The Bobbsey Twins Hit the Trail: Or, Out West with Children's Series Fiction

"What a society wants its children to know reveals what that society wants itself to be," wrote historian Robert Hine in 1973 (238). To see the truth of this dictum, one need look no further than the dozens of mass-produced children's series about the Great West that flourished in the first four decades of the twentieth century. In such books, the West is a moral landscape in which adolescents face and overcome both physical and ideological challenges. Written mostly by Easterners for Easterners, the stories emphasize the "difference" of the West while at the same time reassuring Eastern readers that their own values are universal. Each book reproduces the American Eden that had seemed to promise so much to the first settlers of the new world; each story recreates a version of the mythic battle between civilization and some form of wilderness; and each protagonist reaffirms the rightness of American ideals.

"The West" had been one of the staples of dime novels ever since their appearance in the 1860s. When the new century saw this form of popular literature superseded by mass-produced, cloth-bound books for children, marketers were quick to re-use their most successful formula. So popular was the West as a theme and setting in children's series fiction that almost all series of four or more volumes devoted at least one book to charting the protagonists' journeys along their own versions of the pioneer trail. The Rover Boys, the first twentieth-century series heroes, headed westward as early as 1900 in The Rover Boys Out West, or The Search for a Lost Mine. They were quickly followed by Aunt Jane's Nieces, the Bobbsey Twins, Ruth Fielding, Betty Gordon, Patsy Carroll, the Motor Maids, the Six Little Bunkers, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the Boy Globe Trotters, the Bungalow Boys, the Circus Boys, the Fairview Boys, the Motorcycle Chums, the Moving Picture Boys, and countless others. And these series represent only those in which the title characters visited the West for just one volume. Almost as many other series existed in which every volume concerned the West: the Saddle Boys, the Frontier Boys, the X Bar X Boys, Linda Craig, Bret King, Tom Quest, the Boy Ranchers, the Border Boys, and the Broncho Rider Boys, to name a few.

Although children's series fiction is no longer as popular as it was in its halcyon days before World War II, series publication continues with such perennials as Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and the Bobbsey Twins, all of whom make at least one foray into the West. Today, the Linda Craig Western-mystery series is still in print. But before television and other market forces ended the dominance of series fiction in the juvenile entertainment market, literally hundreds of titles were produced in dozens of separate series. By 1982, the books of the Stratemeyer Syndicate alone (an organization that mass-produced about two-thirds of all series titles) had sold an estimated two hundred million copies (Johnson xiii). Thus between 1900 and 1940, an American child—especially an Eastern, white, middle-class child—would have been hard-pressed to grow to adulthood without being exposed to at least one series version of the West.¹

The sheer number of these series indicates the powerful allure that the myth of the golden West held for children. The obvious popularity and longevity of these books raises significant questions: What vision of the West did series books offer to children? And how does that vision help us understand both what our society was and what it wanted itself to be?

Not surprisingly, the picture of the West in series books is complex and revealing. Most of them acknowledge that the "West" was actually composed of many different "Wests." We find volumes set in Texas, the Rockies, Montana, the Great Plains, New Mexico, Arizona, the Pacific Northwest, and so on. But despite this diversity of physical locales, the "West" as a mythic place had basically the same characteristics whatever the particular location or time. Although the books discussed in...