Zane Grey (2 page)

The landscape naturalizes sexual difference and the male rescue of women from an unnatural religion, but it also naturalizes Grey's narrative omniscience. Some sense of knowing in Grey's landscape seems to propel us onward to find out what it knows. The novel's suspense is not that of a thriller or detective story—Grey is far more prolix in his clues, as in the passage above, which paraphrases, in one of several such moments, the novel's last line; rather, it is the suspense of wondering what the larger stakes of the plot are. The knowledge of what is at stake is imbued in Grey's landscape: it may be just wind on stone, but something like God seems to be there. It is not a God Grey identifies, but we know it's not meant to be the Mormon one. It is older than America, and Grey's protagonists sense its presence as if it will become a final revelation.

In the same year that Mormonism officially gave up polygamy so that Utah could join the Union, the U.S. Census declared that the frontier line of settlement no longer could be said to exist: the consolidation of the American West was nearly complete. The larger significance of the battle for Jane Withersteen's freedom is suggested when Lassiter tries to make her see what is at stake in her fate. Jane insists, “I'm an absolutely free woman,” to which Lassiter somewhat triumphantly replies, repeating national arguments about Mormon women's “slavery,” “You ain't absolutely anythin' of the kind.” In a passage that seems to blur distinctions between Lassiter's and Mormonism's omniscience and even between Mormon and American imperial designs, Lassiter explains:

Jane, you're watched. There's no single move of yours, except when you're hid in your house, that ain't seen by sharp eyes. . . . When you rode, which wasn't often lately, the sage was full of sneakin' men. At night they crawl under your windows, into the court, an' I reckon into the house. . . . This here grove's a hummin' bee-hive of mysterious happenin's. . . . This all means, Jane, that you're a marked woman. . . . Jane, you're to lose the cattle that's left—your home an' ranch—an' Amber Spring. . . . I told you once before about that strange power I've got to feel things.

While Lassiter's “strange power” imitates the Mormons' own, he intuits what the Mormons cannot: how the plot will make him a hero. Jane responds, “What does it mean? . . . I am my father's daughter—a Mormon, yet I can't see! I've not failed in religion—in duty. . . . When my father died I was rich. . . . What am I, what are my possessions to set in motion such intensity of secret oppression?” Lassiter responds succinctly, “Jane, the mind behind it all is an empire builder.” He adds, “They tried you out, an' failed of persuasion, an' finally of threats. You meet now the cold steel of a will as far from Christlike as the universe is wide. You're to be broken. Your body's to be held, given to some man, made, if possible, to bring children into the world. But your soul? . . . What do they care for your soul?” The “mind” that is “an empire builder” is here left unspecified. This lack of specificity curiously opens up Lassiter's pronouncements to a meaning quite opposite his own, for if Jane is read to represent Mormonism and its possessions, the mind that is an empire builder with a will of cold steel could stand for the federal government and its policies toward the Mormons in the latter half of the nineteenth century, before the Mormon church was “broken” into giving up polygamy, the “soul” of the Mormon religion.

The sense of paranoia that Lassiter seeks to instill in Jane was one with which Mormons were familiar during the period of government investigations beginning in the 1880s and continuing episodically to Grey's time. In the sequel to
Riders,
Grey includes an awareness of the investigations. Minister Shefford asks Presbrey why he says the Mormons close to the Utah line are “unfriendly these days,” and Presbrey responds, “They are being persecuted by the government.” Just as Lassiter asserts that “at night they crawl under your windows, into the court, an' I reckon into the house,” nothing was considered off limits when it came to searches by government agents for signs of polygamous living; even bedding was inspected. Whether Mormon or Gentile makes designs, or whether Mormon or Gentile is paranoid, there is a similar sense of looming threat. The distinction between Mormon Empire and American Empire is perhaps the one significant distinction left implicit and unnamed in Grey's novel, and yet that distinction, historically, is what had made all the difference in the abandonment of polygamy and the gradual assimilation of Mormons when Grey wrote his novel.

Although
Riders
is a novel whose deepest impulses are escapist, historical events and memory played a surprisingly large role in its creation and reception. This may not, after all, be so surprising: escapism implies an escape
from
something, and what this novel nostalgically depends upon to rescue its women and children from is the historical threat that the fall of Balancing Rock crushes at the novel's close. The novel's escapism is best understood as its elision of the historical distance between 1912, when the novel was published, and 1871, when it is set, and the transformation within Mormonism and in Mormon-American relations that had occurred in those four decades as the West became progressively American. Its escapism, in other words, lies in the fact that it does not figure (as the less popular sequel does) the transition to Mormon assimilation, but, with the dramatic ending, forecloses any sense of future historical development, with Lassiter, Jane, and Fay trapped in Surprise Valley and Elder Tull pinned underneath a massive rock. Jane's escape, like the novel's, is an escape from a Mormon past the novel simultaneously revives. Such nostalgia for a transitional moment in the West, before it was consolidated under federal control, is characteristic of many early-twentieth-century Westerns and suggests that readers of the genre longed for a landscape of dramatic moral contrasts during a rapidly changing and confusing era. In that cultural landscape, the individual male hero is thrown into relief and granted a freedom to do what federal pressure took forty years to do: free Mormon women from polygamy.

Riders of the Purple Sage
seems as blind to its own mythmaking as Jane is blind to the Mormon conspiracy. Elsewhere the Mormon “invisible hand” is described as “a cold and calculating policy thought out long before [Jane] was born, a dark, immutable will of whose empire she and all that was hers was but an atom.” The description is particularly odd because the novel is set only forty-one years after the founding of the Mormon church; Jane would have been born only a few years later. That this policy was thought out “long before she was born” suggests a history and meaning that stretches beyond Mormonism, further back than 1830. Yet the soulless Mormon evil that looms so large cannot creep or crawl into Surprise Valley. Mormonism is not, in the end, nearly as powerful and Jane is not as heroic as the sacred landscape and the hero Lassiter, who is invulnerable and all-knowing and whose distinction with guns makes all the difference. Lassiter exclaims to Jane, “Since I was a boy I've never thanked God for anythin'. If there is a God—an' I've come to believe it—I thank Him now for the years that made me Lassiter! . . . I can reach down an' feel these big guns, an' know what I can do with them.” The partial defeat of the Mormon master plan in southern Utah in 1871 is a victory not only for God and monogamy over fanatical Mormons in Grey's novel, but for the consolidated nation that, by 1912, was already growing nostalgic for those distinctive cultural differences in the West that it had feared, pruriently enjoyed, and forever changed.

In addition to the novel's continuing popularity, explained in part by the dramatic energy of Grey's prose, what survives this important transitional Western in others of the genre is the contours of the gunslinging hero, not the historical threat that defined him in 1912. In this sense, the Western does seem to have “escaped” a key moment in its literary history: the widespread American fascination with Mormon polygamy.

WILLIAM R. HANDLEY is an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of
Marriage, Violence,
and the Nation in the American Literary West.

FURTHER READING

Bloodworth, William. “Zane Grey's Western Eroticism.”
South Dakota Review
23 (Autumn 1985): 1–14.

Bunker, Gary L., and Davis Bitton. The Mormon Graphic Image: Cartoons,
Caricatures, and Illustrations.
Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1983.

Cawelti, John G.
Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and
Popular Culture.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Givens, Terryl L. The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construc
tion of Heresy.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Grey, Zane.
The Heritage of the Desert.
New York: Forge, 1997; orig. pub. 1910.

———. The Rainbow Trail. Roslyn, N.Y., 1943; orig. pub. 1915.

Gruber, Frank. Zane Grey: A Biography. Roslyn, N.Y.: Walter J. Black, Inc., 1969.

Handley, William R.
Marriage, Violence, and the Nation in the American Liter
ary West. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Hendrick, Burton J. “The Mormon Revival of Polygamy.”
McClure's Magazine
36 (February 1911): 458–64.

Jackson, Carlton.
Zane Grey: A Biography.
Boston: Twayne, 1989; orig. pub. 1973.

Lewis, Alfred Henry. “The Trail of the Viper.”
Cosmopolitan
50 (April 1911): 693–703.

———. “The Viper on the Hearth.”
Cosmopolitan
50 (March 1911): 439–50.

———. “The Viper's Trail of Gold.”
Cosmopolitan
50 (May 1911): 823–33. May, Stephen J.
Maverick Heart: The Further Adventures of Zane Grey.
Athens,

Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2000. ———.
Zane Grey: Romancing the West.
Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1997.

Mitchell, Lee Clark.
Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Nesbitt, John D. “Uncertain Sex in the Sagebrush.”
South Dakota Review
23 (Autumn 1985): 15–27.

Robinson, Forrest G.
Having It Both Ways: Self-Subversion in Western Popular
Classics.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993.

Ronald, Ann.
Zane Grey.
Boise: Boise State University, 1975.

Stott, Graham St. John. “Zane Grey and James Simpson Emmett.”
Brigham
Young University Studies
18 (Summer 1978): 491–503.

Tompkins, Jane.
West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Topping, Gary. “Zane Grey in Zion: An Examination of His Supposed Anti-Mormonism.”
Brigham Young University Studies
18 (Summer 1978): 483–90.

———. “Zane Grey's West.”
Journal of Popular Culture
7 (Winter 1973): 681–89.

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition of
Riders of the Purple
Sage is set from the first U.S. edition published by Harper and Brothers in 1912. The following minor corrections have been made:

P. 165, L. 20: the hyphen has been deleted between “snap” and “shot.”

P. 186, L. 27: “pass” has been capitalized.

P. 207, L. 38: “pass” has been capitalized.

P. 219, L. 1: “little” has been lowercased.

P. 226, L. 31: “central” has been lowercased.

P. 239, LL. 26–27: “cottonwoods” has been lowercased.

INTRODUCTION

William R. Handley

No American writer in the first half of the twentieth century sold as many books as did Zane Grey, whose work had a major influence on the development of the Western. Among the fifty-six Westerns Zane Grey wrote, one of his earliest,
Riders of the Purple Sage,
is still his most popular; within a year of its publication in 1912, it had sold one million copies. Considering the formula it shaped, however, it is a surprising book: the villain is a Mormon polygamist, and while there are shoot-ups, the central hero, Lassiter, gives up his guns and learns to love a child and believe in God. Indeed, the novel's most curious characteristic, if one approaches it with expectations that later Westerns have raised regarding the genre, is that it is intensely concerned with religion, marriage, and family, the very things the cowboy hero of Hollywood film so often wants to escape.

Grey's choice of villain sets in motion the novel's plot and is one reason why the book was so popular in 1912. While most contemporary criticism of
Riders of the Purple Sage
has given the Mormon polygamy in it relatively little attention, the novel's first reviewers noted the historical distinctiveness of the antagonist, as Grey's readers would also have done. (“The ruthlessness of Mormonism in that period of Western development is laid bare with great accuracy,” one reviewer wrote in 1912.) In contrast to
Riders,
Grey's first novel to deal with Mormons,
The Heritage of the Desert
(1910), and the sequel to
Riders, The Rainbow
Trail
(1915), are sympathetic toward and understanding of Mormons, presumably as a result of Grey's personal experience among them in trips he made to Utah and Arizona beginning in 1907. The immediate cultural catalyst for Grey's choice of villain, which was a key to the novel's huge success, was an anti-Mormon magazine crusade in 1911 that Grey was well aware of and that revived national paranoia about polygamy.

It is difficult today to appreciate just how obsessively, even pruriently, interested many Americans were, and for how long (from the 1850s to the 1910s), in excoriating Mormonism and polygamy. (Recent media attention to the polygamy of some fundamentalist Mormons in contemporary Utah does not approach the level of interest in the earlier era; contemporary battles against same-sex marriage come closer.) Though not uniformly, journalists, reformers, federal officials, members of Congress, and ordinary Americans considered polygamy a “barbaric” threat to civilization. The polygamous Mormon man was a repository for Grey's readers, as he had been for decades for Americans, of the contradictions and anxieties in American beliefs about racial and sexual identity. The Mormons figured negatively in these categories' relation to American nation-building not simply as an other but as a group that was not
quite
ethnically other. Indeed, the Mormon distinction, which made Mormons a much demonized group in American politics and culture up to the time of Grey's novel, came eventually to make little difference in American cultural debates once the end of polygamy—and an end to rumors of polygamy's continued practice— allowed the Mormons to become identifiably “white,” in the period's moral and ethnic senses, and thus American. Set forty years before it was published, Grey's novel records this transition: “I've known many good Mormons,” says the hero Lassiter. “But some are blacker than hell.”

Yet the function of Grey's formula—and another key to its popularity—is not simply to demonize an other but also to cast the American heroes and Mormon villains in distinct but oddly similar roles in which they enact a family drama, and in which the whiteness and womanhood of Grey's heroines are at stake. That family drama is in its largest cultural significance the drama of America justifying to itself its own history of conquest in the West, since the designs of the nation are to a large degree predicated upon the idea that the conquered are other (racially, sexually, religiously) and yet culturally made familiar or assimilable for the national majority. Mormons were a transitional object in American identity-formation (Indians and blacks served as “others” consistently and with catastrophic consequences). Through much of the later nineteenth century, Americans shifted from viewing Mormons, primarily based on their polygamous practices, as a semiethnic other to viewing them as white Americans once they adopted monogamy. In 1876, one British observer, William Hepworth Dixon, expressed a view common in the United States when he called Mormons “White Indians” because they shared with Indian tribes polygamous and communitarian practices and because the groups shared other social and religious beliefs “on which Red men differ from White—from all White men except Latter-day Saints.” In this “family compact,” Dixon wrote, Mormons and Indians joined in hostile conspiracies, “leaning on each other for support against a common foe.” When Grey published his novel, he helped revive and resolve an old American fear in a manner that would ensure the disappearance of Mormon villains from the Western formula after 1920, once the Mormon distinction was no longer freighted with as much difference. Grey wrote his novel at just the right moment for a popular reception: when nostalgia about the distinctiveness of Mormon polygamy coexisted with revived paranoia about it; when it seemed that Mormons still threatened “whiteness,” “womanhood,” “Christian civilization,” and the American nation.

Though the Mormons officially gave up polygamy in 1890 and Utah joined the Union in 1896, in the first decade of the twentieth century many Americans doubted whether Mormons could be trusted morally and politically, as rumors of polygamy's continued practice circulated in the press and the federal government continued to investigate the church. Eager to put the past behind them, but scarred by years of antipolygamy rhetoric, Mormons feared further governmental scrutiny, even as they sought to prove themselves changed and trustworthy. Yet some Mormon leaders continued to practice polygamy after 1890, which helped to set the cultural stage for the reception of Grey's novel. In defense of the American family, seven million Americans signed petitions in 1900 imploring the U.S. House of Representatives to exclude one such polygamist, Brigham H. Roberts, from his elected office. When a coalition of protesters wrote in 1904 that Utah's senator Reed Smoot should be barred from holding office because he was also an apostle in the Mormon church, Congress embarked on an investigation into Smoot and the church that may have been the longest and most exhaustive of any religious body in U.S. history. Following the investigation of Senator Smoot, who ultimately kept his seat, rumors that polygamy was still being practiced circulated in a steady stream of articles in the years up through 1911 in publications such as
The Independent, Collier's, McClure's, Pearson's, Cosmopolitan,
and
Everybody's
magazine. Theodore Roosevelt echoed in 1911 a long-standing American sentiment when he warned that the continuation of polygamy would “secure the destruction” of the Mormon church itself. That same year, Maude Radford Warren wrote of her travels in Utah for
The Saturday Evening Post.
A Mormon woman named Mrs. Finley, who gave stump speeches in 1904 for the Democratic Party, told a number of Mormon women “that if the Republicans got in there would be another Smoot investigation, and that all of them might be haled into court again. One woman got up and said she could not go through such agony a second time.”

In the midst of this renewed antipolygamy fever, Grey wrote his most popular novel. While preparing for his 1911 trip to Utah, during which he did his research for
Riders,
Grey wrote to his Mormon guide, David Dexter Rust, “I shall not write anything about the Mormons that would hurt anybody's feelings. . . . I see them as a wonderful people, and so I shall write of them.” Relative to his first Mormon novel, his treatment of Mormonism in
Riders
proved to be harsh enough that at first
Harper's
demurred to publish it, but it was not harsh relative to the tone of the anti-Mormon magazine crusade: “If you could read what is being written now in three magazines about the Mormons,” he wrote to Rust, “you would be pleased with my point of view.” Grey was well aware not only of the anti-Mormon articles that year but of the lucrative potential of anti-Mormon sentiment; he went on to argue that by writing favorably about Mormons, he would lose money rather than earn it: “As I will not make any contract with a magazine to roast the Mormons, I'll have to pay my expenses [for the 1911 trip] out of my own pocket. If I wanted to make any such contract I should get $2500 tomorrow for a trip.”
Riders of the Purple Sage,
of course, made him a wealthy man; in writing the novel, Grey may have been divided between friendship and the desire for financial success, as the magazine crusade continued.

Grey's novel helped codify the formula Western around a historical specificity that had, by the time of the Progressive era, borne the weight of rumor, hysteria, and stereotype, and that had been enmeshed in decades-old debates not only about religion but about race, sex, and the territorial, jurisdictional future of the nation. Like many silent films on the subject (including
The Victim of the Mormons
and
Trapped by the Mormons
in 1911 and 1922),
Riders of the Purple Sage
simplifies an image of the Mormon polygamist that had been for decades varied, wide-ranging, and often contradictory in its negative associations. Representations of Mormon polygamy relied on various nonwhite ethnic categories to emphasize the threat it posed not just to marriage but to white, Christian civilization, of which marriage was considered the cornerstone. The sense of cosmic significance Grey gives to the struggle over the marital fate of the virtuous Mormon heroine Jane Withersteen derives from the long history of this freighted rhetoric, which his mystical landscapes absorb and dehistoricize. Within that struggle, Grey's Gentile men and Mormon women undergo cross-fertilizing transformations. While Grey simplifies the Mormon polygamist's evil, his novel also aims to render the Mormon heroine's plight sympathetically and to figure her conversion away from blind religious duty. In the process, the Gentile hero Lassiter converts to a religion he can share with her, so that Mormon difference is made more familiar and assimilable, and thus ultimately less threatening, at the moment that this finally began to happen historically. The developing romance between Lassiter and Jane, in other words, can be read to represent a larger social shift in Mormon-American relations.

Riders of the Purple Sage
serves this cultural assimilation by typologizing its characters. Lassiter says to Jane, “mercy an' goodness, such as is in you, though they're the grand things in human nature, can't be lived up to on this Utah border. Life's hell out here. . . . I'm goin' to try to hide you somewhere in this Pass. I'd like to hide many more women, for I've come to see there are more
like
you among your people. . . . An' remember this—some day the border'll be better, cleaner, for the ways of men
like
Lassiter!” (emphasis added). Grey establishes fixed, analogous types—Gentile American men like Lassiter, redeemed Mormon women like Jane—within a border region about to undergo historical transition and religious and legal transformation. By setting the novel in 1871 (before federal pressure had forced the Mormon church officially to abandon polygamy), Grey re-creates a dramatic, pervasive threat from which to rescue his Mormon heroine. In culturally shaping the moral and sexual identity of the Mormon for an American readership, the work of fiction follows the work of law in the latter's shaping of the Mormons' future place in the American nation. Jane's dilemma—the oppositional claims of Mormon and Gentile men and her inability to keep her land
and
her freedom—resembles the no-win situation in which Mormons found themselves in the years leading up to their church's ban against polygamy: practice religious freedom and face destruction or give up the cornerstone practice of the religion and join the nation. Between a rock and a hard place, Jane rides away with Lassiter. The fall of Balancing Rock, which closes off Deception Pass “forever” at the novel's end and thwarts the pursuing Mormon riders, allows Lassiter to hide Jane and to close a chapter in southern Utah's history before a better and cleaner era begins, implicitly leaving to others the resolution of historical struggle.

In the contest over sexual relations that Grey's novel engages, grounded on the American side in the conflation of federal law and “natural” law governing the sexes, and on the Mormon side by invocations of religious freedom, a woman's body, soul, and possessions are both battleground and sacrifice. Jane is possessed by her American savior only to be dispossessed of her Mormon father's land and inheritance. (A woman in Utah in the 1870s had unusual rights of inheritance—and even divorce and property ownership—not accorded to women in the rest of the country.) Like all the contradictions in this novel, the fact that Jane resists the Mormon elders who want her land by allowing Lassiter to take her away from it forever is less troubling when viewed in light of the evil Mormon elders, perhaps the only characters who never contradict themselves. The crime of which Tull and his colleagues are guilty is quite simple; at the novel's opening, Venters puts it directly: “You want her all yourself. You're a wiving Mormon. You have use for her—and Withersteen House and Amber Spring and seven thousand head of cattle!” Connected to land and cattle, Jane is in the end forced to cede both to the Mormon elders in her absence. The fate of Jane's womanhood is the microcosm of a larger legal and national destiny that Grey's readers understood had overtaken Mormonism.

When Venters exclaims to Tull, “You want her all yourself,” it is not just Tull's polygamous plans, but his claim of exclusive rights to a woman and her land that upsets Venters, who is not immune, once he shoots, nurses, and falls in love with Bess, to wanting a woman all to himself. The two love plots in
Riders,
one involving Jane Withersteen and Lassiter and the other involving Bern Venters and Bess (or, as she turns out to be, Elizabeth Erne), reinforce the “natural” sexual law of “one man for one woman” that the novel is keen to uphold. Yet in reinforcing this principle, the plots also place the male hero in a role that imitates the Mormons' seduction and captivity of women. To extend what Forrest Robinson says in his study of the Western, the American heroes have it both ways: both seducers and saviors, both enforcers of moral codes and liberators from religious codes. And their seduction and rescue of women border on a cruelty that in Venters's case is redeemed only by his ignorance at the moment he pulls the trigger (Mormons, in contrast, know just what they are aiming at): Venters shoots Bess (but nurses her back to health), kills the man Bess thinks is her father (but she agrees to marry his murderer); Lassiter torches Jane's house (in order to keep it from Mormon hands) and kills Mormon associates of her father. Saving a woman from corruption, in other words, threatens to corrupt her while also cutting her ties to Mormon patriarchy. When Bess is recovering from her gunshot wound by Venters in Surprise Valley, the Edenic hideout and her condition offer Venters a seductively dangerous power over her: “You've saved me,” she tells him, “—and I'm—I'm yours to do with as you like.”
Riders
risks ever more ambiguous distinctions between moral codes. While Jane and Lassiter's relationship is sanctified by conventional values (one man for one woman), the ending also upends them as Jane's sexual virtue is threatened with corruption, by 1912 standards, since, as she is being saved, she and Lassiter are sealed in Surprise Valley without being married. (In the sequel, the grown-up Fay suggestively downplays this contravention of sexual norms when she reports to the Protestant minister Shefford that in Surprise Valley, “Uncle Jim and Mother Jane talked less as the years went by.”)