THE SEA OF GRASS by Conrad Richter

This post marks the first in a new series here at Saddlebums: an occasional piece dealing with the finest western fiction ever written. These contributions will examine the circumstances of publication, the author, and discuss what went into these stories and why they are now ranked among the best. Richard S. Wheeler prepared the first in the series, and it examines Conrad Richter’s The Sea of Grass.

Richard S. Wheeler is the dean of the modern western story. His novels are tender, tough, critical, and original—he has tackled expansive historical dramas, such as Aftershocks, a masterful portrayal of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906; biographical novels like Trouble in Tombstone; mining camp stories, such as his Spur winning novel Vengeance Valley. He is also the author of the well-received Barnaby Skye series—the most recent title in the series is The Canyon of Bones—and his recently released autobiography, An Accidental Novelist, has been praised by readers and writers alike.

The Sea of Grass, by Conrad Richter, first appeared as a Saturday Evening Post serial in 1936, and was published by Alfred Knopf in 1937. It is still in print, from the University of Ohio Press. The novel might be called a traditional cattleman vs. nester story, but it is much more. It is narrated by young Hal Brewton, nephew of the story’s central figure, Jim Brewton, who runs cattle on a vast sea of grass near Salt Fork, which is probably in Texas but could be in New Mexico.

Jim Brewton’s enormous range is almost all public land; he owns only the water holes, and that makes him vulnerable to the nesters wanting to plow the lush grassland and plant crops, even though the land is arid. The opening lines of the novel introduce us to its theme:

That lusty pioneer blood is tamed now, broken and gelded like the wild horse and the frontier settlement. And I think that I shall never see it flowing through human veins again as it did in my Uncle Jim Brewton, riding a lathered horse across his shaggy range or standing in his massive ranch house, bare of furniture as a garret, and holding together his empire of grass and cattle by the fire in his eyes.

The fire in his eyes. There is the heart of the novel. At the beginning, with the arrival of Brewton’s mail-order bride Lutie, we discover a horde of nesters waiting to swarm over Brewton’s ranch. And supporting them is the federal attorney, and later judge, Brice Chamberlain, who sympathizes with the humble. Lutie does, too. She furiously tries to civilize the obdurate Brewton, adding graces to his home, bringing a son and daughter into the family, and taking him to Mass on Sundays, but there is no taming old Jim.

Eventually, she has a third child, a blond boy, as blond as Brice Chamberlain is blond, and soon after that she leaves Brewton, and her whereabouts are unknown for years. But Chamberlain remains in Salt Fork, calls in the army to defend the nesters, and soon the nesters are plowing up Brewton’s range. After a trial, when Chamberlain asks Brewton why his men ran off a nester named Boggs, Brewton has a surprising reply: "He was not run off because he wanted to settle those hundred-sixty acres but because of what he wanted to do with the land."

He goes on to say he has some charity for the nester. "But–"and his voice began to ring in the small, hushed courtroom, "when that nester picks country like my big vega, that’s more than seven thousand feet above the sea, when he wants to plow it up to support his family where there isn’t enough rain for crops to grow, where he only kills the grass that will grow, where he starves for water and feeds his family by killing my beef and becomes a man without respect to himself and a miserable menace to the territory, then I have neither sympathy nor charity!"

As the novel progresses, we learn that Brewton was right. At first, during a wet cycle, the nesters prosper, their crops bloom, and their life seems assured. But with the coming of a dry cycle, their hopes collapse and they flee, leaving a ruined grassland behind them.

The novel was written long before publishers narrowed the traditional western to men’s literature that resolves conflict through violence. And while there is some violence in the story, it is offstage and muted. More surprising was the veiled but unmistakable adultery theme in the novel, handled delicately for the Saturday Evening Post readership. Old Jim Brewton remains as obdurate and flinty as ever as he ages, and late in the novel it appears that he was defeated by his rival and enemy, Brice Chamberlain, after all. But then one day Lutie mysteriously reappears, as passionate and willful as ever, begins once again to civilize the old ranchhouse, and takes up residence as though she had never left. And not only does Brewton welcome her, he is triumphant, for her return marks the final defeat and disgrace of Chamberlain– but I will leave it to the reader to interpret the surprising conclusion.

Conrad Richter’s prose is lyrical and draws us into a world scarcely imagined by modern people. But even more of an asset is his gift of characterization. Lutie and Jim Brewton are as vivid as any characters ever set on a page. Brewton is harsh, rigid, and yet filled with his own code of honor, which he lives by at great cost to himself. Lutie is a visionary, wanting to better the world, not only the world of the settlers, but Brewton’s cruel world, and she sets out to do it in the face of his obdurate resistance. Brice Chamberlain, on the other hand, is an idealist and reformer– with a heart of clay. He’s not man enough to stand up to Brewton after stealing Brewton’s wife (he deserts her at the train station when she is leaving Brewton for him), and lives out his life knowing he is the lesser man.

Richter went on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1951 for another frontier novel, The Town. He had grown up in Pennsylvania, but spent much of his life in the place he loved most, New Mexico.
The Sea of Grass is at or near the top of most lists ranking the greatest westerns.

—Richard S. Wheeler