The Covered Wagon (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

by Emerson Hough, Robert L. Dorman (Introduction)

Overview

The Covered Wagon tells the epic story of a wagon train on the Oregon Trail. First published in 1922, this historical novel offers something for everyone—action, intrigue, humor, and a classic love triangle. It is based on actual firsthand accounts of the grueling four-month overland journey, featuring cameos by famous frontiersmen Kit Carson and Jim Bridger. Both the novel and its film adaptation helped to make the wagon train an unforgettable icon of the Old West.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781411431249
Publisher:	Union Square & Co.
Publication date:	09/01/2009
Series:	Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Read
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	662 KB
Age Range:	3 Months to 18 Years

About the Author

Emerson Hough (1857–1923) wrote for such popular magazines such as Forest and Stream and the Saturday Evening Post. An 1894 article that he wrote led Congress to take action to preserve the dwindling bison herd at Yellowstone National Park. His first book on the West, The Story of the Cowboy (1897) won him the admiration and friendship of Theodore Roosevelt and Andy Adams. Hough went on to publish several best-selling novels over the course of his career, including The Mississippi Bubble (1902) and 54–40 or Fight (1909).

Read an Excerpt

Emerson Hough’s The Covered Wagon tells the epic story of a wagon train on the Oregon Trail. First published in 1922, this historical novel offers something for everyone—action, intrigue, humor, and a classic love triangle. It is based on actual firsthand accounts of the grueling four-month overland journey, featuring cameos by famous frontiersmen Kit Carson and Jim Bridger. In 1923, The Covered Wagon was adapted to the screen and became one of the great blockbusters of the silent-film era and was imitated by movie Westerns for decades to come. Both the novel and the film helped to make the wagon train an unforgettable icon of the Old West.

Emerson Hough (1857–1923) was a prolific author who wrote novels, histories, and articles for popular magazines such as Forest and Stream and the Saturday Evening Post. He was born in Newton, Iowa, and graduated from the University of Iowa in 1880. Trained in the law, he decided in 1883 to go west and try his luck in the remote town of White Oaks, New Mexico Territory. The rugged beauty and larger-than-life people that he found in the ranchlands of the Southwest enthralled Hough. An avid outdoorsman, he hunted and fished throughout the western states and became a nationally known advocate for conservation. An 1894 article that he wrote led Congress to take action to preserve the dwindling bison herd at Yellowstone National Park. His first book on the West, The Story of the Cowboy, was published in 1897, and it won him the admiration and friendship of Theodore Roosevelt, Andy Adams, and other prominent Western writers of the period. Hough went on to publish several best-selling novels over the course of his career, including The Mississippi Bubble (1902) and 54–40 or Fight (1909). In 1918, he wrote a history, The Passing of the Frontier, and this book later inspired him to begin work on a novel of the Oregon Trail that became The Covered Wagon. Although in ill health and near the end of his life when the novel was published in 1922, Hough died the following year at the height of his success, with another Western, North of 36, soon to become a best seller, and the hit movie version of The Covered Wagon playing in theaters.

As an experienced professional writer, Hough was well versed in what made a book appealing by the time that he conceived The Covered Wagon. It is, first of all, the story of a quest, a journey to a promised land. The Wingates and the other families of the wagon train are risking everything in their desire to move to Oregon. They must overcome the hardships and hazards of the journey, while Jesse Wingate, as captain of the train, must try to hold together all of the strong-willed personalities involved, including his own beautiful young daughter, Molly. To add a further level of drama to the daily problems of the trail, Hough places his heroine at the apex of a love triangle that ensnares the book’s hero, Will Banion, as well as its villain, Sam Woodhull. The triangle deepens the dangers faced by everyone on the wagon train, because the situation alienates Banion, their most knowledgeable and skillful leader. Hough, however, does not allow his characters to be long diverted from the basic issue of survival. The western landscape was for him another player in the drama—a principal one. “This was the Far West itself,” he writes, “a new and forbidding land. . . . The mightiness of its calm was a smiting thing.” Yet despite this awesome setting and the immediacy of the many action-filled episodes of the story, Hough constantly plays on the nostalgia of his readers by invoking the theme of the passing frontier. Before their departure, Jesse Wingate tells his reluctant wife (also named Molly) that “this country is too old, too long settled. . . . I want the buffalo. I crave to see the Plains. . . . What real American does not?” Those words were all the more poignant to an audience that had grown up in a more rural, small-town America, but by 1922 had lived through the sour aftermath of World War I and moved into a world of big cities, radio, and automobiles.

To recreate the past in a way that could be so evocative, Hough strove to be a meticulous researcher for all of his novels. Both The Covered Wagon and North of 36 include historical notes of the sources he consulted “to get the local descriptions, the color, atmosphere, ‘feel’ of a day and a country so long gone by,” as he put it. The combative Hough would have been gratified to see North of 36—and by extension, his depiction of the Old West—made the subject of a literary feud over his historical accuracy that has come to be known as the “Emerson Hough controversy.” It was started only months after his death by Stuart Henry, a New York-based writer whose review of the novel referred to Hough as a naïve tenderfoot, questioned his facts, and seemed to cast aspersions on the men and women of the cattle-drive days. A number of Hough’s colleagues among western writers leapt to his defense, most notably the novelist Eugene Manlove Rhodes and the historian Walter Prescott Webb. They shared with Hough the desire to elevate Western literature to greater respectability, and they hotly resented what they saw as the disdain of eastern critics more in tune with decadent European tastes than with mainstream values. Like Hough, Rhodes and Webb believed that the conquest of the West was the great national epic, the defining event in American history. Rejecting the sensationalism of pulp novelists, they looked to fellow westerners as the only ones capable of conveying the essential truths of the frontier experience. Yet in the end they had no real answers to Henry’s contention that Hough had at times exaggerated in North of 36 for dramatic effect.

Critics had in fact been saying something similar about Hough’s work throughout his career—the occupational hazard of the historical novelist. Surprisingly, in spite of such objections to his methods, The Covered Wagon is accurate in many of the particulars of the Oregon Trail experience, according to recent research. More than a quarter million Americans made the journey to Oregon or California between 1840 and 1860. As Hough shows, most of the emigrants in the 1840s traveled in large wagon trains, many of them departing from Independence, Missouri. The trains often took on a military-style organization, with an elected captain, lieutenants, and other ranks in charge of different segments. Frequently there was friction among the different factions of families and neighbors that made up the trains, with splits and defections very common. Most men walked alongside their teams of oxen (as Hough notes, the preferred draft animal) rather than riding horses; women and children rode in the wagons or walked themselves. The journey offered many hardships:  river fordings, dust, disease, bad weather, wagon breakdowns, and the threat of Indian attacks. On this last point Hough took perhaps the greatest license in The Covered Wagon:  most altercations between native tribes and emigrants occurred in isolated incidents rather than massive pitched battles. Native American warriors generally knew better than to attack after the wagons were circled. This threat, in any case, was worse in the 1850s and 1860s, when the tribes realized the extent of the invasion, than in the period chronicled in The Covered Wagon. 

Wagon trains were family affairs, which meant that women shared the rough journey with men. Hough has sometimes been taken to task by critics for the element of romance in his plots and his stereotypical female characters. But considering his body of work as a whole, his depiction of women was somewhat more complex than he is usually given credit for. It is true that Hough could sound quite Victorian in his attitudes regarding sex roles. As he wrote in his autobiography, Getting a Wrong Start, it was a man’s “duty, his business in the world, to care for a woman, to be strong, to fight her fights, to shelter her weaknesses and to have none of his own.” He referred to his own wife as a “girl” and a “child.”1 Certainly these attitudes manifest themselves in Hough’s novels, yet in the pre-Civil War setting of The Covered Wagon, his old-fashioned values were fairly accurate. Married women at the time of the Oregon Trail were entirely dependent on their husbands in a legal sense. They could not vote, hold public office, serve on juries, or own separate property. The daughters of midwestern farm families (from whom many of the overlanders were drawn) were raised to no higher aspirations than marriage, childbearing, cooking, and housework, which was onerous work indeed in the days before electricity. “My mother was a slave,” Hough acknowledged in his autobiography. “That is the right word for the woman of the small community and small means in those days.” Familiarity and security were much more likely to be decisive in choosing mates than love or romance—here Hough did pander to modern mores in his books. But by the time that he wrote The Covered Wagon, Hough had come to see pioneer women and what they had to endure in heroic terms. As he wrote in The Passing of the Frontier, “The chief figure of the American West, figure of the ages . . . [was] the gaunt and sad-faced woman, following her lord where he might lead. . . . That was America, my brethren! There was the seed of America’s wealth.”2 Men might break paths through the wilderness, but women—like the elder Molly Wingate—made families, homes, and communities. Faint traces of the twentieth century’s “New Woman” (who gained the right to vote in 1920) did appear in Hough’s last major novels. Taisie Lockhart, his cattle-driving heroine in North of 36, owns a ranch, rides a horse, and wears men’s clothing throughout the story, though she also does her share of pining, fainting, and weeping. 

Men and masculinity necessarily took center stage in most of Hough’s books. Heroes like The Covered Wagon’s Will Banion embodied the so-called code of the West, which Hough believed that he had experienced while living in the “half mining camp, half cow camp” of White Oaks, New Mexico. “I loved the creed which actually governed the standards of life in that country,” he recalled in his autobiography.3 The code stood for self-reliance, independence, honor, “personal courage,” and a strong devotion to “fair play,” Hough wrote in The Passing of the Frontier. Self-reliance meant that every man had a duty to provide for and protect his household, but fair play involved larger obligations to the community, to serve justice and fight corruption. Hough and other students of western history, such as the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, thought that these values were fostered directly by life in the frontier environment. “Here in the mid-continent, at the mid-century,” Hough observed of the Oregon Trail, “the frontier and the ways of the frontier were writing their imprint on the human product of our land. . . . America and the American were conceiving.” But just as frontier freedom and opportunity could engender virtues essential to democracy, according to this worldview, so also could they degenerate into the lawlessness that was unfortunately typical of the West. “There were men rough, coarse, brutal, murderous,” Hough noted in The Passing of the Frontier—“the individual reverted to worse than savagery.”4 Against such individuals, men of honor and conscience took it upon themselves to uphold law and order, and therein lay much of the drama of frontier myth and history. 

After the 1890s, Hough and many of his contemporaries worried about what would become of the national character now that the frontier was gone and the West fully settled. By 1920, for the first time in the country’s history, more Americans lived in towns and cities than on farms. Hough personified both the noble and positive as well as the uglier and less savory reactions to these trends. Like many Americans, he embraced physical fitness and outdoor sports, especially hunting and fishing, as ways to continue fortifying the body and spirit. Hough’s promotion of conservation to a popular audience was tied his love of  “my wide, wide, beautiful world of the out-of-doors,” as he described it in his autobiography.5 In pointedly titled articles such as “The Wasteful West” and “The Slaughter of the Trees,” Hough laid the blame for the squandering of the nation’s resources on frontier-bred greed and rampant individualism. “America has from the beginning been a land not only of plenty but of waste, of utter, awesome waste in all things,” he noted starkly. Now a time of reckoning had come. “We wiped the West off the earth, if not off the maps, long ago. . . . Continually we make war upon the wilderness, its people, its creatures; yet, having done so, we covet again the wilderness, yearn for it. . . .”6 Conservation laws and policies such as those enacted by Theodore Roosevelt were a means to restrain individual recklessness in the pursuit of wealth, Hough reasoned. These measures signified a responsibility to the greater good of society and a duty to later generations, so that America’s natural abundance might be passed on and wilderness experience might still be available in decades to come. These aspects of the frontier that had made America exceptional among nations could be perpetuated through conservation. The alternative, Hough warned, was “to show the world that the American republic is a failure; that its men and methods are corrupt; that its people are cowards at heart, unready, covetous, weak.”7 The groundswell of popular support that conservation enjoyed during the years after 1900, fostered in part by Hough’s advocacy for wildlife and forests, reveals the extent to which such post-frontier arguments were heeded by a public concerned over the country’s future.

These anxieties also found expression in another early twentieth-century movement to save the “real” America:  immigration restriction. Hough was very much a man of his time in his embrace of these sentiments, which manifested themselves subtly and not so subtly in his writings. From the 1890s through the 1910s, there were record numbers of immigrants entering the country, many of them from eastern and southern Europe, and most settling in the larger cities. Older-stock Americans saw these groups as alien “races” who threatened national unity and institutions as well as the purity of the white, Anglo-Saxon bloodline. Their arguments, although more explicitly racial, are remarkably similar to demands in our own time to use “English only” and “secure the borders.” Hough was especially susceptible to such fears, known as nativism, because he envisioned American history in racial terms. To him, the frontier was a phase in a vast folk movement that for millennia had been engaged in “occupying the unoccupied world,” as he wrote in The Way to the West. “Aryan, Cymri, Goth, Vandal, Westerner—they are all one.” The “half-savage Saxon folk” bound for Oregon in The Covered Wagon were one more chapter in this grand racial epic.  Thus, in The Passing of the Frontier, Hough could only reject the term “melting-pot” as an “odious appellation,” a dreaded trend by which the blood of the “old home-bred frontiersmen” was being “diluted . . . by far less worthy strains.”8 The First World War greatly exacerbated these prejudices of Hough and many other self-proclaimed “100-percent Americans.” During the war he became involved with a vigilante organization known as the American Protective League (APL), dedicated to apprehending “dangerous aliens” and any other “disloyal Americans.” As Hough wrote in the APL’s official history, The Web, “It is only with a grave heart that any real American can face the census map today,” with different colors illustrating the spread of the “foreign-born” population and the “steadily lessening” areas of the native-born. “We soberly must conclude that America is not America.”9 It is small wonder that The Covered Wagon’s readers (or viewers of director James Cruze’s film version) could thrill to scenes of the “Saxon folk” besieged in a race war on the Oregon Trail.

Many others, including Theodore Roosevelt, made statements as objectionable to modern ears as Hough’s, or worse. By 1922, when he published The Covered Wagon, some of the wartime fervor had died down. Hough was seriously ill and sometimes bedridden, which must have been difficult for a man who had long seen himself as virile and active. Twenty years earlier, in The Way to the West, he had written, “Changed unspeakably and utterly, the old West lies in ruins.” It remained his hope to restore it, “in recollection, in imagination at least, if it be within the skill of art or literature to do so.”10 The Covered Wagon was Hough’s attempt to portray the West as he wanted it to be remembered.

Robert L. Dorman, Ph.D., is Monographs Librarian and assistant professor at Oklahoma City University. He is the author of Revolt of the Provinces:  The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920–1945.

            1. Emerson Hough, Getting a Wrong Start: A Truthful Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 228, 169, 15.

            2. Emerson Hough, The Passing of the Frontier: A Chronicle of the Old West (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1918), 93.

            3. Hough, Getting a Wrong Start, 40, 62.

            4. Hough, Passing of the Frontier, 75, 91, 82.

            5. Hough, Getting a Wrong Start, 209.

            6. Emerson Hough, “The Wasteful West,” in Let Us Go Afield (New York: D. Appleton, 1916), 122, 145.

            7. Emerson Hough, “The Slaughter of the Trees,” Everybody’s Magazine 18, no. 5 (May 1908): 592.

            8. Emerson Hough, The Way to the West (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1903), 36, 3, 173.

            9. Emerson Hough, The Web (Chicago: Reilly & Lee, 1919), 28, 59, 458.

            10. Hough, Way to the West, 380.