Literature of the American West and Frontier

Introduction

For Americans, the frontier will always be a literal and mythic place. Even as early settlers struggled against a harsh landscape to create new homes for themselves, a variety of thinkers sought to present the frontier as a figurative place where pioneers could make themselves into whatever they wanted to be. Certain ideas closely associated with the frontier—self-reliance, individualism, Manifest Destiny, regeneration, even democracy—were designed to portray a young America as a place where one's future was absolutely a matter of what one was willing to make it.

Although from a modern standpoint the West and the frontier have often been identified as the same, the frontier actually changed over time as the United States expanded. When the first colonists arrived, the frontier was the Atlantic coast. Once these colonists established settlements, the frontier became the land immediately beyond the Appalachians; later the Ohio Valley; later still the Mississippi Valley; and so forth, until the nation was completely settled. Despite changes in the frontier's location, however, American attitudes toward expansion and settlement have remained remarkably consistent over time, with the New England Puritans establishing the basic ideological tenets of the frontier myth shortly after their arrival. Only in the twentieth century did mainstream cultural and literary representations of the West and the frontier begin to explore a wider variety of themes, issues, and identities.

The Frontier to 1890

Though they came to the New World seeking the right to worship, the Puritans hardly believed in religious freedom as it would later be defined. Rather, they felt that God had destined them to convert America into a theocracy in which people would live according to Puritan doctrine. This plan caused so much strife with American Indians, who often refused to abide by white beliefs, that many Europeans in America (including the prominent ministers Increase Mather and Cotton Mather) soon came to see extermination of Indians as tantamount to religious duty. Thus the essential frontier trope of a contest between civilization and alleged savagery was born in the seventeenth century, with civilization loosely defined as anything white, European, and Christian, and savagery loosely defined as anything nonwhite, non-European, and pagan. Even later Americans who were sympathetic to certain Native American causes held a European American view of the nation's future. Thomas Jefferson, for example, who wrote in 1803 that "our system is to live in perpetual peace with the Indians," declared in the same essay that "we presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them."

These confrontational attitudes carried over into early American literature about the frontier. Novels such as Robert Montgomery Bird's Nick of the Woods (1837) and William Gilmore Simms's The Yemassee (1835), though somewhat different in tone and racial outlook, both ultimately endorsed hearty, sadistic white heroes who reveled in killing Indians. In fiction, however, the early frontier was truly immortalized by James Fenimore Cooper—especially in the Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41), a collection of five novels unified by their focus on Cooper's archetypal frontiersman, Natty Bumppo. Unlike Bird and Simms, Cooper had mixed feelings about the contest between "civilization" and "savagery." On one hand, he was attracted to the idea of the noble savage, which held in part that industrialized society deprived humans of their innate virtue and sense of self-worth. To that end, he romanticized many of his native characters and Bumppo, making them "natural" moralists who acted with integrity despite their wild surroundings. Cooper also believed, however, that just as the wilderness allowed for the full development of virtue, it failed to restrict humanity's most evil impulses (a fact substantiated by the abundance of bad Indians in his novels). Therefore, Cooper accepted the necessity of white expansion and the correspondent rule of law and morality, no matter how artificial, that civilization entailed.

Cooper's writing sparked many later novels that feature white heroes settling the West, often by killing villains and Indians. In 1858, Erasmus Beadle, an editor and businessman, began to market dime novels—inexpensive paperback volumes filled with action-packed frontier plots, most of them based on formulas developed by Beadle and his writers (hence the phrase "formula Western"). These volumes were wildly popular with audiences through the 1890s and accentuated the other kinds of rampant frontier marketing occurring at the time, such as Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show or even George Armstrong Custer's ostensibly true accounts of battles with the Indians. In short, by the late nineteenth century, frontier literature was part of a larger entertainment industry geared to romanticize the West for a mostly Eastern audience, exhorting bands of people to try their luck in settling along the frontier and driving anti-Native American sentiment to a fever pitch.

Despite the success of people such as Cooper and Beadle, however, it would be a mistake to believe that their version of the West went unchallenged. Women writers especially took exception both with Cooper's view of the frontier as a male-dominated space and with his depiction of Indians as largely savage and ignorant. Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok (1824) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie: Or, Early Times in Massachusetts (1827), for example, question the spurious representations and severe treatment of Native Americans by white Americans, directly inverting the ideology of the Leatherstocking Tales. This trend continued with later works such as Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona (1884), which sympathetically depicted the mixed-race relationship of a half-white protagonist and a full-blooded Indian.

More canonical writers also undermined the overtly mythological version of the frontier espoused by Cooper and his followers. Mark Twain's Roughing It (1872), for example, debunked the claims of economic opportunity and social equality along the frontier that Eastern ideologues used to persuade people to settle there. And Bret Harte's The Luck of Roaring Camp (1868) presented a sentimental version of the West, where citizens rarely took up guns to solve their problems. Even in the nineteenth century, then, writers and public figures disagreed drastically on what the frontier and the West were like and on how the two places affected the development of a distinctively American culture.

The Frontier After 1890

In 1893, however, American views on the frontier were forever changed by the writings of Frederick Jackson Turner. Turner, a historian responding to critics who saw American history as a product of friction between North and South, argued instead that the frontier had been the central factor in national development. Land at the frontier was free, Turner maintained, so citizens could always fulfill the American Dream of self-determination simply by moving West onto "vacant" farmland. Like their forebears, these people would continue to carve civilization out of wilderness and, subsequently, would infuse the rest of the nation with a new democratic spirit. In this way, America would be regenerated, both economically and politically, as frontier settlers continued to remind other citizens of the individual freedoms and accomplishments that had made the country great. Ironically, Turner's ideas were occasioned by the 1890 census, which announced that an actual frontier in America no longer existed. Turner's writing was important, then, not only because it placed the frontier at the center of historical debate, but also because it suggested that in the absence of a literal frontier Americans would have to rely on a figurative frontier.

Since the frontier had always been a mixture of fact and fiction, writers had no problem answering Turner's call to elegize its passing. Particularly important was Turner's focus on regeneration, his belief that the frontier embodied the concept of freedom more completely than any other place in America. Other writers, however, did not see the frontier as a symbol to bolster democratic ideals; rather, many used the mythic West to call for "racial revitalization" and sometimes racial supremacy. The beginning of the twentieth century marked a period of staunch racism in which certain whites attempted to "regain" the glories of America, which they believed had been taken from them by immoral whites and non-whites generally. For heroes, these writers turned to the West, arguing that the landscape had been "tamed" through the efforts of archetypal white figures—the hunter, the soldier, and the cowboy. Such figures were immortalized in books like Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902), Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), and later in Louis L'Amour's Hondo (1953) as well as in films such as Red River (1948) and The Searchers (1956). Some novels, such as Frederic Remington's John Ermine of the Yellowstone (1902), continued to present Native Americans as largely savage—even after the last tribes were placed on reservations—to justify the push for predominantly white, male, and violent control of the nation.

Certain writers used the Western for racial and political ends (or simply to create a mythical version of the frontier only tenuously related to historical reality), but other twentieth century writers did their best to offer more realistic or evenhanded depictions. Andy Adams' The Log of a Cowboy (1903) presents cowboy life as it often actually is—tedious, mundane, and exhausting—while novels like Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident (1940) and A. B. Guthrie Jr.'s The Big Sky (1947) portrayed the mythic West as an overly violent place where characters' ready willingness to draw guns often resulted in tragedy. Also, white writers such as Oliver La Farge (Laughing Boy, 1929) and Frank Waters (The Man Who Killed the Deer, 1942) began to explore the complexities of Native American culture, viewing Indians as more than a nemesis of European American pioneers. Additionally, Indian writers began to produce literature that told their own story, offering an incisive counterpoint to mostly white versions of the West. The finest of these works include D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded (1936), N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn (1968), and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977), along with many others.

In the late twentieth century the West experienced a resurgence in American letters, even as the traditional genre fiction Western declined in popularity. Writers such as Sherman Alexie, Cormac McCarthy, Ken Kesey, Thomas King, and Larry McMurtry consciously invoked Western settings and sometimes formula devices in their fiction, often in experimental or otherwise groundbreaking ways. Literary critics, unsatisfied with the mythic version of the frontier left to them by several decades of popular films, television, and radio, began to interrogate the formula Western aspects of canonical writers such as Willa Cather, Nathanael West, and John Steinbeck. Even the film industry, despite its reputation of being among the most shameless purveyors of the frontier formula, began to produce such films as Unforgiven (1992), an explicit debunking of the dime-novel perception of the West. Meanwhile, Western literature also grew more diverse in terms of both authors' identities and the identities of their characters. For example, the award-winning 1997 short story "Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx earned wide attention for its upending of stereotypical Western masculinity, and had even more cultural impact after its adaptation into an Academy Award–winning 2005 film of the same name.

The West continues to supply Americans with a wealth of material for artistic and critical discourse more than a century after the close of the literal frontier. In the early twenty-first century many of the authors who had earlier helped transform the concept of the Western continued to publish notable works, and they were joined by new talents who further expanded the format. Acclaimed novels of the West and frontier from the 2000s and 2010s include Michael Punke's The Revenant (2002), McCarthy's No Country for Old Men (2007), Doc (2011) by Mary Doria Russell, The Sisters Brothers (2011) by Patrick deWitt, The Son (2013) by Philipp Meyer, News of the World (2016) by Paulette Jiles, and In the Distance by Hernan Diaz (2017). Several of these works were also adapted into films.

Bibliography

Cawelti, John G. The Six-Gun Mystique. 2d ed. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1977. Analyzes the twentieth century formula Western in terms of literary antecedents and in terms of psychological and cultural function.

Larison, John. "The History and Future of the Western in 10 Books." Publishers Weekly, 24 Aug. 2018, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/77727-the-history-and-future-of-the-western-in-10-books.html. Accessed 28 Aug. 2019.

Milton, John. The Novel of the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. Analyzes several Western texts that supposedly defy the conventions of frontier writing.

Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization 1800-1890. New York: Atheneum, 1985. Historical extension of arguments made in Regeneration Through Violence, listed below.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973. A seminal text in addressing the role that the frontier has played in defining American culture.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950. The pre-eminent work on American frontier writing. Looks closely at several basic myths that underscore the larger frontier myth.

Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. A reader-response analysis of several Western texts, including film, which focuses on sexual dynamics of frontier literature.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962. Brought the frontier, as myth and as reality, into the center of American historical and cultural debate in the twentieth century.