The story's protagonist is a Texas marshal named Jack Potter, who is returning to the town of Yellow Sky with his eastern bride.
Potter's nemesis, the gunslinger Scratchy Wilson, drunkenly plans to accost the sheriff after he disembarks the train, but he changes his mind upon seeing the unarmed man with his bride.
Stephen Crane was an American author born on November 1, 1871, in Newark, New Jersey, who died on June 5, 1900, from tuberculosis.
According to Encyclopædia Britannica, "He is known for being a novelist, poet, and short-story writer, best known for his novels Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and the short stories 'The Open Boat', 'The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky', and 'The Blue Hotel'".
The short story opens in a parlor car of a train traveling westward from San Antonio towards a late-nineteenth-century Texas town named Yellow Sky.
[5] In the fourth paragraph a young man appears in the doorway of the saloon and says "Scratchy Wilson's drunk, and has turned loose with both hands".
The barkeeper answers his questions by stating "You see, this here Scratchy Wilson is a wonder with a gun—a perfect wonder; and when he goes on the war trail, we hunt our holes—naturally.
"A man in a maroon-colored flannel shirt"[8] and childlike red and gold boots are walking up the main street of Yellow Sky carrying a revolver.
The short story "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" is written to show the vast incline of society for the West.
We also get back stories of certain things that only an omnipotent narrator could know, "...Maroon-colored flannel shirt, which had been purchased for purpose of decoration, and made principally by some Jewish woman on the east side of New York".
"[30] The theme of "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" is "the dying of the sentimentalized West with the encroachment of the lifestyle of the civilized East".
He wears clothing from "some Jewish woman on the East Side of New York" and boots that were "beloved in winter by little sledding boys".
The story takes place in three main locations in the late 1800s: the train, the Weary Gentleman saloon, and outside Sheriff Jack Potter's house.
[clarification needed] In the passenger-car with its "sea-green figured velvet",[34] a waiter, like a "pilot,"[35] is "steering [Potter and his bride] through their meal".
[36] Contemplating the best way to sneak into Yellow Sky undetected, Potter envisions himself as a boat, "a plains-craft"[37] – to use a phrase invented by Crane.
[39] Confronted with the stormy Scratchy, the bride becomes a "drowning woman"[40] and Potter, despite attempts to maintain his course of direction, is "stiffening and steadying"[41] while "a vision of the Pullman floated"[42] in his mind as a symbol of his new condition.
After Scratchy reluctantly accepts the end of the childlike drama that he and the marshal have repeatedly enacted in the past, he picks up his "starboard revolver",[43] "his throat [working] like a pump"[44] of a steamboat, and drifts away, his feet creating the "funnel-shaped tracks"[45] that form the wake of a boat symbolizing the funeral wake commemorating the passing of the frontier.