The Searchers (31 page)

Women characters were transformed as well, from Cooper's delicate and passive objects of desire to rough-and-ready gals who could handle themselves in any situation.
One recurring character
was the purported Indian girl of great physical ability—she rides and shoots better than any man—who turns out to be an upper-class white girl who had been abducted as a child by Indians.

Buffalo Bill himself took the next step, turning literature into live entertainment, bringing real cowboys, Indians, horses, cattle, and even stagecoaches and buffalo onstage for his Wild West Show.

The cowboy was Natty Bumppo's natural heir: a rugged man, freed
from the phony gentility of East Coast society and transformed into a two-gunned, two-fisted man with his own moral code. Sometimes he himself was an outlaw or had been one in the past, and he was not always readily distinguishable from the bad guys he fought against. And fight he did: gun violence was his means of taming and purifying the wilderness. Almost every story ended with a triumphant gunfight.

The first great cowboy novel
, Owen Wister's
The Virginian
, published in 1902 and dedicated to his good friend Theodore Roosevelt, sold nearly two hundred thousand copies in its first year. The Virginian is a transplanted Easterner who has become a cowhand in Wyoming: a natural man, supremely competent, suspicious of city folks and their silly, impatient, sharp-dealing ways.
He is not too fond of foreigners
or of Jews, two of whom he unceremoniously evicts from a flophouse late one evening to make more room for himself. The narrator, a visitor from the East, describes him in Nietzsche-like, homoerotic terms as “
a slim young giant
, more beautiful than pictures. His broad, soft hat was pushed back; a loose-knotted, dull-scarlet handkerchief sagged from his throat; and one casual thumb was hooked in the cartridge-belt that slanted across his hips. He had plainly come many miles from somewhere across the vast horizon, as the dust upon him showed … The weather-beaten bloom of his face shone through it duskily, as the ripe peaches look upon their trees in a dry season. But no dinginess of travel or shabbiness of attire could tarnish the splendor that radiated from his youth and strength.”

The Virginian—we never learn his real name—is a laconic superman who slays the bad guy, wins the heart of the pretty schoolteacher, and rides off with her into the sunset.

Popular fiction writers such as Zane Grey, Max Brand, N. M. Bower, and Ernest Haycox would follow. Americans liked stories about themselves, and they especially admired mythic ones. Whatever the particular plotline, the Western was grounded in the enduring foundational myth that the American frontier was an untouched, pure new world, and a place to test one's mettle and faith.
The land was a metaphor
for the mission: taming the savage wilderness, after all, meant taming one's own soul. It was a place to celebrate the great American values: self-reliance, individualism, and democracy. And the wilderness could be made safe for white women and children only when Indians, with their chaotic violence and barbaric rapacity, had been subdued. The classic Man Who Knows Indians—a white man raised to understand the lore, mind-set, and weaknesses of red men—led the path to civilization.

The Western consistently outsold all other genres, including its closest competitor, the detective story—whose protagonist was, after all, just another version of the Western hero clothed in a double-breasted suit and sent forth into the urban wilderness minus the horse and saddle.

Men wrote and published most of the books, of course, both nonfiction and novels, and they presented a vision of the American West as an exclusively male domain where women served either as victims or as objects of purity rather than desire. It would take many years for a different and more ambiguous version of the settlement of the West to emerge: a female counternarrative that emphasized family and community over the lone heroic gunman. The characters created by Laura Ingalls Wilder and Willa Cather had to fight for their place alongside Wild Bill Hickok and Billy the Kid. Even Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane, the great sharpshooter and gunslinger, were women of manly virtues.

AN UNSENTIMENTAL MAN, Alan LeMay always claimed that his motives for writing Westerns were strictly monetary. But this was misleading. In focusing on the Western, he was writing what he knew best, honoring his own family history and his understanding of the struggle between white civilization and Indian culture.

His ancestors were pioneers
, searching for a promised land on the Great Plains of Kansas, guided by faith and opportunity—not unlike the Parkers of Texas some forty years earlier. LeMay's ancestors settled in Kansas in the days when buffalo herds were still a common sight and Cheyennes and Kiowas still a tangible threat. Indian abductions were a common theme: two white women, Anna White and Sarah Morgan, had been taken by Sioux and Cheyenne in 1868 and rescued the following year by troops under George Armstrong Custer. Anna White had become pregnant during her time in captivity, and after she gave birth to a half-Indian son her white husband threw her out—standard behavior toward a “polluted” former captive.

Alan's paternal grandmother came to Kansas from Denmark in 1870 when she was nineteen. Karen Sophia Jensen was part of a small band of congregants who followed their minister, the Reverend Nels Nelson, across the Atlantic by freighter and then by the new transcontinental railroad to Jamestown, Kansas, where she was one of eleven founding members of the Scandinavian Baptist Church and where she met Oliver Lamay (the spelling would change with the next generation to fit the pronunciation), a hunter and harness maker from nearby Concordia.
The couple married on June 24, 1872, and homesteaded 155 acres in a one-room sod house just outside Jamestown. The last major Indian attack took place 140 miles away on September 30, 1878, when Cheyennes rampaged through western Kansas, killing some thirty homesteaders outside the town of Oberlin. These Indians were not the confident, brazen Comanches of the 1830s but desperate escapees seeking to flee captivity on a reservation in Oklahoma and return to their native homeland in the north. No matter. For those in their path, the results were just as lethal.

Oliver wasn't much of a farmer, but he was a crack rifleman, reputedly the best in Kansas. Buffalo herds would occasionally storm by on their migration south, and one day Oliver grabbed his rifle and shot a buffalo not far from his front door. The animal rose and charged him, and Oliver threw himself into a gulley. The beast rode over him, collapsed a few paces farther, and died.

Early death was no stranger. Oliver and Sophia's three sons survived to adulthood, but their daughter died in infancy. Oliver himself got caught in a blizzard on a hunting trip and developed pneumonia. He died in 1879 at age twenty-six. Sophia, who had no formal education, raised the boys alone, putting all three through high school and college. Her grit and determination clearly served as model traits for Alan's strong, capable women characters.

Dan Brown, Alan's maternal grandfather
, was an Indiana boy who lied about his age to join the Indiana Volunteers and went off to fight the Civil War when he was sixteen. He was wounded in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain in June 1864 and carried to a crowded slave cabin that served as a makeshift field hospital. Dan lay in the sodden clothes in which he had been wounded on bed straw that was never changed, and subsisted on a diet of hardtack and sowbelly. When he was discharged from the hospital three weeks later, he weighed sixty-seven pounds. But he recovered, survived the war, and married an Indiana girl in 1867; Alan's mother, Maude, was born in LaPorte, Indiana, six years later. As an old man, Dan told Civil War stories to his attentive grandson, who learned that there was nothing romantic or redeeming about shooting a man or getting shot yourself.

In 1879 the Browns moved to Concordia on the Republican River in Cloud County, Kansas, where Dan opened a law office, ran for mayor, and bought and sold farmland. It was here that Sophia's eldest son, John LeMay, met Dan Brown's daughter, Maude. They were married in 1897 in Indianapolis; Alan was born two years later on North Illinois Street. He grew up there, graduated high school, and then served as a shave-tail infantry lieutenant during World War One—“
in which I accomplished nothing
,” he later recalled, having never left the States.

Alan LeMay in 1921, age twenty-two, on a schooner off the coast of Colombia, before he became a full-time author.

After the war he worked a wide variety of jobs: horse wrangler in Colorado, swamper in Wisconsin, fisherman in Florida, crew member on a schooner in the Caribbean, geologist in Colombia, sparring partner for a welterweight boxer in Chicago. “
I've also tried several other things
,” he later wrote, “none of them for very long, but each, I was told, for long enough.”

Perhaps it was the breadth of his recent experiences—or perhaps his driving need to find something he was good at—that drove him to become a writer. In any event, within a few months after he entered the University of Chicago in 1919 he was writing stories for money. He sold his first short story to
Detective Story
magazine in December 1919 and never looked back. Two months after he graduated in 1922, he married Esther Skinner, a girl from back home, and took a job at the
Aurora
Beacon News
, figuring to make a career as a reporter. But he quickly determined that fiction was more his line. He sold a few more short stories, then started on a novel.

It was, of course, a Western
.

PAINTED PONIES
IS SET ON THE PLATTE RIVER in western Kansas, and the heart of the story is the trek of the Cheyennes fleeing the wasteland of the Oklahoma reservation for Nebraska and Wyoming.

The novel's hero is a young cowhand named Ben “Slide” Morgan, who shuttles between the prosperous, ever-expanding white world of cowboys, ranch hands, and pioneers and the dying world of the nomadic Cheyenne, unsure whether he himself is white or Indian. The book has an elegiac tone and a rare and intense sympathy for both sides, Indians and pioneers.

The basic characters and the arc of the plot are ones that LeMay would return to time and again. There is the likable, ruggedly handsome cowboy hero, with a straight, bony nose, prominent cheekbones, and “
a face as friendly in expression
as that of a six-months pup.” Slide Morgan is a talented rider and a straight shooter who can handle himself in almost any situation that requires nerve, determination, or gunplay. But he is frustratingly tongue-tied when he tries to address the woman who is the object of his affection. Nancy Chase is eighteen, fair-skinned, spunky, and practical, a young woman willing to wait for the man she loves to realize he loves her too. LeMay lingers like a lover himself over his first fictional female creation: “It was a face of gently rounded lines, with quiet lips, and smiling eyes of a hazel color, as if the brown-green of the sage were shot through with flecks of sunlight. Her hair was of the color of misting rain when the sun faintly touches it with a breath of gold.”

These are characters whose very physical appearance is at one with the unspoiled, natural land they call home.

But what makes
Painted Ponies
stand out above the pulp fiction of its era is its powerful and sensitive portrait of Native Americans. Morgan first happens upon a scouting party of Cheyenne while he is fleeing vigilantes after killing a man in self-defense. The Indians spare his life because he speaks fluent Cheyenne and convinces them that he himself is Cheyenne by birth. They take him to their camp, where he meets Morning Star and Little Wolf, leaders of the procession of families heading north in a last-ditch attempt to return to their homeland. Seeing them for the first time is for Morgan “perhaps the deepest thrill he
had ever known. Here was a fighting people in the saddle, riding out of a land of death through a gauntlet of United States troops—fighting their way home!”

Morgan rides with the Cheyenne for several weeks as they make their bid for freedom. The Indian characters are sympathetically drawn, including a young widow, Antelope Woman, and her small son, Little Frog, whose moccasin Morgan repairs using a small piece of leather from his own. LeMay makes no attempt to turn Morgan into a white savior. Morgan admires the Cheyenne's ways and their doomed crusade, but he has no influence over them, and when they reach territory near his ranch, he breaks off and returns to his own affairs, leaving the Cheyenne to their fate. The Indians fight pitched battles and wage a deft if ultimately hopeless guerrilla campaign against federal troops until the last 149 Indians are rounded up and imprisoned at Fort Robinson. There they go on a hunger strike to protest being sent back to Oklahoma, then stage a breakout with a handful of smuggled rifles, killing their guards and attempting to flee. All of the Cheyenne are killed—men, women, and children alike, including Antelope Woman and Little Frog—cut down and slaughtered in the snow by soldiers grimly following orders. The victims lose their lives but not their dignity. The Western novel formula strains against something deeper, darker, more complex, and quite modern for its time.