SO MANY WRITERS have been inspired by the oral traditions of the American West that very few western novels, poems, and plays are without allusions to Native American myths, tales, and songs or to western folklore. Thanks to the pioneers of ethnology and folklore studies, the West's oral traditions have been recorded in print, preserved in thousands of volumes. Many readers are aware of the existence of such volumes of recorded oral literature, but few realize how rich that heritage is.

Even after reading books of Indian literature, many non-Indians remain ignorant of the value of the Native American oral narratives, because, as Kenneth M. Roemer explains, "they tend to associate them with `quaint' or `primitive' fairy tales, folklore or superstitions. Part of the explanation for these misconceptions is that the popular written and mass media forms of transmitting information about Native American oral narratives often strip away the cultural and literary contexts of the stories. Furthermore, the narratives are usually associated with the dead past of the Vanished American" ("Native American Oral Narratives: Context and Continuity," in Smoothing the Ground [University of California Press, 1983], ed. Brian Swann, p. 39). In their chapter in this section of A Literary History of the American West, Larry Evers and Paul Pavich explain the history of the Native American oral tradition in general terms, giving the cultural and literary contexts of that tradition. Evers and Pavich, pointing out that their subject is too vast and complex to be exhaustively treated in a single essay, ask us at least to recognize that our media-instilled views of Native American literature are misconceptions.

The mass media may find it increasingly difficult to continue purveying such misconceptions, since the study of Native American culture has become an established part of the curriculum at many major universities, leading to the publication of journals such as American Indian Quarterly, Studies in American Indian Literature, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, and Sun Tracks: An American Indian Literary Magazine. Such journals exist because, as Karl Kroeber writes,"Indian narratives need sophisticated critical attention." In Traditional Literatures of the American Indian: Texts and Interpretations (University of Nebraska Press, 1981), Kroeber also says that as a teacher he has found "that many Americans who know only Western literature are baffled by Indian oral narratives" (p. 1). He advises an inexperienced reader

. . . to assume that such tales can be comprehended, that they are neither below nor beyond our customary procedures of analyzing and evaluating literature, and, therefore, that one should attack head-on any overt critical problems posed by a particular tale. One should begin by assuming that an Indian oral narrative may be a first-rate work of art. One must abandon the misconception that this literature is "primitive." It is not. It is worth remembering that all good literature raises troubling problems and is structured by intricacies which both attract and defeat the most intense analysis. (pp. 2—3)

Western folklore has also invited analysis, perhaps because it has occupied such a large territory in the American mind for more than a century. As Malcolm Cowley explains: "What we might call the first American mythology had taken final shape by 1890. In retrospect it seems amazingly complete, including as it does a score of familiar backgrounds, each with its registered trademark." And many of the trademarks Cowley mentions are western: ". . . the sod house on the prairie, the chuck wagon surrounded by cowboys squatting on their heels, the Indian village with dancing braves, and the gambling saloon near the California diggings" ("Three Cycles of Myth in American Writing," in A Many-Windowed House [Southern Illinois University Press, 1970], p. 235). "Against those familiar backgrounds," Cowley continues, "moved a whole pantheon of mythological figures, at least twelve of which might be listed as major gods of our first native Olympus." Of the twelve American gods Cowley identifies, five are largely or entirely western: the woods ranger; the backwoods boaster; "the slit-eyed, lean-jawed, soft spoken gambler with two six-guns hidden beneath the frock coat made by the best Omaha tailor"; the outlaw; and the Indian chief. And of the "demigodlike figures" not far behind those major deities, many are western.

The Old West gave us those folklore figures, and the New West and the contemporary West have added to American folklore, too. Western folklore, like all folk literature, "differs from the rest of literature," as B. A. Botkin has pointed out, "only in its history: its author is the original `forgotten man'" (A Treasury of American Folklore [New York: Crown, 1944], p. xxii). Barre Toelken, author of the folklore chapter in A Literary History of the American West, does not, however, focus on the literature. Instead, he explains folk groups and customs and tells about the shifts and changes in the oral tradition from one layer of culture to another, from East to West or West to East, and from past to present. The traditions of the folk are one of the richest of sources for western writers. In revering the oral traditions of any culture, there is the danger, as Botkin warns, of a clannishness that can fuel chauvinism. But there is an equal danger in ignoring oral traditions: the danger of forgetting that the source of all literature is ultimately the people. Literature is, after all, a process, not a product. And as Robert Weimann has argued in Structure and Society in Literary History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976), "the process of literature, when seen in terms of both its creation and reception, is functionally, significantly, and historically part of the social activity of its creators and recipients" (p. 178). Since a literature begins with what its people say, this literary history starts with an account of what was said by the first peoples who encountered the American West.

JAMES H. MAGUIRE,Boise State University

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