Riders of the Purple Sage (1912)

Very Good

Western published in 1912 set in 1871

This Western is set in Utah which is very much Mormon country and you very much get the impression that the author really didn’t like the Mormons. The principal character is Jane Withersteen who is a Mormon who has defied the church by not getting married and running her father’s ranch with 2 herds of cattle by herself. When she befriends a gentile, Venters, and adopts a gentile child she is targeted by the church who get her riders to quit, then run off one of her herds into the hands of cattle rustlers and take pot shots at a man named Lassiter who has come looking for a friend of Withersteen’s (who she buried some years ago). When Venters goes looking for the missing cattle and shoots a mysterious masked rider the plot thickens. I’m not widely read in the Western genre but this is held to be one of the genres seminal novels. The prose is somewhat overblown and everyone seems to speak in high emotion but the plot itself is a good Western trope, isolated farmhouse being besieged etc.. Withersteen is assisted by the gunslinger Lassiter, there is cattle rustling and lots of details of horses with several being important characters in their own right!

Overall – Entertaining early Western novel ( )

I would not normally be interested in westerns, but this was recommended to me based on my interest in religion. Far from being the stereotypical tale of vigilante justice in the dry and dusty American west, it is a subtle and intriguing book which excels in painting a vivid portrait of the landscape, which itself acts as an important character in the story. It is said that Grey's full opinion of Mormonism can not be divined without also reading the other works in which he treated the subject, but regardless, the book is fascinating in its juxtaposition of Christian imagery with a character, Lassiter, who seems completely removed from any Catholic or Protestant ideal of Christian morality. The important aspect of the novel is not whether Bishop Dyer, Elder Tull, and their ilk were right or wrong; it is the inner transformation that takes place within Lassiter, Jane, Venters, and Bess, particularly the women, as Bess discovers a new identity and Jane enters a metaphorical tomb, rolling the stone that will finalise her death to her old understanding of religion and her resurrection into some other kind of being. One of the great failings I see around me in society today is that when someone questions their own religion, whatever it might be, they often respond by rejecting religion outright, rather than rejecting only the tradition in which they were taught and open-mindedly questioning whether truth lies elsewhere. It is not clear on a first reading what Grey intends for his characters, or what he wants his reader to think, but he raises significant questions and provides fodder for deep philosophical thought. This is hardly a simple cowboy story. It earns its place alongside the greatest classics of world literature. ( )

I was looking to learn about action writing. There were some examples in climbing rocks and horse riding, but the logic of the novel fell apart for me and I stopped. ( )

We meet Lassiter and Jane Withersteen, Burn Vinters and, eventually, Elizabeth Ern.We discover Surprise Valley where Lassiter and Jane finally escape forever. It is a story of rustlers and Mormons. Never politically correct, Grey portrays the Mormons as evil and depraved oppressors of their women. Lassiter is the gunslinger who kills them. Withersteen is the devout Mormon woman whose indomitable spirit will not allow her to give herself to Tull, the Mormon leader. Her intransigence leads to a showdown in which she must lose all - except for the appearance of Lassiter, who saves her. Grey's beautiful descriptions of the the sage-covered land and the men of action who inhabit her are a joy to read. ( )

This book sold 1 million copies in 1912 at the height of an anti-Mormon fever.Today, it seems bigoted and bombastic. However, the descriptions of Southern Utah mesa country and feats of horsemanship are great. ( )