World Westerns

The European Writer and the American West

ONLY WHEN CONFRONTED by the shock of seeing western films in translation–on hearing the white-Stetsoned cowman growl "Hände Hoch!" while his lips are forming the English words, "Better put up your hands"–or when confounded by the greater shock of seeing German actors playing "Cowboys und Indianer" in German-written, German-produced western films, do some Americans experience an intellectual epiphany, a realization that Europeans (along with Asians, South Americans, Australians, and nearly everyone else) have distinctive, indigenous, deep-seated literary and cultural traditions regarding life in the American West. This literature-based mythos has shaped their thinking–in Europe at least–for more than 150 years and continues to shape non-American thinking about the American West, the United States, and its inhabitants. The occasional American who probes beneath postcard views of Europe may witness the Karl May Festival of the West at Bad Segeberg, watch Spanish youth don sombreros and play at rancheros, or read over the shoulder of an engrossed commuter on the Paris Métro as he enjoys a George Fronval Western–perhaps the popular Les Prospecteurs de la Sonora–or observe English schoolchildren as they exchange school uniforms for after-school play in plastic buckskins and fake coonskin caps. Such an observer soon understands that the myth of the American West belongs not only to North Americans, but to all mankind. And the origins and continuity of that myth lie in the literary milieu of several countries, only one of which is the United States.

In fact, a closer examination of the reading habits of men and women– and boys and girls–in nearly any literate nation will demonstrate the power of the American Western, regardless of geopolitics, to sweep its readers into exotic adventures beyond the borders of their own land and time into a Never-Never land in the American Far West. And an even closer examination of the literature of European nations reveals that most of these nations have a longstanding Wild West literary tradition which rivals and in some ways exceeds that of the United States. The sheer weight of the thousands of western novels and stories written by European authors has evolved a European-American western literature which, while little known and even less understood by North Americans, and though often more awkward than its American counterparts in its attempts at artistry and at cultural, anthropological, and topographical authenticity, not only mirrors nationalistic pride and national values, but often depicts a West stranger and more fantastic than the West evoked in the wildest American dime novel.

I

It was not long after the discovery of America that European writers began to shape exotic images of the garden of the New World and its savage but courtly inhabitants. By the eighteenth century such images had become received cultural traditions as Europeans thought of America as an Arcadia inhabited by Noble Savages possessed of Edenic manners and civilization, an image enhanced not only by titillating Indian captivity narratives, but by countless persuasive "America Letters"–epistles sent home to friends and relatives by hordes of European emigrants to America, especially towards the end of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century.

This distorted and romantic vision of the New World was heightened by François-René Vicomte de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), a disciple of Rousseau, who gave America a special touch of gloire. Drawing upon his own six-month-long visit to the United States, Chateaubriand wrote Atala (1801), René ( 1802), and Les Natchez (1826), and popularized, throughout Europe, in many translations and editions, his highly imaginative, romantic rendering of the American landscape and the Noble Savage. The beautiful garden of Chateaubriand's paradise was peopled by savages who combined Edenic simplicity with all of the attributes of the best of European culture– including a surprising frequency of blushing, weeping and fainting–to present, in statuesque poses, beautifully chiseled bronze bodies topped with hair as fine as a "veil of gold." 1 The impact of such splendor on nineteenth-century European readers was equally remarkable, and they turned avid literary attention to this "brave new world, / That has such people in 't!"

Chateaubriand's enormous success in touching this mythic chord prepared the European reader for the works of James Fenimore Cooper. After The Pioneers, Cooper's first work published in Europe, burst upon the continental consciousness in 1823, each of his works met with a phenomenal reception. In his excellent study, Ray Allen Billington writes that Coopermania raged "at fever heat for more than a decade" in Europe; and such enthusiasm continues to the present, with only a slightly abated intensity. 2 The Pioneers, for example, was published in France and England in 1823, almost simultaneous with its publication in the United States, and within a year it was translated into two German editions and, shortly thereafter, into Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, and, during the next decade, into other European languages. 3 Through the remainder of the nineteenth century, many additional translations of Cooper's works appeared regularly in Germany, Italy, France, Spain, and in every other European nation, as well as in Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa. The Russians compared Cooper to Shakespeare, the Germans compared him to the Teutonic knights, the French called him "le Walter Scott des sauvages," and an early Spanish review of The Last of the Mohicans praised him for his ability to awaken in the reader "a voluptuous feeling of noble sensibility." 4

Cooper's enormous popularity and the reception of Chateaubriand's American novels combined, then, with a vigorous romanticism, unrest evoked by widespread political upheaval, and testimonials from the increasing horde of emigrants to the New World to stir in Europe, especially in Germany, Norway, France and England, an appetite for a fiction which would satisfy the ravenous hunger of Europeans for things American, things western. This appetite would attract to the American West the attention of some of the best–and the worst–European writers and begin an outpouring of literature (and, later, films) which continues to the present. The collected impress of such fiction on the European imagination has shaped and continues to shape a distinctively European, mythically powerful, but often distorted image of the American West and its inhabitants. A few limited examples from representative European nations will make this point clear.

II

It seems to have been the Germans who were most nearly affected by the Europamüdigkeit that seemed to flood Europe in the wake of the political and social unrest of the nineteenth century. Such restiveness, stirred by a vigorous German romanticism, turned German minds to effecting literal or imaginative escape into the American West, the "land vaguely realizing westward," where thousands of Germans found focus for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's poetic declaration, "Amerika, du hast es besser." German response to the myth of the West as exploited in the exotic novels of Chateaubriand and the Leatherstocking (Lederstrumpf ) Saga of Cooper spawned a host of imitators, and it was not long, as D. L. Ashliman notes, until "stories of Western adventure constituted a substantial portion of nineteenth century Germany's recreational reading." 5 Hundreds of German, Austrian, and Swiss writers–most typically and notably Charles Sealsfield, Friedrich Armand Strubberg, Friedrich Gerstäcker, Balduin Möllhausen, and Karl May–drew upon firsthand (and imaginary) experiences in the Far West to produce a body of uneven but exciting western fiction which not only influenced and continues to shape German attitudes but had a profound impact upon the thought of other European readers and writers as well. Even the German Boy Scout movement, Die Pfadfinder (Pathfinders), takes its name and some of its philosophy from the works of this influential band of German Western writers. One of the earliest and most important of these writers is Karl Postl (1793–1864), a Moravian monk who wrote under the name of "Charles Sealsfield." During his lifetime Sealsfield was called "der grosse Unbekannte"

(the great unknown one) because of his success in keeping his identity secret from the time he fled his monastery until after his death in Switzerland. Sealsfield's eighteen volumes, most of them about life in the American Southwest, began appearing following the first of his five visits to the United States. Though Sealsfield insisted that he had not been influenced by Cooper, his popular first novel, Tokeah; or, the White Rose (1829), followed the publication of Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans by three years and follows Cooper in relating the poignant story of the last chief of a oncepowerful tribe. Sealsfield's best-known work is Das Kajütenbuch (The Cabin Book, 1841), which contains his best-known story, "The Prairie on the Jacinto," a tale of the Texas war for independence.

An important link in the European novel between Cooper and the popular western works of Karl May at the end of the nineteenth century, Sealsfield criticizes American materialism and coarseness, especially in comparison to a superior German culture, but he glorifies the westward movement and the hardy American frontiersman and is full of praise for American liberties, especially the freedom of the press, and he underscores the importance of such freedom for Germans who were struggling through a troubled era of repression and reaction. His works became best sellers not only in his native land but in France, England, Austria, Hungary and the Scandinavian countries–as well as in the United States. He is, claims Carl Wittke, a novelist of merit who "rightly deserves the place belatedly accorded him as an important figure, both in the history of literature and the history of immigration." 6

Following the lead of Sealsfield, Otto Ruppius, 7 and others who transformed American adventures into German fictional fantasies, Friedrich Armand Strubberg (1806–1889) hammered away on one key–his own adventurous life in Texas during his quarter of a century in the Southwest. Strubberg, who wrote his novels under the penname of "Armand," fled Germany in 1826 following an illegal duel to become an agent for a number of German princes who quixotically sought to establish a feudal state in America. 8 The results of his long years in the Southwest are found in his subsequent fifty-seven novels and his popular book of western adventures, Amerikanische Jagd-und Reiseabenteuer aus meinem Leben in den westlichen Indianergebieten Amerikas (Hunting and Travel Adventures from My Life in Western Indian Territory, 1858). It is Friedrich Gerstäcker (1816–1892), however, who is often credited with being the first writer–anywhere–of "pure" Westerns. In 150 volumes of travel accounts and adventure novels, nearly all of which deal with the American West, Gerstäcker may have been the first to portray a West "conditioned by terrain, frontier social organization, and the realities of time and place." 9 After Gerstäcker's first period of residence in the United States (1837–1842), during which he left a job as a clerk in a New York City cigar store to hunt game and travel from Niagara and Ontario to Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana, he returned to Bremen, where, in 1844, he published his first book, Steif-und Jagdzüge durch die Vereinigten Staaten Nord Amerikas (Rambling and Hunting Trips Through the United States of North America). 10 Gerstäcker's many volumes are distinctive, for they fuse authentic experiences from his three trips to the United States with an intensive interest in outlawry to create a coarsely naturalistic picture of the American frontier which reflects the real lives of farmers and frontiersmen who live amidst outlawry and frontier justice. His most popular novels, for example, Die Flusspiraten des Mississippi (River Pirates of the Mississippi, 1848), Die Moderatoren (The Moderators, n. d.) , and Die Regulatoren in Arkansas (The Regulators in Arkansas, three volumes, 1846), all loosely string many bloody adventures in plots which feature outlaw depredations, organized pursuit, apprehension, and swift retribution. In Die Regulatoren in Arkansas, Gerstäcker glorifies lynch law with the vivid mass execution, at the end of the novel, of sixty-four outlaws! Though Gerstäcker's novels are artistically inferior to Sealsfield's works, they were immensely influential in promoting German emigration to the American West and they continue popular even today. 11

Like Gerstäcker, Balduin Möllhausen was an authority on life in the Far West. He drew on his experience as an artist-topographer on Paul Wilhelm von Wurrtenberg's expedition to the Rocky Mountains (1851–1852), on the Whipple expedition (1853–1854), and on the Ives expedition up the Colorado River (1858), to create a western fiction grounded in authenticity. 12 Möllhausen's first novel, Der Halbindianer (The Half-Breed), appeared in 1861, and was followed by an outpouring of 178 volumes of travel accounts, narratives and novels, books so widely read that Möllhausen became the most popular German writer in Europe during the decades of the 1860s and 1870s. His most highly praised and best-known novel is Das Mormonenmädchen (1864), in which he rails against the Mormon Church in Utah and solemnly warns European girls against the seductive enticements of Mormon missionaries. More typical of his adventure novels, however, is Der Halbindianer, in which the half-breed son of a southern planter attempts, through a series of thrilling adventures, to prove himself the rightful heir to his father's estate. Crammed with authentic information and anthropology about the West and its inhabitants, this novel illustrates Möllhausen's sustained ability to tell a fast-paced, exciting tale.

It is, however, Karl May (1842–1912) who combines the best traits of all these–and many other–German writers to triumph and to endure. It is May's distinctive image of the American West, spun through nearly forty volumes of western lore translated into twenty languages, including Braille and English, which led Der Spiegel, a Geman newsweekly, to proclaim that "May has advanced to be a kind of Praeceptor Germaniae, whose influence, without doubt, is greater than that of any other German author between Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Thomas Mann." 13 May's influence on the German and European mind is phenomenal, perpetuated as it is in more than fortyfive million copies of his works sold in Germany alone since his death and an estimated current sales of one million volumes each year. His readers have come from every social and educational level and include Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer and Thomas Mann, and since 1970 the Karl-May-Gesellschaft has published an annual Karl May Jahrbuch in which scholars probe every aspect of May's personal life and literary development.

May's life was an unlikely one to lead to such prominence. Born in Saxony to a poor weaver family, May overcame a period of blindness to excel in school. His ambition of becoming a teacher, however, was destroyed when he was convicted of the theft of a watch. Unable thereafter to gain a teacher's certificate, May drifted into crime and was arrested for fraud and for impersonation of a Leipzig secret service agent. Convicted several times of fraud, May spent a total of eight years in prison. It was during his prison terms that he turned his lively imagination to outlining, writing, and even publishing adventure tales for sensational German tabloids, and on his release from Zwickau prison in 1874 he began a new career as an editor for family magazines and as a freelance writer. May published volume after volume about the adventures of his two alter egos, Kara ben Nemsi, in Arabia, and Old Shatterhand, in the American West. His collected works, still in print, in paper-and hardback, fill seventy volumes, nearly half of which are set in the American West.

Steeped in the western writings of his forerunners, May combined extensive reading with a fecund imagination and exhaustive research in atlases, geographical and ethnological journals, encyclopedias and dictionaries to depict an "authentic" American West. May himself never visited the United States until shortly before his death, but increasingly he drifted into the error of insisting that his tales were true-to-life accounts of his own adventures. He began signing public relations photographs of himself taken in sombrero, buckskins, and hip boots, armed with his famous Henrystutzen (Henry Rifle) and Bärentöter (Kill-Bear), weapons which, in Europe, are better known than Natty Bumppo's KillDeer. May's insistence on perpetuating this fraud on his readers led skeptics to expose his prison background and May found himself, like Cooper, involved in numerous libel lawsuits which would continue for the rest of his life. His stormy career, further threatened by a scandalous divorce and rapid remarriage, did not, however, impair book sales, and his influence continues unabated. Today, thousands of fans gather at Bad Segeberg in Schleswig-Holstein to enjoy the annual Karl May Festival, established in 1952. Karl May films continue to be produced and patronized by millions of Europeans, and a variety of products, from "Old Shatterhand" card games and dolls to "Winnetou" camping equipment, continue to attract the European buyer.

Indeed, Old Shatterhand and Winnetou have become tangible and universal European symbols of the American western experience. In Winnetou I May introduces his readers to Old Shatterhand, a short, blond, cigarsmoking German named Karl (called "Scharlih" by his sidekick, Winnetou). Karl, a staunch and brilliant young Catholic, has come to the United States as a tutor. He soon joins a railway surveying party, carrying the two amazing rifles given him by Mr. Henry, the famous gunmaker, who perceives in Karl the makings of an unparalleled Westmann, as May calls his frontiersmen. Tutored by other German Westmänner, Karl soon earns his nickname in hand-to-hand battle with a band of Kiowa Indians. Disdaining weapons, the powerful Karl lays out his opponents with one blow of his fist and is immediately christened with the battlename of "Old Shatterhand." "So there I was," Karl–Old Shatterhand says, "equipped, without my assent, with a war name that I have carried ever since. That is the custom in the West." 14 May's works are packed with such "authentic customs," and generations of Europeans have grown to maturity certain that Americans christen each other with such names as those found in May's works: Old Surehand, Old Death, Old Firehand.

As the surveying party moves West, Old Shatterhand and his companions are captured by the Mescalero Apaches and are taken to the tribal pueblo, where Shatterhand, through strength and wits, saves himself and his party and becomes a blood brother to Winnetou, the son of Intschu-tschuna, the Apache chief. Winnetou educates the brilliant Shatterhand in the ways of the Indian, and Shatterhand thus adds Apache and Navajo to his astounding store of languages, which eventually includes English, French, Italian, Spanish, Arabic (six dialects), Sioux, Comanche, Snake, Ute and Kiowa. But that is not all: at one point Shatterhand foils a robbery by two Chinese coolies who plot their crime, alas, within earshot, not realizing that "Old Shatterhand had also spent time in China during his long and far-flung world travels, and had an excellent command of Chinese." 15

Winnetou and Shatterhand (and his wonder horse Hatatitla) enter into a classic relationship which will last fourteen remarkable years and make them more famous through the German West than Deerslayer and Chingachgook or the Lone Ranger and Tonto in the United States. It is a noble companionship, in which Winnetou is almost an equal to his white brother. Winnetou is, sadly, the last chief of his tribe, a tribe which is being destroyed in the Götterdämmerung which May sees as being played out between the white and red man. Winnetou, however, is more than a mere Indian; he is a red demigod. Handsome, brilliant, educated and sensitive, he has "an earnest, manly, beautiful face, the cheekbones of which barely stood out; [it] was almost Roman, and the color of his skin was a dull, light brown, with a breath of bronze floating over it." 16 When Shatterhand first sees Winnetou at home, he is stunned by the Indian's gentle and civilized aspect: [Winnetou] was dressed in a light, linen robe, wore no weapons and held a book in his hand. On the cover of the book, in great gold letters, the word "Hiawatha" was legible. This Indian, this son of a people that many consider as "savage," could apparently not only read, but possessed the mind and taste for culture. Longfellow's famous poem in the hand of an Apache Indian! I would never have dreamed of such a thing! l7

Nscho-tschi, Winnetou's sister, falls deeply in love with Shatterhand. Though he has strong feelings about miscegenation, Shatterhand holds out hope for her, if she will become an educated Christian. En route to St. Louis and a Catholic school, Nscho-tschi and her father, the chief, are murdered by Santer, an evil Yankee. Shatterhand is thus relieved of the hindrance of May's only heroine and is launched into two additional volumes of Winnetou, both devoted to the pursuit and destruction of Santer–and the pathetic death of Winnetou. So, from St. Louis to San Francisco, from Yellowstone to Mexico, Shatterhand and Winnetou roam the West, lending assistance and moral admonition, defending the oppressed, restoring order, avenging murders and rescuing captives from unenlightened savages, perverted Yankees, evil half-breeds, and scheming Mormons.

And through it all, Germania is triumphant. May thoroughly Teutonizes the West–and Winnetou–filling the region with transplanted German customs and hearty Westmänner who, on doffing their coonskin caps, reveal their origins through German songs, German reading, and German customs. May's transplanted Germans radiate the spirit of nationalism that had moved von Fallersleben to pen the stirring "Lied der Deutschen," with its ringing refrain, embodied in May's German West, "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, / Über alles in der Welt."

From Sealsfield through May, "Howgh," "Uff uff" and "Ich habe gesprochen" join with "Hände hoch!" as ubiquitous "western" counterphrases as familiar to modern Europeans as "When you call me that, smile," or "Hi-ho Silver" are to Americans. And modern German writers, from Franz Kafka and Friedrich von Gagern to the mysterious B. Traven, have continued to turn to the West for subject matter and background." In whatever form, Germans have responded deeply for nearly two centuries to western exotica, escape, entertainment and art, and have demonstrated the truth of Herbert Frenzel's assertion that the epochs of European knighthood and the American frontier are the two "realms of fantasy" most attractive to German writers. Sensitive to this attraction, such German writers have transformed "die Heldensaga Amerikas" l9 into a powerfully mythic and heroic epoch which continues to speak to our time-–auf Deutsch!

III

From the steppes of Russia and the cities of Poland and Italy to the villages of the Spanish plains, the zest for literature of the American West continued through much of the nineteenth century. This fervor, centered primarily in Germany, spilled over the borders of German lands into every nation of Europe. In every case, the western works of popular German writers, including those already considered, and others not considered (such as the fifty-nine western adventures of Wilhelm Frey, or Fricks), thrilled Europeans from Holland to Greece. Nineteenth-century Norwegians, for example, elevated Frey and Möllhausen to top position among their nation's most popular writers and read the translations of English Western author Mayne Reid as well. And in the twentieth century Karl May continues a best seller in many European nations.

Such German success stimulated writers throughout Europe to turn their pens to western subjects. Emilio Salgari, in Italy, and Ferenc Belányi, in Hungary, joined France's Gustave Aimard and England's Mayne Reid in producing hundreds of sensational western adventures. And the enthusiasm endures. A recent Hungarian anthology, Vadnyugat (Wild West) featuring stories by Owen Wister, Bret Harte and Vardis Fisher, sold fifty thousand copies-one for every five hundred citizens 20 –and France's George Fronval published six hundred books about the American West–fifty-four of them about Buffalo Bill–between 1925 and his death in 1975. 21 Several Spanish writers continue to produce as many as sixty titles each year, titles such as The Gallows Can Wait and Two Men Too Many in Tucson. 22

Norway is typical of Scandinavian–and European–response to the West. After the nineteenth-century fervor for travel accounts gave way to Westerns toward the end of the century, Norwegians turned to foreign– generally German–fiction about the West. It was not long, however, until Norway's own Rudolf Muss began a career in which he would write more than five hundred accounts of wildly fictitious Indian fights, 23 accounts read with such zest that Muss has earned a place among the five top-selling authors in the history of Norwegian literature. 24 Professor Billington notes that western titles were so much in demand in Norway that some authors, such as the writer of Among the Gold Prospectors of California, falsified their titles in order to gain readers. This book, for instance, is really about gold prospecting in Australia. 25

The Norwegian's love affair with the Western continues. Few modern Scandinavians have been able to resist the attraction of Westerns by Norway's Kjell Halbing (1935– ), who writes under the pen name of "Louis Masterson." Masterson, formerly a banker, has published over sixty novels–most of them written before he made his first visit to the United States. One of Norway's most widely read authors, he has sold nearly twenty million books about a hero named Morgan Kane, an Old Shatterhand kind of scout-Westmann, but with a sex life, and thus a difference. Masterson's books have become popular in British Commonwealth countries since they first began appearing in English translation in 1970. His works, along with the popularity of a number of Wild West magazines, attest to the continuing interest of Scandinavian readers in the phenomenon of the American West in Europe.

It is the French, however, who are probably second only to the Germans in their zest for western fiction. Since the era of Rousseau, the French have manifested a nostalgia for the primitive life. And while the French were generally immune to the "America fever" of nineteenth-century emigration, they were not immune to the lure of the West, which La Salle had called the "best land in the world," and which Chateaubriand praised with such vigor. The French West, whether in the modern fiction of George Fronval, or in the traditional French Westerns of Paul Duplessis, Gabriel Ferry, or Gustave Aimard, transforms the American West into a region mirroring French customs, values and desires, and the result is a West which is just as exciting–and just as distorted–as the German and Scandinavian Wests.

Two of the best-known writers of French Westerns are Paul Duplessis and Gabriel Ferry. In Les Mormons (1859), Duplessis joined Möllhausen, Karl May, Mayne Reid, and others in distorting Mormonism by recounting how the president of the Mormon Church persuades two Parisian sisters to enter his harem. They must be rescued by their brother, who bravely follows them across two continents. Duplessis's other well-known works, such as Les Peaux-Rouges (The Redskins, 1864), are also chase novels packed with ambushes, scalpings and Indian warfare. Even more popular, however, were the works of Gabriel Ferry, especially his famous Les Coureurs de bois ( Trailblazers of the Woods, 1850), about Apaches, buffaloes fighting bears, and famous chases–a book made equally popular in Germany through Karl May's redaction–and Les Squatters (The Squatters, 1858), set in savannahs which resemble more the early American wilderness of Chateaubriand's Atala than the authentic topography found in the works of Gustave Aimard.

It is, however, in the more than eighty western novels of Gustave Aimard, the pen name of Oliver Gloux (1818–1883), that French Wild Western tales reached their peak. Aimard, whose works were equally popular in other European countries, was called the "French Fenimore Cooper," and wrote with an authority gained by spending nearly twenty years in North and South America. An awkward writer, a clumsy creator of flawed plots and painful deus ex machina endings, Aimard conveyed to the European reader copious amounts of authentic information about Indian customs and folkways and generally inaccurate information about American attitudes towards the Indian. His books, which swarm with alligators and fights between man and cougar, portray the Yankee as pious, hypocritical and greedy–and Mexicans are not much better. 26 Again, it is the French who leaven the lump of the world.

Aimard's novels, written between 1848 and 1875, had enormous sales, even in England. 27 His first success, and one of his best novels, is Les Trappeurs de l'Arkansas (The Trappers of the Arkansas, 1858); thereafter he produced an astounding number of books, such as Les Pirates des Prairies (Pirates of the Prairies, 1858), often at the rate of one book a month; these were then translated automatically into several European languages. Aimard repeats his protagonist from volume to volume, sometimes slightly changing the name. Valentine Guillois, his most important character, is, like Old Shatterhand, Aimard's alter ego. Valentine is a Parisian who wanders the West doing good, fighting for principles, and engaging in thrilling adventures. But whether the character is Valentine or Loyal Heart, who pursues Indians and villains with two giant bloodhounds, Aimard's characters do not live. His creative strength lies not in believable characters or art, but in stirring narration coupled with apparent authenticity. The result thrilled Europe for most of three decades.

But if the European response to the American West is of a pattern, the English response followed a slightly different cut. Unlike the continental nations, the British were not really weary of themselves; the British Empire was riding the crest of rampant nationalism and imperialism, and Britons, full of dreams, looked at the American West less through the eyes of seekers than through the eyes of exploiters; less as settlers than as conquerors. In England, material progress was ascendant, and the American West was the place to prove one's mettle, to sink or swim, with pluck and luck. English Westerns thus seem to have been based on the assumption that no one would really want to leave England permanently–though many did–just as no one would really want to live in the cultural slough that was the United States–or the American West–though many did.

Little influenced by the works of Cooper, Englishmen were overwhelmed by Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, and by the flood of dime novels in Beadle's American Library and Beadle's Sixpenny Tales. This flood moved British interest in the frontier from Cooper's forests to the prairies of the plainsman, where, probably because of shared culture and language, British Western authors showed more awareness than their European neighbors of current American western history, from mountain men and Mormons to the Gold Rush and the hard life of the settler.

A further incentive to look Far West were the contributions of George Frederick Ruxton, the first and one of the major novelists of the fur trade. Ruxton, a lieutenant in the British army, travelled extensively in the American Southwest, and, in his incomparable Life in the Far West, which he first published serially in Blackwood's Magazine (1848), he became the first writer to utilize the mountain man for the stuff of fiction. His portrait of the ways of the mountain man has had remarkable influence upon the imaginative literature of the fur trade, and his transcription of mountain man lingo has become part of the lingua franca of the literary trapper as found in the works of Fergusson, Manfred, White, and Guthrie. 28

Unlike continental writers, however, most English writers about the West directed their fiction at a juvenile audience. Captain Marryat, Bracebridge Hemyng, Robert M. Ballantyne, G. A. Henty, and Mayne Reid are typical of British writers who wrote about the American West during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Again and again they recount how a young man, falsely accused of improper conduct, clears his name by a trip to the American West, a trip fraught with manly danger and rewarded by eventual restoration of his name and wealth. 29 But while these writers portrayed English manners and life, on desert and prairie, as superior to all others, they made every attempt to educate their youthful audiences, filling their pages with fact and geography, often at the expense of plot and art.

Captain Frederick Marryat (1792–1848), famous for his nautical novels, turned from his seafaring tales to write the popular The Travels and Adventures of Monsieur R. Violet in California, Sonora, and Western Texas (1843), an exciting story heavily plagiarized from Josiah Gregg's Commerce of the Prairies and G. W. Kendall's Narrative of the Texan Santa Fe Expedition. 30 Robert M. Ballantyne ( 1825–1894), who lived in the Canadian West for six years, far exceeded Marryat as a Western writer in producing seventyone popular books about the West, each laden with Scottish-Presbyterian strictures against alcohol and tobacco and insisting upon the white man's responsibility to convert the red man to Christ. His accomplishment was book after book of exciting adventure couched in less-than-exciting prose. 31 Equally popular were Bracebridge Hemyng's (1841–1901) stories in the Jack Harkaway series: Jack Harkaway on the Prairie, Jack Harkaway out West, and many others.

G. A. Henty (1832–1902), however, raised the juvenile Western to a higher artistic level in transforming his visits to the gold fields of California and his ability to write good historical novels into exciting western tales laden with British pluck, intelligence, tenacity, and breeding. Typical of Henty's western works is The Golden Canyon, about two young Englishmen who, with a mysterious map as their guide, pack into the badlands of Arizona in search of a lost gold mine. Overcoming Indians and other obstacles, they return home wealthy, buy shares in a shipping company, and never return to the golden West. Captain Bayley's Heir likewise recounts how Frank Norris, who is wrongly accused of theft, flees England for adventures in the West which enable him to achieve wealth, restore his name, marry his sweetheart, and stand for Parliament.

Most important among British Western writers, however, is Captain Mayne Reid ( 1818–1883), often called the "Giant of the Westerns" because of his more than fifty books about the American West, books which earned him the reputation of being the foremost British adventure writer of his day. 32 Reid was born in Ireland but turned from his apparent destiny as a Presbyterian minister to serve with distinction as a captain in the U.S. Army (1840–1849), seeing action with General Winfield Scott during the Mexican War. Returning to England full of qualified love for Americans and their institutions, Reid published his first book, The Rifle Rangers, in 1850. His second novel, The Scalp Hunters (1851), called by Bernard DeVoto "one of the best Wild West novels," 33 firmed up his resolve to write for "a somewhat more sophisticated audience" and attempt "to do more than tell an exciting story." 34 The Scalp Hunters is the tale of a Creole who has been hired by a Scalp Hunter to hunt Navajos and Apaches; he enjoys many harrowing adventures which culminate in the rescue of the Scalp Hunter's daughter from the Indians. He leaves hundreds of dead bodies in the wilderness as testimony of his skill, and more than a million copies of the book sold in Britain alone during the next forty years testify to the continuing thrills the novel has generated among readers. 35

Reid's many novels, including those he wrote for Beadle between 1868 and 1877, 36 are usually set in the Llano Estacado and southern Texas, where lovely, wooden heroines and noble, static heroes soon find their courses of true love interrupted by villains who steal the heroines. The hero then sets off in pursuit, the thrills of which become the major thrust of the book, culminating in a last-minute rescue, after which the deserving hero marries the lovely girl. This plot is authenticated by the appearance of a variety of villains–intellectually and morally inferior Indians, wicked Catholic priests, and dastardly Mormons, all of whom must eventually bow to the superior skills of the English hero. Reid's mountain men, however, speak the argot established by Ruxton, and Reid's liveliest character, Old Rube, hero of The Scalp Hunters and The War-Trail (1857), is a profane, sinful character reminiscent (in his disappearances) of Old Bill Williams. He has a distinct air of reality about him. Once, for example, when telling about eating turkey buzzard, Old Rube recounts how he seized the bird by the leg, killed and then skinned it; an eager listener then asks, "And ate it?" To which Old Rube replies, in time-honored trapper fashion, "No. It ate me." 37

Through all these hundreds of English novels about the American West, "Rule, Brittania" sounds loudly, as the British follow their continental counterparts in turning the alkali deserts and sagebrush flats of the American West into a British moor. Thus "By Jove," "I say," and other manifestations of the King's English dot the pages of English western fiction, and one very British adventurer, explaining the West to the young heroes of G. Manville Fenn's To the West (1891), says: Nothing like a good tea meal out in the wilds to put life into one. Why I've known days when we've been ready to break down, or give up, or go back; then we've formed camp, got a bit of fire on the way, boiled the kettle with a pinch of tea in it, . . . and been fit to do anything after. 38 Such is the British-American West!

IV

The enduring fascination of European and British readers and writers with the stuff of the Wild West seems to obviate Carl Wittke's assertion that the phenomenon is "nothing more than a phase of nineteenth-century romanticism." 39 It is much more. The fascination for the West endures unabated and has now spread to South America, Japan, Australia, Turkey, Egypt, and Israel. The non-American American West has in recent decades received yet additional impetus through the western film, and Westernsin film and book-are produced and enjoyed today not only in Turkey and Japan, but in the German Democratic Republic, in Czechoslovakia and Italy, and are seriously studied in France. 40

With a literary interest which is now approaching two centuries in duration, it is apparent to even the most chauvinistic American westerner that other nations have a literary and cultural claim on the American West which is every bit as significant as that of the American nation itself. There is and continues to be something attractive in that mythic complex of romance and adventure, of confrontation and flight, that is the American West. This delightful attraction may be sensed, though not defined, in a passage from Les Coureurs de bois, by Gabriel Ferry as redacted by Karl May. The narrator, speaking of the threat of lurking Indians and wild animals, says, "No one could imagine more terrible enemies; the silent forests and the immeasurable prairies are witnesses of heroic deeds which our new European history could never display–deeds which are reminders of the terrible battles of which we read in our sagas and legends." 41 From Chateaubriand and Charles Sealsfield and Gustave Aimard to Karl May, Mayne Reid and Louis Masterson, these terrible battles are revitalized and reenacted in a region which seems ever destined to exert mythic power as the Garden of the World, the Battleground of the Gods–the, in whatever language or accent, American West.

RICHARD H. C. RACROFT,

Brigham Young University

Notes

1. Carl Wittke, "The American Theme in Continental European Literature," The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 28 (June 1941): 6).

2. Billington, Land of Savagery, Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), p. 3. I am indebted to the late Professor Billington for his studies of the European response to the American West and for this exhaustive study, a landmark in the field.

3. See Haldvan Koht, The American Spirit in Europe: A Survey of Transatlantic Influences (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949), p. 108.

4. John D. L. Ferguson, American Literature in Spain (New York: AMS Press, 1966 [1916]), p. 39.

5. D. L. Ashliman, "The American West in Nineteenth-Century German Literature" (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1969), p. 142. This is the best study to date of the German image of the American West.

6. Wittke, pp. 10–11.

7. For more on Otto Ruppius see Frederick F. Schrader, "Otto Ruppius, a Career in America, " American-German Review 9 (Feb. 1943): 28–33; also Ashliman, pp. 28–39. Several of Ruppius's fifteen volumes are Wild Westerns in the style of Gerstäcker and May; the best known of these is his Der Prärieteufel (The Prairie Devil, 1861 ) .

8. See Preston A. Barba, "Friedrich Armand Strubberg," German American Annals 14 (Sept.–Dec. 1912): 175–225; 15 (Jan.–Apr. 1913): 3–63; 15 (May– Aug. 1913): 115–142. Barba, "Emigration to America Reflected in German Fiction," German American Annals 16 (Nov. –Dec. 1914): 202–212.

9. Harrison R. Steeves, "The First of the Westerns," Southwest Review 53 (Winter 1968): 82.

10. This title has occasionally been mistranslated and published as Wild Sports in the Far West.

11. See Alfred Kolb, "Friedrich Gerstäcker and the American Frontier" (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1966); also Wittke, p. 11.

12. See David H. Miller, "The Ives Expedition Revisited: A Prussian's Impressions," Journal of Arizona History 13 (Spr. 1972): 1–25; Ashliman, "The American West in Twentieth-Century Germany," Journal of Popular Culture 2 (Summer 1968): 82–92.

13. "Karl der Deutsche," Der Spiegel 16 (Sept. 12, 1962): 73. See also Richard H. Cracroft, "The American West of Karl May" (M.A. thesis, University of Utah, 1963), and "The American West of Karl May," American Quarterly 19 (Summer 1967): 249–258.

14. May, Winnetou I (Vienna: Carl Ueberreuter Verlag, 1951; first published 1897), p. 154; trans. Richard H. Cracroft.

15. May, Der Schwarze Mustang (The Black Mustang; Vienna: Carl Ueberreuter Verlag, 1951; first published 1896), p. 51. Trans. by Cracroft.

16. May, Weihnacht im Wilden Westen (Christmas in the Wild West; Vienna: Carl Ueberreuter Verlag, 1953; first published 1897), p. 250. Trans. by Cracroft.

17. May, Winnetou I, p. 154.

18. See Ashliman, "The American West in Twentieth-Century Germany," p. 85. Note that von Gagern, an Austrian, treats the West in three of his major works, Der Marterpfahl (1925), Der Tote Mann (1927), and Das Grenzerbuch (1927). B. Traven's major theme, claims Ashliman, is "the conflict between contemporary Mexican Indians and the ruthless advance of civilization" (Ibid., p. 86).

19. Herbert Frenzel, introduction to Western Saga: Klasische Wildwestgeschichten (Cologne and Berlin, 1964), pp. 23–24.

20. Billington, "The Wild West in Norway, 1877," Western Historical Quarterly 7 (July 1976): 273.

21. Billington, Land of Savagery, p. 317.

22. Land of Savagery, p. 318.

23. Billington, "The Wild West in Norway," p. 273.

24. Billington, Land of Savagery, p. 37.

25. Billington, "The Wild West in Norway," p. 272.

26. Virgil L. Jones, "Gustave Aimard," Southwest Review 15 (Summer 1930): 465.

27. Aimard's success in England is due, in part, to the effective translations of his work by Sir F. C. Lascelles Wraxall, the translator of Les Misérables.

28. See Richard H. Cracroft, "`Half-Froze for Mountain Doin's': The Influence and Significance of George F. Ruxton's Life in the Far West," Western American Literature 10 (May 1975): 29–43. Also Neal E. Lambert, George Frederick Ruxton, Western Writers Series No. 15 (Boise: Boise State University, 1974).

29. James K. Folsom, "English Westerns," Western American Literature 2 (Spring 1967): 3–13.

30. See J. Glen McKellar "A Study of Captain Frederick Marryat and His Contributions to the English Nautical Novel" (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, 1967).

31. See Eric Quayle, Ballantyne the Brave: A Victorian Writer and His Family (London: Hart-Davis, 1967); Billington, Land of Savagery, p. 51.

32. See Joan D. Steele, "The Image of America in the Novels of Mayne Reid: A Study of a Romantic Expatriate" (Ph.D.diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1970); and Roy W. Meyer, "The Western American Fiction of Mayne Reid," Western American Literature 3 (Summer 1968): 115–132.

33. Bernard DeVoto, The Year of Decision: 1846 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), p. 404.

34. Meyer, p. 115.

35. Meyer, p. 117.

36. Albert Johannsen points out (II, 235) that it is difficult to determine the precise number of novels written by Reid; some were issued under different titles, and some books may have been only edited by him, though he has received attribution. Johannsen credits Reid with seventy-five "tales of adventure." Most bibliographies list between fifty and sixty titles. (See Meyer, p. 115.) In fact, England was flooded by dime novels ("penny dreadfuls") about the American West. As Johannsen has noted, over 144 titles in the Beadle series were available in England, not to mention the hundreds of titles from the presses of Beadle imitators. Johannsen, The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels, 3 vols. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950); see especially, I, 113–120; II, 48, 235. Billington, Land of Savagery, p. 48.

37. Meyer, pp. 118–119.

38. Folsom, p. 7.

39. Wittke, p. 26.

40. Bobi Wolf, "Westerns in Eastern Europe," The Pacific Historian 21 (Spring 1977): 29. Kent L. Steckmesser, "Paris and the Wild West," Southwest Review 54 (Spring 1969): 168ff.

41. Gabriel Ferry, Les Coureurs de bois; trans. by Karl May, Der Waldläufer (Bamberg: Karl May Bücherei, 1959), p. 41.

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

May, Karl. Der Schwarze Mustang. Vienna: Carl Ueberreuter Verlag, 1951. First published 1896.

. Ich: Karl May's Leben und Werk. Edited by Roland Schmid. Bamberg: Karl May Bücherei, 1959. Karl May's autobiography.

. Weihnact im Wilden Westen. Vienna: Carl Ueberreuter Verlag, 1953. First published 1897.

. Winnetou I. Vienna: Carl Ueberreuter Verlag, 1951. First published 1897. See also English trans. of Winnetou I, II by Michael Shaw. New York: Seabury Press, 1977.

Secondary Sources

Arnesen, Finn. "Why Norwegians Love Westerns." The Roundup 24 (Oct. 1976): 1–4. The editor of Norway's leading Western magazine tracks the popularity of the Western in Norway.

Ashliman, D. L. "The American West in Nineteenth-Century German Literature." Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1969. This is the most important work to date on the German Western, a point of departure for future studies.

. "The American West in Twentieth-Century Germany." Journal of Popular Culture 2 (Summer 1968): 82–92. An important, focused summary of Ashliman's dissertation.

Barba, Preston A. "The American Indian in German Fiction." German American Annals 15 (May–August 1913): 143–74. An important early study of the Indian in German fiction, somewhat dated but still valid.

. Balduin Möllhausen, the German Cooper." Americana-Germanica Monograph Series 17 (1914): 1–144. An early but very helpful, though laudatory, treatment of Möllhausen.

. Cooper in Germany. Indiana Univ. Studies No. 21.. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1914. A still useful survey of Cooper's immense popularity in Germany.

. "Friedrich Armand Strubberg." German American Annals 14 (Sept. –Dec. 1912): 175–225; 15 (Jan.–April 1913): 3–63; 15 (May–Aug. 1913): 115– 142. A good bibliographical sketch focusing on Strubberg's extended residence in the United States.

Betts, Raymond F. "Immense Dimensions: The Impact of the American West on Late Nineteenth Century European Expansion." Western Historical Quarterly 10 (April 1979): 149–166.

Billington, Ray Allen. Land of Savagery, Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981. A definitive work of scholarship, Billington's last effort. The bibliographical notes and careful scholarship are the springboard for any study of the American West in European literature and culture.

. "The Wild West in Norway, 1877." Western Historical Quarterly 7 (July 1976): 271–278. Reprints portions of "The Frontiersman's Daughter," a Norwegian western drama.

Bohm, Viktor. Karl May und das Geheimnis seines Erfolgs. Vienna, 1962. A fine study, in German, of May's popularity in Germany.

Cracroft, Richard H. "The American West of Karl May." American Quarterly 19 (Summer 1967): 249–258. A useful summary, in English, of Cracroft's M.A. thesis.

. "The American West of Karl May." M.A. thesis, University of Utah, 1963. The most helpful and useful study, to date, in English, of May's western works.

. "`Half-Froze for Mountain Doin's': The Influence and Significance of George F. Ruxton's Life in the Far West." Western American Literature 10 (May 1975): 29–43. Traces the very specific impact of Ruxton's Life in the Far West on later mountain man novels.

Dworczak, Karl Heinz. Karl May, Das Leben Old Shatterhand. Salzburg: Pfad Verlag, 1950. A laudatory but important biography of Karl May.

Fairchild, Hoxie N. The Noble Savage: A Study in Romantic Naturalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1928. A study of the development of the Indian image in European thought.

Folsom, James K. "English Westerns." Western American Literature 2 (Spring 1967) : 3–13. An interesting treatment of the difference between American and English novels about the West.

Fullerton, Ronald A. "Creating a Mass Market in Germany: The Story of the `Colporteur Novel,' 1870–1890." ]ournal of Social History 10 (March 1977): 265– 283. A discussion of those changes in popular German reading tastes which enabled a mass-market interest in the Western.

Haertl, Paul. "Cooper in Germany." American-German Review 3 (June 1937): 18–20. Cooper's significant impact in Germany.

Heller, Otto, and Leon H. Theodore. Charles Sealsfield: Bibliography of His Writings. St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1939. A bibliography of Sealsfield's (Postl's) many works.

Hewett-Thayer, Harvey W. American Literature as Viewed in Germany, 1818–1861. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958. A useful survey of U.S. literature in early nineteenth-century Germany, including copies of a number of reviews.

Jackson, John B. "Ich bin ein Cowboy aus Texas." Southwest Review 38 (Spring 1953): 158–163. A humorous description of differences in German and American comic book Western heroes and villains.

Johannsen, Albert. The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels. 3 vols. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950. The definitive work on the dime novel, a number of which were published in Europe.

Jones, Virgil L. "Gustave Aimard."Southwest Review 15 (Summer 1930): 452–468. An interesting survey of Aimard's life and western works.

Koht, Haldvan. The American Spirit in Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949. The effect of U.S. migration on European thought and politics.

Kolb, Alfred. "Friedrich Gerstäcker and the American Frontier." Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1966. A study of the mythical elements in Gerstäcker's work. Lambert, Neal E. George Frederick Ruxton. Western Writers Series, No. 15. Boise: Boise State University, 1974. An excellent, brief treatment of Ruxton's life, including solid analyses of his western travel narratives.

McDermott, John. The Frontier Reexamined. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967. A collection of helpful essays on the shifting image of the frontier–in Europe and the United States.

Mann, Klaus. "Cowboy Mentor of the Führer." Living Age 352 (Nov. 1940): 210. Thomas Mann's brother attempts to link May's attitudes on race and Germany to Hitler.

Meyer, Roy W. "The Western American Fiction of Mayne Reid." Western American Literature 3 (Summer 1968): 115–132. A good introductory survey of Reid's life and western works.

Miller, David H. "A Prussian on the Plains: Balduin Möllhausen's Impressions." Great Plains Journal 12 (Spring 1973): 175–193. Interesting detail concerning Möllhausen's experiences in western survey parties.

Pearce, Roy H. The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the ldea of Civilization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953. A landmark study of the American Indian's impact on western thought.

Prahl, Augustus J. "America in the Works of Gerstäcker." Modern Language Quarterly 4 (June 1943): 213–224. A survey which probes Gerstäcker's attitudes about American riffraff and backwoodsmen.

Quayle, Eric. Ballantyne the Brave: A Victorian Writer and His Family. London: Hart-Davis, 1967. An important biography of a little-known British writer, some of whose works are set in the Far West.

Read, Helen Appleton. "Karl May, Germany's James Fenimore Cooper." The American-German Review 2 (June 1936): 4–7. A dated introduction to May; of historical interest only.

Rieupeyrout, Jean-Louis. La Grande Aventure du Western. Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1964. An important history of the western film in Europe.

Robinson, Jeffrey. "Le Cowboy." Westways 66 (April 1974): 40–41. A brief discussion of the career of French Western writer George Fronval.

Russell, Don. The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill. Norman: University of Okla-homa Press, 1960. An account, among other things, of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show tours of Europe.

Steckmesser, Kent L. "Paris and the Wild West." Southwest Review 54 (Spring 1969): 178–184. A popular but thoughtful appraisal of the Wild West vogue in France.

Steele, Joan D. "The Image of America in the Novels of Mayne Reid: A Study of a Romantic Expatriate." Ph.D. diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1970. An excellent survey and analysis.

Thorp, Willard. "Cooper Beyond America." In James Fenimore Cooper: A Reappraisal, ed. Mary E. Cunningham. Cooperstown, N.Y.: New York National State Historical Assoc., 1954. A thorough summary of Cooper's influence in Europe.

Uhlendorf, Bernard A. Charles Sealsfield: Ethnic Elements and Problems in His Works. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922. In this very helpful study, the author reprints passages from Sealsfield's western works.

Wechsberg, Joseph. "Winnetou of der Wild West." Saturday Review, Oct. 20, 1962, pp. 52–53, 60. A light survey of the Karl May phenomenon, reprinted, with notes by Richard H. Cracroft, in American West 1 (Summer 1964): 32–39.

Wittke, Carl. "The America Theme in Continental European Literature." The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 28 (June 1941): 3–40. An important pioneering article on the impact of the West in European letters.

Wolf, Bobi. "Westerns in Eastern Europe." The Pacific Historian 21 (Spring 1977): 24–38. A sketchy review of the impact of the Western in Slavic countries.

[Contents]    [Index]

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