Real West, True North: Reading Beyond Literary Myths by Christine Byl

When my first novel, Lookout, was released in 2023, the cultural zeitgeist tilted toward nuance and diversity. Remember those days? Arts boundaries and literary archetypes were being pushed and expanded. Why should we be hemmed in by stereotypes when we could have multi-racial Shakespeare casts, trans superheroes, a Black woman winning country album of the year? While deep systemic hurdles of course remained, for a brief while, it seemed as if any story could come alive by virtue of talent or fervor instead of skin color or birthright. My own novel—a quiet rural Western with open marriage and closeted cowboys—aimed to push the genre, but it wasn’t some crazy outlier. Could a Western be queer? Of course.

Halfway through 2025, the paperback edition of Lookout entered a notably different world. In the 18 months between the two editions, our country chose—by a slim but insistent margin—a sharp paradigm shift, a return to patrolled perimeters. This set of principles is obsessed with rigid dichotomies, with keeping out, or in, and seems recently unprecedented not just for its baldly regressive nature, but also, its incursion from politics into every other sphere of life. The cultural conversation is damp from the constant spew of a kingpin who detests diversity, loathes any narrative in which he is not the center, and will overstep his authority to ban the word “justice” in a federal email or a Harriet Tubman poster from an elementary school classroom. The scales have tipped a bit in the months since July, as resistance gains footing and the public gags on force-feeding. Still, compared to a few years ago, it feels like writing about gay cowboys and small-town abortions might get your name on a watch list.

I’ve been alert (and averse) to essential narratives for as long as I can remember. As a ten-year old, I wanted to be a major league baseball pitcher—why not girls? I was raised on Bible verses whose certainty confused me, since all I had was questions. Santa, the Easter Bunny, Jesus—all of them provoked more skepticism than delight. Decades later, I still have trouble taking capitalized categories at face value. When I hear Real Woman, American Hero, True History, I wonder who’s defining, what’s left out, and at what cost? Literary capitalizations include the True West, as perceived through the Real Western, and its congruent Alaska version, the True North and The Last Frontier. As much as I have been shaped by such terrain, a part of my reading life has been dedicated to scanning for crevasses, sink holes, and hideaways.

 

Learning the ropes

Long before I knew about geographical borders, I visited places via book that it would take me decades to get to in life (Mongolia, Peru), if I got there at all (Narnia.) From my childhood home in urban Michigan, no literary destination beckoned me as viscerally as the American West. I dog-eared my copies of Little House on the Prairie. I reread Old Yeller and Where the Red Fern Grows, weeping every time. I remember discomfort, as a White[1] kid who’d learned about the Potawatomi people in school, with Pa’s anti-Indian comments, but I didn’t know back then to call it racism. I don’t recall that I ever thought about what a Native girl might feel when she read Pa’s words. But I did think about Potawatomi kids, who were often imaginary friends in my historical games. The school library’s Childhood of Great Americans biographies had my name hand-scrawled again and again on the check-out cards, especially Westerns (Sacagawea: American Pathfinder! Sitting Bull: Dakota Boy!) I think the Santa-skeptic in me knew I wasn’t getting the whole story from Laura Ingalls Wilder, or even from the biographers. But what would “the whole story” even mean?

In the mid-90s, beckoned by the West I had imagined, I moved first to Oregon for a semester, and then to Montana for real, and as I got to know the weather, cultures and lands of the northern Rockies, I devoured regional classics, from A.B. Guthrie to Larry McMurtry to Jim Harrison. Though some were ahead of their times, in aggregate, these books confirmed an oft-drawn picture of the “Wild West”: certain kinds of men in certain kinds of landscapes, wrestling and conquering, often alone, often on the run. The story arc had allure, to be sure, but as I grew to know the West off the page, it became clear that things were more complicated, and more interesting, than the mythic literary lump.

In search of a wider canon, I returned to Willa Cather, a touchstone I’d loved since college days, though her biases were clearer. I read William Kittredge, Rick Bass, and David James Duncan, who sought to unpack tropes and expand boundaries, and a handful of White women’s non-fiction—Mary Clearman Blew, Judy Blunt—whose books centered women mostly invisible in other stories. I loved the Montana work that critiqued the conquest narrative, but I still craved a wider spectrum of narrators. Where were the immigrants? What about solo women? Blackfeet, Cree, Navajo people, historic and contemporary, in their own voices? Queer people, unconventional families of any kind? I wanted to know them all, and in the ‘90s, these books were few, far, and frustratingly hard to find.

 

Climbing the fence

Decades have passed since my early readerly forays. I’ve read widely and, happily, have found in the New Western movement the expansiveness I craved. But for all its evocative motifs—big sky and inner fortitude and all that movement—the Western genre’s dogged tropes hang on tight. Though few avid readers would say we believe them, insidious stereotypes persist as the understory of white-washed American history. They are baked into so many of our origin stories that they’re absorbed by our bones like an industrial toxin, or secondhand smoke. Recently, embers are being fanned back into a blaze by a regime that profits from resentment and hierarchy, hoping the smoke obscures our eyes so that we’ll duck our heads and submit to the Old World Order.

It’s easy to pin all the blame off the ranch, but I ran up against loads of my internalized biases while writing Lookout, informed by my years living in Northwest Montana. Despite being a critical reader of diverse narratives, I had an inner perimeter patroller I did not admire and in order to corral her, I had to confront how the Western’s defaults had shaped and constrained my own imagination. I found myself echoing unexamined stereotypes, and mouthing received set pieces, only to notice them in later edits—how did I miss that? Why would I have put it that way? Seeing my missteps, even if later than I wished, helped me consciously articulate what parts of the canon to build upon, and where I wanted to break away. Even after countless edits of Lookout, my blind spots remain. And never mind the novel—I’m doing it now! I’ve scanned this essay for assumptions, and yet, despite my best intentions, I am missing, right now, chances to imagine more largely. I regret the paucity of my own vision.

I also know, from overheard conversations in small towns, and the increasing pressure to embrace backwards-looking identities, that I am not alone in tripping over archaic tropes, and so it seems worth articulating a few of the common ones that have underlain frontier narratives. Left unspoken beneath the surface of things, they undermine cultural growth and new visions. We’re in a time—lord help us, may it be short—where John Wayne is again lionized as central, any other suggestion verboten “DEI.” Myths can be false, even cruel, but still powerful, and the idea of simpler times and easy heroes clearly has strong allure for many. In such a climate, how much more important than ever are the books that proclaim lived realities to counter the mythic ones, stories that speak of the West and the North so many of us know and love?

 

Reading between the lines

Conversation about the literary West can take many turns. The urban vs. rural West brings (far more than) two different stories. Non-fiction and poetry tropes differ from fiction. The Far North—like Alaska—participates in some Western-isms, and adds a few of its own. I’m focusing loosely on fiction of the rural mountain West, as that’s the landscape that informed my own novel, with a few Alaskan mentions along the way. With that, here are some persistent myths, and a few books—some old, some new—to counter them.

1. Myth: Women in the Old West were schoolteachers, whores, or housewives. Their primary roles were to teach, give pleasure, or make ham and biscuits to deliver to the branding crew at lunch break. Women existed to serve, or service, men.

But…: First, let’s undo the notion that “women” means “White women.” Half of the original population of the West was Indigenous women, who counseled and governed; moved settlements; gathered and hunted; navigated the landscape; cared for children and elders; practiced medicine; built structures; crafted clothing, weapons, and home-goods; predicted the weather; made art. Few stories in the Western canon feature Indigenous women at all, let alone in their varied capacities.

White settler women had more prescribed roles, but they were also wranglers, map-readers, entrepreneurs, artists and outlaws, and they homesteaded in numbers that would surprise most readers. Did you know that nearly one in five claims during the classic homesteading era was made by a solo woman? Not women with their husbands (though there were plenty of those). Solo women. Why aren’t 20% of Westerns about these women, or even 5%? Pick up a classic Western and it’s tough to find even a single scene that passes the Bechdel test (two women, talking to each other, about something other than men). Recent decades have brought more women following in the wagon ruts laid down by Cather and Ingalls, but there’s a lot of old dust hanging in the air.

To Read:

• • The Lost Journals of Sacajawea is an award-winning 2024 novel by Salish-Kootenai writer Debra Magpie Earling, and a lyrical gut-punch rescue of the Lemhi Shoshone woman from the colonialist version.
  • The Jump-Off Creek by Molly Gloss is a slim, stoic novel of the late ‘80s, based on the journals of a White settler widow homesteading in 19^th century Oregon.

2. Myth: The West was populated by well-intentioned settlers. Native people were either bloodthirsty “savages”, or unimpeachable healers. Related myth: Indians were around in the “Frontier” era, but now they are mostly gone.

But…: Native people were targeted explicitly by settler colonialism for genocide; Indigenous trauma and injury was not collateral damage from a purer intent, but often, the entire point. Indigenous people were as manifold in personality and motivation as members of any historic group. Many settlers saw Native people as either warrior-scalper, or ally-peacekeeper with an indelible spiritual nature, a dichotomy replicated in early Westerns. This rigid opposition served the needs of colonizers, wherein “Indian” became shorthand for “enemy,” with a few individuals on pedestals, in order to conceal the racist project behind “my Cherokee friend.”

Also true: Far from extinct, contemporary Native people and communities are not only present, but thriving, even though most no longer reside on their ancestral lands, and all are subject to on-going violence and bigotry at extreme disproportionate rates.[2] Despite generational trauma and its residue of social harm, contemporary Indigenous people are doctors, podcasters, parents, coaches, writers, tool-and-die workers, pastors, actors, abortion counselors, judges, poets. Indigenous cultures hold massive reservoirs of traditional knowledge, and Indigenous people are also originators and owners of contemporary expertise, in astrophysics, law, botany, medicine, cartography and on. Most of all, Indigenous people are individuals, with triumphs and trials, of myriad tribes, cultures, houses, backgrounds and families.

To Read:

• • Anything by James Welch, especially Fools Crow, an epic classic centering a Blackfeet protagonist and his community in the late 1800s.
  • Crooked Hallelujah, by Kelli Jo Ford, about a contemporary Cherokee matriarchy in Oklahoma and Texas.
  • Sivulliq: Ancestor, by Lily H. Tuzroyluke, a harrowing survival narrative set in 1890s Arctic, featuring an indelible Inupiaq mother, and a Black whaler.

3. Myth: Westerners are simple. Rural communities are provincial, uneducated, and dull.

But…: Western cities are notably cosmopolitan, but the rural West is also home to complex people of all races and nationalities. Westerners are Sioux and Szechuan, Swedish and Samoan, Senegalese and Salish. (A recent language census found upwards of 60 languages spoken in Montana homes; in Anchorage schools, it’s over 100.) Westerners have a range of interests, hobbies and areas of influence. A dear friend of mine is a mule-packer and a pilot, with a cowboy hat and a BFA in film. I’ve fought fires with a macho Hotshot saw tech who was a lead male cheerleader in college. A woman on my first trail crew ran a chainsaw with chew in her lip during the summer, and sewed costumes for the Minneapolis Opera in the winter. Rural Western towns host rodeos and 4-H Fairs, and also, the AIDS quilt, Eid celebrations, and poetry slams. Families, friends, colleagues, and rivals have campfire conversations and street corner arguments about weather and butchering roadkill. Also, there are lectures in libraries and book clubs in homes about water rights, performance art, and mysticism. Westerners can’t be pigeonholed.

To Read:

• • How Much of These Hills is Gold, by C. Pam Zhang, is a completely original novel about orphaned siblings in a Chinese American family in the Gold Rush era.
  • Site Fidelity, by Clare Boyles, is a collection of stories about rural White working- class characters in the contemporary West.

4. Myth: Men and women in the West fall in love with their opposite, and it’s either soulmates forever after, or doomed from the start.

But…: Love in the West is fond and fraught. Yes, straight high-school sweethearts marry, have two children and a barbed wire fence. Also, men fall in love with men (sometimes also their high-school sweethearts), and women fall in love with women, and people fall in love with more than one person. Transgender and intersex people live in the rural West (under increasing attack). My closest trans friend is a fly-fishing therapist from small-town Utah whose river-time is eroded by testifying against the proliferation of discriminatory bills in Montana, where she now lives.

In the rural West, there are open marriages, and divorced people who love one another. There are couples with one child or ten children, and couples with no children, and single parents and donor parents, and multi-generational families living together. There are restraining orders and 60-year anniversaries. Love affairs, and the families that arise from them, are as diverse in the West as they are wherever people fall in, or out of, love.

This is also true: all lovers are not equally safe in the West. See, trans therapist, above. See, friend of mine having a drink with a colleague in Moscow, Idaho. She’s White, he’s Black. The overt racialized comments from patrons assuming they were a couple were so hostile that even the server took apologetic note. Had they clarified—they aren’t a couple, she is a lesbian—they would have stepped from one landmine onto another.

To Read:

• • Lucky Red, a recent novel by Claudia Cravens, features an orphaned teenaged girl working in a brothel who falls for a female gunfighter.
  • Louise Erdrich’s ‘90s classic The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, about a White priest among Anishinaabe people, explores inter-racial community, gender roles and families, born and chosen.
  • Percival Everett’s brilliant Western, Wounded, features Black ranchers and gay couples, central, not signaled as other.

5. Myth: Animals are either wild and ravenous, waiting to pounce on the livestock, or intended for domestic service and completely expendable. (Occasional exceptions for a heroic and ill-fated dog.)

But…: Humans in the West have long relied on animals for work, recreation, and companionship. While it’s easy to see a herd or flock as an indistinguishable mass, if you work with a barnful of horses, raise chickens, or lead a mule string over a mountain pass, you know that each animal has its own personality.

And the dogs! Bed-sleeping and face-licking can make us forget that they evolved with us, not for us. We call them “mine,” but neither cowboy nor schoolkid should mistake a dog for a possession. No matter how loyal or doting, a dog is like every other resident of the West: a being all its own.

Sans a ranch or a farm or a pet, life teems in Western yards and homes: birds and insects and squirrels and voles pass through every nook and cranny. Creatures are constant, whether a skittery lizard in a desert subdivision, a mountain lion on a local trail (or recently, in downtown San Francisco), or a coyote’s yowls heard through an open window. Each dangling spider or migrating shorebird is intent on its own hardwired or chosen plans, we humans just another creature passing through. For some animals, we could be prey, but most often, we are not. Our worlds abut, but animals exist for their own purposes, unknown by us. “The middle of nowhere” as a descriptor for rural or remote places like my hometown in Healy, Alaska, has always bugged me. It’s the middle of somewhere to many beings, including wolves, hares, mosquitos, and me.

To Read:

• • Ordinary Wolves, Seth Kantner’s novel about a White boy growing up in the Inupiaq Arctic among wild creatures who are neighbors, too
  • Jamey Bradbury’s The Wild Inside, wherein a White trapper, musher and homesteader finds a home on the Alaskan taiga—also featuring a beautiful gender-queer story line.

Horizon line

Times change, zeitgeists come and go. No matter the president, despite adults’ blind spots, young readers across this country will continue to read in search of themselves, longing, as I once did, both to see their faces in books, and to know places beyond their own. Even as book purges accelerate alarmingly, I imagine a kid browsing her school library to find stories in which she sees a wide world, with a place for her in it (with a heroic librarian to guide her, banned keywords be damned.) I am hesitant to clamber onto the “fiction will save the world” covered wagon, as I think it’s more likely that fiction may subtly change one person at a time, and we will decide to change the world, together, or not.

But I do believe that what we focus on gains power. What we don’t see, we are less likely to understand. The current regime would forbid us to look for each other’s truest selves, to focus instead on caricatures and call them real. It can feel impossible to counter such a pervasive cultural shift. At times, my sentences and paragraphs seem tepid, a minimal offering. And yet, I sense that the more varied the stories we write, read, tell, and recommend to others—about the West, the North, or wherever we live—the safer and more interesting the spaces we inhabit will become. Who knows how long the current cultural authoritarianism will persist, but my hunch is it will not outlast the potential of the human imagination. I see and read resistance everywhere. Story by story, image by image, place by place, we keep leaving open the gates, riding through wide expanses, discovering the landscapes where all of us feel seen, known, and welcome.

Footnotes:

• [1] I capitalize White along with other races and/or nationalities, guided by recommendations of The Center for the Study of Social Policy, and the thinking of scholar Eve Ewing: “When we ignore the specificity and significance of Whiteness — the things that it is, the things that it does — we contribute to its seeming neutrality and thereby grant it power to maintain its invisibility.” This feels right to me.
• [2] Revising this essay in early 2025, this link had been “removed for review in light of Executive Orders.” Now, in early 2026, the link is active once more, and the research available. It’s possible it will be removed again.

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CHRISTINE BYL is the author of the novel Lookout, which won a Montana Book Award Honor and was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction’s first novel award in 2023; and Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods, a non-fiction book about trail crews, tools, wildness, and labor, which was short-listed for the 2014 Willa Award in nonfiction. Her work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies, most recently in Alaska Field Guide. Christine has made her living as a professional trail-builder for three decades; she lives with her family in Interior Alaska on the traditional and on-going homelands of the Dene’, including Ahtna, Dena’ina, Koyukon, Upper Kuskokwim, and Tanana people.