{"id":13706,"date":"2019-10-30T21:15:02","date_gmt":"2019-10-31T01:15:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=13706"},"modified":"2020-01-03T13:21:30","modified_gmt":"2020-01-03T18:21:30","slug":"philadelphias-cowboy-creation-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2019\/10\/philadelphias-cowboy-creation-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Philadelphia’s Cowboy Creation Story"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
The Philadelphia Club, 13th and Walnut Streets, 1913. (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 1891, the fictional cowboy<\/a> mounted his steed at 13th<\/sup> and Walnut Streets and never looked back. He galloped a circuitous route to the publishing houses of New York, then headed out to Hollywood and the American imagination.<\/p>\n

What was the cowboy doing at such an unlikely urban crossroads? There, in the Philadelphia Club (as unlikely a place for a cowboy as anyone might ever imagine) Owen Wister, fresh back from his latest Western exploit, held forth in the club\u2019s dining room with his drinking buddy Walter Furness.<\/p>\n

Wister might just as well have been telling tall tales about a European Grand Tour, had he traveled eastward rather than westward. But in the Fall of 1885, Wister, a summa cum laude<\/em> Harvard graduate set to begin law school, was plagued by headaches, vertigo, and the \u201coccasional hallucination.\u201d Fearing a nervous breakdown, Wister’s father sought out advice from family friend, the physician\/author S. Weir Mitchell. \u201cAn extended visit to Europe for relaxation\u201d would usually be Dr. Mitchell\u2019s prescription. But in this case, he recommended that the anxious 25-year-old go West and live outdoors. \u201cSee more new people,\u201d he told Wister, \u201clearn to sympathize with your fellow man a little more than you are inclined to. \u2026 There are lots of humble folks in the fields you\u2019d be the better for knowing.\u201d<\/p>\n

After a series of eye-opening trips to Wyoming and the Yellowstone from 1885 to 1891, Wister, now a full-fledged witness of the American West, returned to share glimpses of his newfound narrative riches. In time, he would come to advocate the idea that the American West, as opposed to the East, was the rightful center of the nation\u2019s heart and soul. And the cowboy, its manifestation in flesh and blood, would be animated first in short stories, then, in 1902, in a best-selling novel, The Virginian.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
The Virginian<\/em>, first edition (1902)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Owen Wister at a campfire in 1891. The Owen Wister papers. (American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But in order to make such a leap, Wister would require an epiphany. This blue-blooded Philadelphian needed to convince himself, his family and friends, that he was the one who could actually pull this off and become\u00a0America\u2019s Rudyard Kipling.<\/p>\n

At the Philadelphia Club that Fall evening in 1891, Wister and Furness ate and drank (and drank) and as the evening wore on and the tales got taller, it occurred to Wister that he could<\/em>\u00a0write the stories that would bring the cowboy to life as the quintessential American.<\/p>\n

Years later, he recalled the moment: \u201cFresh from Wyoming and its wild glories, I sat in the club dining room with a man as enam\u00adoured of the West as I was. . . . \u00a0From oysters to coffee we compared experiences. Why wasn\u2019t some Kipling saving the sage-brush for American literature, before the sage-brush and all that it signified went the way of California forty-niner, went the way of the Mississippi steam-boat, went the way of everything? . . . What was fiction doing, fiction, the only thing that has always outlived fact?\u201d<\/p>\n

Wister sipped his claret and staked out the plan. Then he blurted: \u201cWalter, I\u2019m going to try it myself! \u2026 I\u2019m going to start this minute.” He headed “up to the library; and by midnight or so, a good slice of [the short story] \u201cHank\u2019s Woman\u201d was down in the rough.\u201d<\/p>\n

Success would require a bit more critical help from Dr. Mitchell. According to historian John Jennings, two of Wister\u2019s manuscripts \u201cgathered dust until Mitchell urged Wister to send them to Henry Mills Alden at Harper and Brothers, promising to provide a letter of introduction. Alden accepted the manuscripts and Wister was launched as a minor western author.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eleven years later, with The Virginian <\/em>hot\u00a0off the presses, Wister would become America\u2019s major<\/em> Western author. And the cowboy, originally \u201ca rough, violent, one-dimensional drifter\u201d would transition into a national hero.<\/p>\n

[Sources: John Jennings,\u00a0The Cowboy Legend Owen Wister\u2019s Virginian and the Canadian-American Frontier<\/em>\u00a0(Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2012); Owen Wister, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains<\/em> (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1902); J. C. Furnas, \u201cTransatlantic Twins: Rudyard Kipling and Owen Wister,\u201d The American Scholar<\/em>, Vol. 64, No. 4 (Autumn 1995), pp. 599-606; Neal Lambert, \u201cOwen Wister\u2019s \u201cHank\u2019s Woman\u201d: The Writer and His Comment,\u201d Western American Literature<\/em>, Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 1969, pp. 39-50.]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1891, the fictional cowboy mounted his steed at 13th and Walnut Streets and never looked back. He galloped a circuitous route to the publishing houses of New York, then headed out to Hollywood and the American imagination. What was the cowboy doing at such an unlikely urban crossroads? There, in the Philadelphia Club (as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13706\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}