The popularity of the western cultural genre has waxed and waned over the years but scholars’ fascination with excavating its origins remains steady. Christine Bold's valuable addition to this literature reminds us of the prominent role eastern upper-class white men played not only in shaping the “western,” but in using it to advance their political agendas. Historians have long noted the role that these prominent men, some as members of the Boone and Crockett Club, played in promoting conservation. More recently historians have underscored the elitism that rested at the heart of their environmental politics. Bold pushes the analysis further by charting the ways they also maintained systems of exclusion and privilege through immigration and Indian policy. Though influential, they were not omnipotent. So they took to their pens, creating literary westerns, to garner public support for their goals. She thus marries politics with publications.

Bold focusses on members of the Boone and Crockett Club – the “frontier club” of the title – as the centerpiece of this political and cultural power. Wealthy, Ivy League educated, and unrelievedly white, this exclusive club of hunters included Theodore Roosevelt, George Bird Grinnell, Owen Wister, Silas Weir Mitchell, and Henry Cabot Lodge, among others. Their economic resources, consequent political power, and determination to shape national attitudes through their writing made them influential far beyond their small numbers. What motivated them was fear. They believed that “new” immigrants, African Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South, labor organizers, and other aspects of industrialization and urbanization threatened their positions of privilege. As hunters they wanted to stem the extinction of big game and set aside national parks as recreation areas in the West. As xenophobic, ethnocentric racists they wanted to close the nation's doors to non-Anglos, continue the forced acculturation of Native Americans, and simply ignore African Americans. To help secure support for these goals they created a version of the western genre, Bold argues, which has sustained a vibrant life for over a century even as support for most of their political positions eventually evaporated.

Although a surprising number of Boone and Crockett Clubbers published books and articles, the most famous and influential was Owen Wister. His novel The Virginian consequently looms large in Bold's analysis for it demonstrates how “the ideology of cattle barons became embodied in the quintessential cowboy hero” (12). It secures the privilege of “honorable” killing for the wealthy cattlemen who baldly protected their economic interests while suppressing those of others. It also celebrates the triumph of white masculinity over feminine pacificism and erases the role of African Americans who, in the Johnson County War which served as the inspiration for the story, rescued the beleaguered cattlemen.

Bold goes beyond the texts, however, to reveal the critical linkages that joined elite clubs, in both East and West, with the cattle and publishing industries. Eastern patricians invested in the western open-range cattle business. Through institutions such as the Cheyenne Club they re-created the club culture to promote their social status and economic interests. The latter included fencing off water, jealously guarding their private uses of public lands, and intimidating smaller operators who challenged the barons’ dominance. They resorted to violence and even murder to achieve these ends. Yet through their connections to the publishing world, the cattlemen not only became the heroes of their stories but ultimately prevailed culturally by using “quality” houses and simultaneously demeaning those who produced dime novels and other commercial fare. If the clubmen ultimately lost the range, their version of the western won the cultural war. Dime novels, with their more democratic impulses that challenged elites, disappeared.

A significant portion of the book, however, sheds light on the writings of those who operated outside the frontier club. A vibrant black literary market, for instance, challenged white privilege and reasserted black participation in the West. Most of Bold's examples focus on African American Rough Riders and the Spanish–American War, making the connection to the West a bit tangential. But the larger point remains powerful: blacks were not silenced. Native Americans and proto-feminists also articulated their own visions of the West and insisted on a place for those marginalized by the frontier club. While critiquing assimilation, violence, and other forms of oppression, they championed equality, cultural sovereignty, and independence. If they could not prevail over the master narrative, they remain “too important to ignore” (231).

Based on archival research as well as the rich body of secondary material pertinent to the topic, The Frontier Club adds several new layers of insight into those who produced the “western” and those who, from the beginning, noted its serious limitations. This, too, is a story too important to ignore.