• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4350 0

power. The chief factor was nature. Unlike James Fenimore Cooper, who saw the forest as a place of danger, Wister promoted national parks, such as Yellowstone, for tourism. The Virginian ends with the Virginian and Molly getting married in a beautiful federal forest in Wyoming. No longer were Native Americans a problem in the West—they had been defeated. The new “noble savage” in The Virginian was the Virginian himself, who as a cowboy was liberating himself from industrial disease, urban chaos, and boogie-street immorality. Consequentially, for a man like the Virginian (or Roosevelt) to exist, there had to be a wilderness. Owing to Roosevelt’s embrace of The Virginian, the new American male archetype was off and running, and the concept included the promotion of forestry and humane treatment of horses. “The Virginian is also, despite his skill in violence, a kind man,” the the literary historian John G. Cawelti noted in a Barnes & Noble edition of the book: “Two of the most striking episodes in the novel—one involving a denuded hen named Emily and the other an abused horse—illustrate his general kindness to animals.”35

Wister’s character was a reserved man who obeyed the law, respected nature, never cursed, was courteous to women, and even befriended Indians. Considerateness and gentlemanliness were part of his charm. And he was a walking, talking exemplification of the Boone and Crockett Club’s sportsmen’s code, and also a one-man rodeo. Just as the U.S. Forest Service later used Smokey the Bear to teach people about the dangers of forest fires, The Virginian could be read as constructive propaganda, i.e. real men didn’t disobey federal laws by poaching in places like Yellowstone or Yosemite or the Black Hills; that real cowboys respected the boundaries of national parks and never desecrated these sites. It’s indisputable that The Virginian was worth more, in terms of public relations for President Roosevelt and his conservationist-preservationist agenda, than any five Madison Avenue firms of later years could have been.

Reveling in The Virginian as literature, Roosevelt even approved of the vigilante justice in the novel. Cattle rustlers, plumers, poachers, abusers of wildlife—in Wister’s West they deserved to be hanged. Of course, as president Roosevelt couldn’t sanction Wister’s tracking down and hanging of rustlers, but his sympathies were in that direction. The railroad and barbed wire had ended the open-range era of the West. Gone were the old days of first-generation cowboy lore. President Roosevelt and Wister both scorned the new big business: conglomerates of oil, transportation, and manufacturing which were destroying the wilderness they found so intoxicating. It was up to the new generation of cowboys, Roosevelt believed, to stand against these usurpers. Yesterday’s free-range cattlemen had to become the front line in his conservation movement. To Roosevelt the three great values of America—individualism, nationalism, and democracy—needed wilderness to flourish.

As Wister implies in his dedication, he had let Roosevelt line-edit The Virginian. Why? If Wister’s hero had been prone to wrongheaded violence—eradication of animals, genocide of Indians, brothel morals—as many first-generation western white men actually were, then wouldn’t his book, in effect, be granting mythological status to rogues? To President Roosevelt’s thinking there was already too much melodramatic romanticization going on in the American West. There were too many men like Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and John Wesley Hardin. The black hats were dominating the nickel-novel market. The white-hatted scientists who worked for the U.S. Biological Survey naturally seemed boring and tame compared with the Kid. Wasn’t it far better to give the lawmakers and biologists a boost in the popular imagination? Wasn’t it better to promote Wyatt Earp, Pat Garrett, John Muir, and other men of their type as the heroic face of the American West?* Furthermore, western folklore already had its exploiter gods: Paul Bunyan obliterated forests with his mighty ax