The West as an American conception didn’t really exist until the Lousiana Purchase (although movement had begun away from the coasts—GW himself was a surveyor of the wilds of the Virginia back country, which is now Pennsylvania), but that event did not mark the beginning of a mass exodus. Little was known about this land originally, including how to get around in it. Also, it wasn’t exactly uninhabited, and from the beginning the relations of the Americans with the Indians had had their ups and downs, to put it mildly. And in this vast land without roads or trails, where exactly were the places to go? You would move west presumably to improve your lot; where would lot improvement best take place?
The first to venture forth in the early 1800s were loners and adventurers who, it seems, wanted as much as anything to get away from civilization. There was hunting and trapping to be done, and in the early years mountain men would learn the land and mix with the natives and haul in the beaver pelts and blaze trails. The Gold Rush of 1848 gave people a reason to go to California en masse (usually by boat, around the Cape). It’s only after the Civil War that the major expansion of the US truly begins, with serious waves of settlers heading forth. There’s west, of course, and there’s the West. Kansas was the West, although on my maps it looks like the middle. That’s where Wild Bill Hickok was marshall. And that’s where the cowboys ended up: cattle from Texas were herded up the Chisholm trail for shipment by rail to Chicago. The Wild West begins in Kansas.
Most of the westward-moving settlers were farmers, lured by cheap or free land. One big problem about that land was, of course, those other people already on it. Post Civil War, there were soldiers freed up to accommodate the settlers, and the various policies about the Indians were established, few of them to the benefit of the Indians. The nomadic tribes were used to roaming about unhampered, living off the land, and that wasn’t going to be possible anymore. There was much unhappiness and violence on both sides for years, until finally the Indians gave up where they weren’t defeated outright.
The fact that the west was uncivilized, compared to the east, meant that behavior was not always necessarily the most genteel. When there is literally no law, or at least no one to enforce any laws, sociopaths can thrive. Everyone of necessity is armed, and some of them are dangerous. There’s quite a difference between the local police force in Boston and the local sheriff in Tombstone. I would imagine that the rather Marquis of Queensbury fair-and-square shootout duel was a lot less common than the shoot ‘em in the back variety of rowdiness. Would you give Gary Cooper at fair chance at high noon if you could get the job done with more certainty under the cover of night? In any case, outlaws make for good stories, so we've probably overblown their number for the sake of those good stories, but there certainly was a measure of violence in the west that did not exist in the east. It's hard to imagine the Johnson Country range war taking place in, oh, Scarsdale.
If you look at the map, and understand that the West essentially begins in the middle of the country, than it’s easy to realize that half of our country is populated by people who, in 1950, had arrived in the very first post-War migration, or were their first generation descendents. They not only thought of themselves as Westerners, they had pretty good experience of the old West, or had heard about it from their parents. These people had pulled up their stakes and gone off to see the elephant. They had lived in the Wild West. Had broken the land. Had rushed into Oklahoma when the gun went off (or sooner, as the state nickname suggests). Had lived in a world where there were no cars, only horses. The myth of the west was no myth at all to them, it was their personal story, or their family story. It was real. It was their life.
There was also a measure of reality to the earliest western movies. Plenty of real cowboys played the parts of cowboys because they were readily available to do so, and more than capable of sitting a horse. The stars tended to be actors, but you could fill the screen with plenty of the real thing behind those greenhorns. As the western-making business grew, Hollywood easily acquired plenty of the real thing to populate the product. But what’s perhaps most interesting about the early westerns was that they were practically retelling current events. Wyatt Earp died in 1929; Buffalo Bill died in 1917; Geronimo died in 1909; Wounded Knee was 1890. It’s as if I were to make a movie about, say, Ronald Reagan: not exactly ancient history, no matter how you slice it.
The question remains, why were these films and this genre so popular, and the answer is probably the one that I’ve been dancing around, which is that the reality of the west was so important to so many people that they were happy to mythologize it. The cowboys, the outlaws, the Indians, the cavalries, sheriffs, the posses, the wagon trains, the iron horses—they all went from reality to stereotype. The so-called adult westerns of the fifties (which not incidentally saw a rise in all sorts of so-called adult content, to lure people away from TV and into the theaters) to a great extent sought to return to the truths behind the stereotypes, or to honestly study the stereotypes. And what, ultimately, did the West symbolize that everyone was so eager to commemorate? It was, I think, our hardiness. And our heart and strength. Our fairness. Our ingenuity. Our courage. We were the land of the free and the home of the brave and we did brave things with our freedom. While the Earp brothers were cleaning up Tombstone, the Impressionists were cleaning up in Paris (in fact, they were rather old hat), Wagner was putting the final touches on Parsifal, while Mark Twain had yet to pull Huck out of the drawer and finally finish it up.
Of course, the western movies also have intrinsic benefits like action and adventure that can’t be overlooked. If they were dull, no matter how crucial they are to our cultural self-image, they wouldn’t have gone very far. But they weren’t dull, and because of the diversity of the west, the western movies were diverse. There was something for everybody.
After fifty years or so of this material, including its dominance on early television, it was a part of the culture as much as the literal west had once been part of the culture. In fact, by the 1950s, we are getting to the point where the first generation is mostly died off, and all our contact with the west is secondhand, either as the children of settlers, or through our exposure to the genre on the big or small screen. But our image of ourselves, as empire builders within our own borders, remains. We conquered the land. We conquered the Indians. We conquered the outlaws. The problem was, we had reached the end of the continent, and there was no more west to go to. Whatever needed taming had been tamed. They were building drive-in movies where once the buffalo roamed. With the reality gone, all we had left was the myth. There are some who say that the space race of the 50s and 60s, although obviously fueled by Cold War politics, was also an extension of our passage west. We created a new frontier, up there. (Kennedy referred to his administration’s programs as the new frontier, so the idea that the old frontier was gone was manifest, although he wasn’t referring to the space program.) Maybe, but even if it did, it petered out soon enough. So no matter how you look at it, the winning of the West had happened. It was now all entirely history.
to be continued…
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