The Rustler: A Tale of Love and War in Wyoming by Frances McElrath (review)

3 1 4 WAL 3 8 . 3 F a l l 2 0 0 3 original, independent thinking. These strengths are complemented by the clar­ ity and coherence of his prose and by what I’ll call his overall tonal sensitivity or fair-mindedness in addressing the strengths and weaknesses of critical approaches in the field. While his discussion of, say, Welch’s Winter in the Blood in the context of the “blood/land/memory complex” tends to dilute its textural density, his methodology particularly reaps dividends when he draws out the veiled, strategic oppositional rhetoric in texts immediately after World War II. In addition to such local strengths of analysis and clear framing of the argu­ mentative stakes, Allen’s method also potentially offers a way through the con­ temporary skirmishes being fiercely waged between those attuned to a globaliz­ ing, pan-ethnic approach and those advocating absolutist, local definitions of ethnic or racial identity. This is a noteworthy book that deserves wide reading. The Rustler: A Tale of Love and War in Wyoming. By Frances McElrath. With an introduction by Victoria Lamont. L incoln: U n iversity o f N ebraska Press, 2002. 193 pages, $19.95. Reviewed by Nicole Tonkovich U niversity of C alifornia, San D iego In 1902, the events of the Johnson County War, ten years after its occur­ rence, were fictionalized in two novels. One, Owen Wister’s The Virginian became the fountainhead of a century of imaginative writing about the West; the other, Frances McElrath’s The Rustler— promoted as a tale full of adventure, love, and suspense— sank into oblivion. One hundred years later, McElrath’s novel is once again available. Read through contemporary eyes, The Rustler sheds new light on Wister’s novel and its literary progeny. It exposes the complexities of western economics underlying the phenomenon of rustling and emphasizes the centrality of women— as settlers, as objects of exchange, as writers, and as centrally important ideological relays— in the turn-of-the-century West. Written by Easterners transplanted to Wyoming, the retrospective narra­ tive of each of these eerily similar novels follows the fortunes of an upwardly mobile cowboy in a corporatizing West. The virtue of the cowboy-hero is assayed in relation to cattle rustling. Each protagonist pursues a love affair with an upper-class, eastern schoolteacher who is the key to his social advancement. The differences between the two novels, however, are far more suggestive. Unlike The Virginian, The Rustler makes unbranded cattle, both as economic resources and as figures of other patrimonies, central to the plot. While the Virginian rises into the managerial ranks by his willingness to prosecute rustling, even when it is done by his closest friend, The Rustler's hero, Jim, embraces cattle-thieving as a socially justified act, marking the resistance of the cowboy-laborer to the domination of the western cattle market by effete eastern businessmen. Whereas The Virginian reports the lynching of Steve as a B o o k R e v i e w s 3 1 5 tastefully muted offstage incident, The Rustler emphasizes the violent out­ comes of rustling on those who practice it, as well as their families. The Rustler features a cast of mavericks, human as well as bovine, includ­ ing Mavvy, a heroic orphan girl; Tips, a child-cowboy adopted by Jim; Hazel, a newly orphaned elite woman unsure of her inheritance; and Jim, who has fled an abusive childhood home for life on the range. Unlike The Virginian’s marriage plot, which promises to reunite the divided postbellum nation in the open spaces of the West, The Rustler’s denouement is fragmented. The epony­ mous Jim dies a slow and excruciating death, the result of vigilante justice, nursed by the repentant Hazel, whose dissembling flirtation is at least partly the cause of his flawed decisions. Horace, Hazel’s erstwhile eastern suitor, mar­ ries Mavvy instead. Hazel ultimately refuses to be rounded up and branded as any man’s wife, choosing to devote her life to educating and bettering the social position of the children of Jim’s band of rustlers. Victoria Lamont, who first brought this novel to the attention of western...