The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana
by Jess Nevins
The Young Wild West Adventures (1902-1915)
copyright © Jess Nevins 2022
The Young Wild West Adventures were created by Cornelius Shea and began with “Young Wild West, the Prince of the Saddle” (Wild West Weekly, Oct 24, 1902). Young Wild West went on to appear in 644 stories in Wild West Weekly from 1902-1915, one of the longest runs of any dime novel cowboy hero. Shea (1863-1920) wrote both science fiction and western stories for the dime novels.
Young Wild West is the “Prince of the Saddle” and the “Champion Deadshot of the West.” As a boy he was orphaned in Southern Kansas by the Comanche and was adopted by William West, a hunter passing by the site. West names the child “Young Wild West” because the boy is young and because the area he was found in is particularly wild and frontier-like. Young Wild West’s mission in life is to do good and to avenge his biological family's death, and he does both, wandering from the Missouri River to the mouth of the Rio Grande. He eventually settles down in Wyoming along with his horse Spitfire and his friends: Arietta Murdock, the ridin', shootin', blonde Wyomingan who is West’s love interest; Charlie Watson, a Cheyenne who was formerly a scout for the Government and an Indian fighter; Jim Dart, the quiet teetotaler; and Hop Wah and Wing Wah, West’s two Chinese servants. West is the best shootist, horseman, rider, scout, and roper in the West, capable of taking down a dozen bandits, rustlers, and owlhoots without much trouble. Early in his career West strikes it rich, and he buys the Buckhorn Ranch in Wyoming, which becomes his home. At the end of his career West takes on German enemies in a World War One atmosphere.
The Young Wild West stories are typical for their time. What modern readers will find most interesting about them is that they were written after the Western frontier was settled. Like Owen Wister’s The Virginian, the first Young Wild West story appeared after all of the territories except Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska, and Hawaii had been admitted to the United States as states. In 1902 the American frontier, the location of the Young Wild West stories, had been settled for a decade. The last major native insurrection, the Ghost Dance movement, had ended in 1891, the last major Indian War had taken place over a decade before, and all the native tribes had been relocated to reservations. The American frontier had essentially become white-owned territory which was safely available for Eastern settlers to build up.
This allowed the romanticization of the frontier and of the years in which it was settled to fully proceed. This romanticization had been a part of American literature since James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking stories (see: The Last of the Mohicans), but throughout the nineteenth century stories about the frontier had been written and published while the frontier was actively being settled and while disputes with the natives and with Mexico were a real possibility. During these decades stories about the frontier often had as their subtexts concerns about the future of the frontier and attempts to justify both American Manifest Destiny and the destruction of the native cultures of the frontier. But once all potential threats to white American conquest of the frontier were defeated, and the frontier itself was settled, the messages and subtexts of stories set on the frontier changed. Manifest Destiny no longer needed to be justified. Indians and Mexicans, no longer being active threats, could safely be portrayed as sidekicks to the hero (like the Cheyenne Charlie Watson) or easily defeated enemies. With dime novel publishers having acted years before to remove troubling reminders of class and labor discontent (see: The Deadwood Dick Adventures, The James Brothers Adventures), the dime novel cowboy figure became completely detached from the historical reality it was based on and became sentimentalized and romanticized.
Interestingly, Shea did not portray Hop Wah and Wing Wah in an entirely negative fashion. They are faithful to Young West, are generally friendly, and are good at fireworks and cards. But the two Chinese men are present in the story because the issue of Chinese immigration to America had been dealt with. White Americans had been displeased with Chinese immigration since its inception in the 1840s, and cultural and legal racism against the Chinese had grown throughout the century (see: The Yellow Peril). In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which had barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States for a decade. In 1902 the Act was made permanent and was expanded to prohibit the immigration of Chinese to the United States from Hawaii and the Philippines. White Americans were satisfied by this, and Hop Wah and Wing Wah did not appear to them as symbolic of a troubling flood of yellow faces which would overwhelm white America, but rather as comic figures who could easily be dismissed.
Recommended Edition
Print: Young Wild West’s Whirlwind Riders. Derby, CT: New International Library, 1965.
Online: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20617/20617-h/20617-h.htm