SOURCE: "How the Western Ends: Fenimore Cooper to Frederic Remington," in Western American Literature, Vol. XVII, No. 2, Summer, 1982, pp. 117-35.

[In the following essay, Bold analyzes Remington's Sundown Leflare, John Ermine of the Yellowstone, and The Way of an Indian as they build upon the narrative tradition of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales.]

Come back—do the 4 volume novel about a South Western Natty Bumpo [sic]—Believe me, I know.

Remington to Wister, Dec. 1899¹

When Frederic Remington gave that advice to his defecting colleague, he did not acknowledge that he had already produced his own version of the Leatherstocking Tales. During 1897 and 1898, he had been writing the five short stories about Sundown that were collected in 1899 as Sundown Leflare.² That volume has a cyclical form and a central theme which are reminiscent of the Leatherstocking series' design. Its tone is different, however: the main figure remains more comical and grotesque than Natty; and the cycle is presented by a first-person narrator, a visiting eastern artist, who is always casual about the situation and its implications. Remington's fiction is not as obviously important as Fenimore Cooper's, but its similarities to the Leatherstocking Tales endow it with a considerable significance within the popular western genre. Like a great deal of western fiction, Remington's works begin with the model created by Cooper; but Remington developed from that paradigm increasingly melancholy stories, which are unlike the narratives of other popular western authors and yet are true to the vision of the Leatherstocking myth. His fiction constitutes an important offshoot to the main evolution of Westerns, but one which was fated to wither and die. As a publishing venture, Sundown Leflare was disastrous. It was not widely reviewed or noticed or sold and by 1907, when he had to list his books for Perriton Maxwell, the art critic, Remington silently expunged both it and John Ermine, his novel, from the record of his achievements. He was denying his most interesting forays into fiction.

Remington, an artist before an author and a journalist before a novelist, came to fiction by degrees, and hesitantly. He looked for qualifying devices which would mark clearly the point where reportage ended and invention began. Thus, when his first attempt at fiction, "The Affair of the - th of July," appeared among the journalistic treatments of current and recent events which were collected as Pony Tracks (1895), it was the only piece not to be told straightforwardly by the first-person narrator who inhabits the other reports. The story is based on an actual event, the 1894 Pullman riots of Chicago, and it expands that incident into a furor of carnage and death as soldiers and anarchists clash in an imaginary, apocalyptic fury. The fantasy is conveyed in a letter written by a military aide-de-camp present at the rioting; the epistolary device serves as an obvious demarcation between happening and report, actuality and fantasy. The division between these two categories is emphasized further in the clumsy ending: "Of course, my dear friend, all this never really happened, but it might very easily have happened if the mob had continued to monkey with the military buzz-saw."³

In his first uniformly fictive collection, Sundown Leflare, Remington hedged the delivery of the fiction around with even more qualificatory devices. The first story opens, as usual, with the first-person narrator, but his voice is only the last in the line of narrators. Old Paint, an Indian, is telling a legend which he heard from his father, who was told it by the grandfather. That legend, spoken in the Crow language, is being translated and interpreted by Sundown, a half-breed, to the white narrator, who passes it on to the reader. "Our" narrator's comment—"the problem in this case was how to eliminate 'Sundown' from 'Paint.' So much for interpreters." (p. 4)—must rebound on every participant in the chain of narrative, including himself. The origin of the story is obscured and the unreliability of the tale forefronted. Of course, the last figure in the line of narrators is Remington himself. He was demonstrating an unease with the fictionality of fiction. The further he moved from a verifiable event, the more voices he interposed between himself and the account and the more convoluted his story-telling became. From "The Affair" to "The Spirit of Mahongui" (1898), Remington's letter-writing voice became increasingly obscure and archaic, and the Sundown stories are told in a pidgin dialect which contorts gender, tense and syntactical sequence.

It is not immediately obvious that Sundown Leflare is anything more than a series of picaresque adventures, told in a bizarre dialect. It may have been that the author's discomfort with fiction caused him to articulate innovations in characterization and narrative time only through the story-telling voices; certainly, the whimsical tone adopted by both Sundown and the white narrator camouflages the work's experimentation. The connection with the Leatherstocking cycle is evident in the theme of the man caught between two races and two times. Neither red nor truly white. Natty mediates between the two sides and. though he exists in an age of progress, he adheres to past ways of life. Sundown is also introduced as a mediator between Indian and white man, but the cross in his blood is revealed much more casually: "Sundown was crossbred, red and white, so he never got mentally in sympathy with either strain of his progenitors. He knew about half as much concerning Indians as they did themselves, while his knowledge of white men was in the same proportion." (p. 3) He is an anachronistic, garrulous figure whose role is to translate the myth of a medicine-horse which Paint tells; but he insists on acting as interpreter and commentator as well. Remington's imagination, like Cooper's, was fired by his marginal frontiersman and. after the first story. Sundown takes over the centre of the stage, telling the white narrator about adventures from further and further into his past.

Although it emerges that Sundown is an alien whose present situation is potentially tragic (he has just been abandoned by his wife: he is old. penniless, alone), none of the pathos is allowed to have force. Because Sundown's reminiscences move toward the past, attention is increasingly directed away from his present circumstances until, in the last story, he appears as a young medicine-man. beginning a prestigious career inside an Indian tribe. In the order in which the autobiographical anecdotes first appeared in Harper's Monthly, Sundown describes himself at each stage of a progression from white to red: he talks about himself, firstly, as a buckskinned government scout: then he becomes a "breed" who steals horses; next, he describes himself, "I was all same Enjun . . . but I was wear de hat" (p. 56); and finally he is a medicine-man for the Piegans.

Each step of his transformation to youth is robbed of its possible heroism. The first epithet applied to Sundown recalls the introduction of Chingachgook in The Pioneers. However, whereas Fenimore Cooper explains the ceremonial import of the name "Big Snake," Remington's narrator reduces the metaphor to a reproach: "Oh, you reptile! will you never mind this thinking—it is fatal." (p. 18) In the final episode, Sundown explains his baptism. Like Natty and Chingachgook, he wins his name because of extraordinary abilities (he can see unnaturally far at sun-set), but in this case, the christening is based on trickery (he has secretly acquired a pair of binoculars and uses them under cover of twilight). Sundown is always incipiently heroic and romantic, in his delivery of an army order through murderous weather conditions or in his duel over an Indian woman, but he perpetually undercuts that impression in his telling of heroic deeds. In "How Order No. 6 Went Through," it is his cowardice and common sense which he stresses; after the tale of the joust, he mentions that three years later he sold the squaw for a hundred dollars to a white man. But if the mood of the text is self-parody, Remington's illustrations create the opposite impression. The frontispiece shows Sundown in the present, as a half-breed in white man's clothing, a rumpled, unhandsome, vaguely clownish figure. The pictures become more stylized in lay-out and Sundown himself more Indianized, until, in the last illustrations, he is portrayed as a full Indian with a magnificent physique, splendid in his savage costume. The engravings follow the time-scheme of Sundown's tales, showing him as increasingly young and increasingly red. Remington provided one version of his central figure, the comic, in his writing and another, the heroic, in his illustration.

Sundown undergoes an experience akin to that of Natty and Chingachgook, who slough off the layers of age until they achieve the primal innocence of The Deerslayer. He is participating in the familiar American myth. While he is involved in straightforward chronos, in his developing relationship with the white narrator, during that relationship he articulates kairos,⁴ when he presents himself in moments from the past. Because of the patterning of time, which is central to the collection's structure, since only that element orders the disparate conversations, this half-comic, half-romantic hero shares Natty's immortality. Although Natty ostensibly dies at the end of The Prairie, his death has no force, since it is implied that, setting with the sun, he will surely rise again with it. Indeed, Cooper brought him back to manhood thirteen years later in The Pathfinder.

Sundown articulates in his own language the sense of circular repetition which results from the interweaving of the two time-schemes. He always uses a mongrel verb construction, made up of present, imperfect and infinitive forms. Since he seems not to know the perfect tense, all his verbs are in the present, whose main use is the description of habitual acts, and the imperfect, which describes continuous actions without definite time limits. He has a vocabulary only for the on-going present and the unfinished past; he does not verbalize finitude and ending any more than he experiences them. Remington's conclusion is a more extreme version of Cooper's: both their heroes are eternally displaced and disjunct from the rules of human time. Both are assigned to a cycle which can perpetually repeat, but never proceed.

And when this man breaks from his static isolation, and makes a new move, then look out, something will be happening.

D. H. Lawrence on Natty Bumppo⁵

John Ermine of the Yellowstone (1902)⁶ has none of the narrative devices of Sundown Leflare. In the earlier work, Remington was tortuous and creative simultaneously, reflecting his neophytic experiments with long fiction and his desire to keep those experiments at one or more removes from the authorial voice. John Ermine is a more homogeneous work, which can openly express the tensions of the situation which it presents; in this maturer fiction, the author sloughed off all the first-person narrators and narrowed down his hero's alternatives to two. It is Remington's only fully-worked novel and a story which, while it explores the same theme as Sundown Leflare, has more in common, structurally and tonally, with the Leatherstocking Tales. Remington was not copying Cooper; in fact, he went beyond him. Both Natty and Sundown are part of self-engendering cycles, but Natty is much less versatile, because he is locked into a pattern of dualism which denies him the different guises and perspectives which his comic counterpart enjoys. In John Ermine, Remington again developed circumstances like those in the Leatherstocking series and he worked them through to their logical consequences, breaking through the indeterminacy of Cooper's conclusions.

Cooper worked to a dualistic design when he brought together the historical romance and the frontier saga to create his innovative western fiction; and he repeated the principles of counterpoint and opposition at every level of his work: in theme, characterization, plot, scene and even syntax. When he dramatized the meeting of savagery and civilization which entrap the frontiersman between them, he would punctuate the story with visual translations of the pattern, creating tableaux of three figures, arranged as two elements with a third as the axis which balances, conjoins or distinguishes them. Such are the scenes which open and close the main action of The Last of the Mohicans: when we meet Natty and Chingachgook, they are awaiting and discussing Üncas; the final scene is of the two older men standing on either side of the grave of the younger.

While Cooper established the dualistic pattern at every level of his text, he never exploited either of the consequences suggested by the condition he constructed: that is, he neither involved his wilderness hero in a sentimental reconciliation with either of the two environments, nor did he develop the potential for tragedy or self-destruction. He froze one hero into unresolvable stasis in plot, theme, imagery and structure; he also ended each novel with the conventional wedding of the romantic hero and heroine. Thus his conclusion embraced both the irreconcilable polarities which trap the frontiersman and the harmonious resolution of the romantic couple. All subsequent writers inherited the predicament of problematic duality, but none, until Remington, took further the implications of polarization.

Some authors echoed Cooper's conclusion unchanged. Most immediately, Robert Montgomery Bird wrote Nick of the Woods (1835) as a denial of Cooper's vision of the wilderness. He maintained, however, Cooper's unresolved ending: his Indian fighter, a schizophrenic who embodies more savagely than Natty the tensions of his dualistic experience, wanders farther into the wilderness with his dog at the end of the novel, having saved the heroine from captivity and enabled her to marry the romantic hero. That conclusion is repeated in a modern Western like Shane, in which the eponymous hero reunites husband and wife, ranchers and nesters, then disappears into the sunset on his horse.

More usually, the authors of popular Westerns exploited Cooper's gesture towards sentimental reconciliation. The thousands of dime novels which dominated the period from Cooper and Bird to the twentieth-century Western, centered the western hero and conventionalized the happy ending. Their collective achievement was to devise ingenious ways in which the western hero could take part in battles, rescues and escapes, kill villains and display wilderness craft, and yet end in harmony with a lover. Their methods were superficial: the most convenient strategy was disguise, which enables heroes like Seth Jones and Deadwood Dick to play various roles and keep them separate. In the tamer, turn-of-the-century dime novels, games were substituted for disguise, to create the impression that the hero is never involved in genuine destruction and can remain genteel and romantic at the end of his adventures. Both these methods produced simulated conflict and facile resolution, therefore the element of genuine difficulty was lost and the motivation for action became arbitrary.

It took Owen Wister to achieve something more truly synthetic. His western hero was the first to encompass capacities for civilization and wilderness within his own personality, rather than by artificial means. The apotheosis of sentimental reconciliation is understood to have occurred at the end of The Virginian (1902), where the western cowboy and an eastern schoolmistress marry.

These denouements obviously relate uniformly to the tendencies in Cooper toward sentimentalism. But, in the end, the Leatherstocking Tales tend more towards bleakness and hopelessness. Natty clearly cannot be absorbed by white society in the way of the Virginian, nor can he transgress his bloodright to join the Indians. That the intervening fiction should so invariably ignore the connotations of that situation, emphasizes the uniqueness of Remington's work. Using the same types of the savage and noble Indians and the innocent frontiersman, John Ermine makes explicit that which remains implicit and partly glossed-over in the Leatherstocking cycle: at the center of the novel are circumstances like Natty's. but they are taken to their extreme consequences.

As in The Virginian, the romantic interest in John Ermine is much more central than in any of Cooper's tales. It is not a sub-plot or a strategy to acknowledge the dictates of conventional romance, for the encounter of western hero and eastern heroine determines the course of the narrative. John Ermine tells of a white boy who has been brought up by Crow Indians. In his adolescence he is handed over to a white hermit who is venerated by the Indians and who re-educates Ermine in the ways of white men. In time, Ermine re-enters white society, by way of an army outpost in the West which he, with his half-breed companion, Wolf-Voice, joins as a scout. There he encounters Major Searle's daughter. He falls in love with her, proposes marriage and is rejected with horror. After shooting her successful (eastern) lover in the arm, he is hounded by the cavalry. Outlawed, he retreats briefly to the hermit's cave, but returns to the army post, intending to murder Katherine's fiancé. Instead, he is killed by a Crow scout, who bears an old grudge. Ermine's thwarted proposal stems from the same misapprehension as Natty's in The Pathfinder. both men, having proved their natural gentility by superior behavior in military service, approach a woman of higher social rank to their own. Natty's disappointment leads to his return to his previous circumstances: celibacy and wilderness life. Ermine's rebuff directly causes his death.

The comparison between their fates suggests itself the more keenly because of the similarities in their make-up. They are both isolated wilderness men who stand somewhere between Red and White: celibates and orphans who, while functioning as translators and mediators, stress their disjunction from both sides in their appearance and speech. John Ermine can be read as a more volatile Natty Bumppo, who breaks out of a repetitive cycle, confronts the contradictions in his circumstances and suffers the consequences.

Ermine's career involves some repetition in that it is made up of alternating alienation and reconciliation, as different groups try to remake him to their ideal. Initially taken from the Indians by white miners, to be their "Gold Nugget," he is recaptured by the tribe who consider him, as White Weasel, a promising warrior. He comes to notice the physical difference between himself and his Indian friends and when he is taken to Crooked-Bear, the old hermit exploits the differences, nurturing his hereditary, white instincts. Crooked-Bear also introduces the death-note, both in his meditations on the boy—"Weasel was more beautiful than he would ever be again" (p. 46)—and in his rebaptismal ritual, by which Weasel becomes John Ermine when the hermit gives him his first gun and he shoots a panther. When Ermine is sent from his mentor to seek a new community in the army camp, the ritual is repeated. A Captain refurbishes him with a new gun and uniform, admiring the sight "as though he had created it." (p. 109) Again, Ermine's appearance, particularly his hair, evokes the language of death—"You will fall dead when you see it." (p. 110) In each of these new arenas, he changes from outsider to insider and then becomes a stranger again, as he moves on to his next field of action. The pattern partly masks his accelerating progression towards an increasingly complete isolation. That development is charted closely. At first Ermine asserts that, "I have no relations anywhere on the earth, but I have friends." (p. 146) After the shooting in the last chapter ("The End of All Things"), he discovers that the Crows shun him; he abandons Crooked-Bear as mentor; he mistreats his last ally, his pony. Finally, "he had one friend left, just one; it is always the last friend such a one has,—the Night." (p. 269) This "friend" enables him to enter the army camp, where he dies, utterly alone and without having seen his assailant.

Ermine never has an impulse towards reconciliation, once he recognizes white men and Indians as distinct races. In his role as mediator in the army camp, he means to bring two sides together only, not to reconcile them. The resultant clash causes his death.

He had thought out the proposition that the Indians were just as strange to the white people as the white people were to them, consequently he saw a social opening. He would mix these people up so that they could stare at each other in mutual perplexity .. . (p. 153).

When he brings the Major's daughter and a Crow scout face to face, he intervenes to protect Katherine from the Indian's touch. Having insulted the Crow thus, he is eventually killed by him. His mixture of red and white sensibilities causes agonizing conflict within Ermine. He has two names, at times he is referred to as two separate characters and he prays to two gods. In his final despair he appeals to them both: "O Sak-a-war-te, why did you not take the snake's gaze out of her eyes, and not let poor Ermine sit like a gopher to be swallowed? God, God, have you deserted me?" (p. 246) Ermine understands two-sidedness to be at the root of his tragedy, but he ascribes that characteristic to the white soldiers. Whereas he apprehends vaguely a possible unity behind his beliefs—"Sak-a-war-te and the God of the white men—he did not know whether they were one or two" (p. 133)—he unreservedly identifies duality with the white attitude and blames that as the cause of his humiliation. He accuses the officers, "I tell you now that I do not understand such men as you are. You have two hearts: one is red and the other is blue; and you feel with the one that best suits you at the time." (p. 236) And he tells his hermit friend savagely, "The white men in the camp are two-sided; they pat you with a hand that is always ready to strike." (p. 264)

Ermine is articulating his predicament with a vocabulary and syntax which underline the dualism of his condition. In this, his language is reminiscent of Cooper's. Remington also insists on polarization in his arrangement of significant scenes, such as the meeting between the Indians and the visitors from the East, or in Ermine's death-scene, where the body is discovered flanked by the appurtenances of the red and white races; the blanket on one side, the rifle on the other. The picture echoes Natty's death scene, but it is a dehumanized and brutal version.

However, Remington diverges from Cooper's pattern of clear counterpoint to emphasize the ultimate contrast which his work presents—that is, the difference between this novel and the conventional western romance. At first, it is the novel's resemblance to the conventional model, rather than its difference, which is obvious. It has a typical cast and seems, initially, to follow a typical plot: Ermine's success in the white world suggests his continued happiness; there is a possibility of his victory as suitor; and the Western's convention leads the reader to anticipate a happy ending. But Remington raises the reader's expectations only to thwart them the more forcefully. One of his characters, talking of love, says, "I don't see how men write novels or plays about that old story; all they can do is to invent new fortifications for Mr. Hero to carry before she names the day." (p. 182) Of course, Remington's hero does not end his love quest like this; his experience is not just another old story, but something more anguished and unique. Situations which superficially seem to be similar are actually importantly different. The author builds up, within his tale, a pattern of apparent similarities which regularly turn out to be less important than the differences which they obscure. For example, Remington suggests resemblances between Wolf-Voice and John Ermine or Ermine and Lieutenant Butler, only to show that these likenesses are irrelevant when compared to the contrasts between the men. These more incidental feints towards similarity become formal devices which underline the impression that the novel as a whole, however much it appears a conventional romance, is something far different. The author is revealing, now much more subtly, his former unease about fiction. He insists on the fact that what he tells, though it occurs within fiction, does not restrict its force to an artistic fancy. "Then like the raising of a curtain, which reveals the play, the hermit saw suddenly that it was heavy and solemn—that he was to see a tragedy, and this was not a play; it was real, it was his boy, and he did not want to see a tragedy." (p. 263)

Crooked-Bear continues his reflections, suggesting not only that the ending is truer than fiction, but that it fits into a larger pattern. "I do not understand why men should be so afflicted in this world as Ermine and I have been, but doubtless it is the working of a great law, and possibly of a good one." (p. 267) The hermit acknowledges both the inevitability of the ending and its aptness and, again, the tale creates formal patterns to support that conclusion. Hints of inevitability are embedded in the prophecies which are communicated through repeated clusters of vocabulary. Thus, talk of death around Ermine prefigures his own death. Similarly, when he first encounters Katherine, he "tripped and stumbled, fell down, and crawled over answers to her questions." (p. 154) Those words are echoed in his final descent to death: he stumbles through the dark, crawls through the hills, finally to fall dead on the ground. There are other declensions which contribute to an accumulative impression of irrevocability. One is Ermine's increasing isolation, and that is accompanied by the sense of his shrinking future. A boy with "infinite possibilities" (p. 46), he is deflected into a more limited channel by a photograph and the woman whom it depicts. These idols are agents of confinement: the photograph in its very make-up; and the woman because of her restricting dress, her inhibited manners and her outlook which would cage Indians and put Ermine inside a picture frame. Certainly they restrict John Ermine's ambitions; he stays within his tent, dreaming. At last, Ermine is a man with no future, excluded even by the Indians, as they dream their futile dreams, each under his own tightly-drawn blanket. The pattern of decline is endorsed by the authorial voice, which recognizes the entire movement as the death of a type and a way of life, not just of an individual.

The internal construction of the novel attests to the idea that the ending is fitting and truthful to the situation proposed by the fiction. Beyond that, there is an impression that Remington has conformed most truthfully to the implications of the Western's origins, because he developed Cooper's suggestion of tragic duality, rather than his portrayal of sentimental resolution. That wider sense of John Ermine enacting a valid trend in western material, is corroborated by Wister's novel, which appeared earlier the same year and which ostensibly celebrates the opposite inclination.

By 1902, Remington and Wister were no longer steady friends and they had lost confidence in each other's artistic abilities. While both were enthusiastic about the frontier, Remington believed that the wild West was irrevocably gone, where Wister thought that it could be revived as a corrective to contemporary social and political degeneration. Wister began to criticize Remington in private letters⁷ and Remington can be seen to carry his disapprobation into his fiction. The Virginian⁸ contains various relationships and many adventures, but its closing stages and its ending in particular have to do with the reconciliation of opposites. While first setting out the contrasts between East and West, heroine and hero, Wister proceeded to show the Virginian overcome all Molly's objections, and the two come together in marriage, thus uniting geography, social mores and literary types. In John Ermine, Remington gestured towards The Virginian, implying a direct contradiction of Wister's conclusion. The synopsis of the "old story" neatly summarizes the love-plot of The Virginian and the names "Molly" and "Mrs. Taylor" are introduced peripherally, but during crucial courtship scenes, in connection with Katherine and her mother. In his proposal to Katherine, Ermine invites her to "come to the mountains with me. I will make you a good camp." (p. 223) This is precisely where the Virginian takes Molly after their wedding and the two spend an idyllic month in primal isolation. Katherine, on the other hand, derides Ermine, accuses him of trying to turn her into a squaw and runs screaming into the house. Where Wister ends his novel on a note of peaceful reconciliation, Remington's closing scene is of Katherine shaking hands with the Crow who has killed Ermine. The Crow is called "her malevolent friend" (p. 271) and in that phrase is implied the travesty of reconciliation which has been effected by Ermine's death.

Yet Wister's novel is not as homogenous as it appears at first sight. There is a perceptible disjunction between the story and its ending. It is not only Remington who contradicts Wister, for Wister himself can be seen to be denying, subliminally, that which occurs at the most obvious level of his text.

The Virginian constructs its own set of symbols. The trauma of the rustlers' hanging, the Virginian's reaction and his subsequent injury by Indians are linked intimately with the scenes in which they occur and the feelings which they provoke. Thereafter, cottonwoods, mountains and woods, or cerebral activity and childishness, recur as intimations of evil. Therefore, in the moments before the final duel, the sight of cottonwoods reinforces an atmosphere of danger, and abstract conception divorced from concrete observation is a prime sin of Dr. MacBride's. In the last chapter, after the wedding, the significance of these symbols is inverted as hero and heroine sport in their isolated Eden. They camp among trees in the mountains, a double imprisonment, and the scene repeats a mental picture which the Virginian has forethought. In established western typology, the setting sun represents eternal life. The change which marriage brings to the Virginian is "like a sunrise." (p. 357) He seems to be regressing to a childhood state. Molly wonders, "Was this dreamy boy the man of two days ago? .. . his face changed by her to a boy's, and she leavened with him." (p. 357) Although the narrative has joined Molly and the Virginian in harmony, there remains a structural recognition of their irreconcilability. Dualistic tableaux are set up to establish the polarity of contrasts involved in the beginning, and Wister conveys the power of synthesis by uniting these polarities. But his dualisms remain: when the husband and wife swim in opposite pools with the island between them, they are echoing the configuration of an earlier scene, when they sat on either side of a table—"The inkstand stood between them" (p. 263)—to write letters to the East. The display of union is not convincing at any but the plot level, for the validity of the cowboy's adaptation to the East, the modern West and marriage is undercut by the network of inappropriate imagery and ambiguous statement on which it rests. Wister's novel, coherent in symbolism and structure in only thirty-five of the thirty-six chapters, represents the apotheosis of reconciliation for the western genre; therefore its failure is telling. It is prophetic of the further compromises and incapacities which would be shown by the novel which tells this story again and again—the popular Western. Writers like Ernest Haycox, who had none of the dime novelists' superficiality, strained to duplicate the happy ending, although it became increasingly inappropriate to novels which developed nihilistic and naturalistic themes.

The rupture in The Virginian's design indicates the importance of John Ermine's overt recognition that the Westerner inevitably failed to integrate with society. That such a central work should betray the same concerns, in stifled form, suggests that, although Remington was the first and—until the advent of the anti-Western—last western writer to dramatize this irreversible conflict, he had realized a crucial aspect of the genre, which had been present, but muted, since Fenimore Cooper.

Remington's vision never became popular: while Wister created a divided novel about ultimate harmony, Remington produced a uniform expression of rupture. The ending was almost immediately reversed. When John Ermine was dramatized in 1903, by Louis Evans Shipman, Remington was persuaded to help with the revision of the script. The revised ending ran: Ermine shoots Katherine's fiancé dead. He is accused of murder, but successfully defends his action as self-defense and eventually wins Katherine as his bride.

art is a process of elimination . . .

Remington, March 1903⁹

John Ermine did not attract any imitators; it did not even retain its plot in its own dramatization; and Remington never repeated the dualistic structure. His artistic vision was becoming bleaker. His next work has no vivid interplay between contending forces, only an insistence on the futile gestures of the wild West's last inhabitants. Although The Way of an Indian (1906)¹⁰ does not seem to fit the patterns of the Leatherstocking Tales, Sundown Leflare and John Ermine, it represents a comprehensible development within Remington's work. Sundown is the alien who passes through multiple perspectives and is destined to repeat forever that fluctuation, since he cannot affiliate himself permanently with any one type. John Ermine, who has allegiances to two races, is unable to maintain the same balancing act and is destroyed by the discordances between his two cultures. The hero of The Way of an Indian is never exposed to more than one racial experience and that is one which is already doomed to extinction. The Way of an Indian is Remington's last written work and it seems to represent the end-point in his vision of shrinking possibilities.

The hero is no man caught between two races, but a fullblooded Indian who only ever encounters white men as enemies. The book dramatizes his initiation to fighting manhood, his successful abduction of an Indian squaw, his victories and defeats in battle and, finally, his death as a Cheyenne chief. In his younger days, White Otter—variously rechristened as "the Bat" and "Fire Eater"—undergoes the same delusion as Sundown about the longevity of Indians and the temporality of the white man. This Indian, however, cannot create an alternative mythic time-scheme for himself. Because he is unable to reverse time, he cannot combat the effects of chronology and his delusion can never be transformed into vision. Once he understands the truth, despite his various battles with Whites, there is never any question but that he is a red man who belongs to a doomed race. "Old Big Hair, who sat blinking, knew that the inevitable was going to happen, but he said no word." (p. 36) Neither does Remington say a word to reverse, fictively, historical inevitability. There is no sense of duality in the text because there is never any doubt about the outcome. The author had settled on a fixed perspective and a singlefaceted experience. In his account of the tribe's final massacre, he seems to be paralleling, from the opposite perspective, Custer's report of the "battle" at the Washita in 1868.¹¹ Telling one side of the story, Remington concentrated on the hopelessness of the Indian cause, in a tone that is elegiac rather than angry. When Cosmopolitan serialized the story (from November 1905), its editor felt it necessary to supply the alternative perspective that Remington no longer articulated. The magazine prefaced his installments with a synopsis of the action, written from a viewpoint antagonistic to that of the Indian. Remington continued to be involved in a contrapuntal pattern, although he was trying, now, for the opposite effect.

From its opening scene, The Way of an Indian is concerned with isolation and death. White Otter begins where John Ermine ended—alone and with a bad heart. He is worrying about his lack of protection from evil spirits and his consequent exclusion from the after-life. He ends in exactly the same posture—alone on a hillside, thinking about the after-life, but now an old man who is prepared to surrender to the evil spirits. Although there is a progression from chapter to chapter, as White Otter gains maturity, the thrust of the book is towards circularity and lack of achievement. The Cheyenne's life represents an accumulation of victories, but the reader is allowed to see their pettiness. His individual acts of combat are always against a helpless victim, one who does not realize that he is threatened until he is attacked (once from the rear) and therefore does not defend himself. Even the attack by an Indian band against three white trappers, in which the hero wins his new name, Fire Eater, is won only because the trappers die of thirst. The author presents the warriors as vultures, prepared to lay siege to the beaver-men, but too afraid to attack them directly. It is immediately after this unheroic event that Fire Eater kills a Shoshone by stabbing him in the back. He wins great renown for his performance in these confrontations, but his grandeur is tempered by the author's comment that, "the Fire Eater grew to be a great man in the little world of the Chis-chis-chash, though his affairs proportionately were as the 'Battles of the Kites and the Crows.'" (p. 152)

There is much death in the stories. Like John Ermine, this hero wins new names through his encounters with death, but his experiences are more passive. He achieves his first rebaptism by killing an unsuspecting Crow who thinks the intruder is his lover, and he is renamed Fire Eater for breaching the trappers' gunpowder flames, rather than for slaying any of the enemy. His last rebirth is a deception. Beaten by white traders, he declares himself dead and simulates a resurrection. In his final confrontation with death, the only rebirth which he desires is one into the after-life. White Otter is recurrently isolated and in darkness, prefiguring his death fearfully in his own mind, so his final demise is only the last act in a cycle which has much more to do with death than rebirth. That the cycle will not support any renewal of itself is underlined in the death of the chief's grandchild, which precedes his own. Fire Eater is the last of his line: the baby's death seals off the future; the present is a barren emptiness; the chief can imagine happiness only in death. The most memorable image of the work occurs when the chief takes his grandson to show him a dead white soldier, before the final defeat. The baby, soon to freeze to death himself, stabs the dead corpse.

Pulling his great knife from its buckskin sheath, [Fire Eater] curled the fat little hand around its shaft and led him to the white body. . . . Comprehending the idea, the infant drew up and drove down, doing his best to obey the instructions, but his arm was far too weak to make the knife penetrate. The fun of the thing made him scream with pleasure, and the old Fire Eater chuckled at the idea of his little warrior's first coup. (p. 205)

The text never has the fertility of Sundown Leflare or John Ermine. The hero is a savage, stoic actor, with whom the reader cannot identify. He seems a bloodless cipher in a text full of ritual, signs and tracks. The symbols tend to be inanimate or dead—for example, the hero's good medicine comes from a dead bat and a spider which he kills to discover its prophecy. Scenes are described in terms of the patterns and forms they adopt. These, also, are very often infertile or self-destructive; a circle easily changes from defense to trap. Fire Eater's band makes a late and ill-planned attack on white traders. They retreat to a waterhole, packing themselves in with a rigid formation which simply enables the surrounding Whites to close in the more quickly and massacre the group. This is a local instance of the absence of choice or fluidity which permeates the book. It is the play of alternatives which substantiates the meaning in Remington's other long fictions; the nature of the alternatives gives Sundown his humour and endows John Ermine with tragic force. There is none of that in The Way of an Indian, in fact, there is so much about death that the story is ended almost as soon as it begins, since the reader is constantly aware of the necessary outcome (especially if he has read John Ermine and Sundown Leflare, both of which refer to the downfall of the Cheyenne tribe).

Just before the serialization of The Way of an Indian, Remington had written, "My own pictures, if at all successful, are finished before they are begun . . ."¹² Strangely, he thought this last work his most successful fiction and it seems an example of that method translated into literature. There are no false possibilities suggested in this story and little sense of protest. The narrative is inevitable, predictable; in a sense it is all ending, a logical enough development for a writer who had already tried the never-ending circularity of Sundown Leflare, then the tragic and unexpected finality which is conveyed in the conclusion of John Ermine. Remington's theme of displacement had reached its climax in his last work, in its subject and technique. His fiction could progress no further.

Fenimore Cooper's major innovations and his most accomplished inventions were, of course, his subject-matter and his mythology. Yet he also left an important heritage in the details of his narrative technique, in his manipulation of narrative time and in the very incompleteness of his theme. He did not provide a final answer to his problematic proposition; Henry Nash Smith said, "if he had been able—as he was not—to explore to the end the contradiction in his ideas and emotions, the Leatherstocking series might have become a major work of art."¹³ For over fifty years, none of the writers who took up Cooper's types and scenes developed further the darker and more resonant side of his fiction. Remington was interested in similar narrative patterns and he wrought them to more insistent extremes; and he became the first author to explore fully the contradictions in the image of the wilderness man at the disappearing frontier. He acted on impulses prefigured but not exhausted by Cooper and, despite the clumsiness of his fiction, it conveys powerful and convincing movements. John Ermine, especially, seems a more substantial model than The Virginian for the further development of the Western. Popular western fiction may have lost some better alternatives when Remington's design ended with him.

NOTES

¹ Quoted in Ben Merchant Vorpahl, My dear Wister: The Frederic Remington-Owen Wister Letters (Palo Alto, CA: American West Publishing Co., 1972), p. 283.

²Sundown Leflare (N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, 1899). Page numbers in parentheses in the text refer to this edition.

³Pony Tracks (1895; rpt. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), p. 144.

⁴ I am more concerned with the co-existence of two kinds of narrative time than with the most precise definitions of these terms. I am basing my usage on Frank Kermode's discussion of time in The Sense of an Ending (1967; rpt. N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1979). He talks of chronos as "simple chronicity" (p. 46). Kairos refers to time which encompasses more than mere successiveness: it is time made significant through its relation to the end. "The kairos transforms the past . . . establishes concord with origins as well as ends" (p. 48). In his tale-telling, Sundown creates an alternative time-scheme which is significant because it starts at his ending and proceeds to his beginning. Kairos harmonizes his end and his beginning: as he grows older chronologically, he becomes younger mythologically.

⁵Studies in Classic American Literature (1924; rpt. G.B.: Penguin, 1971), p. 69.

⁶John Ermine of the Yellowstone (1902; rpt. N.Y.: Grosset & Dunlap, 1908). Page references are to this edition.

⁷ Vorpahl, p. 309.

⁸The Virginian (1902; rpt. N.Y.: Pocket Books, 1977). Page references are to this edition.

⁹ Quoted in Edwin Wildman, "Frederic Remington, the Man," Outing, the Magazine, 41, No. 6 (March 1903), 712.

¹⁰The Way of an Indian (London: Gay & Bird, 1906). Page references are to this edition.

¹¹ This is suggested in Peggy and Harold Samuels, eds., The Collected Writings of Frederic Remington (N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979), p. 626. I have culled much of my information on The Way of an Indian from the "Notes" to this edition.

¹² Frederic Remington, "A Few Words from Mr. Remington," Collier's, 18 (March 1905), 16.

¹³Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950), p. 61.