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Gary Cooper made the words famous, but legend has it that Owen Wister actually heard those words spoken by Medicine Bow, Wyoming's deputy sheriff (in response to another poker player who called him an S.O.B.).  In Wister's best known book, The Virginian, Horseman of the Plains, the lead-up is the same and it goes like this:

The Virginian's pistol came out, and his hand lay on the table, holding it unaimed. And with a voice as gentle as ever, the voice that sounded almost like a caress, but drawling a very little more than usual, so that there was almost a space between each word, he issued his orders to the man Trampas:

"When you call me that, smile!"

And he looked at Trampas across the table. Yes, the voice was gentle. But in my ears it seemed as if somewhere the bell of death was ringing; and silence, like a stroke, fell on the large room.

Wister was born in 1860 in Philadelphia.  As a young man, he went West for his health, documenting his experiences in a series of diaries.  With those diaries at hand, he wrote The Virginian in 1902.

The Virginian is the story of a quiet hero, "a courageous loner who follows his private code of honor while prevailing over the forces of evil."

In Owen Wister Out West, Owen Wister's daughter captures the essence of the historical impact of The Virginian:

  . . . For the first time, a cowboy was a gentleman and a hero, but nobody realized then that the book was the master design on which thousands of Westerns would be modeled.  Its hero was the first cowboy to capture the public's imagination, and hundreds of young girls fell in love with him . . . besides being handsome, he was humorous and human . . . The Virginian himself is the progenitor of the cowboy as folk figure.  Because of him, little boys wear ten-gallon hats and carry toy pistols.  This one novel set the tradition of the West permanently.   We still have Western stories, Western movies, and Western radio and television drama in which the cowboy hero defends justice and his girl's honor and shoots it out with the villain . . . It was written as fiction but has become history . . .

The novel was made into at least four movies and a television series. Before the first silent film was made, it was performed in theatres. Dusty Farnum (pictured above) starred in the play for many years and went on to star in the first film version.

Wister dedicated his Western masterpiece to his friend Teddy Roosevelt and some later editions were illustrated by Roosevelt's friend, Frederic Remington.

In Wister's introduction to The Virginian, he gives a taste of the bittersweet pleasure his book will bring, making the reader long for "good old days" even before the book begins:

What is become of the horseman, the cowpuncher, the last romantic figure upon our soil? For he was romantic. Whatever he did, he did with his might. The bread that he earned was earned hard, the wages that he squandered were squandered hard,--half a year's pay sometimes gone in a night,--"blown in," as he expressed it, or "blowed in," to be perfectly accurate. Well, he will be here among us always, invisible, waiting his chance to live and play as he would like. His wild kind has been among us always, since the beginning: a young man with his temptations, a hero without wings.

The cowpuncher's ungoverned hours did not unman him. If he gave his word, he kept it; Wall Street would have found him behind the times. Nor did he talk lewdly to women; Newport would have thought him old-fashioned. He and his brief epoch make a complete picture, for in themselves they were as complete as the pioneers of the land or the explorers of the sea. A transition has followed the horseman of the plains; a shapeless state, a condition of men and manners as unlovely as is that moment in the year when winter is gone and spring not come, and the face of Nature is ugly. I shall not dwell upon it here. Those who have seen it know well what I mean. Such transition was inevitable. Let us give thanks that it is but a transition, and not a finality.