Who Wrote the First Western?

            The Norton Anthology of American Literature would lead students to think that American literature began in New England in the 1630s with writers like John Winthrop and William Bradford.

            Wrong. The first European-language literature published in what is now the U.S. was in Spanish and was written in the West, not on the east coast.

            Spanish were “touring” the American West as early as 1528. In 1565, Pedro de Castaneda published his journal of an expedition that went to Grand Canyon, Texas and Kansas in 1540.

            In 1598, Gaspar Perez de Villagra published a long book titled Historia de la Nueva Mexico.  There was a stage play produced, probably in Santa Fe, in 1598. It was Moros y cristianos.  (Just for the record, in 1598 in England a young playwright named Will something-or-other was writing a play he would call Julius Caesar.)

            So, next time you want to win a bar bet with an English major, bet them they don’t know where the first American literature was written.

 

Cowboy Stories Can’t be Serious Fiction!

            Don’t jump on me for saying that. Blame Bernard DeVoto, the famous Western historian. He blamed it on Owen Wister, that Easterner who wrote The Virginian in 1902.

            Wister, you see, was probably the first writer of westerns to sell over a million copies in his lifetime. He was probably the first writer of westerns to use the shootout in a novel, the shootout in which two men face each other in the street, draw and fire.

            Later and lesser writers put two and two together—gunfights equal profits—and ever since then they have just naturally assumed that westerns are “only” action stories. DeVoto wrote that that one single gunfight in The Virginian “has kept the cowboy story from becoming serious fiction.”

 

John G. Neihardt Feast, 2004

            In November I had the honor of being Master of Ceremonies for the Laureate’s Feast, an annual even to honor the great Nebraska writer and poet John G. Neihardt. This year’s theme came from Neihardt’s narrative of Jedediah Smith, A Splendid Wayfaring.

            Re-reading the book, I was struck by the way Neihardt translated his own prose into poetry. Here’s how the prose reads in A Splendid Wayfaring:

            It was on the 10^th of March, 1823, that General Ashley started again for the Upper Missouri with a hundred men and two keelboats.

            The new grass was like a pale green flame burning slowly up the sloughs, and the young leafage of the cottonwoods was a thin smoke against the sky that day when they started north with the robins.

            Compare that version with the poetry of Neihardt’s “The Up-Stream Men” found in A Cycle of the West, his long epic poem:

                                    When Major Henry went

            Up river at the head of Ashley’s band,

            Already there were robins in the land.

            Home-keeping men were following the plows

            And through the smoke-thin greenery of boughs

            The scattering wild-fire of the fruit bloom ran.

            Truly heroic verse. And it was a truly heroic time, those years of discovery on the Missouri. There’s no denying the bravery and determination that went into the expedition of Lewis and Clark, Ashley and Henry, Smith and Sublette and all the others who set out into the unknown and dangerous territory.

 

What “Epic”?

            Two terms that have been severely downgraded and diluted by misuse are “tragedy” and “epic.” It seems as if any film in which someone dies is called “tragic” and any film involving a battle or a journey is called “epic.”

            John Neihardt’s A Cycle of the West, now there’s an epic poem.

            Many cultures have epics. Most everyone knows about The Iliad and Odyssey, Beowulf, El Cid, the Nibelungenlied, The Song of Roland and Paradise Lost, but what do these have in common?

            . . . They are stories of national importance, stories that show the basic character and values of the society, what the people stood for and did not stand for.

            . . . They are stories with settings that are vast, not tucked away in some drawing room or some dark alley or street.

            . . . The heroes are larger than life. They take greater chances than ordinary men, suffer greater consequences, achieve greater fame and honor.

            . . . The heroes perform actions befitting their reputations.

            . . . The epic poem, even when written in prose, is done in lofty language, language with style and distinction fitting the importance of the topic.