The Cowboy Legend: Owen Wister's Virginian and the Canadian-American Ranching Frontier by John Jennings (review)

John Jennings' title is neatly ambiguous: Owen Wister's Virginian refers both to the title and main character of his novel, The Virginian(1902), and to Everett Johnson, a real-life Virginian who held a strong claim to be the model for Wister's unnamed hero. The plot of The Virginian, which Jennings usefully summarises, is told by an unnamed narrator (presumably Wister) who, sent to Wyoming for his health, is put in the care of the reluctant (also unnamed) Virginian who resents being nursemaid to a tenderfoot (p. xxiii). As Jennings points out in The Cowboy Legend, this is precisely how Wister encountered Everett Johnson (p. 153). Many years later, in conversation with Jennings's parents, Johnson was to reveal that he was the original of the Virginian, with a copy of the book inscribed, 'To the hero from the author' (p. xvii). Though Jennings was only five when Johnson died in 1946, he belongs to the increasingly rare set of people who can claim to have a connection to the classic days of the cowboy era that, through fiction, stage, and screen has so captured the imagination, not only of Americans, but of the world.

With The Virginian, Owen Wister can be said to be the father of the Western or cowboy fiction. Most of the characteristic features familiar in books and films can be seen in The Virginian: the wry threat of the taciturn hero ('When you call me that, smile'); the gunslinger with a complex moral code; the hero without a name. Even the main street duel is here, with Miss Molly Stark Wood's ultimatum prefiguring that of the film High Noon. Everett Johnson's reminiscences, as recorded by his daughter-in-law, Jean Johnson, provide an insight into the authenticity of Wister's portrait of the Virginian, even if, as Jennings is careful to point out, there is 'no physical proof that Owen Wister ever laid eyes on Johnson' (p. xvi). Johnson lived and worked as a cowboy and later a rancher in Alberta, and knew many of the famous and infamous personalities of the Wild West, including Buffalo Bill Cody and Harry Longabough, also known as the Sundance Kid, who was best man at his wedding (p. 128). His life story therefore provides a helpful gloss on the novel, and an entrée into the history of the cowboy era and the vigilante law which The Virginianso stoutly defends.

Jennings's book is divided into eight chapters which follow Everett Johnson's life, told against a careful historical background which also highlights the differences in law and order as practised on the Canadian and American side of the border. He also carefully explores the extent to which Wister relied on real life as the basis for his fiction. Entertainingly written, The Cowboy Legendis a useful combination of literary and historical analysis with the biographies of both Johnson and Wister an excellent starting point for the 'tenderfoot' in Western literary studies.