The Lost Journals of Owen Wister

The faded pencil script spelled out rough poems, descriptions of sunsets and hangings, saloon scenes, cowboy tall tales, the wide-open prairie and the sharp retort of the gun. 

 From Owen Wister’s pen, the cowboy myth was born and became a true relic of Wyoming’s rich past. 

 The Pioneers of Outlaw Country. 

Cowboys, Lawmen and Outlaws… to the businessmen and women who all helped shape Wyoming. 

Here are their stories.

 Owen Wister, His Forgotten Words  

 Welcome to another episode of "Pioneers of Outlaw History," where we delve into fascinating stories from Wyoming’s past that often go unnoticed. I am your host, Jackie Dorothy, and today we are traveling back East to discover a treasure of Wyoming that had been hidden for over sixty-five years. Our story is best told by one who was there herself to watch the saga unfold.  

 Owen Wister’s daughter, Fanny, remembered her father playing the piano, singing the songs with gusto he had composed himself. She fondly recalled her childhood spent at the Butler Place in Pennsylvania with its white mantlepiece supported by Greek pillars and the lemon and citron trees lining the driveway. She played in the walled garden and would visit her father’s pet raccoon, Cindy, who lived in the open fireplace. 

 Twice, she had visited the Wyoming that had shaped her father’s famous novel, The Virginian, yet, he never shared with his children the reasons why the West meant so much to him – until, that is, a librarian brought her father’s legacy out of the shadows. 

 “Owen Wister never talked about the West to his family,” Fanny wrote in her book, Owen Wister, Out West. “I never heard him say a single word about the fifteen years spent mostly in hunting big game and collecting materials for his books. Perhaps it was because by the time we were old enough to hear about them, those years were long past. He had taken us to Jackson Hole to let us see for ourselves.

 In 1951, after my father had been dead thirteen years, a letter came to me from N. Orwin Rush, at that time director of the University of Wyoming Library at Laramie. Mr. Rush said that 1952 would be the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Virginian and that he hoped to collect for the library’s Owen Wister Room a copy of every edition of The Virginian ever published in any language. He also said that the library was going to celebrate the anniversary with a ceremony. Did we, he wondered, have any manuscripts that we would give to the Wister Room? Because we had always been told that my father destroyed his manuscripts as they were typed (and we had never seen a manuscript of his), we assumed that there were none. I replied to Mr. Rush that there was little we could do to add to the Wister Room.

 I then got another letter from Mr. Rush asking whether we would give to the Wister Room my father’s Western diaries. None of us had ever heard of them, and they were not in the files, as I told Mr. Rush. He wrote back, quoting from page 28 in my father’s book about Theodore Roosevelt. “.. Upon every Western expedition I had kept a full, faithful, realistic diary: details about pack horses, camps in the mountains, camps in the sage brush, nights in town, cards with cavalry officers…” Where are these diaries? Mr. Rush wanted to know. It seemed hopeless to try to find them, but I was determined to look. I rounded up my brothers, and we met at Longhouse. 

 My youngest brother said that he would start with our father’s desk, which had been in the second-story library that adjoined Owen Wister’s bedroom and that was his study during his life at Butler Place. 

 The very first drawer my brother opened contained the Wester Journals.

 The fifteen Journals had been in the drawer for sixty-five years. The cover of each is inscribed with my father’s signature and a date and the names of the places he visited. Inside, the tiny, faded pencil handwriting – almost illegible except for the first sentence of each – relates the Western adventures at the heart of Owen Wister’s work.

 We agreed that the University of Wyoming ought to have the Journals, and, through Mr. Rush, we asked only that a copy be made for us. The legislature of the state of Wyoming appropriated money for transcribing the Journals, and the University Library had it done. In the course of a year, transcripts of the Journals arrived separately but not in sequence.

 When I had read them all, I saw that combined with the letter they would tell the story of my father’s discovery of the frontier in his own words. In these records, Owen Wister avows his romantic love of the West. In them, he is seen not only observing and recording but also taking to his heart the region and the epoch. And so the vagabond men of the West – resourceful, young, and wild – became for Owen Wister part of the whole glorious scene, and from his pen the cowboy myth soared into the imagination of the country.”

 Today, the journals of Owen Wister and the desk where they had lay hidden for over 65 years are at the American Heritage Center in Laramie, preserved for future generations. His observations are a window into Wyoming’s past and are considered by many, more valuable than gold.

 Thank you for listening to Outlaws of Pioneer Country. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of this historic series. The stories of our pioneers were brought to you by Hot Springs County Pioneer Association.  

 This program has been made possible through a grant from Wyoming Humanities.

 This was a production of Legend Rock Media.