When Owen Wister, a Philadelphian and friend of Theodore Roosevelt’s, romanticized the American cowboy and cattleman in his novel The Virginian (1902), he had his hero say that “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.” This might have been the most astonishing line written about the nineteenth-century West, a land where the federal government repeatedly intervened to correct mistakes, many of them its own and others made by its citizens, and bail out Western failure. Nowhere was this truer than in the
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