The Growth of Narrative? ?

The Western is no mere travelogue. From the beginning the West was not just a physical location, however exotic or fascinating. It was also a space where things happened. The very first stories told about the West take the form of captivity narratives. These tales of kidnap by Indians, at first based upon actual experiences but increasingly fictionalized, dramatize the deep-seated racial and sexual fears of the whites confronted with the unknown occupants of a strange land.

The first such story was recounted by the Spaniard Cabeza de Vaca in 1542 and tells of his capture by Indians in Texas. Under the Puritans in New England during the 17th and 18th centuries the captivity narrative was developed into something of an art form and continued in the 19th century in both fictional and (more or less) factual versions. It surfaces early in the Western film (for example in The Indian Vestal, a Selig production from 1911), and is at the heart of one of the greatest of all Westerns, The Searchers. In the 19th century the American novel, by this time the dominant narrative form, began to concern itself with the West. Though he did not write the first novel on a Western subject, James Fenimore Cooper was undoubtedly the most influential novelist of the West in the first half of the century. His series of Leatherstocking Tales, beginning with The Pioneers in 1823, defined a major theme. The figure of Natty Bumppo, poised between the savage but free life of the woods and the refined but constricted society of the settlements, not only established the scout as a popular Western character but also expressed a fundamental tension in the American attitude to the wilderness, by turns compelling and malign. Cooper's other major creation, the Indian Chingachgook, dramatized the figure of the noble savage already given currency in the writings of Rousseau and other Europeans. The German novelist Karl May was to follow in Cooper's footsteps; his Winnetou is an Apache version of the Mohican Chingachgook. Later in the century other novelists explored the fictional possibilities of a variety of Western milieux. Charles King based his stories on life in the army outposts on the frontier. Helen Hunt Jackson used the novel for propaganda purposes, writing Ramona in 1884 to protest about the treatment of the Indians. Bret Harte in his stories of the Californian mining frontier established a gallery of types such as the gambler and the good-hearted whore who would later be taken up enthusiastically in Western films. Then at the turn of the century Owen Wister wrote The Virginian, which did more than any other work to establish the cowboy as a central (eventually the central) figure on the Western scene. ?