Virginian (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (57 page)

1
(p. 142)
“Crow”:
The Crow are an indigenous people of North America who lived mostly around the Yellowstone River. They were known for farming tobacco, which they used for religious rituals as well as for pleasure.

2
(p. 145)
“Saynt Augustine.” He meant the great Augustin, the traditional chef of Philadelphia:
Saint Augustine (A.D. 354-430) was a theologian and philosopher; his autobiography,
Confessions,
is a classic Christian work. Here the Virginian is making a joke in referring to Augustin, a caterer in Philadelphia in the early to mid-1800s.

3
(p. 146)
“Tulare, California”:
Located in central California, Tulare County is bordered by the Sierra Nevada mountain range along its eastern side.

4
(p. 147)
“Cliff House”:
This famous landmark in San Francisco, California, has a long history. The first Cliff House was built in 1863 at Ocean Beach. Numerous U.S. presidents, as well as such aristocratic San Francisco families as the Hearsts, Stanfords, and Crockers, all stayed and dined there. In 1881 millionaire Adolph Sutro bought the building and built a railroad to the beach to bring in more customers. Destroyed by fire in 1894, the Cliff House was rebuilt twice, lastly in 1909 by Sutro’s daughter in a neoclassical style. The National Park Service acquired the building in 1977.

1
(p. 158)
Winchester rifle:
American industrialist Oliver Winchester ( 1810-1880) operated the New Haven Arms Company, which manufactured repeating rifles. In 1860 the company introduced the Henry repeating rifle, which was used in the Civil War. Winchester’s company was renamed the Winchester Repeating Arms Company in 1867.

1
(p. 162)
“’Dar is a big Car‘lina nigger... Can’t walk around the streets and scandalize me’ ”:
This song is about the Jim Crow Laws, passed in southern states in the late 1800s after Reconstruction. These repressive codes enforced racial segregation in public places and on public transport. They were overturned by the progressive civil rights legislation of the 1950s and 1960s. The name “Jim Crow” comes from earlier caricature portrayals of blacks in minstrel shows.

1
(p. 170)
“it wasn’t that George Washington couldn’t tell a lie.... I’m sure if he’d undertaken to he’d have told a much better one than Cornwallis”:
One of the most popular legends associated with George Washington ( 1732-1799), commander in chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolution and the first U.S. president, is that, because of his honesty, he was unable to lie about chopping down a cherry tree. English general Charles Cornwallis ( 1738-1805) served the British during the Revolutionary War.

1
(p. 177)
“Knights of Pythias”:
This fraternal organization developed in the nineteenth century, along with such groups as the Improved Order of Red Men and the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. Such American institutions were important forums for social gatherings at the turn of the century.

2
(p. 180)
doctrine of original sin:
According to this Christian doctrine, all people are born with the sin of the first humans, Adam and Eve, who disobeyed God’s command not to eat fruit from the tree of knowledge. The doctrine holds that humans must be purged of this original sin by baptism, thus enforcing the need for redemption.

1
(p. 188)
the Eastern warblings of the Ogdens sounded doubly sweet to Molly Wood.... Newport, Bar Harbor, and Tiffany’s:
These are well-known destinations of the eastern United States. Newport and Bar Harbor are historic resort towns in Rhode Island and Maine, respectively; Tiffany & Company, which opened in New York City in 1837, was and remains one of the country’s finest purveyors of china and jewelry.

1
(p. 205)
My dear Miss Wood:
This is one of several moments in the novel when the narrator seems to overstep the extent of his own knowledge: How has he come into possession of this letter?

1
(p. 220)
Balaam and Pedro:
See note 1 to chapter 6.

2
(p. 224)
“the Southern Reservation”:
Congress established self-governing reservations for the “benefit” of Native Americans; however, many of these tracts were arid lands with poor hunting, and Native Americans were often not permitted to hunt beyond their borders. Melody Graulich writes of the novel’s era in her introduction to
Reading “The Virginian” in the New West:
“Most Indian tribes have been herded onto reservations, where beef contracts provide another source of capital for enterprising entrepreneurs; agents ‘allow’ some Crow off the reservation to sell ‘painted bows and arrows’ to tourists, while the artistic productions of southwestern tribes, like Molly’s Navajo blanket, are already being marketed beyond the region by Indian traders” (p. xi).

1
(p. 271)
Owl Creek,...Washakie Needles,... the Divide to Gros Ventre:
Owl Creek and Gros Ventre are Wyoming ranges of the Rocky Mountains. Washakie Needles is a peak of Wyoming’s Absaroka range of the Rockies. The Continental Divide follows the crest of the Rocky Mountains in Canada and the United States, separating westward-and eastward-flowing drainages.

1
(p. 298)
“thieves have got hold of the juries in Johnson County”:
See note 3 to chapter 1.

1
(p. 313)
“I see no likeness in principle whatever between burning Southern negroes in public and hanging Wyoming horse-thieves in private” :
The Virginian’s vigilante justice follows lynch laws, named after Captain William Lynch ( 1742-1820), also of Virginia. Mitford Mathews writes of them in
Americanisms:
“The practice or custom by which persons are punished for real or alleged crimes without due process of law; the punishment so meted out ... [while lynch law] might lend itself to wrong-doing, and yet, in lawless, wild communities, [it] furnishes a certain kind of rough-and-ready justice.” (See also note 3 to chapter 1.)

1
(p. 326)
“ladies’
temperance meetin’ ”:
This is a reference to the progressive women’s movements of the nineteenth century that lobbied for the moderate consumption or the prohibition of alcohol; such organizations were often tied to religious revivalism and abolitionism.

1
(p. 359)
in a broken country there is nothing left to steal: The
Virginian is largely a novel of nostalgia. In a letter to Robert U. Johnson, dated November 16, 1910, Wister writes: “If progress can empty the rivers of fish and the woods of wild creatures, and fence the wilderness with barbed wire and fill it with second rate people instead of first rate buffalo and antelope—I thank gods it cannot fence the sky, or kill the air, or hide the sun” (Wister,
Fifty Years of The Virginian:
1902-1952).’

The Virginian, published in 1902, was an immediate best-seller that set the public clamoring for more “westerns,” and Owen Wister’s novel became a model for those that followed.

Prolific author Zane Grey wrote more than sixty westerns. In Grey’s best-known work,
Riders of the Purple Sage
(1912), mysterious outlaw Lassiter befriends Jane Witherspoon, a wealthy Mormon ranch owner who has distanced herself from her religious community. Other popular early-twentieth-century authors of the genre include Ernest Haycox and Frederick Faust. The latter, who wrote mainly under the pseudonym Max Brand, was extremely prolific, creating more than 300 western novels, beginning with
The Untamed
(1919).

Many of the popular western novels of the mid-twentieth century are still widely read. In Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s
The Ox-Bow Incident
(1940), set in 1885, mob mentality and vigilante justice in the Wild West lead to the wrongful lynching of three men. In A. B. Guthrie’s
The Big Sky
(1947), a larger-than-life character, Kentucky fur trapper Boone Caudill, undertakes a quest for freedom in the uncultivated West of the early nineteenth century. Hondo (1953), by Louis L’Amour—one of the most popular western writers of all time—traces the struggle of a cavalry scout in Arizona during the Apache Wars of the 1800s as he grapples with conflicting desires: to settle down or to live a life of high adventure.

The western became more sophisticated in the second half of the twentieth century. In high-action novels such as
The Bounty Hunters
(1953) and
Hombre
(1961), Elmore Leonard revitalized the western, bucking its usual clichés to create multifaceted characters and unique plotlines. James Michener’s 900-page best-seller
Centennial
(1974) is a vast panorama of a fictional Colorado town, replete with Native Americans, English nobility, cowboys, and eastern Americans looking for a better life.
Lonesome Dove
(1985), the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Larry McMurtry, follows the myriad adventures of two aging Texas rangers as they wrangle a herd of horses from the Rio Grande to Montana. Cormac McCarthy’s haunting best-seller
All the Pretty Horses
(1992) is set in 1949, much later than the traditional western; it is the coming-of-age story of sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole, who, after the death of his grandfather, flees Texas with two companions and attempts to find ranching work in the rugged Mexican desert. With
Close Range: Wyoming Stories
(1999), Annie Proulx became one of the first female writers to tackle the genre; her vivid, raw tales evoke the West with deft characterization and haunting atmosphere.

Legendary filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille directed the first of several movie adaptations of
The Virginian;
his fifty-minute silent, released in 1914, stars Dustin Farnum, who had played the title character in a well-received stage adaptation of the novel. Another silent version of
The Virginian,
by director Tom Forman, appeared in 1923. The definitive adaptation of Wister’s novel is the 1929 film directed by Victor Fleming, a giant of American cinema who later directed
Gone with the Wind
(1939) and
The Wizard of Oz
(1939). Gary Cooper played the title role in Fleming’s film, with Mary Brian as Molly and Walter Huston as Trampas. (Huston was the father of filmmaker John Huston, who directed the famed westerns
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
of 1948 and
The Unforgiven,
released in 1960.) After his role in
The Virginian,
Cooper was the actor who embodied American masculinity; he went on to star in two adaptations of novels by literary tough-guy Ernest Hemingway,
A Farewell to Arms
(1932) and
For Whom the Bell Tolls
(1943), and toward the end of his career, the western
High Noon
(1952). Stuart Gilmore directed the last major motion-picture production of The
Virginian
(1946), which starred Joel McCrea.

The Virginian
also inspired a top-caliber television series starring James Drury. It aired 249 episodes from 1962 to 1971 and featured guest appearances by such luminaries as Bette Davis, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Diane Baker, George C. Scott, and Harrison Ford. Almost forty years after the first episode in which Drury played the nameless hero, he came back to play a rider in a television movie adaptation of
The Virginian
(2000) starring and directed by Bill Pullman.

Wister’s influence on cinema extended well beyond adaptations of
The Virginian.
The western became one of the most dynamic and most distinctly American cinematic genres. It seems that part of what compels filmmakers to try their hand at the western form is the nostalgia—even regret—built into its subject matter, for by the time movies were being made about the Old West, the cowboy culture was nearly extinct: The Indian Wars were over and native peoples were cordoned off onto reservations, and the expanding railroad system had connected the various parts of the country, erasing the frontier and its “lost Eden” mythology. The cowboys that remained, lacking applications for their unique talents, often found employment with the film studios as advisers. The theme of the useless cowpoke shows up in many classic westerns, such as John Huston’s
The Misfits
(1961). Even the early silents, like the William S. Hart vehicle
Hell’s Hinges
(1916), directed by Charles Swickard, look back wistfully at a simpler, more honorable time.

John Ford directed more than 200 feature films, most of them westerns. His love of the western landscape—in particular, Monument Valley’s buttes, mesas, and fenceless plains—comes across in his sweeping pictorial style. With masterpieces that include
Stagecoach
(1939),
Rio
Grande
( 1950),
The Searchers
(1956), and
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence
(1962), Ford became known for his use of strong color and his spectacular, wide-angle shots. Ford’s films made actor John Wayne the archetypal western hero.

The 1940s and 1950s are commonly referred to as the golden age of the American western.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
(1948), adapted from the novel by B. Traven, follows Fred C. Dobbs, played by Humphrey Bogart, as he prospects for gold in the Mexican hills. As his mission becomes imperiled and the concept of the “one last score” dissolves, Dobbs’s avarice is outdone only by his instinct for self-preservation. John Huston won Oscars for both his screenplay and his direction, and Walter Huston won the award for best supporting actor. Other triumphs in the western genre from this period include Shane (1953), with Alan Ladd in the title role; The
Gunfighter
(1950), starring Gregory Peck; and Fred Zinnemann’s stunning
High Noon
(1952). Zinnemann’s masterpiece stars Gary Cooper in an Oscar-winning performance as stubborn sheriff Marshal Will Kane, who must protect his town against a desperado due to arrive on the noon train.