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.

Giant by Edna Ferber

Bigger.  Biggest ranch.  Biggest steer.  Biggest houses.  Biggest hat.  Biggest state.  A mania for bigness.  What littleness did it hide?...

So the big men strode the streets, red of face, shirt-sleeved, determined.  Their kind had sprung from the Iowa farms, the barren New England fields, from Tennessee.  Their ancestors had found the land too big, too lonely, it had filled them with a nameless fear and a sense of apartness, so they set out to conquer it and the people whose land it was.  And these, too, they must overcome, and keep conquered, they were a constant menace, they kept surging back to it.  All right, let them work for us, let them work for a quarter a day till the work is done, then kick them back across the border where they belong.

Jordan "Bick" Benedict is in charge of Reata Ranch, one of the biggest cattle ranching operations in the entire state of Texas.  The ranch spans across millions and millions of acres, surrounding whole towns, and employing thousands, from the skilled vaqueros and ranch hands to the nameless Mexican laborers who live in dirt-poor shacks.  It's a big operation in the biggest state, and Bick's dreams are only to make it bigger and better.  Into this unique American landscape arrives his new Virginian bride, Leslie, for whom Texas is a strange and foreign country that seems intent on keeping her at arm's length.  She reads books, she walks the ranch--a strange concept to those who live there and traverse it on horses or automobiles--but she despairs that she'll ever truly be a "Texian."

Man, I needed a book like this right now.  I enjoyed the tricksy experimentalism of Bearheart and Event Factory, but you just kind of skate over the surface of books like those, which are sometimes nothing but surface.  I really needed a big, thorough realist book to help distract me from the isolation we're all dealing with at the moment.  Giant is a book like that, an exemplar of a certain kind of mid-century social realism with few tricks up its sleeve.  But like Texas, Giant's realism is a bigger, more heightened type, and it veers often to a satisfying, soapy melodrama, like an episode of Dallas.  This is a book, after all, with a character with the ridiculous name "Jett Rink"--the cantankerous drunken ranch hand who swears one day he'll be a millionaire, and then he'll get revenge on the Benedicts for the way he treated them.  (This is the James Dean role from the movie.)  It's also a book where Bick's imperious sister Luz is thrown and--spoiler alert--killed by a racehorse brought by Leslie from Virginia named My Mistake.  ("How terribly strange and terrible," Leslie thinks, "that it should have been My Mistake.")  It can be gloriously silly.

Leslie, Bick, and the other characters of the book never stop talking about Texas.  They talk about the Alamo, they talk about Santa Ana, they talk about Bowie, they talk about the Davis Mountains in the west and the Panhandle in the north and the Gulf of Mexico--somehow, Reata seems to touch all of these.  Ferber clearly is in love with the bigness and strangeness of Texas as Bick, but Leslie's appearance injects a much-needed cynical eye into the ranch: it's Leslie who insists on visiting the Mexican ranchers' shacks, despite Bick's injunction; it's Leslie who sticks her nose in the shady politics that Bick uses to keep the county commissioners on his side.  This is never clearer than when Leslie, visiting Bick's uncle in the "Western" division, discovers a migrant hiding in a shed, fresh from the Rio Grande.  Bick's uncle feeds the boy and lets him go, but Bick, he says, would have transported him back over the river himself.

Giant is a book that revels in some of our national myths at the same time that it punctures them.  Bick's operation relies not just on the spirit of Texas but the underpaid labor of thousands, and "that's the way it is in Texas" is not enough for Leslie, or for Ferber.  National myths, I guess, tend to cover up a lot of hard labor and suffering.  Ferber also does a great job of depicting a Texas on the verge of great change: oil has arrived to replace the ranchers, and it's the malicious Jett Rink, of course, who's in position to capitalize.  Can Bick survive a changing Texas?  Is the idea of Texas--static, bigger than life--a lie worth preserving?  Everything's bigger in Texas, but, as Leslie puts it, "what littleness does it hide?"