or the colloquial rhetoric of Huckleberry Finn, that would make it possible to understand the frontier not as an "evanescent" stage of social development but as an object of continuing fascination. These two books alone, among nineteenth-century novels, managed to escape the conventions of the wilderness myth by taking the myth itself as in some sense their subject: the energizing vision of escape to a realm of complete freedom, the megalomaniacal fantasy of self-sufficiency underlying it, its inevitable defeat, and the moral havoc released by its attempted realization.

Even Huckleberry Finn conceded more to the Western myth than Twain probably intended. As Slotkin says, it implied that the only alternative to a competitive, commercial society lay "in the personalities of young women, children, and childlike nonwhite races." Notwithstanding Twain's scorn for Cooper's "literary offenses" in sentimentalizing the frontier, Huckleberry Finn reproduced the central action if not the diction of the Leatherstocking novels: the flight of innocence in the face of civilization. That Twain was not altogether satisfied with Huck's final decision to "light out for the territory" may be indicated by his decision to undertake a sequel, Among the Indians, in which a realistic account of the Indian Territory would deflate the image of the noble savage and underline the impossibility of escape. That the sequel was never completed, or even fairly begun, indicates that a fully developed treatment of the Western theme, one that would explore the significance of the West not merely as a place but as a national memory, continued to elude Twain's grasp.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, idyllic images of the West began to give way to a new set of images that reflected the nation's growing preoccupation with overseas expansion. The solitary fugitive from civilization no longer stood at the center of attention. Now it was the gunfighter, too busy with bad Indians and cattle thieves to commune with nature, who served as the hero of Western romance. He still shared with his predecessor the "primitive virtues of a heroic manhood," to recall Charles Webber's phrase, but it was no longer a "compliment," as Washington Irving had said in his account of Rocky Mountain trappers,

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