The Buffalo Runners: A Tale of the Red River Plains

R. M. Ballantyne

R.M. Ballantyne (born Robert Michael Ballantyne) was a Scottish author of popular children’s fiction and wrote more than 100 books. He was also a popular artist with his water-colours exhibited at the Royal Scottish academy.

Ballantyne was born on 24 April 1825 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and was the ninth of ten children. His father, Alexander Thomson Ballantyne, was a newspaper editor and printer for family firm, Ballantyne and Co. His uncle, James Ballantyne, was also very literary and worked as the printer for Sir Walter Scott, the Scottish playwright, novelist and poet. In 1825 a banking crisis led to the collapse of the Ballantyne printing business with debts of approximately £130,000, leading to the decline of the family fortune.

At age sixteen, Ballantyne left the family home and migrated to Canada where he spent five years working for Hudson’s Bay Company. He traded with the Native Americans for furs and frequently sleighed or canoed to the territories that are now known as Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec. These journeys influenced his later novel Snowflakes and Sunbeams (1856). During this time he missed home and frequently wrote to his mother. He later stated that this letter writing helped developed his literary skills.

In 1847, Ballantyne returned home to discover that his father had died. He published his first book, Hudson’s Bay: or, Life in the Wilds of North America, in 1848. During this time he was employed by the publishing company, Messrs Constable, but gave this up in 1856 to focus on his own literary career. During his lifetime he wrote over a hundred books in regular and rapid succession. His titles include: The Young Fur Traders (1856), The Dog Crusoe (1860), Fighting the Whales (1866), The Pirate City (1874) and The Settler and the Savage (1877). His writing drew on his personal knowledge of all the scenes he described and his heroes were moral and resilient. His most popular novel was The Coral Island (1857). However, in this novel he made one small mistake when he incorrectly described the thickness of coconut shells. This small mistake led Ballantyne to gain first-hand knowledge of all the subject matters he wrote about from then onwards. He spent time living with lighthouse keepers at Bell Rock whilst writing The Lighthouse (1865) and spent time in Cornwall with tin miners when he was writing Deep Down (1868).

During this period of his life, Ballantyne met Jane Grant, whom he married in 1866. Together they had three sons and three daughters. Ballantyne spent much of his later years living in Harrow, England. He later moved to Italy for the sake of his health. He was possibly suffaering from undiagnosed Mélière’s disease, which affects the inner ear which and can result in feelings of vertigo, tinnitus, hearing loss and a fullness in the ear. He died in Rome on 8 February 1894.

Ballantyne is a remembered and cherished author. A Greater London Council plaque commemorates him at Duneaves on Mount Park Road in Harrow, England. Ballantyne was also a favourite of the author Robert Louis Stevenson, who was so impressed by The Coral Island that he based portions of his own adventure novel, Treasure Island (1881), on Ballantyne’s themes. Stevenson honoured Ballantyne in the introduction to Treasure Island with the poem To the Hesitating Purchaser.

The History of Western Fiction

Western fiction is a genre which focuses on life in the American Old West. It was popularised through novels, films, magazines, radio, and television and included many staple characters, such as the cowboy, the gunslinger, the outlaw, the lawman and the damsel in distress. The genre’s popularity peaked in the early twentieth century due to dime novels and Hollywood adaptations of Western tales, such as The Virginian, The Great Moon Rider and The Great K.A. Train Robbery. Western novels remained popular through the 1960s, however readership began to dwindle during the 1970s.

The term the American Old West (the Wild West) usually refers to the land west of the Mississippi River and the Frontier between the settled and civilised and the open, lawless lands that resulted as the United States expanded to the Pacific Ocean. This area was largely unknown and little populated until the period between the 1860s and the 1890s when, after the American Civil War, settlement and the frontier moved west.

The Western novel was a relatively new genre which developed from the adventure and exploration novels that had appeared before it. Two predecessors of popular Western fiction writers were Meriweather Lewis (1774-1809) and William Clarke (1770-1838). Both men were explorers and were the first to make travel and the frontier a central theme of their work. Perhaps the most popular predecessor of Western fiction was James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851). His west was idealised and romantic and his popular Leatherstockings series depicted the fight between the citizens of the frontier and the harsh wilderness that surrounded them. His titles included: The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841). His tales were often set on the American frontier, then in the Appalachian Mountains and in the land to the west of that. His protagonists lived off the land, were loyal, free, skilled with weapons, and avoided civilised society as best they could. His most famous novel, The Last of the Mohicans, also idealised the Native American.

During the 1860s and 1870s, a new generation of Western writers appeared, such as Mark Twain (1835-1910) Roughing It (1872) and Bret Harte (1836-1902) The Luck of Roaring Camp (1868). Both writers had spent time living in the west and continued to promote its appeal through their literature. Harte is often credited with developing many of the cult Western’s stock characters, such as the honest and beautiful dance hall girl, the suave conman and the honourable outlaw. These characters went on to be firm favourites in popular, mass produced Western fiction. At the end of the nineteenth century, thousands of people were undergoing the treacherous journey to the west to make a new life for themselves and the fictional stories and legends of heroes and villains who had survived in this wild landscape captured the imagination of the public.

Western novels became popular in England and throughout America through ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ and Dime Novels. These appeared in the late 1800s and were texts that could be bought cheaply (for either a penny or a dime – ten cents) as they were often cheaply printed on a large scale by publishers such as Irwin P. Beadle. Malaeska; the Indian Wife of the White Hunter (1860) by Ann S Stephens (1810-1886) is considered by many critics to be the first dime novel. These sensationalist dime and penny novels capitalised on stories of outlaws, lawmen, cowboys, and mountain men taming the western frontier. Many were fictional, but some were based on real heroes of the west such as Buffalo Bill (the scout, bison hunter and performer), Jesse James (the American outlaw, robber, gang leader and murderer) and Billy the Kid (the American gunfighter). By 1877, these Western characters were a recurring feature of the dime novel. The hero was often a man of action who saved damsels in distress and righted the wrongs of the villains that he faced. For this hero, honour was the most important thing and it was something that the dime heroes never relinquished.

In the 1900s, Pulp magazines helped relay these tales over to Europe where non-Americans also picked up the genre, such as the German writer, Karl May (1842-1912). Pulp magazines were a descendent of the dime novel and their content was largely aimed at a mass market. As their popularity grew, they were able to specialise and there were Pulp magazines devoted specifically to Westerns, such as Cowboy Stories, Ranch Romances, and Star Western. The popularity for these magazines and for Western films in the 1920s made the genre a popular phenomenon.

The status of the genre in the early twentieth century was also enhanced by particular novels by different writers. One of the most influential Western novels was The Virginians (1902) by Owen Wister (1860-1938) which was considered to be a ground breaking literary Western. Wister dismissed the traditional idea of the solitary pioneer conquering new lands and making a new life for himself, and replaced this traditional character with the cowboy. The cowboy was a mix of cultural ideals, such as southern chivalry, western primitivism and stout independence. These were characteristics that many Americans cherished. Wister contrasted the lawlessness of the West to the order and civilisation of the East. He introduced new characters, such as savages and bandits who attacked the more civilised Eastern characters. His cowboy heroes shared many features with the medieval knights – they rode horses, carried weapons, fought duals and valued their honour above all other attributes. Zane Grey’s (1872-1939) Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) was also a popular Western novel. Grey was a prolific writer and wrote over ninety books which helped shape Western fiction. He changed Wister’s cowboy into a gunslinger who was feared by criminals and held in awe by other civilians. Other popular Western writers in this period include Andy Adams (1859-1935) whose titles include The Outlet (1905) and A Texas Matchmaker (1904), Edward S Ellis (1840-1916) who wrote Seth Jones, or The Captives of the Frontier (1860) and The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868), and Bertha Muzzy Bower (1871-1940) who wrote Chip of the Flying U (1906) and The Dry Ridge Gang (1935).

The Western hero lived in an environment where climate, natives and the terrain could be his enemies, and it was his job to tame the wilderness around him, but in doing so he determined his own extinction. In bringing forward civilisation and settlement, they brought about their own demise and their reason for existing. Western heroes could only exist on the frontier. Rebels were popular heroes in the Western novel and these heroes were often compassionate to those less fortunate than themselves and fought for the downtrodden. They were loyal, idealistic, independent, and knew the difference between right and wrong. They fought for the good and made personal sacrifices in order that good would triumph. The hostile setting of the Wild West transformed the characters into survivors as they were forced to alter themselves in order to live in this new setting. The Old Wild West captured the attention of many as it exemplified the spirit of freedom, individualism, adventure and unspoiled nature. It depicted a world that was separate from organised, urban society and showed the life of the wilderness, frontier and its inhabitants. The Western romanticised American history and the treacherous, mysterious and otherworldly Old West.

Chapter One.