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 cow-puncher, 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 always, since the beginning: a young man with his temptations, a
hero without wings.
The cow-puncher’s ungoverned hours did not unman him. If he gave his
word, he kept it; Wall Street would have found him behind the times.
Nor did he talk lewdly to women; Newport would have thought him
old-fashioned. He and his brief epoch make a complete picture, for in
themselves they were as complete as the pioneers of the land or the
explorers of the sea. A transition has followed the horseman of the
plains; a shapeless state, a condition of men and manners as unlovely
as is that moment in the year when winter is gone and spring not come,
and the face of Nature is ugly. I shall not dwell upon it here. Those
who have seen it know well what I mean. Such transition was inevitable.
Let us give thanks that it is but a transition, and not a finality.
Sometimes readers inquire, Did I know the Virginian? As well, I hope,
as a father should know his son. And sometimes it is asked, Was such and
such a thing true? Now to this I have the best answer in the world.
Once a cow-puncher listened patiently while I read him a manuscript.
It concerned an event upon an Indian reservation. “Was that the Crow
reservation?” he inquired at the finish. I told him that it was no
real reservation and no real event; and his face expressed displeasure.
“Why,” he demanded, “do you waste your time writing what never happened,
when you know so many things that did happen?”
And I could no more help telling him that this was the highest
compliment ever paid me than I have been able to help telling you about
it here!