Smile when you go through the doors

The Owen Wister Cabin residing at the Medicine Bow Museum (MBM) is open after being closed for four years.

"It got re-painted and refurbished," MBM worker Howard Bame said. "It was looking pretty rough before."

The Owen Wister Cabin is a significant building to the museum and the country, according to MBM Director Sharon Biamon, because it is a place the author built himself and lived for a time after he completed his most famous work, the 1902 novel "The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains" (The Virginian). The novel made Medicine Bow world famous. The book is also widely regarded as being the first cowboy novel and Wister the "father" of the western novel.

"The Virginian" was reprinted 14 times in eight months and it still stands as one of the top 50 best-selling works of fiction. The book became one of the first mass market bestsellers and is the prototype for defining the cowboy in literature.

Wister created the novel out of several of his cowboy stories, loosely linked together and inserted into a new narrative of his hero's courtship of a New England lady, Molly Wood, who came to Wyoming as a schoolteacher. The novel has a love story, but what enthralled readers was Wister's representations of ranch and trail life.

The unnamed hero demonstrates his superior attributes of being a cowboy and gunslinger. The most famous line is "When you call me that, smile!" as the Virginian faces down an enemy.

It sold nearly 200,000 copies its first year and was quickly adapted, successfully, for Broadway. Five movies and at least one TV series have been made since and the book has never been out of print.

"The Virginian" put together, for the first time all the components which are now expected in a western; whether a book, movie or TV show. A hero, the outspoken yet warm female character, hostile native Americans, rustlers and the villainous antagonist who comes to a bad end.

Wister would appear to be one of the most unlikely people to be the father of western fiction.

He was born in 1860 in Pennsylvania to an affluent east coast family. His father was a physician, his mother was a respected magazine writer. Wister was educated in Switzerland in his early years and later went to private schools on the east coast. At Harvard University, Wister was a member of the Porcelain Club through which he became lifelong friends with future 26th President Theodore Roosevelt.

Wister graduated Harvard and went to Paris for two years to study music composition. His family supported him financially in this endeavor, but really hoped he would go to law school. Wister did eventually give up on learning music and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1888.

Before he graduated, on the advice of his doctor, he traveled west to restore his health. By July 1885, he found himself as a guest at the VR Ranch near Douglas. Wyoming captivated the urbane Wister with its landscape as did the characters who lived on the ranches and in the towns. For the next 15 years, he spent nearly every summer gathering material for his stories.

Wister came to Medicine Bow with the owner of a ranch who had come to do business in the town in the 1890s. No rooms were available, so Wister slept on the counter of the general store, which is still in existence today. A literary plaque on the present building acknowledges Wister's stay.

He began work on "The Virginian" in 1901 and had his character start his journey from the town of Medicine Bow.

"He made our town famous," Biamon said. "It could be said that he put the town in the minds of thousands of people as they read the book."

In 1938, Wister died at his home in Rhode Island. He is buried in Philadelphia.

Bame said because there aren't a lot of pictures of the inside of the cabin when it was completed around 1913, the museum put in artifacts which would likely have been in the dwelling.

"We put in things that they would have actually used during the time that he lived there," Bame said. "All the stuff from this time has been donated."

The cabin was built by Wister and his family over several summers near the town of Jackson.

"The cabin was on land bought by the Rockefeller family who had bought the land so they could preserve the area," Bame said. "They saw the cabin and realized it had historical value, so the Rockefellers had it taken apart and put in storage. It stayed there for years."

The Rockefellers donated the land to the National Parks to help create Teton National Park. Ironically, the Wister family only lived in the completed cabin for one summer. His wife Mary died in childbirth in 1913 with their seventh child and Wister never went back to the lodging.

Wister didn't return west after his wife's death. He didn't write about the west either, with the exception of a few articles.

In 1976, the Medicine Bow Lions Club rescued the building and restored it in memory of the author and his book, "The Virginian". Medicine Bow resident Marvin Cronberg is credited with saving the structure. When learning about the fate of the Wister cabin fate to be destroyed while working near Jackson, Cronberg went to the Lions Club and asked for their help in bring the cabin to Medicine Bow.

Biamon said once it came to Medicine Bow, some years passed before it was constructed. In 1984 the Medicine Bow Depot was turned into the Medicine Bow Museum and the Owen Wister Cabin was constructed next to the former train building.

Four years ago, the cabin had to be closed to save various parts of the building. The work is done and now the cabin is open to the public.

"This building is so significant because Wister didn't have the cabin built, but built it himself. The hands that wrote the novel that changed American literature in many ways, also built the cabin," Biamon said. "It is absolutely beautiful now and people need to come and see it."