Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage remains one of the most popular and famous westerns ever written not because it is a towering literary achievement nor even because the central conflict is a definitive example of the western plot, but because it set the standard for so much of the underlying thematic context of what one expects from the genre.
The stimulus behind the writing of the story and the engine that drives it plot is, in fact, almost definitively not something one expects to confront in a western, either on the page or the screen. Grey was motivated to write his novel by a genuine disgust at the continuing practice of polygamy among Utah Mormons. As a result, Riders of the Purple Sage features no conflict between landowners and homesteaders, no showdown between a lawman and gunslingers and no gathering of a posse to track down the bad guys. Instead, the plot centers on the consequences of religious persecution engendered by gender inequality. Not exactly the standard fare of John Wayne movies and life on the Ponderosa.
Nevertheless, Grey’s novel is essential to the development of the western and the codification of certain stereotypical elements without which subsequent examples of the genre would seem strangely incomplete. For instance, the young Mormon woman whose rebellion against polygamy stimulates the action spends considerable time using every feminine wile at her disposal to convince the mysterious gunman helping her cause to lay down his guns and fine a diplomatic solution rather than resorting to violence. Such a relationship is standard fare for the genre, of course, and is perhaps adapted with the greatest originality in Shane. As with Shane, the attempt is noble, but the message conveyed is that at that time and in that place and under those conditions, the gun is the tool of diplomacy when in the hand of a righteous man.
It is in the situating of Lassiter—the mystery gunman—that Riders of the Purple Sage becomes essential to the creation of the genre and it is also within his character that one comes to see that the plot of the novel—and by extension the plot of most westerns—are merely extraneous and interchangeable details. That Grey’s book retains its high status as influence on the genre despite featuring a plot hardly ever duplicated—conflict Mormon polygamy—says much about the significance of the character of Lassiter and his influence on the western. Take Lassiter out of Utah and the Mormon conflict and set him in Wyoming in the middle of the conflict between ranchers and squatters and he becomes Shane. Take Shane out of the Wyoming of 1889, make him a widower with two kids in 1881 and he becomes Will Munny in the film Unforgiven. Just about every western ever written whether as a book, a screenplay or an episode of a TV show is a repetition of Lassiter’s arrival in Riders of the Purple Sage.
He is the righteous man bring justice to the lawless frontier where the normal alternatives to a man with a gun in the America back East have failed. Lassiter is not merely the prototype of the good guy with a gun, however, he is also embodies an unacknowledged dirty truth about the settling of that lawless frontier: justice and vengeance are indistinguishable.
