Cimarron by Edna Ferber

His past, before his coming to Wichita, was clouded with myths and surmises. Gossip said this; slander whispered that. Rumor, romantic, unsavory, fantastic, shifting and changing like clouds on a mountain peak, floated about the head of Yancey Cravat. They say he has Indian blood in him. They say he has an Indian wife somewhere, and a lot of papooses. Cherokee. They say he used to be known as "Cimarron" Cravat, hence his son's name, corrupted to Cim. They say his real name is Cimarron Seven, of the Choctaw Indian family of Sevens; he was raised in a tepee; a wickiup had been his bedroom, a blanket his robe. It was known he had been one of the early Boomers who followed the banner of the picturesque and splendidly mad David Payne in the first wild dash of that adventurer into Indian Territory. He had dwelt, others whispered, in that sinister strip, thirty-four miles wide and almost two hundred miles long, called No-Man's-Land as early as 1854, and, later, known as the Cimarron, a Spanish word meaning wild or unruly.

Yancey Cravat is a living, breathing avatar of the Wild West: fearless, adventurous, a crack shot with an enormous head like a buffalo. The five years he spends cooped up in Wichita are the worst of his life, but he stays to woo his wife Sabra, the scion of a well-to-do Kansas family. When the territory that's now Oklahoma is opened at last, Yancey is among those "boomers" who race across the border to drive a stake into their chosen lot; and though he's outwitted by a clever madam, he brings Sabra and their son Cimarron to the newly established town of Osage anyway. Sabra, for her part, is mortified by their new life, by the filth and want of Osage, and by the Indians lurking around. The Indians, in fact, are one of the greatest points of disagreement between Sabra and Yancey: she refuses to have anything to do with them, but he uses his newly formed newspaper--the Oklahoma Wigwam--to advocated for better treatment of the Osage, the Kaw, the Cherokee, and others.

Cimarron has the same skeleton as Ferber's Giant, cast back several decades in time. Yancey is like Texas rancher Bick Benedict; he has the West in his bone. Sabra is like Benedict's new wife Leslie, cast into a world that frightens her, one she doesn't understand, though Sabra bucks against Yancey's designs more than Leslie ever does.

With whom are we to sympathize? On one hand, we admire Yancey's high spirits and his advocacy for the Indians, and Sabra's race repulsion makes her an unpleasant character. But Yancey's adventurousness makes him a bad husband: when the "Cimarron Strip"--the Oklahoma panhandle--is opened up, Yancey insists on taking up his family and heading farther west. When Sabra refuse, he goes anyway, and is gone five years, while she stays at home running and growing the newspaper. Though Yancey returns, it's never for long; he's gone to Alaska, or to war in the Philippines, or in France. The spirit of the west begins to look a little selfish; it looks like recklessness and abandonment. Sabra, on the other hand, represents a kind of feminine and civilizing principle. She stewards the newspaper and helps birth Oklahoma's version of "society." Yancey's name is floated time and time again for governor, but it's no surprise that it's Sabra, actually, who becomes a congresswoman from the newly minted state. If Yancey represents the spirit of the west, it's people like Sabra who made sure that the West was more than a spirit.

Is Cimarron a subversive book? Yancey is so larger-than-life; it's hard not to see him as another bit of mythmaking about "How the West Was Won." Cimarron traffics in some embarrassing racial stereotypes: the shiftless Indian, the Jewish peddler. Don't get me started on the fawning "black Isaiah" who accompanies them from Wichita, and then suffers a death of grotesque cruelty at the hands of the Osage. Part of me wonders if the effect of a character like Yancey, who enters in the land run but scorns the government policies of theft and depredation that made it possible, serves mostly to assuage the guilt of "Boomers." But Yancey's cruelty and recklessness go far in puncturing those myths as well. In the end, Cimarron struck me as a more straightforwardly Western novel than Giant, but you can't say it doesn't have its complexities.