The Virginian | Page 3

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The Virginian, A Horseman Of The Plains, by Owen Wister Etext
prepared by Bill Brewer, [email protected]

THE VIRGINIAN A Horseman Of The Plains
by OWEN WISTER

To THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Some of these pages you have seen, some you have praised, one stands
new-written because you blamed it; and all, my dear critic, beg leave to
remind you of their author's changeless admiration.

TO THE READER
Certain of the newspapers, when this book was first announced, made a
mistake most natural upon seeing the sub-title as it then stood, A TALE
OF SUNDRY ADVENTURES. "This sounds like a historical novel,"
said one of them, meaning (I take it) a colonial romance. As it now
stands, the title will scarce lead to such interpretation; yet none the less
is this book historical--quite as much so as any colonial romance.
Indeed, when you look at the root of the matter, it is a colonial romance.
For Wyoming between 1874 and 1890 was a colony as wild as was
Virginia one hundred years earlier. As wild, with a scantier population,
and the same primitive joys and dangers. There were, to be sure, not so
many Chippendale settees.
We know quite well the common understanding of the term "historical
novel." HUGH WYNNE exactly fits it. But SILAS LAPHAM is a
novel as perfectly historical as is Hugh Wynne, for it pictures an era
and personifies a type. It matters not that in the one we find George
Washington and in the other none save imaginary figures; else THE
SCARLET LETTER were not historical. Nor does it matter that Dr.
Mitchell did not live in the time of which he wrote, while Mr. Howells
saw many Silas Laphams with his own eyes; else UNCLE TOM'S
CABIN were not historical. Any narrative which presents faithfully a
day and a generation is of necessity historical; and this one presents
Wyoming between 1874 and 1890. Had you left New York or San
Francisco at ten o'clock this morning, by noon the day after to-morrow
you could step out at Cheyenne. There you would stand at the heart of
the world that is the subject of my picture, yet you would look around
you in vain for the reality. It is a vanished world. No journeys, save
those which memory can take, will bring you to it now. The mountains
are there, far and shining, and the sunlight, and the infinite earth, and
the air that seems forever the true fountain of youth, but where is the
buffalo, and the wild antelope, and where the horseman with his
pasturing thousands? So like its old self does the sage-brush seem when
revisited, that you wait for the horseman to appear.
But he will never come again. He rides in his historic yesterday. You

will no more see him gallop out of the unchanging silence than you will
see Columbus on the unchanging sea come sailing from Palos with his
caravels.
And yet the horseman is still so near our day that in some chapters of
this book, which were published separate at the close of the nineteenth
century, the present tense was used. It is true no longer. In those
chapters it has been changed, and verbs like "is" and "have" now read
"was" and "had." Time has flowed faster than my ink.
What is become of the horseman, the cowpuncher, the last romantic
figure upon our soil? For he was romantic. Whatever he did, he did
with his might. The bread that he earned was earned hard, the wages
that he squandered were squandered hard,--half a year's pay sometimes
gone in a night,--"blown in," as he expressed it, or "blowed in," to be
perfectly accurate. Well, he will be here among us always, invisible,
waiting his chance to live and play as he would like. His wild kind has
been among us