world more clearly from the perspective of a new awareness of their human insignificance. These characters come to the tragic realization that the images of bravery and violence they have been enacting or observing are a distortion of reality. Other critics of Crane’s Western stories have argued against this interpretation. Robert Glen Deamer strongly urges that Crane’s use of the Western myth is serious and not comic or parodic, and that Crane is not ironic in his depiction of Anglo heroes.3 Raymund Paredes argues that these Western stories are very serious indeed, and he charges Crane with racism.4 Deamer allows that Crane was dead serious in his depic­ tion of Anglo heroism in the wilderness, and Paredes asserts that for truly understanding the Mexican this seriousness was disastrous. I think both Deamer and Paredes miss the mark. Unlike the neo-romantic Easterners in the West, Crane never employed the myth of the West as an end in itself, but as an artistic convention to be used for serious artistic ends. Like Chaucer’s use of the conventions of courtly love, Crane’s use of Western conventions always reveals his distance from the reality from which those conventions grew. He knew that the myth of the West was not an indigenous Western creation. As a poetic convention, it was developed by Easterners for consumpton by audiences in the East, and Crane’s awareness of this fact encouraged an ironic use of the myth in his Western stories. Deamer argues that in 1895 Crane could only find the myth still 3Robert Glen Deamer, “Stephen Crane and the Western Myth,” Western American Literature, 7 (1972), pp. 111-123. 4Raymund A. Paredes, “Stephen Crane and the Mexican,” Western American Literature, 6 (1971), pp. 31-38. Paredes writes that both Anglo and Mexican “know fear intensely, but the anglo responds to a challenge or a threat with courage, reacting coolly and weighing his options, working quickly to stay...

Western Motifs in the Thrillers of Donald Hamilton

F R E D E R I S M A N Texas Christian University Western Motifs in the Thrillers of Donald Hamilton The mythic status of the cowboy hero, lean, laconic, and lethal, is a commonplace in Western studies. No less commonplace is the assertion of the Westerner’s kinship with the equally mythic private detective or secret agent.1 The two figures, students of the Western generally agree, share many personal qualities; they are also alike in the degree to which the modem thriller, like the modern Western, raises questions of the individualistic hero in society, the inevitable consequences of his actions, and the increasing moral ambiguity of those same actions.2 Despite this widespread agreement, though, comparatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which those qualities that give the Western its characteristic flavor also appear in the urban, technological thriller. A valuable demonstration of the parallels between these two major forms of popular fiction appears in the novels of Donald Hamilton. Hamilton, who was born in Sweden in 1916, served in the United States Navy during World War II and afterwards turned to free-lance writing. He soon became known as the author of several better-than-average Westerns — among them Smoky Valley (1954), Mad River (1956), and The Big Country (1957). In these books he explores familiar terri­ tory. Two of them, Smoky Valley and The Big Country, have to do with the Easterner who comes West and must win acceptance from the community; the other, Mad River, brings its young hero back home from an unjust prison sentence, determined to reestablish himself. In each instance, though, Hamilton’s ear for dialogue and sure sense of action lift the book above the limitations of its well-worn material. 1See, for example, John P. Sisk, “The Western Hero,” Commonweal, 66 (1957), 368, or John A. Barsness, “The Breaking of the Myth: A Study of Cultural Implica­ tions in the Development of the Western Novel n the Twentieth Century,” Diss. Minnesota 1966, pp. 233-234. 2John G. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique (Bowling Green: Bowling Green Uni­ versity Popular Press, 1971), pp. 78-79. 284 Western American Literature During the same period he wrote a handful of reasonably wellreceived thrillers with contemporary settings, including Murder Twice Told (1950), Line of Fire (1955), and Assignment — Murder (1956); however, he made comparatively little mark in this genre until 1960. In that year, with Death of a Citizen, he began a series of original paperback novels relating the adventures of Matt Helm, a middle-aged, tough-minded professional assassin in the employ of the United States government. The books were highly successful with both public and critics; Anthony Boucher, in fact, early on began favorably comparing them with the works of Dashiell Hammett.3 In the early volumes of the series (which now numbers sixteen books), Hamilton makes effective use of the hard-bitten professionalism that surrounds his seasoned killer. He also makes plain the degree to which Western motifs can invigorate the thriller, for the Helm stories reveal qualities of setting, plot, and character that strongly echo those of the traditional Western. One of the most obvious identifying marks of the Western is its setting. It is, as John Cawelti has said, “a story that takes place some­ where in the western United States in which the characters wear certain distinctive styles of clothing.”4 The simple, physical setting of the story, specified as being in the American West, influences the characters and their superficial actions. Thus, persons who live in the West dress and act in certain common ways, modified by the period, to be sure, but nonetheless sharing a certain commonality. When Hamilton makes his hero a resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico, therefore, the reader is not surprised to find Helm moving in the world of Western informality, where men dress “in a suede leather sport coat and a checked gingham shirt with one of those braided leather strings around the neck that Western males tend to wear instead of ties,” and women in “a lot of Indian silver and . . . the squaw dresses, also called fiesta dresses, the construction of which is a local industry...

Bourgeois Myth and Anti-Myth: The Western Hero of the Fifties

Bourgeois Myth and Anti-Myth: The Western Hero of the Fifties

From Little Bighorn to Little Big Man: The Changing Image of a Western Hero in Popular Culture

From Little Bighorn to Little Big Man: The Changing Image of a Western Hero in Popular Culture

The End of the Trail: The American West of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler

Journal Article The End of the Trail: The American West of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler Get access Joseph C. Porter Joseph C. Porter graduate student and teaching assistant department of history University of Texas at Austin Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 6, Issue 4, October 1975, Pages 411–424, https://doi.org/10.2307/967777 Published: 01 October 1975

Ken Kesey: The Hero in Modern Dress

KEN KESEY: THE HERO IN MODERN DRESS John A. Barsness John Barsness (A.B., William Jewell; M.A., Montana State University; Ph.D., University of Minnesota) is chairman of the English department at Boise State College. He had taught previously at Montana State University where he served also as director of composition. Mr. Barsness has served as director of the Rocky Mountain Writers Conference (1960) and has held offices in the Western American Literature Association and in the Rocky Mountain American Studies Association. His publications include articles in Western American Literature, New Mexico Review, Film Quarterly and Montana. In American literature, it has been virtually impossible to distinguish between the serious and the popular hero. On the one hand, he may appear as Melville's Handsome Sailor, "with no perceptible trace of the vainglorious about him, rather with the offhand unaffectedness of natural regality . . . mighty boxer ... on every suitable occasion foremost";1 on die otiier, he may be as familiar as Owen Wister's Virginian, "a slim, young giant, more beautiful than pictures ... no dinginess ... or shabbiness . . . could tarnish the splendor that radiated from his youth and strength."2 Eitiier figure is interchangeable with the other, a peculiarly native and primordial image arising primarily out of nineteentii-century notions of die democratic frontiersman , made virtuous and pure by the beneficial influences of nature, absolutely free physically and morally from the debilitating corruptions of European civilization. He flourishes best among the innocent ideals of the Jeffersonian landscape, that well-groomed pastoral panorama, populated with peaceful, hardworking, independent yeomen, roused to instant action by any threat to their independence. In such surroundings, the Amercian hero was adored for over a hundred years. He has had less success in the twentieth century, except in his bestknown native form as the cowboy, where he lingers on in popular literature in multiple versions of the Virginian, more and more stylized, farther and farther from the nineteenth century pastoral conviction. But it has become increasingly difficult to maintain that rugged frontiersman as hero, particularly since at midcentury the society approaches an overwhelming urbanization , and contemporary literature seems totally preoccupied with non-heroes whose landscapes are concrete and steel and whose primary characteristics are fixed upon failure. In such surroundings, faced with such assumptions, the hero is an anachronism, out of scale and out of kilter with contemporary standards of trutii. ?ßp?ß? Melville, "Billy Budd," The Portable Melville (New York, 1964), pp. 638-9. 2OwOi Wister, The Virginian ( New York, 1911 ), p. 4. 28RMMLA BulletinMarch 1969 That is why it is so surprising to meet a pair of Western heroes in contemporary American literature, the protagonists of two novels by Ken Kesey: Rändle McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ( 1962) and Hank Stamper in Sometimes a Great Notion ( 1964). Even more surprisingly, both of these heroes have received contemporary praise and survived contemporary criticism, possibly because they are so cleverly concealed in the jungle of contemporary standards which Kesey nourishes around them. McMurphy is a patient in an Oregon mental hospital; Hank Stamper is so surrounded by Freudian implications, complicated fraternal relationships, and sexual rivalries that it is nearly impossible to catch a glimpse of his shining armor. Yet heroes both are, and they dwell, as their ancestors did, in the Virgin Land, victims like all their kind of the pastoral dream in which civilization is a dirty word and Jeffersonian democracy is both the shape of the golden past and the definition of the Utopian ideal. It is an attractive dream, a familiar and simple myth in the Western novel, where the good guys always triumph over the bad guys; or it is a complicated fable in a novel like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where the heroes of the river glide forever past the slack corruption of the town. In essence, any version of the story is a transcendental one. Central to it is the hero, more Jacksonian than Jeffersonian man, intuitive in action, non-intellectual in habit, anti-social, anti-urban, and full of the freedom and strength inherent in nature. The enemy he fights is society, artificial, complex , institutionalized—civilization, if you will, the enemy of Rändle McMurphy...

Review: The Western Hero in History and Legend, by Kent L. Steckmesser and Doyce B. Nunis, Jr.

Review: <i>The Western Hero in History and Legend</i>, by Kent L. Steckmesser and Doyce B. Nunis, Jr.

The Western Hero in History and Legend

The Western Hero in History and Legend

The Western Hero in History and Legend

Journal Article The Western Hero in History and Legend. By Kent Ladd Steckmesser. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965. xiii + 281 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $5.95.) and Heroes Without Glory: Some Goodmen of the Old West. By Jack Schae-fer. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. xix + 323 pp. $5.95.) Get access Roger D. Abrahams Roger D. Abrahams University of Texas Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 52, Issue 4, March 1966, Pages 829–831, https://doi.org/10.2307/1894367 Published: 01 March 1966

The Western Hero in History and Legend

The Western Hero in History and Legend

The Western Hero in History and Legend

The Western Hero in History and Legend

Sociological Symbolism of the "Adult Western"

A socio-psychological analysis of the recurring ideas and emotions that inifluence and produce the adult with a theory as to why it has appeared at this time. The adult is treated as a art form that expresses the emotions, fears, inadequacies and psychoses of modern man. VERY culture has at some precise time in its growth created a folk-type art form in response to its inner turmoils and strivings to satisfy its need for expression of its character. Thus, various art forms such as the Elizabethan theatre, Grecian sculpture, Arthurian legends, impressionistic painting, classical ballet, ethnic folk singing, Flamenco dancing, and so forth, arose as the answer to a need for expression of the culture. For example, the Elizabethan theatre arose in greater part to articulate intense feelings of nationalism, to provide an outlet for the craving for romanitic adventure, to resonate the thoughts of a people just throwing off the shackles of feudalism and searching for knowledge, and to contribute to tlhe enthusiasm and passion for the newly formulated language. The Spanish Armada had been decisively defeated by an all-English navy; English explorers were planting the flag throughout the world and carrying back exotic stories of foreign lands; the Renaissance had liberated the soul and endowed it with a great questioning attitude toward its environment, and the advent of printing had stabilized and focused attention on the nascent language. In such a manner, the adult has evolved at this precise time in our culture as a new art form delineating our motivations and psychoses and permitting their vicarious catharsis. It must be understood that we are not speaking of art in the classical sense, but rather in its secondary meaning as the systematic application of knowledge or skill in effecting a desired result by the adaptation of ideas or emotions to a form of expression. What, then, are these recurring ideas or emotions that influence and produce the adult and make it so enjoyable to all segments of our society? First, the Western contains the spirit of foreign adventure, of new and exciting places; the same element which made the operettas of the twenties and thirties so popular, the locale that is foreign to ours and that gives us a chance to escape our every-day environment and visit some place exotic. Shakespeare used this element successfully in his tales of the kings and the histories which all used foreign locales in the plot. Hollywood used this element in the thirties with a raft of pictures about tropical islands in the prewar South Pacific. Remember, although the western takes place in the United States, the locale is still exotic and foreign, because this locale is not in evidence today and few people have a living memory of it. Coupled with this spirit of foreign adventure is the inherent romance of the West. As the Greeks were concerned with their Trojan Wars, and the Spaniards with their new world conquests, and the English with their colonization, so the American is preoccupied with the West of the beautiful landscapes, with the wide open spaces, the valleys, canyons, mountains, and other scenery. The very landscape breathes heroism between not men but giants. To exist in this land you need heroic will. To the average city dweller, confined to a neighborhood of row houses, a stretch of prairie or mountain range extending as far as the eye can see offers a transcending exhilaration. A second feature lending form and direction to the western format is the unique western hero; for with the western, America has developed its first universal-type hero. America has always been hero-shy; all its heroes are either modern, like movie stars or sports figures, or men of a limited locality such as Paul Bunyan or Rip Van Winkle. Americans have never made a fetish of their Navy and Army heroes as the British, or as the Russians of tlleir Cossacks. America has no mythology as the Europeans, she has no ties with the land or the past as the Israelis, she has had no kings or conquerors leading her armies. The closest America has to heroes are its frontier scout-hunter or Indian fighter and its Babe Ruth's and Lou Gehrig's. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.211 on Fri, 24 Jun 2016 06:51:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Daisy Miller, Western Hero

Daisy Miller, Western Hero

James Hall and the Hugh Glass Legend

A new type of literary character has reappeared with increasing frequency on the roster of Western heroes during recent years.' In books factual, fictional and poetic, from popular paper backs to serious hard covers, writers have rediscovered the mountain man-the Western trapper-as a literary resource. To trace this development in all its ramifications is a long and intricate problem.2 Yet a single illustration of the early appearance of the trapper in print will suggest something of the process by which fact has given rise to legend and to written literature. In his historical context and natural setting the mountain man generically was a complex character. Men of this type, searching for ponds and streams rich in beaver, whose pelts held promise of a fortune in Eastern and European markets, broke in great numbers into the transMississippi wilderness following the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-06. Often stimulated to this kind of rugged life by adventure and the freedom of open spaces rather than by gain, they consisted of many kinds of frontiersmen. Among them were the voyageur and coureur de bois of the North, who fascinated Washington Irving; the Creole from the French settlements near St. Louis, represented at his best by Francis Parkman's guide on the Oregon and Santa Fe trails, Henry Chatillon;