All About Cowboy Action Shooting

Beretta USA, in cooperation with Stoeger Publishing will offer select chapters from this quintessential book as a way to introduce you to the colorful and exciting world of Cowboy Action Shooting.

When Owen Wister's novel, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains, was published in 1902, the author described the Wyoming of his book as a "vanished world" and his hero as one of the "last romantic figures" America would produce. The frontier had been pronounced closed, perhaps prematurely, by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1892, in a speech delivered in Chicago. Wister's work was to be the first verse of an endless eulogy for the American frontier. Now, a hundred years later, we are poised to renew a worldwide fascination with the epic story of America's West.

Owen Wister (1860-1938) Author of The Virginian

Wister, who agreed with Jackson that the frontier was a defining influence in the development of America's unique national character, chose this honest cowboy from Virginia as a model for his readers. He could nothave predicted the widespread success of his literary formula, nor the never-ending influence his work would continue to exert on the arts. As Wister biographer Darwin Payne put it:

"What the Virginian ultimately was create a nearly insatiable appetite in the American Public for cowboy heroes whose hearts were pure as gold, whose intentions for their women were beyond reproach and whose quiet courage made them feared by all." Far more than the Wild West shows, dime novels and magazine serials, Wister's book perpetuated public perception of the "cowboy" as heroic.

It still does. So classic a tale is The Virginian that the title role has been played on stage, screen and television by Dustin Farnam, William S. Hart, Kenneth Harlan, Gary Cooper, Joel McCrae and, most recently, Bill Pullman. The original, starring Gary Cooper in 1929, was the first feature-length Western with sound. After several remakes in the years that followed, The Virginian appeared as a teleplay by Larry Gross and produced and directed by Bill Pullman, who spoke the version truest to Wister, including the hero's best known and most misquoted line:

"When you call me that-smile."

Perhaps Owen Wister began the transition from Real West to Reel West, but the West of history and the West of myth was already synthesizing by the time he wrote The Virginian (his only bestseller).

It remained only for writers like Zane Grey, Stuart Lake and Luke Short, and artists like Russell, Remington and Wyeth to create more mythical images with which to document Western history. By the time moviemakers joined the writers, photographers and printers racing to record the West, it was almost too late for anything like an accurate portrayal. The frontier had been effectively fenced off into mere real estate and was completely populated by the advent of World War II. It was then fictionalized and romanticized on film. As the remaining true cowboys and cowgirls of the 19th century finally rode off into the sunset and sage, the Old West had lost its only remaining eyewitnesses. Histories turned into stories, stories grew into legends, and legends passed into the mistof mythology.

As the remaining true cowboys and cowgirls of the 19th century finally rode off into the sunset and sage, the Old West had lost its only remaining eyewitnesses. Histories turned into stories, stories grew into legends, and legends passed into the mist of mythology. Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery, released in 1903, is considered by most film historians to be the first western movie. The film's flickering ten minutes of mute, black and white images, while primitive by today's high tech standards, were nonetheless compelling enough to sound the death knell for the Wild West shows of Buffalo Bill and a hundred others. The camera took the Wild West to places where the Wild West Shows could never play. Close-up lenses conveyed audiences into scenes in a way that watching from the bleachers never could. Film captured forever the action and romance of every Frontier moment-to be shared with audiences around the world and watched again and again. Little wonder that the first film projectors were called Magic Lanterns.

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