SOURCE: "When West Was Wister," in The New Republic, Vol. 167, No. 8, September 2, 1972, pp. 28-33.

[In the following review of My Dear Wister: The Frederic Remington-Owen Wister Letters, Seelye examines the relationship between these two artists and illuminates their views of the American West.]

When Huck Finn declared that he was going to light out for the Territory, he was speaking of the area beyond Arkansas and Missouri, the present states of Oklahoma and Kansas, as it existed in the 1840s. He was expressing the wanderlust of all Americans, for whom the westering urge had held, like the trade winds, for more than two centuries, but he was expressing in particular Mark Twain's own discontent with "civilization," the strictures and structure of the eastern establishment as opposed to the open, untrammeled spaces and freedom of the western territories. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is set in the 1840s, but it was written in the '70s and '80s, and the meaning of that final declaration gains a certain dimension thereby, for the frontier was fast closing in and closing down as well. And Mark Twain was not alone in his nostalgic reaction to the complexities of emerging Modern America. Even as it closed, the western frontier was sought by an avid trio which was to create the popular image of what the West was all about, a compound of cowboys, cavalry, and cussed Injuns: Owen Wister, Frederic Remington and Theodore Roosevelt.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published in 1885, and it was in that same year that young Owen Wister took a train trip to the Wyoming Territory for his health. The son of Philadelphia gentry and the grandson of Fanny Kemble, Wister had graduated from Harvard with hopes of a career in music. He had been encouraged in this ambition by the praise of Franz Liszt during a postgraduate tour of Europe, but family pressure had forced him into a business career and the study of law. Freud would have recognized the "nervous ailment" which resulted in Wister's trip west: like Huck Finn, he had sickened of civilization and lit out for the only remaining territory. His first western journey eventually led to Wister's writing the book that has become, with all its faults, the "classic" western novel—The Virginian.

It was in 1885 also that Frederic Remington made a decisive trip to the Far West. A native of upstate New York who had attended Yale until family reversals made him withdraw, Remington like Wister had artistic ambitions. But art as she was taught (in a basement) at Yale in the late 19th century did not satisfy him, and as Wister enjoyed the Harvard curriculum less than club life and amateur theatricals (while graduating magna cum laude), so the burly Remington got his greatest satisfaction from playing on the Yale football team captained by Walter Camp. Entering college the same year as Wister, he lasted only a year. His father's death and his mother's displeasure with his artistic leanings were but two of several reasons, but the result was a restless period of wandering about from job to job. By 1882, when Wister was touring Europe and enjoying Wagner's operas, Remington had drifted as far west as Peabody, Kan. He bought a mule ranch with some of the money left him by his father, but soon found that ranching was pretty much like any other business and to hell with it. He sold his ranch in 1884 and headed "somewhere else," this time to the Southwest. He apparently had no definite plan, but he did a considerable amount of sketching in the field, amateurish but energetic drawings which contain all the essentials but none of the craft of his later work. Returning to Kansas City, Remington was able to sell some of the paintings based on his sketches, and though he was swindled out of his patrimony by owners of a saloon he had invested in, the loss was less a setback than the cutting of familial apron strings. He returned to New York only long enough to marry the girl who was waiting for him, and then headed west again to Arizona.

Though Remington and Wister both went west in 1885, they went separately, in more ways than one. Of the two, it was Remington who most resembled Huck Finn, whose personality was most easily accommodated to the western mood, and who, early on, had determined that his future would be tied up with an artistic record of the last frontier. Wister, on the other hand, went west for his health, not for material, and had no idea of becoming a "western" writer. It would be hard to think of a less likely candidate for that office than the dilettantish dude who was escorted to Wyoming by two maiden aunts in 1885. Still, his daily journal (edited in part by his daughter and published in 1958 as Owen Wister Out West) recorded a surprisingly positive reaction: the scenery struck him as monotonous but "beautiful," and reminded him "of the northern part of Spain," and a nighttime scene recalled "Die Walküre—this which is much more than my most romantic dream could have hoped." He wasn't at all surprised, he wrote, that "a man never comes back after he has once been here for a few years." Yet he only stayed a couple of months himself, and when he returned to Boston, he went back to Harvard Law School as well, and though he began to have some success at writing, his pieces in the Atlantic were on "The Greek Play" and "Republican Opera."

Wister went west again in the summer of 1887, but once again returned to law school in Philadelphia. In 1888, he took another western vacation, and returned home to finish his degree and set up a law practice. He also worked on an opera about Montezuma, a subject only remotely connected with Wyoming, but when another bout of bad health sent him west in the fall of 1889, he returned with notes for the stories which were to make him famous, and his next trip in the summer of 1891 was, like Remington's journey in 1885, with the stated intention "to jot down all shreds of local colour and all conversations and anecdotes decent or otherwise that strike me as native wild flowers. After a while I shall write a great fat book about the whole thing." The "fat book" eluded him for the time being, and the "whole thing" seems never to have come within his grasp, but that fall his first western stories, "Hank's Woman" and "How Lin McLean Went East," were published by Harper's. They established him quickly as a western writer, but as their titles suggest, Wister's West (like that of Bret Harte) was from the very beginning an extension of eastern attitudes. Wister noted with relief in his earliest journals that "every man, woman, and cowboy I see comes from the East—and generally from New England, thank goodness." Lin McLean was just such a cowboy, and though his trip back home ended in disgust over eastern narrowness, the cycle of his western adventures (published as Lin McLean in 1895) ended in a proper marriage, symbol of western accommodation to eastern ideals of order.

Considering the importance of marriage to the ending of The Virginian, Wister in a number of his short stories betrays a surprising element of misogyny, and there are other signs that his use of the marriage theme was the result of mixed motives. Molly Stark, the heroine of The Virginian, took her first name from that of Wister's own bride, and the idyllic honeymoon in the novel was based on Wister's also. The largely feminine readership of Harper's (where Wister's books were serialized) was another factor, as was the blue pencil of its editor, Henry Mills Alden, but perhaps the greatest influence shaping Wister's West, responsible for the taming process by which his realistic journal entries became romantic fiction, was Wister's good friend and fellow Harvard graduate, Theodore Roosevelt. Wister was not always comfortable with Roosevelt's progressive politics (and lived long enough to die loathing the even more progressive Roosevelt of the '30s), but the old school tie was strong and his respect for the man was great. Though he didn't always follow Roosevelt's literary advice, he accepted it, and was affected likewise by the sheer magnetism of the man. What Howells was to Mark Twain, Roosevelt was to Wister, not so much a literary censor as a moral mentor, whose force of personality shaped the final bias of the other man's work.

Roosevelt, like Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Ulysses S. Grant and a score of sundry other Indian killers and filibusterers, had made political capital out of his own wilderness campaign, and not a little literary capital also. Having graduated from Harvard three years before Wister, he preceded him west as well, following a sequence of personal and political disasters. From 1883 to 1887 he raised beef and his own muscles in Dakota Territory, affecting a legendary transformation and fixing a useful political image. Though his western enterprise ended in the disastrous winter of 1886-87, the books he wrote upon returning east, along with his complementary philosophy of "the strenuous life," promoted a popular idea of the West as a perpetual preserve of high-minded adventure. Even before he became Wister's literary adviser, Roosevelt's Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (1891) helped to create an eastern market for the western idea—so long as that idea was suitable to eastern tastes.

Roosevelt's book was illustrated by Remington, whose fortunes were on the rise by the early '90s, and when Wister's "Hank's Woman" appeared in Harper's Weekly, the same issue carried part of a series by Remington on the Sioux uprising which resulted in the Battle of Wounded Knee, and it was only a matter of time before Alden would assign him to illustrate one of Wister's stories. This was "Balaam and Pedro," first printed in 1893 and one of the early stories which were to be transformed into the narrative of The Virginian. It was this story, with its eye-gouging incident, which provided the first occasion of a real difference of opinion between Roosevelt and Wister, one in which Roosevelt finally persevered—a decisive victory. Remington and Wister met while the story was still in press, and though Wister at first was reluctant to accept Remington's offers to collaborate, a circumstantial incident convinced him that the success of his story was due in large part to the illustration. The result was nearly a decade of teamwork, a partnership which also had its effect on the direction of Wister's writing.

In the triangular relationship of Roosevelt-Remington-Wister, the artist seems to have been the odd man out. Roosevelt and Remington never had more than a casual, professional acquaintance, and though the politician admired the artist's work and commissioned the famous (and fictitious) picture of the storming of San Juan Hill, Roosevelt would have found the earthy Remington a trifle too coarse for his tastes. Wister too seems to have kept his collaborator out of his personal life, yet Remington, through his illustrations, linked his name firmly to those two good friends. And though all three contributed their share to the crystallization of the popular idea of the cowboy, the greatest of all American folk heroes, it was Remington's paintings and statues which were the pictorial harbinger of that medium responsible for our present-day notions of the West, a West singularly deficient in just those qualities of moral decency which Roosevelt and Wister together promoted. There are no women save squaws in Remington's paintings, and the only marriage he ever celebrated was that hybrid union of beast and man which produced the celibate centaur of our national mythology. Like Virgil, Remington portrayed arms and the man, and his themes were always violent.

Several years ago, G. Edward White wrote a penetrating study of the efforts of Roosevelt and Wister to establish a synthesis between western rugged independence and eastern habits of order, a "consensus" West that had as its twin paradigms the Rough Riders and The Virginian. The coming together in a heroic bond in Cuba of eastern dudes and western cowboys showed that Americans were Americans, for all o' that, and when the Virginian married a daughter of New England in the Far West and then went on to make a fortune from his coal lands, why that was reassuring also. Frederick Jackson Turner once wrote that the Captain of Industry was the Old Frontiersman in new guise, and he may very well have had The Virginian in mind; but in any event Turner was an important spokesman for the idea of consensus, of the ultimate good to come from the marriage of East and West. Not so Remington, for whom the East and the West were unreconcilable opposites. Instead of viewing the West as a transforming arena, he regarded it as an evanescent phenomenon, like the great desert itself, rugged in appearance but as delicate an ecostructure as a frail cactus flower. The West and the East he saw as worlds apart, and the invasion of the one by the other spelt doom for the last territory of freedom. Alone of the eastern trio, in this as in all other ways, Remington seems to have escaped his heritage almost completely. Perhaps because he came from the upstate New York area which produced Leatherstocking, a country still woodsy enough to evoke a wilderness, Remington was actually able to make the psychic leap proposed by Huckleberry Finn. Lighting out for the vanishing territory of 1885, in a sense he never came back, and his early death in 1909 was as symbolic as Wister's bitter, alienated old age.

Given these psychological and cultural antagonisms, the relationship between Remington and Wister could only have been a sort of uneasy truce, producing a collaborative tension which was suggested but not spelled out in White's study of the three men. Ben Merchant Vorpahl has now written a book which does spell it out, a study which is central to an understanding of what the West, as a literary idea, is all about. Vorpahl occasionally snarls his interweaving relationships (it is not always easy to determine who was doing what when and where), and to my mind he is guilty of occasional overstatements in the service of his thesis. But I say this only to emphasize the positive, because I have not had the pleasure of reading such a well-written, graceful, and even witty treatment of popular culture—which often attracts jargon-laden sociological silliness—in a long time.

Vorpahl is clearly up to as well as on to his subject, and the real subject of his book is Frederic Remington, who comes across in his letters to Wister as a slangy, profane, earthy, gourmandizing, woman-fearing, fat American boy—a 300-pound Huckleberry. Toward the end of this book, I began to sorrow that Remington was never called upon to illustrate Mark Twain's classic. His habits of mind, even his wry turn of phrase, constantly bring Twain to mind, and it seems a shame that somewhere along the way the two great nostalgists did not collaborate. It is clear that they belong to the same camp, the Red Man tribe as opposed to the White Man club which both Philip Rahv and Leslie Fiedler (for different reasons) have defined as the chief split of sensibility in American literature.

Wister, of course, belonged to the White Men, and Vorpahl's study suggests that the relationship between the two men resembled that uneasy friendship between Hawthorne and Melville. Though Remington's artistry was essentially flawed by his mixed motives, and though Wister's craft was similarly marred by commercial and cultural considerations, both men did have ambitions to excel in their chosen fields. The eventual fate of their relationship therefore leads us to consider the fate of American literature as well as the fate of the American West, and such a consideration leads us to the inescapable conclusion that the fate of American literature was the fate of the American West, at least so far as the 19th century is concerned. Vorpahl's book is therefore an important additional chapter to Edwin Fussell's Frontier and Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land.

As his hyphenated subtitle indicates, Vorpahl relies heavily on the Remington-Wister correspondence preserved in the Wister archive in the Library of Congress, which hyphenate should read "Remington-to-Wister," because the correspondence is decidedly one-sided. While Wister had a strong sense of his importance and saved all his received correspondence, his manuscripts and related documents, Remington like Melville was a "burner," and even went so far in his last, reclusive years as to destroy many of his most famous canvases. Few if any letters from Wister to him survive, and Vorpahl has had to rely on Wister's letters to his mother (he wrote regularly to her as long as she lived), to his other associates, and on his western journals for material with which to balance the account. Moreover, Remington was a terse even cryptic though exuberant correspondent, and Vorpahl has had to do a painstaking job of research to determine, often, just what in hell he was talking about in his letters. What Remington did not say is often more important than what he discussed, and the resemblance to Melville's correspondence to Hawthorne is more than superficial.

Like Melville, Remington was the one who did most of the pushing, again and again extending futile invitations to Wister to come "up" for a visit. But this one-sidedness took a sudden reversal once Remington began to cast his future fame in bronze and think of abandoning illustration and painting forever. It seems quite clear that Remington's interest in Wister was dictated by professional not personal considerations, that Wister's stories created opportunities for illustration and income. Throughout, Remington indulges in heavy-handed kidding about Wister's unlikely role as western writer, and his remarks about the ephemeral nature of print and paper were similarly pointed. Wister, for his part, seems to have remained rather condescending toward his partner, regarding him as a "mere" illustrator, until that talk about bronze and immortality began. Wister then turned suitor, but it was too late. By then certain trouble-some matters of collaboration had gone awry, and the never more than imperfect sympathies between two thin-skinned artists quickly soured.

The partnership ended virtually on the eve of the publication of The Virginian, and Remington did not illustrate Wister's famous book. He had, however, illustrated a number of the stories from which the novel was derived, and Vorpahl makes it abundantly clear that Wister's slow drift (under the genteel influence of what Remington called "upholstery of a library chair," referring to eastern editors) toward an easternized, school-marmalade West contributed greatly to the estrangement. Like Roosevelt, Wister was from the beginning a latter-day Parkman, a romantic historian of the West, who knew better than he wrote and used his journal material to structure a consensus West—a territory of the mind. Remington, though at the outset a realist, became increasingly withdrawn and mystical as the West that he had known disappeared. His West, that is to say, became a territory of the heart.

But until this drift separated the two men, there was nearly a decade of often intense collaboration of artist and writer, one which transcended the usual relationship. If Roosevelt held Wister in a thrall of personality, Remington too had his attractions, and though it was Remington who paid court to Wister, it was the writer who seems to have been the chief beneficiary of the arrangement. The main purpose of Vorpahl's study is to demonstrate the deeper literary aspects of the Remington-Wister partnership, aspects which have hitherto been unknown, and what emerges is, like the correspondence, one-sided. First, there is the extent of Wister's indebtedness to Remington for "material," for like Wister's journal, Remington was crammed full of firsthand western experience. Thus Wister's early and important essay, "The Evolution of the Cowboy," is shown to have been indebted to the artist for far more than its illustrations. Secondly, Vorpahl demonstrates that Wister had an ideational (ideological might be a better word) debt as well. Not only the facts and anecdotes in "The Evolution of the Cowboy" were borrowed from Remington, but the main thesis as well, a thesis which was twisted out of a Remington essay, "The Horse of the Plains," and which became the main ontological support of The Virginian.

It was Wister's idea, an early manifestation of his chauvinistic Anglophilia, that the cowboy was a last avatar of the old Anglo-Saxon spirit, a veritable knight of the prairie. That the real cowboy was as often Negro or Irish or Swedish as English in his origins did not hinder Wister, any more than the presence of two black regiments in the Cuban campaign darkened Roosevelt's white-on-white "consensus." The posterity of Wister and Roosevelt is necessarily clouded by the outright bigotry of the one and the politically veiled but undeniable racist notions of the other. Remington was even more guilty in this regard, and his letters are filled with "hebes" and "dagos" and "niggers," nor did he ever take the opportunity to celebrate the passing of the black cowboy. But so far as "The Evolution" is concerned, Wister's indebtedness to him concerns an essay in which Remington's racism is, if anything, sublimated. The point of "The Horse of the Plains" was that the animal that made the cowboy such a significant figure was essentially the horse of the Spanish conquistadores, the Arabian Barbary, or "Barb." Conquistadore, vaquero, Indian, cowboy—all western men rode the same mount, and Remington's illustrations supposedly demonstrated this neohippean nongenesis.

As Wister begged and borrowed cowboy etymologies and like data from Remington, so did he pirate his Barbary thesis, for his theory of the "pure" Anglo-Saxon cowboy was obviously derived from the thesis about the "pure" Barbary strain—that is, he substituted the Anglo-Saxon knight for the Arabian horse. Remington knew that Wister's thesis was so much wishful thinking, but since their partnership had just begun and was important to him, he kept quiet and did the illustrations required of him—even a mawkish "The Last Cavalier," which shows a cowboy riding along against a ghostly backdrop of knightly, Anglo-Saxon predecessors. So antithetical was this subject to Remington's own conceptions and techniques (his skies, as Vorpahl points out, are western: big and empty) that it is clearly an inferior picture, and yet its original seems to have been the only recorded acquisition of Remington's work by Wister. Though it was untypical of the painter, the subject matter was endemic to the writer's view of history; it helped provide the subsequent rationale for the distortions of form and fact that went into the writing of The Virginian.

Still, the evolution of Wister's ultimate cowboy was a slow, ten-year metamorphosis. His earliest stories, the ones which Remington illustrated, were among his most realistic, and so long as Wister stuck fairly close to his journals and his recollections, Remington was delighted to illustrate them. But as the character of the Virginian gradually began to evolve from a slangy, simple, even comic cowpoke to a version of flowering knighthood, Remington became less comfortable. In time he grew resentful of having to depict a West and a cowboy which had become a creation of an eastern sensibility. At about this point in their joint career, Remington began to write short stories himself, and though he may have been Wister's inferior in this regard, there is no doubt but that the West he wrote about was the tragic and evanescent ground of his not Wister's imagination. Vorpahl demonstrates, in fact, that Remington's stories are a tacit argument, a quiet rebuttal.

Like Wister, Remington began by writing a series of short stories concerning one character, "Sundown LeFlare," a half-breed cowboy and scout who tells his stories in a heavy dialect to the narrator, a convention which Wister relied on also. But where all of Wister's white heroes make their separate peace with the regulating, marriage-and-business-oriented spirit of the East, Sundown LeFlare is at heart a renegade, a picaro, an illiterate "breed." Wister also wrote admiringly of the Indian, but as the title of his first collection of stories, Red Men and White, suggests, the union for him was never more than conterminous. For Remington, the mixture of bloods was catalytic and fated, and Vorpahl makes clear enough the antagonisms—between East and West and Wister and Remington—which went into the creation of Sundown LeFlare.

These . antagonisms are even more obvious in Remington's novel,John Ermine of the Yellowstone, published late in the same year that The Virginian appeared, and obviously written as a response to that book. John Ermine is a minor work of art but a major indeed initiatory stage in an important subliterary genre, the latter-day recrudescence of noble savagery with a distinctly Nietzschean twist which resulted in such disparate novels as Jack London's Call of the Wild, Ernest Thompson Seton's Two Little Savages and Cyrus Townsend Brady's The Island of Regeneration, and which is epitomized by Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes. Vorpahl does not discuss the possibility of this genesis, but surely the story of a noble and titled Englishman who is orphaned in the jungle but survives to rule over all animate nature red in tooth and claw, and who returns eventually to England to resume the station and duties which he has inherited (only to return finally to the jungle), though containing obvious suggestions of Wister's Anglo-Saxon cowboy thesis, is actually closer toJohn Ermine.

Where Tarzan is adopted by "anthropoid apes," Ermine is kidnapped by Indians, and grows up in savage surroundings. Eventually he is reclaimed by a hermit of the mountains, a white recluse who takes it upon himself to teach the young boy the ways of his people. Growing to young manhood, John Ermine goes to live among other white men, as a scout for a cavalry troop. There he meets and falls in love with a daughter of one of the senior officers, the consensual theme. But though he is white, handsome and as blonde as a Viking, John Ermine is a savage at heart, not an English gentleman, and his rejection by the girl results in a vengeful finale which ends with his death—by the hand of an Indian he insulted. By means of his fable, Remington hoped to disprove Wister's thesis, deny the consensus interpretation, and lay to rest that old romantic trope of a noble-blooded hero in rags. It was a large order, and as the popularity of The Virginian and Tarzan suggests, he was not successful in carrying it out.

Though John Ermine was well received and went through several printings, it never matched the éclat of The Virginian. Even Henry James admired Wister's novel, though with a few telling reservations. James praised the characters and setting of The Virginian, but did not much like the ending. In his stories of Americans abroad, James had revealed his own disinclination to arrive at consensus. He refused to provide the marriage in The American which Howells begged him to include, and in Daisy Miller he gave his rustic little heroine a tragic death in Rome. James wanted Wister's hero to have the same fate: "I should have made him perish in his flower and in some splendid and somber way." Though James did not read and perhaps could not have read Remington's novel, he certainly would have found there an ending to his liking.

For James and Remington, in their far different ways, both belong to that odd fraternity founded by Cooper and continued by Melville and Mark Twain, that tradition in American literature which regards innocence and savagery as not permanent and enduring but fragile and fleeting qualities, IfJohn Ermine throws a different perspective on The Virginian, it likewise illuminates the western implications of Billy Budd (who also "perishes in his flower") and suggests what might have happened had Huck Finn managed to get West and have those wild adventures amongst the Injuns. For all its faults,John Ermine is one of the missing links of American literature, and Ben Vorpahl is to be thanked for providing us with the details of its genesis.