"The Western Mythos"
September 28 2022
Today I headed to my school’s library to ask if they had anything on dime novels, and honestly, I expected nothing. Was pleasantly surprised! The librarian guided me towards a section that had around 10 books dedicated to American Westerns. Unfortunately no actual dime novels, just essays about dime novels, but I wasn’t expecting the real deal to be there anyways.
I found a cozy spot half-hidden behind a wall and looked through each book for anything I could find about dime novels specifically. Three had exactly what I was looking for; The Dime Novel Western by Daryl Jones, `Telling Western Stories by Richard W. Etulain, and Selling the Wild West by Christine Bold. I hope to incorporate little pieces from each of their work into this site.
I read Etulain first, and was really fascinated by what he wrote about Buffalo Bill, and the part he played in manufacturing the fictional Wild West we’re so familiar with. Really, the West that exists in most dime novels and cowboy stories is a completely fabricated fantasy land, partially conjured up by Bill himself.
So who was Buffalo Bill? Essentially, a showman, though he started as an American soldier, and later became an infamous buffalo hunter (hence his nickname). He really skyrocketed to popularity after holding a Fourth of July roundup - “an unforgettable exhibition of riding, roping, shooting, and ‘cowboy fun’” (Etulain, 1). This event, called the Old Glory Blow Out, was wildly popular, and encouraged Buffalo Bill enough to take his show on the road - dubbing it his travelling Wild West.
This travelling Wild West show featured trick riders, ropers, marksmen, and storytellers. Everyone was an actor, dressing the part and playing the role with hammed-up reactions and cheesy lines. One notable member of the gang was Annie Oakley, “a shy farm girl from Ohio … who had already built a reputation for superb marksmanship” (Etulain, 13), and was said to be the show’s “most popular star, next to Buffalo Bill” (Etulain, 13). Annie’s inclusion was an entry way for women to come to the show as well, thus boosting its popularity greatly.
Though Buffalo Bill’s show was intended to be an innocent source of fun, he was unwittingly creating a very theatrical, unrealistic, and even problematic mythos around the idea of the Wild West. His show played up the fun and adventure about being a frontiersman, without grounding any of it in reality. Worse still, his shows painted awful caricatures of Native Americans by consistently staging them as the villains who try to ruin the show - a problematic stereotype that continues to plague Westerns (and real life) today. Because Buffalo Bill was a real person and not just a character on paper, the lines between what was real and what was fake were very blurred.
Nonetheless, he was popular. Bill’s friend, Ned Buntline, would soon begin to develop a series of dime novels about Buffalo Bill and his made-up adventures (Etulain, 6). These stories were even more popular, and were picked up by a variety of authors who wanted to bite off a piece of Bill’s legacy. More and more dime novels would borrow from the famous legends that Buffalo Bill instilled in the genre, solidifying him as a major contributor to dime novel popularity, and Western popularity as a whole.
Next I’ll be looking at Daryl Jones’ work, as Etulain credits him as “the leading authority on the dime novel Western” (Etulain, 18) !