by David Daly and Joel Persky

Journal of the West, April 1990, pp. 12-64.

Introduction

"This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."‹Journalist speaking in John Ford's film "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (1962)

Since the release in 1903 of The Great Train Robbery thousands of motion picture and television Westerns have been produced in the United States. They are among the most abundant yet complex of all American film genres. Through continual updating, reworking, and reevaluation in almost every form of communication, cinematic and otherwise, the Western has evolved into one of our most enduring and powerful foundation myths.

No period from America's past has been documented in such minute detail and in such profusion. Thanks to the movies and television we believe we know exactly what the Old West looked like, even felt like. That period in American history has been captured with a clarity and completeness unequaled in any other area of filmmalcing.

Films tell us very little (and then often inaccurately) about the political, military, and social events or the famous and infamous people that supposedly embodied a particular age. It has become the practice of the movies to shape and adapt such events and people to make them conform to the myth, the romantic ideal, or the legend. Myth and legend tell us that the West was the natural environment of larger-than-life characters. Movies have endorsed this myth, portraying a string of visionary individuals

Page 13

whose personal bravery and spirit shaped the nation's destiny. But to their credit, movie Westerns have also presented a relatively authentic picture of the West as a place that was populated by very ordinary people whose collective presence was the real determinant d that development.

Westerns have shown little interest in dealing with major historical milestones, Instead, they have seemingly concentrated on the romanticization of a few petty criminals and the glorification of certain "heroes." Seldom have the movies made more than a token effort to give a true portrait of a Western hero or heroine, who were often as much villainous as heroic. For the movies. image and beauty ate all important. This can be seen by comparing the generally unattractive physical appearance of many of the real people upon which Hollywood has focused its attention with the glamorized screen versions.

It is with the anonymous plain folk of the West‹the farmer, the rancher, the sold'ier, the banker, the schoolteacher, the storekeeper, the preacher, the cowboy, and their families‹that reality has best been served by movie Westerns. The details of their lives have been so accurately documented on the screen that many of these films become true visions of the past.

The Western, though, has never been an exclusively American phenomenon. Right from the beginning, it has found popular acceptance all over the world, so much so that hundreds/of them have been produced by several countries well outside the United States. The international popularity of the Western is testimony to the near universality of the myths those films reflect. It is perhaps the power of those myths that accounts for their popularity. After half a century, that popularity only began to wane in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Perhaps it is as Thomas Schatz suggested in his essay "The Western," that the movie Western is an historical narrative "which served ideologically to enable the audience (i.e., the public) to negotiate a transition from its rural agrarian past and into its urban-industrial (and post industrial) age."1 Once that passage was made, audiences no longer felt quite as drawn to the Western.

Other countries have certainly had their own influential myths, legends, and heroes: Japan's samurai, England's King Arthur, Spain's El Cid are only a few of the more powerful. None of them though has been expounded in such detail or quite so widely known and understood as the Western heroes.

Although the cinema did not invent the cowboy and all the attendant myths associated with him, the character has certainly entered the world's imagination. This was due in part to Hollywood's ability to dominate the global film market. The American film industry's huge volume of production, coupled with the resultant economic power, permitted the Western to be disseminated in literally thousands of variations and seen in virtually every country around the world.

The Western has certainly not been confined only to the cinema. By the end of the nineteenth century, a large amount of material about the West had been produced. A profusion of paintings, drawings, sculpture, photographs, books of fiction, of history and travel, all attested to its growing fascination. It was upon this vast resource that early films drew their inspiration, direction, and raw material.

Although he was not the first to write a novel with a Western theme, James Fenimore Cooper was undoubtedly among the most influential chroniclers of the West in the first half of the nineteenth century. His series of Leatherstocking Tales, beginning with The Pioneers in 1823, defined and elaborated what was to become a major and dominant theme, that of "the frontier."

Some critics have seen Cooper's exploration of this theme as the essential core of the Western. In The Six-Gun Mvstique, John Cawelti characterizes the genre as "set at a certain moment in the development of American civilization, namely the point when savagery and lawlessness are in decline before the advancing wave of law and order, but are still strong enough to pose a local and momentarily significant challenge."2 This view was clearly influenced by Frederick lackson Turner, one of the most respected historians of the West. Turner argued that the particular character of American society could perhaps be explained by the existence of the frontier, which he defined as the point at which savagery meets civilization.3

From the 1820s onward, Cooper's novels and stories were often adapted for the stage. His work did a great deal to popularize the frontier as subject matter suitable for entertainment. It was one of Cooper's imitators, however, who introduced another element to Western drama. In 1837 Robert Montgomery Bird, inspired and intrigued by Cooper's stories and point of view, published a novel called Nick of the Woods. Bird's hero was Nathan Slaughter, also known as "the Jibbenainosay." Slaughter, like Cooper's Natty Bumppo character, lives among both the Whites and the Indians. But Slaughter is an Indian-hater, devoting a great amount of his time and energy to killing them. The Indians in Bird's novel are the absolute incarnation of evil, the total and complete opposite of Cooper's noble savage. Bird's writing style and subject matter caught the public's imagination and was a sensation.

In 1838, Louisa Medina Hamblin adapted Bird's novel to the stage as The Jibbenainosav. It became one of the most successful American melodramas of its day, and it remained popular with audiences for many years. The play's emphasis on fast-paced action, last-minute rescues, and exciting battles also set the tone for a generation of Western plays to come. It also helped to firmly establish the concept of the Indian dichotomy in the Western‹ noble savage or bloodthirsty redskin.

Beginning in 1860 (with the publication of Anne Stephens' Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter), it was the dime novel that most entrenched the Western hero in the public's imagination. In the last third of the nineteenth century, hundreds of these escapist potboiler adventure books, turned out by publishers such as Beadle and Adams, glorified and manufactured the exploits of

Page 14

such people as the frontiersman, the scout, the cowboy, the outlaw, the eccentric sidekick, and the villainous Indian. In the dime novel we can find the roots of the elemental conflict between goodness and evil, as well as the insistent movement towards exciting action and adventure that would later figure so strongly in movie Westerns. As these stories continued to be adapted to the theatre they would in turn become the inspirations for many movies.

The dime novel had its origins largely in the imagination of generally second-rate fiction writers. Yet no matter how far-fetched the stories, there was often a connection, although sometimes tenuous, with reality. Many of the heroes of the dime novels, such as Jesse James, Calamity Jane' and Buffalo Bill, did actually exist, even if their real lives fell far short of the exploits attributed to them in the writers' purple prose. Other characters, like Deadwood Dick, were purely fictional.

Hardcover Western novels and romances by more skilled writers began to appear in the 1880s, handled by more mainstream publishers such as Lippincott. These books were much better written than the dime novels. Many of them enjoyed respectable sales and a few were even bestsellers by the standards of the day. They were also to provide inspiration to later generations of serious Western storytellers. Many were adapted to the stage, adding sentimentality and romanticism to the exciting action elements already in plxe. At approximately this time, the public was becoming aware of the importance of the discovery of minerals and mining in the West. Fiction writers quickly incorporated the raucous mining camps into their settings. Thus was also added kind-hearted prostitutes and chivalrous badmen (perhaps as proof that goodness existed in the West) to the mix of frontier characters.

Thomas Carlyle, the nineteenth-century historian, is widely quoted as saying that history is merely the biography of great men. Many of the important and influential people '~ the history of the West, such as Buffalo Bill and General Custer, wrote or cooperated in the publication of their memoirs. Apparently, many were only too willing to take on the mantle of "greatness," since some are generally believed to have greatly embellished and exaggerated their roles in determining and shaping history. Biographies of Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, and Davy Crockett played an important part in popularizing a view of the West as a land populated by wildly heroic characters. Some of this material is indistinguishable from fiction.

John Cawelti's description of the function of the hero in the Western seems to apply to the intentions of many of the biographers and their subjects as they concocted their "truths."

"The situation must involve a hero who possesses some of the urge towards violence as well as the skills, heroism and personal honor ascribed to the wilderness way of life, and it must place the hero in a position where he becomes involved with or committed to the agents and values of civilization."4

The legitimate theatre continued to make significant contributions to the growing myths, misconceptions. and legends of the West. Stage melodramas like Frank Hitchcock Murdoch's play, Davy Crockett or, Be Sure You're Right, Then Go Ahead, first produced in 1872, found widespread success and continued popularity over the next 25 years. Prolific writer and entrepreneur Ned Buntline brought Buffalo Bill Cody to New York City in 1872 to star in his play The Scouts of the Prairie. The production proved to be a big success and served as Cody's introduction to the world of show business. The Great Train Robberv had been a play before it was filmed in 1903 and had found its place in history. William S. Hart, one of the screen's first Western stars, had appeared in 1905 in the stage play The Squnw Man. In 1914 it became the basis for one of the first feature-length Western films. In 1907 Hart was also in the stage version of Owen Wister's The Virginian, later made into a motion picture as well. David Belasco's popular 1905 stage production of Girl of rhe Golden West was filmed by Cecil B. DeMille in 1915. It was so successful that it would be remade three more times, the most popular being the 1938 MGM version starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, and it even became the inspiration for a Puccini opera.

Nineteenth-century theatre had evolved into an art form often characterized by complicated lighting effects, skillful set design, and plenty of visual spectacle. Plays set in the West sometimes included large-scale action Sequences, including impressive set-pieces like gunfights, fires, train crashes, and even on-stage horsemanship. This kind of visual excitement was what the movie Western would be able to provide in so much more detail.

William Frederick "Bufhlo Bill" Cody began his show business career on the stage. His Wild West show was a circus-type entertainment which drew on many aspects of Western life and legend. It was a combination of dime novel and stage spectacle. The show celebrated the cowboy's riding, roping, and shooting skills as well as parading real Indians, buffalo, and Western artifacts before the public. The show staged mini-narratives, such as an Indian attack on the Deadwood Stage and gunfights between heroes and villains. This kind of production, along with the growing popularity of rodeos, had by the end of the century helped firmly establish the West as a form of entertainment.

Until the last third of the nineteenth century, most paintings of the West attempted to produce an accurate record of the landscape and its inhabitants. The capability of mass reproduction and the success of popular picture magazines, such es Harper's Weekly (founded in 1857), fed the growing public demand for exciting scenes of action and adventure. The work of artists like Frederic Remington (1861-1909) and Charles Russell (1864-1926) helped reinforce the tendency in popular literature and drama to make the West synonymous with excitement.

Illustrators like Theodor R. Davis (1840-1910) provided the new mass circulation magazines with an impressive gallery of Civil War images. Davis, Remington, and others

Page 14

created memorable images of the West. which depicted either real events or "impressions" of historical events. They all became part of the Western myth as it was constructed for the public. A good example of this mythmaking tendency is the artistic treatment of Custer's Last Stand. Several paintings were made of this significant event in American military history. Many of them were mass reproduced. Thousands of lithographic copies of Cassily Adams' dramatic painting of the battle were distributed and hung on walls all over the country. Remington's version, entitled "The Last Stand," appeared in Harper's Weekly in 1891. In this depiction, the central figure in the middle of the besieged cavalrymen is not Custer, but a battered old Indian fighter. What this serves to do is turn defeat into heroism, suggesting the redeeming myth of bravery and sacrifice, supposedly an endemic character trait of Western pioneers. Director John Ford, who has often been quoted as saying he liked to get a Remington look" into his movies, dealt directly with this particular myth-making process in Fort Apache ( 1948).

Andre Bazin, the noted film critic and theorist. said: "The Western is the only genre whose origins are almost identical with those of the cinema itself.... "5 So, by the time of the coming of the cinema, there already existed a repertoire of Western forms and formats, images, and ideas suitable for the movies. By 1900 there was a whole gallery of types and situations upon which motion picture narratives could draw for their heroic adventures.

Given the cinema's commercial and ideological imperatives, it is no surprise then that the cinematic Western's narrative structure and motifs are derived less from any real world than from the economic and artistic determination of Hollywood to entertain and make a profit rather than accurately inform. It was perhaps inevitable then that historical reality would yield to a romanticized and formulaic treatment in the movies.

Strictly speaking, The Great Train Robbery, copyrighted in December of 1903, was not the first motion picture to have a Western theme. According to copyright records in the Library of Congress, from 1894 onwards Thomas Edison produced a considerable amount of documentary footage showing scenes of Western life. Some of

Page16

this material, made for the Kinetoscope, featured Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West. There were shots of Indians, of cowboys, and scenic views of the West. Two 1898 Edison films in the Museum of Modern Art's collection (Poker at Dawson City and Cripple Creek Bar-room), even have minimal narrative elements. American Mutoscope and Biograph Company's production of Kit Carson (copyrighted in September 1903) may even predate Edison's The Great Train Robbery by three months.

The Western can easily be seen as a form of cultural expression. Its characteristic themes and references are the product of a long history in which the actions of real people were transformed and cod)fied by writers, artists, and businessmen into a series of myths with roots deep in American society. So, from wood carvings, Indian captivity tales, colonial folk music, and ballads, to pulp and "respectable" fiction and even cigarette advertising, the Western has been in a constant state of creation and recreation.

Audiences are easily able to accept a range of films treating the same historical figures and events differently. Each telling creates its own narrative context and each is specific to the political and ideological climate of.the times in which it was made. Each film found its plausibility and terms of reference in the audience's previous experiences with the gcnre.

The Western is both historically and geographically specific. Many critics have pointed out that its material is drawn from a brief period of the winning and settling of the American frontier: "Hollywood's West has typically been from about 1865 to 1890 or so.... Within its brief span we can count a number of frontiers in the sudden rush of mining camps, the building of the railways, the Indian wars, the cattle drives, the coming of the farmer. Together with the last days of the Civil War and the exploits of the badmen, here is the raw material of the Western."6

The movies tell us (as did the popular Western novels which preceded them) that the West lasted only about 25 years. But, if this is true, those 25 years were certainly crammed with the most heroic, most romanticized and, given the popularity of Western novels and movies, the most dramatized period in American history. These years included the end of the Civil War, the coming of the gunfighters, the outlaws, the gamblers, the lawmen, the farmers, the Indian wars, the railroad, and, of course, the cowboy.

The Civil War then defines the beginning of the "classic" historical era that Westerns portray. Those next 25 years, until the "official" end of the frontier, were historically important for America. It was the time of growing industrialization and technological development, increasing urbanization, and massive foreign immigration. It was also a time of racism and of political and economic corruption. Wlth the exception of war movies and certain gangster films, Wk sterns are tied more closely to social and historical reality than almost any other genre.7

Very few Westerns deal with the Civil War itself. The war is central only in a few (like They Died With Their Boots On -1941, The Horse Soldiers -1959, and Major Dundee -1964). and most are uninterested in articulating the issues which caused the War. Instead, American popular culture chose to dwell on only one aspect of that period ‹ the conquest of the Western plains. It is here that the mythology of the West was nurtured.

But in truth, the West of the legendary cowboy and gunslinger bears little resemblance to the barren, lonely wilderness of the plains. The "heroes" of the real West were farmers and cattle drovers. The "villains" weren't necessarily tbe quick-drawing outlaws, unscrupulous land barons, and crooked bankers. The real adversaries were loneliness, isolation, and the elements.

The view that the movie Western has misrepresented the West has been chalienged by few historians or critics. One who did attanpt to argue for their historical veracity, though, was French critic lean-Louis Rieupeyrout. His attempt to defend Hollywood's vision was in hope that the proof of authenticity would change the condescending attitudes toward Westerns which prevailed at the time. Unfortunately, by accepting newspaper accounts, folklore, and secondhand sources as factual history, Rieupeyrout failed to convince many that the cinematic West was a truthful reconstruction of reality.8

In his study of the gangster film, Robert Warshow pointed out that every genre gradually generates its own distinct reality, whether historically accurate or not. "It is only in the ultimate sense that the type appeals to the audience's experience of reality. Much more immediately, it appeals to the previous experience of the type itself; it creates its own ficld of reference."9

One way of confronting the question of the historical accuracy of Westerns is to ask why this short period of history is capable of sustaining such continuing interest over so long a period. The conditions necessary for survival in the West provided rich imagery for a tension that is basic to Amenca's view of-itself. This tension is the conflicting ideals of unrestrained individualism versus civilization and community values. It is represented in the opposing views of the West as either a desert or a garden. This dichotomy was suggested in nineteenth-century economic geography by Henry Nash Smith in his book, Virgin Land. 10

In Horizons West, Jim Kitses sets out a series of "oppositions" which he claims to be operating in the ideology of the Western. Fundarnental is the clash between wilderness and civilization. From this he derives a series of structuring tensions: between the individual and the community, freedom and restriction, integrity and compromise, nature and culture, agrarianism and industrialism, West and East." This is echoed by Thomas Schatz. "These differences may be manifested in a variety of conflicts or

Page 17

opposition: America versus Europe, garden versus desert. social order versus anarchy, town versus wilderness, cowboy versus Indian, ranchers versus farmers, righteous girl versus dancehall girl, and so on."2

A second explanation is that within the narrow geographical boundaries of the West (defined by Phillip French in his book Westerns as "west of the Mississippi. south of the 49th Parallel and north of the Rio Grande'')13 were assembled an interesting cross-section of society, representing a range of economic and social interests in conflict. These individuals were involved in a variety of activities which easily lent themselves to the kind of stories that could illuminate the underlying interplay of historical forces.

Some critics see the popularity of Westerns as linked to America's continual problem of defining its national identity,14 while others attempt to link different phases of Western film production to changes in economic and ideological conditions,15 or even to particular political leaders in power. 16

Any suggestion that the Western is specific to American culture and history will need to address the genre's almost universal appeal and its production in several different foreign countries. Between 1965 and 1975 a number of successful movies were made in Germany, Italy, and Spain. Many critics point out that Westward movement is significant in many cultures. Concepts about "The West" have been an integral part of Western civilization since classical times. Therefore, America's appeal to older European nations is perhaps not unusual.17

Many attempts have been made to analyze the themes and parameters of the Western genre by examining its formal history. Critic and historian Alan Lovell suggests four basic elements:

1. a structure drawn from nineteenth-century popular melodramatic literature: a virtuous hero in conflict with a wicked villain who menaces a virginal heroine;

2. an action story, composed of violence, chases and scenes appropriate to a place like the American West in the nineteenth century;

3. elements of the westward migration and the opening of the frontier; and

4. the revenge structure. 18

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It is Lovell's contention that the history of the Western can be understood by investigating how these elements were worked into its formal structure. Using his criteria, My Darling Clementine (1946) becomes the classic example of the genre. The story is centered around the revenge theme, itself a part of the larger theme of civilizing the West. The hero's need for revenge is tempered by the influence of heroine, a schoolteacher from the East, and becomes part of the establishment of law and order for the town.

A number of critics and historians have attempted to classify the stories which serve as the basis of the Western genre. Unfortunately, none of their attempts can account for all plots. In A Pictorial History of the Western Film, William K. Everson separates themes from plots. Such things as "the wagon train or the building of the railroad," he calls a theme. He then identifies 12 different plot variations:

1. The hero cleans up a "Sin Town" dominated by an evil villain or force.

2. The greedy cattle baron building an empire.

3. Settlers forced off their land for the water rights.

4. Settlers forced off their land because of gold or other mineral deposits.

5. Settlers forced off their land because the railroad is coming through.

6. A lawman poses as an outlaw to join the gang in order to defeat it from within.

7. "Reconstruction" story where carpetbaggers and/or outlaws terrorize the territory after the Civil War.

8. Someone (usually a crooked Indian agent) is stirring up the Indians.

9. The hero has been framed and needs to prove his innocence and clear his name.

10. Family feuds and range wars, often between sheepmen and cattlemen.

11. The problems involved with running a stage or freight line, or getting a contract to supply horses to the Army.

12. The hero's determined search for the person who killed a member of his family. 19

It is clear that Everson sees individuals in Westerns as either good or bad. His system focuses on villainy as the motivation for all plots. It may be true for those cheaply made films called B-Westerns, but his 12 plotlines do not account for enough possibilities. For example, the classic, Ox Bow Incident ( 1943), would not fit easily into Everson's scheme.

In The American West in Film, John Tuska suggests that there are seven basic narratives:

1. The Pioneer Achievement Story‹such as the building of the railroads and the rise of cattle empires.

2. Picaresque Wanderers and Searchers‹involving someone looking for something, often related to the revenge element.

3. The Ranch Story/Town Western‹such conflicts as sheepman vs. cattleman.

4. The Justice/Revenge Theme.

5. The Indian Story.

6. The Outlaw Story.

7. The Law Man Story.20

Tuska then concludes that all seven plot types can actually be reduced to the single basic idea that "the villain must be killed or otherwise somehow removed from the community before 'the good life'‹as defined by the formula‹becomes possible. "21 But there are still a number of important films that will not fit this mold.

Beginning in the late 1960s with the introduction and popularity of film theories like semiology and structuralism, Henry Nash Smith's seminal study of the myth of the American West in The Virgin Land spurred continuing interest and reassessment of the Western. In Signs and Meaning in thc Cinema, Peter Wollen discusses Western filmmaking as a form of contemporary mythmaking. Wollen's conception of mythology was based upon the ideas of influential anthropologist Claude LeviStrauss, the founding father of contemporary structuralist theory. In Srructural Anthropology and other works, Levi-Strauss built upon the ideas of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure who had earlier proposed a theory of "semiology," a science which might study "the life of signs within a Society."22

In Horizans West, Jim Kitses' view of myth was strongly influenced by that of critic and historian Northrop Frye, whose influential Anatomy of Criticism took a more literary direction Frye defined myth in terms of narrative content rather than structure or function.23 Kitses writes that "myth has to do with the activity of the gods and as such the Western has no myth."24 But the Western, he says, does "incorporate elements of displaced (or corrupted) myth on a scale that can render them considerably more prominent than in most art." This is made possible due to the Western's varied inher,itance from the popular literary fonns in which frontier history was first reworked.25

In The Six-Gun Mystique, John Cawelti discussed the Western as form of "social and cultural ritual, "26 defining ritual as "a means of affirming certain basic cultural values, resolving tensions and establishing a sense of community between present and past."27 Cawelti chose to avoid the issue of myth altogether. "For Frye myths are universal patterns of action," Cawelti stated, and he argued that as such they cannot exist within a formula whose imagery and ideology are specific to a given historical context 28

For film theorist and philosopher Andre Bazin. myth is the idealization of historical reality. Between history and cinema a process of mythologizing has taken place. "Those formal attributes by which one normally recognizes the western are simply signs or symbols of its profound reality, namely the myth. The western was born of an encounter between a mythology and a means of

Page 19

expression. . . ."29 The particular myth that Bazin elaborates is the "great epic Manicheism which sets the forces of evil over against the knights of the true cause" at the center of which is the woman posed as representative of good.30 .

But sociologist Will Wright, in Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western. suggested the history of the American West does indeed supply the Western with appropriate material for the production of myth. This it does in two main ways, he says. First, it furnished a dramatic mingling of social types and actions productive of the kinds of opposition from which, in Levi-Straussian terms, myth is made. Second, these character types and actions were capable of carrying the meanings and shifts in meaning which could make sense of the social conflicts dominant in American society at any one time.31 Thus in the cinema, the Western myth "has become part of the cultural language by which America understands itself."32

It is Wright's contention that the meaning of the myths found in Westerns is determined by the oppositions in which the characters are placed and how the character functions in the narrative itself. Here he is relying on Vladimir Propp's notion of "character function" which allows interpretation of actions or attributes based on the individual character's role in the plot.33

Wright goes on to assert that because analysis of the Western as myth stresses the social and historical (rather than formal, authorial, or industrial) production of meaning, its mythic sign)ficance can only be found in what the mass of people want to see. The "classics" are those most popular in the period in which the genre achieves clear definition. not examples chosen because they conform to some preconceived scheme in a critic's mind. Box office popularity is in its turn an indicator of the "meanings viewers demand of the myth."34

The Western myth has moved far beyond its origins in visual and written narrative. It has influenced popular music, fashion, children's toys, advertising, and even our everyday speech. When we say an organization has too many chiefs and not enough Indians, when a radio or TV station does a news round-up, when we have a show-down

Page 20

with someone, when our plans don't pan out, we are using words and figures of speech right out of the Western.

As Christian Metz noted in Language and Cinema, the Western seemed to "deconstruct" itself out of existence once it began to question its own narrative and ideological conventions. When the issues and conflicts were addressed within its historical and geographical context, it no longer carried the same relevance for the public, the genre ceased to have relevance.35 But perhaps those issues are not irrelevant to modern audiences. Maybe they have only been appropriated by other genres and narrative forms, from Star Wars (1977) to Ghostbusters (1984). The myths then continue, but in different forms.

When critics speak of the "authenticity" of a particular Western, they are still referring to an illusion. Such films are no more realistic than the ones which show Indians riding in suicidal circles around parked wagon trains or when 1866 cowboys shoot it out with 1894 Winchesters. No one really cares when, in Red River ( 1947), Montgomery Clift arrives in Abilene, Kansas, with his herd of cows in 1865, a full two years before the town started shipping cattle east. Such details are superficial; their realism, or lack of it, hasn t much to do with the dramatic quality of a film. The real personalities of Wyatt Earp (a frontier pimp) or Billy the Kid (a juvenile delinquent) have nothing to do with the merits of the films that have been made about them. The Western is entertainment and to speak of it in terms of exact, authentic realism is pointless. That kind of realism has never been required of movies and shouldn't be expected of Westerns.

What follows is a discussion of select and specific aspects of the Western motion picture, the myth, and the reality.

NOTES

1. Thomas Schatz. "The Western," in Wes D. Gehring (ed.) Handbor''ofAmericanFi/m Genre5 ( New York: Greenwood Pfess. 1988). 31.

2. John Cavvelti. The Six-Gun Mstique (Bowling Green. OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1977). 62.

3. Frederick Jackson Turner. The Fr~vtrier in American Hisrorv ( New York: Holt. Rinehart and Winston, 1962). 3.

4. Cawelti. Jhe Six-Gun Mvstique. 74.

5. Andre Bazin, "The Western: or The American Film Par Excellence." in What is cinema IBerxeley: University of California Press. 1971). 2:140.

6 Jim Kitxs. HrJri:l~ns West (Bloomington. IN: Indiana University Press. 1969). B.

7. Schatz. 'The Western," 26.

8. Jean-Louis Rieupeyrout, ''The Western: A Historical Gente,' in Quarter/! oJ Film Radia and Tele'isian, 3 (Winter 1952).

9. Robert Warshow. ' The Gangster As Tragic Hero." in The Immediate E:rperiem e (Garden City. NY: Doubleday, 1962), 147.

10. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land(Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press. 1950).

11. Kitses. Hori:uns Wcst, 11.

12. Schatz, "The Western," 28.

13. Phillip French. Westerns: Aspects ol a Mal je Genre (New York: Viking Press. 1977), 24 It should be noted that French's definition excludes a number of important Westerns, such as those set in the Yukon (The Far Country), Mexico (The Wild Bunchl east of the Mississippi River (Drums 410ng the Mohatwk and Northwest Passage) as well as the Florida Westerns, those films dealing with the wars against the Scminole Indians.

14. Kitses. Hari:lJns West.

15. Jean WaFer "The Western: History and Actuality." in Henri Agel (ed.l, ~ Wcstern (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1961). Also. Will Wright. Sir Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1975

16. Freach VVes~erns.

17. Kitses, flori:ons West. 8-9.

18. Alan LovetJ, ''The Western," in Screen Education, 41 (Sept./Oct. 1967~: 97.

19. Willram K. Evason. A Pictorial Histon, of the Western Film (Secaucus. NJ: Citidel Press, 1969), 5-8.

20. John Tuska. 7hc Am~rican West in Film: Critical Approaches to the Westertt (U - ort, CT: Grecnwood Press, 1985). 24-35.

21. Ibid., 37.

22. Ferdinanddc Saussure, "A Course in General Linguistics,'' (1916). in Ri~hard "d Fcrdinande DeGeorge, eds., The Structuralisrs: Fram Marr to Leii-Strauss (Garden City, NY: Doubleday. 19621. 62

23. No~tlYup Fr~e. Anarany of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univasity Press, 1957).

24. Kitses, Mvrizons Wesr, I I.

25. Ibid., 14.

26. Cawelti. Ti~ Sir-Gun Mvstique. 32.

27 Ibid 73

28. Ihid., 30.

29. Bazin, ~Thc V~stern," 142.

30. Ibid.. 145.

31. Wrigh. Si5 Guns and Societ\: 6.

32 Ibid.. 12.

33. Vladimir Propp. The Morphologv of the Folk Tale, bans Laurence Scott (A - in, TX: University of Texas Press, 1968).

34. Wn^. Sir GU~LS, 12.

35. Christi~n‹z,langualc and Cinema (New York: Praeger. 19751

The Frontier

All of the elements we associate with the Western‹the characters, subjects, themes, and even the story form itself ‹are derived, in part, from one of the oldest of American myths, the "Myth of the Frontier." As Richard Slotkin points out in The Fatal Environment, "the Myth of the Frontier is arguably the longest-lived of American myths, with origins in the colonial period and powerful presence in contemporary culture."1 It is based upon a body of literature, folklore, historiography, and ideology produced over a period of 300 years by historians, philosophers, journalists, dime novelists, historical romance writers, melodramatists, Wild West showmen, and moviemakers. By the beginning of the twentieth century, this myth had become one of the central beliefs of American ideolo,.y and culture The myth of the frontier used Westward expansion as a way of dealing with all of the disparate elements which accounted for, or at least helped explain, America's rapid rise from impoverished colony to industrial world power.

The frontier myth celebrated the conquest of a natural wilderness by a hard-working individualist, who took great risks and was quickly rewarded with huge profits and success. The effect of the myth was to represent the Western frontier as the symbolic "cutting edge" of American civilization and progress, as a place in which extreme opposites of values and culture would meet, clash, and pursue that conflict to inevitable ends.

By the time movies were invented, the stories that constituted die frontier myth had acquired vast popularity.

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Western movies found an eager and interested audience. Filmmakers found a ready-made formula and a supply of stories for inspiration.

The federal government's definition of what constituted the frontier was that it comprised any land which the census showed had a population of fewer than two persons per square mile. So, according to that criterion. the frontier ceased to exist around 1890, when the population exceeded the definition.

Cultural historians like Henry Nash Smith and Slotkin have shown that, right from the earliest attempts to settle the frontier, a distinct mythology was present. Exactly what the frontier was like was created in the public's imagination by many sources. It was Mary Rowlandson's 1682 account of her capture by Indians during King Philip's War that originated the captivity narrative as a literary genre. Cotton Mather, minister and writer, took the captivity theme and elevated it to sublime heights. The myth was added to by such diverse sources as James Fenimore Cooper's invincible pathfinder in the Leatherstocking Tales, dime novelists' romanticized fantasies, and shameless self-publicists like George Armstrong Custer. Taken together, these and other sources dictated the elements of what was to become the frontier myth.

The single individual who most shaped our understanding of what the frontier was and of what it meant was Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932). Many historians believe that the paper he gave at the American HistoricalAssociation's conference in 1893, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," ranks as a uniquely significant piece of historical scholarship.2 Turner argued that the West needed to be taken seriously. It was a point of view that was to be endorsed by future Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, both of whom were keenly interested in the study of history.

The basis of the Turner Thesis was the idea that the phenomenon of a moving frontier, where one stage of development gives way to the next, explained what made America unique. The distinctive American national character, Turner said, was the result of the erosion of the influence of European culture as Whites encountered the raw, elemental nature of the frontier. Even American democracy, he said, was the product of the frontier.

Rather than seeing the opening of the West as solely the result of the work of certain heroic individuak, Turner conceived of American history in much broader social terms. He understood the enormous challenge of survival the Western environment posed. Turner made clear the sign)ficance of the physical realities of the West in determining history. His influence can be seen in the work of filmmakers like John Ford, Sam Peckinpah, and Don Siegel. Many of these directors' films reflect a real sense of the immenseness, loneliness, and hardship that was the real West.

Historians no longer completely accept the Turner Thesis. For example, he failed to satisfactorily explain the role of Indians and minorities in the West. His conception of one stage of development giving away to another has also been shown to have only partial validity.

But two undisputed Turner concerns have continued to influence the cinematic portrayal of the West. First, films like Shane (1952), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and Heaven's Gate (1980) reflect Turner's understanding that the West was a place of uneasy social development and ongoing conflict. Secondly, some films, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, speak to the problems Turner elaborated when he referred to the change the "end of the West" posed. Films such as Monte Walsh ( 1970) and many of Sam Peckinpah's films, like Ride the High Country ( 1962), The Wild Bunch ( 1969), and The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), speak directly to this concern.

At the time of the publication of Turner's work, America was entering a period of intense self-evaluation. It was also becoming a major power and world influence. The popularity of movie Westerns gave America an opportunity to examine its past and the events which shaped the nation.

Phillip French, in Westerns, suggests that the Western provided a means for American society to comment upon itself during the period in which it was the center of the world's interest. For some critics the "end of the West" as a theme in the 1960s and 1970s, the end of the Western as a popular film genre, and the apparent end of America's ability to dominate world politics seem to be somehow related.

In Shane (1952), director George Stevens uses the violent, all-made cattlemen to represent the forces of nature. The sodbusters, who bring law, churches, and families to the West, represent the forces of civilization. Each side is given an opportunity to present its case, not so much as good versus evil but as an affirrnation of the painful struggles that are brought about by change. It is this understanding of history that too few Hollywood Westerns reflect.

NOTES

1. Richard Slotkin. The Fatal Environment, 15.

2. Frederick Jackson Turner. The Frontier in Ameritan History, a collection of Turner's essays in which he advanced the famous "Frontier Thesis."

The Cowboy

The movie cowboy was the envy of every man and the ideal of every woman. He was strong, handsome, trustworthy, morally upright, capable of violent action if necessary, as well as an honest cattleman and expert horseman. According to the movies, the cowboy was a latter-day Sir Galahad with a gun. He was a righter of wrongs and capable of great bravery. Sitting astride his horse, decked out in spurs, chaps, revolver, and ten-gallon hat, he became an icon.

That romanticized vision is mostly movie myth. But the myth does have origins in the real-life hard-working men who herded cattle from Texas to the Kansas railheads and later became cowhands on the ranches that dotted the

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West. It was only a brief period of prominence, but the legend of the cowboy has long outlived the historical reality.

Each successive phase in the history of the West may also be reflected in terms of its animals. It was the horse that transformed the culture of the Plains Indians and the beaver which brought the white man West. Eventually the Whites killed off the buffalo. effectively destroying the Indians' way of life. Then came the cattle.

Cattle have been raised in the Americas since the sixteenth century, but their significance to the West begins in the years immediately following the Civil War. Millions of Longhorn cattle ran wild on open public lands in Texas. The removal of the Indians had opened the dry, arid plains to the cattlemen who set about large-scale ranching.

In the economically depressed South, beef prices were low. Prices were much higher in Eastern markets but the problem was transport. There was then impetus for men to drive herds, which lived off the open plain while in transit, hundreds of miles up the Chisholm and other trails as far north as Kansas. This was the location of the nearest railroad, which could transport the live animals to Chicago, from where, using new techniques of refrigeration, the meat could be shipped east. Other cattle went to replenish the stocks of the Upper Mississippi Valley, reduced during the Civil War.

The first cattle were shipped from Abilene, Kansas, in 1867. As the railroad extended west, other Kansas towns like Wichita and Dodge City sprang up as shipping points. Trails were opened to Colorado to supply the mining areas. By the 1870s cattle-raising had spread to the millions of acres of public land of the northern plains of Wyoming and Montana. Trails were extended to stock the developing ranching industry and to supply beef to the Indian reservations now that the buffalo had been decimated. Estimates are that between four and six million head of cattle were driven north from Texas between 1867 and 1886. Perhaps 35,000 men made the trip, although there has been speculation about the accuracy of these numbers.'

There are numerous Westerns set in the notoriously raucous Kansas cowtowns, but films based on the real experience of a cattle drive are not very common. Considering the cattle drive's place in Western lore that oversight seems strange. But in a few movies, like The Texans (1938), Red River (1947), The Tall Men (1955), Cowboy (1958), and The Culpepper Cattle Company (1972), the cattle drive becomes thematically central.

This was also the time of the cattle barons. when huge profits could be made by daring businessmen. Alexander Swan (1831-1905) started the Swan Land and Cattle Company in 1883 and went on to become a major influence in Wyoming. He even helped build an opera house in Cheyenne. Another important cattleman in Wyoming was John Clay ( 1851-1934). He was president of the Wyoming Stock Grower's Association at the time of the Johnson County War, which figured prominently in Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate ( 1980). In Texas, Richard King ( 1824-1885) amassed a ranching empire encompassing over one million acres and thousands of cattle and horses. John Chisum ( 1924-1984) built up a vast cattle ranch in New Mexico but was, by all accounts, unscrupulous and far from ethical. In 1877 he is said to have ordered the murder of a large number of Indians suspected of stealing his cattle, facts ignored when John Wayne played Chisum in Andrew V. McLaglen's Chisum (1970).

Beginning in the late 1940s, Hollywood produced a number of Westerns centering on the patriarchal cattle barons. These men were often portrayed as powerful tyrants, in head-on conflict with small ranchers, farmers, and often with their own families. Many top actors played cattle barons: Lionel Barrymore in Duel in the Sun ( 1946); Spencer Tracy in The Sea of Grass (1946) and Broken Lance (1954); John Wayne in Red River (1947); Edward G, Robinson in The Wolent Men (1954); Rock Hudson in Giant (1956); and Charles Bickford in The Big Country (1958).

There are a number of firsthand accounts of what life was really like at the time. Although fictional and romanticized, Log of a Cowboy, by Andy Adams, was based on personal experience. Published in 1903, Adams made it clear that the cowboy's life was far from glamorous. On the trail the cowboy got linlc sleep, the food was bad, and there were a number of hazardous river crossings (the Brazos, Red, Pecos, Canadian, and Cimarron) that had to be negotiated. Pay was poor for the two-or three-month trip to Kansas and the five or six months it took to get to Montana. Robert Dykstra notes in The Cattle Towns that a cowboy might earn only 60 to 90 dollars for three months of hard work on the trail.2

Other cowboy autobiographers such as Charlie Siringo and Will James painted a similar picture. James (1892-1942) was a novelist and illustrator, best known for his 1926 children's book Smokv. which was later filmed. James published The Lonc Cowboy in 1930, which he claimed was an autobiographical account of his early years as a cowboy in the West. Some parts of it are true and others pure fiction. But he speaks eloquently about freedom and the cowboy's rootlessness. Charlie Siringo (1855-1928), Texas-born cowboy, published his autobiography in 1885, A Texas Cowboy, or, Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Cow Pony. It proved to be very popular, feeding the public's growing fascination with cowboys. He later joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency and helped pursue the notorious Wild Bunch.

Since it required fewer men to tend the cattle on the open range than on a drive, many cowboys found themselves out of work once the drive was over. The myth of "freedom" that is so much a part of the cowboy's image derives in part from the temporanness of his employment. In fact, many cowboys were rootless, wandering the West looking for work. "I live where I hang my hat," says Liberty Valance in Thc Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). There was obviously a feeling of mobility on the trail, but in reality, the cowboy was no freer than today's truck

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driver who delivers freight across the country.

"Cowboying's what you do when you can't do nothin' else," an experienced cowhand tells the young hero in The Culpepper Caule Company (1972). But the romanticized view of the cowboy's life is perhaps best expressed by the title character in Johnny Guitar (1954), who says: "Well, when you boil it all down, what does a man really need?‹ just a smoke and a cup of coffee." And the cabin interiors of Will Penny (1967) made painfully clear what hardship and squalor went with being a cowboy on the frontier.

By the 1890s the days of the trail drive and the open range were just about over. The railroad had reached Fort Worth, Texas, by 1876. That meant cattle could be shipped directly north to market from there. By this time, developing agriculture was beginning to open the Kansas plains to farming. The result would be feuds over land and water rights between the cowboys and the "sodbusters." These confrontations form the basis for a number of Westerns, including the classic Shane (1952).

By 1885 cattle had actually become too plentiful, so livestock associations organized themselves into cooperatives, groups of ranchers who conducted roundups and restricted numbers in order to maintain beef prices. The drought of 1886, the consequent panic selling, and the great blizzard of 1886-1887 brought disaster to the Plains. Many ranchers and cattle barons alike were wiped out. In Wyoming the number of cattle fell from nine million in 1886 to three million in 1895. What this did was hasten the introduction of barbed-wire fencing and signal the end of the open range, a situation that figures prominently in a number of Westerns.

Patented in 1874 by Joseph Glidden of Illinois, barbed wire transformed the Plains. Barbed-wire fencing was a cheap and effective way for the homesteader to protect his crops against the hungry cattle that were allowed to roam free. On the other hand, it also allowed ranchers to more easily care for cattle in winter by restricting their movcments and permitted controlled breeding to improve the strains of stock.

Its introduction, though, was not without resistance. Fence-cutting occurred when ranchers, accustomed to an open range, found their way barred by settlers stringing barbed-wire fences. There was also trouble when the ranchers attempted to fence in the vast public lands and claim them for their own use.

In Westerns, barbed wire is usually a symbol for the

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relentless encroachment of technology. It is often the catalyst for bitter disputes between farmers and ranchers. In Man Without a Star (1955) a character is physically scarred by barbed wire, and in Lonelv are the Brare ( 1962) (both starring Kirk Douglas) the wire becomes the symbol of the passing of the West. In The First Travelling Salesladv (1956), barbed wire, feminism, and automobiles, are some of the modern things Ginger Rogers hopes to bring to Texas.

The 1890s were consolidation years. New breeds of cattle, such as the Hereford, were introduced. Cattle are generally background props in Westerns, but in a few, the attempts to improve the breed become central: The Untamed Breed (1948), Tlte Longhorn (1951), and The Rare Breed ( 1965). Ranch hands were still needed, but the days of the wide-open range, which only 30 years previously had stretched from Texas to Montana. were gone forever.

The dominance of cattle in the West was not to be long lived. The number of pigs and, particularly, sheep continued to increase every year. Since sheep-herding was considered an Indian or Spanish occupation, the dislike of sheep also carried overtones of class and race prejudice, in addition to the standard objection of destroying pastureland. By the end of the nineteenth century sheep-rearing would be as profitable as cattle-raising.

But by then the cowboy had already started to become an object of fantasy. It is still unclear how this process of mythification took place. No real-life cowboy ever achieved the lasting fame or notoriety that was true of other characters or individuals in the West. Jesse James may represent the outlaw, Kit Carson the mountain man, or Wyatt Earp the lawman, but there is no real historical figure to give rise to the mythicization of the cowboy.

It would be logical to assume that such an important mythical figure would have needed some kind of historical reality on which to build, but there is little evidence of what that reality actually was. The precise way, then, in which the cowboy has entered the realm of myth remains a mystery.

Our image of the cowboy is a man in high riding boots, spurs, chaps, wide-brimmed hat, handkerchief knotted about the neck, and a six-gun strapped to the thigh. And in fact, the costume may have had its origins in practical requirements‹high-heeled boots to keep the foot in the stirrup, chaps to protect the legs against thorns, hat to shade the eyes, gloves to protect the hands, and a handkerchief Page 26

to keep out the dust. But it is a costume, nonetheless, and as such it has a certain inherent appeal.

Costume conventions have also become part of the cowboy myth in the cinema. In the real West, the type of chaps a cowboy might use was linked to specific needs and geographic regions. The long-haired sheepskin chap was needed in the Northwest for the extra protection it provided. The short-haired calf or goatskin chap and the stove-pipe shape evolved in the Southwest. Early movie cowboys, like William S. Hart or Tom Mix, often wore the wider, more stylish chaps, not for reasons of geographical authenticity, but because they just looked more interesting. Perhaps their flamboyance is why the wearing of chaps later came to be associated with sissies and dudes.

It was the cowboy showmen of the Wild West shows, not the 1870s range rider, who wore the fancy belt buckles, beaded and fringed jackets, and embroidered shirts that were so popular in 1930s B-Westerns. It was Buffalo Bill Cody who introduced the Stetson hat as the epitome of cowboy headgear. But the good guy didn't always wear a white hat, as fans of Hopalong Cassidy know.

Those who pay attention to such things as costuming refer to Red River ( 1947), directed by Howard Hawks, as an example of the developing trend in Hollywood toward costume realism. In addition to careful attention to recreating the look of everyday life, the film also added to the Western costume repertoire the poncho-like rain slicker. Other films like The Searchers (1956) and The Wild Bunch (1969) added the linen duster or frock coat, based on the Civil War medical coat. It later became a stylized fashion statement in The Long Riders (1980) and Pale Rider (1985).

Hollywood also aided the construction of the mythic image of the cowboy by determining who wore what kind of boot. The common low work boot, which easily tends to look scuffed, would be worn by the farmer or the miner, but never the cowboy hero. No matter the historical period, the hero most always wears the pre-1877 high-heeled style boot with a pointed or squared toe.

The standardized Western costume enhanced the star's appeal, yet always subtly reflected contemporary fashion trends while ignoring historical reality. In the 1940s, men wore padding in their jackets and shirts, and the trend appeared in the costumes worn in the Westerns of the

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period. Clint Eastwood's serape and the bell-bottomed trousers worn by the Mexican villains in Sergio Leone's ''spaghetti Westerns" reflected the hippie look of the 1960s just as Angie Dickinson's 1950s pillbox hat had appeared in Rio Bravo (1958). Americans seem to like to see the American past in their own image.

It is much the same way with dialogue. There seems to be a convention that characters in screen Westerns should speak with the vocabulary and style of the twentieth century. It is disconcerting, for instance, to hear a cowboy use the contemporary slang term "for real" in the Magnificent Seven (1960). There are a number of writers (Owen Wister, Bret Harte, Mark Twain) who have carefully detailed authentic Western speech patterns and word usage. Perhaps producers were concerned that audiences would not accept a hero who spoke in an "old-fashioned" way. But many of lohn Ford's and Cecil B. DeMille's films do make some concessions to re-creating authentic speech patterns as do such films as Shane (1955), Comanche Station (1959), and The Shootist (1976). True Crit (1969), one of the most popular Westerns ever made, is an example of how authentic speech can enhance a film. Instead of saying something cliched or commonplace like ' Reach" or "Draw," Rooster Cogburn, the one-eyed old marshal played by John Wayne, says "Fill yore hands, you son-ofa-bitch." It becomes a memorable and unforgettable line..

The real cowboy's lifestyle may have also contributcd, in part, to the myth. The Kansas railhead cowtowns quickly acquired an early reputation for rowdiness. At the end of a long drive the cowboys apparently could be expected to demand a good time. Magazine stories, dime novels, and artists, such as Frederic Remington and Charles Russell, reinforced the cowboy's image as a hellraiser and the West as an outpost of mayhem and lawlessness. The reality is that the real West was never as violent as we are led to believe.

The association that is often made in Westerns about drinking and masculinity makes it seem like the real West was flooded with alcohol, and possibly alcoholics. Even The Great Train Robbery (1903) contains a scene set in a saloon. In The World Rushed In, J. S. Holliday documents the rather impressive amounts of alcohol shipped West in the last part of the nineteenth century. He notes that in 1890 San Francisco there was a bar for every 96 residents.3

Drinking became ritualized. The heroes of B-Westerns generally only drank sarsparilla, because producers were very much aware of the hero's influence on their mostly youthful audience. But real men drank whisky and only

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turned to beer if nothing else was available. The alcoholic newspaperman, told the saloon is closed for election day in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), begs for a whisky but is refused. "Then give me a beer," he says. "A beer's not drinking." My Darling Clementine (1946) is the Western rarity, a film where alcoholism is a serious theme. Usually it is a source of humor, as in El Dorado (1966).

Of all the Kansas cowtowns, Dodge City was the best known. It was strategically situated on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad. Dodge City first came to prominence as a trading center for buffalo hides. Millions of them were shipped east in the early 1870s. By 1876 most of the buffalo were gone, and the vogue for buffalo skin had waned. So Dodge turned to shipping cattle instead. For the next ten years Dodge City boomed.

The local farmers were less than enthusiastic about the city's cattle trade. The huge herds from Texas destroyed the surrounding farmers' crops, and many of the animals carried splenic fever (also called Texas fever). a disease that had become epidemic in areas to the south. But reforming moralists and marching spinsters (favorite Western cliches) notwithstanding, it was fences and quarantine legislation more than anything that helped spell the end for Dodge City as a cattle town.

Perhaps there was a period in which Dodge City was as wild as its reputation. In 1879, for its 700 residents, the town had two dancehalls, 14 saloons, and nearly 50 prostitutes.4 But the town owes much of its prominence to the fact that several of the most famous and well-known figures in the history of the West lived in Dodge City at one time or another. Bat Masterson was sheriff from 1877 to 1880 and, at one point, Wyatt Earp was his assistant marshal. Both were members of the so-called Dodge City Gang. This was a group of businessmen, politicians, and wealthy landowners who controlled the town's liquor, gambling, and prostitution trades. When gambler Luke Short, a Dodge City Gang member, got into trouble with reformers in 1883 he asked his cohorts Masterson, Earp, and Doc Holliday to help him. The situation became known as the Dodge City War, a war without a single shot being fred.

America has long been considered a violent society. American films are often criticized for their dependence upon violence as a major entertainment element. Violence is central to the myth of the Western. One of the basic assumptions they make is that the frontier was an especially violent place. It has become almost a cliche to say that the violent frontier environment played a dominant role in shaping American institutions and the national character. And it is most probably untrue.

For example, the majority of lynchings in the United States took place in the South, not the West. Yet lynching scenes are included in Westerns with great regularity. But it is William Wellman's study of how emotion can defeat reason in The Ox Bow Incident (1942), the story of two cowboys who try to prevent the hanging of three suspected rustlers, that becomes the most reasoned and realistic cinematic example of attitudes towards lynchings on the frontier.

Statistical studies have repeatedly shown that after 1850 only a very small minority of those moving West ever reached the frontier. It is also true that the West, as a region, was far less violent than some of the established Eastern cities. But myth continues to promulgate the idea that the frontier was an area of unrestrained violence. Even today there are regular assertions that the present rate of violent crime in America is strongly influenced by the nation's frontier origins.

The first real cowboy to contribute to the production of the cowboy myth was quite possibly Army scout Texas Jack Omohundro (1846-1880), a man who actually experienced the cattle drives to Kansas. In 1872 Texas Jack appeared with his friend Buffalo Bill Cody. in Chicago, in Ned Buntline's play The Scouts of the Prairie. Ned Buntline was the pen name of the early dime novelist Edward Zane Carroll Judson. It was Buntline who was partly responsible for creating the legend of Buffalo Bill in a series of books and plays. Texas Jack soon became a hero of a series of dime novels by both Buntline and Prentiss Ingraham, but he was presented as more of a scout than a true cowboy. Ingraham (1843-1904), one of the most prolific of the dime novelists, the author of over 600 books. was one of the principal perpetrators of the Buffalo Bill legend and the creator of the popular, but wholly fictitious, character Deadwood Dick.

The first real cowboy to become famous, in fact as well as fiction, is probably Buck Taylor (1857-1924). Taylor worked with cattle from an early age and was hired to work on Buffalo Bill Cody's Nebraska ranch. In 1884 he started touring with the first Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, where he was billed as the "King of the Cowboys.', He and others like Johnny Baker, known as the "Cowboy Kid," performed some authentic Western feats such as steer roping. bronco busting, and trick riding stunts.

Taylor soon became the hero of one of Ingraham's dime novels, Buck Taylor, King of the Cowboys, published by Beadle in 1887. In it, Taylor joins the Texas Rangers and is captured by Indians, but he does very little actual cowboying. This kind of story was to become the pattern for the fiction about cowboys. They are presented not as men whose job it is to herd cattle, but as footloose adventurers who could take care of any dangerous situation.

Novelist Owen Wister also did a great deal to create the myth of the cowboy. Wister, (1860-1938), wrote extensively about the West. His friendship with Theodore Roosevelt and Frederic Remington helped to establish for him the uniquely Eastern establishment viewpoint he took in his writings, that experience in the West was characterbuilding and morally refreshing. It was Roosevelt who said, in 1899, that the cowboy possessed "the stern, manly qualities that are invaluable to the nation."5 Wister's novel The Virginian was an instant success when it was published in 1902. Like the cowboys of the dime novels, Wister's hero spends little time tending cattle. But in

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providing the title character with a Southern ancestry, Wister gives his hero the qualities and gentility necessary tor him to rise above the limitations of the dime novel.

Wister's cowboy hero was soft-spoken. polite. quiet. a gentleman yet manly. He was slow to anger but extremely menacing when provoked. This interesting combination of good manners and controlled anger is expressed in the bool;'s most famous remark, although, over time, it has now become a cliche. The Virginian's reply to an insult is: 'When you call me that, smile."

The Virginian. was serious, respectable fiction. It was later turned into stage, then film and television, versions. It fed the public's imagination about the West and the cowboy as did works by other writers like Eugene Manlove Rhodes and Emerson Hough.

Why then should the cowboy so dominate the movie Western, with the term "cowboy film" becoming synonymous for Westerns? Early popular film stars. Broncho Billy Anderson, William S. Hart, and Tom Mix, played cowboys. Movie fans quickly accepted the Western as a legitimate form of entertainment and, so too, the cowboy. But there are also other reasons.

The seeming freedom that was associated with the cowboy life had a powerful emotional appeal. The cowboy's nomadic life fit nicely with the cinema's need for new narrative structures. If cowboys moved around a great deal, it was very easy to explain narratively their presence in any particular location. Cowboys could ride off on adventures at a moment's notice, since they rarely had family ties. The soldier must follow the whims of army disciplirie, the miner must guard his claim, and the farmer must tend his crops. The cowboy, in reality, tended his herd. But in the myth he is free. It is this individualism that is most attractive. Here was someone with a profession but who didn't have to work at it. There are very few cowboys in the movies who actually spend much time punching cows.

Perhaps another reason for the cowboy's popularity is that he has a unique. even unusual, look. Some of the earliest descriptions of cowboys take special pains to detail the way in which he was dressed. Few individuals in the West had a particularly distinctive appearance other than soldiers. The cowboy also carried a handgun, often a revolver. No matter how little the gun may have been used in reality, its mere presence was fascinating. Since the cowboy's gun was strapped to his body it became thought of as another part of his nature. The gun then becomes a physical expression of what the cowboy stands for, which, for the cinema, often meant violence. Sooner or later the hero must prove himself and that will almost invariably involve shooting.

The cowboy's horse is as much a part of his persona as his gun. The horse, which he needs to do his job, herding cattle, also gives him the mobility necessary to sustain the myth of the footloose cowboy. The original Western heros, such as Daniel Boone or James Fenimore Cooper's Pathfinder, who spent most of their time on foot, perhaps just didn't have enough panache to be long-term heroes in the cinema.

The cowboy was, by all means, a man. His masculinity was worn as a badge, his right of entry to the West. Masculinity in Westerns is identified as the only source of stability in a frontier world where the clash of savagery and civilization threatens cultural and social order.

What defines masculinity is not physique, good looks, strength, or aggressiveness, but the ability to be tough. According to Rupert Wilkinson in American Tough, this toughness raises contradictory emotions. Toughness is a quality at once admirable yet potentially antisocial.6 It is a quality possessed by both heroes and villains in Westerns.

Critics like Cawelti and Kitses have dealt with this duality, the Western hero combining the characteristics of both outlaw and saviour. In defining the Western as centrally concerned with the epic struggle between Civilization and the Wilderness they suggest that the genre; like myth or ritual, serves to resolve conflicts betw.een certain American cultural values. Nevertheless, the Western leaves unresolved some levels of the conflict between male toughness and social order.

The point can be made most easily with the villains rather than heros. The villains often possess a toughness that equals that of the hero. Sometimes both share similar abilities and skills. It is only when Westerns use racist villains (like Mexicans or Indians who seem to gain their strength from numbers) or urban villains (bankers and businessmen who pay others to be tough) that the exception is seen. Assertiveness or the need for individual expression in villains is perceived as selfishness and aggression. In the hero, those same characteristics are considered good. Villains use their toughness to abuse women and animals and take advantage of the weak. So it is the heroes, their toughness restrained by internal checks, who are able to make that important leap from savagery to civilization.

NOTES

1. William Savage. Jr.. The Cowboy Hero (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 1979), 8.

2. Robert Dykstra. The C.artle To~ns (New York: Knopf. 1968). 88

3. J S. Holliday. The World Rushed In ( New York: Simon and Schuster,1981). 454

4. Dykstra. Cattle Towns 105

5. Savage, Cowboy Hero 96

6. Rupert Wilkinson, American Tough (Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press. 1984), 11.

Agriculture

The real history of the West cannot be divorced from the history of agriculture. As a subject, agriculture is certainly not central to many Westerns. A few films celebrate the coming of the farmer, but most use the "sodbuster" as the symbol of technology and civilization that was destroying the cowboy's way of life. Many more films do make reference, though, to the sometimes violent confrontations between the two factions. The song "The Farmer and

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Cow-hand Should be Friends." in Oklahoma (1955), suggests that this feud was long-standing.

Increasingly, the farmer replaced the rancher on the plains. In The Farmers Frontier, 1865-1900, Gilbert Fite describes the difficult conditions these pioneers endured on the plains. There was no lumber to build homes, barns, and fences. There was often no water and seldom enough rainfall. New methods and inventions were necessary‹ barbed wire to keep OUI the cattle, windmills to pump water, steel ploughs, grain planters, and mechanical harvesting equipment. New hardy varieties of wheat to suit the more hostile conditions were introduced.' The pioneer farmers can be considered products of the industrial revolution.

Under the Homestead Act of 1862. any adult citizen could claim 160 acres of the public domain and after five years residence, it would become his property. But for most farmers, 160 acres was impossible to properly cultivate within the five-year period. Ownership was only a dream for many. Consequently, many settlers were forced to buy their parcel of land from the large-scale speculators, particularly the railroads with their huge land grants from state and local yovernments. The speculators needed to quickly recoup their investments and open up new lands, so they generally welcomed and encouraged the settlers.

Thousands surged Westward and more acres were settled between 1870 and 1900 than in all America's past. Immigrants came from around the world, some from the crowded Mississippi Valley, many from northern Europe, especially Scandinavia.

Life was hard and pioneers faced great obstacles just to survive. Living in damp sod houses and searching for fuel and water in extremes of temperature was a challenge to their courage and fortitude. Having to face plagues of grasshoppers and the continued threat of prairie fires only added to their miseries. Fite refers to a sign chalked to a cabin door just west of Fort Worth, Texas, after a particularly bad drought in 1886: "250 miles to the nearest post office; 100 miles to wood; 20 miles to water; 6 inches to hell. God bless our home!"2

The discomforts were endured as long as the West held cheap lands, ready markets, and the excitement of the challenge of pioneering the frontier. Farmers continued to spread west, into Kansas and Nebraska, into the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana, and finally, in 1889, into the Indian territory of Oklahoma. By then, the frontier was closed and the West was won.

By and large, agriculture is unimportant to the cinematic West, except in symbolic terms. Pigs are used to represent domesticity in Shane. Farmers appear merely as background in most Westerns. For farmers and cowboys alike, the reality of life was hard drudgery. The task for both was the production of food. But what made the cowboy more interesting to the public was that the cowboy seemed to be exotic, a wanderer who did his job on the move. The farmer was dull in comparison, firmly rooted in one place all his life.

One of the enduring tensions in American culture is thc gulf that is perceived to exist between agrarianism and commerce. The antipathy is between what is perceived as good, honest husbandry and corrupt commerce and trade. Westerns have implicitly commented upon this by portraying the railroad owners as unscrupulous merchants taking advantage of farmers and settlers that needed their services.

Movies like Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), Shane (1952), and Heaven's Gate (1980), suggest that pioneer farmers were not just interested in using the West to make a profit, but in building a free and open way of life. Historians have endorsed this view.3 It was that supposed goad and those who saw the West in a different light that led to the conflicts. The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), makes it very clear that the discovery of water was an absolute necessity for both agriculture and commerce. Joe Kidd (1972) involves a conflict between an acquisitive landbaron and Mexican peasants. for whom sheep-herding is a way of life.

On the other hand, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) strongly suggests the link between the coming of the railroad and what has been called the "flowering of the desert." But the smoke-belching train is perhaps more indicative of the idea of technology as a threat, which historian Leo Marx discussed so provocatively in The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America.4

NOTES

1. Gilbert C. Fite. The Farmers Fromier, 1865-/900 (NewYork: Holt. Rinchan and Winslon. 1966).

2. Ibid., 200.

3. Everets Dick. Jhe Sod-House Frontier. 1854-1890 (Ne~ York: A~ pleton-Centuly. 1937).

4. Leo Marx. 7he Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Ne~v Yorl;: Oxford University Press. 1967. )

The Indians

After the cowboy, the American Indian is the most wellknown individual or character in the Western. In fact, the term "cowboys and Indians" has a very specific and widely understood meaning. In the cinema, though, Indians are seldom accorded the same dignity or respect as are the cowboy heroes, nor are they regarded as thinking and feeling human beings. What has developed instead in the movies is the stereotype of "the Indians" as either a stoic, noble savage or a bloodthirsty red devil. There seems to be little ground in between.

Movies in general have been notorious for portraying all ethnic groups and minorities as easily identifiable stereotypes. The Chinese, Mexicans, Irish, Swedish, and Europeans, to name just a few minorities in American culture, can easily and legitimately claim that they have all been given short shrift in the American cinema. Over and over, for example, the movies present the stereotypical rightheaded, clear-thinking American confronting the pompous

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Englishman who is overly preoccupied with tradition and questions of class. It is racial stereotyping I ike this that can easily degenerate into racial prejudice.

Instead of presenting Indians as believable individuals, members of the widely divergent Native American ethnic and cultural groups, Westerns have tended to opt for easily recognizable caricatures. All Indians are often presented as painted and war-bonneted savages, the adversary used by the hero to prove himself.

From the earliest discovery of the continent, Native Americans have been perceived according to each succeeding invader's own political and economic agenda. When the Vikings from Greenland and Iceland arrived around the year 1000, they took an immediate dislike to the indigenous native people and killed them as fast as they could. In the fifteenth century Columbus set about enslaving them. Two hundred years later, New England Puritans massacred them as devil-worshipping heathens. This attitude toward Native Americans became the basis for what has been called the myth of the "Indian Menace," although it was the Europeans who were more the menace.

In nineteenth-century Europe there began a tendency to idealize the American Indian. Indians were seen as the spiritual descendants of the Greek Arcadians, as survivors of the Golden Age. French Romanticism turned them into noble savages. The reason for this positive stereotyping was that the Indian, his way of life, and what he represented, could be used by the intellectuals to criticize the apparent corruption of European societies.

The French and British colonial wars were fought with the assistance of native allies on both sides. This proximity between the cultures gave rise to the first American literary genre, the captivity narrative. It quickly led to fictional stories of adventure and frontier romances like James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales. It is interesting to note that both of the classic Indian stereotypes, the Indian as menace (the Hurons) and as friend (the Mohicans), exist in all of Cooper's work. Cooper's first book, The Pioneers (published in 1823), also introduced the interracial male "couple," the frontiersman Natty Bumppo and his loyal, stoic Indian friend Chingachgook ‹the prototype of the noble savage. The Indian though is more a servant to the white man than an equal, in the manner of Tonto to the Lone Ranger.

Cooper showed the Indian at his best and worst, drawing his plot for Last of the Mohicans from an incident in colonial history, the battle of Fort William Henry in 1757. A British garrison under Colonel Monro was attacked by French and Indian troops.under the command of Montcalm. Trapped, with mounting tolls of dead and wounded, and smallpox raging in the fort, Monro surrendered on Montcalm's promise of safe conduct and protection. But the Indians killed at least 50 of the prisoners and carried off hundreds more, almost half of whom were never seen agam.

Cooper certainly did not invent the Indian villain, but

did not invent the Indian villain, but he

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was the first to present the noble savage in all his glory‹ brave, cruel, -mysterious, and, above all, fascinating. This good-bad dichotomy quickly became entrenched in fiction as well as becoming a staple of the movie Westerns.

As well as stories of conflict between Indians and Whites, there have been a number of films which actually tried to deal seriously with Indian life. Indian Justice, a 1911 Pathe film, and A Squaw's Love, a Biograph film of the same year directed by D. W. Griffith, are both stories of Indian love affairs. Hiawatha was filmed by the Imp Company in 1910, and Longfellow's poem was most likely a major inspiration for the plot.

Another stock character in Westerns is the frontiersman who falls in love with an Indian princess. The theme of miscegenation is especially common and, generally, love between the races is usually doomed. In Back to the Prairie (1911), an Indian falls in love with the daughter of a white man he has rescued, but returns brokenhearted to his people when the father forbids the relationship. But, in Flaming Arrow (1913), the Indian actually winds up with the white girl in the end. The more usual outcome though is found in Ramona (1910), the first film version of Helen Hunt Jackson's oelebrated novel, made by D. W. Griffith for Biograph. The Indian hero is killed by Whites, leaving his Spanish sweetheart to weep by his grave. Variations on this theme have persisted from The Squaw Man (1914) through such classic films as Broken Arrow ( 1950), Across the Wide Missouri (1950), The Big Sky (1952), and Run of the Arrow (1957). The white man would be allowed to stay, for a while, with an Indian woman, such as in The Searchers (1956), but if the relationship was to be more permanent, the couple would be forced to live far from the eyes of white "civilization," as in Two Rode Together (1961).

The popularity of Indians in the early cinema was possibly due to their rather exotic appearance. The pres

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ence of Indians also provided an excellent opportunity to stage exciting battle scenes. Perhaps another reason for the frequency of their appearance on the silent screen was that one major company, appropriately named Bison, specialized in Westerns, which often featured Indians.

The stereotyped visual representation of the Indian was first provided by artists George Catlin (1796-1872) and Karl Bodmer (1890-1893) around the middle of the nineteenth century. Their widely-seen paintings came to represent, for the public, what Native Americans looked like. It was these artists' images of the Indian as warrior, in feathered headdress, mounted on horseback, that quickly came to stand for "the Indian." When the Sioux, Cheyenne, and other Plains Indians refused to be easily pushed aside by white expansionism in the 1870s, that resistance added another level to their fascination for white audi

Buffalo Bill and others who presented Wild West shows would often parade a few "real" Sioux or Cheyenne Indians as part of the entertainment. The Indians, in elaborate and decorative outfits, would then oblige the audience by staging an attack upon a wagon train or railroad. The act would generally also include the taking of captives, perhaps a little torturing and scalping, followed by a "war dance."

This image then of the mounted and befeathered Plains Indians has become the stereotype for all Indians. In their book The Only Good lndian, Ralph and Natasha Friar have called this the "Instant Indian kit:" wig, war bonnet, or headband, vest or shirt, breechclout, leggings or fringed pants, and moccasins.1 Add a breastplate, shield, tomahawk, bow and arrow or rifle, and the archetype is complete.

Such limited and narrow representations cannot begin to account for the diversity of distinct Indian cultures that existed in America before the Whites arrived. Anthropologists estimate that there were between 300 and 500 distinct Indian nations or tribes in l~lorth America, divided into about ten larger separate cultural groups and compromising about 10 to 18 million people before the white man arrived. The lifestyles varied from the fishing and hunting tribes of the Northwest to the agricultural Hopi of the Southwest. The linguistic diversity of Native America was unparalleled in the world. Linguists count nine large North American Indian language stock families comprising about 200 separate, mutually unintelligible, languages. In Westerns though, Indians generally are forced to speak a universal kind of childish pigeon English which in no way reflects the complexity or diversity of Indian languages.

Most Westerns treat all Indians as basically alike, but some tribes are shown as more "Indian" than others. These are generally the more hostile tribes like the Sioux and the Apache, who fought the hardest or most successfully against the white invaders. History tells us that Custer's defeat at the Little Big Horn in 1876 by the Sioux, together with their Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Blackfoot allies, was quite a surprise to the military as well as the nation. It resulted in over a century of Custer myth-making. Geronimo's guerrilla tactics during the Apache wars in the Southwest. from the 1860s to the 1880s, undermined U.S. military pride and self-esteem. Westerns, though, have glorified white victories and created villains out of the Sioux, Cheyenne, Comanche, Seminole, and other nations, who resisted manifest destiny, portraying "belligerent" Indians as the sole reason for all the unpleasantness. Indians became the quintessential savagery against which civilization defended itself.

At the time of its publication in 1972, Ralph and Natasha Friar's The Only Good Indian listed 81 films which dealt with the Sioux and 43 with the Apache. Following, in order, were the Comanche (25), Cheyenne (20), Navajo (16), Seminole (15), and Blackfoot (10). The Crow and Pawnee, who were ' friendly" Indians, and served as Army scouts, received much less attention‹four films each. Those tribes who offered no substantial military do not even make the list at all.2 So, the use of certain "warlike" tribes, in preference to others, to symbolize the North American Indian, has become the justification for centuries of genocide.

What most people know about the Sioux, Apache, and Comanche is what they have learned about them in the movies, since they seem to feature so prominently in Westerns. The movies tell us they were skilled fighters who could fire arrows far more quickly than a rifle could be loaded and fire bullets. This ability alone was perhaps enough to make them the symbolic embodiment of Hollywood's view of the bloodthirsty Indian.

The Apache warrior is instantly recognizable from his shoulder-length, unbraided hair, headband, and leggings. In long contact with the Spanish-influenced Apache culture and in Westerns, Apache women are usually shown wearing Spanish-style blouses and skirts.

Few films, with notable exceptions like Broken Arrow and Apache (1954), have made any real attempt to humanize the traditional image of the Apache as warlike, cruel, and inscrutable. But the Apaches' hostile reputation existed long before the Western settled on them as an example of the hostile Indian. Fighting between the Apache and the Spanish had begun in the seventeenth century, and in stances of violence and cruelty on both sides have been documented. Even films which try to suggest that the Apache was treated unfairly by the white man, like Duel at Diablo (1965) and Chatos Land (1971), still get a lot of mileage out of the graphic depiction of Apache tortures.

The Westerns' attitude that an Indian is an Indian is generally misleading. For example, the Apache actually consist of many different groups, often with various names and ways of living. Some were hunters and farmers, living in wickinps made of brush and covered with skins. Others lived on buffalo and constructed hide tepees. All were relatively stable and peaceable, with the usual territorial squabbles, until the white man arrived. The nineteenth-century Apaches were divided into six different groups, although linguistically related. The

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Western Apache occupied central Arizona. The Chiricahua occupied eastern Arizona and Western New Mexico. They were subdivided into the Eastern, Central (led by Cochise), and Southern (led by Geronimo and Chato) bands. The Mescalero Apache ranged from New Mexico into Texas, and the Jicarilla stretched from northern New Mexico into Colorado and parts of Kansas. The KiowaApache are more closely associated with the Kiowa Indians, and the Lipan, who inhabited west Texas, are all but extinct today. By 1886, with the defeat of Geronimo, all the Apache nations had-been rounded up and placed on reservations.

Another of the movies' favorite "savage" Indians was the Sioux. The name Sioux is a French translation of an Ojibwa Indian word meaning "snake" or "enemy." The Sioux referred to themselves as "Dakota," meaning "allies." By 1800 the Sioux had divided into three main groups. The Whites called these groups Santee, Yankton, and Teton. The Santee lived as farmers in fixed villages in what is present-day Minnesota. The Yankton Sioux were also farmers, settling in South Dakota.

The Teton Sioux consisted of a number of separate subgroups, including the Oglala (led by Red Cloud and Crazy Horse), Brule, Sans-Arc, Two-Kettle, Minneconjou, and Hunkpapa (led by Sitting Bull). It was the Teton Sioux that provided the stereotype of the Plains Indian as featherbonneted, buffalo-hunting, mounted warriors. The Teton Sioux were nomadic, roaming over much of what is today South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. They lived in small extended families with a culture dominated by mysticism and ritual. It was the Teton Sioux, along with their allies, that defeated General Custer at Little Big Horn in 1876. At Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1890, over 100 Sioux men, women, and children were massacred by soldiers. It was the last major outbreal; of violence between Whites and the subjugated Native Americans.

Beginning in the 1850s, the federal government s Indian policy was to place all Indians on reservations in order to make the West safe for white settlement.

"When the white man began to colonize this country, there were about one million Native Americans here. By the late 1800s there were approximately 25,000 left. It was then estimated that it had cost the United States government about one million dollars to kill each Native American. Subsequently, it was decided that it would be cheaper and more convenient to keep the people alive on reservations as paupers."3

This policy gave rise to another stock figure of the Western‹the unscrupulous Indian agent, blamed for everything from stealing and cheating to starting Indian wars. Corruption among those responsible for dealing with Indians on the reservations was indeed a major problem. Indian agents were responsible for the disbursement of federal funds and were licensed to trade with the Indians. The position quickly became an important channel of patronage for Washington politicians. Once the agents had been appointed there were few safeguards against their profiteering. The Grant administration experimented in 1869 with appointing religious leaders as agents, but the policy was soon undermined by those who resented losing the advantages the old system allowed. John Ford refers to this by showing Quakers on the reservation in Chc!,cnac Autumn (1964). So the stock

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figure of the corrupt Indian agent ‹ The Vanishing American (1925), She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949), Ulzana's Raid (1972) ‹ has its basis in history although certainly not all were corrupt.

The Indian's place in the myth of the tarning of the frontier wilderness-has been merely as one of the forces which stood in the way of civilization and progress. Like rivers, mountains, deserts, wild animals, or the weather, Indians were just one more of the natural hazards in the new world which needed to be overcome‹sort of an occupational hazard in conquering the West.

It is no surprise then that the general treatment of Indians in the movies is so unsympathetic. Indians are shown attacking peaceful settlers, wagon trains, stagecoaches and stations, railroads, and forts. According to Friar and Friar, if Indians appear as individuals rather than as an anonymous mass, they are most commonly chiefs, princesses, maidens, and medicine men, or women. They may be squaws, hotbloods, renegades, "no good" Indians, turncoats, or drunks.4 Indians are generally shown finding little happiness in life. They fall victim to white hatred, the hero's indifference or change of heart, their own people'.s revenge or their own incompetence, laziness, aggressiveness, or alcoholism.

Beginning in the 1950s, a more liberal attitude toward Indians occasionally appeared in some Westerns. According to Rainey and Adams in Shoot Em Ups, the Indian "blossomed into a misunderstood, mistreated, sensitive and intelligent human being."5 Broken Arrow (1950) deals with Indian dispossession and used several Native Americans in supporting roles. The Last Hunt (1956) deals with questions of genocide, and Run of the Arrow (1957) centers on the insanities and horrors of all wars, a theme that was returned to some years later in Ul-ana's Raid (1972).

John Ford's attitude toward Indians is quite interesting. He would often hire Native Americans for small supporting roles, but the leading Indian parts would always be taken by white or Mexican-American actors. This was a practice that became widespread in the movies.

Ford was certainly not the only filmmaker to adopt this point of view. But in light of his reputation for insisting on historical accuracy and reality in his Westerns, his obvious endorsement of white superiority and the white status quo is significant. For example, in The Searchers (1956), the director makes it clear that it is acceptable for a white man to have a sexual relationship with an Indian woman but

Page 36 [Picture]

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wrong for an Indian to even contemplate the same act with a white woman. Ford's films, for the most part. gloriously celebrate white supremacy in the West. Even his attempt to make amends to the Indians in Cheyenne Autumn (1964). based on Mari Sandoz's novel about the genocidal treatment of the Cheyenne Indians in 1878, introduced additional superfluous white characters, and nonNative Americans took the leading Indian roles.

One scene in Cheyenne Autumn is particularly meaningful. A newspaper editor reads a typical headline: "Bloodthirsty Savages Rape and Pillage." He says that such an approach is just not news anymore. They should now "grieve for the noble red man"‹ and sell more newspapers.

The Vietnam War, black militancy, and the hippie movement brought a change to Westerns in the 1960s The struggle of racial minorities to end discrimination and stereotyping found its way into the cinema. Films like Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969) and Soldier Blue (1970) suggest parallels between Vietnam and massacres of Native Americans in the West. But even the more anthropologically accurate A Man Called Horse (1970), a white captivity story which makes extensive use of authentic Lakota dialogue, still bases the hero's sadomasochistic test of endurance upon artist George Catlin's depiction of a Mandan Indian ritual.6

Little Big Man (1970), taken from Thomas Berger's novel, portrays Custer as a self-righteous, unheroic character whose reputed bravery was actually based on arrogance and ignorance. In reexamining history, the film again draws parallels with the Vietnam War. The same parallel is suggested in Ulzana's Raid (1972).

The old stereotypes have not vanished though. They have merely been expanded to allow for the portrayal of more sophisticated and culturally authentic Indians. The good Indian/bad Indian dichotomy still dominates the Western. The presence of Native American actors like Will Sampson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo s Nest (1975) and The White Buffalo (1977), or Chief Dan George in Lirtle Big Man, still doesn't mean that Indians will be presented as people.

Geronimo (1829-1909), the famous Apache leader, has been a favorite character in Westerns. He has been played mostly by non-Native actors, like Chuck Connors in Ceronimo ( 1962). But, more than any other Indian character, he has been played by Native Americans. Jay Silverheels played him in Broken Arrow ( 1950), The Battle at Apache Pass (1952), and Walk the Proud Land (1956); Chief Thundercloud in Geronimo! (1940) and I Killed Geronimo (1950); John War Eagle in The Last Outpost (1951); Chief White Horse in Stagecoach (1939); and Chief Yowlachie in Son of Geronimo ( 1952). Nevertheless, their presence has not prevented him from being characterized in the movies as a treacherous, deceitful, and cruel man.

After the death of Cochise in 1874, Geronimo became chief of the Chiricahua Apache. Beginning in 1881 he led his people on an on-again, off-again five-year rebellion against dispossession which at one point involved both American and Mexican army troops. In 1886, the last Indian leader to surrender to the U.S. government, Geronimo was sent into exile in Florida. Later, on an Oklahoma reservation, he sold pictures of himself to tourists. He even agreed to be an exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.

Another major screen Indian was Sioux chief Sitting Bull (1831-1890), whose real name was Tatanka Tyotake. His first screen appearance was in 1914 in the silent Sitting Bull, the Hostile Sioux Chief . Again, he has generally been unsympathetically portrayed as a conniving and vicious warrior in films like Custer's Last Stand (1936), Fort Vengeance (1953), Tonka (1950, and The Great Sioux Massacre (1965). He was even played for laughs in Annie Oakley (1935) and Annie Get Your Gun (t950).

A greatly respected mystic, Sitting Bull consistently urged resistance to white aggressor, refusing to be moved to a reservation. After the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Sitting Bull retreated to Canada but eventually returned south where he surrendered in 1881 and was confined to a reservation. In 1885 he toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, where he was a major attraction.

In 1890 a cult known as the Ghost Dance religion, which promised to overcome the white man and restore the Indian's former power, began to gain larger numbers of Indian followers on the plains. Fearing that Sitting Bull might become an influential leader once again, Indian police were sent to the reservation to arrest him. He was shot and he died in the struggle.

Many historians today believe that the demise of the Native Americans was not due solely to the Whites' superior weaponry or strategy. Instead, it was the extermination of the buffalo, which provided food and shelter for the Plains Indians, that struck the fatal blow. Shooting on a large scale began in 1867, and by 1883,16 years later, the buffalo were virtually all gone. By then, Native Americans were not even an occupational hazard in the West.

NOTES

1. Ralph Friar and Natasha Friar. The Only Good Indian (New York: Drama Book Specialists. 1972). 223.

2. Ibid., 313-319.

3. Ibid., 2.

4. Ibid., 295-298.

5. Les Adams and Buck Rainey. Skool Em Ups (New Rochelle. NY: Arlington House, 1978).

6. Friar and Fnar. The Only Good Indian, 37.

The Army

In the Western, there are few things more romantic than the heroic sufferings of the military, the thin bide line that was supposedly all that stood between savagery and civilization in the West. In the last of John Ford's cavalry trilogy, Rio Grande (1950), Colonel York (John Wayne) warns his son about the Army: 'Put out of your mind any romantic ideas that it's a way of glory. It's a life of suffering

Page 38

and hardship." Then Ford went ahead and painted his usual heroic vision.

In the West, the Army was often a very thin line indeed as Robert Utley points out in Froraier Regulars: The United States Armv and the Indian. 1866-1891. After the Civil War, Congress moved to reduce the size of the Arrny. By 1874 it had shrunk to an official strength of about 27,000 men, of whom perhaps only 19,000 could actually be deployed. And not all of those were stationed anywhere near the West. 1

The Army was organized into ten cavalry regiments, five artillery regiments, and 25 infantry regiments. Cavalry regiments consisted of 12 companies (or troops) each, and there were ten companies in each infantry regiment. Regiments were commanded by a colonel. and each company was commanded by a captain. Individual company strength could be anywhere from 50 to 100 men, but the average size of a cavalry company in 1881 was 58. 2

Regular Army regiments were not stationed in particular localities. The cavalry regiments were simply numbered one through ten and were moved wherever they were needed. Pay was low, about $13 a month for privates in the 1870s, and there were few amenities in their lives. Food was often little more than bacon, beans, hardtack, and coffee. Army-issue clothing was totally inadequate for the extremes of heat and cold the soldier would suffer on the frontier. Training was haphazard and equipment often minimal. The Army continued to issue the single-shot Springfield rifle until well into the 1880s, long after civilians and even some Indians had started using the Winchester repeating rifle. Discipline was harsh, and disease was always prevalent, with cholera accounting for a significant number of deaths each year. Alcoholism was also a serious problem. Army records indicate that onethird of all men recruited between 1867 and 1891 deserted. Encounters with Indians between 1866 and 1891 resulted in 932 soldiers killed and 1,061 wounded. 3

In many instances, the Army was often outmaneuvered and outfought by the Indians. The movies' image of the cavalry charge, which was first popularized in the paintings of Frederic Remington, sometimes did occur. But the Indians rarely could be enticed into a full-scale battle, preferring instead to adopt what has come to be known as guerrilla tactics. The cavalry was so cumbersome that they were not-always able to get close enough to the Indians in the West to engage them in battle. Army horses were not bred to forage for themselves on the plains as Indian ponies were. Therefore, it was necessary for supply trains of oats and hay to be brought along to service the cavalry in the field. Army horses also did not have the stamina for long engagements. In the first few days of a campaign the cavalry, on horses, could cover more territory than the infantry could on foot. The foot soldier, covering up to 20 miles a day, could usually outlast the cavalry after a week.

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That is why it was the infantry soldiers who generally found themselves most often in campaigns against the Indians.

This kind of reality does not easily fit into the romantic fantasy the movies have chosen to impart to the military presence in the West. Right from the beginning, the Western has nearly always insisted on portraying the military in almost total disregard for fact and reality. It was quite possibly pioneer filmmaker D. W. Griffith who established the convention of the last-minute cavalry rescue in The Ba~tle of Elderbush Gulch in 1913. But it is director John Ford who is mainly to be credited with creating the dominant mythology of the Arrny in West ems. Starting in 1939 with Stagecoach and continuing through a whole series of what have come to be regarded as classics, Ford helped to firmly establish the cinematic myth of the triumphant cavalry.

But there may be a literary precedent for Ford's vision of the Army. In the late nineteenth century the novels of the former 5th Cavalry Capt. Charles King (1 1933) helped to popularize stories about life in the Army. King wrote his stories during active service on the frontier. He was stationed in Indian-fighting army posts and rode in campaigns against Cochise, Geronimo, and the Sioux. His first novel, The Colonel's Daughter, was published in 1881 and has a strong claim to be the first true Western novel ever written.

King's romantic fiction, with titles like The Deserter (1887) and An Army Portia (1893), were frequently set on an army fort during an Indian uprising. His novels combine military action with a love story. Some critics have suggested that King's stories may be the distant ancestors of John Ford's cavalry film trilogy. King's work was indeed a strong influence on the later work of Western novelists James Warner Bellah and Ernest Haycox.

It was also King who introduced the Irish soldier into Western fiction. That the Irish were certainly plentiful in the post-Civil War Army is borne out by statistics: they made up about 20 percent of the entire force, with Germans being the next most common group. "Of the foreigners," observed a 4th Cavalry officer, "I preferred the Irish ‹ they were more intelligent and resourceful as a rule."4 And again, it is in Ford's Westerns that Irish soldiers feature so prominently: Sgt. Mulcahy in For, Apache (1948) and Sgt. Quincannon in both She Wore A Yellow Ribbon ( 1949) and Rio Grande (1950).

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The army that Ford shows in his films is certainly quite unique. It is commanded in a most democratic fashion, made up of individuals from a number of cultural backgrounds and even different races, as evidenced in Sergeant Rutledge (1960). In this idealized army that Ford concocts, differences of class, nationality, and political ideology generally do not seem to exist. Everyone from defeated Confederates to fresh-faced Yankees to Irish immigrants are united as comrades in a truly national army. The sons of even the lowliest of ordinary soldiers may, through bravery, become officers, heroes, and even marry the colonel's daughter. Ford's army existed in much the same way that Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders had supposedly taken Eastern college boys and Western cowboys and successfully merged them into a unified fighting force in the Spanish-American War. Ford's army is able to overcome any differences to fight for the common cause ‹ the subjugation of the Indian.

In Remington's paintings, soldiers are generally portrayed as tired and battle-weary. Ford chose to frame many of his Westerns with a similar conceit. Rio Grande (1950) begins and ends with a battered but victorious cavalry column returning to the fort, sadly carrying their dead and wounded. Ford, like Remington, suggests the heroic stature of these men resides in their ability to conquer, yet not rejoice at the enemy's loss.

Ford's Westerns reinforce the idea that it is experience in the West, not a fancy education or blind reliance upon the drill manual, that makes a good soldier. In Fort Apache (1948), the colonel's West Point training has left him stiff and unbending, in contrast with the captain who represents real, firsthand experience in the West. The textbook-taught colonel represents the East and, by implication, European values.

This point of view is also true of Raoul Walsh's They Died With Their Boots On (1941). Custer is shown arriving in a fancy uniform of his own design and announces that his role model is Murat, Napoleon's famous general. It is not until Custer rejects Eastern values and embraces the West that Walsh allows him his "heroic" place in history.

The theme of the necessary rejection of European military tradition runs through many army Westerns. It is evident in films where a European military advisor (usually German, Prussian, or French) arrives, often to derision and suspicion. This is the case in Major Dundee (1964) and The Wild Bunch (1969), among others.

Westerns have often take a critical and judgmental view of certain aspects of military operations. The figure of the pedantic and obstinate commander, refusing to listen to those with actual experience fighting Indians, is not uncommon. Sometimes the character is based directly on Custer, such as in Fort Apache, (1948), The Last Frontier ( I 955), and The Glory Guns ( 1965). It was not until Soldier Blue and Lirtle Big Man, both made in 1970, that Hollywood seriously begin to question the military's role and actions in the West. Both films accuse the Army, at worst, of genocide in order to totally annihilate the Indian or, at best, a determined attempt to reduce them to the status of conquered peoples. One of the effects of the Vietnam War on American society was an increase in antimilitary sentiment. This attitude was reflected in many Westerns made during the period. The irony is that it was post-Civil War pessimism and sadness (the time period in which most army Westerns are set) that resulted in a major reduction of Army strength. It would not be until the late 1980s that the military would regain favor in America, and Westerns, too, would stage a small but insistent comeback both in the cinema and on television.

NOTES

1. Robert Utlry. Fronricr R~gulars: Thr United Slates Army and the Indian. 1866-1891 (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 15-16.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.. 23.

4. Ibid.

Heroes

A central element of the Western has always been the heroes and villains, real and imagined, of the West. Much of the manner in which these individuals have been treated can be traced back to the tensions that are implicit between fantasy and fact.

From James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking to Daniel Boone and from Deadwood Dick to Buffalo Bill, characters from fictich and reality have been melded together to-create the myth of the West. In Virgin Land, Henry Nash Smith confronts the ambiguity that exists with real, historical figures in the West, who were also creatures of imagination, exaggeration, and ultimately, myth. Smith describes the problem that faced the first biographers of Daniel Boone. "Which was the real Boone‹the standardbearer of civilization and refinement, or the child of nature who fled into the wilderness before the advance of settlement?"' He concludes that the Wild West hero could be both and serve either purpose.

For the significant part he played in pioneering the settlement of Kentucky, Daniel Boone (1734-1820) became an internationally known figure during his own lifetime. His first attempt to settle on the frontier in 1773 was unsuccessful due to strong Indian opposition. He led a second party through the Cumberland Gap along what was called the Wilderness Road and helped build Fortress Boonesboro on the Kentucky River. Boone was taken prisoner by Shawnee Indians in 1778, but, after three months in captivity, managed to escape. He then helped defend the fort against attack from a combined force of British and Indians. But Boone failed to properly register the lands he claimed for himself in Kentucky and eventually lost them. For a number of reasons, Boone kept moving his family farther and farther West. The final years of his life were spent in Missouri.

Boone was the first real Western hero. His contribution to Western expansion was quickly recognized and documented

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as early as 1784 in The Discovcry, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke, by John Filson. In 1813 Boone's nephew, Daniel Bryan, celebrated the frontiersman's achievements in an epic poem entitled The Adventures of Daniel Boone. And in 1819 Lord Byron immortalized him in Don Juan.

It was Timothy Flint's biography, The Life and Adventures of Daniel Boone, The First Settler of Kentucky, published in 1833, that firmly established Boone as a legendary figure. The book was instrumental in establishing the frontiersman as the first larger-than-life character in the West. As indicated earlier, Henry Nash Smith showed in Virgin Land how Boone became a curiously ambivalent figure. At times he was used to symbolize the pioneer urge to settle the wilderness and, at other times, he embodied the spirit of solitude, the individual who resented the encroachments of civilization. It is primarily as the frontiersman and the pathfinder that he found his place in the public's imagination. Curiously, his popularity as a hero in the movies has never matched his historical status or importance.

Boone failed to become a major movie hero, although he is a featured character in many films. In 1907, Edison made Daniel Boone, or Pioneer Days in America. Other silent treatments include: Daniel Boone's Bravery (1911), Life of Daniel Boone (1912), and In the Days of Daniel Boone (1923). Buffalo Bill, Jr. played Boone in the lowbudget Mascot film, The Miracle Rider (1935). But Boone was never really given the big-scale Hollywood treatment. He was the subject of a few forgettable films at RKO, Columbia, and Republic‹Daniel Boone (1936), The Return of Daniel Boone (1941), and Daniel Boone, Trail Blazer (1956)‹and then, most notable, turned up on television, played by Fess Parker, in the long-running series Daniel Boone (1964-1970).

Christopher Houston Carson (1809-1868), known as Kit Carson, was one of the key figures in the exploration of the West. But the frontiersman is also important to the development of fiction about the West, the creation of a West of the imagination. Beginning in the late 1820s, Carson earned his living as a fur trapper in and around the Rocky Mountains. In 1842 he met John Fremont, an explorer who was preparing for his first expedition West.

Carson became Fremont's guide, traveling with him on a number of journeys to survey the Platte River and explore the area between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas. It was during the last of these trips, an expedition to California in 1845-1846, that hostilities broke out between the Mexican authorities and American settlers there. When fighting escalated, the federal government became involved. When war was declared between Mexico and the United States, it was Carson who guided General Stephen Watts Kearney and his force from New Mexico to California.

Numerous accounts of Fremont expeditions and his fndings were published at the time, many written by the explorer's wife Jesse, the daughter of the then-powerful senator Thomas Hart Benton. Carson was specifically singled out for his bravery, abilities, and knowledge. These accounts were the beginning of his fame and legend.

Carson's relationship with the Indians was somewhat inconsistent, fighting them on the one hand, yet taking at least two Indian wives. In the 1850s, having taken another woman for his wife, this time a Mexican, he took up ranching. Then, at the beginning of the Civil War, Carson was made a colonel in the Union Army. He later led campaigns against the Mescalero Apache and the Navajo.

Carson quite literally became a legend in his own time. He was legitimately a brave and skillful frontiersman with considerable real achievements to his credit. But the exaggeration and wholesale concoction that heralded his exploits reportedly embarrassed him.

It was Timothy Flint, again, who first introduced the mountain man or scout as a fictional hero into Western literature. Flint's The Shoshonee Valley, published in 1830, was, in fact, inspired by Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales. Carson's expenences with Fremont was ideal subject matter to inspire writers. His next appearance in fiction is in The Prairie Flower (1849), by Emerson Bennett, but it was not until Kit Carson, the Prince of the Gold Hunters (1849), by Charles Avenll, that he was elevated to the status of mythical hero.

In 1858 Carson was the subject of a major biography, The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, From Facts Narrated by Himself, by DeWitt C. Peters. It was this book that carefully established the image of Carson that persists to this day. He was presented as a conservative, almost genteel, hero who neither drank alcohol nor swore. Two subsequent biographies further embellished his character, one by Charles Burdette 1862, another by John S. C. Abbott in 1873. He was cast as the hero of z string of dime novels which proclaimed him "the most renowned Indian fighter the world ever produced." Carson's position as a major Western hero was, by then, very secure.

Yet, mountain men never achieved the kind of popularity in the cinema that they had in other media. Carson did not become an important movie hero. His exploits were first detailed on the screen in Biograph's Kit Carson in 1903. A number of other silent films featured Carson as a character, but his appearances after the coming of sound were largely in low-budget films produced by studios like Mascot, Columbia, and Republic: Fighting With Kit Carson ( 1933), Overland With Kit Carson (1939), and Trail of Kit Carson (1945). There was, though, a B-Western star named after him, Sunset "Kit" Carson.

William Frederick Cody (1846-1917), known as Buffalo Bill Cody, is the quintessential example of how basic elements of actual experience in the historical West could be turned into entertainment, could become show business, and could become an integral part of the essence of the Western. Cody's early life was quite unremarkable, similar to dozens of other Army scouts on the frontier at

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the time. At age 14 he was, for a brief time, a Pony Express rider. He got his name during the period of his life in which he was a buffalo hunter of some renown. He and his friend Wild Bill Hickok served as Army scouts on the Western frontier. At one point, Cody was a scout for General George Armstrong Custer. It was when Cody met dime novelist Ned Buntline in 1869 that his life changed. Cody was already quite well known throughout the West, but he so impressed the writer that Buntline made him the hero of four dime novels, the first being Buffalo Bill, King of the Border Men. With the publication of those stories, Cody was quickly on his way to national and international fame.

Cody, who was born in Ohio, took his first trip east in 1872. While he was in New York City he saw a stage production based on Buntline's first novel about him and was quite impressed with the glamour and hoopla of show business. Buntline was writing a new play, and he persuaded Cody to appear on stage as himself. The play was The Scouts of rhe Prairie, which opened in Chicago on 16 December 1872, and, as Cody's biographer, Donald Russell, said in The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill that night witnessed "the birth of the Western."2

For the next decade Cody split his life between the East and the West. He spent winters on the stage and summers escorting celebrities out West or scouting for the Army. In the summer of 1876, shortly after Custer's defeat at the Little Big Horn, Cody, wearing one of his theatrical costumes, killed and scalped the Indian chief Yellow Hair (often called Yellow Hand in the movies). The incident would be much celebrated in dime novels and in the play The Red Right Hand; or Buffalo Bill's First Scalp for Custer.

In 1883 Cody started Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, and for the next 30 years he toured the world with a production that featured a combination of specialty acts and a number of staged narrative set pieces. There were sharpshooters like Annie Oakley, cowboys like Buck Taylor demonstrating roping and riding skills, as well as dramatizations of events or situations such as an Indian attack on the Deadwood Stage and Custer's Last Stand. In later years Cody found ways to incorporate other visual tableaus such as Teddy Roosevelt's charge up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War. The production was an instant popular and critical success. A constant swirl of publicity surrounded Cody, ensuring him high visibility and public awareness.

A re-creation of Cody's experience as a Pony Express rider was incorporated as one of the acts of the Wild West show. It became one of his most popular attractions. Some critics and historians have suggested that the fame of the Pony Express is perhaps based more on this exploitation by its most famous rider than on any real historical importance of the short-lived, financially unsuccessful undertaking.

The Pony Express was an attempt to establish a fast and regular mail service from St. Joseph, Missouri, through Salt Lake City, Utah, to Sacramento, California. It was begun on 3 April 1860 by the firm of Russell, Majors. and Waddell. The prize was the government mail contract held by the Butterfield Overland Mail stagecoaches, which took a more southerly route‹Fort Smith, Arkansas, El Paso, Texas, to Los Angeles and San Francisco. California.

Young riders, under 21 years of age and weighting less than 130 pounds, carried the mail across the country at breakneck speed through the perils of wilderness. weather, and bandit and Indian interference. Way stations were established every ten miles on the route so riders could change to fresh horses. The service took 13 days and set a standard for reliability.

Its future, though, was questionable right from the start. The transcontinental telegraph was already under construction when the Pony Express was inaugurated. so it was just a matter of time until the young riders would be redundant. The telegraph was completed on 24 October 1861, and the Pony Express ceased to exist two days later after only 18 months of operation.

The fact that the Pony Express operated only for such a short period of time has not prevented it from becoming mythicized and exploited in the movies. and often done so inaccurately. In Pony Express (1953), Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok are given credit for establishing the famous mail service. In addition to this factual error, the actor who played Cody (Charlton Heston) was physically too big a man to have reasonably been a Pony Express rider. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) contains a scene where Pony Express riders are shown carrying the news of Custer's death, an event which occurred at least 15 years after the service was halted.

In 1879 Cody published his autobiography, The Life of Hon. William ~ Cody, Known as Buffalo Bill. It was tinged with elements of fantasy, exaggeration, and fiction as well as scatterings of fact. Beginning in the mid-1870s, over 500 highly imaginative dime novels were written about Cody's exploits. Cody, though, uas a consummate showman and self-publicist who was not above cooperating and encouraging his legend to be embroidered, often well beyond the limits of believability.

In 1890, during the Indian uprising surrounding the Ghost Dance cult, Buffalo Bill offered his services to General Nelson Miles, one of the Army's most experienced and successful Indian fighters. Miles was himself ambitious, aggressive, and vain. but very effective. Sitting Bull had toured for a year with Cody's Wild West Show so the two knew one another. There was a fear that Sitting Bull might reemerge as a powerful Indian leader. But before Cody could get to see him. Sitting Bull was killed during a scuffle with Indian police when they tried to arrest him.

In 1913 Cody made a film called The Indian Wars, which was about some of the events in his life, including his fight with Yellow Hair. General Miles also appeared as himself in it along with a large number of Indians and soldiers. That film has been lost, but some even earlier

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Edison Kinetoscope footage featuring Buffalo Bill still survives in the Library of Congress collection: Buffalo Bill and Escort (1897) and Parade of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show (1898).

The cinema has been fond of Buffalo Bill, featuring him in over 35 feature motion pictures. which have generally portrayed the mythicized Buffalo Bill. accepting his legendary status with alacrity, producing the filmic equivalent of dime novels. Typical is William Wellman's movie biography, Buffalo Bill (1944). It follows Buntline's fanciful and romanticized version of Cody's career rather than attempting to explore the gray area between the legend and the truth. Joel McCrea portrays Buffalo Bill as a handsorne, morally upright man, who earns the undying respect of an Indian chief by fairly beating him in oneonone combat. After that, the frontiersman becomes a champion of the Indian peoples' cause. Cody then goes to Washington as a lobbyist. Later, he gets involved in the circus, but any ironies that might be explored in Cody's transformation from frontier hero to show business entrepreneur are totally avoided and completely overlooked.

More ambivalent is Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians orSittingBull'sHistoryLesson (1976), which casts a jaundiced eye at the necessities of fakery and pretense that were an integral part of Bill Cody's Wild West Show. Paul Newman plays Cody as a man with doubts and guilt, surrounded by those who both print the legend and profit by it. When Sitting Bull joins the troupe and demands that some level of authenticity be part of the act, Cody finds himself hemmed in by audience expectations. No matter how good his intentions, the showman is unable to prevent the systematic denial of justice to the Indian chief and his people.

George Armstrong Custer (1839-1876) is perhaps the most famous, or infamous, soldier in the history of the West. After a less than distinguished career at West Point, Custer proved his mettle at Gettysburg during the Civil War and was made the Army's youngest major-general.

After the War he was assigned to the 7th Cavalry, which was involved in continuing battles with the Plains Indians. At one point he was court-martialed for his harsh treatment of troops under his command and suspended from duty for a year. On 27 November 1868, shortly after he was reinstated, he led an attack on the Cheyenne (called the Battle of the Washita, located in present-day Oklahoma), which resulted in the massacre of over 100 Indians‹men, women, and children.

Custer prided himself on his appearance, wearing tailored uniforms and other striking clothing. He loved to pose for pictures and quickly developed a reputation as a dandy. He has been described as a rather devious manicdepressive with irrational tendencies, determined to win glory at all costs. In 1874, at the age of only 35, he published his autobiography, My Life on the Plains.

In 1873 Custer's regiment was sent to the Dakota territories. The Black Hills was an area guaranteed, by treaty, as land set aside for the exclusive use of the Sioux Indians. After the discovery of gold in the Black Hills there was a large influx of miners. This led to escalating confrontations with the Sioux. The Army quickly became involved in an expanding. full-scale action against the Indians of the Northern Plains. It was in Montana, pursuing a large force of Sioux and Cheyenne, that the 7th Cavalry found itself in the valley of the Little Big Horn on 25 June 1876. With fatal result, Custer allowed his battalion to become separated from the rest of his command. He and 200 of his men were surrounded and destroyed.

On his death Custer was widely hailed as a hero. His "Last Stand" became the subject of numerous paintings which unfailingly and systematically raised him to the status of martyr. Much later, this viewpoint would be revised, instead emphasizing his recklessness, arrogance, and mania for publicity.

Custer's image in the cinema has also undergone a similar revision. Beginning with silent films, like Custer's Last Stand (On the Little Big Horn) (1909), Custer was portrayed as a full-fledged hero. It was not until later that a range of interpretations was to emerge. Ronald Reagan played him as a dashing hero in Santa Fe Trail (1940) as did Errol Flynn (with only a touch of eccentricity) in Thev Died With Their Boots On (1941). Henry Fonda portrayed him as a stubborn disciplinarian in Fort Apache (1948). Custer does not appear in 7th Cavalry ( 1956), but the film defends his reputation after the massacre even in the face of evidence of incompetence brought forward by other officers and soldiers.

Beginning in the late 1960s, with the Vietnam War and its attendant wave of antimilitarism, Custer's reputation was further savaged on the screen. Both Custer of the West (1966) and Little Big Man (1970), which, of all the films, most accurately restages the Little Big Horn battle, portray Custer as a deeply disturbed man, bordering on incompetency. Custer remains one of the few legends of the West to be quite so viiified in the movies. Evan S. Connell's very readable Son of the Morning Star is the most recent and detailed account of Custer's life and death.3

Frontiersman and politician Davy Crockett (1786-1836) is another Western hero whose actual achievements are almost obscured by the myth that surrounds him. Crockett spent a great many years of his life on the Tennessee frontier. As a member of the Tennessee volunteers he was involved in Andrew Jackson's 1814 campaign against the Creek Indians. After servmg in the Tennessee state legislature he was elected to Congress in 1827. He lost his congressional seat in 1835 and headed West. In Texas he got caught up in the war with Mexico. It is his death in 1836 at the Alamo that gave Croclcett his chief fame.

From 23 February to 6 March 1836, a garrison of less than 200 Americans and assorted emigrants held the Alamo mission buildings of San Antonio de Bexar against 2,500 Mexican Army troops, led: by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, before being overwhelmed. This has come to be thought of as one of the most heroic incidents in American history. But many of the facts have

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been disputed ever since, with some of the reputed heroisms being called into question by revisionists, yet indignantly defended by admirers.

The most famous film version of the event is perhaps John Wayne's production of The Alamo (1960). In spite of liberties taken with the truth and the string of platitudes Wayne recites as Crockett, the film, with uncredited assistance from John Ford. is certainly well-meaning, no matter how inaccurate.

There are certain facts about what happened at the Alamo which cannot now be proved one way or another. The question which has been asked by a number of' historians. whether Crockett died fighting or was shot after surrendering, is perhaps moot since there is no conclusive eye-witness evidence. The accepted "truth" in films and television versions is that Crockett battled to the last.

During his life, Crockett had carefully nurtured his fame and reputation. He had been the model for the character of the comic eccentric in James K. Paulding's popular 1830 novel, Lion of the West. In 1834 Crockett collaborated with Thomas Chilton on a romanticized and fanciful autobiography, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee, which did a great deal to further his political career. He quickly became a wellknown figure, due to a great extent to the publication, beginning in 1835, of almanac series of stories heralding Crockett's adventurous life and military exploits.

What Crockett ultimately did, though, was add the tall tale, the exaggeration, to the Western. Crockett certainly didn't invent the tall tale, but he is very much responsible for popularizing the exaggeration as a characteristic form of Western humor. In the almanacs, stories about Crockett have him wrestling bears, pummeling them with his fists. He also apparently not only scalped Indians but ate their flesh as well. Such tall tales were frequently sprinkled through later dime novels in which Crockett appears.

The frontiersman was also a popular figure on the nineteenth-century stage. Frank Murdoch's play Davy Crockett, or Be Sure You're Right, Then Go Ahead, starring Frank Mayo as Crockett, opened in 1872 and was a big hit. It was a staple on the touring circuit for many years. Crockett was portrayed as a poetry-quoting knightly hero.

Crockett is another Western hero who has not found commensurate favor in the movies. He appears occasionally, and mostly in lesser films. It was the Walt Disney Davy Crockett television series, in the 19SOs, that brought him his most lasting fame. The series. starring Fess Parker, created a craze for coonskin caps, which sent the wholesale cost of raccoon tails spiraling, although it is doubtful whether Crockett ever wore such an item. The program's theme song, Davy Crockett. King of the Wild Frontier, reportedly sold over a million copies.

Lawman Wyatt Earp (1848-1929) is the most famous member of the five Earp brothers‹James, Virgil, Morgan, Warren, and Wyatt. All were handsome men who wore the large mustaches popular at the time. Historians have long documented the fact that events of Wyatt Earp's life did not really justify his elevation to one of the major heroes of the West.

In his early years he was a gambler and buffalo hunter. Wyatt's brasher James and his wife lived in Wichita, Kansas, where he was a bartender and she ran a brothel. In 1874 Wyatt was hired as a lawman in Wichita. Two years later he moved to Dodge City, becoming assistant marshal there in 1878. It was here that he joined forces with Bat Masterson, Doc Holliday, and other members of the socalled "Dodge City Gang," the people who controlled all gambling and prostitution in town.

In 1879 Wyatt moved to Tombstone, Arizona, where Virgil was deputy United States Marshal. Morgan and James soon joined them, with Wyatt becoming deputy sheriff for the county. The brothers quickly formed an alliance with some of the influential local businessmen and proceeded to use rough tactics to stop rustling and general rowdiness in town. This set off a feud between the Earps and some of the local cowboys ‹ led by "Old Man" Clanton and his sons (Ike, Phineas, and Billy) ‹ for economic and political supremacy in the area.

It was this tension that led to the famous gunfight on 26 October 1881, not at the O.K. Corral, as legend would have it, but on Fremont Street, which is close by. Wyatt, Morgan, Virgil, and Doc Holliday faced off with Ike and

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Billy Clanton and Frank and Tom McLaury. The McLaurys and Billy died in the gunfight. Wyatt and Holliday were arrested for murder but later released, and Virgil lost his job as deputy marshal. Shortly after, Virgil was badly wounded in an ambush and, in March 1882, Morgan was shot in the back and killed. Wyatt and Holliday took revenge by murdering the two suspected culprits and then fled the area.

Wyatt returned to gambling, wandering the frontier towns and mining camps as far north as Alaska. He ended up in Los Angeles. where he became friends with William S. Hart, Tom Mix, and John Ford, advising the moviemakers on details of accuracy about life in the West.

It was not until the publication of Tombstone, by Walter Noble Burns, in 1927 that Wyatt became a celebrated hero. Burns was a newspaperman whose biographies of famous Westerners (Billy the Kid, Joaquin Murieta) had substantially contributed to their mythification. It was he then who began that process for Wyatt Earp.

Shortly before his death, Wyatt cooperated with writer Stuart Lake on Wyart Earp: Frontier Marshal, published in 1931. Much of Lake's book is absolute fiction. The two books became the basis for the legend of the fearless towntamer who brought law and order to the rough-andtumble West.

Historians contend that Wyatt Earp became part of the myth of the West partly because he was in the right place at the right time. He lived long enough to help create his own legend at a time when people were interested and willing to have heroes larger than life. His elevation to the status of major Western hero was purely chance, given his questionable and checkered past.

Hollywood has had a long fascination with Wyatt Earp, generally portraying him with great respect and dignity. Most films invite sympathy for the Earps and attempt to give heroic importance to the showdown, which it probably does not deserve.

Although it is poor history, perhaps the best, and most definitive, movie dramatization is Henry Fonda's portrayal of Wyatt in John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946). Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan are supposedly peaceful cattlemen out to avenge their murdered young brother, Jimmy. But in truth, James Earp was the oldest brother and never involved in their feud in any way. They are assisted by Doc Holliday, portrayed as a consumptive alcoholic surgeon. The real Holliday was a dentist. Ford claimed that he shot the famous gunfight exactly the way his friend Wyatt said it happened. Since Old Man Clanton is killed in the fight in Ford's film, but actually died some months before, someone's version is incorrect. The shootout, staged at the O.K. Corral rather then on the adjacent street where it actually took place, shows Holliday killed, which he was not. At the end Wyatt is about to marry Holliday's ex-fiancee, which was certainly never the case. Henry Fonda at least looks like the real Wyatt Earp

In the other major Earp film, Gunfght at the O.K. Corral (1956), Burt Lancaster is a clean-shaven Wyatt, and Kirk Douglas plays trigger-happy dentist Holliday, apparently dying of tuberculosis. The film makes its own historical errors but manages also to correct some.

Wyatt, for some reason, was spared the debunking of revisionist Westerns in the 1960s and 1970s. The only variations were when James Stewart played him, mostly for comic relief, in John Ford's Cheyenne Aurumn (1964), and he met the Three Stooges in The Outlaws is Coming ( 1964). Only James Garner and Harris Yulin, in Hour of the Gun ( 1967) and Doc ( 1971), respectively, ever really called into question Wyatt's darker side, and then only very subtly.

NOTES

1. Smith. Virgin Land. 55.

2. Donald Russell; The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 1960). 196.

3. Evan S. Connell. Son of the Morning Star (New York: Harper and Row. 1984).

Outlaws

The outlaw, who lives, and often dies, by the gun, has been a major figure in the Western movie genre right from its earliest days. Since The Great Train Robberv, hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of fictional outlaws as well as recreations of actual people like Billy the Kid, the Daltons, Jesse James, and the Clantons have been an integral part of the movie Western.

In a sense, nearly every Western hero was a gunfighter in that the invariable conclusion to most movies was a shootout. But of course, not everyone who packed a gun was an outlaw. Since the basis of all drama is conflict, Westerns needed bad guys. And the real West provided plenty of raw material for the cinema's needs, whether they were outlaws, professional gunfighters, bounty hunters, mercenaries, or just plain bad guys.

Perhaps somewhat perversely, the desperadoes of the West are often thought of as heroes. It is understandable that they are well remembered, but the fact that they are often regarded with no small degree of admiration and affection says something about human nature, and perhaps also about the cinema, which helped perpetuate that notion. Hollywood would have us believe that many outlaws were more sinned against than sinners, when in fact most of them were petty, unpleasant criminals who helped make life in the West harder still.

The Western's presentation of gunfights and death is, of course, generally incorrect. When a real gunfight occurred, it took place in clouds of dense smoke, caused by the black powder used in the guns. The fast draw was far less important than shooting carefully and straight.

Marksmanship in the real West was much less precise and accurate than movies lead us to believe. Western movie heroes may be able to group five revolver shots within a few inches at 100 feet, but in the real West that would have been an extraordinary feat given the quality of firearms in use at the time. Nor could a distant rider be

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picked off with a single rifle shot at long range. A person hit by a .45 bullet would be dead or in shock, unable to summon the strength to carry on fighting as is often the case in the movies.

The real West, though, was indeed,home to a number of individuals who found themselves on the wrong side of the law. And none were more colorful than Billy the Kid and Jesse James. Perhaps more has been written about the alleged facts surrounding the life of Billy the Kid (18601881) than any other outlaw. He has also featured prominently in more movies than any other desperado, real or imagined. He has remained one of the most interesting of outlaws perhaps because of his youth and the mystery which surrounds his character. Stephen Tatum's Inventing Billy the Kid is an enjoyable and readable study of the outlaw and the fascinating relationship that exists between Western reality and imagination.'

Billy the Kid has been variously known as William Bonney, Henry McCarty, and William Antrim. Historians now believe that his real name was most likely Henry McCarty, that he was born in New York City, and that he killed his first man (of a reputed 21 victims) at the age of l7.

Cattle baron John Tunstall hired the teenager to work as a cowhand on his ranch in Lincoln County, New Mexico. It was here that Billy found himself involved in the socalled Lincoln County War in 1878, a range war that had developed between rival factions, each seeking economic domination of the area. Tunstall joined John Chisum, another wealthy cattle baron, to challenge the powerful Santa Fe Ring which monopolized local business dealings as well as the lucrative government beef contracts. In 1878 Billy witnessed Tunstall's murder, ordered by the Santa Fe Ring. The Kid, along with other Chisum employees and supporters, then carried out a series of revenge killings, including that of a local sheriff.

In order to bring peace to the region, the new governor of the territory, Lew Wallace (author of Ben Hur) offered Billy amnesty. But, frustrated at the time it was taking for the pardon to be enacted and the failure of Chisum to pay his back wages, Billy turned to rustling. The new Lincoln County sheriff, Pat Garrett (1850-1908), was charged with bringing order to the area. His first rask was to capture Billy the Kid so he could be tried for the murder of the previous sheriff. Billy was apprehended and convicted of the murder in 1880, but before he could be hanged he escaped, killing two deputies in the process. Garrett followed him to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, where, on 14 July 1881, he took the young outlaw by surprise in a darkened bedroom and shot him dead. Billy the Kid was 21 years old when he died.

Like many other outlaws in the West, Billy the Kid had become a celebrity even before his death. Newspapers regularly carried reports about him and he was quite well known. But the Kid has not always been presented as a hero. The first biography of the Kid appeared the year he died and, like most dime novels which followed in the 1880s, it portrays Billy as a vicious killer. Pat Garrett's own account, The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, published in 1882, takes the same point of view. Even early silent films, Billy the Kid (1911) and Billv the Bandit (1916), portrayed him as a villain. It was not until Walter Noble Burns' book, The Saga of Billy the Kid (1926), that the Kid was recast as the innocent forced into killing by circumstances beyond his control. This was to become the dominant interpretation, one which persists to this day.

That was also the stance Hollywood quickly adopted, starting with Billy the Kid ( 1930), King Vidor's bigbudget MGM Western, shot in an early 70mm big-screen process, and based on Burns' novel. It starred Johnny Mack Brown in his last major film before he was relegated to BWestern stardom. In the 1930s and 1940s there was a popular lowbudget Billy the Kid series, first starring Bob Steele and later Buster Crabbe. The films had nothing to do with the historical character other than they revolved around an innocent person who was forced by uncontrollable circumstances to live a life outside the law. It was a basic and much-used Western plot device. The character was later renamed Billy Carson after parents' groups complained about children identifying with an outlaw.

In 1957 Billy the Kid was given first-class screen

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treatment in Arthur Penn's psychologically oriented The Lef't Handed Gun (1955). Paul Newman portrayed the Kid as a martyred illiterate (at one point shown struggling to read a newspaper report about his exploits) desperately searching for love and justice. There is some confusion as to whether he was left- or right-handed. The best-known photograph of him shows his gun on his left hip. but the negative could easily have been reversed. In Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Kris Kristofferson played The Kid as a man with a social conscience, contemptuous of Garrett's cozy relationship with the landowners. The Kid has also been played by. among others, Audie Murphy in The Kid From Texas (1949); Nick Adams in Strange Lad! in Town (1955); Dean Stockwell in The Last Movie (1971); and Michael J. Pollard in Dirt! Little Bill\, (1972). He also turned up in The Outlaws is Coming (1964) with the Three Stooges and went gothic in Bill! the Kid vs. Dracula (1965). More recently, Emilio Estevez played him, as William Bonney, in Young Guns (1989).

Jesse James (1847-1882), along with his brother Frank (1843-1915), was the leader of one of the most famous outlaw gangs in American history. They have been variously represented as Robin Hoods and vicious hoods. Like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Wild Bill Hickok, and Buffalo Bill Cody, Jesse James was both famous in his own time and a legend after. Perhaps the best account of the life, death, and legend of one of the West's most famous outlaws is William A. Settle's Jesse dames Was His Name. 2

Sons of a Baptist minister, the James brothers were raised in Missouri during a time of great political and social change. Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state in 1820, in the first of a series of compromises between the North and the South that eventually led to the Civil War. Missourians were Southerners although neither a plantation economy nor a large landowner class developed. The area became a staging point for the Southern side in the bitter Kansas/Missouri border conflict of 1854-1856.

During the Civil War, Missouri was the scene of a great deal of guerrilla fighting and small skirmishes rather than the site of major North/South confrontations, although the Battle of Wilson's Creek on 10 August 1861, near Springfield in southwest Missoun, is the exception. Missouri's poor Whites were virtually peasants. For them, the war was simply a confrontation between forces set on dragging them into a modern world of which they wanted no part. It was from this context that both the James and Younger brothers, another famous group of outlaw siblings, emerged.

In the Civil War, Frank and Jesse rode with Quantrill's raiders, an organized guerrilla band of irregulars which harassed Union forces as well as any outspoken opponents of slavery. When the war ended they were regarded as outlaws, and when Jesse tried to surrender he was shot and seriously wounded.

Frank and Jesse apparently graduated quite naturally to civilian crime. Both were intellectually very bright and capable. Frank, in particular, had eclectic tastes and interests, with a fondness for the writings of Shakespeare and Bacon.

The James' gang began robbing banks in 1866, the first at Liberty, Missouri. In 1873, near Council Bluffs, lowa, they began robbing trains. The first train robbery in America had been committed by the Reno gang in Indiana in 1866, but the James' gang perfected the technique, often with the assistance of the Younger brothers. Their procedure was to nag down the train at a lonely spot, separate the mail car from the passenger cars in order to minimize interference, break into the safe, and escape on horseback. This method was faithfully detailed in The True Storv of Jesse James (1957).

Train robbing brought them to the attention of the Pinkertons. After the Civil War, the Pinkerton Detective Agency, started by A;lan Pinkerton (1819-1884), the onetime head of the U.S. Secret Service, became the most efficient and widely known nongovernmental anti-crime force in the country. The agency gained a reputation for its violent strike-breaking techniques, which were used with great success in the "Molly Maguires" dispute of 1874-1875 and in later rail and mine strikes in the West.

In 1875, in an attempt to capture the James brothers, Pinkerton detectives threw a bomb into Jesse's mother's cabin, killing his eight-year-old half-brother and maiming their mother. Neither Frank nor Jesse was there, and the incident only served to increase local public sympathy for them. The James' gang were already popular figures in the area' which had sided with the Confederacy and who viewed railroads as pernicious Yankee monopolies dedicated to the oppression of the farmer. The James brothers skillfully exploited their antiestablishment, patriotic image over the years.

Stories were already turning Jesse into a kind of Robin Hood. The oft-told tale of his giving a poor widow the money to pay off her mortgage and then stealing the money back from the banker may be more apocryphal than true, and it is told about other outlaws as well, but the incident is reported in a number of written accounts. It is even reenacted in The True Srory of Jesse James, Nicholas Ray's classic Western which exemplifies Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis of the frontier as a place where savagery and civilization meet. Later, Jesse's exploits were set to music, in the "Ballad of Jesse James," further enhancing his dogooder image.

In 1877 John Edwards published Noted Guerrillas, or the Warfare of the Border, the first of many books to detail the exploits of the James' gang and, more importantly, to take a strongly sympathetic view of their actions. Throughout the rest of the decade and well into the 1890s, literally hundreds of stories about the James' gang appeared in dime novels, newspapers, and magazines.

While attempting another bank robbery at Northfield, Minnesota, on 7 September 1876, luck ran out for the James' gang when the townspeople decided to fight the outlaws. Jesse and Frank escaped, but three of the gang

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were killed and the three Younger brothers were captured. Within three years the James brothers were back robbing trains, but there was an increasingly large reward offered for each, dead or alive. In St. Ioseph, Missouri, on 3 April 1882, Jesse was shot in the back and killed by Bob Ford, a member of his own gang.

Ford is remembered by the words of the popular ballad as "the dirty little coward/who shot poor Mr. Howard," (Jesse James). Ford had made a deal with the governor of Missouri regarding the reward money and was later pardoned for the murder. He even went on tour with a stage version of his deed before he himself was murdered in Colorado in 1892. Ford was also the subject of Sam Fuller's I Shot Jesse James (1948).

Shortly after Jesse's death, Frank gave himself up, but public sympathy was such that it was impossible to convict him of anything. Frank later tried show business. For a time, he and Cole Younger toured with a Wild West show, and later he opened his farm to paying tourists. Frank died of natural causes in Missouri many years later in 1915.

In Primitive Rebels, historian Eric Hobsbawn suggests that outlaws like the James and Younger brothers should not be thought of merely as thieves and defenders of slavery. He calls them "social bandits" who fought against "the victory of big men and corporations. "3 In effect, they fought during and after the Civil War to protect themselves and their communities from a modernization they did not want. Philip Kaufman's The Great Northf eld Minnesota Raid ( 1972) makes precisely this point. While The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) is wholly fictional. the film's plot hinges on the treatment afforded the rebel farmers of Missouri.

Much of what has been written about the James brothers has tended to portray them as heroes. This is how they have generally been portrayed in the cinema. But it took some time for them to acquire in the cinema the popular heroic status they enjoyed in the literature. Only a few silent films were made: The James Boys in Missouri (1908), The Near Capture of Jesse James ( 1915), and Jesse James, Jr. played his father in 1921 in two low-budget productions, Jesse James Under the Black Flag and Jesse James as the Outlaw.

It was not until 1939 when Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda sympathetically played Frank and Jesse in Jesse James that the cinema really discovered the James' gang. The critical and financial success of the film (which glosses over Jesse's darker side) helped establish them among the most popular of all cinematic outlaws. appearing in over 32 feature films and on numerous television programs. In the 1960s, as an indication of the direction Westerns were going, Jesse not only met the Three Stooges ‹ The Outlaws is Coming (1964)‹but also Frankenstein's daughter ‹ Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter (1965).

NOTES

1. Stephen Tatum, Inventing Billy the Kid: Visions of the Outlaw in Amenca. 1881-1981 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1982).

2. William A. Settle, Jesse James Was His Name (Columbia: University of Missoun Press 1966).

3. Eric J. Hobsbawn, Primitive Rebels (New York: Praeger. 1963), 25.

Blacks

The Western is not a movie genre that is normally associated with Blacks. It is generally conceded that the myth of the American frontier most specifically speaks to the interests and experiences of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants rather than those of black people. But the period in which most Westerns are set encompasses two important events in black American history ‹ the Civil War and the Emancipation Act of 1863. Afterwards, tens of thousands of black people moved West, and yet, although the ' negro cowboy," for example, did exist, Blacks have very little place in the popular imagery of the West.

It is reasonable to assume that black-white interaction did indeed have some importance in shaping frontier culture in the late nineteenth century. But this fact has not played any truly significant role in the evolution of the Western. For example, the cinema has almost totally avoided dealing with the historical reality and national significance of slavery or abolition issues. Nor has there been any meaningful exploration of the relationships between white settlers (many of whom were from the slaveowning South) and Blacks seeking their freedom in the West. Even films set in border states like Missouri and Kansas, where slavery and abolition were greatly contested during the Civil War, generally ignore those potent social and political realities.

Some of the first Blacks in the West were in fact slaves, brought there by Texas ranchers. After the Civil War and Emancipation, large numbers of Blacks moved West. In certain areas, they constituted a sign)ficance part of the ranch workforee, often as cooks, but also as cowboys. Allblack ranch crews were not a totally uncommon sight. In Blacks in the West, W. Sherman Savage points out that during the long cattle drives of the 1870s and 1880s, "blacks were a common sight on the trails. "'

Blacks were highly visible on the frontier, helping build forts, stringing telegraph lines, and occasionally serving as scouts for the cavalry. The U.S. Cavalry even established two "Negro regiments," which had the lowest desertion rate, a major problem, in the entire army. 2 Between 1870 and 1890 a number of black soldiers earned Congressional Medals of Honor for their individual bravery during the Indian Wars.3 John Ford attempted to introduce some of these elements into the mainstream Western in Sergeant Rutledge.

There were, though, three brief periods in which Blacks found a place in Westerns. The first was during the production of the so-called "race" movies, from the 1900s to the late 1940s, when a series of black-oriented Westerns were made. Two decades later, in the 1960s, a second cycle appeared with themes relating to civil rights and race

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relations, which worked Blacks and black concerns into mainstream Westerns. Finally, in the 1970s, the "blaxploitation" trend in Hollywood generated a number of black Westerns. During each cycle, some of the films clearly and deliberately tried to provide an alternative to the traditional Waspishness of the Western. Most though are simply black versions of standard Western plots, conventions, and cliches.

During each of the periods, these black-oriented films were produced by both independent and mainstream, black and white-owned companies. Nonetheless, many are. conscientious attempts to incorporate black-related themes and imagery into the Western. In retrospect, it is clear that none of these films really challenged the conventions of the Western genre in any significant or fundamental way. What they did instead was to manipulate and twist the genre in order to introduce ideas and themes which are traditionally well outside the scope of the Western.

The "race" movies provided an opportunity whereby conventional white themes and situations were turned upside down and repackaged for black audiences. They were low-budget, all-black films, independently produced outside the studio system, by both black- and whitecontrolled companies. In Northern cities they would be shown in movie houses in the black ghettos, while in the South they would be shown in segregated Blacks-only theaters. In other black communities they would be seen in churches and schools using portable projection equipment. While some of the films dealt seriously with black concerns, the majority were meant only as escapist entertainment or Westerns, two genres also popular in the mainstream cinema.

The Trooper of Troop K (1916), about a black cavalry regiment's encounter with the Mexican Army, was one of the very first black Westerns. The film was produced by the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, one of the first "race" movie production companies. It was run by black actor Noble Johnson who had successfully established himself in mainstream films. Trooper may be seen as the prototype black Western: a "shiftless Negro" is offered a chance for redemption and becomes the hero. Significantly, the film reverses the then-common racist imagery Blacks suffered in mainstream movies, which proved very popular with black audiences and profitable for the producers.

Most "race" Westerns were meant merely as escapist entertainment with black cowboys and heros in place of white. In the early 1900s, Bill Pickett, a black cowboy and expert "bulldogger," made a name for himself with the famous Miller 101 Ranch in Oklahoma. The 101 Ranch, well known for its staged rodeos, also employed Tom Mix and Buck Jones before they found fame in the movies. Picl;ett's flamboyant style quickly made him a popular rodeo performer, and he too, found himself in the movies. Only Pickett starred in "race" Westerns like The Crimson Skull (1921) and The Bull-Dogger (1922).

Beginning in 1939 a popular series of black musical Westerns starring Herb Jeffries was produced by Jed Buell's Hollywood Productions, an independent whiteowned company. Jeffries was billed as "Black America's first singing cowboy in the movies." In films like Harlem Rides the Range (1939) and The Bronze Buckaroo (1939), Jeffries played the quintessential cowboy hero: white hat, pearl-handled revolvers, white horse, and an eccentric

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sidekick to provide comic relief. The films totally copied mainstream Westerns of the period, from the plots right down to Jeffries' impersonation of the then-popular singing cowboy, as epitomized by Gene Autry.

But "race" movies often continued to perpetuate some of the objectionable racial stereotypes so often found in mainstream films, like the slow-witted, eye-rolling Negro, a Hollywood staple for many years. Significantly, Jeffries played a light-skinned black hero while the villains were generally darker-skinned. At the end he would always get the girl, who was usually light-skinned herself. What this did was help to perpetuate the class system of color that generally exists in black society right up to the present.

By the 1960s, with the civil rights movement and its struggle for social integration, Blacks in Westerns became symbols for the interracial tensions that was pulling America apart. Hollywood's attempts to incorporate blackrelated themes into traditionally white Western situations was not without difficulty.

Sergeant Rutledge's story of racial equality and human dignity is clear evidence that the black presence actually destroys the mythology of the frontier West. John Ford's well-documented romanticized conception of the West, either doesn't exist in Sergeant Rutledge (1960) or it is completely reversed. The U.S. Cavalry, the authority in the West, which has come to symbolize the conquest of the frontier, appears directionless, leaderless, and incapable of distinguishing what is morally right and wrong. The confusion which characterizes the military tribunal that sits in judgment on Rutledge suggests that the military has lost control. The film portrays a frontier culture where traditional values seem to no longer have meaning, certainly not a typical Western point of view.

A few 1960s' Westerns, such as Major Dundee (1964), address racial issues by creating a situation where a group of individuals, all from different backgrounds, are brought together for some purpose. Into this group is dropped a black person whose mere presence undermines the group's cohesiveness. That racial prejudice is usually only articu: lated by one member, not the entire group, provides the focus for race-related themes and reflects the political climate in America in the 1960s.

While the 1960s may have been an important period for black integration of the Western, Hollywood generally showed no interest in producing films which would appeal primarily to black audiences. Black characters or racerelated themes could be important elements, but the films continued to be about white characters' problems. The more socially conscious Westerns of the early and mid-1960s eventually made it possible for black characters to appear in a film without necessarily having to deal with social issues.

In the early 1970s, as part of the blaxploitation trend in Hollywood, Westerns attempted to remake the West in black terms and appeal directly to black audiences. Supported and financed by the mainstream film industry, many of these films, drawing partly on historical themes and partly on established Western conventions, occasionally also touched on serious social and political issues. Films like the controversially titled The Legend of Nigger Charley (1972) and Boss Nigger (1974) attempted to create black super-heros and mythology that would give Blacks the same kind of popular imagery that white audiences had so long enjoyed.

But most blaxphitation films were meant as escapist entertainment rather than as social commentary. Some black critics saw the films' emphasis on it-rated violence and sensationafism as a lost opportunity to arouse social consciousness.

Generally, blaxploitation Westerns failed to experiment with the conventions and to go beyond merely entertaining Blacks. Sidney Poitier's Buck and the Preacher (1971) was one of the few black Westerns made at this time that really seemed to understand the conventions of the genre and make them work with the superimposed black themes. In retrospect, perhaps it was Mel Brooks' mainstream interracial Western parody, Blazing Saddles (1974), that made the most of its opportunities.

After a period of about five years, the blaxploitation movement ended abruptly during the mid-1970s. Whether it was because the films failed to experiment with the conventions of the-genre, that they never made significant statements, or that a white backlash began, blaxploitation films apparently no longer had a place in the cinema. The few Westerns that are made today are certainly not an important forum for the black point of view.

But there are still exceptions. Glory (1989), the story of how Blacks in the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry helped turn the tide for the Union Army in the Civil War, was a big-budget film, released during the peak holiday movie-going period at the end of the year. Starring Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, and Matthew Broderick, this epic tribute to the first all-black fighting regiment in U.S. history is significant in that it is that rare motion picture‹one that deals directly with the Civil War and the role of Blacks in shaping America. Glory may herald a fourth cycle of black Westerns.

NOTES

1. W. Sherman Savage. Blacks in the West (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), 88.

2. Ibid., 50.

3. Marvin Fletcher. The Black Soldier and Officer in the Untted States Army (Columbia: University of Missoun Press. 1974), 26.

Women

There has long been a question about the place of women in the Western. Generally, critics assume the genre speaks most directly to a male audience, mainly about masculine problems, needs, and interests. In The Six-Gun Mystique, John Cawelti wrote that the Western speaks to adolescent males about "the conflict between the adolescent's desire to be an adult and his fear and hesitation about the exact nature of that adulthood."1 He also points out

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that. for its young male audience, the Western evokes "tension between a strong need for aggression and a sense of ambiguity and guilt about violence. "'The male oedipal bias of the Western, the male quest for identity, ultimately trivializes and nearly excludes women, stated Cawelti.

But Raymond Bellour argued that the Western actually depends upon "a whole organized circuit of feminine representations (the young heroine, the mother, the saloon girl, the wife, etc.) without which the film cannot function." 3 Bellour saw the Western in relation to the form of the nineteenth-century novel which revolves around the concept of the female being a force of disruption of the equilibrium or status quo. Her presence sets the male elements in motion and finally culminates in heterosexual union. It is the woman then that allows/encourages/forces the male hero to become civilized and take an active part in building a new society rather than to remain a nomad, outside the law.

Feminists have also spent a great deal of time in recent years looking at the Western. In her essay, "The Western: Any Good Roles for Feminists?" in Film Reader, Jacqueline Levitin investigated the limited roles Westerns allow women. Historians have discovered that women's real contributions in the West were far more extensive, meaningful, and subtle than literature, the cinema, and even traditional history books lead us to believe. 4

Perhaps the nearest Hollywood has come to a producing a mainstream, feminist Western is Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954). The film was made some years before the modern women's movement took root and really doesn't directly deal with the particular social issues of gender that have become so dear to contemporary feminists. Yet the film contains one of the strongest portrayals of women in any Western.

The heroine is Vienna, a woman who demands to be treated on-equal terms with men. She is sexually independent, can be motherly, feminine or masculine as need be, and is allowed a measure of control matched by few women in Westerns. But. in the context of the time in which it was made, Johnny Guitar (1954) may also be seen as an anti-McCarthy film which criticizes the destructive masculine drives, which have created a world dominated by death, betrayal, and revenge. At the end, Vienna is still in pants, still the equal of any man. She has resisted all attempts to change her, feminize her, or make her conform to male values.

The limited roles women have been assigned in movies (mother, supportive wife, schoolteacher. temperance leader, prostitute, Indian squaw, outlaw, hardened businesswoman, or landowner) were apparently far from reality. Levitin suggests that the real West offered much wider opportunities for freedom, influence, and social power for women, as well as the potential for more defined female hero figures. But the overpowering patriarchal fiction which defines the West, and the Western, totally undermines those possibilities.

In arguing that the West provides better material to serve women than is currently available, Levitin suggests that all that is required to set things straight is greater historical accuracy. But this line of thinking ignores the major role that fantasy during childhood plays in identification with a strong male hero. In addition, there is also the formidable problem of finding the right plots or stories that will elevate the role of women in the Western.

Women actually have a dual, and contradictory, role. On the one hand, the woman is peripheral. She exists to provoke the hero, to make him act the way he does. In and of herself, she is generally unimportant On the other hand, she is central. The hero needs something to strive for, and often that goal is related specifically to his woman. Women are symbols of the cultural values men must defend but, at the same time, they are symbolic of societal encroachments on the natural male world.

Filmmakers have often used the white woman as representative of the hero s values. It is for her that he fights the Indians, the outlaws, the crooked banker, politician. businessman, cattle baron, or railway. And all of this effort is expended in order "to make this town safe for women and children to walk the streets."

The roots of this symbol go back to the origins of the Frontier Myth, to the seventeenth-century captivity narratives. The manner in which women, and children, are treated often determines personality and motive in the

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movies instantly indicating who is good and who is bad. Villains mistreat women and kill their husbands. making them widows and their children orphans. The hero is identifiable by the respect and kindness he shows women, even fallen women like prostitutes.

This convention is well established. For example, in Jesse James, the hero's fall from being a hero of the people to being little more than a pretty criminal is reflected in how the woman he loves relates to him. When he is an outlaw fighting against an unjust society. she marries him anyway. Later, when he mistreats her, she rejects him, suggesting a fall from grace. But when she takes him back again, he is restored to goodness. This redemptive power of women has been an integral part of the Western, right from the earliest days of the cinema. For example. in Hell's Hinges (1916), starring William S. Hart, the "good badman" is saved by the love of a "good woman." That theme has been played out literally thousands of times since.

And yet, the Hollywood Western has created some very memorable heroines. Joan Crawford's Vienna (Johnny Guitar), Mae West's Klondike Annie (Klondike Annie1936), Doris Day's Calamity Jane (Calamity Jane1953) and Jane Fonda's Cat Ballou (The Ballad of Cat Ballou (1965) are only a few of the fondly remembered female characters who have found a cherished place in screen history. But the search for truth and realism in the Western is perhaps a waste of time, since it is a genre which is often more concerned with myth than historical accuracy.

As discussed earlier, Henry Nash Smith saw the frontier in symbolic terms as a boundary or barrier between opposing ideologies, the dichotomy of the West as either garden or desert. It follows, then, that as actual events like Western expansion began to break down the barriers between the East and the West, perceived barriers, such as Eastern "feminine~ values versus Western "masculine" values, might also be seen to exist. This gender barrier then may be seen as central to the Western. For example, East meets West in My Darling Clementine (1946) when Clementine, an Eastern schoolteacher, has a civilizing influence on Westerner Wyatt Earp. His passage from natural male to cultured male though is unwilling. His reminiscences and yearnings for the old days are a reminder of all that civilization represses in a man.

Many Westerns deal with these boundaries and barriers, often attempting to more clearly define them. Generally, a woman who starts out wearing pants, carrying a gun, and riding a horse won't be doing so by the end. If things turn out according to the formula, she will be "properly" attired in female clothes, taking her rightful place within the heterosexual family structure. She will have learned to leave masculine things to men.

Time after time, the woman is shown sublimating her own need for independence, self-determinism, and adventure. She abrogates her authority and power to the male hero and thereby accepts secondary status, most often as mother figure or in some other supportive and lesser role. If she is allowed to take a more active or aggressive stance, it is the male hero's agenda, not her own, which occupies her time and energies. In High Noon (1952), the Quaker wife turns her back on her own pac.ifist.principles in order to stand by her husband as he faces a violent showdown. She even is able to summon the courage to kill someone herself.

The male penchant for resorting to violence in order to resolve almost any crises, which is central to the Western, is paralleled by the stereotypical values typically assigned to women‹peace, family, and home. The Western continually links masculinity with action, mobility, adventure, and power, while it associates femininity with passivity, weakness, romance, and suffocating domesticity. Femininity is represented as a threat to masculine independence. It is the negative against which all that is male is measured.

This sexual polarization of the moral imperatives of the genre has its literary roots in the writings of Owen Wister and lames Fenimore Cooper, where the male code that justice and law can only be established through violence, rather than through peaceful solutions, is formulated. Also, by the end, the woman is shown finally acceding to the male philosophy, understanding, and accepting that his approach is right and proper after all.

Prostitution was a fact of life on the frontier where men

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invariably outnumbered women. There was probably nothing about this lifestyle that could be considered glamorous, but prostitutes in Westerns (as in most movies) generally seem to be stereotyped as attractive, well-dressed whores with hearts of gold.

Prostitutes appeared in writer Bret Harte's (1836-1902) stories of the California gold camps, such as "The Outcasts of Poker Flat." They quickly found their way into the movies. A number of William S. Hart's early silent films portray these women as habitues of the frontier dancehalls, smoke-filled gambling dens, and saloons. Until the censorship strictures of the Hays Code finally dissolved in the 1960s, the movies had to be very circumspect in how they treated prostitutes, often only referring to them as "saloon girls" or "buffalo gals."

With the demise of self-regulation and the implementation of the rating system in 1969, it was suddenly possible for every Western town to have a brothel or two in addition to a general store, bank, jail, blacksmith, hotel, and saloon. So the Westerns of the 1970s seem to feature a veritable procession of prostitutes.

While feminists have suggested that whores in Westerns merely represent the fantasies of the male filmmakers and their largely male audience, there is perhaps another reason for their presence The emergence of prostitutes as integral screen characters might be seen as an attempt to find interesting and realistic roles for women. And a number of important female stars were only too happy to take advantage of the opportunity to play hookers. Among the more memorable are Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Shirley MacLaine in Two Mules For Sistcr Sara (1969), Stella Stevens in The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), Jeanne Moreau in Monte Walsh (1970) Faye Dunaway in Little Big Man (1970), Julie Christie in McCabe and Mrs, Miller ( 1971), and Isabelle Huppert in Heaven's Gate (1980). Perhaps, in the real West, no whorehouse was ever quite so elegant as the one in The Cheyenne Social Club (1970) or the prostitutes as glamorous as those in Dodge City (1939), but the whores in Ride the fHigh Country (1962) and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) were certainly realistically slovenly creatures.

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Miscegenation, the fear of sex-crazed Indians having intercourse with white women, is a major concern of the Western. In the movies, the result of a union between a white women and an Indian is usually disaster. The woman is considered to be contaminated, unft to ever return to proper white society and certainly not to family life. She is damaged goods.

But when a white man has a relationship with an Indian woman, things are quite different. The Indian women who choose to be involved with white men are often positively portrayed as brave, intelligent, and self-sacrificing. This though may be nothing more than an extension of women's maternal, nurturing role in Westerns. For example, in Samuel Fuller's Run of the Arrow (1957), the Indian woman renounces her Sioux identity, sacrificing her heritage in order to follow the Irish cavalryman she loves back to white civilization. The implication is that her life will certainly not be easy, but she is to be respected for her choice. The Big Sky (1952), Two Rode Together (1961), and Duel in the Sun (1946) all deal, on different levels, with this same theme. But it is John Ford's The Searchers ( 1956) that is perhaps the classic example. The hero's quest is to free his niece from captivity by the Comanche. But, in the end, the niece wishes to stay with the Indians, refusing to see herself as a victim, thus bringing into question the hero's debilitating racism.

Women who exhibit masculine characteristics of independence and strength are viewed positively only if their feminine qualities clearly and specifically dominate. Strong women must still be associated with motherhood and family, or demonstrate the unequivocal commitment of the faithful wife or lover. In the same way, weak and ineffectual men are marked with implicity feminine characteristics. Such men are shown as idealists, sensitive romantics, willing to expose their emotions. Worst of all, they may be damned as incompetent and passive. "We're not here for romance, son," the seasoned old cowboy says in Ride the High Country (1962). Domesticity is something a man must rise above if he is to become heroic. a point made explicity clear in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).

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If being the supportive wife and good mother is what is expected of women in Westerns, then that feminine ideal is measured against the nonconformists, the women who twist and bend the conventions and expectations. These bad girls" challenge men, expect equality, demand sexual independence, and refuse secondary or inferior status. Like men they wear pants, carry guns, own land, property. and business. forcing men to accept them on their own terms. But in the movies, this independence and refusal to conform is often only temporary. If the bad girl doesn't eventually see the light, become "feminized" and accept her proper role, she will most likely come to an unpleasant end. Such was the case in Duel in the Sun ( 1946) with the tragic death of Pearl Chavez, the ambitious tomboy daughter of a white father and Mexican-Indian mother who wanted too much.

But this feminization process isn't always easy. Doris Day's memorable protrayal of legendary frontier character Calamity Jane is an interesting example. In Calamity Jane (1953), her buckskins are feminine and soft, and her love for Wild Bill Hickok is true and reciprocated in marriage. But her feminization is not total because at the end she is back in male garb, riding shotgun on the Deadwood Stage. But then, the film was a musical comedy.

The real Calamity Jane (1853-1903) was a frontierswoman named Martha Jane Cannary. Much of her background, including the reason for her nickname, is obscure. She worked as a mule driver, often wore men's clothes, and had a reputation for being able to hold her liquor as well as any man and swear with the best of them. Contrary to legend, she was most certainly never romantically involved with Wild Bill Hickok (1837-1876), although Cecil B. DeMille's The Plainsman (1936), with lean Arthur as Calamity Jane and Gary Cooper as Hickok, purports to show their amorous relationship. Joseph G. Rosa's excellent biography of Hickok, They Called Him Wild Bill, is a model of thorough research and scholarship which clears up a number of misconceptions about the famous scout and lawman as well as clarifies his relationship with the so-called Calamity Jane.5 Cannary apparently did have a daughter with a man named Clinton Burke. Upon her death in 1903, at her own request, she was buried beside Hickok, who had been shot and killed in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, in 1876.

Late in her life she appeared on stage as "Calamity Jane, the Famous Woman Scout of the Wild West." There is, however, ample evidence to suggest that her scouting activities for the Army consisted more of providing sexual diversion for the soldiers than anything else. She was, most probably, what has euphemistically been called a "camp follower.".

Her portrayal in more than 15 movies was far more influenced by fiction than fact. Beginning in the 1880s, Calamity Jane was featured in a number of popular dime novels written by Edward L. Wheeler. She was usually portrayed as being in love with the dashing and manly Deadwood Dick, one of Wheeler's fictitious heroes. Very little fact has been allowed to inhibit the movies' vision of Calamity Jane. She has been played on the screen by, among others, Frances Farmer, in Badlands of Dakota (1941); Jane Russell, in The Paleface (1948); Yvonne De

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Carlo, in Calamiry Jane and Sam Bass (1949); and Abby Dalton, in The Plainsman (1966).

There are other real Western women upon whom the movies have focused attention. Annie Oakley (1860-1926) was the stage name of Phoebe Ann Moses, perhaps best known as one of the star performers in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. She was born in Ohio and never went West until she toured there with the show in later years. But she came to symbolize the idea of the tough Western heroine. She joined Buffalo Bill Cody's show in 1895, where she, was billed as "Little Sure Shot" as she shot cigarettes out of men's mouths and could accurately fire backwards using mirrors. Her trick-shooting abilities brought her fame and great success. She also appeared with Pawnee Bill Lillie (1860-1942) ‹ real name Gordon William ‹ in his Wild West show, was featured in a number of stage plays and became a heroine in a series of comic books. She has been played by Barbara Stanwyck in Annie Oakley (1935), Betty Hutton in Annie Ger Your Gun (1950), Gail Davis in Alias Jesse James (1959), Nancy Kovack in The Outlaws Is Coming (1964), and Geraldine Chaplin in Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976).

Belle Starr (1848-1889), born Myra Belle Shirley, is best known as an outlaw. She was raised in Missouri at a time of great conflict and change. Another famous outlaw, Cole Younger, is most likely the father of her first child, Pearl. She had a second child, Edward, by outlaw Jim Reed. After Reed was killed she formed her own outlaw gang farther West in Indian Territory. It was while living there with a Cherokee Indian named Sam Starr that she started using his name. During the last years of her life she took other lovers and was constantly in and out of trouble before she was shot in the back and killed in 1889.

She became the subject of sensationalized newspaper and dime-novel accounts about her life. She was portrayed as the side-saddle-riding "bandit queen" who liked to dress in velvet skirt and plumed hat. These stories, which emphasized her sexual proclivities as well as her daring bravery, helped establish the legend of Belle Starr after her death. She has been played by Gene Tierney in Belle Starr (1941). Isabell Jewell in both Badmen's Territory (1946) and Belle Starr s Daughter (1948), Jane Russell in Montana Belle (1951), Merry Anders in Young Jesse James (1960), Pat Quinn in Zachariah (1970), and Pamela Reed in The Long Riders (1980). Keith Larsen played her son, Edward, in Son of Belle Starr (1953).

Women are simultaneously p.owerful and powerless in Westerns. But there are some women who are not easily identified as either good or bad, weak or strong. These are the ambivalent women in revenge Westerns, where the male hero is on a quest to kill someone for a crime committed against him, his family, or a friend. Often the

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women are pivotal to whether the hero successfully completes his mission or not. And they are mysterious. For example. in Winchester '73 ( 1950), right up to the end it is quite possible that the heroine is merely a whore in league with the villain. In Rancho Nororious (1952) the hero s obsession with avenging his wife's murder leads to the death of a woman he wrongly suspected of conspiring with his wife's killer. The heroine in Hannie Caulder (1971), an updating of the female gunslinger story, sets out to avenge her own rape and her husband's murder by learning to be just as tough as any man. But after her success there is a subtle reminder that women cannot really be the complete heroines‹she comes face-to-face with the mysterious man in black who has quietly observed (thereby implicitly approving and sanctioning) her odyssey throughout.

Because women so often represent civilization, community, and progress, it is not surprising that newspaper owners and editors in Westerns are often women. Edna Ferber, who often created strong female characters, set a number of her novels in the West. In Cimarron, although a man starts the town newspaper, it is his wife who runs it ‹ with a missionary zeal. She intends to use the newspaper to tame the town and encourage respectability, to become the community's conscience. So the appearance of a newspaper in town, especially if run by a woman, could be a potent symbol. Women are seen setting type in Dodge Citv (1939) and Carson Cirr (1951), and Jesse James' first wife is shown working in a newspaper of fice in Jesse James (1939).

Newspapers quickly sprang up in towns throughout the West. San Francisco apparently was able to support 12 daily newspapers in the early 1850s. And in the mid-1880s, even Dodge City, with a population of less than 2,000 people, had three papers.

The local newspapers reported and recorded both the fact and the fiction about the outlaws, the lawmen and the ordinary people of the West. Historians are indebted to (and sometimes confused by) these local newspapers for guidance in sorting out the truth, the lie, and the legend which was often printed with equanimity.

In movie Westerns, the existence of a newspaper is a signal that civilization has arrived. In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), when Butch and Sundance are shown reading newspaper accounts about their exploits, the implication is that the days of the old West are numbered. Newspapers, then, almost always represent the feminine forces of law, order, respectability, and progress.

Yet even in the Western, the pen is not mightier than the sword. Force must still be met with force. In Fort Worth (1951) Randolph Scott plays an ax-gunslinger who renounces violence and becomes a newspaper editor. He attempts to use his newspaper to fight a greedy landowner and rid the town of outlaws. But he reluctantly comes to the realization that a gun is often still necessary for right to triumph in the West.

The sentiment also appears in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), although the film is more complex in its investigation of the press' complicity in concocting salable fiction rather than disseminating truth. Ford's message in the film is much broader. The film makes it clear that the press no longer stands for truth and that truth is often not as interesting as fiction.

Movies have never stood for truth, but their ability to create "truths" in the minds of its audience is undisputed. The promulgation of myth and legend is indeed part of what fascinates us about the power of the motion picture. Perhaps the essence of the Western is defined when the newspaperman in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance speaks the oft-quoted line: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

NOTES

1. Cawelti. Six-Gun Mystique. 82.

2. Ibid., 14.

3. Raymond Bellour. "Alternation, Segmentation. Hypnosis: Interview With Raymond Bellour,' in Camera Obscura. 3/4 ( 1979): 88.

4. Jacqueline Levitin. 'The Western: Any Good Roles For Feminists?' Film Reader 5 ( 1982). Also, see: Sandra L. Myres. Westering Women and the Frontier Experience. 1800-1915 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982); Julie Roy Jeffrey. Frontier Women: The Trans-Mississippi West (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979).

5. Joseph G. Rosa. They Called Him Wild Bill (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 1964).

Conclusion

Despite the apparent death of the Western, there are many elements of the West still active in our culture. Western clothes remain in fashion, with high-heeled boots, jeans, and stetson hats considered appropriate apparel in areas of the country other than in the Western states. Actually, people dressed in Western clothes can be seen all over the world, and not just on American tourists.

Country and western music is still very popular. Western images are still used to sell everything from tobacco to jeans to automobiles. Serious Western literature continues to be written and the Western still finds space on television in series (Paradise) and in longform (Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove). Despite the disastrous failure of Michael Cimino's Heavens Gate (1980), new films like Silverado (1985), Young Guns (1989), and Glory (1989) are still produced.

Each time Westerns have been declared dead, the genre has managed to renew itself. The Western myth still retains its power, rooted in American history and world consciousness. Despite changes in audience taste and interests, there is no reason to believe that the Western will not, like the Phoenix, rise from the ashes, with new meaning and significance for the future.

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David Daly (1.) is professor of cinema in the Department of Communications at Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield, Missouri. He received his Ph.D. in cinema from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in 1978. He has published a number of books and articles on motion pictures and the industry and currently is a film reviewer for Gannett Newspapers.

Joel Persky (r.) is a professor of communication at Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield, Missouri. A graduate of Brooklyn College, he received his Ph.D. from New York University in 1975. He has wrinen extensively on media and media effects, and has had his work published in a variety of journals. He has produced, directed, and written dozens of television programs which have been broadcast on TV stations in New Yorl; and Texas.