Where the Wild West Never Dies Glenn A. Hazelwood Biblio.com Bookseller
Where the Wild West never dies? Yep, pilgrim, in the great American novel. America has the unique distinction of seeing the advent of a writing genre all its own. While it feeds from the roots of many other genres, its multifaceted backdrops, varied cast of characters in type and style, and locale, make it particular to only one place and time: the American frontier.
Mention the Wild West, and each of our minds will be captured by an image: cowboys and Indians, gunslingers and shootouts, Texas rangers and town marshals, badmen and bandit gangs, cattlemen and drovers, saloon girls and school marms, wagon trains pushing westward, the calvalry and wood-picketed forts, gamblers and miners, trappers and buffalo hunters. Real names and names of fiction meld together: Wyatt Earp, Doc Holiday, Bat Masterson, Wild Bill Hickock, Buffalo Bill, Kit Carson, Billy the Kid, Johnny Ringo, Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, Black Bart, Matt Dillon, Cap'n Woodrow Call, Gus McCrae, the Cimarron Kid, Johnny Yuma, and more. Many are both real and fabled in American folklore, part truth, part creation of talented storytellers. Pick a name that's only a fit to be found in the Old West from Deadman's Corner, Wyoming, to Rattlesnake, New Mexico, or Diablo, Arizona, to Bad Wound, South Dakota, and you'll likely find it coloring the Western landscape.
The real Wild West was such a brief period in history that one may wonder how influenced the imagination, not just in America, but around the world. It was no more than the span of three decades, in the terms most think of as the Wild West, from about 1860 to 1900. The beginnings of the Civil War to the late 1800s were the crux of the settling of the vast southwestern section of America, and this period personifies the Wild West.
It is fairly well accepted that the first writer to ply the new market with great success was Ned Buntline (1823-1886), a novelistic journalist, publisher, and promoter royale. Buntline traveled throughout the Southwest, interviewing the well known names of the day, for a creation of his, the dime novel, perhaps the first of the popular paperbacks. With firsthand information and a great imagination, Buntline literally created his first heroes of the plains for eastern audiences, Buffalo Bill Cody and Wyatt Earp. It does seem a bit odd that Buntline, and writers like him, would have thought it necessary to "color" the truth of their characters, given that their actual exploits were indeed larger than life, but so goes the imagination of the novelist.
Walter Noble Burns (1872-1932), a lesser known author than Buntline, is no less important to the "invention" of the Old West In many ways. Burns is generally credited with the creation of the action-adventure/romance western plot that has became a standard for the genre. His novel on Wyatt Earp, Tombstone: An Illiad of the Southwest, is devoted to the famed shootout at the O.K. Corral. Though Burns considered himself a journalist and biographer, his books were more novels from information gathered and crafted around a story than true biographies. The same year Burns was born was also the birth year of what was to become the first great novelist of the western, Zane Grey (1872-1939). Grey authored over 70 books given to the wild west, perhaps his most well-known amongst them being, Riders of the Purple Sage. Approximately ten of his works have made it to the silver screen as major motion pictures as well, including "Western Union," a 1941 film starring the legendary western actor Randolph Scott, along with Robert Young and Dean Jagger. Two of his novels, The Lone Star Ranger, and King of the Royal Mounted, are considered by most authorities in the field as the basis for the classic radio serials, then television series, The Lone Ranger, and Sgt. Preston of the Yukon.
Although seldom given just due, the western presented not only the male personification of the rugged, strong and silent hero, a character that might qualify as a singular creation of the genre, or at least the genre that certainly fortified the typecast in stone, it gave strong lead roles to women as well. While it certainly utilized the classic, helpless and hapless heroine, it also portrayed women of strength and fortitude of the pioneering stock needed to help tame a wild frontier. On occasions, such as Zane Grey's Maverick Queen, Wildfire, The Border Legion, and Call of the Canyon, women took the lead roles in tales of the Old West. And though little recognized, the western has always enjoyed--along with the expected male fans--a large following of women. Ask any woman who's a fan, and names like Calamity Jane, Annie Oakley, and Belle Starr spring to mind.
Great novelists, as well as the lesser known, have never skipped a beat in carrying on the tradition of the Old Wild West tale. Famed author of the western, Louis L'amour (1908-1988) was born in the waning days of the wild west, and the first renowned author of westerns born to the West itself, in Jamestown, North Dakota. His writing career spanned 70 western novels and 17 short stories. Carrying on the rich heritage today are novelists such as Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry of Lonesome Dove fame, and many more. It's an easy prophecy that as long as there are writers, readers, fans, and collectors, books are where the Wild West never dies--around the bookshelves.