"The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" is a short story drawing on elements from Western fiction. While much of Crane's other fiction fits within the genres of naturalism or realism, this story is more of a Western.
In Westerns, the plot often revolves around a conflict between the western frontier and eastern civilization. This is a notable tension in the story. In the first part, Jack Potter brings the east with him back west, in the form of new clothes, a bride, and plans for a new domestic lifestyle. Another common feature of Westerns is a setting that feels still, sandy, and eerily quiet. After the first part, which takes place entirely aboard the train, the narrator develops Yellow Sky as a sleepy, silent place whose social center is a saloon and that is only shaken up when Scratchy Wilson has had too much to drink. The contrast between this character—a gunslinging troublemaker—and Potter—a mild, reliable marshal—also reinforces the story's Western flair.
As the reader begins to realize that the story will culminate in a standoff between these two men, the tension rises amidst Yellow Sky's stillness. The image of the two men facing one another in silence when the confrontation finally comes in the fourth part draws on yet another Western motif.
The two men faced each other at a distance of three paces. He of the revolver smiled with a new and quiet ferocity.
However, "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" diverges from the typical Western storyline in a notable way: the gunfight never exists as anything more than a threat. Scratchy Wilson fires shots as he prowls around the town in the third part, but in the fourth part, no shots are fired between gunslinger and marshal. Potter doesn't even have a gun with him, and is therefore unable to participate in the Western ritual. He has replaced his gun with a wife and the hopes of building a new, domestic life with her.
In the final paragraph, Crane pushes the conflict between frontier and civilization to the utmost extent, a move that necessitates subverting the expectations carried by the genre. Potter's lack of the necessary tool for participating in the confrontation in the expected way bewilders Scratchy Wilson. He is defeated when he realizes that his chosen adversary has chosen a different life and in a way made himself untouchable.
The story's very last sentence describes the "funnel-shaped tracks" Scratchy Wilson's feet make in "the heavy sand" as he goes away. He has been vanquished by his chosen adversary's rejection of the rituals that once defined their common ground—rituals that also define the Western genre. While many of the story's features reinforce its Western atmosphere, the ending suggests that urban development and the encroachment of the eastern lifestyle are eradicating conditions that shape the genre. The narrator compares Scratchy Wilson to "a creature allowed a glimpse at another world," a world without room for the only mode of life familiar to him.
