Student Handout 4-How The Virginian Influenced Real Life

This mountain is named after Owen Wister because of his early visits to the area. Mount Wister (11,490 feet) is located in the Teton Range of Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. The peak is located 5 miles west of Taggart Lake and to the south of Avalanche Canyon. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mount_Wister_Grand_Teton_NP1.jpg

This sign [unknown date] was located on the Lincoln Highway upon entering Medicine Bow, Wyoming. The most famous line from the The Virginian is written on it. In the book, the Virginian is playing a game of cards with the villain Trampas who says, “Your bet, you son-of-a-„ „.“ The Virginian responds, “When you call me that, smile!” The town clearly shows pride in its association with the book. [Note the misspelling on the sign of “Wonderfull.”]

Courtesy Wyoming Tales and Trails; wyomingtalesandtrails.com

Courtesy Wyoming Tales and Trails; wyomingtalesandtrails.com

This pyramid monument made out of petrified wood is dedicated to Owen Wister. It was erected in 1939 near Medicine Bow, Wyoming.

Courtesy Wyoming Tales and Trails; wyomingtalesandtrails.com

This image of Medicine Bow, Wyoming in the 1930s shows a hotel named after the novel in the center. The Virginian Hotel is the large white building in the center of town.

“The Virginian also led to the creation of more westerns. Never out of print since publication, it inspired a successful stage play, five film versions between 1914 and 2000 – including the landmark oater [Western movie] in which Gary Cooper delivered one of the genre‟s unforgettably defining lines: “When you call me that, Smile!”– and a TV series that ran from 1962-1971.

Wister‟s episodic novel was a watershed achievement. His main characters all became iconic building blocks of the modern Western:

the unnamed, heroic ranch foreman, a virtual white knight in spurs the beautiful schoolteacher from the East that Wister named after his wife Molly Trampas, the villainous leader of a gang of rustlers.

More than that, Wister‟s clever dialogue and realistic take on gunplay, horsemanship, ranch and trail life, frontier love, and the inevitable final shootout either established or furthered the conventions that blazed a fictional trail directly through True Grit, The Shootist, Shane, Zane Grey‟s Riders of the Purple Sage, Louis L‟Amour‟s Hondo, and James A. Michener‟s Centennial to such modern classics as Larry McMurtry‟s Lonesome Dove, and Cormac McCarthy‟s All the Pretty Horses. Wister knew that his story of the harsh, unforgiving Wyoming territory had raised the bar on Western fiction and, through his title character, symbolized something that even the West couldn‟t rein in: “the American genius,” as Wister wrote to his friend, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, shortly after The Virginian appeared.”

Excerpted from ExplorePAHistory Historical Marker Page on Owen Wister