The Virginian

“Scattered wide, [small towns] littered the frontier from the Columbia to the Rio Grande, from the Missouri to the Sierras. They lay stark, dotted over a planet of treeless dust, like soiled packs of cards. Each was similar to the next, as one old five-spot of clubs resembles another. Houses, empty bottles, and garbage, they were forever of the same shapeless pattern. More forlorn they were than stale bones. They seemed to have been strewn there by the wind and to be waiting till the wind should come again and blow them away. Yet serene above their foulness swam a pure and quiet light, such as the East never sees; they might be bathing in the air of creation's first morning. Beneath sun and stars their days and nights were immaculate and wonderful.”

The Virginian establishes the archetype of Western small-town frontier life in all its tawdriness. These places seem to decay even as they’re being built. Piles of trash, grime-smeared locals, and dusty saloon halls stand in ironic contrast to landscapes of austere majesty, just as the moral decrepitude of the most wicked of frontier denizens contrasts with the quiet integrity of the hero, the Virginian. 

“City saloons rose into my vision, and I instantly preferred this Rocky Mountain place. More of death it undoubtedly saw, but less of vice, than did its New York equivalents. And death is a thing much cleaner than vice.” 

Plain-spoken and hard-working, the men who play poker at the Medicine Bow saloon may be quicker to draw guns but slower to engage in fraud than their city counterparts. The narrator finds that life in the Wyoming territory possesses a bracing honesty and a simple nobility missing in the more cultivated East. 

“The placid regiments of cattle lay in the cool of the cottonwoods by the water, or slowly moved among the sage-brush, feeding upon the grass that in those forever departed years was plentiful and tall.” 

For all its stark grandeur, the West also has oases of lush beauty, and competent ranchers such as Judge Henry make full use of them. The book’s lyrical descriptions of Western locales evokes in the reader a nostalgia for places never visited and a desire to learn more about the Old West. This, in turn, helped make stories of the frontier West—and, later, Western films and TV shows—popular around the world. 

“Pleasant systems of water running in channels were being led through the soil, and there was a sound of rippling here and there among the yellow grain; the green thick alfalfa grass waved almost, it seemed, of its own accord, for the wind never blew; and when at evening the sun lay against the plain, the rift of the canyon was filled with a violet light, and the Bow Leg Mountains became transfigured with hues of floating and unimaginable color.” 

The beauty of the land becomes a serene constant against the bustling tumult of the humans that occupy it. Beyond the struggles and drama on the ranches and in towns, the mountains and the sky persist, unchanging, eternal counterpoints of startling beauty. 

“[…] they came upon the schoolhouse, roofed and ready for the first native Wyoming crop. It symbolized the dawn of a neighborhood, and it brought a change into the wilderness air. The feel of it struck cold upon the free spirits of the cow-punchers, and they told each other that, what with women and children and wire fences, this country would not long be a country for men.” 

Though at first the West is largely the domain of cattlemen, more settlers arrive and, with them, civilization. Much of the wild freedom of that country soon would fade; the cowboys would be gone before they knew it. Much of the charm, as well as a great deal of the tragedy, of the Old West lies in the conflict between the freewheeling cowpunchers and the staid—and sometimes corrupt—newcomers who will transform the region even more than did the first pioneers. 

“‘If a man is built like that Prince boy was built (and it's away down deep beyond brains), he'll play winnin' poker with whatever hand he's holdin' when the trouble begins. Maybe it will be a mean, triflin' army, or an empty six-shooter, or a lame hawss, or maybe just nothin' but his natural countenance. ’Most any old thing will do for a fello' like that Prince boy to play poker with.’” 

The Prince is an important historical figure who appears in plays by Shakespeare that the Virginian has read. Poker is a game the Virginian considers a test of a person’s winning spirit. Just as a smart poker player can win the pot with bad cards, so can the Prince—and the Virginian himself—win at the game of life with whatever resources are at hand. 

“Scipio’s bleached eyes brightened with admiration as he considered the Southerner's back. ‘Well,’ he stated judicially, ‘start awful early when yu' go to fool with him, or he'll make you feel unpunctual.’”

Scipio, newly hired by the Virginian to work at the Sunk Creek Ranch, sees right away that his new boss isn’t a man to trifle with. His comment is a darkly humorous way of saying that a person would have to be extremely capable to outwit or outfight the Virginian and survive. 

“As soon as you treat men as your brothers, they are ready to acknowledge you—if you deserve it—as their superior. That's the whole bottom of Christianity, and that's what our missionary will never know.” 

People would rather be loved into righteousness than shamed into it. Judge Henry suggests that the local parson, Dr. MacBride, exhibits too much moral superiority and not enough brotherhood.

“Their sin was indeed the cause of their damnation, yet, keeping from sin, they might nevertheless be lost. It had all been settled for them not only before they were born, but before Adam was shaped. Having told them this, he invited them to glorify the Creator of the scheme. Even if damned, they must praise the person who had made them expressly for damnation.” 

The narrator laments the severity of Dr. MacBride’s sermon, which focuses exclusively on the awful fate that he predicts for the congregation, with no mention of the soaring beauty, love, and forgiveness of the faith. 

“I couldn't be so good if I wasn't bad onced in a while.” 

The Virginian explains his love of pranks to Molly, who’s concerned about his boyishness. His explanation contains multiple meanings: He is well aware of his humanness and is comfortable with it; he knows that sometimes he must do a thing that may offend someone if it greatly benefits others; he wants Molly to know exactly whom she’s becoming involved with; and he wants her to know that he will be honest with her and won’t blame circumstance for his behavior. 

“Think what we do to hundreds an' thousands of little calves! Throw 'em down, brand 'em, cut 'em, ear mark 'em, turn 'em loose, and on to the next. It has got to be, of course. But I say this. If a man can go jammin' hot irons on to little calves and slicin' pieces off 'em with his knife, and live along, keepin' a kindness for animals in his heart, he has got some good in him.” 

The Virginian notes the goodness that rises up from the dim mind of Shorty, the ranch hand other cowboys condemn as too weak to be useful. Along with his wise perspective on ranch matters, the Southerner also reveals his compassion for others. 

“‘Nothing’s queer,’ stated the Virginian, ‘except marriage and lightning. Them two occurrences can still give me a sensation of surprise.’” 

The Virginian makes ironic reference to his own yearning for a woman who loves him but refuses to accept him. Marriages often succeed or fail for odd reasons, some of them sudden, and in that respect their occurrence remains as mysterious as lightning strikes. 

“In bets, in card games, in all horse transactions and other matters of similar business, a man must take care of himself, and wiser onlookers must suppress their wisdom and hold their peace.” 

With its emphasis on self-reliance, the Western code of conduct requires that onlookers refrain from interfering in other people’s negotiations. Offering advice to the weaker person will anger the stronger one, who’s hoping to move in for the financial kill. Thus, foolish or addled people, as much as capable ones, are left to fend for themselves in their transactions.

“So the Virginian talked, nor knew what he was doing to the girl. Nor was she aware of what she was receiving from him as he unwittingly spoke himself out to her in these Browning meetings they had each day.” 

During his convalescence at her cabin after the Indian attack, the Virginian listens as Molly reads poems by Robert Browning, and they discuss them and talk about many other things. His views and opinions and critiques startle and intrigue her, and they talk daily for hours. Without realizing it, Molly slips further into love.

“I have had to live in places where they had courts and lawyers so called but an honest man was all the law you could find in five hundred miles.” 

The Virginian, writing to Mrs. Wood to defend his betrothal to her daughter, explains that, in his world, very often only his integrity and self-possession protects him from men of bad will. His point is that it’s possible to use dark methods to fight evil in a wilderness and still be a good man. 

“The great levels around me lay cooled and freed of dust by the wet weather, and full of sweet airs. Far in front the foot-hills rose through the rain, indefinite and mystic. I wanted no speech with any one, nor to be near human beings at all. I was steeped in a revery as of the primal earth; even thoughts themselves had almost ceased motion. To lie down with wild animals, with elk and deer, would have made my waking dream complete; and since such dream could not be, the cattle around the deserted buildings, mere dots as yet across separating space, were my proper companions for this evening.” 

As he travels overland by horse, the narrator delights in the vast silence of the plains. The frontier West, as yet free of cities with their smokestacks and noise and anxieties, offers to the traveler the balm of fresh air, vastness, and solitude.

“Well, here's what it is: a man maybe such a confirmed miscreant that killing's the only cure for him; but still he's your own species, and you don't want to have him fall around and grab your laigs and show you his fear naked. It makes you feel ashamed.” 

The Virginian talks about how hard it is to execute a fellow human, even an unredeemable one. On this day, he has overseen the hanging of two men, one of them his old friend Steve, who were caught stealing livestock, a capital crime. Though he knows justice has been done and that it was the other captive who quailed in terror, he is deeply disturbed by Steve’s coolness in the face of death. 

“Now back East you can be middling and get along. But if you go to try a thing on in this Western country, you've got to do it well. You've got to deal cyards well; you've got to steal well; and if you claim to be quick with your gun, you must be quick, for you're a public temptation, and some man will not resist trying to prove he is the quicker.” 

The Virginian feels troubled by the misadventures of Shorty, a dim cowboy too incompetent to survive long in the world of cattle rustlers. The Virginian sets out the basic rule of survival for a criminal in the West: Even bad men must be competent, or they won’t last.

“I expect in many growed-up men you'd call sensible there's a little boy sleepin'—the little kid they onced was—that still keeps his fear of the dark. You mentioned the dark yourself yesterday. Well, this experience has woke up that kid in me, and blamed if I can coax the little cuss to go to sleep again! I keep a-telling him daylight will sure come, but he keeps a-crying and holding on to me.” 

Unable to settle his conscience over the killing of his friend, the Virginian finds that childhood fears have risen up through the cracks in his emotional armor. Suddenly exposed and vulnerable, he must stare into the shadows of his soul, searching for answers that few can find.

“The courts, or rather the juries, into whose hands we have put the law, are not dealing the law. They are withered hands, or rather they are imitation hands made for show, with no life in them, no grip. They cannot hold a cattle-thief. And so when your ordinary citizen sees this, and sees that he has placed justice in a dead hand, he must take justice back into his own hands where it was once at the beginning of all things. Call this primitive, if you will. But so far from being a defiance of the law, it is an assertion of it—the fundamental assertion of self governing men, upon whom our whole social fabric is based.”

Judge Henry argues to Molly that the frontier constabulary and courts are weak or non-existent, and that the citizens, if they are not to be robbed blind by thieves, must do the policing and sentencing themselves.

“He had looked upon life with a marksman’s eyes, very close; and no one, if he have a heart, can pass through this and not carry sadness in his spirit with him forever. But he seldom shows it openly; it bides within him, enriching his cheerfulness and rendering him of better service to his fellow-men.” 

The Virginian, like all thoughtful persons, cannot go through life without recognizing its frequent cruelties and unfairness. These realizations can wound the spirit; such injuries scar over but never disappear, leaving marks on the soul. These marks, however, deepen the character of good people. 

“It was his code never to speak ill of any man to any woman. Men's quarrels were not for women's ears. In his scheme, good women were to know only a fragment of men's lives. He had lived many outlaw years, and his wide knowledge of evil made innocence doubly precious to him.” 

Having lived for a time as a ruffian, the Virginian appreciates goodness and would not tarnish it by acquainting it with evil. He learns, however, that his fiancée is made of stronger stuff than most other people. To her only does he break his silence about the dark doings he has witnessed. 

“‘Can’t yu' see how it must be about a man? It's not for their benefit, friends or enemies, that I have got this thing to do. If any man happened to say I was a thief and I heard about it, would I let him go on spreadin' such a thing of me? Don't I owe my own honesty something better than that? Would I sit down in a corner rubbin' my honesty and whisperin' to it, 'There! there! I know you ain't a thief’? No, seh; not a little bit! What men say about my nature is not just merely an outside thing. For the fact that I let 'em keep on sayin' it is a proof I don't value my nature enough to shield it from their slander and give them their punishment. And that's being a poor sort of a jay.’”

Trampas has ordered the Virginian to leave town or face him in a duel. The Virginian explains to Molly why he must accept this challenge. He would not be able to live with himself if he couldn’t accept the responsibility of standing up to intimidation. For the Virginian, ultimately, it’s not the world’s opinion of him that matters but his own.