Riders of the Purple Sage celebrates the frontier experience and mourns it’s passing. As the story opens a wealthy woman rancher in Utah disobeys her church’s elders and begins to lose her stock and workers. Help arrives in the person of Lassiter, a hired gunfighter who routs the persecutors and then reveals his own motivation for taking on the Mormon establishment. Grey used characters like Lassiter to show how powerful men could be, but also how they were able to be changed by women and develop deeper ties to the community without putting their masculinity at risk. At a time when America had lost the frontier, and the country’s ethnic mix was changing, Grey offered an ideal where all could meet as equals, judged only by their willingness to work.

CHAPTER I

LASSITER

A SHARP clip-clop of iron-shod hoofs deadened and died away, and clouds of yellow dust drifted from under the cottonwoods out over the sage.

Jane Withersteen gazed down the wide purple slope with dreamy and troubled eyes. A rider had just left her and it was his message that held her thoughtful and almost sad, awaiting the churchmen who were coming to resent and attack her right to befriend a Gentile.

She wondered if the unrest and strife that had lately come to the little village of Cottonwoods was to involve her. And then she sighed, remembering that her father had founded this remotest border settlement of southern Utah and that he had left it to her. She owned all the ground and many of the cottages. Withersteen House was hers, and the great ranch, with its thousands of cattle, and the swiftest horses of the sage. To her belonged Amber Spring, the water which gave verdure and beauty to the village and made living possible on that wild purple upland waste. She could not escape being involved by whatever befell Cottonwoods.

That year, 1871, had marked a change which had been gradually coming in the lives of the peace-loving Mormons of the border. Glaze - Stone Bridge - Sterling, villages to the north, had risen against the invasion of Gentile settlers and the forays of rustlers. There had been opposition to the one and fighting with the other. And now Cottonwoods had begun to wake and bestir itself and grow hard.

Jane prayed that the tranquillity and sweetness of her life would not be permanently disrupted. She meant to do so much more for her people than she had done. She wanted the sleepy quiet pastoral days to last always. Trouble between the Mormons and the Gentiles of the community would make her unhappy. She was Mormon-born, and she was a friend to poor and unfortunate Gentiles. She wished only to go on doing good and being happy. And she thought of what that great ranch meant to her. She loved it all - the grove of cotton-woods, the old stone house, the amber-tinted water, and the droves of shaggy, dusty horses and mustangs, the sleek, clean-limbed, blooded racers, and the browsing herds of cattle and the lean, sun-browned riders of the sage.

While she waited there she forgot the prospect of untoward change. The bray of a lazy burro broke the afternoon quiet, and it was comfortingly suggestive of the drowsy farmyard, and the open corrals, and the green alfalfa fields. Her clear sight intensified the purple sage-slope as it rolled before her. Low swells of prairie-like ground sloped up to the west. Dark, lonely cedar-trees, few and far between, stood out strikingly, and at long distances ruins of red rocks. Farther on, up the gradual slope, rose a broken wall, a huge monument, looming dark purple and stretching its solitary, mystic way, a wavering line that faded in the north. Here to the westward was the light and color and beauty. Northward the slope descended to a dim line of cañons from which rose an up-flinging of the earth, not mountainous, but a vast heave of purple uplands, with ribbed and fan-shaped walls, castle-crowned cliffs, and gray escarpments. Over it all crept the lengthening, waning afternoon shadows.

 

Born in 1875, Pearl Zane Grey was raised in Zanesville, Ohio, a town founded by his mother’s family, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1896. His father was a dentist in Ohio, and Grey followed him in that profession, but in New York City. His passion for the American West was aroused in 1907 when Grey had an opportunity to tour the West with Buffalo Jones, a longtime hunter and adventurer. Under Jones’ guidance Grey traveled through the desert, chased wild horses and hunted cougars. His journals of the time were filled with glowing passages about the beauty of the land.

With the publication of Riders of the Purple Sage Grey found his audience and went on to publish a total of 85 books. In 1937, now a wealthy writer with homes in California, Arizona and Tahiti, he suffered a stroke while fishing for steelhead on the Rogue River in Oregon. He recuperated sufficiently to go on a fishing expedition to Australia but suffered a heart attack and died on October 23, 1939 at his home in Altadena, California.

 

 

Riders of the Purple Sage (World Digital Library Edition) by Zane Grey
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