The Virginian

Excerpt from The Virginian

On a Monday noon a small company of horsemen strung out along the trail from Sunk Creek to gather cattle over their allotted sweep of range. . . . The Virginian was grave in bearing and of infrequent speech; but he kept a song going—a matter of some seventy-nine versus. Seventy-eight were quite unprintable, and rejoiced his brother cow-punchers monstrously. . . . He would lift his gentle voice and begin:

'If you go to monkey with my Looloo girl,/ I'll tell you what I'll do:/ I'll cyarve your heart with my razor, AND/ I'll shoot you with my pistol, too—'

Then they would stridently take up each last line, and keep it going three, four, ten times, and kick holes in the ground to the swing of it.

By the levels of Bear Creek that reach like inlets among the promontories of the lonely hills, they came upon the schoolhouse, roofed and ready for the first native Wyoming crop. It symbolized the dawn of a neighborhood, and it brought a change into the wilderness air. The feel of it struck cold upon the free spirits of the cow-punchers, and they told each other that, what with women and children and wire fences, this country would not long be a country for men.

^{Source: Wister, Owen. The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 69.}

Historian Interpretation

It may have been the emergence of modern America, with its urbanization and industrialization, that sparked an additional interest among its people for a past that was more direct, more simple, more easily understood. The nation had, some held, grown too fast, had lost something in that process; and now there was a yearning to return to that fast-disappearing life on the soil. There now became evident a nervous feeling that the West either would go unrecognized in literature or that it would not develop a literature of its own. Sentimentalists wanted an American story, one of triumph, of surmounting odds, of hope. . . .

Wister, however, appeared to have hit the bull's-eye by offering American readers something that transcended the common literary fare of adventure laced with romance. His central figure, the cowboy, had been around for some time, but usually in a supporting role and certainly one that lacked heroic proportions. By putting the cowboy on the center of the state, Wister contributed heavily to the rise of the western's popularity.

^{Source: Athearn, Robert G. The Mythic West. University of Kansas Press, 1986. P. 162-3.}