The Virginian by Owen Wister

First published: 1902

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Western

Time of plot: Late nineteenth century

Locale: Wyoming

Principal characters

• The Virginian, a cowboy
• Judge Henry, the Virginian’s employer
• Trampas, a cowboy and the Virginian’s enemy
• Steve, a cowboy friend of the Virginian
• Shorty, a cowboy at Judge Henry’s ranch
• Molly Wood, a young schoolteacher at Bear Creek, Wyoming

The Story:

The Virginian is sent by his employer, the owner of the Sunk Creek Ranch, to meet an Eastern guest at Medicine Bow and escort him 260 miles from the town to the ranch. While the Virginian and the guest await the arrival of the Easterner’s trunk on the next train, the cowboy enters into a poker game. One of the players, a cowboy named Trampas, accuses the Virginian of cheating. The man backs down before the Virginian’s gun, but it is clear to everyone that the Virginian has made an implacable enemy.

A few months later, in the fall, a schoolmistress comes West from Vermont to teach in the new school at Bear Creek, Wyoming. All the single men—and there are many of them in the territory—eagerly await the arrival of the new teacher, Molly Wood. The Virginian is fortunate in his first meeting with her. A drunken stage driver tries to ford a creek in high water and maroons his coach and passenger. The Virginian, who is just passing, lifts the young woman out of the stage and deposits her safely on the bank of the stream. After he rides away, Molly misses her handkerchief and realizes that the young cowboy somehow contrived to take it.

The next time the Virginian sees Molly, she is a guest at a barbecue. He rides his horse for two days for the opportunity to see her, but she coquettishly refuses to notice him. Piqued, the Virginian and another cowboy get drunk and play a prank on all the people who brought babies to the barbecue; they switch the babies’ clothing, so that many of the mothers carry off the wrong children. Before returning to Sunk Creek, the Virginian warns Molly that she is going to love him eventually, no matter what she thinks of him now.

During the next year, the Virginian begins to read books for the first time since he left school in the sixth grade. He borrows the books from Molly, which gives him the opportunity to ride to Bear Creek to see her at intervals. In the meantime, he rises high in the estimation of his employer. Judge Henry puts him in charge of a party of men who are to escort two trainloads of steers to the Chicago market.

On the trip back to the ranch, the Virginian’s men threaten to desert the train to go prospecting for gold that was discovered in the Black Hills. The ringleader of the insurgents is Trampas. The Virginian sees that the best way to win over the men is to make a fool of Trampas. His chance comes when the train stops near a bridge that is being repaired. Since there is no food on the train, the Virginian goes out and gathers a sackful of frogs to cook. Then he begins to tell a tall story about frogs that completely takes in Trampas. When the other cowboys see how foolish Trampas appears, they are willing to return to the ranch, much to the discomfiture of their ringleader.

The Virginian returns to Sunk Creek to find a pleasant surprise awaiting him: The ranch foreman leaves because of his disabled wife, whereupon the judge makes the Virginian his foreman. Trampas expects to be discharged from his job as soon as the Virginian becomes foreman, but the Virginian decides it is better to have his enemy in sight, so Trampas stays on, sullen and defiant.

The following spring, the Virginian makes a trip to a neighboring ranch. On the way back, he is attacked by Indians and severely wounded. He manages to escape from the Indians and make his way to a spring. There he is found, half dead, by Molly. The Indians are still in the vicinity, but the young woman stays with him at the risk of her life. She binds his wounds, takes him back to her cabin, and calls a doctor.

Molly, who is preparing to return to her home in the East, has already packed her possessions. She postpones her return to care for the Virginian, and by the time he recovers sufficiently to go back to work, she changes her mind. She is sure by then that she is in love with the cowboy foreman, and when the Virginian leaves her cabin for Sunk Creek, Molly promises to marry him.

Upon returning to work, the Virginian finds that his enemy, Trampas, has disappeared, taking another of the cowboys, Shorty, with him. About the same time, the ranches in that territory begin to lose cattle to rustlers. A posse is formed to track down the cattle thieves. After several weeks of searching, two of the thieves are caught. Since the rustlers somehow managed to gain control of the local courts and were already freed on one charge, the posse hanged both of them. It is a terrible experience for the Virginian, especially since one of the men, Steve, was a close friend. The Virginian hates to think he hanged his friend, and the hurt is worse because the condemned man refused to say a word to his former companion. On his way back to Sunk Creek, the Virginian comes across the trail of the remaining two rustlers, Trampas and Shorty. Because they have only one horse between them with which to escape, Trampas murders Shorty.

When Molly hears of the lynching and of the Virginian’s part in it, she at first refuses to marry him. After a conversation with Judge Henry, however, she realizes that the Virginian did no more than his duty. She and the Virginian are reconciled, and a date is set for their wedding.

On the day before their wedding, Molly and the Virginian start to ride to Medicine Bow. On the way, they meet Trampas, who gallops ahead of them into the town. Molly questions the Virginian about the man and discovers the enmity between the two. When they arrive in town, they are warned that Trampas said he would shoot the Virginian if he were not out of town by sunset. Molly tells him that she can never marry him if he fights with Trampas and kills him. The Virginian, knowing that his honor is at stake, leaves her in the hotel and goes out to face his enemy. Trampas fires first and misses. Then the Virginian fires and kills Trampas.

When the Virginian returns to the hotel, Molly is too glad to see him alive to remember her threat. Hearing the shots, she was afraid that the Virginian was killed. They are married the following day, as they planned, and spend two months of their honeymoon high in the Rocky Mountains.

Bibliography

Cobbs, John L. Owen Wister. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Argues that Wister was a good writer whose works deserve more attention. Devotes one chapter to a discussion of The Virginian and provides a good survey of other secondary sources on the book through the early 1980’s.

Etulain, Richard W. Owen Wister. Boise, Idaho: Boise State College, 1973. A brief survey of Wister’s career and a good introduction to his writings. Includes some perceptive comments about The Virginian.

Graulich, Melody, and Stephen Tatum, eds. Reading “The Virginian” in the New West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Collection of novels reexamining the novel and using the book as a means of studying twenty-first century writing about the region. Includes discussions of Wister’s life and travels, his handling of gender and race in The Virginian, the novel’s role in American literary and cultural history, and adaptations of the novel for film, stage, and television.

Lambert, Neal. “Owen Wister’s Virginian: The Genesis of a Cultural Hero.” Western American Literature 6 (Summer, 1971): 99-107. A perceptive analysis of the development and meaning of the central figure of Wister’s novel by one of the leading students of his work.

Payne, Darwin. Owen Wister: Chronicler of the West, Gentleman of the East. Dallas, Tex.: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985. One of the best available biographies of Wister, which draws on extensive research in his papers at the Library of Congress and other manuscript collections. Contains an abundance of material on the history of The Virginian and the response it evoked during Wister’s lifetime.

Reid, Margaret. “’Traces of a Vanished World’ in Owen Wister’s The Virginian.” In Cultural Secrets as Narrative Form: Storytelling in Nineteenth-Century America. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004. Devotes three chapters to the novel, discussing its genesis, influence on subsequent literature, romance and nostalgia in the work, and the book’s depiction of frontier heroes. Argues that the Western frontier has taken on a “mythic force” in the creation of America’s national identity.

White, G. Edward. The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968. Examines the way in which Wister interacted with the West and the historical circumstances that led him to write The Virginian. Considers Wister’s links with participants in the Johnson County War of April, 1892.