The Roaring UP Trail
In 1916 when Zane Grey decided to write his first historical novel he selected the building of the First Transcontinental Railroad because of the stories his old friend and guide, Al Doyle, had told him around many a camp fire. He took his time to plan out a detailed outline of the book he intended to write and the themes he wished to have portrayed. The problem came when he began to tie all of the unlike and unequal passages together, as he had written the book out of sequence. Consequently, the book became much longer than he had anticipated.
So it was, according to Jon Tuska, "a large, diffuse and even at times confusing manuscript he sent to Ripley Hitchcock, his editor at Harper & Bros....(and) as was usual with Ripley Hitchcock given a Zane Grey manuscript, he set about rewriting whole sections, altering the sequence of events and what happens to character". The one example Tuska highlights is: Warren Neale fights with the gambler Durade and brutally kills him. Hitchcock changed the scene and had Durade survive the fight although severely injured and disfigured.
Zane Grey accepted these changes because Zane Grey's ultimate objective was to rise to a higher level of literature and he was sure Hitchcock could help him do that. After-all, Ripley Hitchcock had been Stephen Crane's editor. That's not unlike all of us. We all want to be accepted and admired by our peers, and by those who publicly comment on what we do. But in my view Zane Grey already had something much more important: Zane Grey had the reading public.
After the changes were completed Harpers sent a condensed section of the novel to Blue Book, a prestigious pulp fiction magazine where it appeared under the title, The Roaring U. P. Trail in eight issues (May 1917-Dec. 1917).
Perhaps the critical praise the book received when Harper published it, simply titled, The U. P. Trail soothed over with Grey all of the changes Ripley Hitchcock made. We will never know how it might have been received had no changes been made. Jon Tuska says, "For his part Grey would not revise his view of editorial intervention on his stories until the conflict erupted over the censorship imposed by Harper & Bros. on The Vanishing American. From that point forward everything changed".
Union Pacific was a step up. A person can read for themselves what Zane Grey really intended to say: The end of "beauty, lonesomeness, silence, wilderness...(and on the last page) the Indian's setting sun" because of the construction of this epic railroad.
