The Western Fiction of Mayne Reid

R O Y W. M E Y E R Mankato State College The Western Fiction of Mayne Reid Bernard De Voto once referred to Mayne Reid’s The Scalp Hunters as “one of the best Wild West novels.”1 Praise from so authoritative a source is not to be taken lightly, even though Reid’s astonishing output—nearly sixty books in about thirty years— might seem to suggest that he belongs in a class with Ned Buntline and the people Erastus Beadle hired to write his dime novels. As a matter of fact, Reid did write for Beadle from 1868 to about 1877, and it is true that in sheer facility he resembled those assembly-line producers of pulp fiction.2 But he aimed at a somewhat more sophisticated audience and attempted to do more than tell an excit­ ing story. When he wrote fiction with a setting familiar to him— Mexico and the American Southwest—the result was more nearly comparable to the popular historical novels of the late nineteenth century than to the Wild West thrillers of the weeklies. Reid’s first-hand acquaintance with the American West seems to have been brief. Born in Ireland in 1818, he came to the United States in search of adventure, landing at New Orleans in January 1840. Finding no commercial use for his classical education (his father, a Presbyterian minister, had intended him for a career in the church), he took a job with a commission house and later xThe Year of Decision: 1846 (Boston, 1943), p. 404. 2Albert Johannsen, The House of Beadle and Adams (Norman, 1950), II, 235. The exact number of novels written by Reid is difficult to determine. Some were reissued under different titles, and some books attributed to Reid may only have been edited by him. Most bibliographies list between fifty and sixty titles; Johannsen credits him with seventy-five “tales of adventure.” 116 Western American Literature worked as a clerk in a store at Natchez. His imagination fired by stories he had heard from hunters and Indian traders, he undertook two trading expeditions into the Red River country. According to Reid’s wife and biographer, he spent months among the red men; trading his wares for their furs and skins, learning somewhat of their language and knowledge of woodcraft, sometimes lodging under their shelters, and eating by their camp-fires. With them, and the white hunters for his teachers, he hunted the buffalo and grizzly bear; trapped the beaver and otter, and lassoed the wild horse or mustang.3 Later he is supposed to have traded along the Missouri and Platte rivers and organized several hunting expeditions out of St. Louis, on one of which John James Audubon accompanied him. It is possible that Reid had all the experiences his widow credits him with, but if so he must have compressed them into a rather short period. By September 1842 he was living in Pittsburgh, after having worked for a time as a teacher in Nashville and as an actor in Cincinnati. The probability is that, although Mrs. Reid may have exaggerated the extent of his Western experience, he did live on the Mississippi and travel in the trans-Mississippi West enough to provide him with a basis for his later novels about that region. After about four years of varied journalistic activity, including some work for William T. Porter’s Spirit of the Times, Reid enlisted in a volunteer regiment for service in Mexico. Landing near Vera Cruz in March 1847, he took part in several battles and was wounded (and reported killed) at Chapultepec the following September. He stayed in Mexico until May 1848, improving his opportunities to study the flora and fauna and to write sketches for the Spirit and other papers. Discharged with the rank of captain, he set about capitalizing on his Mexican experiences by writing a novel. 8Elizabeth Reid, Captain Mayne Reid: His Life and Adventures (London, 1900), p. 11. This is an expanded version of a “memoir” published first in 1890. It is the source for all biographical information about Reid in this paper, corrected here and there by the Dictionary of National Biography sketch by George...