The Virginian

The Virginian

By Owen Wister.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Dedication
4. To the Reader
5. The Virginian
   1. I: Enter the Man
   2. II: “When You Call Me That, Smile!”
   3. III: Steve Treats
   4. IV: Deep Into Cattle Land
   5. V: Enter the Woman
   6. VI: Em’ly
   7. VII: Through Two Snows
   8. VIII: The Sincere Spinster
   9. IX: The Spinster Meets the Unknown
   10. X: Where Fancy Was Bred
   11. XI: “You’re Going to Love Me Before We Get Through”
   12. XII: Quality and Equality
   13. XIII: The Game and the Nation—Act First
   14. XIV: Between the Acts
   15. XV: The Game and the Nation—Act Second
   16. XVI: The Game and the Nation—Last Act
   17. XVII: Scipio Moralizes
   18. XVIII: “Would You Be a Parson?”
   19. XIX: Dr. Macbride Begs Pardon
   20. XX: The Judge Ignores Particulars
   21. XXI: In a State of Sin
   22. XXII: “What Is a Rustler?”
   23. XXIII: Various Points
   24. XXIV: A Letter with a Moral
   25. XXV: Progress of the Lost Dog
   26. XXVI: Balaam and Pedro
   27. XXVII: Grandmother Stark
   28. XXVIII: No Dream to Wake from
   29. XXIX: Word to Bennington
   30. XXX: A Stable on the Flat
   31. XXXI: The Cottonwoods
   32. XXXII: Superstition Trail
   33. XXXIII: The Spinster Loses Some Sleep
   34. XXXIV: To Fit Her Finger
   35. XXXV: With Malice Aforethought
   36. XXXVI: At Dunbarton
6. Colophon
7. Uncopyright

Imprint

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To
Theodore Roosevelt

Some of these pages you have seen, some you have praised, one stands new-written because you blamed it; and all, my dear critic, beg leave to remind you of their author’s changeless admiration.

To the Reader

Certain of the newspapers, when this book was first announced, made a mistake most natural upon seeing the subtitle 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 tomorrow 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 sagebrush 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 cowpuncher, the last romantic figure upon our soil? For he was romantic. Whatever he did, he