They’ll Keep Telling Those Vivid Tales of the West : Writers Kick Up Their Heels Discussing Changes in Genre

Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.

--T.K. Whipple, in the epigraph to Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove”

The dreamers gathered in the climate-controlled Holiday Inn convention center here booed the name Larry McMurtry.

They booed because the author had snubbed them, preferring not to join the Western Writers of America or to attend last week’s conference in this high plains town just south of where Custer made his final judgment error. All in all, though, the 200 or so writers attending the four-day affair were good-natured about the absence of the relative greenhorn who wrote “Lonesome Dove.”

For one thing, the Code of the West don’t allow for sniveling. For another, when McMurtry’s saga of a cattle drive stampeded off with paperback sales of 2 million and last year’s Pulitzer Prize for literature, it only added to growing interest in and respect for the Western genre.

A few years ago, for instance, in an issue of Northwestern University’s Triquarterly literary journal devoted to “Western Stories,” literary types argued that the myth of the American West “is the most enduring and influential message our society has given us in the 200 years of American social history.”

If that’s the case, the prolific professionals visiting the cowboy state last week bear a good deal of responsibility for the myriad ways in which that myth is interpreted and embellished in print, film and television.

Mark Roberts of El Cajon, for instance, couldn’t remember if he’s published 71 or 72 novels, but he knows he “burned up one computer by pumping 3 million words through it in four years.”

Typical of his work--and of one niche of a multifarious market that includes everything from “porno Westerns” and “Christian Westerns” to straight-shooting history and literary fiction--is Roberts’ “Sixgun Samurai” series, in which an American kid raised by Japanese warriors returns to the post-Civil War West to confront the Union regiment that slaughtered his real family.

“That gave him 287 soldiers to track down and snuff,” Roberts said. If Pinnacle Books hadn’t finally cut them short, he and his co-authors might have completed the 287-book series, Roberts added, grinnin’ like a jackass eatin’ cactus (to use an old cowpoke phrase).

Other writers take a slightly less action-packed view of the West.

“The cowboy was a colorful figure. But very often, the six-gun he carried was rusty--he’d only use it to pound in barbed wire,” said David Dary, a journalism professor at the University of Texas and the author of several non-fiction books, including “The Cowboy Culture.” In the 1870s, though, the dime novels popular in the East got into the hands of the Western buckaroos they supposedly portrayed, and the romance of “the hearty soul who’d charge hell with a bucket of water” became intertwined with the reality of the working cowboy, Dary said.

Author Ralph Beer, who grew up on his father’s Montana cattle ranch and remains “the labor force” there, once rebuilt an old bunkhouse with a friend. Tacked up between the open two-by-four studs, they found posters of Gene Autry posed in shimmering blue Hollywood cowboy duds.

“And these were real cowboys that lived in that bunkhouse,” Beer said. “I knew these guys. They didn’t have a decent shirt among them.”

Beer, whose novel “The Blind Corral” received the Western Writers’ Spur award this year, as well as good reviews (“A writer gifted with both strength and grace,” according to the New Yorker) published a piece in Harper’s a couple years back on the tough economics of modern ranching.

“It’s very hard for me to glorify the working cowboy,” he said. “The instinct is there to defend their real skills, their intuitive skills; to defend the work, defend the land. At the same time, cowboys can be very boring. A lot of them I don’t find very good company. A lot of these guys are real jerks.”

Yet Beer’s fiction focuses on this new west, and up in the northeast corner of “the cowboy state” the myth remains particularly vibrant, with real life and images from the old “True West” pulp tangled up like typewriter ribbon in a tumbleweed.

The Ucross Bar

So, while most of the more traditional writers at the conference toured historic massacre sites and battlefields, Beer and his editor at Viking and some “young turk” cohorts from Missoula went booming around in Beer’s ’64 Lincoln Continental, checking out the bars in towns with names like Ucross (after a local ranch’s brand) and jawboning with the local folk.

Meanwhile, in a bucolic lodge at Eatons’ Dude Ranch, other Western Writers two-stepped to a country swing band before an audience of stuffed elk, antelope and buffalo heads, as city folk practiced their roping and riding by big barns out back.

At Eatons’ Ranch, the myth sells for about $525 a week.

Most folks, however, are willing to settle for a $3 or $4 novel. And the market for the Western genre, from the guaranteed million sellers of member Louis L’Amour, to regional, small press offerings, is as hot as a brandin’ iron, said Gregory Tobin of Bantam books--one of a passel of city-slick New York editors who showed up in Sheridan.

Many of the editors attending the conference readily confessed that their assessment of the writers gathered hinged on commercial rather than artistic interests. (“They’re very polite,” one editor said of the writers at the conference. “Square, but polite.’)

Meanwhile, some writers who’ve broken out of that pure market mentality remain mildly perturbed about being treated with condescension by a literary establishment more interested in what might be termed “Easterns.”

“I think the openness and honesty throws them off,” said Max Evans, an Albuquerque author of realistic Westerns in contemporary settings, best known for “The Rounders,” which became the classic Henry Fonda and Glenn Ford film.

Steven Krauzer, who “guest edited” the “Western Stories” issue of Triquarterly with author and critic William Kittredge, admires some of the “literature of despair” coming from coastal cities--”Less Than Zero,” and “Bright Lights, Big City,” for instance. To an extent, he sees similarities in those books and his own “work within the myth” of the old West. “Both transport you--make you think about things and think about change,” he said.

The difference is that “Western writing is about good behavior,” he added. “It’s about doing it right. The resolutions are clean.”

Elmer Kelton, whose novels have won four Spur awards and are taught in literature courses, accepts the notion that many readers escape into traditional Westerns to find an era when folks could still solve problems.

Raised on a Texas Panhandle ranch where his father was foreman, Kelton grew up listening to the old-time cowpunchers spin yarns about life on the open range. But his dad “didn’t see any glory in the life, “ and Kelton’s “serious” novels, such as “The Day the Cowboys Quit,” stir pragmatism in with the romance, his admirers say.

Earlier last week, Kelton and a couple of dozen other writers strolled across the site of the Fetterman Massacre, a wide-open ridge where Sioux and Cheyenne warriors ambushed and killed 79 U.S. soldiers and two civilians who’d been helping push forward the Western frontier.

“What makes this interesting is to put yourself in the place of the men who were here,” Kelton said as he kicked through the cheat grass scattering swarms of grasshoppers. “Try to imagine their thoughts and fear, their emotions when they realized the trap had been sprung, and how far it was back to the fort.”

As they stood on that windblown ridge with their backs to the distant Big Horn Mountains and an interstate that runs roughly in the tracks of the pioneer trail those soldiers were defending, many of the writers seemed to be envisioning that chaotic afternoon, 120 years ago. In a nearby forest, a grizzly mauled a game warden who was trying to relocate him away from the local Indian reservation, where he’d been wolfing down cow carcasses.

The Western Writers’ “Saddleman Award” would go, in absentia, to Clint Eastwood, who launched his career as Rowdy Yates on TV’s “Rawhide”--and the Sheridan newspaper continued its coverage of Rawhide Village, a subdivision in the next county that officials ordered evacuated because of toxic gas leakage.

Wranglers now chase down cattle with helicopters or Honda ATVs, and one Oklahoma cattle broker passing through Sheridan spoke with admiration of a horse trainer who treats his steeds “somewhat like human beings--he never stresses them, he doesn’t want them to become negative.”

But, as a bit of doggerel scrawled in 1917 and quoted in Western Writers’ publications reminds us:

The west is dead my friend But writers hold the seed. And what they saw Will live and grow Again to those who read.