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BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 1 / / Becoming Western / Liza J. Nicholas 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 [First Page] [1], (1) Lines: 0 to 16 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [1], (1) Jack Flagg and the Battle over “Westernness” Owen Wister and Jack Flagg were both twenty-five years old in the summer of 1885. Flagg was a working-class iconoclast from the South, Wister was an eastern elite, but their lives would nonetheless come together to shape the West’s stories about itself far into the future. Flagg rode Wyoming’s ranges as one of the cowboys with whom Wister would become so enchanted. Wister’s documentation of Flagg’s likeness in popular fiction would bring the author worldwide acclaim and shape thousands of readers’ impressions of the West and its inhabitants.1 In the spring of 1885, with a new degree from Harvard, Flagg’s future chronicler boarded an outbound train at Boston destined for Wyoming. Wister suffered from the nineteenth-century ailment neuralgia, the symptoms of which included headaches, nightmares, vertigo, and hallucinations . Wister’s was a common complaint among middle-class men. It was thought to be a symptom of modern civilization, the result of excessive brainwork and the nervous strain of the professional classes. Neuralgia was a cross that men of Wister’s class and status had to bear, and Wister hoped the West’s dry climate would improve his health.2 He spent his first summer in the primitive West at Major Frank BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 2 / / Becoming Western / Liza J. Nicholas 2 | The Battle over “Westernness” 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 [2], (2) Lines: 16 to 20 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [2], (2) Wolcott’s ranch in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin. For Wister, the West presented a rejuvenative, primitive, and empty space. “Each breath you take tells you no one else has ever used it before you,” he wrote to his mother, “[the scenery] is wild and desolate.” Wister determined to chronicle—to define—the exotic land to which he bore witness. He wrote in 1885, “The details of life here are interesting. Wish I could find out all about it—and master it— theoretically. It’s a life as strange as any the country has seen.” On his return to Wyoming in the spring of 1891, he wrote, “the only thing I do is to jot down all shreds of local colour and all conversations and anecdotes decent or otherwise that strike me as native wild flowers. After a while I shall write a great fat book about the whole thing.” 3 Wister reveled in Jack Flagg’s rugged world, and he went on to interpret it for a worldwide audience in his 1902 classic, The Virginian. For a time, Jack Flagg lived the mythologized life of a cowboy in the West’s open-range era, a lifestyle that popular culture would colorfully and eternally iconize. Flagg was from a well-todo family in West Virginia who had fallen on hard times in the aftermath of the Civil War. He arrived in Wyoming in 1882 with one of the legendary cattle drives from Texas, and he later gained local notoriety as a prominent figure in a range conflict on the western prairie. Flagg was more than a simple cowboy, however. His life in Wyoming reveals a much broader discussion over the role of the West and its inhabitants’ images in the national consciousness . In 1890, the dominant story Wyoming would tell about itself was still up for grabs. The state was sparsely settled, with little or no industry, mining, or labor presence to influence its core narrative. 4 A “conversation” about this narrative—about what Wyoming’s predominant image and identity would be—took place in the state in the late nineteenth century. When that discussion waned, the cowboy emerged as Wyoming’s representative icon. As the perennial home of the cowboy, Wyoming would come to be imagined as the last bastion of true Americanness. The vision of the West that Wyoming embodied could serve as...

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