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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
It is a commonplace that American western fiction is ‘mythic’ and archetypal. It is also increasingly taken for granted that westerns reflect contemporary political and social issues and that one can learn much about American attitudes from a study of westerns as historical documents. Are these ideas reconcilable? One answer would be that though the book or film may communicate certain contemporary messages to its local audience, it also conveys ‘universal truths’ to a wider public. To see how wrong this happy compromise is, one has only to consider the following typical cases, taken from various stages in the history of American western fiction. Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking stories seem to be set in an impossible never-never land, yet the author occasionally provides ’scholarly‘ footnotes relating the stories’ locales to real places in America. The dime novel Seth Jones, by Edward Ellis (1860), contains elaborate anthropological notes on Indians, but on the page following one of them the hero says, ‘“Howsumever, that don't make no difference, whether it's the Mohawks, Oneidas, or any of them blasted Five Nation niggers, they are all a set of skunks …”’ Emerson Hough pauses in the middle of North of 36 (1923) to provide a bibliography of sources for the facts about cowboy life on which he draws. The film producers D. W. Griffith and James Cruze (The Covered Wagon, 1923, is based on a romance by Hough) spent enormous amounts of money and energy to get costumes, settings and technical details historically accurate, when their plots moved to the old romance rhythms of love affairs and escapes from fates worse than death.
1 See, for example, ‘Mark Twain: An Inquiry’, North American Review, February 1901Google Scholar; reprinted in Howells, W. D., Criticism and Fiction and Other Essays, ed. Kirk, and Kirk, , New York, 1959, pp. 217–20.Google Scholar
2 Crumbling Idols, modern edition by Johnson, Jane, Cambridge, Mass., 1960, pp. 16–17.Google Scholar
3 Three Greek Romances, edited and translated by Hadas, Moses, New York, 1953, p. 17.Google Scholar
4 Burns, Walter Noble, Billy the Kid, London, 1925, p. 24.Google Scholar
5 Ibid., p. 122.
6 ‘The American Myth Rides the Range’, Southwest Review, Summer, 1951, p. 160.Google Scholar
7 ‘Under Western Eyes’, The Times, 20 02 1971, p. 15.Google Scholar