[In the following essay, French traces the role of the cowboy character in the dime novel, revealing the character's emerging importance in the works of four novelists.]

Sentimentalists are poor prophets. In his nostalgic tribute to the old dime novel, Charles Harvey wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 1907:

More than a quarter of a century ago … the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe ended the days of the old trail and its story tellers. Between the railroads which transported the cattle from the ranges to the stockyards, and the barbed wire fences of the settlers who are abolishing the ranges, the cowboy as a picturesque feature of the Western landscape has passed out, and the dime novel will know him no more.¹

Harvey was wrong; it was the dime novel, not the cowboy, which was doomed. The stereotype of the noble, fearless cowboy is today firmly rooted in American literature. The advent of television has confirmed the hypothesis, suggested by the motion pictures and numerous western magazines, that purveyors of popular entertainment are agreed that the epic hero of the new world came riding out of the West.²

How did the now seemingly immortal cowboy arrive at his present eminence? Since “dime novel” lingers in literary fancy as a blanket term for all the cheap, paper-backed publications of the nineteenth century, one may assume that the contents of these old thrillers were much akin to those of contemporary formula fiction about the West and that the cowboy, like Athena, sprang forth full-grown and armed for the good fight. Yet an examination of the “dime novels”³ themselves, as may be made in the representative collection preserved by the University of Texas, proves that the nineteenth century cowboy was not himself a stereotyped figure, but a man interpreted from several viewpoints who evolved, largely as a result of outside influences, into the current stereotype. The purpose of this article is to describe the evolution of the fictional cowboy through an analysis of the works of four representative writers.

The cowboy was not the central figure in early Western fiction. The Indian scout, the prairie guide, the road agent, and the buffalo hunter were more interesting than the ranch hand to Newton M. Curtis, Edward Ellis, “Ned Buntline,” and “Buckskin Sam” Hall, early exponents of the Western tradition. Buffalo Bill, Kit Carson, Bigfoot Wallace, and the James Boys loom large in the old hierarchy, but one must wade through many pages of microscopic print before finding a work that can legitimately be called “cowboy” fiction. The cowboy one does find has not been adequately interpreted by analysts like Douglas Branch, who, although he wrote the most comprehensive work about the cowboy in fiction, formulated some erroneous generalizations about his subject.

Branch first assumed that “the greatest of the dime novel cowboys is Young Wild West,”⁴ although, strictly speaking, Young Wild West is not a dime novel hero at all. This prototype of the modern fictional cowboy did not make his appearance until 1902, whereas the traditional “dime novel” had expired in 1899, when the firm of Beadle and Adams, responsible for originating this lightly regarded art form, closed its doors.

Since Branch had chosen Young Wild West as exemplary of the dime novel cowboy, he was led to the further generalization that “in the dime novel, if not in the American monthly magazines, the cowboy was nature's nobleman.”⁵ He errs here in confusing two periods. The magazine articles adversely critical of the cowboy appeared in the eighteen-seventies and eighties; by 1886 a writer for Harper's Monthly was prepared to admit, “the morale of the entire range and ranch cattle business of the United States now compares favorably with that of other large enterprises.”⁶ Young Wild West and his kind were a product of the twentieth century, who emerged after Owen Wister had stabilized the picture of the cowboy in The Virginian.⁷ Many changes took place during the intervening years. The range cattle industry still existed when the unfavorable articles appeared, but had become a romantic legend by the time Young Wild West galloped into print.⁸ As often, there is a difference between writers' attitudes toward something existent and something recalled.

Actually the cowboy had a short life as hero (or, as will be shown, villain) in the dime novel. Although forerunners of the dime novel had appeared as early as 1838, when improvements in printing methods rendered feasible the large-scale production of inexpensive books, the cowboy did not receive more than passing mention in these publications until 1885.⁹ Although Cooper's The Prairie was a story of the plains, the frontier of popular literature was, until 1860, Cooper's old New York frontier; Edward Ellis moved the frontier to Illinois, but romance still lagged behind reality. It was not until Beadle and Adams' Half Dime and New York Dime Libraries, designed to appeal to juvenile readers, were launched in 1878 that the cowboy came into his own. Even then tales of the Southwest were less common than detective and sea stories. Not until Buffalo Bill brought his famous Wild West show to New York in 1883 and “Col.” Prentiss Ingraham began to immortalize the dashing scout did the exploitation of the cowboy begin.¹⁰ Cody probably had a greater effect upon the American imagination than any other showman.

When the cowboy did appear, he was not the same person we expect to find in contemporary romances; nor was he alike in all dime novels. There is no typical dime novel. Each author approached his subject matter consistent with his own predilections and prejudices, not in a way characteristic of the dime novel as an entity. Even a generalization like Henry Nash Smith's “Whatever may be the merits of the dime novel cowboy … he apparently had nothing to do with cattle”¹¹ is an over-simplification, because one of the first writers to be concerned with the cowboy, Joseph Badger, Jr., attempted to portray life on the ranch realistically.

Charles Harvey made another unfounded generalization when he wrote that “there were no problems in any of the dime novels, old or new.”¹² Although dime novelists generally ignored social issues, Capt. Frederick Whittaker, as will be shown in the discussion of his works, used the paper-backed publications as platforms from which to expound political doctrines commonly absent from adventure fiction.

Only four of the Beadle and Adams staff wrote enough about the cowboy to provide a body of work in which distinctive qualities may be discerned. The different and contradictory approaches of these four illustrate the evolution of the concept of the cowboy. Joseph E. Badger, Jr., the earliest, wrote with restraint, good humor, and an attempt at realism. Capt. Frederick Whittaker joined the Eastern journals in launching a vicious attack upon the ranch hand. “Col.” Prentiss Ingraham based his creations upon real persons (members of Buffalo Bill's troupe), whom he attempted to develop into counterparts of the heroic figures of early nineteenth-century romance. William G. Patten, the junior member of the group, was one of the first to depict the cowboy as a moral superman and to suggest the transformation of the unassuming herdsman into the singing Lothario who is heroic by virtue of his special position as a free agent in a regimented world.

Badger wrote several hundred novels for the dime serials, only a few of them about cowboys. Practically nothing is known about Badger's life, but in a probably apocryphal biography written by one of his fellow workers he is described as having been an outlaw on the Texas border.¹³ If he had been a wayward youth, he began his career appropriately by writing novels like Gospel George; or, Fiery Fred, the Outlaw (1879), about gamblers and road agents. Later he came over to the side of the law and in the bulk of his works described the adventures of omniscient sleuths in works like Masked Mark, the Mounted Detective (1885). When he discovered the literary potentialities of the cowboy, he was one of the first to use authentic western scenery in his novels. Into Laughing Leo; or, Spread Eagle Sam's Dandy Pard, which is nothing but an extended conversation about a lost heir, he incorporates credible descriptions of a cattle stampede and a round-up characteristic of the “stock ranges of Montana and Wyoming”¹⁴ about which he was writing. A passage like the following was not then the cliché it has since become:

It was the season of the “Fall round-up,” and this was the concluding day of that arduous task.

For two weeks past masters and men had been working hard, gathering in the scattered “bands” of cattle, marking, branding, culling out for market such as had been left over from the earlier drive.

According to custom, every ranch within miles and miles had been represented, all working together, chosen riders from each ranch taking turns in “cutting out” stock bearing their respective brands, until the last bunch was attended to. Then the unbranded slice—the Mavericks without marks—were put up to auction, the proceeds to revert to the Stock-growers' ‘Association,’ and the cattle themselves to be caught, thrown, marked, and seared with hot irons.¹⁵

One of the unusual features of his work is his attempt to satirize the conventional treatment of the romantic hero and villain. His villains are often attractive persons, while his heroes and heroines are the victims of their bad tempers and rash actions rather than of nefarious intrigues. Rob Roy Ranch; or, The Imps of the Panhandle, a tale of Texas in the days of the settlement of the Llano Estacado, is typical of his work. One accustomed to formula western fiction is sure that Fergus Cameron, a young Scotsman, who is “gay, laughing, light-hearted under any and all circumstances,”¹⁶ will turn out to be a misunderstood hero, while his morose rival, Hal, will be exposed as a blackguard. The assumption is wrong; the roles are reversed. The further revelation that the villain operates outside the law because he is “stealing to get enough money to live an honest life without working”¹⁷ is also disconcerting; most dime novel wrongdoers have less inviting motives.

One is equally sure that the gallant young cowboy called “The Prairie Kid” in The Cowboy Chief's Sure Shot; or, Hard Knox, the Rogue Rancher, will turn out to be a wronged hero, while the vicious-tempered and spiteful vigilante, Hard Knox, will be proved a masquerading rascal, especially since Badger indicates that his sympathies are with the “Kid.” The young man, however, proves to be a rustler, while Knox is established as being just what he seemed to be—a mean-tempered and maladjusted vigilante attempting to bring law and order to a wayward community. Preceptors of youth might shudder at the morality of this fable, but the story is more spontaneous and convincing than most of its genre. Badger taught geography, not ethics.

The best of his western works is The Prairie Ranch; or, The Young Cattle Herders, which is distinguished by the author's use of the kind of restrained realism and gentle satire usually associated with the work of Andy Adams. Badger proposed in this work, published in 1884, to give Eastern boys an account of Texas ranch life, without, like many of his contemporaries, writing down to his audience. There are no heroes, villains, romances, hair-breadth escapes, or improbable feats of horsemanship in the novel. Although Badger calls a tornado a “Norther,”¹⁸ he presents, through his account of a young New Yorker's introduction to a relative's ranch, information about such western institutions as the “Californian” saddle, the rodeo (used here to mean the round-up on the ranch, not a public riding and roping contest), the Longhorn, the coyote, and the trail drive. The only concession to romantic convention is the inclusion of an incident in which the boy mistakes the ranch-owner's visiting brother for a road-agent. Here Badger satirizes rather than inflames the workings of the romantic imagination.

The restraint and veracity of Badger's work set him apart from his contemporaries, but his work proves that at least one novelist attempted to launch a popular western fiction in which he would describe the West as he found it, not as he or his readers would like to imagine it was.

While Badger was sympathetic toward the cowboy, another Beadle writer, Capt. Frederick Whittaker, an ex-Union army officer, was markedly hostile. He considered the cowboy as a vulgar reversion to primitive man and thought of the West as a lawless and uncultured twilight zone somewhere beyond the fringe of civilization. There is no evidence that Whittaker ever visited the West; but a dime novel writer did not need first-hand knowledge of his settings.¹⁹

Whittaker's antipathy toward the West is manifest in two of his earliest books, The Death Head's Rangers, a Tale of the Lone Star State, and The Texan Sport; or, The Boy Mustang Hunter, in which he uses the Spanish term vaqueros when speaking of cowboys.²⁰ Both novels contain anachronisms. When soldiers gather in Kentucky to come to Texas in 1836, “… every man's got one of Curnel Colt's six shooters, …”²¹ although the revolvers were first manufactured in 1838.²² A group of French fugitives prepare to sally forth on the plains wearing “silver, arrow-proof hauberks” and other accouterments of the medieval knight.²³ In both books Whittaker contrasts savage, drunken Kentuckians and sadistic Texans unfavorably with gentle, grouse-hunting Englishmen and cultured, chivalrous Frenchmen. He depicts one of the Texans exacting revenge by horribly torturing a foe before shooting his brains out, while, in contrast, “the Frenchman,” the author comments, “was one of those chivalrous tender-hearted men, of whom, thank God, there are some left, whose souls revolt at cruelty and revenge.”²⁴ At the end of The Texan Sport, when the young mustang-hunter has been converted from his wild ways and has abandoned a jealous rancher's daughter for a wholesome French heiress, all abandon Texas and move to New Orleans to enter society. Even one of the old Texas rangers was redeemed and became a “respectable member of society.”²⁵

The author's condescending attitude is most noticeable in his cowboy novels, Apparently the earliest of these is a short libel entitled Parson Jim, King of the Cowboys, which depicts the regeneration of corrupt and uncouth Colorado by a young consumptive from Boston. The descriptive passages in this novel dispel the notion that all dime novels glorified the cowboy. Whittaker's concept of Western manhood is revealed in a passage which describes what happens just after the young consumptive arrives in Muleville, Colorado. He is at the hotel when a distraught native rushes in shouting:

“The cowboys are coming! Git to hidin’! Thar on a tear.”

The warning seemed to be perfectly understood by all but young Arthur. … The judge turned pale, and the whole crowd rushed wildly for the back yard, where they disappeared.

Up to the door of the Metropolitan Hotel dashed a score of mounted men, on small wiry horses, covered with foam and dirt, and James Arthur, for the first time in his life, saw the spectacle so familiar to the citizens of Muleville—“cowboys on a tear”. … All wore red silk sashes, garnished with knives and pistols. … These men all seemed crazy with excitement or drink, and were firing recklessly all round them into the windows of the houses, as if careless what damage they did.²⁶

Arthur is beaten by the cowboys, but regains his health and outwits his depraved foes. He is hired by a young Eastern girl, whose ranch Whittaker holds up as an example to the West. His description of Queen's Ranch shows that Whittaker approved the establishment because it was conducted in accordance with Eastern standards:

The Queen's Ranch was remarkable in Colorado for more things than one. It was the richest in the state, the only one run by a lady, the only one where they tried to breed thoroughbred horses and cattle exclusively, getting rid of all other stock, and the only one where there was a civilized house, a garden, wheeled vehicles, roads and a grand piano. … The hostess of the establishment went so far as to indulge in pocket handkerchiefs and little napkins. … She wore a Worth costume of wine-colored velvet and satin and seemed much out of place in the rough life of a cattle ranch.²⁷

Whittaker appears to have been the only writer concerned about the supply of grand pianos and little napkins in Colorado. No lover of untamed nature was he. While the mistress of the Queen's Ranch is listening to a singer who will make her “forget that [she is] on a cattle ranch,” her cowboys are outside beating each other with long whips.²⁸ Whittaker preferred life in the great indoors.

The author had more on his mind than denouncing the cowboy; he was also concerned about the abuse of privilege by the wealthy and powerful. The central action of Parson Jim revolves around a contested election in which the tyrannical cattle ranchers are seeking to impose their will upon the less dynamic members of the community. Whittaker believed the cowboys might be redeemed if they followed the lead of James Arthur. His Boston cowboy thus harangues the oppressed Westerners:

If you’ll follow where I lead, we’ll show the ranchers that the cowboy is king of Colorado and that all the wealth a man can acquire will not make him our master. It is the old battle between the people and the rich few, who shall be masters. I stand on the side of the people, and I say that the cowboy, and not the rancher, is the true king of Colorado. We have all heard a good deal of our cattle kings, simply because they are rich men. They go to Europe and live in wealth, while the cowboys take care of their cattle and work for a bare pittance. I think all this can be changed. We have the votes and can rule if we will.²⁹

Even if the reader ignores the question of which was politically more liberal, the East or the West, he may find that this speech sounds suspicious. It would ring more true in Union Square than in the Colorado Hills. Whether or not one accepts Whittaker's moral that the West will redeem itself by becoming like the East, one must admit that such assaults upon the prerogatives of the privileged class discredit the notion that there are no social ideas in the dime novels.

Whittaker's attitude toward the cowboy is shown again in Top Notch Tom, the Cowboy Outlaw; or, The Satanstown Election, which has virtually the same plot as Parson Jim, but a Texas rather than a Colorado setting. At the beginning of the novel a Scottish bartender shouts, “Bats, laddies, bats! The cowboys are coomin’.”³⁰ An old resident says disgustedly, as the town arms: “‘A caowboy will be a caowboy, anyway ye can fix him, and ye can’t no more keep him from goin’ on a tear when he gets paid off than ye can get a steer to stop bellerin’ when he feels the hot iron at round-up time.’”³¹ Satanstown, Texas, is to Whittaker much like Muleville, Colorado. His description of it shows his concept of the West: “When Satanstown was not ‘on a drunk,’ it was a pretty quiet place; for half the inhabitants were getting over the last debauch, and the only noise that disturbs the silence is the occasional howl of a gentleman who is being kept in a back room by his friends, on account of a fancy he had that the house was full of snakes.”³² He also charges that in the West women were not allowed to “mess in affairs,”³³ although women were frequently civic leaders there and first gained equal suffrage in the plains states.³⁴

In the most biased of his novels, The Texas Tramp; or, Solid Sol, the Yankee Hercules, an 1890 production, Whittaker extended his accusations to include Southerners as well as Westerners. This novel begins with a description of a group of cattlemen gathered “in front of the apology for a dwelling which was dignified with the title of ranch-house,” lamenting the fall of the Confederacy and hating the Yankees.³⁵

Into this scene of despair walks Solid Sol, a New Hampshire hobo, who eventually sets things right. Although hated at first by the embittered Southerners and brutal cowboys, Sol establishes himself by rescuing a ranch-owner from marauding Mexicans and Indians, spanking a recalcitrant cowboy, and beating up Geronimo, the notorious Apache chief. All the while he lectures the ex-Confederates, chastising them for their bad manners and inefficient ranch management and holding up Yankee manners and efficiency as an ideal. His preachments are finally effective, for Whittaker informs us at the end of the book: “In a place where it had been the boast of the inhabitants that they had ‘driven out every Yankee who had ever entered Texas,’ Northern men became as numerous as men born in the state, and the result had been that Mesquite Country [sic] had become noted as the richest in the South.”³⁶

Whittaker compounded an apparent ignorance of the West with a provincial bias and native bad temper to produce the moral that only Easterners could make the plains barbarians acceptable members of American society. He exemplified an attitude toward the cowboy which made even “Buckskin Sam” Hall, a native Westerner who never wrote a distinctly “cowboy” novel, include in one of his tales of the Army in the West a digression objecting to the malicious criticism of the cowboys and placing the blame for their misbehavior on the townsmen Whittaker defended. He wrote in The Brazos Tiger:

… These so-called cowboys have been greatly traduced by the American press; for, as a class, they are noble, brave, and fearless men, liberal to a fault, tender-hearted, and devoted to each other. In fact, few men can be found, who lead a roaming life in Nature's garden, who will not divide their little all with anyone in need. Fewer still would desert a friend, or take advantage of an enemy.

If, when they reach a town, they are poisoned with “Prussic Acid bugjuice,” until they become insane, and use the weapons they are obliged to carry too freely—more in sport than otherwise—it is the fault of the town that permits the sale of the vile poison, more than of the poor fellows whose protracted privation and continuous watchfulness by day and night, naturally cause them to take advantage of a day's rest to have a free and easy “jamboree.”³⁷

Hall's panegyric contains the germ of the attitude which was to result finally in the ennoblement of the cowboy. “Nature's garden” is a favorite concept of the cultural primitivists who see in a natural order a benevolent norm for man's conduct and who find man at his best when he lives close to unspoiled nature. Hall's lead was followed by writers like Prentiss Ingraham and William Patten in their glorification of the cowboy. It appears likely that the legend of the noble cowboy arose, at least in part, as a reply to Eastern attacks upon the West and that the combined effect of the writings of the attackers and defenders of the cowboy precluded a continuation of the kind of realistic treatments Joseph Badger, Jr., had written. One might even ponder whether literary sensationalism is so much the result of public demand as of the efforts of opinionated writers to attract attention to themselves.

One of the defenders who initiated the literary legend of the heroic cowboy was the self-styled “Colonel” Prentiss Ingraham, who is reputed to have written more dime novels than any other man.³⁸ He is best known as the writer of more than a hundred tales about the exploits of Buffalo Bill. His writing of these stories led him to the writing of cowboy novels, but his contribution to the literature of the range was incidental to his other interests. He did not attempt to present a valid picture of the West; cattle are hardly ever mentioned in his works. He treated the cowboy in the same way he treated the pirate, the detective, the Confederate soldier, and a variety of other heroes. He was not interested in proving that the cowboy was “nature's nobleman,” but that he was cut from the same cloth as heroic figures in other professions in other parts of the world. “Blood will tell” was his basic concept.

He made one important contribution to the development of the literature of the cattle kingdom—the establishment of one unusually gifted cowboy as the hero of a series of related tales. The device of making one man the central figure in a succession of novels was an old one among dime novel writers, but Ingraham was the first to take a cowboy—Buck Taylor, a member of Buffalo Bill's troupe—and build a series of stories around him. Ingraham may have used a real person, not only because he was interested in publicizing Cody's touring company, but also because, like his father, Joseph Holt Ingraham, a prolific novelist of an earlier period, he was obsessed with the notion that the writer of romances should try to persuade his readers that he was writing biography rather than fiction.

The Taylor series of six related novels began with Buck Taylor, King of the Cowboys, published in 1887, but did not flower until 1891, when in a series of long tales—Buck Taylor, the Saddle King; The Lasso King's League; and The Cowboy Clan—Ingraham suggested the way in which a real person, familiar to many of his readers, could be developed into a romantic hero engaged in seemingly ceaseless warfare against one especially durable criminal band. To prove that Taylor was no ordinary person, Ingraham wrote in the first book about the cowboy: “It was no easy task to load that long rifle on the back of a wild horse, but Buck managed it, and turning in his saddle, again sent a bullet flying toward his pursuers.”³⁹ Another feat earned Buck his title “King of the Cowboys”: the eighteen-year-old youth rode on five different horses in succession, wearing five different costumes, and made a group of bloodthirsty Indians, who were besieging a group of Texas Rangers, believe that he was a rescue party.⁴⁰ In a later book, Ingraham described Buck in more detail: “He was a person over six feet in height by several inches, with a slender form, but athletic, broad shoulders, and the very beau ideal of a Texas cowboy. … His face was one to remember when once seen, beardless, youthful, yet full of character and fearlessness, amounting to reckless daring.”⁴¹

According to Ingraham, the cowboy tended cattle only so long as he had nothing else to do. One of the Taylor novels begins with this deceptively realistic description: “Cattle and horses by the hundreds were asleep upon the prairie, or grazing upon the rich grass, while about them the cowboy sentinels rode to keep them from straying, either whistling or singing to soothe the dumb beasts.”⁴² But as far as the reader knows the cattle stay asleep through the exciting events that follow. The cowboy's important tasks are rescuing distressed damsels, penetrating the disguises of the wicked and meting out punishment to rogues who might have stepped right out of the pages of Scott, Cooper, or Ingraham's own father. The rustler, the range war, the struggle between farmer and fence-cutter made no impression upon “Col.” Ingraham. He did not need to study ranch life, for he had a stock of dramatic situations left over from his earlier novels about buccaneers and soldiers. A conversation from one of the Taylor novels illustrates Ingraham's concept of a dilemma. Buck speaks to one of his cohorts:

“There are Indians in the timber to the right and left of us and we must dash through.”

“Why not go back, pard?”

“Because there are Indians following on our trail.”⁴³

Ingraham was not concerned with the cowboy as a son of nature; he depicted him as the inheritor of the Medieval tradition of knight-errantry. His concept of the cowboy is apparent from this passage:

They were proud to be called “Texas Cowboys,” and knew the country perfectly. They could follow a trail as well as an Indian, ride even better, throw a lasso unerringly, and shoot straight to dead center every time. A reckless lot of men they were, light-hearted, utterly fearless, generous, noble in the treatment of a friend or a fallen foe, and though feared by evildoers and redskins, they were admired and respected by the soldiers and people of the settlements.⁴⁴

The evolution of the cowboy from a subordinate figure in tales of Western adventure to the central figure in a distinctive literary genre was virtually completed by William G. Patten, one of the glibbest of the Beadle authors. It is ironic that the cowboy should have won his long fight to replace the scout and road agent as the principal exemplar of Western life after the days of the long trail had passed; but it is often only after the representatives of a type, like the ante-bellum planter or the New York Indian, have disappeared that a stereotype can be formed which may be exploited without caution. Patten wrote with the lack of restraint and with the talent for oversimplification necessary for the creation of a myth. No one's heroes have endured more excruciating trials or made more remarkable recoveries than his. Patten speeded up the pace of the stories. Always a man of action, the cowboy in Patten's works became a dynamic stampede-stopper, rounder-up of rustlers, and even cattle-herder. Patten's cowboys apparently never ate or slept, although they sometimes made love. While most previous literary cowboys had been laconic, his were incessantly talkative. Most of his stories are told largely through dialogues, as are many Western stories today. Whereas Badger's cowboys had been morally unpredictable, Whittaker's morally depraved, Ingraham's moral according to a transplanted code, Patten's were symbols of Western morality and Western loyalty. Typical of Patten's concept of the cowboy is Hustler Harry:

… a man at least six feet tall and “built from the ground up.” Not a thick-set, ox-like figure, but one which combined great strength and manly grace; a form which filled the rough cowboy costume until the clothes fitted as if cut by a metropolitan tailor. Every limb was rounded and muscular, yet not overburdened and cumbersome. The head was well-poised on a perfect neck, the wide-brimmed sombrero being set jauntily on the side of his brown, curly mass of hair. His features were round and clear-cut, as if chiseled from marble, but the square, full lower jaw, denoted a determined, unswerving nature. His eyes were blue and filled with half-mirthful yet wholly unfathomable light. … No weapons were in sight on the belt or in the pocket of this independent cowboy, for cowboy he appeared to be.⁴⁵

He was not only a cowboy, but a paragon of virtue, who belied all the vile rumors that had been circulated about uncouth, gun-carrying Westerners. He did not even drink. “I hope you won’t think me uncivil, but I don’t touch ther stuff,” he tells a well-wisher who has offered him whiskey.⁴⁶ He was, furthermore, the spokesman for a new philosophy about cowboy life. He was not a cowboy because of a sense of duty, but because he loved the free life. Harry spoke for most of Patten's cowboys when he said to an admirer:

“Fact is, if I war rollin’ in yaller wealth, I never cu’d give up the range. Just one whiff of ther trail, one beller from the hurd, one rattle of long horns sets my blood ter bilin’ and seethin’ like I was set fair onto a red-hot furnace and ’er nigger fireman shovin’ pitch-pine an’ rosin fer all he war wu’th.”⁴⁷

Patten also advocated the notion that the cowboy is “nature's nobleman.” In Wild Vulcan, an incredible compound of Gothic claptrap and prairie romance, he thus describes his hero:

Standing in the full glow of the fire, Prairie Paul ran his eye over the encampment in a critical manner. He was a tall, frank-faced, manly-appearing youth of twenty, and was dressed in an unusually neat-appearing suit of fringed buckskin, but wore long-legged cowboy boots minus the high heels. … His face was smooth-shaved, and the dark eyes which peered from beneath the brim of the sombrero were keen and piercing. His long curling hair fell upon his shoulders. In truth, Prairie Paul looked decidedly picturesque and handsome as he stood in the full glow of the firelight, glancing keenly around at the encampment, and it was not strange that Nida's heart felt a little thrill as she watched him. Perfect grace and strength were blended in his fine figure. He was one of those grand creations of the mountains and the plains, a young nobleman of nature.⁴⁸

Patten's most noteworthy contribution to cowboy literature was neither Hustler Harry nor Prairie Paul, but Cowboy Chris, “the beau ideal of a rough and ready cowboy, such a person as would make an excellent friend or a very unpleasant enemy.”⁴⁹ Chris did not appear in the Beadle series until 1897, shortly before they disappeared from the newsstands, but he made up quickly for lost time. Several dozen of his adventures were published during the last years of the once famous publications. While the stories themselves are but carbon copies of Patten's earlier tales, they represent a step forward in the development of the cowboy-hero, because Chris, unlike his predecessors, did not settle down at the end of one adventure, but, like the heroes of the recent radio and motion picture cowboy serials, resolved the situation so that another might settle down while he himself remained free to take on new challenges. At the end of Cowboy Chris, the Vengeance Volunteer, for example, Chris surrenders the heroine to another and says to one of his companions, “somewhat sadly,” “Come away and leave them together. They are happy.”⁵⁰

With Chris, we arrive at the modern concept of the heroic cowboy; he is the link that unites the original dime novels with the pulp Western fiction and “horse operas” of today. It is not surprising to find that his creator ended his career writing the Frank Merriwell stories.⁵¹ Patten was the maker of the commercially durable heroes who could entrance the unsophisticated through volume after volume. His characters are the archetype of a modern myth. Badger had suggested that the cowboy might be treated realistically; Whittaker had treated him as a blight upon society; Prentiss Ingraham had shown that the members of a Wild West troupe might be re-incarnations of the knights of old. It was Patten who transformed the cowboy into “nature's nobleman,” and at the same time returned to authentically Western problems to provide the bases for his plots.⁵²

I do not mean to suggest that these four writers exhausted the possible varieties of the early cowboy novel, but I do believe that they represent the main steps in the evolution of the concept of the cowboy. One might speak of Badger's cowboys or of Whittaker's cowboys, but not of a common type to be found in the works of all these writers. The cowboy we know as a literary stereotype evolved through a series of stages, and his evolution is reflected in the dime novels. The works of Owen Wister, Andy Adams, and Emerson Hough, as well as others credited with the advancement of cowboy fiction, appear less isolated when they are viewed against the background of the lowly “dime novels” in which the cowboy hero fought his way into existence and prominence.

Notes

1. Charles M. Harvey, “The Dime Novel in American Life,” Atlantic Monthly, C (July, 1907), 44.

2. See Walter P. Webb, The Great Plains (New York, 1931), pp. 464-470, 491-496, for an account of the popularity and appeal of the cowboy hero.

3. Even this generic label is inaccurate; many “dime novels” sold for prices ranging from five to twenty-five cents. The true “dime novels” were salmon-colored, paper-covered booklets published by the firm of Beadle and Adams in the 1860's; subsequently, the title was applied to publications, of varying formats, produced by a number of competing firms.

4. Douglas Branch, The Cowboy and his Interpreters (New York, 1926), p. 185.

5. Ibid., p. 191.

6. Joseph Nimmo, Jr., “American Cowboys,” Harper's Magazine, LXXIII (1886), 884. Nimmo's article contains a résumé of contemporary opinions about the cowboy. The unfavorable articles are discussed by Henry Nash Smith in Virgin Land (Cambridge, 1950), p. 109.

7. Wister believed that in his novel he was writing the cowboy's epitaph. In his introduction to the novel, he wrote, “But [the cowboy] will never come again. He rides in his historic yesterday. You will no more see him gallop out of the unchanging silence than you will see Columbus on the unchanging sea come sailing from Palos with his caravels.” (Owen Wister, The Virginian [New York, 1902], p. viii.)

8. Webb. op. cit., p. 240, suggests 1885 as the best date for marking the end of the range cattle industry.

9. In an early novel about ranch life by W. H. Bushnell, The Hermit of the Colorado Hills (New York, [1864]), the cowboy was not even mentioned by that name; he was still called vaquero or simply “herdsman.”

10. Richard J. Walsh, The Making of Buffalo Bill (Indianapolis, [1928]), p. 222.

11. Smith, op. cit., p. 111.

12. Harvey, op. cit., p. 44.

13. A. H. Post, Roving Joe: The History of a Young “Border Ruffian,” Beadle's Boys' Library of Sport, Story and Adventure, No. 7 (New York, 1882). The Beadle writers took turns eulogizing one another's colorful careers in this “realistic” serial.

14. Joseph E. Badger, Jr., Laughing Leo; or, Spread Eagle Sam's Dandy Pard, New York Dime Library, No. 433 (New York, 1887), p. 6.

15. Ibid., p. 3. This description of the round-up may be compared with the discussion in Webb, op. cit., pp. 255-259.

16. Badger, Rob Roy Ranch; or, The Imps of the Panhandle, New York Dime Library, No. 409 (New York, 1886), p. 2.

17. Ibid., p. 3.

18. Badger, The Prairie Ranch; or, The Young Cattle Herders, Beadle's Boys' Library of Sport, Story and Adventure, No. 8 (New York, 1899), p. 21. This copy is a reprint of an 1884 publication. Many dime novels were re-printed several times, sometimes with new titles.

19. Gelett Burgess, “Confessions of a Dime Novelist,” Bookman, XV (1902), 532, relates that Eugene Sawyer, creator of Nick Carter, based all of his New York stories on impressions gained during one four-hour visit to the city.

20. Frederick Whittaker, The Texan Sport; or, The Boy Mustang Hunter, Beadle's Pocket Library, No. 465 (New York, 1872), p. 27.

21. Whittaker, The Death's Head Rangers, A Tale of the Lone Star State, Beadle's Dime Novels, n.s, No. 95 (New York, 1872), p. 24.

22. Webb. op. cit., p. 171.

23. Whittaker, The Texan Sport, p. 51.

24. Ibid., p. 89.

25. Ibid., p. 93.

26. Whittaker, Parson Jim, King of the Cowboys; or, The Gentle Sheperd's Big “Clean Out,” New York Dime Library, No. 215 (New York, 1882), p. 3.

27. Ibid., p. 8. Whittaker predicted many of the improvements which were made in cattle breeding, but not necessarily the way in which they were brought about.

28. Ibid., p. 8.

29. Ibid., p. 19.

30. Whittaker, Top Notch Tom, the Cowboy Outlaw, New York Dime Library, No. 303 (New York, 1884), p. 3. The “bats” are baseball bats which the Texans used for defense rather than recreation.

31. Ibid., p. 3.

32. Ibid., p. 2.

33. Ibid., p. 15.

34. Webb, op. cit., pp. 504-506.

35. Whittaker, The Texas Tramp; or, Solid Sol, the Yankee Hercules, New York Dime Library, No. 609 (New York, 1890), p. 2.

36. Ibid., p. 30.

37. Sam S. Hall, The Brazos Tiger; or, The Minute Men of Fort Belknap, New York Dime Library, No. 212 (New York, 1882), p. 2.

38. E. S. Jenks, “Dime Novel Makers,” Bookman, XX (1904), 112. Elaborations upon this statement can be found in any biographical account of Ingraham. He was best known of the dime novel writers and is mentioned in almost every work concerning the genre. He posed as a former officer of the Confederate Army, although War Department records show that he never rose above the enlisted ranks.

39. Prentiss Ingraham, Buck Taylor, King of the Cowboys; or, The Raiders and the Rangers, Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 497 (New York, 1887), p. 5.

40. Ibid., p. 8.

41. Ingraham, Buck Taylor, the Saddle King; or, The Lasso Rangers' League, New York Dime Library, No. 649 (New York, 1891), p. 2.

42. Ingraham, Buck Taylor, The Comanche Captive; or, Buckskin Sam to the Rescue, Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 737 (New York, 1891), p. 2. The Buckskin Sam of the sub-title is Sam Hall, the dime novelist; not only did dime novelists sometimes become characters in the work, but also various characters, especially Buffalo Bill, were sometimes represented as the authors.

43. Ingraham, Buck Taylor, the Saddle King, p. 4. Although Ingraham was writing of the plains, he was addicted to forest scenes, another indication that he was adapting the conventions of an older fiction rather than contriving new ones adapted to his purported settings.

44. Ingraham, The Cowboy Clan; or, The Tigress of Texas, New York Dime Library, No. 658 (New York, 1891), p. 7. If we substitute “lists” for “lasso-throwing” and “Turks” for “red-skins” the resemblance to the Medieval knight is striking.

45. William G. Patten, Hustler Harry, the Cowboy Sport; or, Daring Dan Shark's General Delivery, New York Dime Library, No. 545 (New York, 1889), p. 3.

46. Ibid., p. 3.

47. Ibid., p. 4.

48. Patten, Wild Vulcan, the Lone Range Rider; or, The Rustlers of the Bad Land, Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 682 (New York, 1890), p. 4.

49. Wilder, William West [pseud.], Cowboy Chris, the Desert Centaur; or, Hawkers for the Human Hawk, Half Dime Library, No. 1066 (New York 1897), p. 2.

50. Patten, Cowboy Chris, the Vengeance Volunteer, Half Dime Library, No. 1075 (New York, 1898), p. 16.

51. Edmund Pearson, Dime Novels; or, Following an Old Trail in Popular Literature (Boston, 1929), pp. 216-217.

52. One of Patten's works, Nobby Nat, the Tenderfoot Detective; or, The Girl Rancher's Rough Rustle, Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 820 (New York, 1893), for example, is based upon the war between the cattlemen and the farmers over fencing the range.