SOURCE: “The Literature Before 1900,” in The American Cowboy: The Myth and the Reality, University of Oklahoma Press, 1955, pp. 140‐57.

[In the following excerpt, Frantz and Choate trace the beginnings of cowboy fiction to the mid‐1850s, with what is called “ranch fiction,” and follow the development of the literature through the turn of the century, with the publication of such novels as the popular Wolfville (1897) by Alfred Henry Lewis and the less successful Girl at the Halfway House (1900) by Emerson Hough.]

A century and a quarter ago, a Yankee whaleship, the Essex, was rammed by a sperm whale with such force that her bow was stove in and she was swallowed by the Pacific Ocean within ten minutes. Nearly another quarter of a century went by before the Essex got her chronicler, Herman Melville, who made her sinking the climax of Moby Dick, his classic of whaling.

The range cattle industry and its legendary worker, the cowboy, were not so fortunate. The frontier cowboy closed shop about 1890. A quarter of a century went by, but the complete chronicler had not appeared to immortalize the cowboy in literature. Now nearly three quarters of a century have passed, and still we await his appearance. Is the cowboy not so worthy a subject as the whaler? We rather think he is, but still we await the great American novel to tell us so.

In the opening salvo of this study [The American Cowboy], some statistics were given regarding the cowboy story. If you recall, one stated that nearly one thousand titles were listed in Book Review Digest. In addition, the short stories featuring the cowboy are so numerous that to try to capture them in statistics would be like trying to count red ants on the prairie. The point is that there has been a mass of cowboy literature, and that out of that literature have come some good, if not great, works, some stories that have captured the cowboy with fidelity, some stories that have captured him with imagination, and even some that have combined these two qualities.

There is another point. To try to blanket the field of cowboy fiction would be to smother you beneath that blanket. Moby Dick appeared within a quarter of a century after the Essex sank. Suppose then we largely confine ourselves to the first quarter of a century following the closing of the range in examining the story of the cowboy as told by the purveyors of commercialized imagination. Except to spill over for an occasional comparison, this chapter will concentrate on a critical interpretation and evaluation of cowboy fiction from 1890 to 1915, treating such literature, so‐called and legitimate, as a distinct literary genre, making no attempt to get outside the cowboy genre to compare The Log of a Cowboy with Moby Dick, or Wolfville with Huckleberry Finn.

This time delimitation has validity, for the period between 1890 and 1915 is a focal point for cowboy fiction. What appeared before 1890 either had no literary merit or was just plain sub‐literary. The range fiction appearing since 1915 parallels in pattern and artistic merit the literature within our quarter‐century, the only differences being a slight shift in market taste, a polishing of style, and a flirtation with Freud.

Historically, the basis for ranch literature existed from the time the Anglo‐Americans first settled in Texas, and the descendants of the rancheros in California and the pastores in New Mexico will insist that the basis should be placed further back than Texas. Cowboy stories had made an appearance, if not exactly created a vogue, well before the Civil War. And by the time the range closed down, the cowboy myth was already acknowledged. Our Western story of 1890‐1915 then actually created no myth but enlarged and enhanced the color and the romance of the legend. When Owen Wister, toward whom most sombreros are waved when men talk of the beginnings of cowboy fiction, wrote Lin McLean in 1898, he was aware that he was not creating a legend, but that he was working with a lore which had already become a part of American folk life. And through the decades, it has been those writers—or panderers, as the more self‐consciously artistic might say—who were aware of the myth and tried to transmit and prolong it who have been most successful. Eugene Manlove Rhodes wrote from atop a literary mesa as compared with Zane Grey in his valley wasteland. But Grey knew that the public's interest lay not in the cowboy as he actually was, but as the American folk hero his public wanted him to be. Rhodes knew what the cowboy actually was, and wrote accordingly. Fifty people have read Grey for one who has read Rhodes, and that includes the reading cowboy.

Actually, “ranch fiction” preceded “cowboy stories” along the literary trail, the cowboy emerging only after he began to take on folk qualities. In the 1850's, Charles W. Webber came out with his collection of Tales of the Southern Border, a blend of romanticism and naturalism which alternately sentimentalizes over Texas frontier life and criticizes the crudities and brutalities of that same life. Although Webber's stories are not cowboy stories in the later sense, the cowboy appears on occasion, remarkably akin to his descendant a couple of decades later. For example, in one of the stories set on a ranchero, the host, commenting on the abundance promised by a generous Nature, adds that “the ingenuity of Colt has guaranteed us, in his revolvers, a secure possession” of this abundance. “I can only control the savage herd about me by the terror which the constant presence of this … really formidable weapon inspires,” he observes.¹ The Colt reappears a few years later in Theodore Winthrop's John Brent, laid among roping and horsebreaking vaqueros on a California ranchero. Talking about riding a wild horse leads one character to remark: “Ef you ever ride or back that curwolyow, I'll eat a six‐shooter, loaded and capped.”²

In each decade up to 1890, the ranch story could be traced, but usually the story would be the same. Ranch life is depicted with some care; the cowboy is a character but seldom a leading one. He is around, but he is in the shadows. Lippincott's Magazine carried a story in 1880 entitled “Sargent's Rodeo,” which had a lot to say about the roundup, roping, and branding of cattle, but comparatively little about the cowboy.³ Even in the early 1890's, Mary Hallock Foote, whom Wister mentions with admiration in his Members of the Family, was able to write stories of ranch life with only casual mention of the cowboy and range rider.⁴

Stories and novels in which the cowboy played a reasonably major role did begin to appear within a dozen years after the first longhorns were trailed into Abilene. Thomas Pilgrim, who wrote under the pseudonym of Arthur Morecamp, wrote perhaps the first strictly cowboy fiction. His first novel, Live Boys; or Charley and Nasho in Texas, is based on the adventures of a Texas trail drive into Kansas. Written for boys, it treats both preparation for the drive and the adventures of the drive itself.

Pilgrim's second novel appeared a year later in 1880. In several respects, Live Boys in the Black Hills is more important than the earlier work, for it includes descriptions of the trail, a Kansas cowtown, and Deadwood, Dakota Territory, the end of the trail. Most of the standard Western items are present—the cattle trail, the mining frontier, buffalo, Indians, dance hall brawls, and blazing six‐guns. Calamity Jane enters—“on the street on horseback, riding straddle, drunk as a fool, and cutting up like a greaser on a spree.”⁵ The cowboy is here, but he is hardly a hero, that role being reserved for the two “Live Boys.”

Scribner's tried an adult approach, or more precisely, an approach for adult readers, in its March, 1880, issue with a story entitled “Over Sunday at New Sharon,” depicting a Sunday in Dodge City. Here, while Dodge City was wallowing in its lusty glory, the cowboy definitely occupies a position upstage:

Everywhere, the cow‐boys made themselves manifest, clad now in the soiled and dingy jeans of the trail, and then in a suit of many buttoned corduroy, and again in affluence of broadcloth, silk hat, gloves, cane, and sometimes a clerical white neck tie. And everywhere, also, stared and shone the Lone Star of Texas—for the cow‐boy, wherever he may wander, and however he may change, never forgets to be a Texan, and never spends his money or lends his presence to a concern that does not in some way recognize the emblem of his native state.⁶

These stories have no significance, unless it is in their timing. But they do drive home the point that the cowboy was in the process of being discovered while the range was still open, and that the cowboy, like America awaiting on Isabella, needed only a sponsor to make his presence felt throughout the nation.

The sponsor appeared when the publishing house of Beadle and Adams took the cowboy under its fictional wing and promoted widespread acceptance in an incredibly brief time. The “Wild West” had been in the Beadle and Adams catalogs for a quarter‐century before the cowboy began to emerge as a leading fictional character, but when he did come out of the wings in the 1880's, Beadle and Adams had a ready‐made reading audience of considerable proportions palpitating for any hero bearing the Beadle and Adams imprint.

Until the cowboy, the dime novel had exploited such famous frontier personalities as Kit Carson, Calamity Jane, and Deadwood Dick, the innocuous Richard Clark, in an ever wider separation between fact and fiction. Buffalo Bill was regularly turning out autobiographical experiences, most of them written by a soldier of fortune named Prentiss Ingraham, who in his way was as fabulous as Cody. Ingraham, who had fought with Juarez, in Austria, Crete, Egypt, Cuba, and with Buffalo Bill, wrote nearly a thousand novels himself, all in longhand, sometimes at virtually one sitting—one took him all of a day and a half.⁷ You can disparage the quality, but the quantity is truly prodigious. Even the more modest output of Edward L. Wheeler, the creator of the Deadwood Dick series, is startling by most modern comparisons. Wheeler, incidentally, is interesting as a type of cowboy writer. He looked like a theologian, greeted all strangers as “pard,” never traveled west of Illinois, spent most of his life in Pennsylvania, and was not incapable of placing Cheyenne east of the Black Hills of South Dakota or of other fantastic geographical errors. And he did all of this in a life that lasted a mere thirty years.⁸

To continue this divergence from fact, when the range rider with his fast draw and his Apache‐slaying proclivities became a standard hero, proved no feat at all. But the cowboy was doomed to a short life as a strictly dime‐novel hero, for writers of a somewhat higher caste, such as Wister, were only a decade or so away. By 1907, one critic was already certain that “the cowboy as a picturesque feature of the Western landscape has passed out and the dime novel will know him no more.”⁹ But in 1955, the pulp magazine and the pocket book carry on in the dime‐novel tradition, and today it is the dime novel that is gone, not the dime‐novel cowboy.

Two of the more recent looks at the cowboy and Beadle and Adams are the monumental bibliography, The House of Beadle and Adams, by Albert Johannsen, and the provocative article in Studies in English by Warren French, who suggests that only four of the firm's staff wrote a sufficient number of novels to provide a body of work in which the cowboy assumed discernible characteristics. Each of the writers tackled the cowboy from a different point of view, French says. Joseph Badger, Jr., one of the earliest, wrote with restraint, humor, and some realism. Captain Frederick Whittaker, an ex‐Union army officer, on the other hand, was decidedly hostile. He saw the cowboy as a reversion to primitive man—lawless and uncultured, which may have been realistic, except that he didn't paint the cowboy against a backdrop of a sometimes lawless and uncultured frontier. The third writer, Prentiss Ingraham, already met as a fictional chronicler of Buffalo Bill, draped his novels around the frame of Buck Taylor, a cowboy in Cody's Wild West show. French credits William G. Patten, the fourth of the Beadle and Adams cowboy quartet, as the novelist who lifted the cowboy from a subordinate to a central figure in the Western literary genre. Patten's men were men of action, risking their necks in turning stampedes and resisting theft in chasing rustlers. They were men of honor and integrity, nature's noblemen.¹⁰

Beadle and Adams shared the later preoccupation with Texas as a subject for exaggerated fiction. A quick rundown of the firm's titles beginning with the word “Texas” reveals a total of forty‐one, and the number which have “Texas” farther along in the title or which are wrapped around Texas topics must be tremendous. Whether it was the influence of the Texas cowboy is unknown, but the name Texas apparently carried a connotation of lawlessness, as indicated by such titles as Terrible Texans, Terror Tom of Texas, and Terrible Six from Texas. We must confess, though, that to us the most intriguing title in the list may have nothing to do with cowboys whatsoever. When we spotted Red‐Light Ralph's Resolve, we were sorely tempted to drop this study and go on a search for a copy.¹¹

Seriously again, the Beadle and Adams stable, working in the aggregate, hit the cowboy from at least four different angles, as French suggests. And as far as paternity is concerned, the nickel and dime publishers can claim that 1955's fictional cowboy child is theirs by reason of a rough resemblance.

Whatever may be due the early ranch stories or the novels of Beadle and Adams, Owen Wister is the writer who made the American cowboy palatable to Eastern readers and therefore worthy of recognition by the literary critics. Philadelphia‐born, Harvard‐educated (summa cum laude in music, Class of '82), Wister made a trip to the West in 1882, was impressed, and returned to Wyoming in 1891 for health and big game, both of which were available in quantity. In that same year, he sold his first story to Harper's.¹²

From the first, Wister seems to have been aware that in the cowboy he was dealing with a distinct class of frontiersman, and Lin McLean, his first cowboy creation, is the Virginian a little less surely etched. Look at this description:

He was a complete specimen of his lively and peculiar class. Cow‐punchers are not a race. … They gallop over the face of the empty earth for a little while, and those whom rheumatism or gunpowder does not overtake, are blotted out by the course of the empire, leaving no trace behind.¹³

The story is told simply. Lin McLean, a robust young bachelor, has left the range with his wages to visit his brother, a sophisticated Bostonian. Humorously, Wister relates McLean's sampling of a sermon, a mild flirtation, a poker game in which he is cleaned, a gold prospect, and, of course, the trip East, where he learns that he no longer fits into Boston society and returns happily to the West.

Six years later, the Harper's story reappeared as the first chapter of a full‐length, if somewhat episodic, novel titled Lin McLean. As before, the treatment is lighthearted and based on the sometimes uncouth and boisterous joking of the frontiersmen. McLean, incidentally, wears his six‐shooter strapped low on his right leg, which in a moment of stress might make him a most likely candidate to shoot himself. The novel has an adumbrative interest, for both the Virginian and Molly Wood, the Bear Creek school mistress, appear. As might be suspected, the Virginian is already nobler than Lin McLean. Already too, Wister is getting sentimental about the cowboy, as most Western writers invariably do. McLean, he says on the very first page, “lived in the old days, the happy days, when Wyoming was a Territory with a future instead of a state with a past.” Later McLean observes: “Someday we punchers won't be here. The living will be scattered, and the dead—well, they'll be all right. Have yu' studied the wire fence? It's spreading to catch us like nets do the salmon in the Columbia River.”¹⁴ To a nation that knows little of Arthur and nothing at all of Roland or Amadis, the legends of Lin McLean strike responsive ears which detect here a vanishing type.

In 1900, The Jimmyjohn Boss, another Wister collection, appeared. It is not convincing, though one sketch, “Hank's Woman,” a psychological study of Williomene, an Austrian maid who marries Hank after being dismissed as an incompetent domestic, possesses genuine merit. Williomene comes to despise Hank, and the story ends in murder and suicide.

Meanwhile, other writers of some quality, of whom two at least should be mentioned, were being attracted by Western possibilities. Indeed, one of them, Alfred Henry Lewis, was considered ahead of Wister as the century made its turn. Lewis, born in Cleveland in 1859, had been city attorney of Cleveland at twenty‐one. Later he had spent time in Arizona and New Mexico and had practiced law in Kansas City, after which he became a successful newspaper man.

Lewis' Wolfville, published in 1897, became an immediate commercial success. Written with serious intent and from personal observations in Tombstone and Charleston, Arizona, it was serious only in execution, for it is a humorous burlesque of frontier personalities. There is no malice, nor any attempt at satire in the Mark Twain sense—just broad, seasoned, gaudy fun and exaggeration at the hands of the cowboy, miner, sheriff, outlaw, and dance hall girls. Bret Harte's influence is clearly discernible, but unlike Harte, Lewis does not create diamonds in the rough. His Wolfville folks are whatever they are, and just sometimes are their motives good. The sentimental and picaresque are not compatible in Wolfville.

Wolfville is also a collection held together by the narrator, the Old Cattleman. It starts on a high note with a grand spoof of a gambler's funeral, which represents Wolfville's opportunity to lord it over rival Red Dog. Doc Peets is the master of ceremonies and he knows how to go about getting ready:

“It's the chance of our life,” says Doc Peets, “an' we plays it. Thar's nothin' too rich for our blood, an' these obsequies is goin' to be spread‐eagle, you bet! We'll show Red Dog an' similar villages they ain't sign‐camps compared with Wolfville.”¹⁵

Doc demands that the hole be dug at least a mile from camp, for to have a successful funeral, “you needs distance.” Further, he tells the preacher, “We wants nothin' but good words. Don't mind about the trooth.”¹⁶ When finally the gambler is buried, the folk of Wolfville honor him with a head board:

JaCK KinG
LIfE AiN'T
in
Holding a Good Hand
But
In Playing a Pore Hand
Well.(17)

Lewis knew how to handle the tall tale. Texas Thompson and Old Jim Bridger spent a Thanksgiving in the Great Salt Lake Valley. Snow fell on top of snow, six feet deep, bogging down twenty thousand buffaloes. Texas Thompson and Bridger cut the throat of each animal, left them till the spring thaw, and then rolled them into the Salt Lake, where the briny water promptly pickled them. Now Texas Thompson and Bridger returned from trapping each year by way of the Great Salt Lake, fished out however many buffaloes they wanted, and gorged themselves.¹⁸

Such stories brought an immediately enthusiastic audience, too enthusiastic perhaps for Lewis' modest talents. In 1902, he tried to enlarge his reputation with Wolfville Days and again with Wolfville Nights, six years later he brought out Wolfville Folks, and in 1913 he made a final appearance with Faro Nell. In between these major works, numerous stories appeared in popular magazines. They all provided a good living, but didn't avoid the problem of working a good idea to death with sheer repetition. Nowadays, unfairly really, Lewis is passed over casually, but at the turn of the century he was considered a front‐rank practitioner operating only a plane below Harte and Twain, but operating from such a wide plane that his advertising of Western frontier humor represented a contribution of continuing significance.

One of the best Western novels in the nineties appeared two years before Wolfville was published. Arthur Paterson's A Son of the Plains pictures the sheepmen‐cattlemen war and works out a story of rather high literary quality, despite such stock situations as the stagecoach robbery and the pitched battle between the cattleman and the sheepman. In his book, Paterson treats the range rider as a dominant hero type, and he does it with attention to authenticity.

At the turn of the century, another first‐novel appeared which acts as a transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century concept of cowboy fiction. Titled appropriately The Girl at the Halfway House, it represents the position or attitude halfway between the feeling toward a cowboy hero in the 1890's and the popular, if not completely artistic, realization of that hero in the decade and a half ahead. When it appeared, it attracted little attention, and it has scarcely been mentioned since, but it is unquestionably the best of the Western novels turned out by its later famous author, Emerson Hough.

Hough knew his West, veer though he might from the historical straight and narrow along his fictional path. Born in Newton, Iowa, of a pioneer Iowa family, he taught school before winding up with a law degree from the University of Iowa and locating in a tiny frontier town between the Pecos and Rio Grande in New Mexico. It was a wild, rough place, “half cow‐town and half mining camp,” and the young attorney had the discernment to realize that he was witnessing a passing historical pageant which in his mind took the form of plots and stories.¹⁹ A contributor of short stories to magazines while still in college, he now began to record in earnest. By 1897, he had brought out his nonfictional The Story of the Cowboy, which nearly sixty years later still endures as a popular standard. However, his most celebrated works, North of 36 and The Covered Wagon, belong to the 1920's, when Hough had reached his mid‐sixties.

The Girl at the Halfway House tells the story of the wasteful, riotous days of the cattle drives, and of the suffering, starving, killing, and raw life associated with a virile and daring frontier. Underlying the story runs the theme of man's enthusiastic expression of his atavistic nature, which he buries under a veneer sometimes thin, sometimes comfortably thick.

The novel is divided into four major parts. It begins with a closing battle in the Civil War in which Captain Edward Franklin, a Union officer of the engineers, watches a Southern girl searching the battlefield for her dead lover. Later they meet in Ellisville, a Kansas depot teeming with Texas longhorns, and—and this is desiccating a tender romance with brevity—they fall in love. Ellisville could be Abilene, Dodge City, or any railroad town in between.

The second part of the novel disposes of the buffalo. Franklin watched the hide hunters, going out, coming in, “unloading their cargoes of bleached bones at the side of the railroad track,” the heap of bones growing “vast, white, ghastly, formidable, higher than a house, more than a bowshot long.”²⁰

In its third part, The Girl at the Halfway House gets around to the story of interest to us—the cattlemen's frontier. Here Hough, who is not above writing dated prose, reaches vivid heights that deserve to be quoted for their continuing interest. He saw the trail herds as follows:

There came on the great herds of gaunt, broad‐horned cattle, footsore and slow and weary with their march of more than a thousand miles. These vast herds deployed in turn about the town of Ellisville, the Mecca for which they had made this unprecedented pilgrimage. They trampled down every incipient field, and spread abroad over all the grazing lands. … Herd after herd passed still farther north, past Ellisville, going on wearily another thousand miles, to found the Ellisvilles of the upper range.²¹

The eddying of a booming frontier town like Ellisville is particularly well handled. Here is one description:

The town became a loadstone for the restless population ever crowding out upon the uttermost frontier. The men from the farther East dropped their waistcoats and their narrow hats at Ellisville. All the world went under wide felt and bore a jingling spur. Every man was armed. The pitch of life was high. It was worth death to live a year in such a land.²²

Hough was aware of the importance that such a frontier town would eventually have on American literature:

Over all the world, unaided by a sensational press, and as yet without even that non‐resident literature which was later to discover the Ellisvilles after the Ellisvilles were gone, there spread the fame of Ellisville the Red, the lustful, the unspeakable. Here was a riot of animal intensity of life, a mutiny of physical man, the last outbreak of innate savagery of primitive man against the day of shackles and subjugation. The men of that rude day lived vehemently. They died, they escaped. The earth is trampled over their bold hearts, and they have gone back into the earth, the air, the sky, and the wild flowers.²³

Hough gives a description of the cowboy that could have come from any 1955 movie script. It is colorful, it is exaggerated, and it is what the public wants to hear: “Wild men from the range,” he wrote, “rode their horses up the steps and into the bar‐room, demanding to be served as they sat in their saddle, as gentlemen should.” The town marshal was due his share of attention—“a heavily built man, sandy‐haired, red‐moustached, and solid,” with bow legs and thick fingers that belied their deftness, a man “careful in his shooting, because he is careless of being shot,” a man who contended “(while he was alive) that a man with one gun was as good as a man with two.”²⁴ Naturally the marshal winds up in a gun duel with the town's badman and gun artist.

If Hough is guilty of coloring his historical materials, it must also be admitted that his spirit is more genuine than in the ordinary range novel. Thus he describes the passing day of the cattleman:

Far as the eye could reach, the long and dusty roadway of the cows lay silent, with its dust unstirred. Far, very far off there was approaching a little band of strange, small, bleating, wooly creatures, to whose driver, Mother Daly refused bed and board. The cattle chutes were silent, the corral empty. … Up and down the trail, east and west of the trail, all was quiet, bare and desolate. … The cowman, the railroad man, and the gambling man had gone, leaving behind them the wide and well‐perforated Cottage, the graveyard with its double street. …²⁵

The concluding portion of the novel is told through the eyes of the farmer who enters the area with his family and his plow, supplanting the old frontier order. There are faults in The Girl at the Halfway House, but most of them are not our concern here. What does concern us is that in Halfway House Hough has written a turn‐of‐the‐century novel that tries to take its West seriously and that foreshadows the cowboy‐Western fiction of the years ahead. Only two years ahead lay Wister's The Virginian, the generally acknowledged starting point for the cowboy as he has developed in American literature. The Girl at the Halfway House makes a proper steppingstone for The Virginian.

And so the twentieth century arrived, with the fictional cowboy having behind him an apprenticeship of a quarter of a century. Already his period of range and trail were being decked out in the colors of the myth and legend makers. And they could lead the reading public, who would be mostly in the East, in almost any direction they chose, for the Eastern readers had no actual knowledge of what the West was like, or of what it should be like; but they had imagination, and the writers were learning how to exploit that imagination.

But even at the turn of the century, there were few, if any, signs that the American cowboy would one day command the reading interest of a large segment of the American reading public. In 1900, no one could know that a dominant American folk hero would come forth in less than two year's time, a folk hero who would still be around nearly six decades later. The seeds had been planted—actually, they had only been scattered; but they were taking root, and when men like Wister and Hough began to fertilize and nurture those seeds in the years ahead, a tremendous harvest of cowboy fiction was going to be ready.

Notes

1. Tales of the Southern Border, 242.

2. John Brent, 28.

3. F. M. Osbourne, “Sargent's Rodeo,” Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XXV (January, 1880), 9 ff. A year later in Lippincott's February issue appeared “‘The Kid’: A Chapter in Wyoming,” in which several references are made to the “Cow‐boy” and the “cow‐puncher.”

4. “A Touch of the Sun,” Century Magazine, Vol. LIX, No. 3 (January, 1900), is a good example of Miss Foote at her serious Western best. Owen Wister, Members of the Family, 15.

5. Arthur Morecamp, Live Boys in the Black Hills, 293.

6. Scribner's Monthly, Vol. XIX, No. 5 (March, 1880), 771.

7. Johannsen, House of Beadle and Adams, II, 155‐60.

8. Ibid., II, 293‐98.

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

10. Warren French, “The Cowboy in the Dime Novel,” Studies in English, Vol. XXX (1951), 219 ff.

11. Johannsen, House of Beadle and Adams, II, 394, 405.

12. Unless otherwise cited, biographical information in this chapter and in the next is from Stanley J. Kuntz and Howard Haycraft (eds.), Twentieth Century Authors.

13. Wister, “How Lin McLean Went East,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. LXXXVI, No. DXI, (December, 1892), 135.

14. Wister, Lin McLean, 1, 160.

15. Alfred Henry Lewis, Wolfville, 2.

16. Ibid., 3.

17. Ibid., 8.

18. Ibid., 259‐60.

19. Pauline Graham, “Novelist of the Unsung,” The Palimpsest, Vol. XI, No. 2 (February, 1930), 69.

20. Hough, The Girl at the Halfway House, 70.

21. Ibid., 168.

22. Ibid., 168‐69.

23. Ibid., 170.

24. Ibid., 234‐36.

25. Ibid., 288‐89.

Works Cited

Secondary Materials

Johannsen, Albert. The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels. 2 vols. Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1950.

Kuntz, Stanley J., and Howard Haycroft (eds.). Twentieth Century Authors. New York, The H. W. Wilson Company, 1942.

Fiction‐Books

[Hough, Emerson.] The Girl at the Halfway House. New York, D. Appleton and Company, 1900.

[Lewis, Alfred Henry.] Wolfville. New York, F. A. Stokes Company, 1923.

[Morecamp, Arthur. (Pseudonym for Thomas Pilgrim).] Live Boys in the Black Hills. Boston, Lee and Shepard, 1880.

Webber, Charles W. Tales of the Southern Border. Philadelphia, Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1853.

Winthrop, Theodore. John Brent. Boston, Ticknor and Fields, 1862.

Wister, Owen. Lin McLean. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1898.

———. A Member of the Family. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1911.