Sunrise

Anton Vargas is the legendary figure at the heart of the novel’s historical narrative and its central theme, The Mythologization of the American West. The book presents two distinct versions of him: The heroic gunslinger of the dime novel An Incident at Greyrock and the complex, mortal man who exists in the historical sections. As a myth, he is a one-dimensional hero: charming, fearless, and infallible, a character curated for public consumption. This persona is a commercial fiction, created by the writer Daggart Caul, who even gives Vargas Preacher Maclean’s most memorable line to make him more heroic. The novel uses this mythic version as a foil to explore the more complicated truth.

The historical Vargas is a dynamic and round character, seen as a young, reckless man in flashbacks and, most prominently, as a sick, 45-year-old man returning to the town of Sunrise in 1902. This older Vargas is haunted by regret and motivated by a desperate need for atonement. He is dying of cancer and has come back to find his estranged friend and former lover, Doctor “Preacher” Maclean, before he dies. This quest reveals a man at odds with his own legend. While he can still perform the part of “Anton Vargas” to intimidate a mob or charm a local, his private reality is one of physical pain and deep emotional guilt over his abandonment of Preacher 20 years prior. His story is a deconstruction of the Western hero, replacing the stoic, self-reliant archetype with a man defined by his vulnerability and his deep, unresolved emotional bonds.

His relationship with Preacher is the core of his character. It subverts the traditional Western narrative by centering on a queer love story and a conflict rooted in moral and political conviction rather than a simple showdown. Vargas’s choice to abandon Preacher before the raid on Fort Searles was an act of self-preservation that he has come to see as his life’s greatest failure. His return is intended to face the consequences of that choice and, in his own words, give Preacher the chance to “take your revenge” (251). Ultimately, Vargas is a tragic figure whose life illustrates the vast, often painful gap between public myth and private truth.

Doctor Thomas “Preacher” Maclean serves as the primary foil to Anton Vargas and the moral conscience of the Greyrock Four. He is a round, dynamic character defined by his fierce intellect, medical skill, and uncompromising opposition to injustice. His nickname, “Preacher,” stems from his past as a seminarian, but it also reflects his tendency to lecture passionately on matters of principle. Unlike Vargas, who is pragmatic and self-interested, Preacher is an idealist driven by a deep-seated rage against the hypocrisy and violence of American expansion, particularly the government’s betrayal of its treaties with Indigenous nations. His fury over the illegal occupation of Fort Searles is the catalyst for the central conflict between him and Vargas.

Preacher’s introduction in a flashback, heckling a fraudulent medicine show, establishes his core traits: He is a man of science who despises charlatans and a compassionate physician who immediately tends to a dying Vargas. Throughout the narrative, he functions as the voice of a more complicated, politically charged history that the sanitized myths of the West seek to ignore. His plan to dynamite the armory at Fort Searles is a radical act of political protest, positioning him as an outlaw in the eyes of the state but as a man of integrity within his own moral framework. His character challenges the simplistic good-versus-evil binary of the Western genre, presenting a model of heroism rooted in dissent and solidarity with the oppressed.

In his final appearance, Preacher is a man missing an arm and an eye, but he remains committed to the same morals that defined him years earlier. He lives as a fugitive, known locally as the sorcerer “El Hechicero,” helping people escape the reach of the law. His reunion with Vargas is a tense, emotionally fraught reckoning. Preacher’s cold rejection of Vargas’s dramatic appeal for a vengeful death demonstrates his refusal to participate in the kind of theatrical narrative Vargas has lived his life by. He represents the unglamorous, difficult reality of living by one’s convictions.

Colin “Coll” Yard is the main perspective character of the 2003 timeline, a local historian and the head of the Salt Draw Historical Society. He is a round and dynamic character who initially embodies a well-intentioned but complacent relationship with the past. This informs his later role as an ambiguous antagonistic figure in Nina’s storyline. Though it is never confirmed, the narrative heavily implies he is connected with Louise Hawley’s death. 

As the director of the annual Greyrock reenactment, he is the modern custodian of The Mythologization of the American West, perpetuating the heroic, simplified version of Anton Vargas’s story found in the dime novel. He is protective of this comforting narrative, which gives his community a sense of pride and identity. His initial resistance to Louise Hawley’s manuscript and her complicated new evidence reveals his preference for the established myth over a more ambiguous and challenging truth.

Coll’s character arc is driven by a series of moral crises that force him to confront his own passivity. The incident at the Cabin bar, where he fails to intervene forcefully as Bob Fournier desecrates a wolf carcass, exposes his tendency toward inaction in the face of ugliness. This failure is thrown into sharp relief by the judgment of his sister, Freenie, and his friend, Mira Greyfeather, who challenges his sense of self by saying, “I think I’ve been a bit mistaken about you” (159). These confrontations, combined with the disturbing postcard and mysterious phone calls, begin to unravel his comfortable worldview.

His journey culminates in a moment of deep disorientation when he picks up Nina and Ben. As the rescuer, he believes he is in control of the situation, but he quickly becomes an unwitting character in their chaotic narrative. His final lines in the novel, where he lies to Nina about the cause of a potential illness from the wolf, show him using a fabricated narrative to assert control. This act mirrors the historical myth-making he has dedicated his life to, but it also is a turn toward a more ambiguous moral position, leaving his development unresolved as the story abruptly shifts back to Nina.

Louise “LT” Hawley is a key character who functions primarily through the manuscript Nina discovers. As a character Nina imagines, she is a posthumous guide whose work provides the tools for survival: a map, a historical context, and a sense of purpose. The discovery of her corpse in the stable’s crawl space makes her a literal memento mori, a reminder of the death that surrounds Nina in her new environment. As the author of the manuscript “Sunrise,” however, she is a meta-fictional presence: an inquisitive and empathetic historian whose research into Anton Vargas drives the novel’s deconstruction of Western myths.

In the 2003 timeline, Louise appears as a persistent and cheerful young writer from Denver who seeks out Colin Yard for a tour of Sunrise. In this section, she acts as a catalyst, forcing Coll to confront the inconsistencies in the town’s official history. Her discovery of the Fred Kipley interview tape is the key that unlocks the more truthful, complex narrative of the Greyrock Four. Her authorial notes, found at the end of her manuscript, reveal her own creative and ethical struggles with the story, mirroring the struggles for meaning undertaken by both Nina and Coll. Her unresolved death and the mystery of her presence in Sunrise add another layer to the novel’s exploration of untold stories and the ghosts of history.

Fred Kipley is a member of the Greyrock Four and serves as the story’s most reliable historian. A pragmatic and steady presence, he is a round but mostly static character who acts as a bridge between the myth and the reality of the Old West. In the 1902 narrative, he is the long-serving deputy marshal of Sunrise, a man deeply embedded in his community. His loyalty is torn between his old friend, Anton Vargas, and his desire to protect Preacher Maclean from Vargas’s dramatic quest for atonement.

His most significant role comes via the 1936 interview discovered by Louise Hawley. In this recording, he systematically deconstructs the dime novel’s version of events. He clarifies that the Four were strangers, rather than a seasoned gang; he highlights Sadie Wilkins’s important, and overlooked, intelligence in sending the altered telegram; and he provides intimate, demythologizing portraits of both Vargas and Preacher. As the son of a Shoshone woman who assimilated to survive, Kipley’s personal history offers a grounded counterpoint to the abstract and entitled philosophies of men like John Daisy, adding a layer of personal complexity to the theme of The Ethics of Cultural Repatriation.

Ben Robbins is Nina’s boyfriend and the primary catalyst for her ordeal. He is a subtle antagonist, representing a form of self-absorbed and manipulative masculinity. His romanticized view of the West is a shallow fantasy of escape, which he tries to impose on Nina without regard for her own life or ambitions. He is dismissive of her career, her anxieties, and her family. His behavior escalates from passive aggression to outright emotional cruelty, culminating in him abandoning her on a Nebraska highway. This pattern of control and disregard sets the stage for Nina’s ultimate decision to leave him behind, both metaphorically by jumping from the plane and literally by stealing the truck at the end of the novel.

Sadie is the fourth member of the Greyrock Four. A sharp, capable, and independent woman, she defies the traditional Western damsel-in-distress archetype. It is her quick thinking and knowledge of telegraphy that saves the day at Greyrock, a fact the dime novel largely erases to elevate its male heroes.

John is a flat antagonist in the 1902 timeline. He is a wealthy and powerful Anglo collector of Indigenous artifacts. His self-serving monologue, in which he justifies his ownership of a sacred arrow by claiming “inheritance… is a matter of spirit” (241), makes him a key figure in the novel’s critique of colonial entitlement.

Bob is a flat antagonist in the 2003 timeline who is a cruder, more violent version of John Daisy. His brutal, public desecration of a wolf carcass is an act of meaningless dominance over nature, and his subsequent death from a disease contracted from the animal is a moment of grim, karmic justice.

Freenie is Coll’s pregnant twin sister and his primary foil. Impulsive, confrontational, and morally clear-sighted, she acts as his conscience, refusing to let him retreat into passivity and forcing him to confront the ugliness of the events at the Cabin bar.