Wister, an American writer whose stories helped to establish the cowboy as an archetypical, individualist hero. The book begins: Crested with eagle feathers, bronze and lean, festal in beaded buckskin, he leaned against a tree as he played his pipe: no common member of his tribe; a young chief among the Shoshones, by the haughty set of his head and the scorn of his nose. His face of war and hunting, antique as a Pharaoh's on a tomb, followed the turns of the music he was making, bowed and nodded over it, joined in its ups and downs-but always haughty, in spite of its animation