Zane Grey was born in Ohio and went to college on a baseball scholarship. He graduated with a degree in dentistry and set up a practice in New York City. He wrote a novel in his spare time, self-published it with his wife’s encouragement, and soon quit dentistry to write more novels. He is said to have been America’s first millionaire writer. My copy of Riders was published in 2002 and claims to be “unabridged and unaltered” from the original 1912 edition published by Harper and Brothers. I like the old style cowboy on this cover, but for some reason it reminds me that I’ve always found a mismatch between the book’s title and its narrative. The title makes me think of a largish group of cowboys, doing whatever groups of cowboys do. As it turns out the novel focuses more on individual challenges, both physical and moral.
I was about twelve or thirteen when I first found Riders in the Carnegie Library in Ogden, Utah. I had very recently started coming upstairs to the adult section of the library. I remember being very nervous up there, especially the first time I went to check out. I still had my child’s library card and I couldn’t quite believe it was actually going to work. Then, as I handed over the two books I’d chosen, the librarian asked me why I wasn’t looking for books downstairs. I told her the truth, which was that I couldn’t find anything else interesting down there. That seemed to be a satisfactory answer; she calmly accepted my card and I never went downstairs again. On a subsequent visit she even let me check out a Simon Templar novel, though not without a small frown of disapproval and a comment to the effect that it might not be suitable for someone my age.
She had no such disapproval for Zane Grey. The library had a dozen or more Grey books, all in lovely matching hardbound editions. I must have read seven or eight of them during that period. Most of them weren’t very memorable. For quite a few years thereafter my sense of Zane Grey was that even though his books were in the adult section of the library, there was something unsophisticated about them; they weren’t children’s books, but they had an outmoded innocence that had little relevance to the modern world. But I did remember a few scenes from Riders. When I saw a copy in a used book store forty years later, I picked it up.
Upon rereading, I soon saw that the worldview of the novel was indeed far away from how we were thinking in the early sixties when I was twelve or in the early years of the 21st century when I was fifty-something. But the difference wasn’t amusing, it was sad. In the novel nature was real and powerful. The extremes of weather, the open spaces, and the shape of the plains and hills were all important; and the ways in which people responded to them defined those people in a very basic way. Morality was also very real to Grey’s heroes and heroines; they really, really cared about what was good. Nowadays we go on and on about the weather and some of us claim to revere nature, but neither has much effect on us really; we only measure ourselves against nature on our days off. We also think we care about morality, but we are awfully flexible really. It is almost as if the whole of the century that has passed since 1912 has seen a process of caring less and less about such things. I don’t say that people in 1912 behaved or thought exactly like Zane Grey characters, but they must have understood and valued them, at least enough to make their creator a millionaire. These days Zane Grey stories are pretty funny all right, but it’s our loss.
And of course Riders is hopelessly romantic, as I believe we are all meant to be. Be that as it may, the ending of the novel describes exactly what I have longed for all my life: to be far away from the grubbing and grasping, the crowing and the whining and the cant–to be far away from all that, but not to be alone.