WYOMING LIT TRIP

One chapter in our region’s history has generated a sagging shelf of iconic western literature (and film).

Welcome to Johnson County---

home of the notorious cattle wars, playground of The Virginian, way station to Shane’s mysterious journey, and gateway to the Wyoming of Annie Proulx’s fiction.

The cattle wars were a dramatic domino in a series of tragedies and transitions that ended the corporate cattlemen’s monopoly of public lands. Unwilling to address environmental degradation and adapt to political shifts, cattle barons blamed farmers, small cattle operations, and sheep ranchers for their troubles. Big Ranching formed vigilante posses to terrorize encroaching “dirt scratchers” for real and perceived crimes of rustling. In Johnson County the farmers fought back, trapped the vigilantes in a barn, and turned the thugs over to the army.

While the classic texts that treat this history should be taken with several grains of salt, they are insightful when read in context, and make enjoyable reading despite their cultural baggage.

Consider …

Owen Wister supports the Big Ranching establishment in his progenitor of the western genre, The Virginian. Before Wister, cowboys were considered immoral ruffians. He turned the nameless, nomadic, underpaid, family-adverse, and short-lived cattle worker into a national hero. Virtually every western since contains elements of Wister.

On a recent trip to Wyoming my family and I stayed at the historic Occidental Hotel in Buffalo – in the very room where (hoteliers claim) Wister wrote parts of The Virginian. Here’s Mr W's bed.

Unlike The Virginian, Jack Schaefer’s classic, Shane, sides with the "little guy." Like Wister, Schaefer tackles the role of violence in meting out justice. Shane was written before Schaefer traveled west, but he expertly captures the emotional powder keg of the time and place. Buffalo's Occidental Saloon shows many of the scars from gunfights that Schaeffer fictionalized in Shane.

It may seem a stretch, but Annie Proulx covers much of this same landscape in her recent short story collections, Close Range: Wyoming Stories and Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2. Proulx explores the consequences – unintended and otherwise – of a violent history, harsh geography, and technological change. By the time Proulx gets to him, the mythic hero who escaped to the West in the 1860s is hitching rides and living in a dumpy trailer in the 1960s.

Found! The REAL Brokeback Mountain of Proulx’s story.

Not as glamorous as the Canadian setting used in the film -- not even the snowy peaks seen here -- it’s the more modest (i.e. sheep friendly) green slope. A fitting backdrop for a tragic story about two down and out sheepherders. Compiled by Karl Olson