The purpose of this webpage is to take a closer look at what makes up a Western and the history behind it.

What do you think of when you think of the Western? Do you picture the lone cowboy on his horse riding into the sunset or the showdown gunfight on Main Street at noon or the runaway stagecoach being chased by Indians?

The West has had a duality of being both a factual place and a mythical place. In the 30 years that the West existed, it saw the near extinction of the Indians, massive land rushes by homesteaders, gold rushes, and cattle drives. (Wright, p. 5)

"But in the years since 1970 the myth has become increasingly attenuated. For one thing, the West is becoming increasingly like the rest of the country, complete with standardized fast food franchises, shopping malls and housing developments which look much the same from New York to Los Angeles. The increasing sameness of the West and the East has finally accomplished what Frederick Jackson Turner prophesied in 1893: the closing of the spatial frontier has led to the closing of a spiritual and cultural frontier. There is no more free land; only real estate values." (Cawelti, p. 11)

The Western is "a form of popular art that is uniquely American in its settings, conflicts, and resolutions. Yet it is also the one genre of American popular fiction that has seized the imagination of almost the rest of the world. The Western hero, with his sturdy independence, his faithful horse, and his prominently displayed gun, has become the exemplar of American manhood, idealism, and courage. He has also represented a glorification of lawlessness, aggression, and violence." (Durham and Jones, p. v)

"Western stories ordinarily describe a part of the comparatively recent past, a time that lies somewhere between the Civil War and the invention of the automobile. Most Westerns (except for a few that involve their characters in "real" historical events like the Custer defeat or the Lincoln County War) resolutely avoid any more specific dating. Consequently the West becomes a land without time, distant yet paradoxically so close that it seems almost a part of the present." (Durham and Jones, p. 1)

"The setting is constant, as the name "Western story" implies. But frequently the story is vague about the exact place; its action unfolds on deserts or ranges that might be anywhere between Texas and Montana, and its hero can ride through mountain passes that be in the Oregon Cascades, the Colorado Rockies, or the California Sierra Nevada. Its isolated town may be in Wyoming or Arizona, and its lonely wind often howls in some nameless part of the vast West. This lack of specific setting gives a universality to the action, emphasizing the almost mythic quality of the characters and setting many Western stories apart from merely provincial or local-color fiction. Vagueness about exact place in Western stories has, incidentally, also been useful to Hollywood producers, who have filmed hundreds of Westerns just outside the suburbs of Los Angeles and thousands without going more than 250 miles from Beverly Hills." (Durham and Jones, p. 2)

Not much has been written about the Western before the nineteenth century. There is a general consensus that current popular Westerns were started by James Fenimore Cooper’s The Leatherstocking Tales in 1823. The most well known of these books is The Last of the Mohicans. Even though Cooper’s series takes place in the East and Cooper himself never went to the West, his books have had a great influence on those to come, especially Owen Wister.

Owen Wister wrote The Virginian in 1902. The Virginian is seen as the first formula Western. This is because it "created the romantic cowboy hero and many of the stock themes of subsequent Westerns." (Vinson, p. 285)

But before Wister’s The Virginian gained such prominence, the dime novel, created in 1858 by Erastus and Irwin Beadle, was the most popular and prolific form of literature. This is because they were very cheap so the working class could afford to buy them and they followed a very simplistic plot pattern that could be endlessly repeated in a variety of ways, although by 1890 interest in the dime novel waned.

1903 saw the release of the film The Great Train Robbery. The Great Train Robbery is usually considered to be the first Western film, mainly because it "set the pattern – of crime, pursuit, and retribution – for the Western film as a genre." (Fenin and Everson, p. 47) And by 1930, the Western film had become a fully recognized genre. 1940 saw the creation of the cowboy code by Gene Autry. Gene Autry was the first successful singing cowboy (Lusted, p. 112); the other being Roy Rogers. Autry’s code has ten guidelines on how a cowboy should be:

The 1950s and 1960s saw the height of the television Western. Most of the 1970s saw more of anti-westerns and parodies of Westerns than traditional Westerns. By 1980, the television Western was in decline.

Late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have seen an overall decline in interest in Westerns. This is because of many reasons: the Civil War, television and film, changing economics, and the development and modernization of the West as it was settled. John Cawelti believes "that the declining effectiveness of the Western as a popular genre results, in part, from the changing perception of the West itself. During the last part of the nineteenth century, the period when the Western really developed as a popular formula, the West was both a mythical landscape and an actual place. Readers of those dime novel adventures of cowboys, marshals, and badmen could feel increased interest in those stories because they purported to be based on near contemporary events and characters. In other words, the Western conflated time and space so that the “old West” was a place of mysterious excitements and great deeds, but was also somehow present and real." (Cawelti, pp. 10-11)

With this loss of the West as a place and the symbolism of the era of the mythical West, the Western has not had that characteristic spark that captures the imagination with wonder and the escapist thrill of adventure from heroes like the Lone Ranger, Buffalo Bill, and Wild Bill Hickok. And while Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour were two of the most prolific and popular Western authors, with the death of L’Amour in 1988, no other Western author has achieved the status that they hold. (Cawelti, p. 2)

Characterization of the Western Novel

All Westerns have the same components that make them Westerns. These are civilization (East) vs. the wild, untamed frontier (West) or savagery, right vs. wrong and the use of violence, and the overarching plot of the story.

"There are three central roles in the Western: the townspeople or agents of civilization, the savages or outlaws who threaten this first group, and the heroes who are above all "men in the middle", that is they possess many qualities and skills of savage but are fundamentally committed to the townspeople." (Cawelti, p. 73)

"In the traditional Western a very strong distinction was made between good violence (perpetrated by the hero) and bad violence (that used by the villains in pursuit of their evil aims). Moreover, the hero was usually portrayed as very reluctant to enter into violence." (Cawelti, p. 15) “In the earliest days of the Western only the bad and the bullying were actually killed and the tradition of poetic justice was fulsomely present. In fact in the early novels there wasn’t a great deal of shooting. The villain was as likely to be vanquished in a fist fight as by a six-shooter. There are often hints that this method is in fact more manly, certainly more civilized, like having to work-out in the Y.M.C.A gym. It was closer to the experience, or at least the more immediate longings, of the average dime novel reader." (Calder, p. 107)

These two components are very much intertwined in the Western because one component influences the other. The townspeople from the East, who are always seen as the good guys, are trying to make the West more like the East and the savages or outlaws, who are always seen as the bad guys, don’t like this because this process of civilization is taking away their space in the case of the savages or it makes it harder to do business as usual in the case of the outlaws. Eventually they come into conflict and it is up to the hero to mediate a resolution, usually by driving off or killing the bad guys.

The third component of the Western is the overarching plot. This is the type of Western that the story is. There are seven types of Westerns:

The plot is an important component because it sets the stage as to where and why the townspeople have a conflict with the savages or outlaws.

The Novels

I have read five Westerns for this project, which I will now discuss.

Casey Ryan is about the adventures of an Irishman named Casey Ryan as he works as a stagecoach driver and prospector in the Nevada desert. Ryan has a reputation for being a forceful driver, not turning aside for anyone, and having a short temper. But he is too trusting and gets into trouble. How will he get out?

Overall, I thought Casey Ryan was a typical, standard Western. It seemed to be very similar to some of the Max Brand Westerns that I’ve read in the past.

B.M. Bower has written over 70 Westerns, is one of the most widely known female authors, and is the first woman to make a career of writing Westerns. Page 29 of The Encyclopedia of Frontier and Western Fiction edited by Jon Tuska and Vicki Pickarski has a picture of Bower.

So Wild a Dream is a coming of age story set during the 1820s fur trade. After the love of Sam Morgan’s life marries his older brother, Sam sets out to wander the West. Along the way he meets various people and gets involved in many adventures in the process of becoming a mountain man.

I found So Wild a Dream to be an endearing story and really enjoyed reading it. The character of Sam Morgan was very believable.

Calder, Jenni There Must Be a Lone Ranger Hamish Hamilton Ltd. 1974

Cawelti, John G. The Six-Gun Mystique Bowling Green State University Popular Press 1984 2nd edition

Cawelti, John G. The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel Bowling Green State University Popular Press 1999

Durham, Philip and Jones, Everett L. The Western Story: Fact, Fiction, and Myth Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1975

Fenin, George N. and Everson, William K. The Western from Silents to the Seventies Grossman Publishers 1962 1973 edition

Jones, Daryl The Dime Novel Western Bowling Green State University Popular Press 1978

Lusted, David The Western Pearson Education Limited 2003

Tuska, Jon and Piekarski, Vicki edited Encyclopedia of Frontier and Western Fiction McGraw-Hill, Inc. 1983

Vinson, James edited Twentieth Century Western Writers MacMillan Press Ltd. 1982

Wright, Will Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western University of California Press 1975