I’ve been very sloppy about usage of the words legend and myth, which are far from interchangeable. When we talk about the west, there are definitely myths, and there are definitely legends, and while sometimes they overlap, we should do our best to achieve some sort of clarity. So we should begin with definitions. Go look the words up. Anywhere. I’ll wait.
[Whistle, whistle… Shuffle, shuffle… Scratch the odd itch…]
Okay, you’re back, and you now have definitions. Good. If you’re still confused, let me help clarify. My romantic prowess is legendary. Your romantic prowess is a myth.
Or, let’s try another approach. Legends explain themselves, myths explain something else. A legend starts with a narrative of reality and, for whatever reason, makes that reality into a hyperreal narrative, something even better than reality, something even more real than the reality and which replaces the reality. A myth starts with something incomprehensible or complicated and attempts to make a narrative out of it. In other words, with a legend we have a preexisting narrative, and with a myth, we have phenomena we are trying to understand, which we do by creating a narrative of explanation. (Without specifically attempting to do so, Caveman does cover some of this material, but then again, Caveman covers everything ever, so that shouldn’t come as any surprise.)
What is legend about the West, and what is myth, is often hard to distinguish, and certainly open to interpretation, regardless of your definitions of myths and legends. You can pin down a few things though. There are certainly legends based on various individuals, or groups of individuals. The mountain men/trappers/trailblazers of the earliest years were real people. We think of someone like Kit Carson as heroic by nature, and the facts of his life don’t dispute this. Sacajawea strikes me as providing a transcendent narrative based on fact (she’s sort of the Ginger Rogers to Lewis and Clark’s Fred Astaire, doing the same thing but backwards and in heels). Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show (begun in 1883!) was in the legend-making business, actually hiring Sitting Bull to stage attacks on his show’s wagon trains, and (indirectly?) making Annie Oakley into an eponym for a free ticket. George Armstrong Custer is a legend (an unfortunate one, perhaps, the kind of general only a CIC like George W. Bush could love). Wyatt and Doc are legends. Tombstone is a legend. The wagon trains are legendary. The building of the railroads and the Golden Spike. The great cattle drives up from Texas. The hunting (to near extinction) of the buffalo, some of which was done from the windows of moving trains by British tourists—some sport, eh? The legendary cleaning up of outlaw towns, brought about by those legendary sheriffs and marshals but also by those legendary average people, the teachers and farmers and merchants and clerics trying to make lives for themselves in a new place.
It was the media that made these narratives into legends, that is, into those hyperreal narratives. The first medium to do this was the magazine, and its child, the dime novel. Western stories made good copy, with beginnings and middles and ends and clear-cut good guys and bad guys and lots of action. These stories lasted down through the pulps in the 20th century, and western novels are still an active genre. (For what it’s worth, one of my first publishing jobs was working on western material, inter alia, and I got quite a kick out of it. Met a lot of interesting people, learned a lot of interesting stuff. You may think I’m just blowing off mental exhaust but I have a history with this material, including editing at least one exhaustive book on western movies. In fact, I’m something of a legend myself in western writer circles. Mention of my name to the right people might get you a free Longhorn Beer, if you smile when you say it.) The most powerful medium to work the western narratives was, of course, movies, which, as we’ve said, started with westerns pretty much from day one. In fact, The Great Train Robbery is one of the earliest American movies (1903), filmed in that great western location also known as New Jersey. (Train robberies, by the way, may be a true pomo aside to explore: there were hardly any in the real-life west. Apparently they are a freestanding legend all their own, with more fictional than real examples.) By the 30s and 40s, Westerns are as big as they’ll ever get, with A movies and B movies and incredibly popular western stars looming large in the US imagination. And this overall popularity of the genre in film, as with the versions on the page, is based to a great extent on the presence of those beginnings and middles and ends and clear-cut good guys and bad guys and lots of action. That makes for good movies, insofar as old Hollywood defined good movies.
Westerns as vehicles for legend haven’t completely gone away, but their preeminence is long gone. There’s probably a variety of reasons for this. Any genre will use itself up after a while. You can tell the story of, say, the O.K. Corral just so many times before your audience is twenty-three kliks ahead of you and you’re still unreeling the credits. And sophistication of film per se passed by the simplistic good vs. bad via action formula on the adult level. And as the West drifted further and further into the past, its immediacy drifted along with it. We became too many generations away from it to care as much, so now instead of direct experience of the west all we had was direct experience of westerns, a classic opportunity for a postmodern approach to the genre on the one hand, and the diminution to a trickle of the genre in any approach. Who do you see (if anyone) when you think of Wyatt Earp: Henry Fonda? Kurt Russell? Kevin Costner? Hugh O’Brien? Whichever, you probably don’t see the real Wyatt Earp. Action defined as people shooting each other on horses isn’t as exciting as the action of people shooting each other from cars (and cars didn’t really explode in numbers until after WWII)(and for that matter, car chases have recently begun to lose their luster after fifty years of them). One generation’s personal history is another generation’s multiple-choice question on a history test. Move down enough generations, and it’s only relevant if it’s really relevant. That is, the Viet Nam war was relevant to everyone in the 70s. It wasn’t relevant to children born in the 90s except insofar as they were the children of those to whom it was relevant in the 70s. Children born today will judge its relevance based on whatever impact the war has on them, be it political (the lessons and direct impacts of the war, if any) or personal (lingering family ties to veterans). Add another 30 years, and who knows? A footnote to unrest at home, or maybe even that’s forgotten. A war as well known as the one from the halls of Montezuma or the one on shores of Tripoli? In our books, WWII holds out, and so do the Revolution and the Civil War. There’s room in any one mind, personal or cultural, for only so much history.
So we hold some of the legends of the west still, but almost of necessity it’s of the legends as legends. We remember the best stories because they were good stories and were therefore told over and over, usually with embellishment. Sometimes the truths behind these stories were shaken if not stirred, and their literalness is long lost to all but the most diligent historian. As we said at the beginning, “When the legend becomes the fact, print the legend.”
But where’s the myth in all of this?
to be continued…
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