Charles "Buffalo" Jones

And yet, by 1922, when the novel was first serialized, Grey had written sixteen Westerns, and already twelve of these had been made into movies, beginning in 1918 with Samuel Goldwyn's six-reel version of The Border of the Legion. Which is to say: Marian Warner's "impressions of the West" are, in the plot's historical moment, impressions most likely derived from Grey. This irony extends somewhat further: while the cinema, -370- like jazz, can typify the "speed-mad, excitement-mad, fad-mad, dressmad" decadence of the East in The Call of the Canyon, Grey himself was introduced to the far West, in New York in 1907, when he saw the films of Yellowstone produced by "Buffalo" Jones. He then accompanied Jones on a trip to Arizona, recounted in The Last of the Plainsmen (1908), during which he himself served as cameraman. The Call of the Canyon, for all its romantic antimodernism, situates itself within this modern visual culture, trying to share in what Griffith called the "universal language" of moving pictures. Appearing serially in the Ladies' Home Journal (1921-22), in the midst of full-page ads for Paramount Studios and articles on Griffith's latest success (Way Down East), the novel tries to teach "modern woman" the Western lesson of antimodernity through the image alone, restricting the meaning of the West to the "visual." It is "mere heights and depths, mere rock walls and pine trees, and rushing water" — these mere sights — that transform the "modern young woman of materialistic mind" into an "American woman," dedicated to a life in the home ...»