SOURCE: “The Cowboy in the Dime Novel,” in Studies in English, Vol. XXX, 1951, pp. 219-34.

In the following essay, French traces the role of the cowboy character in the dime novel, revealing the character's emerging importance in the works of four novelists.

Sentimentalists are poor prophets. In his nostalgic tribute to the old dime novel, Charles Harvey wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 1907:

More than a quarter of a century ago … the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe ended the days of the old trail and its story tellers. Between the railroads which transported the cattle from the ranges to the stockyards, and the barbed wire fences of the settlers who are abolishing the ranges, the cowboy as a picturesque feature of the Western landscape has passed out, and the dime novel will know him no more.¹

Harvey was wrong; it was the dime novel, not the cowboy, which...