Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey

First published: 1912

Type of plot: Western

Time of work: 1871

Locale: Southern Utah

Principal Characters:

• Jane Withersteen, a young Mormon heiress
• Jim Lassiter, a gunman engaged in an eighteen-year search for his sister
• Berne Venters, a non-Mormon befriended by Jane Withersteen
• Elder Tull, a Mormon leader, one of the principal villains
• Bishop Dyer, another Mormon, suspected by Lassiter of having led his sister astray
• Oldring, the leader of an outlaw band
• Bess, Oldring’s “masked rider” until she is unmasked by Berne Venters

The Novel

Riders of the Purple Sage begins in Cottonwoods, a little Utah border settlement where life is made possible by Amber Spring, belonging to Jane Withersteen. Although her father has left her a fortune and she owns most of Cottonwoods, her fellow Mormons, led by the evil Bishop Dyer and Elder Tull, try to dominate her. They especially dislike her friendship with Berne Venters, a young rider who does not share their faith. When they attempt to whip Venters and drive him out of Utah, Jim Lassiter, a Texas gunfighter, intervenes.

For years, Lassiter has been searching for his sister, Millie Erne, spirited away from her husband by Mormons. He now learns she is dead and vows to wreak vengeance upon the Mormon who ruined her life. Jane has taken in a non-Mormon orphan girl named Fay Larkin. She has continued her friendship with Venters and is romantically drawn to Lassiter. Elder Tull—who wants to make Jane one of his wives—Bishop Dyer, and their accomplices attempt to break Jane’s spirit by stampeding her cattle and intimidating her riders. She hires Lassiter to ride for her but attempts to discourage his use of violence.

A gang of rustlers, under the leadership of the outlaw Oldring, is operating in the area. One member of Oldring’s band never appears without disguise and is known only as the “masked rider.” On the range, Venters comes upon Oldring and his rustlers, one of whom is the masked rider. Oldring escapes beneath a canyon wall, but Venters shoots two of his companions, killing one rustler and wounding the masked rider. He discovers to his amazement that the masked rider is a girl named Bess. He nurses her for several weeks, during which time he falls in love with her. Later, the young lovers discover a hidden valley, which Venters names Surprise Valley. The entrance is guarded by a great balancing rock, probably put there by some ancient peoples. Venters and Bess settle down in their paradise like a chaste Adam and Eve. Venters assures himself that, despite the years Bess has spent with Oldring and his men, she is innocent of both criminal and sexual wrongdoing.

From time to time, Venters must leave the valley to get supplies. On one such occasion, Lassiter trails him and learns the location of Surprise Valley. Eventually, Venters rides into Cottonwoods; confronting Oldring in a bar, he invites the rustler outside, where he shoots him to death in the street. Lassiter is also contemplating violence, for he has decided that Bishop Dyer is the man who seduced Millie Erne away from her husband. In an attempt to stay his hand, Jane reveals that it was her own father who despoiled Millie, that it was he for whom she was taken. Lassiter is undeterred. He will use his six-guns to free Jane from the “invisible hand” of Mormonism. The conflict between Jane’s loyalty to her religion and her growing attraction to Lassiter now reaches a climactic point.

Lassiter methodically executes Dyer, torturing him with superficial wounds before administering the coup de grâce. Now Lassiter must flee Cottonwoods. Jane makes her choice: She will break with her old Mormon life and flee alongside the Texas gunfighter, taking little Fay Larkin with her. A Mormon posse, led by Elder Tull, is soon in hot pursuit. The fugitives head for Surprise Valley and meet Venters and Bess, who are just leaving for Venter’s old home town of Quincy, Illinois. Here, Bess’s story is finally told by Lassiter, who learned it during an earlier conversation with the outlaw Oldring. Bess is, in truth, Elizabeth Erne, daughter of Millie. Bishop Dyer took her from her mother at the age of three and gave her to Oldring, the purpose of this act being to obliterate her family roots. Dyer anticipated that she would be reared as an outlaw. Oldring, however, soon came to think of himself as the girl’s father and brought her up honest and pure, despite the fact that she rode with his gang of rustlers. Jane is so moved by this story that she gives the young couple Night and Black Star, her two favorite horses. Venters and Bess flee from Utah astride these fastest racers on the sage.

Lassiter, Jane, and Fay Larkin slip through the entrance to Surprise Valley with the Mormon posse nipping at their heels. The only way to escape is to roll the balancing rock. If Lassiter rolls the rock, however, the pursuers will be permanently sealed inside Surprise Valley. Jane makes her choice; she urges Lassiter to heave the rock into place (this will crush the pursuing Tull), and he does so.

The Characters

Riders of the Purple Sage, Grey’s most popular novel, develops the character types he would use for another twenty-seven years. The reading public responded so well to these characters and their stories that Grey became one of America’s best-selling authors.

Jane Withersteen is the frontier woman—strong and independent but tolerant of others, courageous but vulnerable to the assaults of evil men, dependable but adaptable. The central conflict in the novel is hers, the conflict between her commitment to her religion and her commitment to the man she loves. Lassiter is the typical Grey hero, an uncomplicated man of the West. He has no internal conflict. He has no doubts as to what the solution to his problem should be. He will find the man who stole his sister away into Mormon slavery and kill him. He has an additional and higher motivation for gunning down Bishop Dyer—the bishop’s and Elder Tull’s mistreatment of Jane—but his violent resolution would have been the same had he never met Jane.

Venters and Bess are the novel’s ingénues. In this young non-Mormon’s loyalty to Jane Withersteen and his defiance of the Mormon majority (he is referred to throughout the text as a “Gentile”), he represents the struggle of the individual against tyranny. Bess is one of several Grey females who romantically, and implausibly, disguise themselves as male riders. The lack of coarseness in her nature, her purity even while living in the midst of an outlaw gang, is romantic in the extreme. Grey accounts for her growing up to be a “good girl,” despite all of her role models being cutthroats and thieves, through yet another romantic convention. Oldring takes his role as foster father seriously and protects the girl from the wickedness of his men, even locking her in on those occasions when he must be away from camp. The outlaw with a good heart, a rough sense of honor, or simply tender feelings for the female sex is a recurrent character type in Grey’s fiction.

The villains, Elder Tull and Bishop Dyer, represent authority. Grey often portrays authority in a negative light, even when it is not corrupt. His idealized Westerner strives to be free of all artificial constraints, and this idea is elaborated in many lengthy scenes picturing man or woman alone on the majestic plains or mountains. In Riders of the Purple Sage, authority is corrupt. In addition to committing what would be crimes if there were a civil law to judge them, Tull and Dyer are religious fanatics and hypocrites. Grey portrays the Mormon community as a tyrannical theocracy and Tull and Dyer as the “invisible hand,” the evil priests who manipulate the malice against Jane Withersteen and her Gentile friends. In fact, the novel is, from beginning to end, virulently anti-Mormon. In 1912, that aspect of the novel was not especially controversial.

Critical Context

In 1907, Grey, still an easterner, accompanied Charles Jesse “Buffalo” Jones on an Arizona hunting trip. The trip was a seminal experience for Grey, in the long term imbuing him with a lifelong wonder at the majesty of the American West and, more immediately, furnishing the material for several books—The Last of the Plainsmen (1908), The Heritage of the Desert (1910), Roping Lions in the Grand Canyon (1924), and Riders of the Purple Sage. As Mormons guided Jones and Grey across rivers and through desert and mountain terrain, the writer developed an unfavorable opinion of them. He hinted at his disapproval of Mormonism in The Heritage of the Desert and made it explicit in Riders of the Purple Sage. However, the grandeur of the West, the chivalry of the Western hero, and the strength of the Western heroine are the elements that have made Riders of the Purple Sage the most popular and most favorably reviewed of Grey’s many books.

Grey and Owen Wister, the author of The Virginian (1902), virtually created the Western novel, which, in turn, spawned the motion-picture Western. Between 1918 and the end of the twentieth century, Grey’s novels and short stories were adapted as feature films, serials, or made-for-television movies approximately 115 times. In addition, a weekly television series, Dick Powell’s Zane Grey Theater, which ran from October, 1956, to September, 1962, used material only loosely connected or wholly unconnected to Grey’s writings. It is probable that more of Grey’s work has been adapted for the screen than that of any other American author. Riders of the Purple Sage alone was filmed five times—in 1918, 1925, 1931, 1941, and 1996. In the first four productions, the gunman Lassiter was portrayed by stars of the genre: in turn, William Farnum, Tom Mix, George O’Brien, and George Montgomery. In evaluating the 1941 production, a critic suggested that the story was creaking with age and had little life left in it. However, in 1996, Ed Harris and Amy Madigan produced and co-starred in a television adaptation—quite faithful to the romantic tone of the novel—that was a popular and critical success, thus reaffirming the appeal of this quintessential Western romance.

Bibliography

Farley, G. M. Zane Grey: A Documented Portrait. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: Portals Press, 1986. A meticulous study of Grey’s career, listing everything he ever wrote and every movie adapted from his works.

Hardy, Phil. The Film Encyclopedia: The Western. New York: Morrow, 1983. One volume in a nine-volume series. Contains cast and production information as well as critical evaluations and synopses for hundreds of Western films from the sound era, including the 1931 and 1941 versions of Riders of the Purple Sage.

Jackson, Carlton. Zane Grey. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1989. A biographical-critical entry in Twayne’s United States Authors Series. Contains a chronology and a selected bibliography.

Scott, Kenneth W. Zane Grey, Born to the West: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. A thoroughly annotated bibliography containing a biographical-critical introduction and chapters on “The Fiction of Zane Grey,” “Zane Grey on Film,” and “Writings About Zane Grey” from 1904 through 1977.

Zane Grey: The Man and His Works. New York: Harper, 1928. A valuable compilation of articles by and about Grey, brought out by his longtime publisher at the height of his popularity.