The Western adventure novel is one of the oldest genres in American fiction.

Robert Adams states that Lonesome Dove follows "in trails well worn by Zane Grey and Clarence E. Mulford;" one can also add the Westerns of Louis L'Amour to the long list of American Western novels.

The Western genre can in some ways be considered as having begun with James Fenimore Cooper's early-nineteenthcentury Leatherstocking novels, including The Last of the Mohicans (1826; see separate entry), The Deerslayer (1841), The Pioneers (1823), and The Pathfinder (1840; see separate entry), Cooper brought in some now-standard elements— Indians, descriptions of the landscape so different at that time from the postcolonial cityscapes of his readers; the white man who is nearly as adept in the ways of the land and the native peoples as they are themselves; the white women who urgently need rescuing. Indeed, Gus and Call are not unlike...