Eleanor Gates, The Biography of a Prairie Girl (1902)

Eleanor Gates

This autobiographical novel begins with one of the finest pieces of writing I’ve found in more than 100 books of early frontier fiction. Eleanor Gates begins her story with the birth of her central character on a remote Dakota homestead during a raging blizzard. The family waits with growing dread the return of the newborn girl’s father, who has ventured into the storm for help.

The man’s remains are not found until the spring thaw, only a short distance from the family’s cabin. Told from the distance of a few childhood years, the girl thinks of her birth as the time she was brought by the stork—which chose the same day to take away her father. The raw realities of frontier life are thus embedded early on in a story of growing up on the prairie.

Plot. The novel is a rarity for its time, as it takes for its subject the emergence of a character’s consciousness during 15 years of childhood. Each chapter is a separate episode during those years, and each illustrates how the conditions of life on the prairie give form and shape to the girl’s personality and identity.

Heroine is actually not the right word for her, as she does nothing that requires heroism. Yes, she shows spunk, independence, curiosity, and a reckless daring at times, but what we are witness to is her gradual absorption of what’s to be learned from life’s limitations and contingencies.

Map of Dakota and nearby territories, 1864

Sometimes they are harsh, as when drought nearly destroys her family’s livelihood and prairie fire wipes out the little that is left of it. Sometimes they are trivial, as when an uncooperative chicken refuses to sit a nest of eggs and then refuses to lay altogether. 

In a comic turn, a visiting botanist discovers a petroglyph he believes is evidence of an earlier form of human life on the plains. We learn instead that what he’s found are the little girl’s initials inscribed on a rock face by a favorite playmate, the son of an officer from a nearby fort. More menacing is her night’s stay in an outlaw-infested hotel, where she and an older brother, with cash from the sale of a small herd of cattle, come perilously close to being victims of foul play.

The Myth of the Code of the West

Cattle drovers, El Centro, California, 1972

Among western fans, a lot of deference is paid to something called “The Code of the West.” There apparently was such a code of behavior on the frontier—more likely several codes. Since they were unwritten, there’s no sure way of knowing exactly what they were.

A popular book Cowboy Ethics with beautiful western photographs by David R. Stoecklein gets mentioned by cowboy enthusiasts, often in connection with National Day of the Cowboy. Its subtitle, What Wall Street Can Learn from the Code of the West, gives a curious twist to the subject. Published in 2004, just before the current economic meltdown, it also sounds more than a little prophetic.

Like the Commandments, the author James P. Owen lays out ten rules of conduct that the book calls “The Code of the West.” His source for these rules seems to be the western movies he has seen (Open Range, Shane), not any kind of historical research. Though he claims to have read a stack of books, there’s no list of them to verify that claim.

I’m not writing this to knock Owen’s efforts to get some accountability in the financial industry, or anywhere else for that matter. But while there may be some truth in it, the problem with his argument is that it’s based so thoroughly on myth.

When western fans evoke the Code of the West, it’s nearly always in service of an argument about an ideal American past when men were decent, honest, and incorruptible. My argument is that outside of a handful of idealists, some cowboys among them, that America never existed.

Land sale poster, Texas, 1800s

If you don’t read, you don’t know this. Over and again, reading early western novels, I find an America that’s little different from today. What you learn is that the urge to get rich quick prevailed. Everywhere, there were people gaming the system to milk it for every dollar they could get.

The land giveaways in the West are a prime example. For all those homesteaders with the best of intentions, there were many speculators with no higher aspiration than to buy low and sell high. Greed built boomtowns that were no more than bubbles engineered by profiteers. There were phony investment companies and banks absconding with people’s savings.

The railroad monopolies had their part to play in all this, luring settlers into the West with false promises and then bleeding them dry with crippling freight rates. They bought legislators and judges to look after their interests. The American West was a free-for-all for crooks, swindlers and robber barons.

Working cowboys. The code-abiding cowboy probably existed to a degree. The best evidence of that is his poverty. He worked and worked hard for low wages, and unless he turned to thievery, there was little alternative, given his lack of education and social polish. To tighten their grip on the cattle industry, cattlemen squeezed cowboys out of developing equity in a herd of their own by turning “rustling” into a crime.

Working cowboys, South Dakota, 1888

We know from reading newspaper accounts of the time that cowboys were regarded as a menace to society. Armed as they usually were, young, and given to drink, cowboys were also prone to high-risk, often lethal misbehavior. Some rebelled against the incursions of Eastern-style law and order. A gang of them, as just one example, gave the Earps trouble in Tombstone.

Historically, it makes more sense to see cowboys as social outcasts. Law abiding or law breaking, they clung to a kind of personal honor that men do anywhere who are disadvantaged and opposed by the same adversaries. The codes they lived by originated before the coming of the law in the West, and they remained mostly extra-legal.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Where men administer their own code of conduct, there are rarely any loopholes—and no need for lawyers. That system of justice has a tempting appeal in today's complex world. And its celebration in western movies accounts in large part for their continuing appeal.

But it has nothing to do with a lost America that many western fans believe once existed and yearn for a return to. I would argue that a return to the America of, say, 1885 would find a world little different from our own. Greed, corruption, and malfeasance up and down the social order—and people disadvantaged by them—would prevail as they do now.

And where there was a belief in progress, a hope for a more equitable future would be found everywhere. As we struggle clumsily for that same future today, an honorable code of conduct would do much to making progress toward that goal a reality. But myths about the past won’t do it.

Just my opinion, of course. I’m open to reasoned argument.

Photo credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Randolph Scott, Man in the Saddle (1951)

Commentary: cowboys as aliens

Holton-Curry Reader, 1913

What was the frontier? Asking that question is like asking the proverbial blind men to describe an elephant. Case in point:

Recently, notice came of an upcoming scholarly symposium on “The Significance of the FRONTIER in an age of Transnational History.” The word “frontier” was not only all in caps, but it extended across the entire width of the poster advertising the event (click here to see). The copy on the poster was superimposed over a photograph of Frederick Jackson Turner—the man who famously announced the closing of the American frontier in 1893.

For readers and writers of western fiction, there’s a curious thing about the description of this symposium. While it’s clearly about the American West, there is not a single reference in its 395 words to cowboys, ranching, cattle, outlaws, lawmen, or firearms. For the folks organizing this event, theirs is a different frontier and a different West—one without cowboys.

Frontier studies, while you may not have heard of it, is a self-explanatory term and probably seems a worthy subject of scholarly interest. I could tell you that “Turnerian historiography” refers generally to Turner’s theory that the frontier experience shaped American character, and you would know what I’m talking about. You’d probably even agree with the idea.

Children's Classics in Dramatic Form, 1909

However, several terms crop up in the description of the symposium that might have you wondering:

• New American History
• Borderlands studies
• Critical race theory
• Settler colonialism
• Environmental history
• Postwestern

You can google on all these terms and discover that each stands for a complex of ideas, theories, and publications that reflect what scholars talk about when they talk about the frontier. And most are conversations that have been going on for decades.

The copy describing the event ends with a list of possible questions the symposium hopes to address. At the very end of that list, the organizers wonder whether academic scholarship in frontier studies has had “any effect on contemporary popular productions.” In other words, is any of their work showing up in western fiction, movies, TV, poetry, and whatever else about the frontier West is being produced for popular consumption.

After some thought, I’d have to say the answer to that hopeful question is mostly no. You could probably even put that in capital letters and make it extend across the page.

Golden Treasury Reader, 1909

And therein lies the problem for both western fans and scholars. It’s the separate-but-equal world they inhabit. There’s mythology on one hand and ideology on the other. One camp’s point of view is faith-based; the other is analytical. Both are political—each more red or more blue.

I’m not one to take sides here. I just wish the two would find more of a meeting ground. As long as scholarship talks in a language ordinary folks don’t understand, there will be little that western fans will learn from it. As long as western fans regard the mythology as gospel and not to be tampered with, their devotion to the genre will go unshared by most scholars.

Heath Reader, 1907

So I find myself in the middle, borrowing from the new frontier scholarship to see and enjoy more in western fiction and movies than I would otherwise. And I try to pass some of that along here. As I try my hand at writing western fiction, I also attempt to blend the two perspectives to contribute something fresh and original to the genre.

The early western writers I’ve been reading (1880-1915) were not afraid to set all kinds of stories in the West. They were unconstrained by requirements of a genre still in the process of being born. Thus, much of what they wrote was fresh and original.

I’d like to see the western open again to that kind of freedom. It’s been argued that the western lost its audience in the late 20th century because it couldn’t reinvent itself. But enough time has passed for writers and filmmakers to do just that. Like western writers of 100 years ago, they are free to bring their imagination and their skill as storytellers to the West, as if the western never existed.

Unsatisfied with the old formulas, they may draw if they like on the scholarship that has been freeing history of the old mythologies and out-dated or unfounded beliefs. Lonesome Dove was already a step in that direction. More recently, Deadwood and Hell on Wheels. In each of them, mythology confronts history in ways that excite, inform, and entertain. And they chip away at the dead wood that has taken over the genre.

Itcho Hanabusa, 1888

There are contemporary writers of western historical fiction like Richard Wheeler, Carol Buchanan, Johnny Boggs, and many others whose work brings the past compellingly to life. But it’s the blending of history with myth that has become a challenge for western genre fiction.

Still, there are signs this is changing. As just one example of western genre fiction that most readers here are likely to know, I’d pick Edward Grainger’s stories of U. S. Deputy Marshals Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles. Both characters are clearly fictional, but they deal with aspects of American social history that have been largely ignored in the past. And they’re grounded in a historical reality that a reader in 2012 can recognize and care about.

It’s not surprising that many readers posting favorable reviews of the Cash-Miles stories say these are the first westerns they’ve ever read. Many moviegoers who saw last year’s True Grit were of a similar mind. Like probably anyone who has read this far, I’d like to see the western make a comeback. But I don’t think it will happen without a continued infusion of something other than the same old formulas and clichés.

Phra That Phanom chedi, Thailand

I know, some readers love the formula western because it is so predictable. A certain kind of hero, a high-risk conflict, and a resolution involving gunfire. I recall sitting in front of several boys in cowboy hats who took seats behind me in a screening of “Hud” back in 1963. Their running commentary on that movie predicted every turn they expected the plot to take, only to be disappointed each time.

Readers in cowboy hats, especially young ones, need not be disappointed like that. There should be westerns for them. But I’m arguing for westerns you can’t predict. In fact, I think there should be more general disagreement about what a western is. That’s the kind of diversity I think many new readers could get behind. And for starters, the blind men who proved their worth describing an elephant would be perfect for the job.

Further reading:

Postwestern

Lamar Center for border and frontier studies, Yale

Frontier studies, Google Scholar

Image credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Patience Stapleton, Babe Murphy (1890)