A New Take On Old West Lit

Sentimental Cowpunchers, Homesteader’s Gramophone: Three Classic Western Christmas Stories

By James Work, Guest Writer, 12-20-10

	Owen Wister, courtesy of American Heritage Center collections, University of Wyoming.

She won “Best Leading Actor” from the Omaha Actor’s Guild, packed the theater as Emily Dickinson in “The Belle of Amherst” and now she was on the phone asking me for Christmas material.

“I need a western piece to read for some charity appearances,” she said. “I won’t have time to read them all, so just pick one and I’ll cut it to fit the time requirements.”

Cripes. If there’s anything I hate worse than making decisions it’s making other people’s decisions.

Okay, so what makes a good Christmas story? The answer’s as obvious as an elephant in an outhouse. It shows how Christmas is a time when Evil is banished by Good and self-isolated people crave society. Look at A Christmas Carol or How the Grinch Stole Christmas. For that matter, look at “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” or even The Nutcracker. Christmas is magic, Evil is overcome by Good and people celebrate.

This made Owen Wister’s “A Journey in Search of Christmas” my prime candidate. Lin McLean has a wad of roundup money in his jeans and an ache in his heart. Everyone in Cheyenne seems to know that a woman has made a fool of him by marrying him when she already had a husband. Looking to be alone, Lin takes the train to Denver. He intends to spend Christmas Eve by punishing a power of whiskey and blowing himself to a fine meal. He might even go to the theater.

But Denver’s too lonely for Lin McLean. He comes across three waifs, bootblack boys huddling together in the cold streets. They admire the tall cowboy’s boots and gun. He tricks them into accepting a hot supper. Then he takes them to the theater to see a melodrama about a sea captain’s castaway children.

Two of the boys have homes, of a sort. Lin keeps Billy with him and Billy offers Lin two of his few possessions. “His first feeling had been to prevent the boy’s parting with his treasures, but something . . . made him know that he should take them.” They have breakfast on Christmas morning, flapjacks and maple syrup, and wander into a church where carols are being sung.

In the end Lin McLean saves Billy from life on the dirty streets in a surprise twist that would tickle Charles Dickens half to death.

I had a problem with Wister’s story, however. The only female in it is a bigamist and slut who abandons her own son. So much for redemption and change, not to mention Christmas.

Next choice: “The Christmas of the Phonograph Records,” a memory piece by Mari Sandoz, who grew up to become a writer—and woman—of extraordinary strength. If you’ve read her story of her abusive father, Old Jules, you know the kind of tough I’m talking about. (When Mari entered a short story contest, Jules said “You know I consider writers and artists the maggots of society.”)

“The Christmas of the Phonograph Records” begins on Christmas Eve. A wagon pulls up to the Sandoz house and heavy boxes are unloaded. Jules had taken a twenty-one-hundred dollar inheritance into the settlement to pay the mortgage and buy overshoes for the children, flour, sugar and other staples. He returned with an Edison gramophone and crates holding hundreds of wax cylinder recordings. He bought overshoes on time, along with some guns he wanted.

Mother is horrified.

“More debts!” she accused bitterly.

Jules puts Mari to work cranking the gramophone. News of the music spreads. More and more people arrive and Jules plays the Magnificent Host until dozens of guests, invited and uninvited, have eaten two month’s supply of bread and much of the meat that was to have seen the Sandoz family through the winter.

Jules slumbers in his chair. When Mari nods off or goes to help make biscuits for the crowd, he wakes up and growls “Can’t you keep the machine going?”

The effect of the music upon the isolated homesteaders is heart-warming, however. They laugh, they dance, they weep to hear the classics of their Czech and German homelands. Mari understands. She understands even when she inadvertently causes the destruction of a few of the wax cylinders.

“I got the worst whipping of my life for my carelessness,” she writes, “but the loss of the records hurt more, and much, much longer.”

Christmas audiences might not appreciate that ending.

I chose a story that begins, “Stubby Pringle swings up into saddle . . . Stubby Pringle, rooting tooting hard-working hard-playing cowhand of the Triple X, heading for the Christmas dance at the schoolhouse in the valley.”

The story is by Jack Schaefer, who created Shane and Monte Walsh. On the way to the dance, Stubby comes upon a lonely cabin where a woman is chopping firewood. She has been nursing her sick husband and trying to find a way to make Christmas happen for her little boy and girl.

“I reckon I could spare a bit of time,” Stubby says.

He chops wood, gets a Christmas tree, helps make decorations from bits of ribbon, old paper bags and pinto beans strung on thread. While the woman sews a new dress for the little girl’s present, Stubby takes out his pocket knife and whittles a little toy horse for the boy, “a horse fit to carry a waist-high boy to uttermost edge of eternity and back.”

Stubby creates Christmas presents out of everything he has, even leaving his pocket knife as a gift to the sick father. By the time he gets on his way again, he arrives at the schoolhouse as the last revelers are just leaving. He turns back toward the Triple X.

My actress friend loved “Stubby Pringle’s Christmas.”

“But isn’t it too romantic?” I asked.

“Look, James. You’ve known cowboys. So have I. So did Schaefer. This story is more true than it is romantic.”

She was right. She recited “Stubby Pringle” many times. I presented it a couple of times, myself. It’s a story that can make adults believe in cowboys and kids believe in the character Stubby sees on his way home, “plump and jolly and belly-bouncing who spoke to him that night out on wind-whipped winter-worn mountainside.

“We-e-e-l-l-l do-o-one . . . pa-a-a-rt-ner!”

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.

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