Tag Archives: James Fennimore Cooper

09.02.25
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Way Out West, Part IV

The written word is primary.

James Fennimore Cooper, c. 1850. Photo by Matthew Brady. Public Domain.

Long before Marshal Matt Dillon strode the dusty streets of Dodge City; before Hoppy, Roy, and Gene rode the range; before Tom Mix and Hoot Gibson twirled their lassoes; before William S. Hart oozed western authenticity; before The Great Train Robbery was committed to celluloid—in fact, before movies could be produced and radio waves modulated—there were writers singing the praises, and hyping the romance, of the American West.

James Fennimore Cooper (1789-1851) may have been the first novelist to glamorize the West in his Leatherstocking Tales, which featured rugged frontier scout Natty Bumppo. The Deerslayer and his Native American friends, Chingachgook and Uncas, held sway in the forests of New York State. But in those days, as mentioned previously, the West was in the East. At least The Prairie—the last novel in the series, in story chronology—takes the aged Pathfinder all the way to the vast plains beyond the Mississippi.

Ned Buntline, c. 1886. Photo by Sarony, New York. Public Domain.

After Cooper, the next notable writer to euhemerize the West was Edward Zane Carroll Judson Sr. (1821-1886), a heavy drinker who went about the country giving temperance lectures, a raffish troublemaker who barely escaped the noose in more jurisdictions than one. Seeking sensational material to publish about Wild Bill Hickok, who had driven him off at gunpoint, Judson on the rebound met William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody. The two gregarious men became friends, and Judson’s career as “Ned Buntline,” writer of western stories, was launched.

He published a serial novel, Buffalo Bill: King of the Border Men, in the New York Weekly beginning in 1869. That became the basis for two plays about the great man, one of which—written by Buntline—starred Cody as himself, with appearing Buntline in a supporting role. For several years, the great Cody shot buffalo for the railroad in summer and portrayed himself on stage in winter. This was Buffalo Bill’s introduction to show biz. If you want to know where that led, rent or borrow a copy of Annie Get Your Gun.

Emma Ghent Curtis, author of The Administratrix, c. 1894. Photographer unknown. Public Domain.

Buntline wrote other western-themed dime novels, none as successful as his early promotion of Buffalo Bill. Judson (Buntline) died of congestive heart failure in 1886, having briefly been one of the wealthiest authors in the country.

Owen Wister, c. 1903. Photographer unknown. Public Domain.

Meanwhile, Emma Ghent Curtis (1860-1918), a Hoosier transplanted to Colorado, was writing The Administratrix. Published in 1889, it was the first real cowboy novel, outside of the dime-novel tradition. Its protagonist is a woman who falls in love with a cowboy and then cross-dresses as a cowboy in order to find his murderer. Though Curtis may be fairly said to have invented the genre—wouldn’t you know?—it’s a man who gets all the credit.

Poster for the Broadway production of The Virginian by Wister and Kirke La Shelle, 1903. Public Domain.

Philadelphian Owen Wister (1860-1938) penned a novel of the West and got it published in 1902 as The Virginian. Unlike Curtis’s obscure novel, The Virginian sold 200,000 copies in the first year. It’s credited with establishing many now-familiar tropes including the cowboy hero, the innocent schoolmarm, and the devious villain. Wister became “the father of Western fiction.” The Virginian was made into a successful stage play and has been the basis of five movies and a TV show. The original novel has sold 1.5 million copies to date.

Riders of the Purple Sage, by Zane Grey. Harper & Brothers. Fair use.

In Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, a dentist, former minor league baseball player, and aspiring author named Zane Grey (1872-1939) read The Virginian, studied its style and structure, and decided to try his hand at a Western novel. After western adventures including a hunting trip to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, he got the feel of the West and taught himself to be a convincing Western writer. His novel The Last of the Plainsmen was rejected by Harper & Brothers but serialized by Outing magazine. The next one, The Heritage of the Desert, was published by Harper and became a best-seller. Two years later he produced Riders of the Purple Sage, his most successful book and one of the most successful Western novels in history.

Grey died in 1939 at age 67, the author of more than ninety books, most of them Westerns, and one of America’s first millionaire authors. 

“Hopalong Takes Command,” an illustration by artist Frank Schoonover for a 1905 Hopalong Cassidy story, in the collection of the Delaware Art Museum. Licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0.

Another who deserves mention is Clarence E. Mulford (1883-1956). In 1904, Mulford created the cowboy character Hopalong Cassidy. In a series of short stories and 28 novels from then until 1941, Mulford sketched Cassidy’s adventures, elaborating a “detailed and authentic world filled with characters drawn from his extensive library research” (Wikipedia). 

Mulford sold film rights to Hollywood producer Harry Sherman, who made a popular series of Hopalong Cassidy films. On the silver screen, Cassidy’s character was changed from a profane, rough-hewn cowpuncher to the rather genteel, upstanding, hero portrayed by actor William Boyd and idolized by millions of us kids in the 1950s. (I even bought Hopalong Cassidy Cookies. They were delicious.)

Louis L’Amour in 1970. Photo by Thomas J. Kravitz, Los Angeles Times. Licensed under CC-BY-4.0

If Zane Grey and Clarence Mulford were prolific, the next great Western author was superabundant. Louis L’Amour (1908-1988) wrote 89 novels, fourteen short-story collections, and two full-length works of nonfiction. Almost all of them Westerns. His novels really began to sell around 1950. Just at that time, when he was still a hungry writer, L’Amour actually wrote four new Hopalong Cassidy novels, under a pseudonym, under contract for people who were planning a series of books and magazine stories to capitalize on Hoppy’s new-found fame. 

Poster for Hondo, a movie based on a Louis L’Amour short story, “The Gift of Cochise,” novelized by L’Amour upon the film’s release. Fair use.

L’Amour’s version of Hopalong Cassidy was inspired by Mulford’s original roughneck, but the editors softened the character to comport with his new Hollywood identity. L’Amour disclaimed authorship of those four books forever after.

Your New Favorite Author’s long-time friend Bill Martinez, who worked for Bantam Books when L’Amour was under contract to them, escorted the celebrated author on elaborate book tours. He was a nice man, Bill told me, but on tour he needed someone to protect him and carve out down time, especially since he was ill at that stage of his life.

Poster for Lonesome Dove, based on the novel by McMurtry. Fair use.

And just when we might have thought all possible changes had been rung on the Western literary canon, along comes Larry McMurtry (1936-2021). McMurtry was a writer for all seasons, producing a large body of work in several genres and types, but much of it was Western fiction. The most famous book is probably McMurtry’s epic 1985 cowboy novel Lonesome Dove. The book, about retired Texas Rangers who own a cattle company and go on a cattle drive, won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a four-part TV miniseries starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall. Because of the era when it was written, Lonesome Dove dealt with adult issues including sex, violence, and betrayal in a more forthright way. Most people who have read Lonesome Dove—or, for that matter, any of McMurtry’s other major works—acknowledge him to be a master storyteller.

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Your New Favorite Writer is well aware, Dear Reader, that there have been Westerns written and filmed since Larry McMurtry. But I think it’s amazingly advanced of me to work in Lonesome Dove, what with its being post-1957 and all. 

Perhaps you’ll be relieved to learn this installment concludes our little colloquium on Westerns—except that there is one curious post-script to scribe, or footnote to note, about a couple of larger-than-life characters who bridged the span of time, having one boot firmly in the Old West and the other in what we may think of as modern-day America.

Tune in next week for One More Round.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

09.19.23
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Aaarrr!

September 19 falls on a Tuesday this year. Tuesday is the day I post each installment of this blog, and . . .  

September 19, of course, is . . . 

International Talk Like a Pirate Day!

So cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of mayhem.

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Avast! 

International Talk Like a Pirate Day may be abbreviated to just Talk Like a Pirate Day, making it more wieldy in the mouth.

Since 1995, it is a day when those starved for amusement interject “Aaarrr!” into every other sentence. Lest that become boring, the day’s inventors, John Baur and Mark Summers, have provided a complete lexicon of pirate phrases. Conveniently, they all begin with the letter a—as in “ahoy,” “avast,” and so on. No sense wearing yourself out on the rest of the alphabet.

In this euphoric pursuit, one can’t help wondering where the very concept of talking like a pirate came from, can one?

Piracy, after all, is a crime. Its practitioners are known criminals. One might expect them to be unsavory characters, but—how, precisely, would they talk?

Perhaps like Errol Flynn in Captain Blood?—“It’s the wehld agaynst oss, and oss agaynst the wehld!” 

Hmm. I don’t know.

What about Long John Silver, the most famous pirate of all? He’s an invention of nineteenth-century writer Robert Louis Stevenson. Long John is the prime villain of Stevenson’s adventure novel Treasure Island. Before he reveals his villainy, however, he talks like this: 

See here, now, Hawkins, here’s a blessed hard thing on a man like me, now, ain’it? There’s Cap’n Trelawney—what’s he to think? Here I have this confounded son of a Dutchman sitting in my own house drinking of my own rum! Here you comes and tells me of it plain; and here I let him give us all the slip before my blessed deadlights!

Now, that’s more like it—a bit rough around the edges. Still, it’s hardly the slavering, bloodthirsty banter we might have expected from Long John Silver. For that, we must go to the man who became Long John Silver—actor Robert Newton. 

Newton as Long John Silver. Public Domain.

Newton (1905-1956) first appeared as Silver in Walt Disney’s British-made film adaptation of Treasure Island in 1950. Two years later he played Edward Teach in Blackbeard the Pirate. He reprised the Treasure Island character in a 1954 Australian-made film, Long John Silver, and in a 26-episode TV series, The Adventures of Long John Silver, in 1955. 

By March 1956, the hard-drinking fifty-year-old actor was dead. He left behind a varied and impressive catalog of important film roles. But he will always be remembered as the complete owner of Long John Silver. Today, almost seventy years after his death, it is Newton’s voice—an exaggerated version of the West Country accent of his youth—that today’s pirate talkers mimic. 

A younger Newton, channeling Laurence Olivier. Public Domain.

And a typical Hollywood thing happened: Long John Silver went from fearsome villain to endearing rogue. He became the protector of, not so much a threat to, young Jim Hawkins. That’s how it had to be for a half-hour television series to be watched by the young people of the English-speaking world. 

So powerful was Newton’s characterization that Long John migrated to center stage and become the hero of the piece. Thus he became not only the locus classicus of offically approved pirate speech but also the very embodiment of The Lovable Pirate. 

Lovable, tender-hearted, heroic, or repentant buccaneers were nothing new. The nineteenth century gave us romanticized pirates in Walter Scott’s The Pirate, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Red Rover, and Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. 

But Robert Newton stamped the worn-out stereotype with a twentieth century gloss, bringing it to life on screen with his memorable portrayals of Long John Silver and Blackbeard.

Former English poet laureate John Masefield, a lover of the sea, let slip something nearer the sad truth of piracy in his curiously schizophrenic poem, A Ballad of John Silver, to wit: 

. . . Then the dead men fouled the scuppers and the wounded filled the chains, 
And the paint-work all was spatter-dashed with other people's brains, 
She was boarded, she was looted, she was scuttled till she sank, 
And the pale survivors left us by the medium of the plank. 

O! then it was (while standing by the taffrail on the poop) 
We could hear the drowning folk lament the absent chicken-coop; 
Then, having washed the blood away, we'd little else to do 
Than to dance a quiet hornpipe as the old salts taught us to. . . .

Lovable pirates, indeed. Aaarrr.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer