Having been raised on TV westerns (my favorites were Cheyenne, Maverick, and the Rifleman), I never looked at rustlers as anything more than bad guys out to steal cattle.
It took Victoria Lamont, an English professor at Waterloo College in Ontario, Canada, to open my eyes.
Her book, Westerns: A Women’s History, spotlights accomplishments made by women who wrote about the Old West in an era when the Western frontier was recognized as officially closed (1880 to 1900). Yes, women wrote about cowboys, ranchers, romance, and rustlers.
In doing so, Lamont must deal with the mythology that surrounds the Old West. We know a lot about that mythology since it’s been transferred to screens both large and small for 100 years. We know who wears the white hat and who doesn’t.
“Mythology likes to be simple but these stories are complicated,” said Lamont.
Comparing two books published in April 1902, Lamont notes that both covered the same subject, action based on a real-life rustling dispute in Johnson County, Wyo. in the late 19th century--with completely different results.
Owen Wister’s The Virginian became a bestseller that’s generated six films (so far) and a long-running TV series. The Rustler by Frances McElrath, a woman whose lone novel was largely unknown until reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press in 2002
.
Wistler’s version supports cattle owners who resorted to vigilante violence to deal with two men who opposed the cattle companies and were identified as rustlers.
McElrath tells a different story, a story of a class struggle in the Old West, said Lamont, pointing to a collision between rich and poor. The rich were the big cattle operations financed by wealthy individuals in the Eastern U.S. or Europe that discouraged cowboys who wanted to get a piece of the action by getting into the cattle business.
Unbranded cattle—mavericks—became a big issue. Cowboys who didn’t turn over these cattle to the large cattle companies could be accused of rustling, she said. If courts didn’t find those accused of rustling guilty, cattle owners felt justified in resorting to vigilante action, said Lamont.
“In my opinion, Frances McElrath’s version of history is more accurate,” she said.
Lamont’s next book focuses on Bertha Bower, another woman whose writing accomplishments have been overlooked. Bower’s publisher decreed in 1920 that her books on the Old West were second in sales only to Zane Grey.
THE OLD WEST