The Train
The Pullman locomotive that brings the marshal and his new bride to town is a symbol of the changing of the west. It represents the future, modernity, technology, industrialization and, most of all, the death of the wild frontier.
The Maroon Shirt
Curiously, the maroon shirt which Scratchy Wilson is wearing when the marshal and his bride bump into him in the street is given extensive description. The reader learns not only its color and the reason for purchase, but it was manufactured “by some Jewish women on the east side of New York.” This level of detail about any object should never go unnoticed and that is especially true when the object is a shirt worn by a gunslinger well past his prime. The shirt is another symbol of the encroachment of domesticated civilization into the formerly wide open and lawless west.
Mrs. Potter
When a character that figures in the title of a story remains relatively mysterious as a result of her personality not being fleshed out, that is another indication of something that may be primarily important to the story as a symbol. The bride who comes to Yellow Sky doesn’t even get a name. In fact, she isn’t even referred to as Mrs. Potter, but instead is either the bride or wife. Lawmen in western literature do not get married at the beginning of a story unless by the end one of them has been widowed. Since that this is not the case, the bride should be considered yet another symbol of the changing times.
Guns
Any self-respecting western has to have guns, right? Guns do appear in this story, but in a way typical of Crane’s love of irony. The expected shootout in the showdown between the law and the bad guy never comes to fruition and in the process of getting to that anti-climax is a scene almost unique in the history of western fiction in which an unarmed marshal causes the gunslinger to actually drop his revolver to the ground while in the process of loading. This peculiar but consistent portrayal of guns as having absolute no bearing on the outcome is, once again, part of the wide tapestry of the story’s theme about the changing ways of the wild west.
Scratchy’s Tracks in the Sand
One of the most iconic generic conventions of the western is that of the hero riding off into sunset once his job is done. Crane completely reverses this concept by ending his story on the image of the bad guy walking away. The symbolism of this reversal of tradition is made clear by the final words of the story:
“His feet made funnel-shaped tracks in the heavy sand.”
In other words, the days of men like Scratchy are over. All that’s really left of him are the footprints he left behind because as far as history is concerned, he may as well be dead.
