The Influence of the American West on Bram Stoker’s Dracula

In Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the character who kills the vampire is a Texas frontiersman. Stoker made the avenger a Texan because he imagined the American West as a place where heroic outdoorsmen battled nature and its savage inhabitants. He first made this association in an earlier novel, The Shoulder of Shasta (1895), in which a grizzly hunter on the California frontier rescues a maiden from predators who share certain characteristics with the vampire in Dracula.