The Wildness Inside

Photograph of Thomas King Whipple in what appears to be a United States Marine Corps uniform. Date unknown, but sometime during World War I. Courtesy Princeton University Library.

All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past but still lives in us.

T. K. Whipple, “The Myth of the Old West”

There is a craving among those who live in suburbia, who live in the safe neighborhoods along the wilderness road—in the heart of civilization. It is a wildness inside, gnawing at the souls of men. Perhaps women experience the same appetite, I do not know, but every man wants to taste the wilderness when it rumbles like a hunger in his heart. It is one of the reasons why The Lord of the Rings—the novels and the movies—are so popular among boys and men. Writer John Eldredge spoke eloquently of this yearning when he wrote:

The business world—where the majority of American men live and die—requires a man to be efficient and punctual. Corporate politics and procedures are designed with one aim: to harness a man to the plow and make him produce. But the soul refuses to be harnessed; it knows nothing of Day Timers and deadlines and P&L statements. The soul longs for passion, for freedom, for life. As D. H. Lawrence said, “I am not a mechanism.” A man needs to feel the rhythms of the earth; he needs to have in hand something real—the tiller of a boat, a set of reins, the roughness of rope, or simply a shovel. Can a man live all his days to keep his fingernails clean and trim? Is that what a boy dreams of?

No. We dream of slaying dragons, mounting battlements, and riding herd over stampeding cattle. This is why Westerns, what few that get published and produced these days—read and watched—is primarily a male dominated genre. They awaken within us the desire to saddle up and ride to the other end of the neighborhood—to visit the wilderness.

Few, however, have the time or means to actually throw a leg over a saddle to feed the wildness inside, but all can spend a few hours, a few days, or even few weeks dreaming of being a cowboy through movies and books. Because this is true it comes as a shock to many readers of Lonesome Dove that Larry McMurtry wrote the novel in the hopes of demythologizing the Old West—something I wrote about at length in “The Blood of Ambivalence.” Commenting on his novel in an interview, McMurtry said, “The book is permeated with criticism of the West from start to finish. . . . But people are nostalgic for the Old West, even though it was actually a terrible culture. Not nice. Exterminated the Indians. Ruined the landscape. By 1884 the Plains were already overgrazed. We killed the right animal, the buffalo, and brought in the wrong animal, wetland cattle.”

McMurtry’s criticism of the Old West, steeped in his unromantic acceptance of its realities, was born of the where and when of his youth. In many ways he was a member of a transitional generation reared on the boundary of the frontier and civilization. His father was a rancher and his uncles were the last of that dying breed of cowpunchers who drove herds to northern railheads. As a boy and young man, McMurtry lived at the end of the wilderness road but dreamed of civilization. His experience of growing up when and where he did was unique, especially when equated to his readers, most of whom lived (and live) at the safe end of that road but whose hearts yearn for the wilderness.

This push and pull between the myth of the Old West and the reality of the Old West, mingled with the nostalgia for a time that might have been but will never be again, lies behind McMurtry’s choice of epigraph for Lonesome Dove: a passage from T. K. Whipple’s 1931 essay, “The Myth of the Old West”:

All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.*

---

A professor of English at the University of California in the 1920s and 30s, as well as an essayist and critic, Whipple composed “The Myth of the Old West” from 1929 until 1931. He set out to explore the value of “the West—or the frontier, for the terms are synonymous—and how it has ‘formed our character as a nation’ for better or for worse . . . as a national myth or symbol.” We shouldn’t conclude, Whipple insists, that these terms”imply falsity.” In fact, he defines a myth as “A story, true or not, which exerts a strange power over us, which becomes a nucleus about which cluster many feelings and imaginings.”

Like McMurtry, Whipple didn’t view the Old West as heroic. “To think of it so is to falsify and romanticize,” he wrote. The tension between the romanticized vision of the Old West and the reality of the Old West is played out beautifully in the 1980 film Tom Horn, starring Steve McQueen. Speaking with his love interest Glendolene Kimmel (Linda Evans), who has a nostalgic attachment to the Old West, Horn (McQueen) asks her, “Listen, why are you hanging around me?” She says, “Because you are a link to the Old West.” Horn, who has no such romantic notions, responds, “If you really knew how dirty and ragged-assed the Old West really was, you wouldn’t want any part of it.”

But neither McMurtry, Whipple, nor McQueen in his gritty and ragged-assed Western could escape the pull of the wildness inside, what Whipple called, “the animal virtues”: “physical vigor, physical courage, fortitude, sagacity, quickness, and the other qualities which enable a man to thrive in an uncivilized environment, to take care of himself amid primeval dangers and hardships”—virtues that “survive in us as unused but strong potentialities.”

---

This gets us back to the Western and why, I believe, McMurtry selected Whipple’s words for the epigraph of Lonesome Dove.

Whipple’s larger argument is that “the western story has not done all it might for us, because it has never received adequate representation,” even though “the story of the West should be the Great American Epic.” As the uniquely American story, Whipple wonders why this “epic is still unsung . . . since there is nothing the matter with the story of the West.” He blames American writers and readers.

Of writers, Whipple’s criticism is pointed and blunt: “The better American writers are too highbrow. They find Henry James more interesting than Jesse [James]. . . . They have abandoned themselves to trying to be subtle, minute, and accurate. In a word, these . . . young men find the West too strong a meal for their stomachs.” He speculates: that “to write of the commonplace is easier, and that authors have avoided more powerful stuff [peril and excitement, blood and tears] because they had not the power to deal with it.” As a result, “the West was set aside.”

Highbrowness, however, was only one reason why America’s best writers avoided writing Westerns. The other reason, Whipple identified, was the “lowbrow” popularity of dime novels and the snobbery of highbrows. “Literary aspirants with serious purposes could not afford to soil their names by writing ‘best sellers.’ What would become of their reputations, if they wrote books anybody could enjoy?”

Of readers, the male half especially, who “knew what it liked,” which was rip-roaring tales of “gunmen, scouts, and cowboys,” also “knew that for the most part what it liked was not literature.” As a result, “the superstition, quite unwarranted—quite contrary to fact, indeed—grew up that western stuff was not the stuff of which literature is made.” Therefore, “the ‘western’ has suffered from a blight.”

Whipple then appeals to “the people of the United States to rebel against their recorders, and demand that some meaning be extracted from material so rich in significance as that concerning men or the children of men who left civilization and traveled the wilderness road.”

Enter Larry McMurtry and Lonesome Dove—and the epigraph from Whipple.

---

McMurtry left off the last sentence from Whipple’s paragraph that makes up the epigraph: “That is why our western story still holds us, however ineptly it is told.” McMurtry intended Lonesome Dove to remedy that ineptness. He would take a highbrow approach to the lowbrow Western and elevate it. A literary aspirant with serious purpose, McMurtry, however, wouldn’t worry about his reputation in hoping to write a best seller. But neither would he shy away from giving the reader a glimpse into the reality of the Old West and give it to them with the bark off.

But as I argued in “The Blood of Ambivalence,” McMurtry failed to demythologize the Old West. Instead, ironically, he penned, in the eyes of most readers, the quintessential romantic version of the Old West. The wildness inside will not be denied—especially among those who live at the civilized end of the wilderness road and dream of the wild outside.

---

* McMurtry takes liberties with Whipple’s actual words, which are included here: “All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past but still lives in us; thus the question [of what happened to the “men who left civilization and traveled the wilderness road”] is momentous. But it has not been answered. Our forebears had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live; and what they lived, we dream. That is why our western story still holds us, however ineptly it is told.”

---

John Eldredge, Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2001), 6.

Larry McMurtry, in John Spong, “True West,” Texas Monthly, vol. 38, issue 7 (July 2010), 130.

T. K. Whipple, “The Myth of the Old West,” in Study Out the Land (Berkley: University of California Press, 1943), 59–68.

---

Y’allogy is an 1836 percent purebred, open-range guide to the people, places, and past of the great Lone Star. We speak Texan here. Y’alloy is created by a living, breathing Texan—for Texans and lovers of Texas—and is free of charge. I’d be grateful, however, if you’d consider riding for the brand as a paid subscriber and/or purchasing my novel.

Be brave, live free, y’all.