The Cowboy Legend : Owen Wister's Virginian and the Canadian
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University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository University of Calgary Press University of Calgary Press Open Access Books 2015-11 The cowboy legend : Owen Wister’s Virginian and the Canadian-American frontier Jennings, John University of Calgary Press Jennings, J. "The cowboy legend : Owen Wister’s Virginian and the Canadian-American frontier." West series; 7. University of Calgary Press, Calgary, Alberta, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/51022 book http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca THE COWBOY LEGEND: OWEN WISTER’S VIRGINIAN AND THE CANADIAN-AMERICAN FRONTIER by John Jennings ISBN 978-1-55238-869-3 THIS BOOK IS AN OPEN ACCESS E-BOOK. It is an electronic version of a book that can be purchased in physical form through any bookseller or on-line retailer, or from our distributors. 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Acknowledgement: We acknowledge the wording around open access used by Australian publisher, re.press, and thank them for giving us permission to adapt their wording to our policy http://www.re-press.org 5: Owen Wister and Wyoming (1885) Before the Great Die-Up and the Johnson County War, Wyoming was, in- deed, the ideal cattle country, a land of breathtaking vistas and seemingly endless cattle range. To this cattle Mecca Owen Wister was sent in the sum- mer of 1885 to restore his fragile health. That summer Johnson took a leave of absence from the 76 and eventually drifted down to visit Mike Henry’s 88 Ranch near Fort Fetterman. Johnson had at one time been engaged to Lizzie Henry and still remained a good friend of the family. It was while he was staying at the 88 that the manager of a nearby ranch, Frank Wolcott, heard that he was in the area and, being short-handed, asked him to help out with a dude who was about to arrive from the East.1 This eastern greenhorn, as it happened, was Owen Wister, who was making his first visit to the West. Two spinster friends of his mother – Maisie Irwin, who operated a private girls’ school in Philadelphia, and her assistant Sophy – accompanied him. They came west, it seems, to keep an eye on Wister’s delicate health.2 This was the first of many trips to the West for Wister. He came in 1885 as a young man in his mid-twenties, sent by his family doctor in the hope that the West would help cure him of one of the most fashionable complaints of the period – frayed nerves, or “neurasthenia” in the popular jargon of the time. Wister had recently graduated from Harvard and was about to enrol in law school. He was in a most uncertain frame of mind about his future. His first love was music, and for a while he hoped that he might make a ca- reer as a pianist. But this was not to be. Though very accomplished, he was probably not quite good enough to pursue a career as a professional pianist and, besides, his father, who controlled his finances, discouraged his am- bitions. These years of training, though, would certainly not be wasted. At 153 this stage in his life, he had no serious pretensions about becoming a writer; these thoughts would not enter his head until the early 1890s. But when at last he found his calling and produced the first great western novel, an important part of its appeal rested on Wister’s acute ear and his masterful ability to pick up the cadences of western speech and expressions peculiar to the West. All of this was far in the future. Wister came west in 1885 as an ef- fete tourist whose real love was for the old cultures of Europe. He was not drawn, it seems, to the rawness of Wyoming, only to the possible restorative power of its air. It was not until he reached Wyoming that something, quite unexpectedly, stirred within him and set in motion thoughts that would germinate for the best part of a decade before taking precise shape. Two things are clear from Wister’s first western diary of 1885. He cer- tainly did not come to Wyoming with thoughts of writing. The sparse en- tries are those of a tourist more interested in hunting and in his close circle of contacts than with any notion of seeing Wyoming and its people through literary eyes. Yet it is equally clear that he fell hopelessly in love with Wyo- ming. After a stop in Cheyenne to sample the famous Cheyenne Club, Wist- er and his chaperones left the train west of Cheyenne and set off for the Wolcotts’ VR Ranch by stage. It was at the Cheyenne Club that Johnson first met Wister and his two companions. He picked them up at the club and ac- companied them by train to Rock Creek and then fifty miles by stagecoach to the VR Ranch. The Cheyenne Club was unique in the West and just the sort of place to make Wister feel at home; it was the foremost anomaly on the frontier. It became the focal point for the big ranchers of Wyoming, which is why, shortly before Wister’s visit, Cheyenne was reputed to be the richest city per capita in the world.3 The Cheyenne Club rivalled the best clubs of New York and London with its superb French chef and impeccably trained servants from Ottawa. It is not hard to see why it attracted the cream of British and eastern American ranching investors, most of whom spent more time in Cheyenne than at their ranches. Dinner jackets, not chaps, served as the dress code, and many members seemed less interested in cattle than in sup- porting the new Cheyenne Opera House, whose formal opening included satin programs scented with just a hint of perfume. One legendary dinner in 1883 for forty-two members, at which the English members entertained the Americans, demolished sixty-six bottles of champagne – more than a bottle and a half per member.4 There was much to celebrate. In those heady days, profits from cattle in Wyoming fluctuated, according to Agnes Spring, from 50 percent to 100 percent.5 154 THE COWBOY LEGEND Perhaps, while at the club, Wister might have run into Van Rensselaer Schuyler Van Tassel, who was one of the first major investors in north- ern Wyoming and whose family was featured in Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Or perhaps Wister encountered G. A. Searight of Austin, Texas, whose Goose Egg Ranch south of Casper on Poison Spider Creek would allegedly be the setting for the baby swapping incident in The Virginian. On July 4, on the way north from Cheyenne, Wister recorded in his diary: I can’t possibly say how extraordinary and beautiful the valleys we’ve been going through are. They’re different from all things I’ve seen.… You never see a human being, only now and then some dis- appearing wild animal. It’s what scenery on the moon must be like. Then suddenly you come around a turn and down into a green cut where there are horsemen and wagons and hundreds of cattle, and then it’s like Genesis.6 In one of his first letters from Wyoming to his mother, he told her that “the air is better than all other air.