Part of what comes with the subtitle “Adventure” is the promise of action. I expected that the prose of this first section would try to be exciting. Each of the ten tales would be like some kind of fast-paced Saturday morning cartoon. Most likely there wouldn’t be any fine Italian cuisine as in Samurai Pizza Cats or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but the first story might have some danger to dish.
I thought things would move quickly, and characters would persistently be on the verge of death. I imagined that life would ornately pop and the alleged barren ruggedness of Marlboro men in the desert plains would reveal some elaborate interiority.
Even as I held these predictions, I knew they were silly. That was clear reading this opening entry by the spiritualist writer Stewart Edward White. Here is a slow four chapter participant in the myth-building of the the American West.
“The Two-Gun Man” begins with a characterization of, Buck Johnson, the protagonist who is “American born” but wields a “black beard and a dignity of manner that had earned him the title of Señor.” Well, ok. Johnson is not the two-gun man; rather he is an honest cattle rancher with “capacity, courage, directness of method, and perseverance.” For White, he embodies the spirit of the protestant ethic—he doesn’t give up. His dedication to his work makes him morally propulsive. And that dedication and desire makes him wary of those surrounding him.
Working in Arizona on the Mexican border, Johnson has some of his cattle stolen and he enlists his foreman, Jed Parker, to find the thief and the property. These prosaic names lend of a sense of mundanity to the world White creates. It is up to Parker to discover someone who is precisely not prosaic—he is to find “a man with nerve.” Parker needs someone that understands the land--someone shrewd and skilled enough to catch a dishonorable rogue who would take another man’s livelihood.
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| This story was also published in this first issue of The Famous Story Magazine (1925) |
White’s story traffics in a romanticism about the state of nature as one of beautiful and innocent lawlessness. The absence of law does not equal disorder; for White the relationship between the two pivots on a question about the human. White’s west is gritty space where men, rattled by their own courage, are dignified and treat the land with a kind of underdeveloped spiritual recognition. Heroes are to love the land.
Others dishonor nature. It is men who scratch profanity onto the world, just as it is men who impose a set of rules for how land will be chartered. This is a vision which seems to draw a past where women are inconceivable
For White, Native Americans are antagonistic figures relegated to that past as they are born of and remain tied to that state of nature. Described almost entirely in the past tense, White’s depiction of indigenous life is one defined by absence. Native people have no claim to land. They only are of the land. It is Johnson’s time in the military and his desire to set things right, which makes him particularly suited to the present. The exchange that is made is at the center of his personality: to survive now he must be in a perpetual “state of warfare.”
The languid text sets up a fairly simple story that could serve as a template for typical Hollywood fare and the writing moves along with little adornment. White’s most interesting choices are in his literary depiction of the surroundings. Presaging the films of John Ford, the setting is magisterial and the most engaging passages are descriptions of a landscape that threatens to swallow any white man in its ferociousness. As White writes, “The desert compassed them about, marvelously changing shape and color, and every character, with all the noiselessness of phantasmagoria.”
Though Ford and the Hollywood dream factory would shape the country’s imagination of the frontier world, White frames that world as one without noise. Silence haunts. Static is only introduced by disloyal figures who break the proper system that has been implanted into the land by a certain kind of Western thought. Embedded in such a dream is the belief that the land could be properly legislated, if only by an uncorrupt presence.
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| Stewart Edward White surveying something, most likely before he shoots or tracks it. |
This is a savior’s dream, one which relays a vision of imperialism and refuses to think social-political life as anything but what American society has propagated. This is the dance White does: he praises the dignity of work and calls for the correct spiritual response to the land.
So where is the adventure? In part, it too is relegated to the past. Johnson is celebrated for his previous accomplishments in war. He is a vessel for America. He cares for his cattle (whatever it might mean to be devoted or care for property that one would brand—which is to say he has a financial investment in it). He is one who tames nature by recognizing it is a form of life, but one which has a proper capitalist use. For White, a man Theodore Roosevelt described as “the best man with both pistol and rifle who ever shot,” this makes sense in the way that so much of the construction of “the West” makes troubling, if inaccurate, sense.
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| White, like many of the authors in this collection, eventually worked in the film industry as well! |
But no guns are fired in this story. No one dies. The adventure takes shape in the agreement that Jed Parker makes with the unnamed two-gun man. Parker and Johnson hire the titular man to find the stolen cattle within ten days, believing that such a deed will be impossible.
It is not. The story concludes with a twist that has been foreshadowed with little subtlety. The two-gun man returns after ten days, bringing with him Johnson’s cattle. Parker and Johnson are surprised at this return. And this is where the tale turns, as the unnamed man reveals that he was the thief all along.
Like a Hollywood villain, this proclamation brings with it the ballooning of character. His announcement causes him to “suddenly loom large in the doorway.” What now? Johnson’s past will not save him.
The system of rules is broken again; the two-gun man is the savior, the mercenary, and the baddie. And so the story ends.
You can read "The Two-Gun Man" as part of Stewart Edward White's Collection "Arizona Nights" at Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/753
You can listen to each part of the story ("Cattle Rustlers, The Man With Nerve, The Agreement, The Accomplishment”) at Librivox: https://librivox.org/arizona-nights-by-stewart-edward-white/
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