Which specific elements in Crane's "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" help to determine its theme, and how?

Stephen Crane's 1898 short story was meant to explore, sometimes humorously, how the American West was changing near the turn of that century. 

• Trains were making it easier for people to travel great distances, and Crane opens the story with the town policeman, Jack Potter, returning to Yellow Sky with the woman he has married earlier that day in San Antonio. She is an Easterner unused to the vast distances of the West and the...

Stephen Crane's 1898 short story was meant to explore, sometimes humorously, how the American West was changing near the turn of that century. 

• Trains were making it easier for people to travel great distances, and Crane opens the story with the town policeman, Jack Potter, returning to Yellow Sky with the woman he has married earlier that day in San Antonio. She is an Easterner unused to the vast distances of the West and the unique pressures on her husband in his prominent role in Yellow Sky. So, the initial setting of the story, the train, illustrates how trains were bringing Easterners and Westerners together.


• The fact that the story's protagonist is a lawman with enemies in a Western town is a familiar trope. Potter really has two "enemies:" the town, to whom he will have to answer for his choice in marrying an Easterner without their "permission;" and Scratchy, his "ancient enemy" and a living artifact of the Old West.


• The fact that Scratchy walks away from his "showdown" with Jack Potter—who is described as a "city policeman," and not a sheriff—suggests that civilization and modern thinking have reached West Texas.