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Until meeting Fleming, Gary Cooper had acted in some bit parts and some small-budget movies. This changed when he won the lead role in Fleming’s film Wolf Song, and the director helped guide Cooper toward becoming a leading man. In this chapter, Sragow discusses Wolf Song and explains how the film catapulted Cooper into stardom. Talkies were emerging at this time, and Cooper starred in Fleming’s first movie with sound, The Virginian (1929), establishing him as a serious actor. The script was cowritten by Louis Lighton, who would continue to create successful films with Fleming. The chapter contains Cooper’s recollections about filming what he considered to be his favorite movie.

Chapter Two argues that the frontier club western served as the hinge between open-range ranching and “quality” publishing—industries which were locked in parallel marketplace battles, shared investment and personnel overlaps, and wielded similar tropes of cultural hierarchy. It traces Wister’s journey from Philadelphia to Wyoming to Manhattan via elite clubs which shaped the emerging western. Philadelphia Clubman, novelist and physician Silas Weir Mitchell provided Wister’s entrée to ranching and publishing, and the drawing-room manners and heterosexual romance which the Boone and Crockett Club template lacked. Wyoming cattle kings (especially Cheyenne Club members) cultivated anglophile rituals to mask the brute force of their financial cartel. And Manhattan’s “quality” publishers (including Harper Brothers and Macmillan) developed marketplace manoeuvres—again cloaked as cultural superiority—to defeat competition from dime publishers and reprint libraries. A concluding comparison between frontier club and dime novel westerns suggests how frontier club writings promoted these parallel interests.

The Introduction discusses how upper-class clubmen in the East, cattle kings in the West, and popular print culture in its formative years came together in the late nineteenth century to create the modern western. It charts the frontier club group through a network of exclusive college and gentlemen’s clubs, including, centrally, the Boone and Crockett Club and one western outpost, the Cheyenne Club. The quintessential example of the frontier club western is Owen Wister’s bestselling novel The Virginian (1902). Its fictional action was fuelled by the exclusive club mentality and it converted clubmen’s extra-legal violence in Wyoming into an image of heroic individualism.

This chapter looks at the history of popular westerns across print, performance, and display in the United States between 1860 and 1920. In particular, it examines the dominant western formula that not only popularised the West but also reinforced hierarchies of race and gender while also propagating different myths of American nationhood. It first considers dime and nickel novels, together with Buffalo Bill Cody as a key figure in the western’s emergence as America’s national image and the role of dime novels in that process. It then explores some popular works emerging from the frontier club, including Owen Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian before concluding with an analysis of other figures — well beyond the confines of the frontier club — who made a bid on the literary marketplace.

The Conclusion sketches the enduring imprint of frontier club fictional patterns, especially on mainstream western movies. Stock features include the laconic white gentleman cowboy, the pacifist heroine come west, the stalk and shootout, and vast, emptied landscapes threatened by “savage” Indigenous figures. Among the movies under discussion are the multiple remakes of The Virginian (five films plus a television series) between 1914 and 2000, High Noon, Shane, and several films directed by John Ford, including Cheyenne Autumn, The Searchers, Sergeant Rutledge, and My Darling Clementine. Attention is also paid to ways in which anti-western movies—including The Ox-Bow Incident, Blazing Saddles, Posse, and Wild Wild West—challenge these emphases.

Drawing on a wide range of cinematic productions spanning from The Virginian in 1929 to Golden Age and spaghetti westerns to recent popular TV series like Deadwood and Longmire, this chapter establishes the close connection between Western film and ancient epic, showing that like the poems of Homer and Virgil, Western film places invented or fictionalized characters in a foundational period from history, and thus offer enough truth to be relevant, but enough fiction to provide a comfortable distance. Works from both genres also delineate fundamental values and beliefs and provide models both virtuous and cautionary for male and female behavior while helping to justify national self-image. At the same time, the best productions from both genres complicate the ideologies they promote through devices such as depictions of excessive violence, positioning protagonist and enemy as alter egos, and the hero’s ultimate exclusion from the society he has redeemed. And much as epic both reflected and influenced notions of honor, justice, and manhood in antiquity, the imprint of Westerns on our own belief systems is so powerful that it continues to shape and reflect our own values and ideologies today.