By Phil Roberts,
published April 3, 1980
“It is a fearful place. A town consisting of a station and a dozen wooden horrors of various purposes.”
Such a description hardly seems likely to come from a man who would make the place (and himself) famous by featuring it in his book, the first Western novel ever published.
The writer was Owen Wister; the town, Medicine Bow; the book, The Virginian.
Wister, born in Philadelphia just before the start of the Civil War, was an arch-type upper class Easterner. He was educated in the best private schools in New Hampshire, Switzerland and England. In college at Harvard he studied music and, later, spent two years in Europe at music academies.
In 1884, his health was deteriorating and taking the advice of his former classmate and good friend Theodore Roosevelt, he decided to come West.
Some of his journal accounts and selections from letters home indicate that Wyoming in the 1880s was a difficult place for wealthy Eastern gentlemen to get used to.
“This life has a psychological effect on you. To ride 20 miles and see no chance of seeing human traces, to get up on a mountain and overlook any number of square miles of strange volcano-looking convolutions—and never a column of smoke or a sound except the immediate grasshopper—and then never to go upstairs. You begin to wonder if there is such a place as Philadelphia anywhere—and if so, where?”[i]
Wister spent his first summer in Wyoming as a guest at the ranch of Major Frank Wolcott (later a leader of the “invaders” in the Johnson County War/Invasion).[ii]
Wister returned to the East and Harvard Law School after a pleasurable summer in Wyoming. During the next five years he came back to Wyoming four summers. While he was impressed with the natural beauty of the state, some of his comments in his journal, republished in the book, Owen Wister Out West, by his daughter, Fanny Kemble Stokes, are hardly complimentary to Wyoming towns. A copy of the book is in the collection of the Wyoming State Archives, Museums and Historical Department.[iii]
“There stands Douglas like a pillar of salt, a monument to the reckless animal spirits of the American vagrant. There are no mines here. Farming is impossible… There is absolutely nothing that could possibly make Douglas a real place.”[iv]
The next stop, more of the same: “I reached Casper at 7 p.m. …. Hotel food, vile, Town of Casper, vile.”
He was impressed with the beauty of the mountains at another stop and a little more charitable about the town: “Buffalo is a shade better in its appearance than most of these towns.”
Strangely, Wister kept some of his harshest words for the very town that would be featured in his book years later: “This place is called a town. ‘Town’ will do very well until the language stretches itself and takes in a new word that fits. Medicine Bow, Wyoming, consists of: 1 depot house and baggage room, 1 coal shooter, 1 water tank, 1 store, 2 eating house, 1 billiard hall, 6 shanties, 8 gents and ladies walks, 2 tool houses, 1 feed stable, 5 too late for classification, 29 buildings in all.”[v]
He was even less pleasant about his evening meal there: “The lady who waited on us at supper, I do not believe is in a family way—I believe she has a gross stomach. I slung my teeth over the corned beef she gave me and thought I was chewing a hammock.”
That night, before a stage trip north, he was forced to sleep on the counter of the store because all the rooms in town were taken by other guests.
As one would expect from an Eastern gentlemen, Wister was enamored by the Wind River mountains, the Big Horns, the Tetons and Yellowstone Park. He hunted in the Wind River area for elk and bear and spent many days fishing for trout.
After spending four of five summers in Wyoming, graduating from Harvard Law School and entering a Philadelphia law firm, he was sent West by Harpers Magazine to do a series of articles. Frederic Remington was to illustrate the series.[vi]
In 1902 he used several of the articles as chapters in his full-length novel with a Western theme. The Virginian was born. Medicine Bow, the undistinguished 30-year-old railroad town, was put on the map.
The Virginian, dedicated to Wister’s friend Theodore Roosevelt, became an instant best-seller. By 1938, the year of Wister’s death, the novel had sold more than 1 ½ million copies. While it remained one of the most popular novels in its first 80 years, it also spawned several movies and a television series.[vii]
Although some people still may claim “the Virginian was my grandfather,” or someone their family knew, Wister said the main character was actually a combination of a Wyoming man, an Arizonan, and a Kansas man he had met on his western travels over the years.[viii]
Wister wrote numerous other short stories and novels during his career, but none was as popular as his first. He frequently returned to Wyoming and built a vacation cabin near Jackson.
In the 1970s, the log structure was moved to Medicine Bow by the Lions Club and, through donations, reassembled next to the railroad depot, a building that, since 1980, has housed the town’s museum. The Virginian Hotel, one of the town’s landmarks, was built in 1911, years after book was published.[ix] The words branded into the wooden sign in front of Wister cabin were those put into the mouth of a Western hero by a Philadelphia lawyer: “When you call me that, smile.”
[i] Many of the direct quotations come from Wister’s journals and letters, held in the collections of the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming. Some have been collected and edited in a book, Owen Wister Out West: His Journals and Letters. By Owen Wister, edited by Fanny Kemble Wister. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).
[ii] Wister favored the side of the “invaders.” Scheduled to come West in the late spring of 1892, he cancelled the Wyoming leg of the trip when he found out how his friends, the “invaders,” had failed miserably in their battle against small ranchers in Johnson County.
[iii] The name of the State Archives, Museums and Historical Department was changed in the wake of state reorganization and merger of agencies in the early 1990s. The department’s parts are now in the Cultural Resources Division, Wyoming State Parks and Cultural Resources Department. The physical location, temporarily moved to the U. S. West building in Cheyenne for two years in the middle 1990s, is still in the Barrett Building in the State Capitol Complex on Central Avenue between 23rd and 24th Streets in Cheyenne.
[iv] Douglas was established by the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad in 1887 near the site of Fort Fetterman, abandoned by the railroad in the early 1880s. For a story about a unique medical organization founded at Fetterman by a group of cowboys and ranchers, see the article on this site about the Fetterman Hospital Association.
[v] The building list, with slight variations, appears in the pages of The Virginian, an example of how many observations Wister made in his journals and letters found their way into his writings years later.
[vi] Owen Wister, “The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher,” Harper’s Magazine, Sept. 1895.
[vii] Several of the films were made in the early years of silent movies. They are: The Virginian, starring Dustin Farnum and directed by Cecil B. DeMille (1914); The Virginian, starring Kenneth Harlan, a silent film based on play co-written by Owen Wister and playwright Kirk LaSelle (1923); The Virginian, starring Gary Cooper (1929) and co-starringWalter Huston, Richard Arlen. This black and white film was directed by Victor Fleming. The Virginian, starring Joel McCrea (1946) co-starred Brian Donlevy, Barbara Britton, it was directed by Stuart Gilmore. The most recent movie titled The Virginian was a made-for-television version starring Bill Pullman and filmed mostly in Canada (2000) James Drury starred in The Virginian as a television series from 1962-70. The 1st 90-minute Western TV drama was broadcast by NBC
[viii] A number of theories postulated the identity of the person who influenced the character, his name and his origin. At least one commentator claimed that Wister wrote only the first few chapters and, frustrated with the work, handed it over to a Wyoming journalist, Tom Daggett, who finished the novel. No credible evidence confirms the story.
[ix] Glen Barrett, The Virginian at Medicine Bow(Boise, privately printed, 1978)