Jack Schaefer’s Shane is apparently regarded as a classic of the Western genre. published in 1949 (expanded from a serialized version published in 1946), the novel shows us a period of about six months through the eyes of Bob Starrett, an eleven-year-old boy on a homestead in Wyoming, ostensibly in 1889 (more on this below), whose parents have taken on a stranger — known only as Shane — as a farmhand. inspired by the Johnson County War, the the Starretts and other homesteaders are threatened by a wealthy large rancher, but Shane intervenes to end the rancher’s depradations, effectively securing the valley for the “small” homesteaders.
this is one of the most unhingedly homoerotic books I have ever read ostensibly by and for straight people. I cannot emphasize enough how clear it is that, first of all, Bob has a gigantic crush on Shane but also, and more importantly, that both of Bob’s parents are also in love with Shane, and that this is made basically explicit in the text. at the very least, the text is explicit that Bob’s mother, Marian, is in love with Shane, and his father, Joe, responds to this by saying that he doesn’t begrudge her this and that “I’m man enough to know a better when his trail meets mine. Whatever happens will be all right.” this conversation appears to serve as foreplay for them. what!!! every interaction between Shane and Joe is incredibly homoerotic, and every conversation Joe has with Marian about Shane is dripping with veiled references.
the greatest strength of the novel is the perspective: this is one of the best executions of a novel for adults from the perspective of a child that I have ever read (my other go-to example of this is Gabrielle Roy’s Rue Deschambault, available in English as Street of Riches), in this case with the added mediation of adult Bob looking back. Schaefer strikes a careful balance between Bob’s naïveté and on-the-verge-of-adolescence desires and anxieties, on the one hand, and conveying the full, adult weight of what is happening to readers. masterfully done.
and then of course there are the conventions of the Western novel — the obsession with masculine dignity and honor, in particular (of course no man in his right mind could bear to have someone think that he would prefer soda-pop to whisky; the only rational response to such an accusation is to throw a punch, apparently). so much of this is simply goofy, but Schaefer does for the most part succeed in making me feel the gravity of it, at least in the sense that the characters take it all seriously.
this is a Western where Indigenous people never appear on the page (they haven’t yet as of the halfway point, and I’m given to understand that this continues) except in the tween protagonist’s fantasies of shooting “Indians”. obviously the entire novel is structured by settler-colonial dispossession: both ranchers and homesteaders are laying claim to stolen land under the Homestead Act of 1862. being a Western, the novel does not need to be read “contrapuntally” (following Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism) to see its relationship with colonialism.
what I am struck by, however, is a much more specific and striking way in which the novel is structured by settler-colonial violence. the wealthy rancher who serves as the villain of the novel justifies his claim that he “deserves” more land — which he intends to take by force if necessary — on the basis that he has just won a large government contract and needs to expand his property to fulfill it.
the contract? well, that would be a contract with “the Indian agent at Standing Rock, the big Sioux reservation over beyond the Black Hills”.
technically the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation per se did not come into existence until 1890, but the Standing Rock Agency did already exist within the larger Great Sioux Reservation. in 1889, the Indian agent at Standing Rock was James McLaughlin, who, in 1890, ordered the arrest of Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake (known in English as Sitting Bull), ultimately precipitating the massacre of around 300 Lakota at Wounded Knee on 29 December, 1890. the rancher in Shane, Fletcher, has specifically been commissioned to supply beef — presumably to compensate for the near-extermination of bison as part of the US state’s concerted efforts to make Plains tribes’ traditional lifeways impossible, forcing their death or assimilation.
what do we do with this? what impact does McLaughlin’s presence have on our reading of Shane? perhaps none: certainly Fletcher would be greedy and cruel with or without this contract; this little skirmish in the Johnson County “War” would unfold in the same way with or without Standing Rock.
in some ways I think this is a very good book, and certainly it was a more pleasant — in fact, enjoyable — reading experience than a novel that centered on the “Indian wars” and the immediate violence of colonial expansion from a settler perspective would have been.
at the same time, I think there is something profoundly disturbing about the way these two sentences could pass by unnoticed — perhaps slightly less likely in a post-#NoDAPL era, but still I suspect many readers do not even register them, or consider what the time period means (if they know about Wounded Knee at all!). this is a novel — and the Western, of which it is apparently one of the premier examples, a genre — for which one of the most horrifically violent periods of US colonial expansion can serve simply as a backdrop, a bit of historical flavor to ground its reimagining of an inter-settler conflict in a particular moment.
but the contract is there. the shadows of James McLaughlin, of the Ghost Dance, of Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake, of Wounded Knee loom over the entire novel out of this single, passing sentence early in chapter V. the casual “Fletcher was back and he had his contract” that begins chapter VI. the contract is there.
(back: main page · reviews by author · reviews by country · other reviews from the USA)