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His books have been of two principal kinds, novels of the West and the two volumes, Under the Big Top and Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything! that spring from the circus. The novels are The Cross-Cut, The White Desert, and The Last Frontier, in that order. Are they simply the usual “Westerns”? No. There is in The Cross-Cut that quality of humor, that enjoyment of a capital hoax, which first cut out from the stampeding herd of Western stories Owen Wister’s The Virginian. Almost everyone, recalling Mr. Wister’s novel, thinks of the opening scene in which the cowboys, like Little Buttercup in Mr. Gilbert’s “Pinafore,” “mixed those babies up.” That affair, so refreshingly different in its realism and sense of scandalous fun from the sentimental heroics of other Western tales, is easily recalled when most other incidents of The Virginian are forgotten. Similarly one recalls with fresh amusement the ruse whereby ’Arry ’Arkins got the Blue Poppy mine unwatered. Messrs. Fairchild and ’Arkins had very little capital; but by a convincing effect of drowning in the mine, the whole community was stirred to rescue the presumed corpse of ’Arkins; machinery that the two men could not have hired was set to work pumping, and by the time the hoax was revealed, the mine was dry.
The White Desert has nothing to do with sand and alkali but is a story of the bleak, white stretches of the Continental Divide, where the world is a world of precipices, blue-green ice, and snow-spray carried on the beating wings of never-resting gales. It is the tale of a lumber camp and of a highly dramatic, last ditch struggle. Mr. Cooper admits that the first chapters were from an experience of his own. On the Berthoud Pass, 11,300 feet high, his speedster broke down. Now safety speed on the roads thereabouts is possibly fifteen miles an hour. The grades sometimes run as high as eighteen and twenty per cent. With no windshield, no gears to aid his brakes, no goggles and a sprained steering gear, Mr. Cooper was towed on these mountain roads by a largely liquored gentleman in a truck at a speed of twenty-five miles an hour. Mr. Cooper was bald before this happened....
Essentially, The Cross-Cut and The White Desert are stories; The Last Frontier, with no sacrifice of story interest, can stake a claim of more importance. Like certain novels of Emerson Hough’s[82] and Hal G. Evarts’s, this is an accurate and alive presentation of American history in the guise of fiction. The period is 1867-68 when, as an aftermath of the Civil War, many impoverished families sought the unsettled frontier lands. The Kansas-Pacific Railway, a link between East and West, was under construction, its every mile contested by the Indians. It was the period when Buffalo Bill made his reputation as a buffalo hunter and Indian scout; when General Custer nearly wore himself out hunting Indians; when the Battle of Beecher’s Island aroused the nation. Buffalo Bill, Custer, and the building of the railroad are the true subjects of this fine romance which ends when the great stampede has failed. “The buffalo were gone. Likewise the feathered beings who had striven to use them as a bulwark and had failed—enfiladed by scouts, volleyed by cavalry, their bodies were strewn in the valley with the carcasses of the buffalo.” Within months Custer was to come back, and in triumph. The “golden-haired general” was to ride to the battle of Washita “at the head of the greatest army of troops ever sent against the red man.... There would be other frontiers—true. But they would be sectional things, not keystones, such as this had been.”
These novels, in their order, mark a growth in the writer’s stature; and Mr. Cooper, like others who show growth, has humility as well as ambition. The thing he has in mind to do, possibly in his next novel, is more difficult than anything he has done—an attempt to take a few contemporary lives and view them in the perspective that history affords. This, of course, is very hard to do. Certainly Sinclair Lewis did not do it in Main Street, and no amount of exact, faithful, realistic detail accomplishes it. It can only be done by simplifying one’s material so that a few humble people are seen as typifying human endeavor. But if the effort is successful, the result will mean as much in one century as in another, and the work will live.