On "The Virginian" by Owen Wister ****

This book was a staple on the shelf at a bookstore where I used to work, a Penguin classic. I don't know that we ever sold a copy. It looked rather dull to me, like one of those books you should read but won't until it's assigned in some class. It never was. I never read it.

Here I am some thirty years later, and I read it, because Wister's book is known in some circles as the first true Western--a book with all the conventions of a cowboy novel--and actually written in the early 1900s rather than in the 1800s as I had once supposed. And it is a surprisingly good read--difficult to follow in parts but generally not too difficult, and in some ways narratively unconventional.

It is one of the few books I've read that is told from the perspective of a first-person narrator that is actually about a third person. Think Great Gatsby--which is really about Gatsby and Daisy and Tom and not so much about the guy telling the story--or to a lesser extent, On the Road, which in some ways is really about Dean Moriarty more than Sal Paradise, though Sal's ideas play a much larger role than in Gatsby. Here in "The Virginian," our narrator tells us all about a certain class of men that the Virginian perfectly fits and that is disappearing along with the American West. We don't learn too much about the narrator (he's from out east and doesn't really know much about Western ways, at least at the start), and many times in the narrative, the narrator completely disappears, as if he's simply recounting stories he's heard from the Virginian or his friends about the Virginian.

The Virginian is a southerner who for a long while has been a cow-puncher. One-half of the book revolves around his relationship with a man name Trampas, who early in the novel feels insulted by the Virginian at a game of cards. Thereafter, Trampas is forever looking to one-up the Virginian, and the Virginian constantly manages to put him down. Trampas is a brute, a man who only stops stealing cows from the ranch at which the Virginian works because after beinghired by the ranch. One day Trampas says insulting things about a lady from Vermont who has moved to the nearby town to be a school teacher; the Virginian defends her, even though he doesn't know her. He also, at some point, saves her from drowning. These incidents drive the Virginian to take an interest in the woman, even as Trampas again feels put out by the man. An ultimate insult occurs when the Virginian is put in charge of carrying cows east to Chicago with a crew; on the way back, Trampas attempts to abscond with the crew by telling them of the fortunes to be made in a mine. The train on which they travel breaks down; they're stuck. The mine is real temptation. The Virginian manages to keep his crew aboard by going frog hunting and then selling the cooked frog legs for high dollars to the various passengers and by telling a good number of tall tales about the great money to be made from frog legs. On his return to the ranch the Virginian is promoted to foreman.

Eventually Trampas quits, and cows begin disappearing again. Meanwhile, the schoolmarm is drawn to the Virginian but also repulsed. She has no desire in general to marry, but also she is disgusted by the way that our cowboy serves as the law in a place where there is no law--that is, the Virginian occasionally has to kill a man. Such an instance occurs when the Virginian and a crew are sent out to hunt down and kill a cattle rustler gang. They catch two, one of whom is an old friend of the Virginian's, and execution then proceeds.

Trampas is one who manages to get away, though the Virginian has no real proof. Meanwhile, Trampas buys a horse from a financially desperate man who promises to buy the horse back. Trampas treats the horse miserably and eventually kills it. This is the sort of man Trampas is. He also, in the process, realizes Indians are after him, and he departs; the Virginian is not so lucky. His schoolmarm finds him and nurses him back to health and finally falls for him.

This same Trampas executes the man who he has taken in as an accolade in order to escape from the lynch posse. And on the day of the Virginian's wedding tells the Virginian that he has till sundown to get out of town or face his death. And so we have the inevitable duel.

The book ends somewhat surprisingly on a quiet note, focusing mostly on the teacher and her Vermont family. One can think of it, I suppose, as an extended coda. In a sense, that's its proper function. After all, as the narrator states in the first chapter, he's documenting a kind of man who is disappearing from the landscape, as the West is being tamed.