Impressions of the West: Willa Cather

By Jim Poulton

Willa Cather. Credit: Entertainment Realm

A Lost Lady is a novel with many themes, from the aggression at the root of relationships between men and women, to the value of illusions, to the rhythms of life that dictate that as some of us decline and weaken, others will grow strong and virile, and will take the places of the weak and departed. Set on the Western Plains, the book describes the lives of Captain and Mrs. Forrester. Captain Forrester is a retired railroad man who has made enough money to retire comfortably in Sweet Water, an area he first saw when he was young and vowed to return to because of its pristine beauty. His wife, 25 years his junior, is a beautiful and aristocratic woman who is bored, confused and disloyal to her husband. After his death, she leaves the Sweet Water estate in the hands of an exploitative and greedy man named Ivy Peters.

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As in the Great Gatsby, to which A Lost Lady has been compared, events occurring on a human scale can also be interpreted as symbols of broad sweeps of history. The deterioration and death of Mr. Forrester and the decline of his estate can also be read as a tale of the transition of the West itself - from an age of romance and adventure and the pioneering spirit, to the age of selfishness and blindness to the beauty and meaning embedded in the landscape.

Here is Captain Forrester describing, to his dinner party guests, how he first discovered Sweet Water, and his philosophy of life and of the West:

[T]he Captain began his narrative: a concise account of how he came West a young boy, after serving in the Civil War, and took a job as driver for a freighting company that carried supplies across the plains from Nebraska City to Cherry Creek, as Denver was then called. The freighters, after embarking in that sea of grass six hundred miles in width, lost all count of the days of the week and the month. One day was like another, and all were glorious; good hunting, plenty of antelope and buffalo, boundless sunny sky, boundless plains of waving grass, long fresh-water lagoons yellow with lagoon flowers, where the bison in their periodic migrations stopped to drink and bathe and wallow.

George Catlin, Buffalo Bulls Fighting in Running Season – Upper Missouri, 1834-1839. Credit: ArtUnframed.com

"An ideal life for a young man," the Captain pronounced. Once, when he was driven out of the trail by a wash-out, he rode south on his horse to explore, and found an Indian encampment near the Sweet Water, on this very hill where his house now stood. He was, he said, "greatly taken with the location," and made up his mind that he would one day have a house there. He cut down a young willow tree and drove the stake into the ground to mark the spot where he wished to build. He went away and did not come back for many years; he was helping to lay the first railroad across the plains.

… "When things looked most discouraging," he went on, "I came back here once and bought the place from the railroad company. They took my note. I found my willow stake,--it had rooted and grown into a tree,--and I planted three more to mark the corners of my house. Twelve years later Mrs. Forrester came here with me, shortly after our marriage, and we built our house."

Mrs. Forrester nodded at him from her end of the table. "And now, tell us your philosophy of life,--this is where it comes in," she laughed teasingly.

… "Well, then, my philosophy is that what you think of and plan for day by day, in spite of yourself, so to speak--you will get. You will get it more or less. … [Y]ou will accomplish what you dream of most."

"And why? That`s the interesting part of it," his wife prompted him.

"Because," he roused himself from his abstraction and looked about at the company, "because a thing that is dreamed of in the way I mean, is already an accomplished fact. All our great West has been developed from such dreams; the homesteader`s and the prospector`s and the contractor`s. We dreamed the railroads across the mountains, just as I dreamed my place on the Sweet Water. All these things will be everyday facts to the coming generation, but to us--" Captain Forrester ended with a sort of grunt. Something forbidding had come into his voice, the lonely, defiant note that is so often heard in the voices of old Indians. - A Lost Lady, Part One, Chapter Four, 1923

Across the Continent, Currier & Ives. Credit: EasyArt.com

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Impressions of the West: Walter Van Tilburg Clark

Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Credit: sfsu.edu

One of the greatest novels of all time about the American West, The Ox-Bow Incident was first published in 1940. It’s the story of two riders in the Old West, Art and Gil, who end up in the town of Bridger’s Wells. The people of the town are tense because of recent cattle rustling, and when they hear a rumor that a neighbor has been murdered and his cattle rustled, they form a lynch-mob to track down the culprits. They find three strangers and accuse them of the crime. Without a trial, the mob votes to hang the three. When they return to town, they find that their neighbor wasn’t murdered after all. The novel ends with Art and Gil agreeing to carry a letter one of the victims wrote to his wife on the night before he was hanged. Gil says, ‘I’ll be glad to get out of here.’ Art says, ‘Yeh.’

Gil (Henry Fonda) and Art (Harry Morgan) reflect on the night's events at the Ox-Bow (from The Ox-Bow Incident, 1943). Credit: poptheology.com

The story is told from Art’s perspective. Here is his description of the Ox-Bow valley, where the hanging was to take place:

The Ox-Bow was a little valley up in the heart of the range. Gil and I had stayed there a couple of days once, on the loose. It was maybe two or three miles long and half or three quarters of a mile wide. The peaks were stacked up on all sides of it, showing snow most of the summer. The creek in the middle of it wound back on itself like a snake trying to get started on loose sand, and that shape had named the valley. There was sloping meadow on both sides of the creek, and in the late spring millions of purple and gold violets grew three, violets with blossoms as big as the ball of a man’s thumb. Beyond the meadow, on each side, there was time to the tops of the hills. It was a lovely, chill, pine-smelling valley, as lonely as you could want. Scarcely anybody came there unless there was a dry season. Just once in a while, if you passed in the late summer, you’d see a sheepherder small out in the middle, with his burrow and dogs and flock. The rest of the time the place belonged to squirrels, chipmunks and mountain jays. They would all be lively in the edge of the wood, scolding and flirting. – The Ox-Bow Incident, p. 113

The Ox-Bow Incident was made into a movie in 1943, starring Henry Fonda, Harry Morgan, Dana Andrews and Anthony Quinn. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture in that year.

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