A New Take on Old West Lit

Four Unforgettable Western Women Writers

By James Work, Guest Writer, 5-06-11

	Mary Hunter Austin, circa 1900, photo by Charles Fletcher Lummis

When we did the Western Literature Association survey of Most Important Authors, very few women made the list. Willa Cather got her fair share of votes. Mari Sandoz was the next favorite, followed by Leslie Silko and Mary Austin. After that came such names as Amy Tan, Sandra Cisneros, Pam Houston, Terry Tempest Williams and Ann Zwinger. With the exception of Cather, none had sufficient support to be called “important.”

For my list of significant Western women writers, I chose the four I find most unforgettable, four women I have spent many evenings with and who belong in the library of any well-read Westerner.

1. Mary Austin’s The Land of Little Rain

Mary Austin’s The Land of Little Rain (1903) will not tempt you to hoist the family bungalow onto a flatbed truck and move to the Mojave Basin; however, Austin can lead you to wonder why you live where you live. The Mojave hills, the colors, the seasons of the place “trick the sense of time, so that once inhabiting there you always mean to go away without quite realizing that you have not done it.” Austin treats individuals—the Basket Maker, the Pocket Hunter, the Mule Driver on the borax wagons—as the equals of the coyotes, the scrawny rabbits, the soaring hawks and cruising vultures.

Without apology she anthropomorphizes animals and plants, turning nature observations into philosophical truisms. Writing of False Asphodel, Austin says “a very poet’s flower; not fit for gathering up, and proving a nuisance in the pastures, therefore needing to be the more loved.”

Austin’s genius is in seeing holistic relationships between individual and place, how a plant, animal, watercourse or mineral finds what she calls its “proper destiny.” Whenever I read Land of Little Rain I feel that somewhere there is a place for my own spirit. “Come away,” she says, “you who are obsessed with your own importance in the scheme of things.”

2. Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House

Shortly after my son came of age he said, “Dad, I need to find myself.” I told him that I thought I had seen him in Puerto Rico. In a year of washing dishes and drawing chalk pictures on San Juan’s sidewalks for loose change, he found at least a part of himself.

Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House (1925) is about seeking your spiritual best place. The professor does not physically go to that place, which he thinks is in the desert southwest. He makes the journey vicariously through a student, a fictional rendition of Richard Wetherill, one of the first whites to see Mesa Verde’s ruined walls and towers. One moonlit night Tom Outland lies on a flat rock beneath the ghostly Stone Age city: “This was the first time I ever saw it as a whole. It all came together in my understanding, as a series of experiments do when you begin to see where they are leading. Something had happened in me that made it possible for me to co-ordinate and simplify . . . .”

Here more than in any of her works Cather shows her genius for coordinating history and humankind, precisely placing characters into their social and historical setting. She didn’t write about history; she wrote within it.

3. Mari Sandoz’s Slogum House

As did Mari Sandoz, another author worthy of shelf space. Sandoz wrote fine history books, including Cheyenne Autumn (1953), Crazy Horse (1942), The Buffalo Hunters (1954), The Cattlemen (1958), The Beaver Men (1964). To me her most unforgettable book is a novel, a brutal, nasty drama set into the history of the Nebraska panhandle: Slogum House (1937).

Gulla Slogum runs a road house, a whorehouse catering to cowboys and teamsters. She has turned her two eldest sons into thieves and killers who bully the territory; her daughters she has turned into whores. Gulla has many enemies, but her chief enemy is time. She is running to fat and losing whatever looks she may have had. The government’s opening of the Nebraska Panhandle to homesteading threatens her livelihood.

Sandoz does not justify the evil in her Slogums. She builds upon the truth that some humans have such evil in them. “She was like all the rest—like Gulla, like Hab and Butch—driven by something that made them fall upon the helpless to hurt them, to tear them . . . .” Ruedy Slogum is good, almost too good. Libby Slogum sees her mother’s amorality and tries to leave. But Gulla goes on. She bribes politicians and lawmen, has men beaten and tortured, ruins families who homestead on “her” land.

If you wonder, “were there ever such people in the West?” just remember than Sandoz was a consummate historian.

4. Dorothy Johnson

Dorothy Johnson is on my list of unforgettable characters for herself, not for her stories. From Whitefish, Montana she wrote a bunch of excellent stories including The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1949), A Man Called Horse (1950) and The Hanging Tree (1957). All three were made into memorable films.

I first saw Johnson when she addressed the WLA luncheon at Sioux Falls, South Dakota in 1977. Her topic was “How to Get On a Horse.” As she described being a little girl—a short little girl—trying to get into the saddle of a tall horse, she had everyone in the audience laughing so hard that they were holding their sides trying to get their breath.

When I phoned for permission to use The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in my anthology, she made me laugh again. “The original version?” she asked. “With the original ending?”

I said I always try to use a first edition version when possible.

But her question became like a bug in my boxers. I read and re-read “Liberty Valance” and finally figured it out. I phoned her again.

“Bert Barricune’s funeral is in 1910.”

“Right,” Dorothy Johnson said.

“In your original, after the senator and his wife attend the funeral they drive to the airport to return to Washington.”

She began laughing over the phone, and together we sounded like a pair of lunatics sharing a limerick.

“And the magazine printed it that way!” she chortled.

“Why not?” I laughed. “Liberty Valance is a great story.”

What I meant was that even without her sense of humor, Dorothy Johnson’s books deserve a place on my bookshelf.

Dr. James Work is the editor of the textbook Prose and Poetry of the American West, past-president of the Western Literature Association, and author of eight novels set in the West.

More articles in this series:

• The Five Most Important Frontier Novels by James Work

• The Five Most Important Works of Mountain Man Fiction by James Work

• “The Five Most Important Cowboy Novels Ever” by James Work

• Western Writing and Stereotype: Eastern Novels Go Inward, Western Novels Go Outward by James Work

• Sentimental Cowpunchers, Homesteader’s Gramophone: Three Classic Western Christmas Stories by James Work

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