ATDTDA (7): Out as far as Reef could see, 209-210

[Monte Davis]

Paul Nightingale

> according to Madsen (American
> Exceptionalism) "[t]he Western is a product of the
> twentieth century--the first Western was Owen Wister's
> The Virginian (1902)--and this century's desire to
> construct for itself a noble if doomed
> past" (AE, 123).

According to Davis, Madsen's is a tendentiously narrow definition of "the
Western" -- which hardly sprang full-blown from Wister's brow. To make it
work, she has to ignore Tom & Huck's games, the Wild West shows, the Western
dime novels starting in 1860, Davy Crockett, Tippecanoe and Tyler Too,
Daniel Boone -- hell, there's identifiable literary DNA for it in John
Smith's "A True Relation" and "Generall Historie."

Yes, about the time of the Turner thesis (on which she hangs her argument)
the Western began to take on an increasingly elegiac and mythological tone,
which was a dominant strain by the time of the John Ford movies she's eager
to get to. But to say The Virginian was "the first Western" is like saying
Cold Mountain was the first chronicle of adventures on a long journey home
from a war.