I'm starting this new topic to discuss Westerns, and will begin with this comment by William Handley.
I just started reading William Handley's The Brokeback Book, and he quotes Wister often. Here's one:
"Brokeback Mountain is not a conventional Western. Yet it is a Western to the same extent that Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise and Wister's The Virginian are -- neither involves battles between cowboys and Indians but both are studies in gender difference within a nationalized landscape, which might be a broad definition of Westerns."
I never thought of the Western that way, but he might have a point.