The Virginian

The Virginian

THE VIRGINIAN A Horseman Of The Plains By Owen Wister To THEODORE ROOSEVELT Some of these pages you have seen, some you have praised, one stands new-written because you blamed it; and all, my dear critic, beg leave to remind you of their author’s changeless admiration.

TO THE READER Certain of the newspapers, when this book was first announced, made a mistake most natural upon seeing the sub-title as it then stood, A TALE OF SUNDRY ADVENTURES. “This sounds like a historical novel,” said one of them, meaning (I take it) a colonial romance. As it now stands, the title will scarce lead to such interpretation; yet none the less is this

when you look at the root of the matter, it is a colonial romance. For Wyoming between 1874 and 1890 was a colony as wild as was Virginia one hundred years earlier. As wild, with a scantier population, and the same primitive joys and dangers. There were, to be sure, not so many Chippendale settees.

We know quite well the common understanding of the term “historical novel.” HUGH WYNNE exactly fits it. But SILAS LAPHAM is a novel as perfectly historical as is Hugh Wynne, for it pictures an era and personifies a type. It matters not that in the one we find George Washington and in the other none save imaginary figures; else THE SCARLET LETTER were not historical. Nor does it matter that Dr. Mitchell did not live in the time of which he wrote, while Mr. Howells saw many Silas Laphams with his own eyes; else UNCLE TOM’S CABIN were not historical. Any narrative which presents faithfully a day and a generation is of necessity historical; and this one presents Wyoming between 1874 and 1890. Had you left New York or San Francisco at ten o’clock this morning, by noon the day after to-morrow you could step out at Cheyenne. There you would stand at the heart of the world that is the subject of my picture, yet you would look around you in vain for the

reality. It is a vanished world. No journeys, save those which memory can take, will bring you to it now. The mountains are there, far and shining, and the sunlight, and the infinite earth, and the air that seems forever the true fountain of youth, but where is the buffalo, and the wild antelope, and where the horseman with his pasturing thousands?

So like its old self does the sage-brush seem when revisited, that you wait for the horseman to appear.

But he will never come again. He rides in his historic yesterday. You will no more see him gallop out of the unchanging silence than you will see Columbus on the unchanging sea come sailing from Palos with his caravels.

And yet the horseman is still so near our day that in some chapters of this book, which were published separate at the close of the nineteenth century, the present tense was used. It is true no longer. In those chapters it has been changed, and verbs like “is” and “have” now read “was” and “had.” Time has flowed faster than my ink.

What is become of the horseman, the cow-puncher, the last romantic figure upon our soil? For he was romantic. Whatever he did, he did with his might. The bread that he earned was earned hard, the wages that he squandered were squandered hard,--half a year’s pay sometimes gone in a night,--“blown in,” as he expressed it, or “blowed in,” to be perfectly accurate. Well, he will be here among us always, invisible, waiting his chance to live and play as he would like. His wild kind has been among us always, since the beginning: a young man with his temptations, a hero without wings.

The cow-puncher’s ungoverned hours did not unman him. If he gave his word, he kept it; Wall Street would have found him behind the times.

Nor did he talk lewdly to women; Newport would have thought him old-fashioned. He and his brief epoch make a complete picture, for in themselves they were as complete as the pioneers of the land or the explorers of the sea. A transition has followed the horseman of the plains; a shapeless state, a condition of men and manners as unlovely as is that moment in the year when winter is gone and spring not come, and the face of Nature is ugly. I shall not dwell upon it here. Those who have seen it know well what I mean. Such transition was inevitable.

“She’d ought to wear knickerbockers,” murmured the Virginian. “She’d look a heap better ’n some o’ them college students. And she’ll set on potatoes, yu’ say?”

“She thinks she can hatch out anything. I’ve found her with onions, and last Tuesday I caught her on two balls of soap.”

In the afternoon the tall cow-puncher and I rode out to get an antelope.

After an hour, during which he was completely taciturn, he said: “I reckon maybe this hyeh lonesome country ain’t been healthy for Em’ly to live in. It ain’t for some humans. Them old trappers in the mountains gets skewed in the haid mighty often, an’ talks out loud when nobody’s nigher ’n a hundred miles.”

“Em’ly has not been solitary,” I replied. “There are forty chickens here.”

“That’s so,” said he. “It don’t explain her.”

He fell silent again, riding beside me, easy and indolent in the saddle.

His long figure looked so loose and inert that the swift, light spring he made to the ground seemed an impossible feat. He had seen an antelope where I saw none.

“Take a shot yourself,” I urged him, as he motioned me to be quick. “You never shoot when I’m with you.”

“I ain’t hyeh for that,” he answered. “Now you’ve let him get away on yu’!”

The antelope had in truth departed.

“Why,” he said to my protest, “I can hit them things any day. What’s your notion as to Em’ly?”

“I can’t account for her,” I replied.

“Well,” he said musingly, and then his mind took one of those particular turns that made me love him, “Taylor ought to see her. She’d be just the schoolmarm for Bear Creek!”

“She’s not much like the eating-house lady at Medicine Bow,” I said.

He gave a hilarious chuckle. “No, Em’ly knows nothing o’ them joys. So yu’ have no notion about her? Well, I’ve got one. I reckon maybe she was hatched after a big thunderstorm.”

“In a big thunderstorm!” I exclaimed.

“Yes. Don’t yu’ know about them, and what they’ll do to aiggs? A big case o’ lightnin’ and thunder will addle aiggs and keep ’em from hatchin’. And I expect one came along, and all the other aiggs of Em’ly’s set didn’t hatch out, but got plumb addled, and she happened not to get addled that far, and so she just managed to make it through. But she cert’nly ain’t got a strong haid.”

“I fear she has not,” said I.

“Mighty hon’ble intentions,” he observed. “If she can’t make out to lay anything, she wants to hatch somethin’, and be a mother anyways.”

“I wonder what relation the law considers that a hen is to the chicken she hatched but did not lay?” I inquired.

The Virginian made no reply to this frivolous suggestion. He was gazing over the wide landscape gravely and with apparent inattention. He invariably saw game before I did, and was off his horse and crouched among the sage while I was still getting my left foot clear of the stirrup. I succeeded in killing an antelope, and we rode home with the head and hind quarters.

“No,” said he. “It’s sure the thunder, and not the lonesomeness. How do yu’ like the lonesomeness yourself?”

I told him that I liked it.

“I could not live without it now,” he said. “This has got into my system.” He swept his hand out at the vast space of world. “I went back home to see my folks onced. Mother was dyin’ slow, and she wanted me.

I stayed a year. But them Virginia mountains could please me no more.

Afteh she was gone, I told my brothers and sisters good-by. We like each other well enough, but I reckon I’ll not go back.”