This is Jackie Dorothy and Dean King - welcoming you to the world of 1885 with Owen Wister!!!
The Harvard student of law bent over his journal, writing in camp light and by kerosene. He was capturing the words that he would one day use to write the most popular Western fiction in the world.
This famous author was a true pioneer of Wyoming.
The Pioneers of Outlaw Country.
Cowboys, Lawmen and Outlaws… to the businessmen and women who all helped shape Wyoming.
Here are their stories.
Owen Wister, Fact to Fiction
Welcome to another episode of "Pioneers of Outlaw Country," where we delve into fascinating stories from Wyoming’s past that often go unnoticed. I am your host, Jackie Dorothy, and today we are traveling to the town of Medicine Bow with Owen Wister. It is the year 1885 and the young tourist – and future novelist - is arriving at the dusty town after spending two weeks vacationing on the Wolcott Ranch on Deer Creek in the territory of Wyoming.
He has been keeping a faithful journal and jots down the following entry….
July 19th, Medicine Bow
Got here at 5:30 this evening, July 19, after nineteen hours of driving and a night in the mountains. We’re expecting by the midnight train some trout and bass for stocking.
This place is called a town. “Town” will do very well until the language stretches itself and takes in a new word that fits. Medicine Bow, Wyoming consists of:
1 Depot house and baggage room
1 Coal shooter
1 Water Tank
1 Store
2 Eating houses
1 Billiard hall
6 Shanties
8 Gents and Ladies Walks
2 Tool houses
1 Feed stable
5 Too late for classification
29 buildings in all
The lady who waited on us at supper I do not believe is in a family way. I believe she has a gross stomach. I slung my teeth over the corned beef she gave me and thought I was chewing a hammock.
I have walked nearly two acres in order to carefully ascertain the exact details of this town, and I feel assured my returns are correct.
Killed today the first deer I ever shot at. Hit it plumb in the shoulder and broke its heart.”
This journal entry becomes, nearly word for word, the inspiration for Wister’s future best selling novel, The Virginian. 18 years later, on page 12 of his famous book, Wister writes:
“Town, as they called it, pleased me the less, the longer I saw it. But until our language stretches itself and takes in a new word of closer fit, town will have to do for the name of such a place as was Medicine Bow. I have seen and slept in many like it since.
Scattered wide, they littered the frontier from the Columbia to the Rio Grande, from the Missouri to the Sierras. They lay stark, dotted over a planet of treeless dust, like soiled packs of cards. Each was similar to the next, as one old five-spot of clubs resembles another. Houses, empty bottles, and garbage, they were forever of the same shapeless pattern. More forlorn they were than stale bones. They seemed to have been strewn there by the wind and to be waiting till the wind should come again and blow them away.
Yet serene above their foulness swam a pure and quiet light, such as the East never sees; they might be bathing in the air of creation's first morning. Beneath sun and stars their days and nights were immaculate and wonderful.
Medicine Bow was my first, and I took its dimensions, twenty-nine buildings in all,—one coal chute, one water tank, the station, one store, two eating-houses, one billiard hall, two tool-houses, one feed stable, and twelve others that for one reason and another I shall not name.
Yet this wretched husk of squalor spent thought upon appearances; many houses in it wore a false front to seem as if they were two stories high. There they stood, rearing their pitiful masquerade amid a fringe of old tin cans, while at their very doors began a world of crystal light, a land without end, a space across which Noah and Adam might come straight from Genesis. Into that space went wandering a road, over a hill and down out of sight, and up again smaller in the distance, and down once more, and up once more, straining the eyes, and so away.”
The description of the town was just one example of how Owen Wister used his journal entries to write his great novel and other stories. Another entry portrays a rather unique sleeping arrangement that Wister’s tenderfoot in the novel endured. He also found the inspiration for this scene in his own true experience at the “town” of Medicine Bow. He had arrived there with his ranch hosts to pick up a delivery of live fish to stock the creeks and ponds at the ranch for future fishing trips - but it was his nap that captured his imagination.
July 21st
I slept from ten to twelve-thirty on the counter of the store at Medicine Bow, and then the train came in, bringing the lawyer and the fish. And after much business talk and lifting tin cans we started off across the plains at two o’clock.
In his novel, The Virginian, Wister’s sleeping arrangements become a much longer segment that the one sentence he jotted down as a young Harvard student….
“The man that keeps the store is a friend of mine,” said the Virginian; “and you can be pretty near comfortable on his counter. Got any blankets?” I had no blankets.
Our entire company, drummer and all, now walked over to the store, and here my sleeping arrangements were made easily. This store was the cleanest place and the best in Medicine Bow, and would have been a good store anywhere, offering a multitude of things for sale, and kept by a very civil proprietor. He bade me make myself at home, and placed both of his counters at my disposal. Upon the grocery side there stood a cheese too large and strong to sleep near comfortably, and I therefore chose the dry-goods side. Here thick quilts were unrolled for me, to make it soft; and no condition was placed upon me, further than that I should remove my boots, because the quilts were new, and clean, and for sale. So now my rest was assured.
Medicine Bow was quiet as I went my way to my quilts. So still, that through the air the deep whistles of the freight trains came from below the horizon across great miles of silence. I passed cow-boys, whom half an hour before I had seen prancing and roaring, now rolled in their blankets beneath the open and shining night. “What world am I in?” I said aloud. “Does this same planet hold Fifth Avenue?” And I went to sleep, pondering over my native land.
Morning had been for some while astir in Medicine Bow before I left my quilts. The new day and its doings began around me in the store, chiefly at the grocery counter. Dry-goods were not in great request. The early rising cow-boys were off again to their work; and those to whom their night's holiday had left any dollars were spending these for tobacco, or cartridges, or canned provisions for the journey to their distant camps. Sardines were called for, and potted chicken, and devilled ham: a sophisticated nourishment, at first sight, for these sons of the sage-brush. But portable ready-made food plays of necessity a great part in the opening of a new country. These picnic pots and cans were the first of her trophies that Civilization dropped upon Wyoming's virgin soil. The cow-boy is now gone to worlds invisible; the wind has blown away the white ashes of his camp-fires; but the empty sardine box lies rusting over the face of the Western earth. So through my eyes half closed I watched the sale of these tins, and grew familiar with the ham's inevitable trademark—that label with the devil and his horns and hoofs and tail very pronounced, all colored a sultry prodigious scarlet. And when each horseman had made his purchase, he would trail his spurs over the floor, and presently the sound of his horse's hoofs would be the last of him. Through my dozing attention came various fragments of talk, and sometimes useful bits of knowledge. For instance, I learned the true value of tomatoes in this country. One fellow was buying two cans of them.”
With the discovery of the journals written by the 24-year-old Owen Wister, modern readers can see that the great Western that he wrote in 1902 was not such a far-fetched tale of fancy as they may think. Many of his stories were based on Wister’s actual experiences as a tourist in the territory of Wyoming, beginning in 1885 and continuing for the next 15 years.
Today, these journals of Owen Wister and the desk where they had lay forgotten for over 65 years are at the American Heritage Center in Laramie, preserved for future generations. The family gifted the journals to Wyoming where they felt the small books belonged – in the land that inspired The Virginian.
Owen Wister’s observations are a window into Wyoming’s past and are considered by many, more valuable than gold.
Thank you for listening to Outlaws of Pioneer Country. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of this historic series. The stories of our pioneers were brought to you by Hot Springs County Pioneer Association.
This program has been made possible through a grant from Wyoming Humanities.
This was a production of Legend Rock Media.
