Sunrise

The chapter opens with Anton Vargas confronted by his own legend when a young fan presents him with memorabilia, including a copy of the dime novel An Incident at Greyrock. This interaction drives the idea that the Greyrock dime novel is a distorted, commercialized version of history. The fan’s collection transforms Vargas’s lived experience into a series of disconnected, heroic artifacts. The narrative immediately complicates this simplified persona through the young searcher Dillon, who observes that the real Vargas is “shorter. Darker, too” (93) than his dime-novel counterpart. This physical discrepancy between the man and the myth signals a deeper narrative project. The subsequent flashback to the Greyrock siege provides the unvarnished reality, replacing the novel’s choreographed heroism with a scene of chaotic, desperate survival. In the revisionist account, Vargas is an inexperienced youth who is shot by a bandit the more seasoned “heroes” overlooked. His famous shot is an accidental volley that only removes his attacker’s ear. This sharp contrast between the historical event and its popular retelling reveals The Mythologization of the American West, demonstrating how the complex, often brutal realities of frontier violence were sanitized and reshaped into sellable entertainment that affirmed a romanticized national narrative.

The introduction of Doctor Thomas Maclean, or “Preacher,” further deconstructs the archetypes of the dime novel Western. Resisting the trope of the benevolent physician, he first appears as an angry heckler at a medicine show, a man of science railing against charlatanism. His defining traits are a volatile mix of pragmatic compassion and brutal efficiency. He saves Vargas’s life by draining a horrific abscess in a public saloon, but his methods are unceremonious and driven by necessity. This complexity culminates in the aftermath of the Greyrock siege, where he matter-of-factly reattaches the captured bandit’s ear. This act is one of grim, transactional logic; he uses medical skill as leverage for information, offering it as a fair exchange for the names of wanted men. Preacher’s character resists easy categorization, embodying a frontier morality shaped by constant exposure to violence and death rather than abstract ideals of good and evil. His actions suggest a man for whom survival and tangible outcomes have superseded conventional ethics, a worldview that lays the groundwork for the political radicalism hinted at in Dillon’s mention of “bad business up at Fort Searles” (94). His distrust of false authority, whether a snake-oil salesman or the government, is established early as a core personality trait.

The narrative uses the physical landscape to underscore the violent history layered upon the American West, deepening the theme of its mythologization. At John Daisy’s estate, Vargas discovers an “old buffalo jump” (87), a site of ancient Indigenous hunting rituals that Daisy’s workers have repurposed as a stone quarry for his grand house. This detail physically grounds the narrative in a history of cultural erasure and appropriation, where a place of deep significance is literally dismantled to build a monument to colonial wealth. John Daisy’s collection of Indigenous relics, displayed in his library, directly interrogates the colonialist impulse to possess and categorize other cultures. Vargas finds “arrowheads, buffalo bones, scrapers, the tattered edges of leather or clothing” (87) arranged in shadow boxes and on pedestals. This act of curation strips the objects of their cultural and practical meaning, transforming them into aesthetic curiosities for a wealthy Anglo collector. The display is a form of symbolic violence, asserting dominance by treating the material culture of Indigenous peoples as a finite, conquerable history to be owned and exhibited. This scene introduces The Ethics of Cultural Repatriation, questioning the right of an individual like Daisy to hoard artifacts that are the heritage of a living culture. The collection, like the house built from the buffalo jump, illustrates how westward expansion involved the systematic appropriation and decontextualization of Indigenous identity, reframing cultural legacy as private property.

The chapter’s nested structure, which uses the 1902 story to contain an extended flashback to 1878, is a formal device for exploring memory and the construction of identity. By presenting the terminally ill, world-weary Vargas first, the narrative ensures that the reader encounters the origin of his legend with a sense of dramatic irony. The reader witnesses the birth of a hero already knowing the vulnerable man he will become. This dual timeline juxtaposes endings with beginnings, legacy with the raw experience that created it. While the dime novel offers a simplistic, external account of his life, Vargas’s quiet return to Sunrise provides access to an internal, symbolic reality, guiding him toward a reckoning that is far more personal than his public reputation suggests.