The Untamed

Published: 1919

Max Brand burst on the scene with this striking novel less than two decades after Wister’s The Virginian and just as Zane Grey was topping the bestseller lists. In those three writers one can trace the evolution of western storytelling from history into myth. Wister’s Wyoming and his cowboy characters were drawn from life, while Grey romanticized the desert Southwest and the heroes and villains he put there. Brand stripped away realism and romance in The Untamed and left pure myth—with even a touch of the supernatural.

The “untamed” in the novel is a trio of beings, only one of them human, a young man Dan Barry. The other two are a black horse named Satan and a wolf-dog named Black Bart. All three of them are feral creatures, each in his way a little more than half wild. Dan was found wandering footloose in the desert by a cattleman, Joseph Cumberland, and a special friendship has grown between Dan and Cumberland’s daughter, Kate.