Review of Western Stories: From Buffalo Bill to Larry McMurtry By Richard W. Etulain

Authors

Roger Welsch, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

Winter 2001

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 21, No. 1, Winter 2001, pp. 73.

Comments

Copyright 2001 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

In Telling Western Stories Richard Etulain has produced one of those rare combinations of a book that would make an excellent text for any class in Western literature and at the same time a well-written history easily enjoyed simply as a book of general interest. Etulain actually treats ideas and images more than stories, although it is, he argues, through stories that the ideas and images of the American West have been molded this past century and a half.

That is the essence of Etulain's narrative: there is not an absolute history, a clear reality, that determines how we see the past or a region or the history of a region-which is true not only of the history of the American West but all histories, to my mind. The key to understanding a perception of a history is how that history is brought to the public. Briefly, it is not so much history that molds the image, as the image that molds history.

Sometimes the image-makers are patent frauds, manipulating "the story" to their own gain and glory; in other cases the representations are honest but misguided. And if not misguided, inevitably subjective. Only in folklore, curiously, is there a wider reliability; an individual may tell any story he wishes or knows, but a widely told and known narrative- folklore-is under the constant pressure of communal memory, still fallible but with an internal mechanism of constancy and accuracy the popular or high culture story can never enjoy.

This book surveys and briefly analyses the popular and high culture end of that paradigm and does it as well as I have ever seen. I am puzzled by the annoying inclusion of a dozen "illustrations" of the covers of books mentioned in the text that do not really illustrate anything and would have preferred ten more pages of text or even images of examples of a West modeled by, say, art. But even as I write that I know it is only the requisite academic niggling meant to demonstrate that I read the book and thought about it carefully: "praising with faint damn," as the phrase goes.

The book should be read and enjoyed by students and scholars, literary historians and lovers of the West, disciples of Frederick Jackson Turner and shameless fans of Louis L'Amour alike.