"White for a Hundred Years": The Frontier Club West

In the late nineteenth century, a group of powerful clubmen created the popular western as we now most commonly know it, part of a network of exclusionary discourses—joining the literary marketplace, conservation, Jim Crow, immigration restriction, and American Indian policy—which shored up their socio-economic interests.

This paper focuses on the racial exclusions of the frontier club western, which spanned the enclaves of whiteness produced by Boone-and-Crockett hunting tales, the erasure of Black rough riders in Theodore Roosevelt's account of the Cuban campaign, and segregationist narrative structures in westerns by Owen Wister, George Grinnell, and Madison Grant.

Little-known materials in the archive of Owen Wister, bestselling author of The Virginian (1902), expose the Black presence at the heart of this whitened West. In 1893, Wister traveled from upper-class Philadelphia to a fellow clubman's ranch in Texas. His imagination was seized by Homer, an African-American ranchhand and cook, whom Wister photographed repeatedly, wrote vividly into his diary, and remained haunted by for the rest of his writing life. In The Virginian—a work signally devoid of African-Americans—Homer mutates into Scipio, ranchhand and cook, who carries a classic slave name while insistently protesting his racial purity (“I’ve been white for a hundred years”). Scipio became the inspiration for Wister’s “epic western,” The Marriages of Scipio. Despite years of false starts and editorial urging, Wister was unable to produce his magnum opus, and he never wrote about the West again. This was a multiply suppressed story. When Wister’s daughter published his diary six decades later, she expunged the descriptions of Homer. Meanwhile, Wister's photographs of “the 280 pound darkey” lay hidden and undeveloped in his desk—nitrate negatives, until their recent processing, which kept the Black cowboy white for over a hundred years.