Harvard Magazine: Owen Wister, Brief life of a Western mythmaker: 1860-1938

Ambivalence about his success was linked to Wister’s personal disillusionment with the West. He had believed a new kind of American would be produced by the simplicity and rigor of life there: an honorable, chivalrous, high-minded natural aristocrat not unlike the Virginian. Instead he found his beloved Wyoming increasingly overrun with what he disdainfully regarded as the rabble of an excessive democracy: populist politicians, traveling salesmen, rebellious workers, unassimilated immigrants, and tourists.