[In the essay below, Bold examines the role of dime novels, pulp fiction, and the commodification of literature in transforming views about the West.]

Read collectively dime novels and their descendants tell the story of the frontier West's commodification in popular literature. This process was mediated by changing historical circumstances and individual authorial contributions, from the first intersection of mass literature and westward movement in the mid-nineteenth century to the “nostalgic remorse” for the frontier West of late twentieth-century capitalist culture.¹ Early and late, however, the commercial frameworks within which cheap Westerns were produced left their imprint on this fiction's format, formulaic action, narrative voice, and reception.

The mass production of American cheap fiction took off in the 1830s as part of the explosion in America's market economy.² The commodification of literature was facilitated by a huge increase in urban population, the spread of literacy, and rapid advances in transportation, industrialization, and print technology. The newly invented rotary press and the fanning out of a railroad network made possible, for the first time, fast, voluminous production of low-priced literature and transcontinental distribution to a mass audience. The new technology also dictated the appropriate form of this reading material. Story papers' large folio sheets with serials set in cramped columns of diminutive typeface, few illustrations, and a very low price—three to six cents per issue—were the result of a narrow calculation about how to attract and hold the largest audience as cheaply as possible. The meshing of cheap literature with a range of commercial interests and pressures was established.

With the beginning of the dime novel, these developments bore down on—and were refined in—Western fiction, the dominant genre of adventure story in the dime format.³ Irwin and Erastus Beadle and Robert Adams began dime novels in 1860 when they produced uniformly packaged series of complete, predominantly American novels in compact pamphlets priced at five or ten cents. The Beadles' major innovation was gearing their marketing strategies to the period's trends: the portable format suited escalating rail travel; the distinctive cover designs, uniform for each series and “library,” and the increasingly lurid illustrations made effective displays at the recently developed newsstands; and the very low price for stories of 35,000 and 70,000 words (“a dollar book for a dime!!” the publicity blared) was affordable even for the poorer industrial workers and immigrants. These mass publishers attempted to regulate not only production, advertising, and distribution but writing as well. Beadle and Adams regimented authors' production mainly in terms of quantity, speed, length, and fixed payment rates, supplying only general instructions on content. The results were massively successful; before they folded in 1898 Beadle and Adams published 3,158 separate titles and sold copies in the millions. By 1879 W. H. Bishop could declare that dime novel literature was “the greatest literary movement, in bulk, of the age, and worthy of very serious consideration for its character.” He concluded, “the phenomenon of its existence cannot be overlooked.”⁴

A host of imitators sprang up. The most successful were Frank Tousey, George Munro, Norman Munro, and Street and Smith (the last transferring from the story paper to the dime novel field late, in 1889, but immediately becoming the Beadles' main rival and surviving as pulp magazine and comic book publishers until 1950). These later publishers extended the network of commercial pressures bearing down on cheap fiction by introducing advertising and cutting prices to produce competitive “nickel novels”; furthermore, by narrowing the output to juvenile fiction and by supervising their writers much more closely, they systematized the production line more rigorously than Beadle and Adams had. Dime publishers came to commodify authors, denying them decision-making powers: by 1896 Ormond Smith dictated character, plots, and scenes to the author who was ostensibly “inventing” Frank Merriwell.⁵ Writers in dime and nickel stables lost their individualized signatures, too. Publishers and editors shunted authors around from one house pseudonym to another; at Street and Smith multiauthored series under one trademark name came to be the rule.

This emphasis on standardization left direct and indirect textual imprints on dime novel Westerns. The conservatism of the Western's fictional formula can be explained in a number of ways: by the political conservatism of frontier society that is represented—to however mediated a degree—in these adventure stories, by the slowness with which large-scale popular tastes change, or by the imitative tendencies of individual authors. Nonetheless, publishing calculations clearly encouraged caution and the reproduction of proven successes. Typical of the mass publishers' shrewd commercial strategies is Erastus Beadle's choice of the first dime novel: Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter, by Ann S. Stephens, which was reprinted from its serialization in the The Ladies' Companion of 1839 to appear as number 1 of Beadle's Dime Novels in June 1860. Not only did Erastus Beadle begin with a proven bestseller, but he grafted an example of sentimental or women's fiction—the most popular genre of the mid-nineteenth century—onto a new format and new publicity that exploited public interest in the westward movement. Malaeska is a decidedly woman-centered frontier narrative. Set in the early wilderness of the Hudson Valley, the story traces the fate of a Native American woman who is left widowed by the death of her white soldier husband, robbed of their son by her aristocratic in-laws in New York City, forced to witness his suicide when his Native American heritage is revealed to him years later, and finally killed by her own grief on her boy's grave. That this is a distinctively female, as well as Native American, experience is suggested by the narrator's comment on Malaeska's self-sacrifice: “It was her woman's destiny, not the more certain because of her savage origin. Civilization does not always reverse this mournful picture of womanly self-abnegation.”⁶

Although Malaeska sold at least a half-million copies in its dime format, its plot did not become the dominant formula for Western dime novels. Later in 1860 Edward S. Ellis, a young schoolmaster, brought to the Beadles a wilderness adventure with clear sales potential. Seth Jones; or, The Captives of the Frontier tells the frontier story from a perspective different from Malaeska's, focusing on a white hunter who saves various white captives from the Mohawks in a series of melodramatic adventures in the wilderness of western New York State. Orville J. Victor, Beadle's editor, called Seth Jones “the perfect Dime Novel.”⁷ Publishing it as number 8 of Beadle's Dime Novels, the firm puffed it with a massive advertising campaign in which newspaper advertisements, billboards, and handbills carried the tantalizing question “Who is Seth Jones?” followed by lithographs of a coonskin-capped hunter declaring, “I am Seth Jones.” The public response was even more massive than that to Malaeska, and the story of male heroism became entrenched as the dominant dime novel formula.

This paradigm shift, from a centrally female to emphatically male Western, carries cultural and political resonances. In direct contrast to Malaeska, Seth Jones and its imitators articulated the West in the optimistic, patriarchal terms of Manifest Destiny then in the ascendancy in public rhetoric. Whereas Malaeska to a degree exposed the human cost of the western movement, the male-centered dime novel drew on the same fund of triumphant images and nationalistic narratives as did newspapers and politicians. At the same time the Beadles' preference for the Ellis version of frontier adventure can be read as one beachhead in the attack on women's sentimental, religious culture. Jane Tompkins has tracked brilliantly how men seized the public imagination in the post-Civil War Western and into the twentieth century. It may be that what Tompkins names “the deauthorization of women” profited from an early, explicitly commercial boost.⁸

Although Seth Jones was a new story, it strongly resembled an earlier series of bestsellers—James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales (1823-41)—in terms of plot, setting, character types, and the representation of social roles.⁹ Like Cooper, Ellis chose an attack by “savage” Native Americans on a family of white settlers as the framework for his plot and an avuncular, Indian-slaying hunter as their rescuer. If Ellis's disposition of gender and race is recognizably conventional, his configuration of class is modified. Whereas Cooper's backwoodsman, Natty Bumppo, is unfit for the romantic role because he lacks social standing, Seth Jones casts off his hunter's disguise at the end of the tale to reveal himself as a young, aristocratic easterner suited to marry the white heroine whom he has saved from captivity. Both authors play out European social hierarchies in the American wilderness, but Ellis's frontier hero transcends class stratifications in a way that Cooper's does not. This sunny, optimistic ending erases the tension between East and West evident in Cooper: a shift of register with particular symbolic power in a time of national strife. Ellis's adaptation of Cooper also serves patriotic nationalism by simplifying the ethics of white settlement: demonizing the Native Americans justifies white conquest, and the elision of backwoodsman and aristocrat harmonizes competing economic interests. (By 1868 an obvious imitation of Seth Jones had made this message explicit. Percy St. John characterizes white frontier settlers thus: “Never weary, never conquered, they advanced still onward toward the setting sun, laying first the foundations of home and then of empire.”)¹⁰

This version of the frontier adventure, appropriating the wilderness for the glorification of white men rescuing white women and killing Native Americans, held sway thereafter in the Beadle production line and its imitators. Over time a combination of publishers, editors, and authors adapted the scenes, character types, and political rhetoric in response to changing historical circumstances, but the familiar narrative line of the formula survived. This strategy of innovation contained within repetition is perceptible in the development of heroic types in dime and nickel Westerns. The imperative to produce a hero transcending class and region remained paramount, but as the figure was inserted into different cultural environments, his specific lineaments changed: the hunter gave way to the scout, the cowboy, the outlaw, the frontier detective, and the freelance law-enforcer. In different accents these heroic types voiced their commitment to a certain brand of democracy and nationalism.

Buffalo Bill extended the Western hero's range, both fictively and commercially. Bill Cody was working as a buffalo hunter and scout for the Western army when he was discovered in 1869 by E. Z. C. Judson, a prolific popular author, entrepreneur, and sometime political activist better known by his most famous pseudonym, Ned Buntline. Buntline recognized Cody's commercial potential. He wrote him up as a heroic scout, Sioux fighter, freelance law-enforcer, and rescuer of captive maidens, first in Buffalo Bill, the King of Border Men! (which was serialized in Street and Smith's story paper New York Weekly of 1869-70) and then in dime novels; Buntline also briefly put Cody on the New York stage.

When Prentiss Ingraham took over authorship of Buffalo Bill stories in 1879, the figure became more violent, slaughtering scores of Native Americans in defense of whole communities instead of picking off single attackers in the style of Seth Jones, and more flamboyant, dressing in rich, elaborate costumes. In Ingraham's formulation the violent plainsman's gentlemanly demeanor and exotic appearance endowed Buffalo Bill with the marks of gentility necessary to the romantic hero. Ingraham also worked the figure up as nationalist icon: anticipating the Turner thesis by fifteen years, Ingraham depicted Buffalo Bill as “a barrier between civilization and savagery, risking his own life to save the lives of others.”¹¹ When Cody began to star in his own Wild West show from 1883, he extended his dime novel persona into the historical and political arena by incorporating America's imperialist ventures into his act, while Ingraham continued to produce melodramatic dime and nickel fiction as tie-ins to the performances.¹² Gradually a commercial constellation emerged around the imperialist frontier hero. …

Overlapping this development was the construction of another version of the dime novel hero. Edward Wheeler promoted the popularity of the Western outlaw when he introduced Deadwood Dick in the first number of Beadle's Half Dime Library in 1877. Deadwood Dick is the familiar amalgam of savagery, culture, nationalism, and individualism but inflected in a new direction. An easterner, Deadwood Dick has been forced to flee west under threat of imprisonment through the depredations of a pair of eastern financiers. Disguising himself in a black costume and mask, Dick gathers a hardy band around him and undertakes a series of violent adventures whose ethical status is ambiguous. On the one hand, the reader is told that Dick has abandoned himself to illegal pursuits; on the other, Dick is repeatedly shown rescuing innocent, genteel easterners, dispatching villains who are more often crooked businessmen than savage Native Americans, and becoming entangled in a number of romantic attachments. These melodramatic adventures play out class interests more explicitly than earlier dime novels, partly because the site of the action is the frontier boomtown rather than the sparsely settled wilderness. Dick frequently opposes “purse-proud aristocrats,” who are clearly censured by the democratic narrative voice: in Deadwood Dick's Device or, The Sign of the Double Cross (1879), the scheming Howells are “a leading family, both financially and socially—for Leadville, mind you, has its social world as well as its Eastern sister cities, formed out of that class whom fortune has smiled upon. And surrounded by great superfluity of style, pomp and splendor, they set themselves up as the ‘superior class,’ ye gods!”¹³ But the social bandit’s alignment with the laboring classes does not extend to political activists: “on a visit to Chicago soon after the Haymarket Riots of 1886, Deadwood Dick, Jr., denounces the anarchists who are on trial because they are an undesirable foreign element. He declares that all the accused persons deserved to be hanged.”¹⁴ A number of dime publishing firms capitalized on the popularity of the outlaw hero by developing entire libraries devoted to increasingly sensational tales of actual and fictional bandits. As the thrills became more exaggerated, the explicit sociopolitical commentary waned.

In the early twentieth century this sensationalizing of outlaws drew the wrath of some concerned citizenry and public bodies. One cultural institution in particular acted on this outcry against dime and nickel publishers: the office of the postmaster general determined what material could be sent through the mail and at what rates. This office, perhaps in response to concerns over worker unrest and rising socialism, censored inflammatory outlaw stories from 1883 through the turn of the century by refusing mailing privileges.¹⁵ In response dime publishers turned to moralistic adventure stories, fastening particularly on the heroic cowboy.

The cowboy had emerged gradually as a cultural hero; partly through the intercession of dime fiction, his image shifted over the 1880s from hell-raiser to half-wild, half-cultured frontier hero and democratic individualist who could function equally adroitly on the open range and in the frontier town.¹⁶ The decisive gentrification of the cowboy occurred beyond the dime novel genre, in the fiction of Owen Wister, the political rhetoric of Theodore Roosevelt, and the art of Frederic Remington.¹⁷ That development was reincorporated, in turn, into the juvenile nickel Westerns of the twentieth century, which transformed the gentlemanly cowboy into a clean-cut boy. Frank Tousey's Wild West Weekly, a series about a gang of boys in the West (again led by a displaced easterner) that began in 1902, was the most popular version of this formula. In 1904 Street and Smith produced a close imitation, Young Rough Riders Weekly (later, Rough Rider Weekly), authored under the house pseudonym “Ned Taylor.” These stories played on associations with Teddy Roosevelt, who was beginning his second term as president when the series began: the leader of this gang of boys is Ted Strong, an easterner who inherits two ranches in the Dakotas and one in Texas, and each gang member wears “a neatly-fitting khaki uniform such as those worn by the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War.”¹⁸ Although the standard captivity-and-rescue ritual survives, the action is modernized and heavily influenced by marketplace issues: battles revolve around corporate trust busting, the regulation of property rights, technological advancement, and sporting competitions, not the killing of Native Americans. Ted Strong's pervasive influence functions primarily to eradicate the wildness from the West.

What these shifts and turns in dime fiction share is the location of power in the white hero. In the dime and nickel Western white women and all nonwhite figures are relegated to providing the occasion for the excitement but are permitted no agency in its momentum or consequences. White women are typically passive victims saved by the hero's courage and wilderness skills; Native Americans, the threatening savages whom he destroys; Mexicans, the lustful degenerates whom he drives off; and blacks, the comic childlike incompetents whom he protects. (The most extreme reification of an African American occurs in Buntline's Red Ralph, The River Rover; or, The Brother's Revenge [1870]. The black figure, Tony, is servant to the aristocratic villain. Repeatedly doing his master's bidding, his punishment is a stark dehumanization: catching Tony in an assassination attempt, the hero first cuts a cross into his forehead and then returns him to his master with a letter pinned to his breast. Red Ralph the sailor later carves anchors into the servant's cheeks, and the heroine finally scalds him white.)

Variations to these flat caricatures appear, but ultimately they seem contained by the heroic imperative. For example, when Deadwood Dick defends the land rights of a peaceful Crow Indian in Deadwood Dick's Claim; or, The Fairy Face of Faro Flats (1884), the point is more the extent of the hero's protective powers than American Indians' rights. Wheeler also produced a series of female figures who transcend the passive gentility of the typical dime novel heroine: Hurricane Nell, Wild Edna, Rowdy Kate, and most famously, Calamity Jane, who figures briefly as Dick's wife but more regularly as his sidekick in the Deadwood Dick series.¹⁹ These women adopt masculine attire, display prowess on horseback and in gunplay, and often save the hero from fatal danger. Ultimately, however, their ostensible power is negated: either the masculine role is only a stage in a woman's maturation toward adult domesticity, or her masculinized behavior results in her death, or (as in the case of Calamity Jane, who has lost her chastity) she leads a kind of living death, forever branded a degenerate and outcast from respectable society. In lip service to women's changing social roles in the early twentieth century, Stella, Ted's companion in Rough Rider Weekly, is empowered in gradual, limited ways: she initiates and conducts her own adventures, and her western costume is practical yet feminine; ultimately, however, she depends on Ted for her safety. With these stereotypes the fictional narratives entrenched a disposition of gender and race that was reflected in the demographics of the publishing houses, where white men predominated in all professional roles.

However simplistic the dime—and nickel—novel formula, the embedding of topical references in the narratives and their responsiveness to changing cultural climates suggest that these melodramas were offered as prisms through which to view current affairs. Implicitly and explicitly the frontier wilderness came to be aligned with modern society, to the extent that the dime Western could be read, in Daryl Jones's words, “as a vehicle for addressing social problems associated with urbanization and industrialization.”²⁰ Public discourse and cheap fiction symbiotically supported a vibrant, optimistic political rhetoric that characterized the Far West as site of national, economic, and personal regeneration. On a number of fronts dime and nickel Westerns seem to support the dominant rhetoric of the era by mimicking and extending it into frontier melodrama.

Complicating the easy alignment of text to sociopolitical arena, however, is the author-reader relationship. Inscribed in these formulaic Westerns are authorial voices that attempt to circumvent the regulation of the marketplace by insisting on their individual contributions to narrative production and by recovering an oral relationship with their readers. The details of both mass-publishing history and textual developments suggest that, ultimately, these voices were circumscribed by the culture industry. Nevertheless, they can be read as limited but significant challenges to the powerful institutions of cultural production, as signs that the fictional West was not completely homogenized by commerce.²¹

Some Beadle and Adams authors forged a facsimile of a storyteller's relationship with their audience by talking to their readers about the commercial paraphernalia of the dime novel. Buntline, for example, mounted a running commentary on his place in the production line, as well as a defense of his populist politics, within his repetitive dime tales of captivity, chase, and rescue on the frontier. In a typical acknowledgment of the competitive commercialism of his task, he ended a stirring frontier tale with “I hope you feel as if you had got your money's worth.”²²

Edward Ellis and Prentiss Ingraham implicated authors, characters, and readers in self-conscious codes, conventions, and sign systems, thus moving the fiction closer to an acknowledgment of its status in the publishing field. In Ellis the narrative commentary is supplemented by characters simultaneously enacting and discussing the formulaic plots: series characters typically cite by title their appearances in earlier publications, and they explicitly acknowledge their participation in ritualistic, somewhat predictable action. Ingraham's fiction insists that the production and decipherment of codes are at the heart of Western adventure. In Buffalo Bill's Redskin Ruse; or, Texas Jack's Death-Shot (1895), for example, characters spend much time translating secret messages, “reading signs” on trails, devising “talking papers” (as maps are called), and interpreting key clues on clothing and bodies, all the while identifying their adventures as types of games.

Edward Wheeler's characters emphasized the constructedness of the formula further by becoming independent of their author to the extent that they wrote their own plots, devised their own identities, and fought their own publishing battles. For example, just at the time that Street and Smith marketed an imitation of the Deadwood Dick Series, Wheeler had his hero declare, “I see that counterfeits are being shoved on the market—that is, sham Deadwood Dicks. We have one here in Eureka. … I wish to meet this chap and learn where he obtained the right to use my copyrighted handle?”²³ The voice that recognizes the rules of the marketplace and the systematic interchange between producer and the consumer now belonged to the characters. The shift in rhetorical power is a textual illustration of the diminution of authorial power, just around the time when authors were losing more of their autonomy in the publishing hierarchy.

As dime publishers became more interventionist, these authorial gestures disappeared from the text. In Street and Smith juvenile nickel series an editorial voice at the end of the story comments on the construction of the fiction, encourages readers to distribute it for financial rewards, and in time, invites the audience to participate in its composition. The most emphatic example of this process occurred in the letters pages of Rough Rider Weekly, significantly revolving around the social construction of gender. In response to conflicting advice from readers about whether Ted Strong should marry Stella, the editor threw open the author's study and invited in all the readers: “So you think Ted and Stella should marry? What do the rest of our readers think about it? … There are two sides to this question, and we should like to have it decided by our readers.”²⁴ The fiction thus became an overt bargaining tool between publisher and public; the only role left to the author was to carry out the audience's demands.

The question of how all these textual signals—of topicality, authorial presence, and reader power—were received by readers is linked to the equally knotty question of who constituted the massive new audience for dime and nickel Westerns.²⁵ The Beadles avowedly aimed at a large and diverse audience, attempting to transcend class division in audience as well as hero; they announced in 1860 that they “hoped to reach all classes, old and young, male and female.”²⁶ They advertised dime novels in the nationally influential New York Tribune, and some of their publications were reviewed (favorably) in the highbrow North American Review. The Civil War produced a captive audience of soldiers, who were highly responsive to the sensational adventure that some publishers became adept at producing. Later, industrialization, urbanization, and economic calculations seem to have delivered the working classes as the main audience for cheap fiction. Frederick Whittaker specifically enumerated the audience: “The readers of the dimes are farmers, mechanics, workwomen, drummers, boys in shops and factories”; extrapolating from this and other evidence, Michael Denning has averred that “the bulk of the audience of dime novels were workers—craftworkers, factory operatives, domestic servants and domestic workers.”²⁷ Retrospectively commentators tended to style dime novels as “part of the youth of many of us” (this from an editorial in the New York Sun in 1900). In fact, however, it was only toward the end of Beadle and Adams's life and throughout Street and Smith's dime career that a specifically juvenile audience was targeted. Within these reading groups for dime novels, more males than females seem to have been attracted to Westerns, and readers developed different interpretive strategies according to their level of investment as “Committed, Regular, or Casual” readers.²⁸ Hypothetical reconstructions of these readers' responses to authorial and narrative signs suggest that working-class readers, at least, read dime fiction in ideologically charged ways, not as simple escapism dissociated from their daily lives. Piecing together evidence from a patchwork of autobiographies, diaries, and reports by social reformers, Michael Denning has argued that workers read cheap novels allegorically or typologically, interpreting a range of scenarios as microcosms of their social world. Thus, especially at times of industrial agitation and strikes in the late nineteenth century, workers could read the triumph of labor in stories of western outlaws, such as Wheeler's Deadwood Dick, The Prince of the Road; or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills (1877). One way of understanding the authorial gestures toward the commercial constructedness of the work is as invitations to what John Fiske labels a “producerly reading”:

the producerly text has the accessibility of a readerly one … but it also has the openness of the writerly. … It offers itself up to popular production; it exposes, however reluctantly, the vulnerabilities, limitations, and weaknesses of its preferred meanings; it contains, while attempting to repress them, voices that contradict the ones it prefers; it has loose ends that escape its control, its meanings exceed its own power to discipline them, its gaps are wide enough for whole new texts to be produced in them.²⁹

Both empirical evidence and theorized hypothesis suggest, then, that the audience of dime and nickel Westerns was not undifferentiatedly passive. Some readers could respond to textual hints and ambiguities according to their own agendas, contributing their own meanings to the complex multiple authorship of these cheap forms.

In their ritualistic adventures of attacks, captivity, and pursuit, dime novels encode a West where nationalism and commerce intersect regeneratively. The market operates visibly on the manufacture of the dime novel as product, on the textual representation of the West—which develops from untamed wilderness to site of business opportunities—and on the narrative voices that deliver those images. Within this representational space a hierarchy of gender and race is formulaically inscribed. Distributed by the millions, this version of the West could claim a democratic voice on many levels.

The pulp magazines and comics that succeeded dime and nickel novels display similar strategies, although potentially to different rhetorical effect. The production process became slicker and more intense as the technological and commercial environment heated up, distribution increased exponentially, and certain narrative features became increasingly exaggerated. Encoded within these changes, however, is a familiar story of white male supremacy impelled by a democratic ethos that conflates nationalism and commerce.

Partly because of the postal restrictions on series of complete novels, pulp magazines took over from dime novels after World War I, bringing with them a new format and different editorial methods.³⁰ These weekly and monthly magazines were miscellanies of short and long fiction with various features like quizzes, letters pages, and factual articles, printed on cheap pulp paper and selling for ten or fifteen cents. Pulps were invented in 1896, but they reached the height of their popularity only once they began to specialize after 1919: Street and Smith were first with this innovation, with their all-Western Western Story Magazine. Within the Western genre further subdivision (into, for example, romance Westerns—Ranch Romances, Romantic Range—and adventure Westerns—Ace-High Western Stories, Double Action Western) enabled publishers to target specific audiences. This precision was important because of the attempts to raise advertising revenue; advertisers wanted assurance that notice of their products was reaching appropriate audiences. The run of pulp authors was slotted into this regulated scheme, with uniform payment rates—two cents and, later, one cent per word—and manuscript lengths—5,000 words for a story, 30,000 words for a novelette, and 60,000 words for a serial. The reigning climate was imitation and reproduction, the editorial consensus being that “if there is one trait that the pulpwood reader has it is his predilection for sameness.”³¹ The pulps died as a popular form around 1950, partly because of competition from the more seductive media of television and cinema and from the boom in slick magazines and paperback books when paper quotas ended after World War II. In at least one pulp editor's opinion, however, pulps suffered also because the automation of production became too oppressive for the writers, artists, and editors involved in their making.³²

By and large pulp magazines recycled the formulaic narratives and character types of the twentieth-century nickel novels, dispensing with the juvenile emphasis and adding some violence and sex to the action. For example, when Street and Smith turned Wild West Weekly into the pulp magazine Wild West in 1927, the lead story simply took the characters from the nickel novel and turned them into mature young men, enlarging the scope of their violent action and romantic entanglements. Although the subgenre of the romance Western seems to privilege women figures, by endowing them with economic power (typically portraying them as ranch owners) and positioning them in the center of the adventurous action, the female sphere is ultimately limited in familiar ways. In “Hearts and Saddles,” by J. Edward Leithead—the lead story of Ranch Romances for July 1931—the heroine is contained by the essentialist marks of femininity; Sally Kerrigan is “a very pretty girl in overalls and brass-studded buzzard-wing chaps, a gray curled-brim sombrero drawn low on her head. Unless one looked closely, noting the wholly feminine cast of brown features and the soft, well rounded contours of a girlish form, she might be mistaken for a rider of the opposite sex.”³³ It is not surprising that, despite her contribution to the vanquishing of rustlers, the crises of the cattle drive, and the hard work of the ranch, Sally Kerrigan ends the tale in the hero's arms, “her eyes … shining in proclamation of surrender.”³⁴ Figures from minority cultures within America continue to function as appendages to the white male hero, too. Occasionally a more distinctive narrative emerged from the mass, from a “star” writer who succeeded in parlaying his or her work into paperback book format. The pulp fiction of Zane Grey and Frederick Faust (better known by one of his twenty pseudonyms, Max Brand), for example, has marked characteristics. Both authors worked up the Western's mythological associations, shaping familiar adventures into an archetypal pattern of separation-initiation-return; Grey emphasized sexual thrills and lavish scenic descriptions; and Brand came to reverse the dominant trend, turning from the Virginian type of romantic hero to the Leatherstocking type of extrasocietal loner. Ultimately, however, these variations seem primarily structural, not challenging the ideological limits of the pulp formula.

The diminution of the authorial voice continues in the textual dynamics of the pulp magazines, with the further impression that readers, too, are being articulated as component parts of a commercial scheme run for the benefit of the publishers. Generally the stories lack even the limited individuation of the dime narrative voices, although occasional stars like Grey and Brand sustained characteristic accents in their work. Story functioned as product in this format more explicitly than ever; in the words of one pulp editor, “Serials are nothing more than sales promotion efforts.”³⁵ The power of the editorial voice was institutionalized in departments such as “The Round-Up” in Street and Smith's Western Story Magazine and “The Wranglers' Corner” in the same firm's Wild West, where editors orchestrated characters' responses to readers' letters in a facsimile of direct contact. Authors, particularly star authors, were intermittently given a voice in this conversation, but it was heavily mediated by editorial invention and the injunction that authors are “just common folks, same as you and me.”³⁶ This device served not only to induce community identification in the reader but to gauge and manipulate audience response for financial profit. As part of this rhetoric, in 1924 readers of Street and Smith's Western Story Magazine were enlisted in the effort to drum up advertising revenue: “We know you read the advertisements in our magazines, and that you can help us prove it to the advertisers.”³⁷ In a final sign of commodification, when the latter-day pulp Far West was launched in 1978, the readers' responses were limited to a multiple choice questionnaire that explicitly controlled the range of responses available to them. The implication is that publisher-editors were attempting the ultimate rationalization of labor, incorporating authors and readers as component parts of their smoothly operating machine. Given Henry Steeger's judgment that “pulps were the principal entertainment vehicle for millions of Americans,” the circulation of such traditional images of the West and the attempt to reify their readers potentially marked a large sector of American cultural life.³⁸

The genre that finally linked the written Western to the movie and television version was the comic.³⁹ According to Maurice Horn, “the birth of the comics as a distinct medium”—as strips with sequential narrative, continuing characters, speech balloons, onomatopoeia, and frame-enclosed pictures—occurred in 1896, with the panel Yellow Kid by Richard Outcault in Joseph Pulitzer's Sunday supplement to the New York World.⁴⁰ By the early years of the twentieth century comic strips were a regular feature in daily newspapers, too. Over time these strips expanded from juvenile to adult forms; from about 1929 many privileged adventure action over comedy; and from the early 1920s, they increasingly imitated the “syntax” of movies with much cross-fertilization of content between comics and animated cartoons. American comic books took off in the 1930s, first with reprinted comic strips, and then with original material, mainly addressed to young readers. Since World War II the development of comic strips and books has been intermittent, with periods of censorship, decline, and renewed innovation, especially from underground “comix.”

The economics of comic production were distinct from dime and pulp calculations because strips were controlled by a syndicate distribution system that rationalized production and centralized control more fiercely than any publishing house. There is diverse evidence of syndicate editors seizing the creative initiative from artists and authors. For example, Joseph Patterson, founder of the Tribune-News Syndicate, “often took average artists, suggested titles, changed characters and outlined themes, to create classic comics.”⁴¹ Especially after the consolidations of the 1930s, syndicates also managed energetic cross-fertilization among the entertainment media. In the 1970s the Field Newspaper Syndicate developed features and continuities on the basis of quasi-scientific planning and polling, including canvassing newsagents' responses to new titles. Audiences were massive: in 1938 a Gallup survey stated that 63 percent of adults read daily comics and 73 percent of adults read Sunday comics.⁴²

Strips devoted to the Wild West appeared in the late 1920s, and flurries of humorous and adventure Western stories occurred throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, both in newspaper strips and in comic books. By 1965 comic Westerns kept pace with developments in the cinematic Western with such irreverent anti-Western comics as Tumbleweeds. The hand of the syndicate is evident in these developments. The Tribune-News Syndicate initiated many Western titles; Texas Slim, for example, which ran from 1925 to 1928 and then from 1940 to 1958, arose in response to Patterson's request for a humorous Western. The comic strip Bronc Peeler, drawn by Fred Harman from the early 1930s, was transformed into Red Ryder by New York entrepreneur Stephen Slesinger, who then parlayed the figure into movie serials, comic books, novels, radio shows, and advertising. With the Lone Ranger the commercial diversification operated in the opposite direction. Beginning life as a radio serial in 1933, the figure's massive success led editors at King Features to initiate Lone Ranger comic strips and comic books, which survived until the 1970s; there was also highly successful marketing of Lone Ranger guns, Lone Ranger costumes, Lone Ranger books, and Lone Ranger movie serials. … There were comic strips of Zane Grey's novels and of screen cowboys such as Tom Mix and Gene Autry.

The narratives of these Western comics remain recognizably formulaic. The following summary of Broncho Bill (begun by Harry O’Neill for United Features in the late 1920s as Young Buffalo Bill, later Buckaroo Bill) suggests their debt to the dime and nickel formulas of an earlier era: “The stories in Broncho Bill came to center around the activities of a Bill-led group of youthful vigilantes calling themselves the Rangers, sort of gun-toting boy scouts. O’Neill's idea of suspense was to have some innocent, a hapless infant or a golden-haired little girl, about to fall over a cliff or be eaten by a grizzly bear.”⁴³ The positioning of Native American sidekicks—speaking, at least in Bronc Peeler and The Lone Ranger, the most ludicrous “You Betchum!” patois—is familiar, too. Some suggestive exceptions to the formula appeared, however; the protagonist of White Boy (from 1933) was raised among Native Americans, and Ghost Rider (from 1950) was a supernatural Western. Moreover, the graphic articulation of comics served, in time, to heighten the sensationalism of both violence and voyeuristic sex. Even more resonantly than earlier forms, the comics speak to the political world; they not only incorporate topical references (during the World Wars, for example), but the strips' position within newspapers links them to cultural events, however dissociated their fantasy world may seem. Western comics survive to an extent today, although, as with movie Westerns, they are no longer the dominant genre; perhaps their heritage is most strongly imprinted in the individualistic “superheroes” such as Superman and Spiderman.

Within this matrix of production authors' and artists' choices and roles were heavily determined by the syndicate machine. When entrepreneurial forces took over Fred Harman's comic strip, for example, the artist was turned into an economically productive celebrity: “Harman appeared in the ads along with his characters. ‘Fred Harman, famous cowboy artist who draws the popular NEA newspaper cartoon red ryder comic strip, was a sure ’nough Colorado cowboy before hittin’ the trail to New York City. Fred helped Daisy design this genuine Western-style saddle carbine an’ hopes you get your red ryder carbine right away!’”⁴⁴ The Daisy Manufacturing Company (a maker of BB guns) also conducted competitions, with the artist as first prize: “see Fred Harman draw his famous Cartoon Strip.” In a familiar ironic juncture Harman was puffed as the originary talent just at the time when his strip was being scripted by a number of ghost artists. Most syndicate employees enjoyed less exposure than this, being shuffled from strip to strip as market forces dictated.

Despite all these structural similarities between comic narratives and modes of production and those of earlier mass-produced Westerns, readers' responses may have made different meanings out of comics. Martin Barker's nuanced reading of non-Western comic books suggests that an increasingly sophisticated and knowing rhetoric—on the cover, in the editorial matter, and within the strips themselves—plays with the slippage between fantasy and reality and with self-reflexive commentary in ways much more complex than, though still recognizably related to, the rhetoric of dime novels. Barker reads these socially embedded signals as offering readers a “contract” involving resistance to authority (adult authority, in the case of juvenile audiences); working with a more textual interpretation, Horn argues that “if the medium is the message, then the message of the comics, with their flouting of the rules of traditional art and of civilized language, can only be subversion.”⁴⁵ This hypothesis can be extrapolated to Western comics. As early as 1939 the comic strip Little Joe emphatically parodied the genre's reliance on racial stereotypes. Utah, the old frontiersman, seeks to cheat “an Injun” out of his fine horses in exchange for what Utah believes is a defunct automobile:

Utah: Howdy! Right nice pair o’ hosses you got thar—care to sell?

“Injun”: Ugh! No sellum!

Utah: Ah—I see you like-um automobile—nice car—swap cheap! Have look-see anyway—

“Injun”: Ugh! Heap fine smell buggy!

Utah [sotto voce]: Heh! Heh! Look at him! Them simple red men is all suckers fer bright paint—jest watch me git him—[to “Injun”] Done! I git th’ hosses! You git th’ car … all even—no backin’ out! (Heh! Heh! Jest wait’ll th’ illiterate cuss tries drivin’ it!)

“Injun”: Ugh! [driving off in car] Yes—a very snappy job—superb lines—abundant power—much improved over the model I had while in college—nice to have met you—adios!

[Utah collapses in astonishment, mouth agape.]⁴⁶

Marvel Comics' Kid Colt Outlaw plays up the parody of its “blam! whump! wham!” action with pointed editorial comments: Kid Colt's “Deadly Double” is a “Wild and Wooly Western Masterpiece! … Lettered by: Al Kurzrok … Villain Booed by: Sagebrush Irv.”⁴⁷ Such reminders of comics' artifice and their melodramatic absurdities proliferate throughout the recognizably formulaic tale of robbery, vengeance, and justice. These textual gestures can be interpreted as inviting a resistant reading of the plot, thereby undermining the narratives of law and order. Such subversion is, of course, significantly contained by the syndicate machine producing and profiting from these publications. Nevertheless, at the rhetorical level comics offer readers the opportunity to challenge the codes and hierarchies of the Western genre (and the society that it represents). The comics' pronounced foregrounding of parody is largely foreign to the pulp magazines and promises more subversion than the “producerly readings” or space for contestation opened up by the dime novels.

Evidence that these subversive gestures in comics are matched by readerly resistance, expressed as critical distance, comes in the reading practices of the comic audience most studied to date: children. Working from various case studies, Barker identifies “children's handling of the ‘hidden curriculum’ of adult power” in their reactions to weekly comics.⁴⁸ Reflecting more personally on his son's response to 1950s comics, Robert Warshow speculated that the boy's fascination with the publishing house, the staff, and the drafting processes indicated a specific strategy on the part of the juvenile reader: “I think that Paul's desire to put himself directly in touch with the processes by which the comic books are produced may be the expression of a fundamental detachment which helps to protect him from them; the comic books are not a ‘universe’ to him, but simply objects produced for his entertainment.”⁴⁹ Again, a critical leap is required to extrapolate from this evidence specifically to Western comics. Nevertheless, the potential is clearly there for comic readers to construct a West of the imagination more self-consciously parodic or knowingly limited than any mere plot summary might suggest.

In this chapter I have tried to read the frames of production and reception that mediate narratives of the Wild West in dime, nickel, pulp, and comic publications. The image of the West that results is shifting and, to a degree, fractured. On the one hand, at the level of textual representation, the West of the majority of cheap fiction seems unremittingly masculinist, racist, and nationalistic, whether represented as savage wilderness, vanguard of American civilization, wellspring of imperialist energy, limitless playing field, home of entrepreneurial capitalism, or a dehistoricized, moralistic environment that legitimizes violence and, later, sexual titillation. Yet the reading of this simple triumphalism is complicated by the contradictory voices that emerge as part of the commodification process. The most dynamic developments in the fictional formula seem to occur in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when dime and nickel Westerns adapted their lineaments to changing cultural and political climates, partly by incorporating the market economy into their fictional action. Thereafter, repetitions in plot, character, setting, and language saturate the fictive material. At the same time, however, editorial gestures to readers become more knowing and sophisticated; whereas the formulaic fiction petrifies in the later twentieth century, the rhetorical devices framing that fiction become increasingly suggestive, offering readers various kinds of resistance to the heroic narratives. Audiences of different classes and periods seem to have followed their own agendas, their interpretations sometimes running counter to and sometimes colluding with the manifest story lines and the commercial paraphernalia. The “meanings” of mass-produced Western fiction can be read as the product of all these forces in contention and collusion with one another, contested terrain playing out a range of economic, national, and personal interests.

Notes

1. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (London, 1987), 10.

2. I address this period at greater length in Bold, “Popular Forms I,” in The Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliott, 285-305 (New York, 1991). Sources include Mary Noel, Villains Galore: The Heyday of the Popular Story Weekly (New York, 1954); Madeleine B. Stern, ed., Publishers for Mass Entertainment in Nineteenth Century America (Boston, 1980); and Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York, 1985).

3. The proportion of dime novels devoted to western topics is documented in Philip Durham, “Introduction,” “Seth Jones,” Edward S. Ellis and “Deadwood Dick on Deck,” Edward L. Wheeler: Dime Novels (New York, 1966): “approximately three-fourths of the [Beadle and Adams] dime novels deal with the various forms, problems, and attitudes of life on the frontier, and … more than half are concerned with life in the trans-Mississippi West” (ix). The details of dime novel production and formulas are drawn from Christine Bold, Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction 1860 to 1960 (Bloomington, Ind., 1987); Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America (London, 1987); Albert Johannsen, The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels: The Story of a Vanished Literature, 2 vols., supplement (Norman, Okla., 1950, 1962); Daryl Jones, The Dime Novel Western (Bowling Green, Ohio, 1978); Quentin Reynolds, The Fiction Factory; or, From Pulp Row to Quality Street: The Story of 100 Years of Publishing at Street and Smith (New York, 1955); and Madeleine Stern, Publishers for Mass Entertainment.

4. W. H. Bishop, “Story-Paper Literature,” The Atlantic Monthly, September 1879, 383.

5. Reynolds, Fiction Factory, 88-89.

6. Ann S. Stephens, Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter, Beadle's Dime Novels no. 1 (New York, 1860 [1839]), 57.

7. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Mass., 1950), 93.

8. Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York, 1992), 42.

9. For more information, see John Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago, 1976); and Smith, Virgin Land.

10. Jones, Dime Novel Western, 22.

11. Prentiss Ingraham, Buffalo Bill, from Boyhood to Manhood. Deeds of Daring, Scenes of Thrilling Peril, and Romantic Incidents in the Early Life of W. F. Cody, the Monarch of Bordermen. Beadle's Boy's Library of Sport, Story, and Adventure no. 2 (New York, 1878), 2.

12. Christine Bold, “The Rough Riders at Home and Abroad: Cody, Roosevelt, Remington, and the Imperialist Hero,” Canadian Review of American Studies 18 (Fall 1987): 324-30; Richard Slotkin, “The ‘Wild West,’ ” in Buffalo Bill and the Wild West, 27-44 (Brooklyn, 1981).

13. Jones, Dime Novel Western, 84-87.

14. Smith, Virgin Land, 101.

15. Bold, Selling the Wild West, 6-7; Jones, Dime Novel Western, 79.

16. Warren French, “The Cowboy in the Dime Novel,” Studies in English 30 (1951): 219-34.

17. G. Edward White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister (New Haven, Conn., 1968).

18. Ned Taylor, “The Young Rough Riders in the Rockies; or, a Fight in Midair,” Young Rough Riders Weekly no. 38 (1905), 1.

19. For further information about dime novel heroines, see Smith, Virgin Land, 112-20.

20. Jones, Dime Novel Western, 127. Various articles in Reckless Ralph's Dime Novel Round-Up (1931-; retitled Dime Novel Round-Up in 1953) document examples of topical references.

21. I develop this argument in much greater detail in Bold, Selling the Wild West.

22. Ned Buntline, The White Wizard; or, The Great Prophet of the Seminoles, Beadle's Dime Library 2, no. 16 (New York, 1879 [1858]), 32.

23. Edward L. Wheeler, The Phantom Miner; or, Deadwood Dick's Bonanza (Cleveland, 1899 [1878]), 17.

24. “A Chat with You,” Rough Rider Weekly no. 140 (1906), 30.

25. That this audience was new and massive is confirmed by Smith, Virgin Land, 91, and Jones, Dime Novel Western, 8, 14.

26. Johannsen, House of Beadle and Adams, 1:9.

27. Frederick Whittaker, “Reply,” New York Tribune, March 16, 1884, 8; Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents, 27.

28. Martin Barker, Comics: Ideology, Power, and the Critics (New York, 1989), 51.

29. John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (Boston, 1989), 104.

30. These details of pulp magazine production are drawn from Bold, Selling the Wild West; John A. Dinan, The Pulp Western: A Popular History of the Western Fiction Magazine in America, I. O. Evans Studies in the Philosophy and Criticism of Literature, no. 2. (San Bernardino, Calif., 1983); Tony Goodstone, ed., The Pulps: Fifty Years of American Popular Culture (New York, 1970); Ron Goulart, Cheap Thrills: An Informal History of the Pulp Magazines (New Rochelle, N.Y., 1972); Frank Gruber, The Pulp Jungle (Los Angeles, 1967); and Harold Brainerd Hersey, Pulpwood Editor: The Fabulous World of the Thriller Magazines Revealed by a Veteran Editor and Publisher (New York, 1937; reprint, Westport, Conn., 1974).

31. Hersey, Pulpwood Editor, 2.

32. Daisy Bacon, “The Golden Age of the Iron Maiden,” The Roundup, April 1975, 7-9.

33. J. Edward Leithead, “Hearts and Saddles,” Ranch Romances, July 1931, 169.

34. Ibid., 215.

35. Hersey, Pulpwood Editor, 23.

36. “The Round-Up,” Western Story Magazine, October 27, 1927, 135.

37. “A Chat with You,” The Popular Magazine, February 1905, n.p.

38. Goodstone, Pulps, v.

39. Information about comics is drawn from Barker, Comics; Herb Galewitz, Great Comics (New York, 1972); Goulart, Cheap Thrills; and Maurice Horn, ed., The World Encyclopedia of Comics, 2 vols. (New York, 1976).

40. Horn, World Encyclopedia of Comics, 1:10-11.

41. Richard Marschall, “A History of Newspaper Syndication,” in World Encyclopedia of Comics, ed. Horn, 2:726.

42. Galewitz, Great Comics, vii.

43. Goulart, The Adventurous Decade (New Rochelle, N.Y., 1975), 184.

44. Goulart, Adventurous Decade, 187.

45. Barker, Comics, 61; Horn, World Encyclopedia of Comics, 1:50.

46. Galewitz, Great Comics, 244.

47. Gary Friedrich, Werner Roth, and Herb Trimpe, “The Deadly Double,” Kid Colt Outlaw, August 1978, 1.

48. Barker, Comics, 86.

49. Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theater, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (Garden City, N.Y., 1962), 87.