LAWMEN AND OUTLAWS have been subjects for literature since before the time of Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Those famous characters perfectly exemplify the essential ingredient for successful dramatization: conflict. And their counterparts in western American literature have been popular for the same reason. Stories about American sheriffs and outlaws, whether featuring historical characters or wholly fictional ones, are variations on a time-tested and classical theme.
The outlaw has a larger role in literature than does the lawman. His exploits seem to offer more in the way of dramatic possibilities, and as Eugene Manlove Rhodes said, "outlaws are more interesting than in-laws." Novelists, playwrights, and folk singers have been much more sympathetic to the outlaw than have historians. Indeed, they have helped carry on a romantic tradition that contrasts sharply with ascertainable historical data about crime and criminals. Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief" seems applicable as an explanation for the continuing popularity of stories about Romantic Outlawry.
The plots and character portrayals in outlaw narratives fit into familiar patterns. Often we have a basically decent man who becomes the victim of one or another kind of persecution. After insufferable provocation, he turns on the persecutors and makes revenge his raison d'être. His enemies, who are corrupt officials and sheriffs, evil politicians, or land-grabbers, ordinarily have the law on their side. Powerful and immoral, they manipulate the legal machinery for their own selfish ends. Implicit in such plots is the assumption that legal law can be and often is divorced from moral law. In such situations the outlaw may be seen as a hero, since he defies corrupt authority in defense of the "higher" cause of social justice.
Despite his crimes, the outlaw is a humane character. He is kind to women and children, and he does not mistreat animals. He has a sense of humor, is loyal to his friends, and gives to the poor what he has taken from the rich. This idealized outlaw or "good badman" is the most prominent character-type in both folklore and literary tradition. The contrasting picture of the outlaw as a vicious psychopath and "back-shooter" is much less in evidence.
Many of the narratives that fit into this pattern are quasi-historical. An early example is seen in the literary treatment of the California bandit Joaquin Murieta.* *The name has been spelled in various ways, though the presumed descendants of the family in Sonora use Murrieta, which is the common Spanish spelling. As an historical personage, Murieta is almost as shadowy a figure as Robin Hood himself. Scant records provide only sketchy documentation for crimes committed by a Spanish-speaking outlaw in the early months of 1853. Yet a down-on-his-luck newspaperman, John Rollin Ridge, decided to make him into a hero. Hence The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854) is largely an imaginative work written for commercial purposes. Like many subsequent books about outlaws, it could be classed as either historical novel, or fictionalized biography.
The formula employed by Ridge is almost prototypical. His Murieta is not innately depraved, but is a victim of persecution. A mob of Anglo American gold seekers rape his sweetheart, hang his brother, and beat him into unconsciousness. Thus revenge becomes Murieta's main pursuit, and he exacts a retribution by means of a series of holdups and killings. But despite these crimes, the outlaw retains his humanity. He has "a frank and cordial bearing which distinguished him and made him beloved by all with whom he came in contact." Many acts of generosity as well as bravado reveal him to be one of the most accomplished outlaws of all time.
Ridge's formulaic book was not immediately successful, but in the long run it created one of the West's "Robin Hoods." This was evidenced by the appearance of Murieta "folklore" (much of which is of questionable authenticity), dime novels, plays, novels, and other "biographies." By the 1880s, even respected historians were using Ridge's Life as the source for extended discussions of the outlaw. None of the novels, such as Charles Park's Plaything of the Gods (1912), did much to make Murieta known to the Anglo American audience. But ultimately one writer, Walter Noble Burns, did help to popularize the legend. His 1932 opus, The Robin Hood of El Dorado, ran to 304 pages compared to Ridge's ninety. The difference is accounted for by a "lot of ginger bread work": old timers' reminiscences; a number of invented episodes; the conversations and "philosophical reflections" of the outlaws. Written much like a movie script, Bums's book was in fact made into a film which made Murieta known to the national audience.
During the post-Civil War era, the sub-literature of the dime novels featured many stories about outlaws. In 1877, the firm of Beadle & Adams began the cycle when it issued such a novel about Deadwood Dick, a fictional road agent in the Dakotas. The eighties then saw hundreds of other novels based on the exploits or imagined exploits of Jesse and Frank James, Billy the Kid, Sam Bass, Murieta, the Dalton gang, and other less well known criminals. Such subject matter was logical for this peoples' literature, which was addressed to farm boys and workers for whom the polite literature of the day had no meaning.
Ambivalent attitudes toward the outlaw are revealed in these stories, the clearest examples being those about the James brothers. Such publishers as Frank Tousey and Street & Smith issued numerous "James Boys" titles, and the portrayals vary from the villainous to the heroic. Early issues frequently depict Jesse James as a murderous enemy of society, who deserved his death at the hands of turncoat Bob Ford. But then the writers transform him into a saintly do-gooder. In this role he is seen paying off farm mortgages, bouncing children on his knee just before bank robberies, and saving young women from lustful "bad" outlaws. He also becomes the traditional avenger, finishing off the cowardly Pinkerton detectives who, in bombing the James farm, had injured Jesse's revered mother. However, the moral issues involved in depicting outlaws in a favorable way are ever-present. Indeed, public pressure seems to have caused both Tousey and Street & Smith to terminate their respective James Boys series in 1903.
In nineteenth-century accounts, Billy the Kid is a fiendish executioner, a smirking psychopath, in virtually all the stories about him. In The True Life of Billy the Kid by "Don Jenardo" and in John W. Morrison's Life of Billy the Kid, A Juvenile Outlaw (both 1881), he is a "demon" who "has a heart only for anatomical purposes." He takes sadistic delight in each of the twenty-one murders with which the authors credit him. The Kid's reputation as the "Robin Hood of New Mexico" was created in post-1900 interpretations, a most impressive example of literary turnabout.
In some of the myriad dime novels, the writers depict lawmen as appealing personalities. Often there is a detective from the East, such as "Old King Brady," who comes west and tangles with the James Boys or Billy the Kid. However in the "Diamond Dick" novels, published between 1878 and 1911, we have a more identifiably western figure. Diamond Dick, Junior, is a crack shot and an expert cowhand. Tall, blond, and handsome, he dresses in a semi-Mexican costume. The plots show him and his father justifying their reputations for "maintaining law and order on the Western plains." In one series of stories, Diamond Dick enters Hole-in-the-Wall and takes Butch Cassidy into custody, but the wily outlaw eventually escapes.
The best-known historical lawman to appear in the dime novels is James Butler ("Wild Bill") Hickok. He was well known to the New York
writers, having been featured in a Harper's magazine article and having acted in a touring stage play with Buffalo Bill Cody. Hickok's brief tenure as a law officer in Kansas prompted some stories about him in which he brings various miscreants to book. Such is the case in Prentissraham's Wild Bill, the Pistol Prince, an 1881 paperback that combines actual biographical details with fictional episodes. Wild Bill successfully grapples with Indians and bears, and cleans up on hooligans at Hays City and Abilene. One legend which enlivens the narrative is Hickok's encounter with the McCandless
gang. "For this desperate affray, in which one man whipped ten desperadoes, killing eight of them, the title of `Wild Bill' was bestowed upon the famous borderman." This kind of exaggeration showed the potentialities for making lawmen into heroes.
Yet the outlaw dominated in popular literature, and folklore did as much as printed fiction to keep him in sharper focus. Some of the "folklore" about outlaws is of dubious authenticity, because it derives from commercial and literary sources rather than oral tradition. But some of the folktales and songs are genuine, including those about Sam Bass and Jesse James. Bass was a cowboy who turned train robber. He held up a Union Pacific express and returned to East Texas with the loot. The squatters there made a hero out of him because, so folk tradition maintains, he was quite liberal in handing out the stolen twenty-dollar gold pieces. Bass was gunned down by the Rangers in 1878, after being betrayed by gang member Jim Murphy. Almost immediately a folk song appeared that made the outlaw into a Robin Hood. It praised his character: "A kinder-hearted fellow you seldom ever see"; and it condemned Jim Murphy: "Oh, what a scorching Jim will get when Gabriel blows his horn."
The "Ballad of Jesse James" was probably percolating through folk channels shortly after that outlaw's death in 1882, although printed versions don't appear until about 1900. There are some three dozen variants of the ballad, but they all make Jesse a folk hero. Most of them include a stanza in which he "took from the rich and gave to the poor." They also humanize him: "he had a hand, and a heart, and a brain." And not surprisingly they castigate his slayer, Bob Ford, as "a dirty little coward."
Folktales, many of them embodying classic motifs, also began to be attached to Jesse's name. Jesse and Frank encounter a widow who is about to lose her home because she can't meet the mortgage. The kind-hearted brothers lend her the necessary money, and then retrieve it by holding up the banker as he rides back to town. Jesse's trickery is highlighted as much as his generosity. He reverses the shoes of his horses to lead posses in the opposite direction; assuming a disguise and a bumpkin's demeanor, he joins a posse searching for himself. And the outlaw's primitive sense of humor is also revealed. Seated on a train next to an unsuspecting detective, he tells the man that he is in the tombstone business.'
Unconsciously, the creators of such lore were helping fashion American counterparts of Old World folk figures. As Theodore Roosevelt observed, "there is something very curious in the reproduction here on this continent of essentially the conditions of ballad growth which obtained in medieval England, including, by the way, sympathy for the outlaw, Jesse James taking the place of Robin Hood." The Trickster, for example, is a well-known figure in world folklore. While real-life outlaws do pull tricks to escape capture, folklore expands such episodes (or invents them) for an audience which evidently enjoys seeing the pursued outwit the pursuer.
Folklore in Missouri and elsewhere also saw Jesse and Frank James as rebels-with-a-cause. The post-war policies of the Republican administration seemed vindictive to some of the former Southern adherents. Hence the James gang's robberies of what were presumed to be Yankee-owned banks and trains seemed heroic rather than criminal to many. The "Boys" left farmers alone, so folk tradition said, and robbed only pot-bellied monopolists. Identification of any outlaw with such concepts is one sign of an emergent Robin Hood legend.
The post-1900 period saw the "Western" emerge from its paperback origins into the respectability of hardbound publication. Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902), which marked the changeover, incorporated a subplot involving rustling. The title character's friendship with the rustler Steve introduced the dilemma of personal loyalty in conflict with the obligations of social and legal codes. This dilemma was to be explored in many later novels where outlawry was the theme.
A group of writers headed by Zane Grey, and including William MacLeod
Raine and Charles Alden Seltzer, began to fill in what would become the classic format of the Western. Their fictional heroes, regardless of occupation, were larger than life size. Grey strove for authentic historical background in his novels, but his characters were all superheroes. There never was an actual gunfighter to match Jim Lassiter in Riders of the Purple Sage. The rustler Oldring in that same novel was extraordinarily humane, too much so to reflect the outlaws of the real world.
Yet Grey's novels, populated as they were with robbers and rustlers, reveal many aspects of western development. Historically, there was a thin line between lawmen and outlaws, and such personalities as Frank Canton or Henry Brown might be cited as examples of those who stepped from one side to the other. Fiction writers used this situation quite frequently. What might be called the mixed-identities plot, reminiscent of Restoration drama, is a recurrent one. The suave and respectable banker or rancher is secretly the mastermind of a rustling operation. The desperate outlaw on the other hand is actually a cattle detective or a U.S. marshal working "under cover." Such is the case in one of Grey's most popular novels, Nevada (1928). This is the story of gunman-outlaw Jim Lacy, who, it turns out, is really a detective for the Cattlemen's Association. Or in Shadow on the Trail (1946), Wade Holden is a survivor of the Sam Bass gang. However his "good badman" status is achieved when he breaks up a rustling gang in Arizona, with the result that the pursuing Texas Rangers decide to let him go free.
Another standard for Grey and others is the "frame-up" plot. The hero is forced into outlawry, at least temporarily, by an ingenious villain who traps him with a murder indictment or a rustling charge. The protagonist must clear himself of the frame-up, because the legal machinery is either inoperative or under the control of the villain. In the novels, characters placed in such situations always express their admiration for the common law which is administered through the courts. But they also recognize that the unsettled conditions of the frontier society in which they live make this law inapplicable. Consequently, the hero of the story, whether nominally lawman or outlaw, must accomplish what the official legal system cannot. This extreme freedom of action, the absolute individualism, is what makes many Westerns part of a romantic tradition.
While Grey and others were shaping the main tradition in novelistic fiction, some authors were reinterpreting the characters of actual outlaws. In 1903, Walter Woods wrote a play entitled Billy the Kid. The drama viewed this outlaw sympathetically, as a wronged and misunderstood youth, thus reversing the dime novel portrait of a smirking psychopath. Woods used the dramatist's prerogative of rearranging history, allowing the Kid to escape to Mexico in the final act instead of being killed by Pat Garrett.
Interestingly, Garrett himself had helped lay the foundation for this more favorable depiction by co-authoring The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid, published in 1882. Garrett was politically ambitious, so in this biography he would hardly say that the outlaw he'd shot was an insignificant punk. Instead, the Kid becomes "the peer of any fabled brigand on record." At any rate, the Woods play marked the beginning of a revisionist cycle which was to see Billy the Kid transformed from a self-centered mercenary into a romantic idealist.
The major contributor to this changed interpretation was Walter Noble Burns. His pseudo-biographical Saga of Billy the Kid (1926) is often placed on the fiction shelf by discerning librarians. Burns did indeed interview New Mexicans who had known the outlaw some forty-five years before. But time had softened memories of that violent era, and in addition Burns fully intended to make the outlaw a legendary figure. So the Kid is "under mystic protection," and "destined for a genial immortality." The novelistic qualities of the Saga were fully appreciated by a Hollywood studio, which purchased the film rights and produced the first major Billy the Kid in 1930.
Burns also stimulated the creation of "folklore" about the outlaw. A music publisher sent a copy of the Saga to the Reverend Andrew Jenkins, and suggested that he compose a song based on it. The result was the ballad Billy the Kid, which is thus of commercial and literary rather than folk origins. However, most of those who hear renditions of it, most notably that recorded by Woody Guthrie, assume that it dates from the cow camps of the 1880s. This ballad helped to circulate some of the legends about the Kid; viz., "There are twenty-one men I have put bullets through / And Sheriff Pat Garrett will make twenty-two."
The lawmen of history also received literary attention in the twenties. Garrett and Hickok were the best known of these, and both were interest because of controversial aspects of their careers. In Garrett's case this was the view (held by Bums among others) that he had been a Judas for shooting his erstwhile friend, the Kid. But Eugene Manlove Rhodes in his fiction cast the lawman in a favorable light. Pasó por Aquí (1926) is a novelette about an outlaw, Ross McEwen. After robbing a store, he is pursued across the New Mexico desert by a relentless posse. Stopping at a small ranch, he finds the inhabitants ill with diphtheria. McEwen elects to give up his chance to escape, and instead stays to nurse the family back to health. Pat Garrett finally catches up with the fugitive, but instead of turning him in, permits him to go free, having decided that McEwen has atoned for his crime by being the Good Samaritan. The theme of this story, the relationship of moral justice to formal justice, is what gives it its near-classic quality.
As for Hickok, biographers in the twenties had begun to pick apart his legendary fight with the so-called "McCandless gang." Novelists, on the other hand, depicted him in a more traditional way, as a stock western hero. Emerson Hough's North of 36 (1923) for example, is about a cattle drive from Texas to Kansas. It features a heroine, Taisie Lockhart, who finds all kinds of trouble along the way. In Abilene, where Wild Bill is the marshal, he helps her out of yet another scrape by capturing a band of rustlers. This and other fiction helped to make Hickok, despite the historical revisionism, the personification of the virtuous law-bringer.
In the twenties and thirties a new crop of writers began working with western themes. Quite a few of these authors, such as Ernest Haycox and Max Brand (pseudonym for Frederick Faust), served an apprenticeship in the "pulps." Such magazines as Western Story and Triple X attracted a huge readership during this period. And a composite picture of the western lawman was drawn in the hundreds of these stories in which he was often the central character.
Physically, he is tall, broad-shouldered, and narrow-hipped. Of North European descent, he is often described as blondish and blue-eyed. The eyes are an unusual feature. They are "friendly" until danger appears; then they "blaze," "smolder," or "glint" with steely determination. The lawman's reflexes are always lightning-like or "cat-quick." Extraordinarily adept with weapons, especially the six-shooter, he invariably outdraws and outshoots the thugs who challenge him. He has a physique that makes him well-nigh indestructible, for in story after story he suffers up to a half dozen bullet wounds without any crippling effects.
Morally, the men are thoroughly dedicated to the law. They uphold it with a seriousness that comes from knowing that they carry the burden of establishing "civilization" in an untamed land. Fiction's lawmen personify a Puritan-like concept of Absolute Good as they tangle with villains who represent Absolute Evil. And observing a code of fair play, they give the lawless all the breaks in the inevitable gunfight.
There is little correlation between this character-type and the actual law officers. Aside from the great variety of physical types represented in the group, the gun-wielding feats in Westerns are clearly exaggerated. Modern tests with weapons of the 1865—1890 period, such as the Colt .45, have proved the impossibility of many exploits described in fiction. "Fanning" the gun, bull's-eye accuracy, and the lightning draw are among the conventions which have had to be discarded.
Similarly, the actual peace officers seldom took big risks for the sake of law and order. And many of them lived in something of a moral shadowland. Individuals like Hickok or Wyatt Earp were only semi-professionals, working as lawmen on an irregular basis. Like others they supplemented their incomes by engaging in private enterprise on the side, such as gambling or saloon-keeping. This conduct, rather questionable by present-day standards, contrasts markedly with the absolute dedication and professionalism of the lawmen in western fiction.
Nevertheless, the popularity of the mythical lawmen was proved by the widespread acceptance of novels such as those written by Max Brand. Brand published dozens of Westerns, some under other pseudonyms, and was Zane Grey's rival in commercial success. Like Grey, he was known for his king-sized heroes. Typical of the mythological cast of his novels would be Singing Guns (1938). In this one, Sheriff Caradac enters the hole-in-the-wall country to kill the feared outlaw Rhiannon. But the latter wounds Caradac, and then nurses him back to health. In return, the sheriff helps Rhiannon to go straight. The two thwart an effort by villains to seize a long buried treasure, and, at the conclusion, Rhiannon is cleared of all charges against him.
Brand's choice of language indicates that he sees the two characters as
demigods. Caradac observes at one point: "That thrust of the eyes, far off, gave him a feeling of omniscient divinity. So the Homeric gods glanced down from snowy Olympus to the plains where men lived. So he and Rhiannon lived among the clouds until the winds parted them as with a hand and let their looks go dizzily down." Rhiannon, like Caradac, is a superman. In one day he shoots and skins a deer in five minutes, shoots a running horse through the head at thirty feet, and picks up a man and jumps with him out of the way of a falling derrick. The hazy, idealized locale of the story also suggests the mythic quality of Brand's novels.
A year after leaving New Mexico, Rayburn is persuaded to return. He is elected sheriff on a reform ticket. But on the day of the election, Fay Dutcher holds up the local bank, killing Purcell in the process. Rayburn is thus forced to hunt down the outlaw band made up of his former comrades. He finally kills Dutcher in a gunfight, and then resigns as sheriff.
Aside from its artful adaptation of an historical episode, the novel satisfactorily explores the complexities of law in a frontier society. Clark Rayburn questions the value of that law when it requires him to shoot his old friend. But he decides that "it was all in accordance with his faith in the intangible symbol of the law. None had been more quick than he to learn that the law had a way of forcing a man to one side or the other in the unrelenting fight it waged for supremacy over the range. Rayburn had seen to it that he got on the right side in time. For better or for worse, the die was cast and he must go on." This is in many ways a paradigm of the situations mirrored in countless novels about the West.
By this period also, the legends of the more notorious outlaws continued to unfold in media other than the novel. Jesse James was the subject of Elizabeth Beall Ginty's play, Missouri Legend. First acted on Broadway in 1938, it portrays a clean-living outlaw who loves his wife, is religious, and has a sense of humor. He is also the "Robin Hood of the Ozarks," a characterization exemplified by his gift of money to a helpless widow. And that same year, Billy the Kid, a nimble-footed cow thief in real life, became the subject of an Aaron Copland ballet.
The Kid inspired more literary attention than did Jesse James. Among the possible reasons for his appeal to the imagination are his youth, his comparatively small size (5'8" and 140 pounds), his frequent light-heartedness, and his association with an idealistic cause, i.e., the losing side in the Lincoln County War. The Mexican background also lent an aura of romance to his exploits. The result may be seen not only in numerous biographies but also in a succession of novels which portray him as a likeable youth who became a victim of persecution. In this group are Edward Beverly Mann's Gamblin' Man (1934) and Charles Neider's Authentic Death of Hendry Jones (1956), the latter a thinly disguised "California" version of the Kid's career.
There is also a smaller body of fiction which harkens back to the dime novel stereotype of the devil-in-human-form. Nelson Nye's Pistols for Hire (1941) makes the Kid a cold-blooded mercenary who shoots people in the back. Edwin Corle's Billy the Kid (1953) also makes him a steely-eyed executioner, with "subzero emotions." He threatens to gun down the husband of a Mexican woman with whom he's having an affair. However, the author's claim that this novel "tells the story of Billy the Kid with veracity" would have to be challenged.
There is a similar counter-tradition in the case of Jesse James, although that individual has been less extensively (or successfully) featured in literature. Will Henry's (pseudonym for Henry Allen) Death of a Legend (1954) reversed the usual rebel-with-a-cause interpretation, replacing it with the picture of a psychotic gunman, "an incredibly wicked man." In this novel the outlaw shoots without reason–or remorse. However, the legend had become so well-established that its death was an impossibility.
In the post—World War II period, Louis L'Amour emerged as the successor to Zane Grey and Max Brand in popular appeal. Like Grey, L'Amour takes great pains to achieve accuracy in such details as clothing, weapons, and locale. But his characters belong in the same mythic land with those of Brand's. His outlaws are likeable rogues of the "good badman" type, while his lawmen are the traditional lantern-jawed paragons of dedication and durability. Catlow (1963) is a good example of the reworking of the ageless hounds-and-hares theme. The title character is nominally a criminal, striving to steal a Mexican gold shipment. His antagonist, Marshal Ben Cowan, doggedly pursues the outlaw on both sides of the border. But ultimately, after they take turns rescuing each other from Indians and gunmen, Catlow is able to ride off to live a redeemed life.
While L'Amour may be said to represent the traditional type of Western, the 1960s and '70s also saw a different brand of fiction being published. This was the tongue-in-cheek story where satire and humor were principal ingredients, although the humor was often of an ironic or even bitter kind. Thomas Berger's Little Big Man (1964) devotes two chapters to a Wild Bill Hickok whom readers had never encountered before. He is portrayed as a paranoid individual plagued with self-doubts. Hickok teaches the narrator (Jack Crabb) the finer points of gunfighting, but he is ultimately revealed as an unhappy hero suffering from eye trouble as well as psychological handicaps.
In True Grit (1968), Charles Portis wrote a novel which may have the universality to become a classic. The teenager Mattie Ross is the main character, but much of the action is dominated by U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn. His character certainly deviates from the traditional lawmen of earlier fiction. He is fat, one-eyed, and often liquored-up. He does conform to literary precedent by killing the principal outlaw (Ned Pepper), and then saving the life of the young heroine. But instead of ending with these virtuous acts, the novel describes Cogburn's sordid subsequent career: he loses his badge after killing a man under dubious circumstances; he hires on with the infamous Texan invasion of Wyoming's Johnson County; and at his death he is working with a carnival sideshow. This tarnished figure seems to reflect some of the scepticism about the western experience that was surfacing during the period of the Vietnam War.
At the same time, other writers continued to create serious Westerns, using the by-now-familiar historical episodes and personalities with considerable sophistication. Amelia Bean's Time for Outrage (1967) was a novel based on the Lincoln County War, and showed great knowledge of the finer points in the historiography of that affair. Billy the Kid plays a minor role, for as an "Author's Note" explains: "Bonney never was at any time during the war a leader of any group or contingent."
Ron Hansen's Desperadoes (1979) is a historical novel about the Dalton gang. "Most of this novel is based on verifiable fact," says the author in his preface. The story does indeed parallel history as it follows the brothers from their early days as Indian Territory lawmen to the bloody bank robbery fiasco at Coffeyville, Kansas. This book demonstrated the possibilities of realistic rather than romantic fiction about outlaws. The hardscrabble farms, muddy roads, and one-horse towns of the time are recreated in merciless detail. Novels like this illustrate the continuing possibilities for experimentation with the outlaw character type.
It is noteworthy that some of history's better-known lawmen and outlaws have not been well developed in literature. Butch Cassidy and Wyatt Earp come to mind, since both have received considerable exposure in television and film. It appears that certain conditions must be met before a literary tradition can emerge. These include a gestation period in which the individual's exploits can be seen as usable for purposes of imaginative interpretation.
Wyatt Earp was not a well-known personality before 1931. But before he died in 1929, Earp had related his life story to Stuart M. Lake, who published it as a biography, Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal. This promoted the lawman as a notable figure in western history, and he has been the subject of much non-fiction. But there has been no comparable development of a literary tradition like those featuring Garrett or Hickok. Among the few efforts in this direction is the ubiquitous Will Henry's Who Rides with Wyatt (1955). This portrays a vengeance-bent Earp who "takes the law into his own hands" as he tracks down his brother's slayers.
Similarly, Cassidy (Robert Leroy Parker) appeared late in the history of western outlawry, with a corresponding delay in literary recognition. Cassidy was featured in some of the dime novels at the turn of the century. He also was the subject of folktales in the Rocky Mountain states. Like Jesse James, he helps the proverbial Poor Widow pay off her mortgage. But these beginnings were not followed by a cycle of biographies and novels comparable to those devoted to James or Billy the Kid. Perhaps Cassidy had been born a bit too late for the usual legend to jell.
The outlaw and lawman have endured as subjects for literature since they embody that elemental conflict which has always been part of the human condition. They are characters in a kind of primitive literature, akin to the Icelandic sagas, which seems to be formulaic rather than innovative. Max Brand exaggerated only slightly when he described his technique: "The basic formula I use is simple: good man turns bad, bad man turns good. Naturally, there is considerable variation on the theme . . . There has to be a woman, but not much of a one. A good horse is much more important." But uncomplicated though most of the narratives have been, they still seem to speak to universal concerns. They depict a kind of maximal freedom of decision and action which many readers find appealing. Since most people live under a variety of constraints, they can experience this freedom only vicariously. Furthermore, such stories in their American settings have nostalgic qualities. They take place in the late 1800s, a less complex period in the national history and one when industrialization had not yet affected the West in a major way. So the outlaw in particular represented a pastoral ideal. In a sense, he served as surrogate for all those other westerners who disliked industry, corporations, and progress. His crimes seemed excusable when the victims were wealthy exploiters of the land and its people. For such reasons, it is safe to predict the continued appearance of these figures in western literature.
Primary Sources
Bean, Amelia. Time for Outrage. Garden City: Doubleday, 1967. Interesting novel about New Mexico's Lincoln County War, with Billy the Kid playing a minor role.
Beldon, H. M. Ballads and Songs Collected by the Missouri Folklore Society. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1955. Contains a standard version of the ballad about Jesse James.
Berger, Thomas. Little Big Man. New York: Dial Press, 1964. Novel with an unconventional depiction of Wild Bill Hickok.
Botkin, B. A. A Treasury of Western Folklore. New York: Crown Publishers, 1951. Includes a useful section on "Law and Order, Ltd."
Brand, Max. Singing Guns. New York: Dodd, Mead Company, 1938. A typical popular Western using the outlaw vs. lawman theme.
Burns, Walter Noble. The Robin Hood of El Dorado. New York: Coward-McCann, 1932. A fictionalized "biography" of the California bandit Joaquin Murieta.
–. The Saga of Billy the Kid. Garden City: Doubleday, Page, 1926. Represented as a biography, this book has a great deal of fictional material.
Corle, Edwin. Billy the Kid. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1953. A novel which depicts the Kid as a cold-blooded killer.
Field, Peter. Law Badge. New York: William Morrow, 1940. A well-written novel which explores the conflict between obligations to the law and personal friendship.
Garrett, Pat. The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid. 1882. Reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954. Garrett helped create the legend of Billy the Kid.
Ginty, Elizabeth Beall. Missouri Legend. New York: Random House, 1938. A play with a sympathetic characterization of Jesse James.
Gray, Carl. A Plaything of the Gods. Boston: Sherman & French, 1912. A pretentious novel about Joaquin Murieta.
Grey, Zane. Nevada: A Romance of the West. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928. One of Grey's most popular novels, it tells of an outlaw who is really on the side of the law.
–. Shadow on the Trail. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946. Another of Grey's novels dealing with a good badman.
Hansen, Ron. Desperadoes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979. An historical novel about the Dalton gang.
Henry, Will. Death of a Legend. New York: Random House, 1954. A novel in which Jesse James is the embodiment of evil.
–. Who Rides with Wyatt: The Strange and Lonely Story of the Last of the Great Lawmen. New York: Random House, 1955. One of the few efforts at fictional interpretation of Wyatt Earp.
Hough, Emerson. North of 36. New York: D. Appleton, 1923. A traditional Western with Wild Bill Hickok as one of the characters.
Ingraham, Prentiss. Wild Bill, the Pistol Prince. New York: Beadle & Adams, 1881. A quasi-biographical narrative.
Jenardo, Don. The True Life of Billy the Kid. New York: Frank Tousey, 1881. A purported biography with many imaginative details.
L'Amour, Louis. Catlow. New York: Bantam Books, 1963. An outlaw-against lawman story by a best-selling novelist.
Mann, Edward Beverly. Gamblin' Man. New York: William Morrow, 1934. A novel with a sympathetic portrayal of Billy the Kid.
Morrison, John. The Life of Billy the Kid, a Juvenile Outlaw. New York: John W. Morrison, 1881. A typical early dime novel featuring a bloodthirsty Billy the Kid.
Neider, Charles. The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956. A novel set in California, but based on the Lincoln County War and the career of Billy the Kid.
Nye, Nelson. Pistols for Hire. New York: Macmillan, 1941. Billy the Kid is a despicable back-shooter in this story.
Portis, Charles. True Grit. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968. A classic novel involving a memorable character who is a U.S. marshal.
Rhodes, Eugene Manlove. Once in the Saddle and Pasó por Aquí. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1927. The second of these is Rhodes's classic tale of an outlaw and the lawman Pat Garrett.
Ridge, John Rollin. The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit. 1854; rpt. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955. This book started the whole Murieta legend.
Woods, Walter. Billy the Kid. In America's Lost Plays. Vol. 8. Edited by Garrett Leverton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940. This 1903 melodrama did much to romanticize Billy the Kid.
Secondary Sources
Adams, Ramon. Burs Under the Saddle. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964. A combined bibliography and critique which evaluates a number of books about outlaws and lawmen for their historical accuracy.
–. Six Guns and Saddle Leather: A Bibliography of Books and Pamphlets on Western Outlaws and Gunmen. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969. The standard, exhaustive bibliography on the subject.
Boatright, Mody C. "The Western Bad Man as Hero." Publications of the Texas Folklore Society 27 (1957): 96—105. Perceptive essay.
Cawelti, John G. The Six-Gun Mystique. Bowling Green, Ohio: The Popular Press, 1971. A sophisticated analysis of plots and characters in western fiction and films.
Clough, Wilson. "The Cult of the Bad Man of the West." Texas Quarterly 5 (Autumn 1962): 11—20. Westerners seem to exult in their badman traditions.
Deutsch, James I. "Jesse James in Dime Novels: Ambivalence Towards an Outlaw Hero." Dime Novel Roundup 45 (February 1976): 13—19. Discusses the changing interpretations of the outlaw's character in the sub-literature.
Dobie, J. Frank. Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1942. Includes a short chapter on the badman tradition.
Dykes, J. C. Billy the Kid: The Bibliography of a Legend. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1952. An informative, extensively annotated study of the Billy the Kid interpretations.
Easton, Robert. Max Brand, the Big "Westerner. " Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970. Fine discussion of the work of one of the most popular of western authors.
Folsom, James K. The American Western Novel. New Haven: College and University Press, 1966. Has an illuminating chapter on "Good Men and True" which is about sheriffs and badmen.
Inciardi, James A., et al. Historical Approaches to Crime. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Books, 1977. Contains a good section on "The Wild West Industry"; how dime novelists and magazine writers exploited western themes, especially outlawry.
Jackson, Carlton. Zane Grey. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1973. Excellent critical analysis of Grey's works, including those with rustlers and sheriffs as characters.
Jones, Daryl E. "Clenched Teeth and Curses: Revenge and the Dime Novel Outlaw Hero." Journal of Popular Culture 7 (Winter 1973): 652—665. Astute analysis of revenge theme.
–. The Dime Novel Western. Bowling Green, Ohio: The Popular Press, 1978. Good survey of the major themes in the genre.
Lee, Hector. "Tales and Legends in Western American Literature." Western American Literature 9 (February 1975): 239—254. Discusses some of the legends about outlaws.
Leithead, J. Edward. "The Outlaws Rode Hard in Dime Novel Days." American Book Collector 19 (December 1968): 13—19. Useful analysis of novels about the James brothers.
Settle, William A., Jr. Jesse James Was His Name. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966. Good discussion of folklore and fiction about the outlaw.
Sonnichsen, C. L. "The Wyatt Earp Syndrome." American West 7 (May 1970): 26—28, 60—62. An examination of contemporary Westerns, with special attention to Earp.
Steckmesser, Kent L. The Western Hero in History and Legend. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965. Traces the legends of Wild Bill Hickok and Billy the Kid in literature and folklore.
–. "Robin Hood and the American Outlaw: A Note on History and Folklore." Journal of American Folklore 79 (June 1966): 348—356. Discusses the prototypical pattern for the Robin Hood type of outlaw.
Wilgus, D. K. "The Individual Song: Billy the Kid." Western Folklore 30 (July 1971): 226—234. Discusses the authorship and recording history of the ballad.
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