It has been noted, too, with adequate scholarly documentation, that other of the cowboy's genes and chromosomes came from the dime novels that erupted virtually with the firing on Fort Sumter and flourished throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century. Still, there would have been neither the necessity for nor the possibility of such scholarly disquisitions had it not been for the growth of the cowboy in magazine fiction.

In the closing decade of the last century, the triumvirate of Theodore Roosevelt, Owen Wister and Frederic Remington was foremost in the literary upgrading of the West and its denizens in the tastemaking magazines– Atlantic, Century, Harper's, Scribner's. Their offerings from pen and palette in essence limned and hymned the nation's successful conquest of its great western expanse. Wallace Stegner has suggested that examining the collaboration between Wister and Remington reveals the ontogeny of the cowboy as a literary figure. Such redoubtable students of the cattle kingdom as Bernard DeVoto, J. Frank Dobie, and Walter Prescott Webb, as well as Stegner, have attested their belief that Wister's The Virginian (1902) clothed the cowboy with literary respectability. It is not intended here to dispute these investigators' conclusions, but to note firmly that The Virginian caused no upsurge in the incidence of Western stories in the quality, mass-circulation magazines between 1900 and 1910. Neither did it alter in any significant way the image of the cowboy presented weekly and monthly to millions of readers of these magazines.

The magazines referred to included Collier's, McClure's, Cosmopolitan, American, and Everybody's. Perhaps the most representative of the general magazines, certainly the most successful in attracting readers, was the Saturday Evening Post. Examination of more than 400 issues of the Post published during the first decade of the twentieth century reveals that Western stories constituted only seven percent of its short fiction for that period, five percent of its articles, and a minuscule proportion of its serial-story offerings. These figures parallel the ratio of western materials in the contents of other mass-circulation periodicals from the same time segment.

Of the Post's Western stories, about one-third belong to what may be termed the "Wolfville genre," which dominated the art form in this decade. The most prolific producers of such stories, those whose output gives the anecdotal Wolfville genre its place in the evolution of the cowboy in literature, were Alfred Henry Lewis (who created the actual Wolfville locale), Emerson Hough, Henry Wallace Phillips, William R. Lighton, Kenneth Harris, Rex Beach, and John Haslette. Some of O. Henry's Texas stories also fall into this category, as do Thomas Janvier's prose sketches of "Santa Fe Charley." Many of the early Western stories by Stewart Edward White and Owen Wister's "Scipio Le Moyne" tales, forerunners of The Virginian, meet the Wolfville criteria.

Wolfville fiction presents a thoroughly masculine society, in which women, by and large, are stage properties stuffed with sawdust. Such tales feature a picturesque setting quite distinct from the urban East, such as Lewis's "Wolfville" (based largely on Tombstone, Arizona) or Hough's "Heart's Desire" (based on White Oaks, New Mexico), and often a continuing and reappearing central character, such as Phillips's "Red Saunders," Lighton's "Billy Fortune," and Harris's "Ricky Redmond." A plot is not essential; if there is one, it borders on "mellerdraymah." There is explosive physical action, not necessarily with pistols, and the cowboys and other characters are given such tags of dialect, mannerism, and costume as to positively distinguish them from their more combed and curried and convention-bound fellows.

Humor in these stories is important. It is broad and masculine, often verging upon adolescent, locker-room low comedy, but it should be remembered that this humor is equal to the action in both story content and flavor. The line of descent from the writings of Bret Harte and Mark Twain to the Wolfville stories seems unmistakable. These tales took the Harte-Twain legacy–which incorporated self-reliance, individualism, acceptance of danger, disdain for class distinctions, pride in country, and a self-imposed obligation to aid those in distress–and began its expansion into what later became "The Code of the West," a code that engendered and included the stereotyped characteristics of the fictional cowboy.

As the Strenuous Decade turned into the decade of the teens, there were signs and portents in the writings of Eugene Manlove Rhodes and George Pattullo that the cowboy might become a full-bodied, fourdimensional literary figure who would truly reflect and represent the frontier experience that had forged and shaped and tempered him. Of all those who wrote about the cowboy, only a very few had Rhodes's advantage of prolonged, personal involvement in the horse-and-cattle West, and none of these few had Rhodes's literary craftsmanship. That Rhodes was a romantic, that he idealized the real, rather than making the real ideal, is beyond doubt. Yet what he wrote about his West rings true as a shod hoof on malpais, and upon what he wrote, barring certain romantic confections, the reader may depend. His novella "The Little Eohippus" was the very first cowboy-and-the-lady romance to grace the pages of a major magazine (Saturday Evening Post, 30 November through 28 December 1912). It is important to recall, in considering this claim, that The Virginian was not serialized as such, but was reworked and refined by Wister from prior short stories and two-part episodes.

George Pattullo's version of the West arose from a markedly different background than did that of Rhodes. A Canadian-born Scot, Pattullo was editor of the Boston Herald at the time he spent the first of three consecutive summers, 1908–1910, roaming the Southwest with Erwin Smith, one of the great photographers of the cattle kingdom. Pattullo saw with a reporter's eye, and he wrote of what he saw with a deep awareness of the foibles of mankind, the idiosyncrasies of livestock, and vagaries of chance. Gene Rhodes, a horseman himself, believed that Pattullo's "Corazon" (McClure's, July 1910) was the finest horse story every written. Between 1909 and 1917, Pattullo's short stories and articles appeared in the leading magazines, although the Saturday Evening Post was his primary outlet.

A long-developing literary groundswell, beginning in the early years of the century, became the wave of the future that inundated the work of Rhodes and obliterated that of Pattullo. In 1904, Street & Smith's Popular published Bertha M. Bower's "Chip of the Flying U," the first of almost sixty short stories, novels, and serial installments she would contribute to that semi-pulp magazine over the next six years. Clarence E. Mulford's now famous "Hopalong Cassidy" stories, anecdotal in form, raucous with action, and haloed by gunplay, were launched in 1905 by Outing, a limited-circulation monthly travel magazine. In the decade of the teens two popular writers of Western tales, William MacLeod Raine and Charles Alden Seltzer, began to publish voluminously. Both wrote mainly long fiction, however, and seldom broke into the magazine market.

In 1912 the cowboy achieved his apotheosis in a book whose impact is still being felt. This was Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage, a work which, in Lawrence Clark Powell's words, "More than any other book determined the universal stereotype of the West." Grey had been discovered, as it were, in 1910 by Popular, which serialized his first successful Western story, "The Heritage of the Desert." The venerable publishing house of Harper & Brothers, which would not sully the pages of its monthly magazine with such offerings, read the nation's tastes correctly and published the story in book form, with such success that they did the same with Riders of the Purple Sage, which had been serialized in Field and Stream. With the latter work, Grey became foremost among the early "Formula Fabulists"–Mulford, Raine, and Seltzer being the others–and he became the only one of the four to leave a deep imprint in the pages of the major mass-circulation magazines.

The climate of opinion in the year of Theodore Roosevelt's "Bull Moose" attempt to regain the White House may explain the instantaneous success of Riders of the Purple Sage. Whereas the raffish, unconventional characters of the Wolfville genre had given vicarious expression to a growing distaste for the constricting social conventions of an increasingly urban milieu, the cowboy of the Fabulists reflected a deep desire to find personal solutions to complex political and economic problems through direct, individual action which would produce immediate and beneficial results.

The cowboy had thus become Galahad in a morality play for Everyman; the clearly and cleanly limned proponent of good over evil; protector of the weak from the rapacious; bringer of benefits to others through his courage, self-sacrifice, and hard-twisted moral fiber. He became, in short, the Sun God produced by all peoples in all ages in time of need–blood brother to Taras Bulba, El Cid Campeador, and Robin Hood. His virtuous solemnity was made necessary by the tensions and conflicts of his righteous errands into the wilderness of what had become for the Fabulists a timeless and unchanging West. In this setting, the inhabitants partook quite logically of the West's positive influence in creating essential nobility of character. This and related themes were used by other than the Fabulists. Long before he wrote The Shame of the Cities, Lincoln Steffens reported on a "bronco-busting" contest at Denver, Colorado (McClure's, December 1902), wherein he made it clear that he found a nobility among the contestants, fresh from the range, that was lacking in eastern urbanites.

Examples of the theme of western nobility in the short fiction of this period are abundant. Edison Marshall's "Count a Thousand–Slow–Between Each Drop" (American, December 1915) features "T'rantler Bill" and "Texas John," together with "Long-Ear Joe," their trusty burro, who rescue a little girl after her parents die from thirst when their wagon breaks down. The story is subtitled "A Hero Story of Thirst in the Desert." Marjorie B. Cooke's "Harrigan–of the Rockies" (Collier's, 24 April 1915) concerns a prospector who sells out his claim for a tidy sum and sashays forth to give New York a whirl. There he meets a girl who is leading an artsy-Bohemian Greenwich Village existence, because she has no real interest in or purpose to her life. She is redeemed by the cleansing love of a Real Man, and they head west together after proper matrimonial pronouncements.

One of the winners in Collier's prize story contest for 1914, for which Theodore Roosevelt was a judge, was Francis Hill's "Anent: A Biscuit Shooter" (24 April 1915). The plot concerns a gambler who promises to marry a girl and then does not. In order to get rid of her, he seeks to drive her into a life of prostitution, a risky plot device for the times, but a gambling cowboy is the catalytic agent that sees their union sanctified. Roosevelt said of this story, "The gambling cowboy is an excellent figure." Emerson Hough took eight installments of "The Man Next Door" (Saturday Evening Post, 8 April through 27 May 1916) to relate the tale of a Wyoming ranch-raised girl whose widowed father takes her to the East to live after selling his ranch in order to provide her the opportunities she deserves. The old ranch foreman goes with them, and most of the story concerns the efforts of father and foreman to find a suitable, gentlemanly, cultivated easterner for the girl's husband.

The same theme of solid, clean western values versus those of the frothy, decadent East appears in Wallace Irwin's serial "Venus in the East" (Saturday Evening Post, 13 July through 31 August 1918). A stalwart son of the true West visits New York where he becomes involved with both a beautiful woman who is cynical and heartless and a wholesome New England miss, the latter of whom, needless to say, gets the hero in the end. In advertising the book version of Rex Beach's Heart of the Sunset (1915), Harper & Brothers said it had "the breezy bravery which is the American Cowboy type." Herman Whitaker's Over the Border (1917) wrings the most out of its chase-sequence plot by having three rowdy cowboys in Villa's Mexico enable an American girl trapped below the border to reach safety by sacrificing themselves one by one. The cowboy as symbol was never so plain as in Herbert Johnson's editorial cartoon (Saturday Evening Post, 2 June 1917) showing Uncle Sam in cowboy garb applying his LIBERTY brand to the left ribs of the Kaiser Wilhelm bull.

Following World War I the character of the cowboy did not change, but he did proliferate, competing successfully with the heroes of War Birds and Flying Aces, as well as with the "hardboiled" sleuth and the Tarzan stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs. In particular "pulps" flourished during this period. Among the "slicks" Ladies' Home Journal brought out its first Western stories in 1920 and began serialization of its first Zane Grey offering, "The Call of the Canon," the following year (November 1921). One attempt to gauge the popularity of American authors in the immediate postwar period placed Grey at the top of the list, based on sales of his published books. He and his fellow Fabulists were joined in postwar years by J. Allan Dunn, Eugene Cunningham, W. C. Tuttle, and, with blare of trumpet and ruffle of drum, the old master of "thud and blunder," Frederick Schiller Faust, who reserved three of his many pen names, the best known of which became Max Brand, for his Western output. While only Grey found his major market in the quality, mass-circulation magazines, the others had prominent publishers for book versions of their works, because of magazine-generated demand.

Mody Boatright once said of the Saturday Evening Post that George Horace Lorimer, longtime editor of the magazine, "kept before his readers the cowboy as a symbol of the rugged individualism that had made America great." Careful analysis of the Post's fiction offerings during the postwar years does not support this statement. It does show that in these years Lorimer strove to give his readers renewed pride in their country and in their countrymen's past accomplishments which would help them face an uncertain future with their traditional values unimpaired. One means toward this end was to encourage the western "epic." Lorimer's first offering in the epic vein, and it was a spectacular success, was Emerson Hough's "The Covered Wagon" (1 April through 27 May 1922). Another Hough epic, "North of 36," the story of the first longhorn herd to take the long trail north from Texas, was published posthumously. Of all the epic Westerns brought out in the Post, the one with the greatest sweep and scope was written in a series of forty-three related stories, containing more than ninety illustrations by W. H. D. Koerner and appearing between 5 July 1930 and 23 March 1935. Collectively these constituted Stewart Edward White's saga of "Andy Burnet" and his long rifle, the veritable "Boone gun," moving from the Ohio River to California and from Burnet's mountain man days to his subsequent successful life as a ranchero.

With the addition of the epic dimension, the evolution of the cowboy in short fiction was complete–with one exception. This came with the work of Ernest Haycox and the brothers Glidden, who wrote under the pen names of "Luke Short" and "Peter Dawson," the latter being one of Faust's earlier noms de plume, in the years surrounding World War II. Haycox was the pioneer of the trio in employing two women in his plots. One of these is good, but tinged with Lilithian passion; the other is bad, but suspect of having a heart of gold. This formula added a touch of emotional suspense and sexual titillation to what remained essentially the action-packed yarn concocted by the Fabulists; it also consumed a great deal of the reader's time while the hero untangled his hormones.

In the years following World War II, cowboy stories began to fade out of the "slicks," even as the mass-circulation magazines themselves faded. The portrayal of the cowboy became more and more the province of the novel, the motion picture, and television. A few authors, notably Jack Schaefer, published creditable short fiction about the cowboy during this period, but the market for such fiction began to diminish, and writers moved on to other forms. In today's "serious" literature about the cowboy, he is often seen as Joseph McCoy saw him a century past: evil and degenerate and without redeeming qualities, an antihero. Admittedly the magazine Fabulists unrealistically idealized the cowboy as noble, virtuous, and heroic. Their view, however, was no more distorted or bogus than is the currently fashionable portrayal of this legendary figure.

W. H. H UTCHINSON, California State University, Chico

Selected Bibliography

The primary sources upon which my contribution has been based consist of some five thousand issues of various slick paper and semi-pulp magazines, which span the period 1900–1940. This work was carried on over a thirty-year period and resulted in the following publications, which may be of interest.

Hutchinson, W. H. A Bar Cross Man: The Life and Personal Writings of Eugene Manlove Rhodes. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956.

. A Bar Cross Liar: Bibliography of Eugene Manlove Rhodes, Who Loved the West-that-was When He Was Young. Stillwater, Oklahoma: Redlands Press, 1959.

. "Grassfire on the Great Plains: Story of a Literary Battle." Southwest Review 41 (Spring 1956): 181–185.

. "Virgins, Villains and Varmints." Huntington Library Quarterly 16 (August 1953): 381–392.

. "The Western Story as Literature." Western Humanities Review 3 (Jan. 1949): 33–37.

. The World, the Work and the West of W. H. D. Koerner. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979.

Besides the works of James K. Folsom, Russell Nye and Henry Nash Smith mentioned in the text, the following secondary sources have been useful in providing background material and whetstones to sharpen the edge of opinion.

Easton, Robert. Max Brand, the Big Westerner. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970.

Frantz, Joe B., and Julian E. Choate, Jr. The American Cowboy: The Myth and the Reality. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955.

Goulart, Ron. Cheap Thrills: An lnformal History of the Pulp Magazines. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1972.

Gruber, Frank. Zane Grey: A Biography. New York: World Publishing, 1970.

Jones, Margaret Ann. "Cowboys and Ranching in Magazine Fiction, 1901–1910." In Studies in Literature of the West, vol. 20 of the University of Wyoming Publications Series. Laramie: University of Wyoming, 1956.

Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines. 5 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1930–1968.

Pattee, Fred Lewis. The New American Literature, 1890–1930. New York: Century, 1930.

Powell, Lawrence C. Southwest Classics: The Creative Literature of the Arid Lands. Pasadena: Ward Ritchie, 1974.

Shaul, Lowana Jean. "Treatment of the West in Selected Magazine Fiction, 1870– 1900." Unpublished Master's Thesis, University of Wyoming, 1954.

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