Zane Grey Read Free Page A

“They are being persecuted by the government.” Just as Lassiter asserts that “at night they crawl under your windows, into the court, an’ I reckon into the house,” nothing was considered off limits when it came to searches by government agents for signs of polygamous living; even bedding was inspected. Whether Mormon or Gentile makes designs, or whether Mormon or Gentile is paranoid, there is a similar sense of looming threat. The distinction between Mormon Empire and American Empire is perhaps the one significant distinction left implicit and unnamed in Grey’s novel, and yet that distinction, historically, is what had made all the difference in the abandonment of polygamy and the gradual assimilation of Mormons when Grey wrote his novel.
    Although
Riders
is a novel whose deepest impulses are escapist, historical events and memory played a surprisingly large role in its creation and reception. This may not, after all, be so surprising: escapism implies an escape
from
something, and what this novel nostalgically depends upon to rescue its women and children from is the historical threat that the fall of Balancing Rock crushes at the novel’s close. The novel’s escapism is best understood as its elision of the historical distance between 1912, when the novel was published, and 1871, when it is set, and the transformation within Mormonism and in Mormon-American relations that had occurred in those four decades as the West became progressively American. Its escapism, in other words, lies in the fact that it does not figure (as the less popular sequel does) the transition to Mormon assimilation, but, with the dramatic ending, forecloses any sense of future historical development, with Lassiter, Jane, and Fay trapped in Surprise Valley and Elder Tull pinned underneath a massive rock. Jane’s escape, like the novel’s, is an escape from a Mormon past the novel simultaneously revives. Such nostalgia for a transitional moment in the West, before it was consolidated under federal control, is characteristic of many early-twentieth-century Westerns and suggests that readers of the genre longed for a landscape of dramatic moral contrasts during a rapidly changing and confusing era. In that cultural landscape, the individual male hero is thrown into relief and granted a freedom to do what federal pressure took forty years to do: free Mormon women from polygamy.
    Riders of the Purple Sage
seems as blind to its own mythmaking as Jane is blind to the Mormon conspiracy. Elsewhere the Mormon “invisible hand” is described as “a cold and calculating policy thought out long before [Jane] was born, a dark, immutable will of whose empire she and all that was hers was but an atom.” The description is particularly odd because the novel is set only forty-one years after the founding of the Mormon church; Jane would have been born only a few years later. That this policy was thought out “long before she was born” suggests a history and meaning that stretches beyond Mormonism, further back than 1830. Yet the soulless Mormon evil that looms so large cannot creep or crawl into Surprise Valley. Mormonism is not, in the end, nearly as powerful and Jane is not as heroic as the sacred landscape and the hero Lassiter, who is invulnerable and all-knowing and whose distinction with guns makes all the difference. Lassiter exclaims to Jane, “Since I was a boy I’ve never thanked God for anythin’. If there is a God—an’ I’ve come to believe it—I thank Him now for the years that made me Lassiter! . . . I can reach down an’ feel these big guns, an’ know what I can do with them.” The partial defeat of the Mormon master plan in southern Utah in 1871 is a victory not only for God and monogamy over fanatical Mormons in Grey’s novel, but for the consolidated nation that, by 1912, was already growing nostalgic for those distinctive cultural