Traditional western vs. Frontier Fiction

Putting together a survey of the first writers of novels set in the West, I have been puzzled by what to call what they wrote. The term “western” doesn’t quite do the job. In the mind of readers, that word has come to mean a story specifically about cowboys and/or lawmen and outlaws. But the early years of the genre (1880-1915) saw novels on many other subjects.

There were novels about prospecting and mining, the military, the logging industry, railroads, reclamation projects, homesteaders, politics, parsons, Indians and mixed bloods, Mormons, animals, the settlement of Old California, marriage and domestic relationships, and so on. To give them their own name, I’ve been calling them “early westerns.”

By doing that, I was hoping to help rehabilitate the term “western” itself, which bears the stigma for many readers of a worn-out and outdated genre of storytelling. I felt that by demonstrating the breadth of its origins, I might encourage both western readers and writers, some of whom who are already rediscovering its roots.

Traditional western. So I have quietly balked at the term “traditional western” because its usual focus on good men gunning for bad men is too narrow for what I was finding as I read. True, you can argue that a tradition got started with novels by Wister, Mulford, Seltzer, Raines, Coolidge, Grey, and a few others.

But those writers actually made up only a small percentage of turn-of-the-century western fiction. Seen in context, what people call the “traditional western” begins to look more like an off-shoot of a much broader variety of storytelling set in the West.

The male-dominated world of the “traditional western” also assumes that males have dominated the writing of western fiction from the beginning. That’s not in fact the case either. When Owen Wister began publishing his stories, the majority of western novelists had been women.

Their number included Mary Hallock Foote, Helen Hunt Jackson, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Emma Ghent Curtis, Patience Stapleton, Marah Ellis Ryan, and Gertrude Atherton. They had been writing western stories for almost 20 years before Wister published his cowboy western, Lin McLean, in 1897. It wasn’t until that novel that males of any number began writing in the genre.

Frontier fiction. A while ago, the term “frontier fiction” emerged as an apparent attempt by publishers to shake the western stigma for new fiction set in the West. John Nesbitt’s recent novel, Dark Prairie, is an example of the new breed, signaled in part by a shift away from the usual western cover art. The cover of Dark Prairie evokes a mood meant to draw in adult readers not looking for gunplay and lone horsemen in cowboy hats.

With this development, it has belatedly occurred to me as I write a book of my own on the subject that “early western” is not the right term for the novels I’m writing about. They are, and always were, “frontier fiction.” As stories about men and women in various walks of life, they have a particular character for being set on the barely civilized frontier. And, for a general rule, that’s about as specific as you can be about them.

So with something like relief, I’ve come to accept “frontier fiction” as a term that comes closer than “early western” to describe what I’m writing about. I figure it would also look good in a book title.
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Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Robert J. Conley, Zeke Proctor: Cherokee Outlaw