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Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for

Winter 1985

Cowboy Knights and Prairie Madonnas American Illustrations Of The Plains And Pre-Raphaelite Art

Kirsten H. Powell Middlebury College

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Powell, Kirsten H., "Cowboy Knights and Prairie Madonnas American Illustrations Of The Plains And Pre- Raphaelite Art" (1985). Great Plains Quarterly. 1826. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/1826

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. COWBOY KNIGHTS AND PRAIRIE MADONNAS AMERICAN ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE PLAINS AND PRE,RAPHAELITE ART

KIRSTEN H. POWELL

In 1911, Dorothy Canfield's short story "The lives here and has for years-a man from Ne­ Westerner" appeared in Scribner's Magazine. 1 braska."Z The story describes the chauvinism of Joanna, In vain she tries to deny the accounts of the a young lady from Kansas who, when sent East Nebraskan's tales of broncobusting, cattle to attend college, tries to convince her friends branding, and cowpunching that make their that eastern notions of the West are misconcep­ simple lives seem commonplace. As Joanna tions. "You think all Western men are long­ attempts to convince them of the hard-won haired cowpunchers!" she cries to her Maine­ sophistication of Kansas City, the "Nebraskan" born roommate. "Let me tell you that they are appears on the scene, shown in H. C. wall's not, but a great deal better-dressed, and more illustration riding a horse and dressed in chaps, up-to-date and-and cultivated than these silly spurs, ten-gallon hat, and neckerchief (fig. 1). Eastern boys!" She takes her crusade to Hills­ Speaking with a pronounced Yankee twang, he boro, Vermont, where she informs her elderly invites Joanna to visit his ranch, adding, "T'aint cousins that there is no difference at all be­ much to look at compared to the payrayra (he tween Kansas and Vermont except that Kansas pronounced prairie as Joanna had heard 'old is sophisticated ahd advanced and modern settlers' in Kansas say the word), but we'd be while Vermont is provincial, narrow, and almighty glad to see you.,,3 behind the times. To her surprise, her cousins Determined to expose the man as an im­ tell her, "We know about the West. A Westerner poster, Joanna visits his tiny Vermont farm. After showing her the house, the old man takes her to a partitioned room in the barn, telling An instructor of art history at Middlebury Col­ her that she is the first person he has ever al­ lege, Kirsten H. Powell has divided her research lowed to enter. There, beside a rough bunk and between American art pottery and western American illustration. Her most recent book is a small cook stove, is a wall covered with pic­ Cowboy Knights Errant and Klondike Kings: tures of western scenes. Western Illustrations by P. V. E. Ivory (1982). They were of all sorts, rough line drawings [CPQ 5 (Winter 1985): 39-5Z.] cut from newspapers, colored illustrations

39 40 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 1985

FIG. 1. H. C. Wall, from "The Westerner," Scribner's Magazine, 1911. Center for Great Plains Studies Collection of Western Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

from the magazines, but they all represented There is an underlying theme in Canfield's Western scenes, the sort of Western scene that story: the prevailing eastern stereotypes of west­ Joanna was always repudiating in her descrip­ ern life at the turn of the century. As she tions of her Kansas home-cattle stampedes, indicates, these stereotypes were projected in cow-punchers, Indians, sod-houses, lines of illustrated articles and stories published in the prairie schooners making their way through popular press. Despite the reality of western the sage-brush, cow-boys galloping along progress, the old Vermonter could maintain his over vast sunlit plains where nothing broke nostalgic image of a place he had visited forty the perfect circle of the sky-line. years earlier with the help of pictures cut from magazines. Although those pictures struck the As she takes in the array of pictures, the man young lady from Kansas as false, they were typi­ adds, "You see, my being out there such a short cal of the imagery that promoted the myth of the time- t'was only three months from start to West for the eastern public. On that wall in the finish- I was afraid I'd forget about it some.,,4 barn there might have been scenes like Percy He explains that despite his passion for Nebraska Ivory's Knight Errant of the Plains (fig. 2), which he put aside his dreams of making something of appeared on the cover of Harper's Weekly in himself and a life in the West for his wife, a deli­ 1909; or his Madonna of the Prairie, published as cate woman whom he rescued from the rigors a halftone engraving by H. C. Merrill in the same of pioneer life. Joanna returns home with a new year; or N. C. Wyeth's broncobuster from the understanding of the depth of one easterner's cover of the Saturday Evening Post in 1903; or love for her region as well as his deeper love for even Frank Schoonover's Hopalong Takes Com­ his wife. mand, published in 1905 in Outing Magazine. COWBOY KNIGHTS AND PRAIRIE MADONNAS 41

FIG. 2. P. V. E. Ivory, Knight Errant of the Plains, oil on canvas, 1909. Delaware Art Museum, Louisa du Pont Copeland Memorial Fund. 42 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 1985

At the turn of the century, when artists firmly traced by Owen Wister in 1895 in his and writers began to search for a vocabulary essay "The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher," to set western heroes and heroines apart from published in Harper's Magazine. As Wister ob­ the general public, they frequently turned to served, the Anglo-Saxon heritage was evident terminology derived from medieval England. "from the tournament at Camelot to the round­ Western adventurers were often equated with up at Abilene," adding, "No doubt Sir Launce­ medieval knights, not only in paintings like lot bore himself with a grace and breeding of Ivory's Knight Errant of the Plains but also which our unpolished fellow of the cattle trail in written accounts like one that appeared in has only the latent possibility; but in personal Scribner's in 1901 entitled "A Section Hand on daring and in skill as to the horse, the knight the Union Pacific Railway." As the writer stops and the cowboy are nothing but the same in Nebraska he recounts, Saxon of different environments.,,8 Frederic Remington's illustrations for Wis­ That evening, in a village inn, while the rain ter's essay also made this point. In The Last poured without, I sat cheek by jowl with a Cavalier Remington showed a cowboy riding Knight Templar who had just returned from beside a ghostly cavalcade featuring mounted a convention of his order in Denver. It was knights in armor, thus linking the cowboy to not the meeting that inspired him; it was the his Arthurian ancestors. Wister developed this mountains. Raised on the prairie, he had imagery further in The Virginian, in which the never seen even hills before, and the sight cowboy hero is a modern Launcelot in leather of the earth rising from a plain until it armor, who, when he rescues Molly Wood (who touched high heaven was like giving his mind comes to the West from Bennington, Vermont), the sense of a new dimension. is "her unrewarded knight.,,9 Wister's and Remington's impressions of the He adds that the band of "knights errant and West set the stage for other eastern artists and ladies fair" climbed Pike's Peak, a task com­ writers to apply their assumptions about pared to a struggling saint's "steep ascent of medieval adventure and chivalry to the western heaven.,,5 Even the most prosaic objects experience .. Behind Wister's and Remington's evoked similar medieval imagery from writers, general equation of the West with Camelot, as in Beatrice Hanscom's poem "In Quiet there seems to have been at least one specific Ways," which describes "long rows of milk­ source for the popular parallels between the pans that shone as bright as armor worn by knights and madonnas of English medieval art parfit knight or bold crusader.,,6 and literature and the vocabulary of American Why was this imagery of England's remote hero-worship. This was the influence of the past applied to the American experience with art of the English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood such enthusiasm? One explanation may stem on the American imagination at the turn of from the problem of defming heroes in a the century. Although the presentation of the democratic society based on equality. To dif­ western hero and heroine in the guise of their ferentiate special individuals from the general medieval counterparts is a complex phenome­ population, artists and writers borrowed hier­ non stemming from a variety of sources, Pre­ archical structures from the English monarchy, Raphaelite art played an important role in the so that Buck Taylor was "king" of the cowboys; ways some American illustrators pictured the the Virginian was a "noble" young cowboy; West. Deadwood Dick was the "Black Prince" of the In 1848, a group of English artists and Black Hills; and, more recently, John Wayne writers banded together under the name "Pre­ was the "Duke.,,7 The direct line of figurative Raphaelite" to support their belief that true descent from the heroes of Anglo-Saxon his­ inspiration could be found only in nature and tory to the cowboys of the plains had been in the art of the Middle Ages and the early COWBOY KNIGHTS AND PRAIRIE MADONNAS 43

FIG. 3. D. G. Rossetti, Lancelot and the Lady of Shalott, from the Moxon edition of Tennyson's poems, 1856. Delaware Art Museum, Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial. 44 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 1985

Renaissance. Following the painter Ford Madox stroke, and shallow perspective in pictures such Brown, who advised the brotherhood although as Two Knights do Battle before Camilard (fig. he never joined it himself, and the writer John 4) demonstrate Pyle's debt to Pre-Raphaelite Ruskin, artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William illustrations. Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais in par­ Not only was Pyle one of the most famous ticular turned their attention to medieval and American illustrators at the turn of the century, religious subjects. Often they attempted to he was also an influential teacher. The Howard make religious themes more meaningful by Pyle School of Art in Wilmington was a mecca placing them in ordinary settings, as Rossetti for aspiring illustrators.ll Begun in 1900, the did in The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and as Mil­ school offered free instruction to talented lais did in Christ in the House of his Parents. 10 young artists who had already mastered the Moreover, they turned to subjects that took rudiments of drawing and composition. Admis­ them far from modern industrial England, illus­ sion to the school was highly competitive; in trating Tennyson's Arthurian poem, The Idylls 1903 only three new students were chosen of the King (fig. 3), and devising their own from almost three hundred applicants. In Pyle's quasi-medieval subjects, as Rossetti did in The classes in facial expression, students learned Wedding of Saint George and Princess Sabra. the importance of accuracy of expressions; in In most cases, the male characters in their daily composition classes, they were encouraged paintings and drawings were chivalrous heroes to use their imaginations to invent their own who, like Saint George, rescued damsels in dis­ subjects. It was not enough for a pupil to tress, while the women were either sacred produce an interesting composition; he was virgins and madonnas or evil femmes fatales. expected to express his inner thoughts and The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood exerted a feelings about a subject in order to convey the strong influence on English art throughout the message behind a picture. To make an imaginary second half of the nineteenth century, and their scene as realistic as possible, Pyle urged his many followers maintained the Brotherhood's students to project themselves into the setting. interest in idealized images of knights and In this way, even a subject unfamiliar to the ladies. artist could be made to seem real to the viewer. At the turn of the century, American artists In his classes Pyle followed his Pre-Raphaelite were introduced to a Yankee variant of Pre­ predecessors' emphasis on fidelity to actual Raphaelitism through the writings and illus­ appearances as well as richness of the imagina­ trations of Howard Pyle. Pyle had fallen under tion by urging students to amass collections of the spell of the English artists by studying their studio props to give their illustrations authen­ works in reproductions and by examining the ticity, a directive his young pupils enthusias­ large collection of Pre-Raphaelite drawings and tically followed. In addition to collecting the paintings owned by the wealthy industrialist usual trunkloads of costumes from various Samuel Bancroft and exhibited in Pyle's home­ countries and historical periods, those students town of Wilmington, Delaware. The influence interested in western subjects, such as Ivory, of the English artists upon Pyle was strong, and Wyeth, and Schoonover, found themselves through many illustrated stories and books he acquiring such items as guns, saddles, chaps, popularized their romanticized views of medie­ wagon wheels, and even buffalo robes to give val life for Americans. Known for such illus­ their pictures the ring of truth.12 They fre­ trated tales as The Merry Adventures of Robin quently photographed themselves or models Hood, published in 1883, and The Story of dressed in their paraphernalia to be used for King Arthur and his Knights, which appeared "memory aides," as Pyle called them. This side in 1903, Pyle elaborated upon the subjects of of illustration appealed to most of the young the Pre-Raphaelite artists as well as their styles artists, and dressing up to recreate historical of illustration. The flat composition, dense pen eras became a favorite activity. In one of their COWBOY KNIGHTS AND PRAIRIE MADONNAS 45 tuo Kuig~ts bo battleJ ~~ before Cameliatb .P.P.!ii

FIG. 4. H. Pyle, Two Knights do Battle before Camilard,from The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, 1903. Delaware Art Museum, Howard Pyle Collection. 46 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 1985

FIG. 5. P. V. E. Ivory, It's You or Me Bill, oil on canvas, 1917. Ivory-Greene Collection. COWBOY KNIGHTS AND PRAIRIE MADONNAS 47 most elaborate costume parties, Pyle and his upon the thorn and there he blew three deadly students produced a medieval evening, com­ notes (fig. 6) of 1917, to western scenes, as in plete with a banquet for knights and ladies and Fight on the Plains (fig. 7). Later, Pyle's pupil culminating in a wild night of sword battles Frank Schoonover could move with equal facil­ and jousting. 13 ity from subjects like Ivanhoe to scenes like Although western themes held little interest Tex and Patches, a design for a Colt firearms for Pyle, he found that many of his young stu­ poster published in 1926. dents were as fascinated with the Great Plains In addition to battle scenes, illustrations of as he had been with Sherwood Forest and cowboy knights also focused on the theme of Camelot. Luckily Pyle's teaching methods the damsel in distress, another western subject were broad enough for his students to apply with its roots in Pre-Raphaelite imagery. Espe­ his ideas about the romance of knights and cially popular with Pre-Raphaelite artists were ladies to their own nostalgic scenes of an en­ scenes in which men rescue women from a chanted land west of the Mississippi where variety of perils, such as William Holman knights in buckskin rescued ladies from prairie Hunt's Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus, perils. While Pyle did not expect his students painted in 1851, or the design of Walter Crane, to share his own interest in Pre-Raphaelite sub­ a second-generation Pre-Raphaelite artist, for a jects, he did not hesitate to urge them to study plate decorated with Saint George killing the works by Pre-Raphaelite painters. For example, dragon to rescue the princess Sabra. Such he advised Ivory to study art by Rossetti, imagery subsequently appealed to Pyle, and in Millais, and Brown, thus narrowing the gap be­ turn it appealed to his students. tween the American heroes of the wilderness and We have already seen an instance of the mi­ their chivalrous ancestors in European art and gration of this theme to an American setting literature.14 Even though the locale changed, in Canfield's story "The Westerner," when the Pyle students' heroes and heroines maintained a young adventurer puts aside his dreams of particular Pre-Raphaelite flavor. This is especial­ settling in Nebraska to rescue his future wife ly apparent in works featuring prairie knights from her distress as an unwilling pioneer. It and madonnas. was also a popular theme for illustrators. In For instance, in the hands of Pyle's students, W. H. D. Koerner's pictures that accompanied the jousting knights seen in Pyle's Arthurian Hal G. Evarts's story, "The Shaggy Legion," illustrations reappeared in the guise of cowboy published in 1929, the woman in The Terrified heroes. In Ivory's It's You or Me Bill (fig. 5), an Girl Looked into Savage Faces in Which She illustration to B. M. Bowers's "The Lone Rider," Could Read No Mercy is freed by her eques­ a story about the Texas Rangers, the modern trian hero. That Koerner could have been led knights in chaps fight it out atop a racing train to such imagery by his early acquaintance with spouting a swirling curve of smoke. (Ironically, Pre-Raphaelite art in Wilmington is evident at the turn of the century trains were romanti­ from notes that he took during his tenure as a cized as "winged steeds" in a caption to an student at Pyle's school. Koerner observed in illustration of a train, as "the dangerous steed" his class notes, "One way to get a spiritual in a story in which a woman drives a train, and feeling in a certain figure is to keep everything even as Pegasus himself in a tale about a train softer in the figures than in other parts of the ride through Oklahoma. IS ) Other Pyle students picture and let light radiate away from it.,,16 depicted similar battles between the forces of The interest in spirituality was common to good and evil. N. C. Wyeth, whose illustrations most Pre-Raphaelite painters, especially to for medieval classics such as The Black Arrow Rossetti and the young Millais. Later Koerner were favored by children throughout the early cited specific European painters whom Pyle years of the century, had little difficulty apply­ directed his students to study: "Mille a [Millais) ing his medievalizing mode, seen in It hung and Joseph Iseral [Israels). Also the man who 48 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 1985

FIG. 6. N. C. Wyeth, It hung upon the thorn and there he blew three deadly notes, from The Boy's King Arthur, oil on canvas, 1917. Private collection, photograph courtesy of the Brandywine River Museum. COWBOY KNIGHTS AND PRAIRIE MADONNAS 49

FIG. 7. N. C. Wyeth, Fight on the Plains, from The Great West That Was, oil on canvas, 1916. Private collection, photograph courtesy of the Brandywine River Museum.

painted Joan Arch (probably Jules Bastien­ Some of Pyle's students continued this tradi­ Lepage, whose combined Pre-Raphaelite and tion in illustrations like The Marriage of Sir Impressionist Joan of Arc is now in the Metro­ Gawain, by Bertha Corson Day, published in politan Museum of Art).,,17 Chivalry was not 1902 to accompany Pyle's sister Katharine's limited to human knights and ladies. Koerner's book Where the Wind Blows. Marriage themes close friend and former studio-mate, Ivory, also soon found their way to western illustra­ even applied it to horses in his painting oh Give tions by Pyle's proteges. Matrimony was some­ Them a Fighting Chance, Replied Homer. He times only implied by engagement proposals, Would Have Been Safe If He Hadn't Come Back as in Koerner's illustration, published in 1922 After His Woman, illustrating a scene from for Emerson Hough's "The Covered Wagon," Honore Willsie's story, "The Pinto Stallion," captioned Molly! He Broke Out. Listen to Me! published in 1921. In Ivory's illustration of Do You Want the Engagement Broken? Do You Willsie's text, it is clear that equine chivalry Want to be Released?; or in Ivory's picture also appealed to artists and writers. You are Going To Marry Me-Someday. That's In Pre-Raphaelite images such as Rossetti's What I Think of You! included in Charles The Wedding of Saint George and Princess Alden Seltzer's 1918 novel Firebrand Trevison. Sabra, the result of chivalry was often marriage. Moreover, prairie weddings also entered popular 50 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 1985 imagery, as in N. C. Wyeth's covered wagon studio-mate's example as well as on Brown's wedding scene in which the preacher rides prototypical modern madonna. As in Brown's beside the wagon at breakneck speed, entitled painting, Ivory's and Koerner's illustrations I Hereby Pronounce Yuh Man and Wife!, emphasize the exalted status of women as child­ illustrating Edward S. Moffat's story "The Mis­ bearers. This a.ttitude was common in popular adventures of Cassidy," published in 1908. literature of the time, where wilderness women From rescue and marriage of the damsel in were idealized as lovers or mothers.18 Indeed, distress, it was only a short step to the prairie in "The Westerner," Canfield makes a point of madonna theme. Images of madonnas were telling the reader that the old man and the wife common Pre-Raphaelite subjects, not only in he released from prairie life to take back to traditional presentations like Rossetti's The Vermont have not had children. In other Seed of David altarpiece, but also in veiled stories and songs this point is made more open­ forms such as the emigrant woman in Brown's ly, as mothers are sentimentalized as the ulti­ The Last of England, who holds her tiny in­ mate heroines of the West.19 Even when this fant's hand as she and her husband depart. With association was not overtly made, as in Schoon­ her bonnet-lining and bonnet circling her face over's painting of a woman doing laundry in like a halo, the woman in Brown's painting front of a sod house, Silently He Rode On, seems to represent the modern madonna whose published in Country Gentleman in 1926, the flight is not to Egypt but to Australia or Amer­ inference of the role of women as nurturers and ica. Although many of Pyle's students produced helpmates is evident. variations on this theme by showing mothers Of the various myths of the West, the myth with children, Brown's motif of the modern of the frontier hero and heroine has tradition­ madonna especially appealed to illustrators of ally been one of the most appealing to the the women of the prairie. American imagination. While in the nineteenth Ivory was one of the first of the Pyle stu­ century the western hero was frequently a dents to use the prairie madonna theme as a specific person whose deeds had granted him subject. In 1909, the H. C. Merrill publishing hero status, by the early twentieth century, company used his painting Madonna of the heroes were more often generalized types Prairies as the subject of a halftone engraving, rather than historical persons. This change and later as a calendar illustration. Two years suited the illustrators of popular eastern maga­ later Ivory illustrated Maude Radford Warren's zines who could rely upon their imaginations to story "A Woman Pioneer," published in Satur­ formulate their pictures of the knights and day Evening Post, which also featured idealized ladies of the prairies. Setting the stage for the scenes of women and wagons, imagery that led western heroes of radio, film, and television to a later painting by Ivory that again capital­ were the illustrators active during the first ized on the prairie madonna subject. quarter of the twentieth century, who com­ Pictures like Ivory's were a far cry from illus­ bined the heritage of romantic knights and trations produced during the second half of the ladies as they were portrayed by Pre-Raphaelite nineteenth century that showed a more realistic artists with their own visions of romantic view of life on the plains, such as J. C. BIard's American heroes and heroines. A Family Encampment, published in 1867 in When we examine our frontier heritage Albert D. Richardson's Beyond the Mississippi. with attention to the emphasis that has been Nevertheless Ivory's idealization of the pioneer placed on idealization, the importance of Pre­ woman captured the imagination of his fellow Raphaelite precedents is clear. Not only has our illustrators. When in 1922 Koerner produced vocabulary of hero definition been dependent his version of the prairie madonna subject as an upon what Theodore Roosevelt called "the re­ illustration for Emerson Hough's "The Covered production here on this continent of essentially Wagon" (fig. 8), he was building on his former the conditions of ballad-growth which obtained COWBOY KNIGHTS AND PRAIRIE MADONNAS 51

FIG. 8. W. H. D. Koerner, Madonna of the Prairie, from Emerson Hough's "The Covered Wagon," Saturday Evening Post, 1 April 1922. Delaware Art Museum, Howard Pyle Student Collection. 52 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 1985 in medieval England," but more precisely it has 6. Beatrice Hanscom, "In Quiet Ways," been dependent upon the Pre-Raphaelite restate­ Scribner's Magazine 34 (1903): 201. ment of those conditions.20 Looking back on the 7. For further elaboration on the theme of popular art and literature that dealt with the the cowboy monarch, see William W. Savage, plains, it is not surprising that it was dependent Jr., The Cowboy Hero (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979). upon European antecedents; most of the popular 8. Owen Wister, "The Evolution of the Cow­ magazines of the first quarter of this century fol­ Puncher," reprinted in Ben Merchant Vorpahl, lowed patterns established in Europe. Illustra­ My Dear Wister: The Frederic Remington­ tions by European artists and stories about life Owen Wister Letters (Palo Alto, Calif.: Ameri­ outside of the United States were often featured. can West Publishing Co., 1972), p. 81. Just as the literature of the frontier and cattle 9. Owen Wister, The Virginian (London: kingdom was often produced by eastern writers Macmillan, 1902), p. 119. who attached a certain glamour to their subjects, 10. Further insight into Pre-Raphaelite veiled so the popular early twentieth-century visual symbolism can be found in George P. Landow, imagery of the plains was often produced by Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism artists working in the East for eastern magazines. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). 11. See Rowland Elzea and Elizabeth Hawkes, Indeed, one editor of a magazine that featured eds., A Small School of Art (Wilmington: western stories went so far as to remark that "a Delaware Art Museum, 1980), pp. 3-7. great many of these authors are legitimate de­ 12. In Ivory's collection, for instance, there scendants of the tellers of sagas and of the trou­ were buffalo hides, western clothing, a complete badours.,,21 Like the writers, the illustrators Mexican leather cowboy suit, bandoleros, bon­ also 'imbued their subjects with the glow of an nets, and a wide assortment of guns and rifles. era of sagas and troubadours, in keeping with 13. Henry C. Pitz, The Brandywine Tradition the Pre-Raphaelite approach to illustration (Boston: Houghton Mifflin), p. 131. popularized by Pyle and his followers. Their 14. Ethel Penniwell Brown and Olive Rush paintings and drawings codified the image of class notes, Howard Pyle Student Collection, the American western hero and heroine as the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington. 15. E. L. Blumenschein, "The Southwest from heirs and heiresses to a rich imaginative tradition a Locomotive," Scribner's Magazine 34 (1903): formed in nineteenth-century Britain by the 433; Arthur Train, "Extradition," Scribner's artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Magazine 37 (1905): 375; Blumenschein, "South­ west," p. 433. NOTES 16. W. H. D. Koerner class notes, Howard Pyle Student Collection, Delaware Art Museum, 1. Dorothy Canfield, "The Westerner," Wilmington. Scribner's Magazine 49 (1911): 158-65. The 17. Ibid. daughter of the president of the University of 18. See, for example, Charles Seltzer's novel Nebraska, Lincoln, and an acquaintance of Firebrand Trevison (New York: Grosset and Willa Cather, Dorothy Canfield became a best­ Dunlap, 1918), in which the action revolves selling novelist and a member of the editorial around a woman who is threatened by an evil board of the Book-of-the-Month Club. For a man and saved by an honest one, whom she note on her relationship to Cather see Joseph marries. Epstein, "Willa Cather: Listing toward Lesbos," 19. Cf. Tim Spencer's song "That Pioneer in The New Criterion 2 (December 1983): 36. Mother of Mine," sung by Roy Rogers, in 2. Canfield, "The Westerner," pp. 158,159. which the mother is a symbol of faith and a 3. Ibid., p. 160. guardian angel. Discussed in Savage, The Cow­ 4. Ibid., pp. 162-63. boy Hero, p. 85. 5. Walter A. Wyckoff, "A Section Hand on 20. Quoted in Walter Prescott Webb, The the Union Pacific Railway," Scribner's Maga­ Great Plains (Boston: Ginn, 1931), p. 453. zine 29 (1901): 687. 21. Ibid., p. 468.