Owen Wister’s classic 1902 Western tale is told from the point of view of an unnamed Tenderfoot visitor to the Judge Henry’s Sunk Creek Spread near Medicine Bow, Wyoming who is babysat by his host’s Trusted Man the Virginian. We get little description of the Virginian save that he is young and lithe, a giant of a man pretty as a picture and appears tall in the saddle and has shiny black hair. Those who are good at their jobs do them with an economy of motion, with a grace and ease that make what they do look easy until someone else tries to do it. So it is with the Virginian. There’s a confidence and competence that for example let’s fellow card players know when he lays a gun on the table that if forced to he will know how and not hesitate to use it.
The book unfolds at a lazy pace and documents through anecdotes the friendship that develops between the author and the Virginian. The land and the creatures that inhabit it get more detailed descriptions than the people who intrude on it. The demise of open range caused by fences and farming figures prominently. Texas is still a state that requires crop growers to protect their fields from wandering cattle. Interstates are fenced and their ramps protected by Texas Gates.
The author indulges in entire chapters that provide back-story and biographical material on his characters but do nothing to move the story along. One gets the sense that the tenderfoot who narrates the tale is the author himself with his Eastern Civilized Sensibilities. He muses about the brutality inherent in a cattle operation and is scandalized at the fact that some take pleasure in such brutality and ill-treat their animals, particularly their horses. He dwells upon frontier justice at a time when cattle rustling and horse thievery were hanging offences and lynchings were staged in the field lest lawyers and town juries let the miscreants walk. If we find it hard to think that this frontier is only a century behind us we must remember that it was even more recent that a white jury in the South would not have convicted a white of killing a black.
Would it be an offense to reveal that the book ends with a Honeymoon Camping Trip in the Mountains?
The book unfolds at a lazy pace and documents through anecdotes the friendship that develops between the author and the Virginian. The land and the creatures that inhabit it get more detailed descriptions than the people who intrude on it. The demise of open range caused by fences and farming figures prominently. Texas is still a state that requires crop growers to protect their fields from wandering cattle. Interstates are fenced and their ramps protected by Texas Gates.
The author indulges in entire chapters that provide back-story and biographical material on his characters but do nothing to move the story along. One gets the sense that the tenderfoot who narrates the tale is the author himself with his Eastern Civilized Sensibilities. He muses about the brutality inherent in a cattle operation and is scandalized at the fact that some take pleasure in such brutality and ill-treat their animals, particularly their horses. He dwells upon frontier justice at a time when cattle rustling and horse thievery were hanging offences and lynchings were staged in the field lest lawyers and town juries let the miscreants walk. If we find it hard to think that this frontier is only a century behind us we must remember that it was even more recent that a white jury in the South would not have convicted a white of killing a black.
Would it be an offense to reveal that the book ends with a Honeymoon Camping Trip in the Mountains?
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