The Domestication of the Wild West
The domestication of the wild western frontier is here represented symbolically by the marriage of one of the most iconic figures in the genre of western fiction: the lone lawman. Traditionally, lawmen in the towns sprouting up across the frontier are unmarried—or occasionally widowed—and childless. The job is harsh and can be cruel and is therefore representative of the sturdy character required for the settling of the west. When Marshall Potter arrives back home with a new bride in tow, it signals an epochal change in the tenor of the times and the character of the place.
Demythologizing the West
Part of the overall thematic scheme of how the west was tamed is the inversion of certain stereotypes and expectations which server to de-mythologize concepts about frontier life gained from popular entertainment. The story begins with its hero on a train, not a horse. His bride is neither young nor pretty. Both of these images run directly counter to the firmly ensconced stereotypes already ingrained into the genre. Most unsettling of all is that the story seems to build toward fulfilling the signature event of many such stories: the showdown between lawman and gunslinger. In this case, however, what actually transpires is not just a reversal of expectations, but something close to a farce or outright parody.
Crane's Ironic Worldview
The story is neither farce nor parody, however. Despite some comedic upending of conventions and expectations, ultimately the story is a seriously contemplation of how the culture of the frontier did undergo an unsettling period of transition into domesticity. What seems like farce or parody are events or situations which recur throughout much of Crane’s work. Long before it became the guiding principle of fiction, Crane presented world as seen the lens of irony. Within the context of generic expectations, the opening of the story is so purely ironic that one should actually expect the inevitable showdown at the end to go no differently. The jittery nervousness of Marshall Jack Potter on the train at the beginning of the story is essential because it sets the stage for everything to follow. A man who seems anxious about bringing home a wife to a town where he expects to face a dangerous outlaw turns out to be keyed up at the thought of the town finding out he got married. It is from this reversal of expectations—which is based in the unwritten, but generally adhered to genetic convention that a western lawman never marries and if he does then either he or she is going to die at some point—that the story pursues its themes both of the reality of the taming of the wild frontier and the breaking down of the myth built around that historical fact.
