I’m looking to do a bit of reading about this important era of American history.
I’ve read quite a bit of Wallace Stegner, although he is a post old west writer.
Who was the last writer to have personally lived in and experienced the “Old West” (1880-1910)?
Mark Twain and Bret Harte come to mind…but their writings are more representative of an earlier period.
What athors should I be looking for?
Note that the first writer to popularize the “Old West” stereotype was Owen Wister with The Virginian (really the Ur-text for all westerns from then on). It was written in 1902. Wister had visited the Western US in the 1880s, but spent most of his life on the east coast.
Why is it that these particular years define the “Old West” for you? Or, to put it another way, what’s the point of the question? What kind of experiences are you getting at? A lot changed in that 30-year span–many things that popular fiction and film portray as an “era” were actually very short-lived, and simply got singled out in fiction for their picturesque characteristics (CF, the Pony Express, etc.).
Jack London joined the Klondike gold rush in 1897 and returned to California the following year. He’s gotta be a contender.
Ambrose Bierce, the original “embedded reporter,” left Washington DC in 1913 to interview Pancho Villa and his rebels in Mexico. He was 71. He disappeared mysteriously. He gets my vote as the last.
Edgar Rice Burroughs knew many cowboys and scalawags.
Jack Williamson was born in the Arizona Territory and later traveled to New Mexico in a covered wagon. He died in 2006.
I suppose it depends on what you consider to be the Old West. Larry McMurtry grew up on a Texas ranch in the thirties and forties.
Louis L’amour March 22, 1908 – June 10, 1988
In his auto biography L’amour talks about leaving home at 14. He traveled the West working odd jobs and interviewing a lot of old timers from the wild west days. That was in the 1920’s and 30’s. That really was the last chance to get any first hand accounts of life in the 1880’s, and 1890’s.
He continued his research after becoming an author. Finding old books that had been written by old lawmen and cattle ranchers. His fiction books are the most authentic that can be found.
I might suggest Tom Mix. Yes I know he was a movie star, but he did write his own auto biography, years ago, I had a copy of it, and I also have hear he scripted a few of his own movies.
Bat Masterson, the famous law man of Dodge City, Kansas and Trinidad, Colorado. His final job was a sportswriter (mostly boxing) in New York City.
Gene Fowler grew up in Pueblo, Colorado during some of its wild west days. Really a good writer. I recommend “Timberline.”
Damon Runyon, yes, I know people think of him as a New Yorker, but he grew up in Colorado during the Wild West days.
Lowell Thomas, once again people don’t think of him as a Westerner, but he grew up in the rough and tumble time of the old west in Cripple Creek, Colorado and wrote some about it.
There’s clearly a wide range of interpretations here. I would have supposed that the “Old West” ended with the closing of the frontier and the effective end of the Indian Wars in the 1890s, and that “personal experience” would mean that a writer had himself been west of Kansas City before that time, so nobody born later than about 1875 would be eligible.
Mary Ellicott Arnold (1876– 1968) and Mabel Reed (1876–1963) wrote a memoir of their experiences as Bureau of Indian Affairs employees titled In the Land of the Grasshopper Song: Two Women in the Klamath River Indian Country in 1908-09.
I read it many years ago, as assigned reading for a college history course on the U.S. West. I think the description and reviews on Amazon pretty much capture what I remember about it.
I have no idea about the answer, but the first person I thought of - and then rejected - was actually Wallace Stegner.
Well, I see the history of the west in a certain way:
-the period from the end of the Civil War (1865) to the defeat of General Custer (1876)
-from about 18880 to the closing of the frontier (end of the homestaed act (1907)
-from the Spanish-American war (1899) to WWI (1918).
The period of the most interest is the 18880-1910-when bank robberies and range wars were going on.
Stegner is a fine writer (his “Big Rock Candy Mountain” is one of my favorites), but he writes abot time from 1915 onwards.
I don’t know that Laura Ingalls Wilder is necessarily the last, but she certainly deserves mention. She lived from 1867 to 1957.
I’m not an expert on Westerns or the Old West by any stretch, but I’m surprised to see 1880 and 1865 mentioned as potential dates for the start of the Old West. I thought the end of the Civil War was more or less the middle of the Old West period, and that it included the Texas Rebellion, or at least the California Gold Rush. I always thought of the death of Davy Crockett at the Alamo as symbolic of the shift of “the West” from the Ohio Valley to the area west of the Mississippi, which is what came to be known as either the Old West or the Wild West.
gun writer elmer keith (1899 to 1984) and his book “hell i was there!”
I think I lot of the iconography of what is popularly referred to as the “old” West or the “wild” West is a hodgepodge of conceits latched onto and reiterated long after that time and ingrained in modern culture through film and TV, with little concern for accurately portraying the realities of day-to-day life, which probably varied in nature a lot at any given time depending on proximity to rail lines and telegraphic communication. The notion, for example, of a nearly lawless society driven and organized by gunslingers and showdowns comes out of a period of not much more than 10 years, I estimate, but from what you see in movies you’d think that half of the 19th century was like that.
Oh! Robert E. Howard! He didn’t write a lot of cowboy stories (and sure wasn’t famous for them), but he wrote a few and grew up in a variety of Texas cow towns and boom towns, spending most of his life in Cross Plains. B. 1906, d. 1936. If anybody lived through the last gasp of old Texas, it was this guy.
Angle of Repose takes place in the late 1800s, at least the non-modern bit. But Stegner was born too late to have any personal exposure to the time period he writes about.