The Magazine West

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

THE trouble with too many Western books is that they are written by Easterners, and if not that, they are written for Easterners, which is a great deal worse. Here on the coast, when we say West we mean, in a general way, west of the Rockies and along the Rio Grande, but being a Westerner is a state of mind. A great many excellent people born in those purlieus never attain to it. Around Los Angeles, for instance, there are large numbers of Easterners born every year who continue in that condition the whole of their natural lives; but the Fortyniners, those men of strange manners and singular achievement, were all sprung from some other where. That is why some of the best books of the West are written by people who do not live in it, and so many writers born there have nothing whatever to say about it. Herman Whitaker lives in Piedmont and writes about Mexico and the Canadian border. James Hopper, at home in the heart of Old California, spreading himself over our island possessions, writes the more delightfully the farther he is away from his source. But then Mr. Hopper wrote exactly the same sort of stories when he was on the staff of McClure’s. Jack London is credited a Westerner because he was born in Oakland and owns a house in Sonoma County. But Mr. London is essentially a product of social rather than local conditions, a fleck of the ferment thrown from the underworld against our sky; but no one knows yet if he will remain a permanent light there or drop back into the mass from which he was squeezed up. It is because he exhibits possibilities of doing either that Mr. London is still worth watching; but nobody — at least nobody in the West, — would consider his writings as representative of Western thought and manners, or regard him in any sense as an exponent of the Western spirit. Every year or so there drifts to New York on the back-water of the tide that sets forever toward the sunset, some clever young Californian who continues to write satirical verse and fatten purple cows as successfully among the chimney pots of West Twenty-third Street as ever he did on the sand lots back of the Bay. And still the West — the old West — the real West, is far from these, separated as far as Dan from Beersheba by that vast, familiar territory of the Magazine West.

This is a very curious country, bounded by McClure’s, Everybody’s, and the Sunday Supplement. Its inhabitants are chiefly “Bad Men,” “Señoritas,” “Tenderfeet” who always begin very badly and end handsomely, cowboys carrying guns which are invariably represented in the illustrations as incorrectly worn, and beautiful young girls who ride amazingly. All these dress and talk as the Magazine East would like to think they do.

No one quite knows who is responsible for the speech of the Magazine West; Mr. Harte is often credited with it. When Mr. Harte wrote The Luck of Roaring Camp, he probably did not know he was doing anything unusual — in fact I am certain of it, or he would never have given it to the Overland Monthly, which perhaps paid him three dollars and a half a page for it. It might not have occurred to him that there were large numbers of people to whom the speech of miners was picturesquely unfamiliar; he heard it all around him and wrote it as he heard. Later when he had learned what the East wanted and was out of touch with his source, he gave them the best imitation of himself that he could manage. It would be perfectly easy for the student of the real West to arrange Mr. Harte’s stories chronologically by the talk in them. That might have been the beginning, but it has been recently more delightfully done. I always think when I read Red Saunders and Wolfville Days, how much more interesting my eighteen years among them would have been if cowboys and miners really talked as they do in those delicious tales. Personally I have found their speech rather notable for poverty of expression. The average prospector can get along with a vocabulary as small as his camp kit. Because a cowboy speaks in your presence of “rounding up a bunch of money,” he is not to be supposed completely supplied with a literary medium of racy phrases. He would also speak of “rounding up a bunch of girls” for a dance and cutting out one for himself, but it does not prove him possessed of imagination. The fact is, he has probably lost from misuse, if he ever had them, the words suitable to the occasion. “Round up” is the active verb of his occupation, but when you have heard it used constantly as a substitute for make, do, accomplish, get, obtain, it loses a little of its quality of picturesqueness. Men who lead outdoor lives in the big West happen upon many things seldom seen by wistful eyes, but one finds the greatest difficulty in getting a consecutive account of them when they lie outside the narrator’s occupation, because of the sheer inadequacy of his vocabulary. What the cowboy or miner speaks least about, and therefore has the fewest words for, are his emotions.

Personally, I have never met the prototype of the Magazine Bad Men, though I have seen a few who would have liked to be thought so; and since Charles Lummis gave up his corduroys, the only man I know of in the West who dresses in the least like magazine illustrations is Reuben, the guide, of San Diego, who takes tourist parties across the Mexican border into Tia Juana. Of course it is worth while to be taken to a town that calls itself Aunt Jane, by a man who dresses as Reuben does, but the commercialism of it all is obvious. Once there was a newspaper man who came up into my country to write up the way his syndicate thought it ought to be. His sombrero was very wide and rakishly tilted — away from the sun. His shirt was open at the throat and decorated with a handkerchief; but because he did not know why cowboys wear handkerchiefs around their necks, he wore it like a girl at a picnic. It was white silk and became him very well. There had not been an arrest made in Maverick for nearly three years, but the syndicate man had so much gun-metal on him that he fairly clanked. When he first struck our town he saw an Indian in shirtsleeves and overalls, leaning against the doorsill of the general store. He was Johnny Dean, a graduate of the Carson School, who played the cornet and afterwards organized a labor strike among the Indians at the salt works. The syndicate man clapped him on the back and said, —

“Heap big Indian, come drink firewater.”

Dean looked him all over with the gentle flicker of a smile. “ Thank you,” he said, “I never use alcoholic stimulants.” The interesting part of this story is, that it is a two years’ penitentiary offense to furnish liquor to Indians.

In the Magazine West all the señoritas are pretty, and the tenderfoot is always falling in love with them. A lady, who ought to know better, wrote a story of a university professor who broke an engagement in order to marry one of them after a few days’ acquaintance. Now the real daughter of the old Spanish California aristocracy is so carefully sheltered that the tenderfoot seldom gets so much as a glimpse of her, and would seldomer be considered eligible for marriage if he did; and the daughter of the mixed Indian, Mexican, and of-what-not-breed is not the least bit more likely to interest a cultivated Eastern gentleman than any other illiterate girl of limited capacity who has fine eyes and smells of garlic.

Of course there is a real West, which sometimes gets into books — the West of Emerson Hough and Owen Wister, though Mr. Wister was a good ten years too late to get the best of it. Stewart Edward White knows it and Andy Adams is it. Too few people have read The Log of a Cowboy and Reed Anthony, Cowman, but those who have, can well imagine the historians of the true West digging up Mr. Adams’s books from under a waste of others to find in them the speech, the thought, and the essentially uncomplicated male attitude that made possible its earliest great achievement. Some years ago there appeared in the Century a story, “Benefits Forgot,” which perhaps by the death of its author has been allowed to drop out of notice, but of a Westernness convincing and absolute. It was of the same stripe as Mary Hallock Foote’s Led Horse Claim, but it gave promise of exceeding Mrs. Foote’s work in verity as a man’s view of a man’s country always must. One can never quite get permission to call Frank Norris’s Octopus a Western book because the purpose of it was a little bigger than the West, but there were things in it that give one to wonder whether if Mr. Norris had continued to write, he would have proved himself a citizen of the world or merely a Californian. There is n’t any Western poet yet, — unless you count Walt Whitman who lived in the East, — though there are poets in the West, and playwrights too, whose work could just as well have been written in New York, and generally is.

The Great Divide was a most interesting example of the inaptitude of the East to get at the West where it lives. Though there is occasionally lack of chivalry in the West, there is always common sense, — which leads naturally to saying that a really competent Westerner, if only he had moved a few states nearer sundown, is William Allen White. But you will notice there is no gun-play In Our Town, no señoritas, and no professional Bad Men; just human nature and a friendly understanding of it; some short cuts to decent, humorous tenderness for its frailty, unwhimpering acceptance for its lack and loss; and if that is n’t the meaning of the West, what then ?