The Virginian Meets Matt Shepard
By D. Claudia Thompson
In 1951, in preparation for the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Virginian, Prof. N. Orwin Rush of the University of Wyoming wrote to Fanny Kemble Stokes, Owen Wister’s daughter, to inquire into the whereabouts of the journals that Wister had kept during his trips to the west in which he had gathered material for his writings. Wister’s children were unaware that such journals existed, but, after a brief search, they discovered the notebooks in a desk that had been in Wister’s study.
The journals were donated to the University of Wyoming, and they now form the core of the Owen Wister Papers at the American Heritage Center. Mrs. Stokes edited and published some of them as Owen Wister Out West in 1958. In the introduction, reflecting onThe Virginian she wrote:
Its hero was the first cowboy to capture the public’s imagination… Before this, cowboys had been depicted as murderous thugs. The Virginian was utterly different… Because of him, little boys wear ten-gallon hats and carry toy pistols…We still have Western stories, Western movies, and Western radio and television drama in which the cowboy hero defends justice and his girl’s honor and shoots it out with the villain. The Virginian stands among the ten best-selling novels of the past fifty years. It was written as fiction but has become history.1
In the 1950s, when this was written, the popularity of the Western was just about at its peak. There were, in fact, no less than twenty-nine Western series on television in 1958.2 Mrs. Stokes, in my opinion, overstates Wister’s role in creating the cowboy as hero; but no one who has ever watched Matt Dillon gun down his opponent at high noon on the main street of Dodge City in the opening sequence of Gunsmoke is likely to deny that Wister had an impact. Mrs. Stokes’s second and even more grandiose statement that Wister’s “fiction has become history,” however, it is partly the aim of this paper to affirm.
Modern scholarship has begun to explore the inter-relations between history and myth; and what we have discovered is that myth affects history as much as history affects myth. The myths that people believe in influence and shape their actions; and the myth of the heroic cowboy has had an impact on our view of ourselves as Americans for as long as that myth has existed.
Mrs. Stokes is correct in pointing out that the original heroes of European civilization in America were not cowboys. The figure of the heroic cowboy is actually superimposed on an older Euro-American myth: the Wild West. The Wild West was born when the first European ships set out across the Atlantic. West was the direction of the unknown, the unknown is always dangerous, and, to Europeans, dangerous was equated with wild. The settlers came armed and prepared for danger and violence, and they found what they were looking for.
And here I would like to point out that, although myth is a word that is often used to denote something that is untrue, that is not strictly the sense in which I am using it. By myth, I mean a belief or assumption accepted without proof, which may turn out to be either true or false when acted on. Any myth that is found to be consistently false is apt to be discarded.
At any rate, the European settlers came prepared for conflict with the people already inhabiting the land, conflict occurred, and so the myth, having proved true on application, survived and was strengthened. Indian-white conflicts became a staple not only of each new westward expansion but also of popular literature. Captivity narratives, stories of Indian attacks and of the escape of heroic white survivors, began to be published in the 1600s and new stories continued to be added to the lexicon until at least the 1870s.3 The appeal of these stories was always that they were true; and under the influence of such stories, travelers on the Oregon and California Trails in the mid-1800s always set out heavily armed and determined not to let themselves or their loved ones fall prey to the terrific tortures that the narratives assured them that Indians practiced.
Statistics regarding mortality along the emigrant trails are uncertain and controversial, and they are necessarily heavily based on the anecdotal evidence found in surviving journals and letters. But one source estimates that careless mishandling of firearms was the leading cause of accidental death on the trail. Another source places drownings first and shootings second. A third writer concludes from these estimates, “The evidence shows that the abundant emigrant weaponry actually increased the risks involved in an overland journey.”4 On the other hand, authenticated Indian attacks did occur, and some travelers were captured or killed by Indians, so the belief in danger from Indians survived as a lively part of the western myth.
Curiously, because it survived, it tended to survive whole. When I was a child, I remember picking up a western novel set on the Oregon Trail on the cover of which was a hapless blonde girl tied to a stake in the middle of the plains. The writer, or at any rate the illustrator, apparently was not aware that the western Indians, unlike the eastern woodland peoples, did not practice ritual captive torture. Nevertheless, it should have occurred to somebody that burning at the stake is an unlikely pastime for any culture accustomed to living on a tree-challenged prairie.
Absurdities of this sort, however, are unimportant when they occur in stories that everybody accepts as fiction. The tendency of the emigrants to shoot themselves and each other, in mistake for marauding Indians, is more problematic. But occasionally the myth became dysfunctional enough to be truly dangerous. In August 1854, near Fort Laramie, a cow strayed away from an emigrant train and was shot and butchered by a small group of Miniconjou Sioux who were camped with a larger group of Brulé Sioux. The owner of the cow complained of his loss to the commander of the post when the train reached the fort. The commander sent a young second lieutenant, John L. Grattan, newly-graduated from West Point and inexperienced in the West, with a detail of twenty-nine men and two howitzers to arrest the accused Indians. The leading man of the Brulé village, Brave Bear, tried to negotiate between Grattan and the Sioux; but the Indians did not understand the concept of arrest followed by inquiry and trial, and Grattan knew little about Indians other than the myths of hostility and cowardice that were current in the popular literature of his day. He ordered his men to fire, probably intending at first only to intimidate the Indians into cooperation. The Indians returned fire; the howitzers were discharged but did little damage since they were aimed into the air; Brave Bear was mortally wounded; Gratttan and the 28 men with him were killed before they could retreat to the fort; and relations between the Sioux and the military were permanently damaged.5
The interpreters of history or, if I may use the word in this context, the myth-makers have not been kind to Lt. Grattan, who is generally given the blame for misunderstanding and mishandling the situation; but to understand the whole truth of what happened and why it happened, it would really be necessary to examine the myths which existed in the minds of the Indians involved as well. The point of the anecdote, as I am using it, however, is to demonstrate that history evolves into myth, that myth tends to simplify and petrify the original facts, and that these simplifications can, in turn, affect history.
At this point, I need to return to the myth of the cowboy. As I mentioned previously, Owen Wister did not create the first cowboy hero. The heroic cowboy was a literary contrivance built on the figure of the heroic frontiersman. It was a natural extension, since Anglo-Americans first encountered the cowboy in Texas, as an exotic figure of Mexican origin; and Texas was where one of the greatest of the heroic frontiersmen, Davy Crockett, ended his career. The association of frontiersman and cowboy continued in the public mind with the partnership of Buffalo Bill Cody and Texas Jack Omohundro in the 1870s. Both Cody and Omohundro were engaged in recasting the reality of their lives into mythic form, and, again, their appeal to the public lay in the belief that there was truth, or at least some truth, in the romances they created to entertain their audiences. In 1877 Texas Jack published his life story in a national periodical called Spirit of the Times:
“As the general trade on the range has often been written of,” he asserts there, “I’ll simply refer to a few incidents of a trip over the plains.” He then offers this description of a stampede: “If them quadrupeds don’t go insane, turn tail to the storm, and strike out for civil and religious liberty, then I don’t know what strike out means…this is the cowboy’s ride with Texas five hundred miles away, and them steers steering straight for him; night time, darker than the word means, hog wallows, prairie dog, wolf and badger holes, ravines and precipices ahead, and if you do your duty three thousand stampeding steers behind. If your horse don’t swap ends, and you hang on them till daylight, you can bless your lucky stars.”6
Omohundro died in Leadville, Colorado, in 1880, but Texas Jack had adventures for the next twenty years in dime novels written by Ned Buntline and Prentiss Ingraham, although these later stories drew little or nothing from the hero’s actual life.7
The cowboy, like the frontiersman, was very much an American hero: a hero of the common man. In the popular fiction which he inhabited, he generally spoke a slangy, if not absolutely ungrammatical, English, and he presented an absurd and comical figure if he was ever introduced to an eastern city. Still, by the later decades of the nineteenth century, the cowboy had become a figure of virility, self-assurance, and romance whose courage, if not his manners, were admired by American youth concerned that civilization and a lack of Indian threats were making them soft, diffident, and unmanly.
The most famous of the effete young men who sought redemption by migrating to a cattle ranch was New Yorker Theodore Roosevelt, who lived and ranched for a time in North Dakota, and who published in 1888 an account of cowboy life in the West called Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail, copiously illustrated by his friend and fellow New Yorker, Frederic Remington. Roosevelt’s stirring account of his life in the west emphasized encounters with outlaws and wild game, and he was full of praise for the cowboy, whose character and antecedents he sketched. Roosevelt claimed that, although cowboys were drawn from all over the country, most of them and the best of them were southerners.
“For cowboy work there is need of special traits,” he wrote, “…and young Easterners should be sure of themselves before trying it: the struggle for existence is very keen in the far West, and it is no place for men who lack the ruder, coarser virtues and physical qualities, no matter how intellectual or how refined and delicate their sensibilities.”8
One of the young easterners who sought health and manhood in the west during this decade was Owen Wister, who came to Wyoming from Philadelphia in 1885. Like Roosevelt, he lived on a cattle ranch. In fact, he stayed at Frank Wolcott’s ranch near Glenrock; but Roosevelt’s influence on his work is frankly acknowledged by himself. In Roosevelt, the Story of a Friendship, Wister related how he was partly inspired by Roosevelt’s published writings to undertake the western-themed fiction which he eventually turned into The Virginian.9 Although Wister marketed his stories as fiction, he drew much of the background and some incidents from his own observations, and it is this aura of reality that has helped the book to retain its importance through the years.
Wister was a much better writer than Ned Buntline or Prentiss Ingraham, who had imagined absurd adventures for Buffalo Bill andTexas Jack in the dime novel literature of Wister’s youth, and I will not assert that he drew much directly from those sources. Wister repeated, however, some of elements of that less reputable fiction, particularly the brave cowboy comfortably at home in a world of conflict and violence. In Wister’s story, the western hero is not a comic figure out of his own element, however; and the violence, instead of being constant and endemic, is carefully constructed to erupt in an ultimate inevitable climax. Wister, in fact, invented the showdown.
In the figure of Molly Wood, Wister embodied the east and eastern culture and equated pacifism with the feminine. In the figure of his hero, he explored what it takes to be a man. To be a man, in Wister’s world, it was necessary, as Roosevelt had asserted, to be sure of oneself. It was necessary to recognize what was right and what should be done, and to do it even in the face of overwhelming social pressure. It was necessary to resort to violence even though civilization condemned violence. To avoid violence was womanly. None of this was Wister’s sole creation, but because he wrote well, and because he wrote for an elite audience of literate intellectuals, his special spin on the cowboy myth had enormous influence in the development of subsequent literature. Wister did not really create the western genre, but he infused new life into it, made it respectable, and sent it into the twentieth century vigorous and proud.
In order for a myth to have influence, it has to feel true, morally true if not literally true, to a large number of people. The Virginianhad that appeal. It has remained constantly in print. It was filmed several times and was recently resurrected as a TV movie on TNT. Elements of the book appeared over and over again thinly disguised in other people’s works: the cowboy and the schoolmarm, the lynched rustler, the tenderfoot from the East, nearly every character Wister created had adventures under other names in other films and books; but it was the final showdown between good man and bad man that became the leading cliché of western literature. It is the figure of the man standing for his beliefs alone against strong pressure that is Wister’s most enduring legacy to the myth.
It happens, however, that it was this element that drew least from Wister’s experience and most from his imagination. In the West of reality there were no formal duels between good and evil, chaos and order, or “quality” and “equality,” as Wister described his two antagonists,10 supporting a class system which rapidly disappeared and which had little influence on later westerns. Wister’s heirs, writers like Zane Grey, Max Brand, and Louis L’Amour, discarded the parts of his fable that felt untrue or unnecessary to them. As with the captivity narratives and early stories of cowboy life, when new writers stepped in to continue the tradition, they were quick to abandon mere facts or anything that felt discordant to popular views. Myth searches for underlying truths. Its purpose is not to record history.
That, at least, was the belief of Max Brand, who was particularly influential in this trend. Although born in Seattle and educated in California, Frederick Schiller Faust, who used the pen name Max Brand, wrote much of his voluminous western fiction in Florence, Italy; and he made no secret of the fact that he drew his inspiration from Greek and Roman myth rather than from American history.11 Other writers followed suit. Most of them, like their predecessors Ned Buntline and Prentiss Ingraham, made a living churning out popular fiction at so much a word, and they had no time for research. Readers didn’t quite see it the same way. They still tended to equate truth with reality; but since most of them were neither westerners nor historians, and since the new stories were still being set in an increasingly remote past, they largely failed to notice as the western became more and more disconnected from the 1880s West that Wister had known.
Westerns grew in popularity through most of the twentieth century and peaked during World War II and the Cold War. By the 1950s the world of the western was as richly imagined, and as far from reality, as the court of Camelot. The western began to decline in popularity late in the 1960s, at the same time that the Vietnam conflict began to discredit war as a solution to world problems; but although westerns have ceased to be the dominant form of popular culture, they have not disappeared, and the thesis at the center of Roosevelt’s and Wister’s philosophies: that manliness requires a willingness to resort to violence, has survived intact and has largely transcended the western genre.
On the night of October 6, 1998, a young gay student at the University of Wyoming named Matthew Shepard left a local bar with two other young Laramie residents, Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney. Shepard was found tied to a fence and badly beaten the next day. He died of his injuries five days later. Henderson and McKinney were arrested for the murder. So were their girlfriends, who had helped them dispose of evidence linking them to the crime.12
I was living in Laramie at the time, and, like many of the townsfolk, I was shocked and saddened, when I first read the news, by the destruction wrought in five young lives, all of them destroyed or forever altered by an apparently pointless act; but Laramie had been shocked and saddened by tragedy before and would be again. Yet other crimes committed here had brought no hordes of national reporters into our town, and no international wire services had advertised us to the world as a place that could not keep its citizens safe.
So I naturally wondered: what was it about this crime that attracted national attention? Why did this story, particularly, evolve into multiple movies of the week, some of which had as little connection to reality as Buffalo Bill’s or Texas Jack’s narratives of their Indian-fighting days? Why is it that the Shepard murder seems poised to become one of those historical events that morphs into myth?
One of the few really insightful pieces of journalism to come out of the media attention was written by JoAnn Wypijewski and published in Harper’s Magazine in September, 1999. Wypijewski focused her piece on the psychology of Matt’s killers. She suggested that they shared a particular trait in common with the Columbine killers and with many other young villains of recent crimes. They were not the school bullies, they were the kids that the school bullies bullied. In fact, she concluded, “[i]t’s¼possible that Matthew Shepard didn’t die because he was gay; he died because Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson are straight.”13 Her implication is that the killers felt they were proving their manhood by beating a gay man so severely as to cause death.
Wypijewski was also struck by the extent to which Laramie identified itself with the cowboy myth, and, certainly, if you take a walk downtown, you will encounter many proud displays of westernness there from the Cowboy Bar to the oversize horseshoes recently painted on the sidewalks; and since Laramie is not quite a tourist mecca, it is presumably the locals who are supposed to be enticed by this advertising. Wypijewski also brought into the mix the kind of religion, and it certainly exists here in Laramie, which teaches that homosexuality is a biblically-condemned sin.14 So long as we teach our children to solve problems with violence, she implies, and so long as we teach our children that homosexuality is a problem, some of our children will seek to solve homosexuality with violence, and we must embrace the Shepard murder as the logical result of such teachings.
And this is where the Virginian meets Matt Shepard. Clearly, it would be ridiculous, however typical of myth-making, to reduce this argument to an insistence that little boys who wear ten-gallon hats and carry toy pistols will grow up to be murderers. It is not the little boys who grow up, no matter what they have worn or what they have read or what they have watched on television, who commit the crimes that shock the nation. It is the little boys who can’t grow up. It is the ones who somehow lose their way on the road through adolescence to emotional maturity. These are the ones who draw their role models from fiction and myth and who seem unable to check these models against reality.
But if the Shepard case is, in a sense, a new chapter in the cowboy myth, it may also have some common ground with the story of Lt. Grattan. Grattan entered myth from history as the stereotypical example of how a fixed and unquestioned idea of Indian hostility can create disaster. The Shepard case may stand to the future as an example of how a fixed and unquestioned belief that violence is to be equated with masculinity can pass from a myth to a real-life tragedy.
As I pointed out earlier, myth tends to simplify and, finally, to petrify; and the more remote it becomes from the events that inspired it, the more likely it is to lapse into absurdity. The publication of The Virginian and the death of Matt Shepard bracket the twentieth century. The myth had nearly a hundred years to simplify and petrify, and it is hardly Wister’s fault if some of the ideals that he championed in 1902 seem less admirable to us now. Cultures change and myths need to change with them. It seems reasonable to propose that in the twenty-first century we will create new myths by drawing inspiration from new experiences, and that we will condemn the absurdities of our past myths and discard those that no longer feel true. Whether the heroic cowboy finds his way onto the discard pile or is reincarnated to a new life in another generation, probably depends on the talents of those gifted story-tellers of the future who are able, as Owen Wister did one hundred years ago, to create fables which appeal, which feel true on some level, to the culture at large.
1 Fanny Kemble Wister (ed.), Owen Wister Out West: His Letters and Journals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 2, 24-26.
Readings in Wyoming History
Essay #17