SOURCE: Smith, Henry Nash. “The Innocence and Wildness of Nature: Charles W. Webber and Others.” In Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, pp. 71‐80. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950.

In the following excerpt, Smith examines the interpretation of the American West by Charles Webber and other writers.

The Wild Western hunter and scout descended from [James Fenimore Cooper's character] Leatherstocking could reach full status as a literary hero only at the cost of losing contact with nature. …

Leatherstocking's own debt to nature was of course very great. “I have been a solitary man much of my time,” he exclaimed in his old age, “if he can be called solitary, who has lived for seventy years in the very bosom of natur', and where he could at any instant open his heart to God without having to strip it of the cares and wickednesses of the settlements. …”¹ The...