Zane Grey Read Free

story—Grey is far more prolix in his clues, as in the passage above, which paraphrases, in one of several such moments, the novel’s last line; rather, it is the suspense of wondering what the larger stakes of the plot are. The knowledge of what is at stake is imbued in Grey’s landscape: it may be just wind on stone, but something like God seems to be there. It is not a God Grey identifies, but we know it’s not meant to be the Mormon one. It is older than America, and Grey’s protagonists sense its presence as if it will become a final revelation.
    In the same year that Mormonism officially gave up polygamy so that Utah could join the Union, the U.S. Census declared that the frontier line of settlement no longer could be said to exist: the consolidation of the American West was nearly complete. The larger significance of the battle for Jane Withersteen’s freedom is suggested when Lassiter tries to make her see what is at stake in her fate. Jane insists, “I’m an absolutely free woman,” to which Lassiter somewhat triumphantly replies, repeating national arguments about Mormon women’s “slavery,” “You ain’t absolutely anythin’ of the kind.” In a passage that seems to blur distinctions between Lassiter’s and Mormonism’s omniscience and even between Mormon and American imperial designs, Lassiter explains:
    Jane, you’re watched. There’s no single move of yours, except when you’re hid in your house, that ain’t seen by sharp eyes. . . . When you rode, which wasn’t often lately, the sage was full of sneakin’ men. At night they crawl under your windows, into the court, an’ I reckon into the house. . . . This here grove’s a hummin’ bee-hive of mysterious happenin’s. . . . This all means, Jane, that you’re a marked woman. . . . Jane, you’re to lose the cattle that’s left—your home an’ ranch—an’ Amber Spring. . . . I told you once before about that strange power I’ve got to feel things.
    While Lassiter’s “strange power” imitates the Mormons’ own, he intuits what the Mormons cannot: how the plot will make him a hero. Jane responds, “What does it mean? . . . I am my father’s daughter—a Mormon, yet I can’t see! I’ve not failed in religion—in duty. . . . When my father died I was rich. . . . What am I, what are my possessions to set in motion such intensity of secret oppression?” Lassiter responds succinctly, “Jane, the mind behind it all is an empire builder.” He adds, “They tried you out, an’ failed of persuasion, an’ finally of threats. You meet now the cold steel of a will as far from Christlike as the universe is wide. You’re to be broken. Your body’s to be held, given to some man, made, if possible, to bring children into the world. But your soul? . . . What do they care for your soul?” The “mind” that is “an empire builder” is here left unspecified. This lack of specificity curiously opens up Lassiter’s pronouncements to a meaning quite opposite his own, for if Jane is read to represent Mormonism and its possessions, the mind that is an empire builder with a will of cold steel could stand for the federal government and its policies toward the Mormons in the latter half of the nineteenth century, before the Mormon church was “broken” into giving up polygamy, the “soul” of the Mormon religion.
    The sense of paranoia that Lassiter seeks to instill in Jane was one with which Mormons were familiar during the period of government investigations beginning in the 1880s and continuing episodically to Grey’s time. In the sequel to
Riders,
Grey includes an awareness of the investigations. Minister Shefford asks Presbrey why he says the Mormons close to the Utah line are “unfriendly these days,” and Presbrey responds,