SOURCE: "Exotics, Fantasies, and Cowboys," in The Popular American Novel: 1865-1920, Twayne Publishers, 1980, pp. 78-95.

While the mainstream of American fiction bubbled merrily along from the psychological romance of Hawthorne and Melville to the psychological realism of Howells and James, and the underground current splashed from the sentimentalists to the gossip of social satire and the novel of manners, another tradition persisted among a small group of writers but an enormous audience of readers. American literary critics and historians have never been at ease among the writers of fantasy and exotic romance, perhaps because such literature is so far from the main-stream, perhaps because its enormous popularity makes it suspect. The genre persisted into a contemporary respectability not unrelated to the fact that its most important modern practitioners are academics of flawless repute. In the period 1865-1920 it remained mostly underground, in the dime novels of the House of Beadle and its followers, and periodicals typically hidden in the corn-crib. It surfaced into respectability only occasionally during the period, notably in the works of Frank R. Stockton (1834-1902), in a spate of Utopian novels in the 1890s, and in the perfection of the myth of the cowboy and the wild west. Writers in the genre are consistently underestimated by most critics, partly because their defenders so consistently overestimate them.

The quality most outstanding in the writings of Frank R. Stockton is a kind of boyishness, an untrammeled enthusiasm possible only for someone who, in maturity, never lost the easy expectations of youth. It is no surprise, then, to read in a lightly fictionalized biographical story which he never managed to place with a publisher that he had from the first an easy-going attitude toward life and literature that was never to leave him. He wrote in "What Can I Do for an Old Gentleman," while still in his teens, that he

wished to enjoy life as he worked, not after his work was done, and he was by no means a fool—so he tried Literature. Everyone knows there are two ways by which a man can make money by the joint labor of his brain and pen. One, is to learn the business as you would a trade, and become a journalist, employed by those who will harness your Pegasus, but will at the same time provide him with oats—the other is to write what one pleases, as one pleases, and endeavour to find someone who will also be pleased with it—and pay for it.

It is both Stockton's strength and his weakness that he never had to revise those attitudes. Although he seems to have drifted into writing by accompanying his engravings with texts, the truth is that he wrote prolifically from his adolescence, and managed to publish almost everything he wrote later, after he became popular. Thus his mature production seems uneven because his earliest stories were published simultaneously with some of his latest and best work.

There can be no doubt, however, about the success of the longer adult fiction of his mature years. Beginning with the loosely novelistic frame of the stories collected in Rudder Grange (1879) and its sequels, The Rudder Grangers Abroad (1891) and Pomona's Travels (1894)—all published serially much earlier than their copyright dates—Stockton gave free rein to an imagination that always threatened to run off with him, but never failed to delight a constantly growing readership. Imagination is the key word to describe his writing. Either outrageous and farcical settings or actions are accepted with complete aplomb, or his characters turn the humdrum into the exotic by their extraordinary behavior or perceptions. The Casting Away of Mrs. Leeks and Mrs. Aleshine (1886), probably his best novel of this type, illustrates the technique perfectly. In the face of ship-wreck and the threat of drowning, the two mature ladies draw from their treasury of middle-class skills what is necessary to survive, using brooms as paddles, breaking out sausages and cheese in the middle of the ocean—preserved, one assumes, for just such an occasion—and paying their board religiously to the absentee landlords on their desert isle—after deducting a proper amount for their housekeeping. At the other end of the scale, when they return to Mrs. Aleshine's very ordinary Pennsylvania farm with three entranced sailors in tow, the sailors determine, as a gesture of appreciation, to paint the farm in the stripes and colors of shipping companies all over the world, "until an observer might have supposed that a commercial navy had been sunk beneath Mrs. Aleshine's house grounds, leaving nothing but its smoke-stacks visible." The art of understatement, dead-pan comedy in prose, found its highest development in Stockton's works.

In spite of his febrile imagination, Stockton was not immune to the dicta of literary fashions, but as one might expect, his efforts toward literary realism are somewhat halting and tentative. His best work in that vein is The Hundredth Man (1887). Verisimilitude in that novel is created by the scenes describing the events in a New York restaurant, done very much in the style of Daniel Defoe in places (for whom, along with Charles Dickens, Stockton always professed admiration). But truth to detail about the preparation and serving of food at Vatoldi's is counterpointed by some of the wildest and most comic flights of his imagination in the story of the strike of the restaurant's waiters, who want to wear dress coats instead of aprons and jackets. It is an industrial strike as seen by Hollywood casting offices. Picketers carry signs with biblical overtones like "Eat not at the house of the oppressor!" A renegade scab is placarded, while dining:

YESTERDAY THE BOYCOTTERS GIVE ME
TWO DOLLARS
TO PLAY SHAM, AND TO-DAY I AM PAID
THREE DOLLARS
TO EAT, DRINK, AND BE MERRY.

Interwoven with the scenes of the restaurant is the main plot of the novel, from which it gets its title. Horace Stratford is a wealthy modern Diogenes looking for the "hundredth man," whose humane qualities distinguish him from the other ninety-nine. His fantasy leads him to interfere with an engagement, which in turn entangles him with the novel's heroine, Gay Armati. His redemptive manipulation of her toward a more suitable mate, Arthur Thorne, earns him the role of the "hundredth man" in his own and the reader's mind. It is all very gently comic, full of social savoir faire, and ripe with the kind of imaginative detail one expects from Stockton. The concerns of the late nineteenth century are all present—industrial strife, the unease of the wealthy in the face of their social obligations, the strain of the newly rich when they have no tradition to channel their ideas of noblesse oblige. But the concerns are transmuted in the crucible of Stockton's imagination to the farcical strike, Stratford's redemptive quest, and the final determination of J. Weatherby Stull, the secret owner of Vatoldi's, to create a "law hospital" with the earnings he has gained from his restaurant's marvelous oyster stew.

Stull's "law hospital" is typical of Stockton's prescience, more often remarked by critics in his technologically futuristic novels, like The Great War Syndicate (1889) and The Great Stone of Sardis (1898). The law hospital is an act of extrapolation of present "technology" into the future no less than the others. Philanthropists had long been founding hospitals and endowing universities; Stull, with something of his creator's imagination, joins the two matrices of philanthropy as usually practiced toward the ill with his recognition of the legal plight of the poor, to invent a concept only now gaining acceptance in American society, legal "clinics" available to those who suffer most from the necessary imbalance of a capitalist economy. It is the mark of Stockton's rich imaginary powers that he virtually throws away this truly remarkable insight in The Hundredth Man. His invention of "negative gravity" backpacks, from which the Buck Rogers creation and the modern real thing descend, dates from 1884, but is more striking than the "law hospitals" only because of our intense preoccupation with the more flamboyant qualities of technological advance in comparison with more meaningful progress in social matters.

The Great War Syndicate, like "negative gravity," captures our imagination because of the technological fascination of inventions like the "Repeller," an ironclad ship with a long-range cannon which fires with deadly accuracy because of a computer-like aiming device. What ought to impress us about the novel is the creation of a military-industrial complex in the "War Syndicate" which is more powerful than the governments of the states in which it thrives, and which forces a pax Americana upon an accepting world. The Great Stone of Sardis is filled with technological miracles—a submarine under the North Pole icecap connected to New York by an umbilical telegraph cable, a ray for seeing through successive strata of the earth's surface—but its sociological savvy is no less striking: the hero, having discovered an enormous diamond at the North Pole, buries it to save the world from the economic disruption it would create. Comparison with F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Diamond as big as the Ritz" is inevitable; where Fitzgerald's vision is apocalyptic, Stockton's is hopeful. The good sense of Mrs. Leeks and Mrs. Aleshine persists into what for Stockton was undoubtedly a future filled with as many possibilities as dangers. It is hard not to love such a writer, however one feels about the tough-mindedness of his vision.

Stockton has been called the "principal humorist of the genteel tradition" and accused of "letting his lively fancy go its happy way in many books, some of them dictated while he lay at ease in a hammock .. . in the midst of all the crowding issues of [the eighties]." Those issues are not absent from his writing, as we have seen, but they are seen in a larger, happier context as a result of that "lively fancy." Undoubtedly Stockton's reputation has suffered simply because of the time in which he happened to be writing. Now that the pendulum is swinging back from the excesses of dogmatic realism, now that writers like Jorge Luis Borges, John Barth, and Vladimir Nabokov are the fixed points of light of our firmament (not to mention J. R. R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and T.H. White), perhaps it is time for a Stockton revival. Surely the author of "The Lady or the Tiger?" cannot be considered psychologically naive, however fantastic his creation. The same is true for the sociology of The Great War Syndicate and the economics of The Great Stone of Sardis. Undoubtedly he wrote for an audience that appreciated him for the wrong, escapist, reasons, and he fell into a decline when those reasons had become suspect; now that the assumptions of both the "genteel tradition" and the "age of realism" are no longer current, Stockton deserves a rereading and reappreciation.

If Stockton's happy situation allowed him to invoke and smooth over a vision of the future into purest fantasy, John Ames Mitchell's brought him closer to those who felt and feel that the American dream is nightmare. As Stockton began his career by using his talents as an engraver, Mitchell began as an artist, at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard and at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Mitchell chose to "harness his Pegasus" as a journalist, however, and that rein on his fancy led him into darker valleys than any Stockton imagined. Mitchell was the founder and first publisher of Life, a satiric weekly which during Mitchell's tenure was more like the Harvard Lampoon than the slick weekly it became after it was bought in 1936 by Time, Incorporated. As a satiric publication, it was a rather scattershot affair, concerning itself as much with unburning issues like women's dress fads as with the great social problems of the Age of Transition. But Mitchell did not turn his back on the larger issues of the Gilded Age; his attacks on the giants of capital brought his magazine repeated libel suits and even the threat of physical violence toward himself. His social conscience during these years was raised to a far higher level than Stockton ever reached.

At about the age of forty-five, ripened by many years of life in New York and proximity to the centers of political and economic power, Mitchell turned more and more to fiction. His early efforts were incredibly crude, but showed from the first what direction he would take. The Last American (1889) is a novelette which a modern high-school sophomore might be proud to have written, but hardly anyone of greater sophistication. It is written as a fragment from the journal of Khan-Li, a prince of "dimph-yoo-chur" and admiral in the Persian navy. Khan-Li is in charge of an expedition in the year 2951 which rediscovers America. His helmsman is named "Grip-til-lah" and among his companions are "Nofuhl," "Ad-el-pate," and "Bhoz-ja-khaz." Most of the humor, alas, comes from these funny names, which is perhaps the kindest thing one can say about the work. The expedition arrives in a deserted, ruined New York, and, after some rather pointless tomfoolery based on linguistic interpretation of broken inscriptions, gets down to some satire on manners, mores, and politics. American women are accused of going about too much in the world, blushing too little, and managing their own lives. Irish politicians come in for their share with the discovery of a half dollar minted in 1937, during the reign of Dennis Murphy, the last of the Hibernian dictators. Yellow journalism is scathed for providing scandal in place of responsible reporting, and the American reading public for tolerating the situation. It is all farfetched and almost embarrassing in its naiveté.

Then the ship, the Zlohtuhb, sets sail for Washington, where the last American is encountered. A father and his daughter create an "international incident" by serving their guests raw whiskey and then misinterpreting a courteous kiss by one of the Persians. In the ensuing struggle, the American fights gamely, but is overwhelmed. If satire is intended, it is hard to say what it is directed upon, beyond the anachronistic assumption that these Persians persist after an ultimate oil crisis.

Such senescent juvenilia are interesting only as a preparation for Mitchell's more important works, of which the best are Dr. Thorne's Idea (1897), a study of deviant behavior based ultimately, like Frank Norris's McTeague, on Lombrosso's ideas about heredity, and The Silent War (1906). The apocalyptic vision of The Silent War makes the novel kin to the savage utopias of writers like Ignatius Donnelly, while Mitchell's obvious sympathy for "good" capitalists, like his hero, Billy Chapman, shows that he is not far from the Christian socialism of Howells and H. G. Wells. The central idea behind the silent war is simply a bad guess about the future of industrial relations in America. Instead of a rapprochement between big business and big labor, a single organization of workingmen called the People's League is approaching the numbers necessary to elect its own president and congress, and threatening to create an income tax, "to tax the millionaire for the benefit of the working man, instead of taxing the working man for the benefit of the millionaire," as the system of tariffs did when the novel was written. Such reform is only what Billy Chapman himself had argued for among his plutocratic colleagues. But the League has fallen into the hands of a sinister Committee of Seven who, not content with their approaching victory at the polls, are attempting to hurry up the process by a particularly cold-blooded scheme of extortion. They have a list of millionaires whom they approach for a "donation" of $200,000 for the League. Those who refuse are murdered. After a few murders, the word gets around, and the treasury is filled.

The murders themselves are interesting, rather like the reputed Mau-Mau terrorists in Kenya. Each millionaire is "set up" by his own servants, but slain by someone else's. Billy Chapman, as a scrupulous millionaire, is, of course, in a terrible bind; sympathetic as he is to the ends of the People's League, he can not tolerate their methods, and so refuses to pay. He is preserved by the most unlikely of coincidences, but one can hardly accuse Mitchell of manufacturing a happy ending. There is every indication that in spite of Billy's specific fate, the People's League will prevail and the Committee of Seven, with its extraordinary fund-raising capacities, will become the power behind the American government. One thinks of the news stories of the junctures among the Mafia, the CIA, and the Teamster's Union and shudders. Certainly no writer presents such a chilling picture of the relations between crime, business, and labor until Ira Wolfert's Tucker's People in 1940.

Mitchell's radical vision is the more striking for his obvious sympathy for capitalism. Although he does caricature the greedy industrialist, banker, and Solid Citizen as foils, most of the wealthy characters in the novel (all who are given names) are quite sympathetic. They argue with the caricatures about the morality of their positions and espouse socialistic (or at least paternalistic) views. Above all, they themselves illustrate, and they urge upon the others, an avoidance of conspicuous consumption. As one of them says,

I would suggest… that being recognized as gamblers, you make yourself less conspicuous. Try to travel without private cars. Avoid getting the best of everything by extravagant fees. Give people of moderate means a chance to get what they pay for.

On the other hand, Mitchell does not make the Committee of Seven terrifying. They are described as definitely "not anarchists in appearance." Rather, they have the air of "prosperous workingmen—or skilled mechanics," which, of course, makes their cold-blooded extortion and murder scheme the more horrendous. And their arguments, as Mitchell presents them, are unanswerable, even by his sympathetic spokesman for capital, Billy Chapman.

"The working people of this country, Mr. Chapman, are on the ragged edge of revolt. You rich men, here in the East, have no conception of the bitterness—the deep resentment—at the conditions that result in this unequal distribution of wealth. Those who work the hardest get the least."

"If you can believe that American workmen are worse off than those of other countries, you can believe anything."

"That is not the question. In a country like this, there is plenty for all; plenty of food, clothing, space and fuel, more than enough for everybody. Why should a few have not only the best of it all, but a thousand times more than they can use, while all the others, those who work the hardest, live in attics and cellars, eat the meanest food and never enough? And all in a land of plenty. You will admit there is something radically wrong when a few are amassing fabulous fortunes and many, however industrious, can barely live."

Moreover, Mitchell again and again makes the point that extortion and murder as political weapons are merely an extension of business principles. A spokesman for the Committee of Seven makes the exact point to Billy: "We are merely meeting you capitalists on your own ground and with your own weapons. You hold us up with your trusts, your tariffs, your irresponsible and somewhat peculiar management of the people's savings. Is it not better that a dozen or more millionaires should quietly disappear, especially if they prefer death to parting with a fraction of their fortunes, than that mobs should rule?" [italics added] The managerial quality of the last clause carries real terror in it. Both sides decry anarchy; each sees the means as justifying the end. Apocalypse is rarely so orderly and reasoned. It is a "silent war" indeed, and the more frightening for that.

Mitchell's later novels decline in their quality and their ferocity, but Drowsy (1917) deserves some discussion as a fantastic romance in the science-fiction vein à la Frank R. Stockton. Cyrus Alton gets the nickname "Drowsy" from his tendency toward fantasizing, but he hitches that sin to the wagon of a sound technological education at Harvard and M.I.T. and develops a new "electro kinetic" force which he uses to power a spaceship. A trip to the moon yields the discovery of a long-dead civilization and, more practically, a 3000-carat diamond, which he just happens to pick up among the rubble on the moon. With his newly acquired wealth and a promise not to flood the market with more stones, he continues to dabble in science, including thought-telegraphy and the first trip to Mars. His thought-telegraph works with his beloved, and his spaceship fails, the two phenomena joining to provide a happy ending with no hint of future disruption of the diamond market or the orderly growth of technology. The novel is interesting primarily as a corrective to the reader who might have misunderstood the lesson of The Silent War: Mitchell's vision of the ideal future is a benign capitalism based upon the combination, typically American, of inventiveness and the laws of the marketplace as described by Adam Smith.

The two novels by Mitchell define rather neatly the two kinds of futuristic romance spawned at the end of the nineteenth century by the success of Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888). Like Drowsy, Albert Chavannes' The Future Commonwealth (1892) and Solomon Schindler's Young West (1894) are more concerned with technological marvels than with sociological problems; like The Silent War, Henry Olerich's A City less and Country less World (1893) and Costello N. Holford's Aristopia (1895) center on the organizational and sociological changes created by new societies evolving out of the inequities of the rampant capitalism of the late nineteenth century.

Of the dozens of romances of technology produced before 1920, the best were produced by a hackwriter writing anonymously for a dime novel series called The Frank Reade Library. Luis P. Senarens (1865-1939) wrote under the pseudonym "Noname" an incredible series of adventure novels for boys which anticipated the science-fiction boom of the twentieth century. He orbited one of the first space satellites in Lost in a Comet's Tale (1895), invented the helicopter in Frank Reade, Jr., and His Airship (1884), and designed the first robot in Frank Reade and His Steam Man (1876). His inventiveness was doubtless spurred by the formidable competition of the writers of other juveniles like the Tom Edison, Jr. series published by Street and Smith and equivalents in the Beadle series. Works for more mature readers were not lacking in predictions of airplanes, automobiles, and space travel. The journey to Mars had become almost a commonplace by the time Drowsy blasted off, while labor-saving devices in works like Chauncey Thomas's The Crystal Button (1891) were reducing the workday to four hours.

Technological advances could create dystopias like Donnelly's Caesar's Column (1890) and Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and a few lesser works, but more frequently were combined with social advances to produce true utopias. C. N. Holford's Aristopia (1895) set limits on ownership of private property which effectively did away with greed. Albert Chavannes' Brighter Climes (1895) combined the best of socialism in production and individualism in distribution for his "Socioland" in Africa. Henry Olerich's A Cityless and Countryless World (1893) described a Fourieristic world of ideal communities of one thousand members each. And so, to use a phrase made current by a much later Utopian, it goes. The literary value of these works is virtually nil, and their historic and sociological value is generally restricted to those who are interested in the lunatic fringe of social change. No student of nineteenth-century history and culture can afford not to read the best writers in the genre—Bellamy, Howells's A Traveler from Altruria, Twain's Connecticut Yankee. But research beyond the next level, Stockton and Mitchell, is better left to the specialist and the enthusiast for utopias, science fiction, and juveniles.

Writers of the period did not have to go as far as Mars to find the exotic, of course. The West, with its blend of the Garden and the Desert, its possibilities for untold wealth in gold or sudden and cruel death at the hands of savage Indians, provided an exotica Americana as suitable to romance and fantasy as the most esoteric utopia. The mythos of the Western novel had already been set with Cooper's Leatherstocking tales; all that the writers of the period 1865-1920 added were refinements to the genre. Nevertheless, these refinements define the transition from the romantic age to the modern age for the novel of western adventure no less well than the equivalent works of New England, the South, or the Utopians.

Cooper's novels are all based upon a sophisticated vision of the contrast between nature and culture. That sophistication is continued in the writings of Thomas Allibone Janvier, particularly in his remarkably successful Western novel, The Aztec Treasure House (1890). Janvier's life and works divide into three neat segments: Western travels, bohemian life in New York's Greenwich Village, and travels and studies in Provence. For the purposes of this chapter, only his Western travels are directly significant, but the evidence of his good-humored appreciation of bohemianism in his first book, Color Studies (1885), and his later association with Mistral and the Societé de la Félibrige in Provence suggest the breadth of his range and his eye for the telling detail.

The immediate inspiration for The Aztec Treasure House was undoubtedly H. Rider Haggard, especially King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She (1887). In the characters gathered together to make up the expedition—an anthropologist, an heroic priest, a competent metallurgist, an ex-railway shipping clerk from Massachusetts, an Indian boy and his burro, El Sabio, "the wise one"—in the succession of dangers and mysteries, from savage Indians to mysteriously sunken cities, the style is pure Rider Haggard. But Janvier did more than merely transplant African adventure to the Southwest. His narrator, Professor Thomas Palgrave, Ph.D. (Leipsic), is a wonderful creation, doubtless drawn to some extent from Janvier himself. In the midst of whatever excitement occupies the foreground of the book, the Professor is as often as not bemused by some linguistic or anthropological aside. Indians are about to try to take his life; he muses that the expression is "an imperfectly expressed… concept for life can be taken only in the limited sense of depriving another of it; it cannot be taken in the full sense of deprivation and acquisition combined". In the midst of a bloody retreat, he apologizes for the brevity of his account:

I cannot tell very clearly how our retreat to the Citadel was managed, nor even of my own part in it; for fighting is but rough, wild work, which defies all attempts at scientific accuracy in describing it—and for the reason, I fancy, that it engenders a wholly unscientific frame of mind. Reduced to its lowest terms, fighting is mere barbarity; a most illogical method of settling some disputed question by brute force instead of by the refined reasoning processes of the intelligent human mind; and by the anger that it inevitably begets, the habit of accurate description, is hopelessly confused. Therefore I can say only that foot by foot we yielded the ground to the enemy that pressed upon us.

And, whenever he reaches the limit of fantastic description the reader is likely to swallow, he refers him to his soon-to-be-published magnum opus, Pre-Columbian Conditions on the Continent of North America.

The other characters on the expedition are hardly less well realized. The heroic priest, Fray Antonio, has a streak of pedantry that delights the narrator; moreover, his heroism itself is suspect with its almost pathological search for martyrdom. The incredibly competent engineer, Rayburn, and the comic low character, Young, are stock creations, but they succeed in surprising the reader from time to time, Young on the social structure of the Aztec society they encounter, Rayburn with some shrewd and arch comments on human nature.

The novel includes surprisingly little "local color" of the Southwest which is at all specific. The adventures with the latter-day Aztecs are located in a never-never land which is only generally remarkable as sub-tropical. There is a good deal of social comment of a vague Utopian sort in the description of the Aztec society. It seems the ancient Aztecs under the wise king Chaltzantzin practiced a kind of eugenic breeding system: all persons who, on coming to maturity, were judged weaklings or cripples, were to be killed. As soon as the law was in effect the weak-kneed liberals began tinkering with it, changing it after Chaltzantzin's reign to create a class called "Tlahuicos," who were to be permanent slaves and the pool from which the human sacrifices were drawn. One would think the Tlahuicos as a breeding pool would create an inferior society, but that was not the case. Developing over the centuries as a separate caste, yet reinfused with each generation of cripples and weaklings, the Tlahuicos had become a proletariat bubbling with revolutionary fervor, and with a natural connection to a "liberal" wing of the ruling class—the relatives of each generation's weaklings and cripples. The revolt turns out to be abortive, however, since the army remains loyal to the despotic priest-captain. All of this is interesting in itself, but it is made more so by the comments of Young and Rayburn, likening this rather exotic society to standard American politics. The priest-captain "goes in for Boss management and machine politics .. . as straight as if he was a New York alderman or the chairman of a state campaign committee in Ohio.… Where our chance comes in is in having the respectable element, the solid men who pay taxes and have an interest in decent government.… They may not pay taxes here, but that's the kind I mean," says Rayburn. It is likely that Janvier intends some sort of political comment with the Tlahuicos, perhaps alluding to the situation of the blacks in America, perhaps directing some satire toward liberal reformers. If that is the case, he has not succeeded in making any point very well, since everyone seems to lose in the end except the intrepid foursome.

It is too easy to poke fun at this novel, and it is unfair and unwise to do so. For all its faults, it succeeds admirably as a romance of adventure and develops some thoughtprovoking ideas about ancient Indian culture and the clash of that culture with the modern ethos. The blend of archaeology, sociology, and derring-do that Janvier managed with this novel was not to be seen again in the genre until Willa Cather's Death Comes to the Archbishop, where, to be sure, it was done much better. The Aztec Treasure House is valuable as a pioneering work, and remains well worth reading.

At the opposite extreme from Janvier's adventure novel is Mary Hallock Foote's sensitive study of Western life in the mining camps, The Led Horse Claim (1883). Where Janvier's writing is all mystery, suspense, and violent action, Mary Hallock Foote retells the Romeo and Juliet story in a setting remarkably apt for it—rival mines on opposite banks of Led Horse Gulch, Colorado. The plot itself is fatuous, in large part through no fault of Mrs. Foote. Her original story had the lovers separating at the end, but a happy ending was forced on her by her editor. The setting is authentic and extremely well realized. Mrs. Foote had been living in Leadville, Colorado, where her husband was a mine manager, for years. And if as a woman she could perhaps not observe, let alone write about, those segments of crude Western society which provided the staple for Joaquin Miller or Bret Harte, her astute observation and recording of the problems of genteel living in such raw surroundings is the more interesting.

The two novels together represent the parameters of Western fiction. Janvier's writing involves myth, action, esoterica; Mrs. Foote's precise observation, manners, the exoteric made interesting by its curious setting. The two possibilities of technique were to be continued in Western novels through the period to 1920, with only the occasional writer able to combine them effectively, as Owen Wister did in The Virginian (1902), and Eugene Manlove Rhodes did in a series of novels. Favoring either a mythic quest or local color, the "cowboy novel" developed into a distinct genre between these two antithetical directions. And, while the foremost practitioners of the genre have been well studied in this series, several noteworthy writers somewhat below the level of Wister and Rhodes demand our attention.

In spite of precursors like Cooper's The Prairie (1827) and Washington Irving's Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837), the "cowboy novel" as developed in the twentieth century was essentially fixed as a genre in the 1890s and 1900s. Its earliest manifestations are not novels, but histories of the brief epoch during which the cowboy of myth and movie came closest to existing: the years 1865-1880, when all the "events" of the cowboy novel were briefly present: the Great Cattle Drive, the extermination of the buffalo and the Indian, the great popular expansion westward and the subsequent closing of the range. The cowboy figures in all aspects of this period. Although he is most prominent in the cattle drive and the closing of the range, he lends his type to the hunting of the buffalo and the genocide of the Indian.

It is almost impossible to discover the inventor of a cliché like the cowboy; there are too many parts to the production-line model added by too many different hands to allow the historian to determine specific origins. Therefore it is probable that Emerson Hough (1857-1923) added little to the archetype of the cowboy, even though his The Story of the Cowboy (1897) is the first and among the best of the early descriptions of the cowboy type, and he certainly did not allow mere facts to interfere with his mythic creation. The Story of the Cowboy is hackwork from beginning to end, totally dependent upon secondary sources and extremely uncritical in its handling of those sources. Hough's purpose is clear from the very first words of his introduction—to raise a monument to the type of the cowboy which would persist into an age when he was no longer present:

The story of the West is a story of the time of heroes. Of all those who appear large upon the fading page of that day, none may claim greater stature than the chief figure of the cattle range. Cowboy, cattle man, cow-puncher, it matters not what name others have given him, he has remained—himself. From the half-tropic to the half-arctic country he has ridden, his type, his costume, his characteristics practically unchanged, one of the most dominant and self-sufficient figures in the history of the land. He never dreamed he was a hero, therefore perhaps he was one. He would scoff at monuments or record, therefore perhaps he deserves them.

It is precisely such a figure that Hough presents to the reader—and proceeds to alabasterize permanently: "the virile figure of a mounted man. He stood straight in the stirrups of his heavy saddle, but lightly and well poised.… a loose belt swung a revolver low down upon his hip. A wide hat blew up and back a bit with the air of his travelling, and a deep kerchief fluttered at his neck". Such writing hardly even pretends to be anything more than fiction, and throughout The Story of the Cowboy Hough's eye is on the epic, the heroic, the archetypal. His consideration of "Society in the Cow Country" is a brief for a Warner Brothers set, introducing each type with statements like, "there was always a sheriff in a cow town, and he was always the same sort of man—quiet, courageous, just, and much respected by his fellow-men," repeating the same kind of guff about the newspaper editor, the lawyer, the saloon-keeper, the gambler, and all the other clichés of the Western. Had he individualized his characters at all, his "history" would have been a full-fledged novel.

Not that The Story of the Cowboy is completely without historic relevance. Hough's description of the cattle drives is generally accurate, as are his comments on the range wars of the eighties, including a history of Billy the Kid which is remarkably unromanticized. But no effort toward historical accuracy can possibly counter-balance Hough's obvious intentions toward the picturesque in such paragraphs as this one:

It is high and glaring noon in the little town, but it still sleeps. In their cabins some of the men have not yet thrown off their blankets. Along the one long, straggling street there are few persons moving, and those not hastily. Far out on the plain is a trail of dust winding along, where a big ranch wagon is coming in. Upon the opposite side of the town a second and more rapid trail tells where a buckboard is coming, drawn by a pair of trotting ponies. At the end of the street, just coming up from the arroyo, is the figure of a horseman—a tall, slim, young man—who sits straight up on his trotting pony, his gloved hand held high and daintily, his bright kerchief just lopping up and down a bit at his neck as he sits the jogging horse, his big hat pushed back a little over his forehead. All these low buildings, not one of them above a single story, are the colour of the earth. They hold to the earth therefore as though they belonged there. This rider is also in his garb die colour of the earth, and he fits into this scene with perfect right. He also belongs there, this strong, erect, and self-sufficient figure. The environment has produced its man.

Was ever a writer more self-consciously engaged in archetypal creation? Does not such writing constitute a kind of fiction, however disguised as history? And, of course, the work was incredibly successful, reprinted many times in the twentieth century and plagiarized in general and in detail by hundreds of writers, including Hough himself in later novels like The Covered Wagon (1922).

If The Story of the Cowboy is mythic creation posing as history, Andy Adams's The Log of a Cowboy is the same thing as autobiography. Adams (1859-1935) gives a name to his persona, Thomas Moore Quirk, but no commentators on The Log of a Cowboy have been fooled into thinking that the narrator was anyone other than Andy Adams, whose experiences of trail drives exactly correspond to those of the Log. What no critics have noticed is that Adams uses the same archetypal techniques as Hough, except that his Tom Quirk and colleagues are individualized to the point of having names and escaping the "earth-colour" implications so patent in Hough's description. They are nonetheless complete archetypes, romantic versions of what such revisionist histories as Frantz and Choate's American Cowboy Myth and the Reality (1955) have shown to be entirely the creation of nostalgic and romantic imaginations. Tom Quirk is no more Andy Adams than Ishmael is Herman Melville—which is to say, of course, that he is something more. Through Tom, through the other characters in the Log and the stories they tell around the campfires, myths, not history, come into being. The Log is filled with details about a specific trail drive from the Mexican border through Texas and the plains to Montana—but so is Faulkner's The Bear about a specific hunt. The Log records faithfully virtually every kind of event possible on such a drive, river crossings, stampedes, debauches in towns along the trail, information about the handling of cattle specific enough to generate a textbook on the subject—but so does Moby-Dick on whaling. When all the details and trifles are added together with the epic setting and underplayed but heroic style, it becomes clear that the purpose of the book is not to detail a historical phenomenon but to generate a continuing myth. Instead of a stuffed carcass in a museum, Hough and Adams give us live wings for our imagination. Ours and central casting's.

And therein lies the difficulty. If Oedipus is a myth, so is Mickey Mouse, and, somewhere in between, Rip van Winkle. There are Mickey Mouse cowboys, a plethora of them. Frank H. Spearman (1859-1937) created a true archetype with Whispering Smith (1906), whose title character speaks so softly that he is given this soubriquet despite his accomplishments with a six-shooter. Alas, throughout the novel all he does is whisper and shoot villains until the reader could hardly care less. So much for Mickey Mouse. The Oedipuses of cowboy fiction are to be found in works by writers like Zane Grey, Eugene Rhodes, and Walter van Tilburg Clark, and are therefore outside the limits of this study. But several other writers have managed to create characters of considerable mythic dimensions who are nevertheless largely forgotten.

Stewart Edward White (1873-1946) was something more than a hackwriter, though the fifty or so books released under his name would seem to argue to the contrary. His Western fiction has a definite sense of place in spite of the fact that his travels in the West were limited. But in characterization he worked well within the Emerson Hough tradition of the man produced by his environment. In particular, his first three novels, The Westerners (1901), The Claim Jumpers (1901), and especially The Blazed Trail (1902), present the archetypal Western hero—a man thoroughly schooled in his craft, self-reliant in the Emersonian tradition, always quietly confident of his ability to cope with the unexpected, and answerable only to his own conscience in moral matters—that is, willing to take the law in his own hands, usually by way of a Colt. 45. The variations on this theme are endless, in White's novels of the West and in the genre as a whole, but the main characteristics of the Western hero remain constant from Natty Bumppo to Shane and Destry, and White was not the one to experiment rashly in this field. A later trilogy based on California history, Gold (1913), The Grey Dawn (1915), and The Rose Dawn (1920), shifts the emphasis from the Western archetype to the influence of place upon character, but these are perhaps not properly cowboy novels. White also wrote adventure novels about Africa and works on spiritualism, but his Western books are the basis of his reputation, and they are eminently readable.

Two otherwise quite minor novels illustrate how the cowboy hero's willingness to stand outside the law marks the major area of influence of this genre upon modern literature. Charles C. Park's A Plaything of the Gods (1912) is based upon the real life of Joaquin Murieta, the California bandit. The novel traces Murieta's life from his early days as a devout Catholic to his conversion to a blood-thirsty bandit intent upon revenging the wrongs done him and his Spanish colleagues by the American invaders of California. The emphasis in the novel is always on the factors justifying Murieta's behavior and the quality of fairness that he presents as he administers his own brand of justice. In one sense, the novel harks back to the old Robin Hood ballads, but in tone it is much closer to the modern cult of the anti-hero that is best illustrated in the movie Bonnie and Clyde. In the growth of that genre the cowboy novel is central, marking the line of descent from Emerson's comment that he would prefer to be "the devil's child" than submit to moral judgment other than his own, through Twain's Colonel Sherburn, to Berger's Little Big Man, to mention only the most "western" of the modern examples. Self-reliance and transcendentalism may mark the beginning of the tradition, but it is the American frontier and the cowboy myth that allowed it to develop.

Roger Pocock's Curly (1905) illustrates the other value to be derived from the cowboy myth. This novel is virtually a Populist tract in its insistence that the large land-owners, the banks, and the politicians are leagued against the poor farmer-cowboy, who must turn outlaw in order to survive. The satire is not subtle here, but the technique is pure. Through the innocence of the cowboy and his innocent eye, the hypocrisy of society can be laid bare most effectively, and the cowboy's resort to extralegal practices seen only as his marching to a different drummer. Thus the genre has enriched the modern complex novel with its expansion of the transcendental paradoxes first proposed early in the nineteenth century.