Writing About the Western United States

Writing About theWesternUnitedStates JamesK. Folsom, ed. The Western: A Collection al Critical Essays. EnglewoodCliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1979. 177pp. L L. Lee and Merrill Lewis, eds. Women. Women Write,;,, and the West. Troy, N.Y.:Whitston Publishing, 1980.252 pp. JohnR. Milton. The Novel of the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980.341 pp. W1iliamW.Savage, Jr. The Cowboy Hero: Hi~ Imagein American Histo1:1• & Culture. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979. 179pp. MEMORANDUM From:Jonah Cetacea, Chairman To· Prof. Izaak Walton Re· Classes in 1981-82 Marshall Gilliland Smeethe popularity of Canadian Literature of the West continues to result in overflow enrollments, the Class Committee wishes you to teach the long-dormant Western American Fiction next year,in order to accommodate those students wanting to study in the department. Please send jour text list .... I will return to this excerpt, but first picture in your mind's eye a saloon in Collegetown, in which five men are playing poker. They come from an ordinary town of its sort, picturesque and populated mostly by Homosapien Scholars and their disciples, who pursue money, promotion, degrees and hockeypucks. At this poker table are Mythhunter, Compiler, Wheeler-Dealer, Teacher, and Reviewerskeptic. They have been winning and losing money forseveral hours; it is late and they are betting on the last hand of five-card draw.Compiler bets a dollar ... and the betting goes on until first Wheel et'" Dealerand then Mythhunter decide the game is too rich for their weak cards. Then Compiler folds. Teacher bets three dollars (these modest amounts are typical of Collegetown poker games). Reviewerskeptic likes the odds and raises a dollar, whereupon Teacher calls. His aces and fours beat the kings andtens. Canadian Review of American Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring 1982, 75-86 76 Marshall Gilliland That oblique indication of how this essay is going to conclude juxtaposes a bit of wit with the high seriousness of the books reviewed here. These four volumes vie for placement on Selected Bibliographies that list someof the countless pages written by academic writers and regional fans since the critical and cultural discovery of the American West in the 1920s. Twoof the titles identify non-books, another title is on a work that is more like an elaborate inventory sheet than a discussion of an author's ideas, and the fourth title introduces a book you may want to buy, to read, to use-which action depends upon your literary speciality or how interested or curious you are in a new subject. The West is familiar to all of us. We know a little or a lot about it because of the publicity and study given it since the European-based explorers first visited it. Some people dismiss the West as being unimportant to them, and indeed it may have no significance in their personal or professional lives. This group of people forms one of the two opposite limits of interest in the West; the other limit is represented by people who enthusiastically embrace even the trivia of western history and culture as being important. Between these two groups are such diverse people as poets who celebrate the land· scape, Indians who view the land as home and source of religion, hucksters who peddle images of romantic places and deeds, teachers who instruct students in the region's past and present characteristics, and vicarious westerners who ride mechanical bulls while wearing their boot-cut jeans and snap-closed shirts. They are interested in a region, a myth, and a symbol of such complexity it can never be exhaustively catalogued, described or analyzed. This complexity sometimes is a challenge for an academic writer. One such writer is William W. Savage, Jr., an historian at the University of Oklahoma. After writing a brief history of the Cherokee Strip Live Stock Association in 1973, he edited or co-edited four books on western topics. Now he has set out alone to catalog the images of the cowboy in American popular culture and to debunk the myth of the archetypal American hero. He suggests that anyone who takes the boring, popularized cowboy seriously is befogged. Savage also suggests that the professional western commentator...