The Virginian

“[…] the Eastbound departed slowly into that distance whence I had come. I stared after it as it went its way to the far shores of civilization. It grew small in the unending gulf of space, until all sign of its presence was gone save a faint skein of smoke against the evening sky.” 

Watching his steam train depart, the narrator senses the lonely immensity of the land he has come to visit, a place both beautiful and unforgiving. 

“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.