The Cowboy Legend : Owen Wister's Virginian and the Canadian-American Ranching Frontier
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The cowboy, as perhaps no other figure, has captured the imagination of North Americans for over a century. Before Owen Wister's publication of The Virginian in 1902, the image of the cowboy was essentially that of the dime novel - a rough, violent, one-dimensional drifter, or the stage cowboy variety found in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show. Wister's novel was to transform, almost overnight, this image of the cowboy. Soon after its publication, Wister sent a copy, inscribed "To the hero from the author," to Everett Johnson, a cowboy from Virginia who had been a friend of Wister's in Wyoming in the 1880s. Johnson had migrated to Alberta by the 1890s, eventually settling in the Calgary area. Before his death in 1946, his daughter-in-law, Jean Johnson, transcribed Everett's stories of the old west and collected them into a manuscript, now on deposit in the Glenbow Archives.In The Cowboy Legend, John Jennings, building on Jean Johnson's work, details the evidence that Everett Johnson was the initial and prime inspiration for Wister's cowboy, and in the process shows that Johnson led a fascinating life in his own right. His memories of both the Wyoming and Alberta cattle frontiers provide insight into ranch life on both sides of the border, and the compelling parallel biographies of Johnson and Wister feature vignettes of legendary period figures such as Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, and Butch Cassidy, not to mention the best man at Johnson's wedding, Henry Longabaugh, a.k.a. the Sundance Kid. With an impressive range of scholarship and archival research, Jennings melds this realistic study of the cowboy frontier with an intriguing account of Wister's subsequent creation of the cowboy mystique, aided by two close friends and perhaps somewhat unexpected collaborators, Frederic Remington and Theodore Roosevelt. As compulsively readable as it is informative, this unique contribution to western history and literature will be welcomed by fans and scholars alike.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".