The rise and fall of the western: the true western, whether book or movie, was more than entertainment; it was an encapsulation of the American myth - includes related article

National Review, Dec 31, 1989 by Anthony Lejeune, Hertha L. Lund

The Rise and Fall Of the Western

A NATION which loses its myths is in danger of losing its soul. Just as the legends of King Arthur were "the Matter of Britain," so Westerns have been the Matter of America; which is why what's happened to the Western is no trivial affair. That something has happened is surely beyond dispute, the clearest proof being the simple absence from the screen of new Western films or series; today's predominantly youthful audiences are supposed not to be interested. The alleged exceptions prove the rule. Not only are they treated as coelacanths, rare survivals from another age, but they are advertised as possessing qualities incompatible with the traditional form. Lonesome Dove, we were told, "strips the glamor from the Old West": The Young Guns had "brat-pack" appeal.

But mere absence isn't all. A worm had already entered the apple.

The early writers of Westerns had ridden the range and carried six-shooters, or at least known men who did. There were plenty of people still around who remembered scenes no less colorful than those being woven into the mythology. "It's a fine big country now," observed an old-timer in a television documentary about the West, "but, by golly, wouldn't it be fun to pull it all down and start right over again."

From facts to legend was a very short move. No Hollywood scriptwriter could have improved on the advertisement actually published in San Francisco when the Pony Express was launched: "WANTED--Young skinny wiry fellows, not over 18. Must be expert riders willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred. Wages $25 per week." The Pony Express operated for only 18 months before being put out of business by the completion of the transcontinental telegraph: but it was immediately transmuted into the stuff of legend.

"In the beginning," someone wrote, "the frontier was a fringe of trees five yards in from the Atlantic shore." For a long time afterward tales which seem to us like Westerns were merely adventure stories with a setting which, though wild, had no particular identity. The Western as a distinct literary form was really an embodiment of Horace Greeley's celebrated exhortation, "Go West, young man!" Bret Harte and Mark Twain, who did go West to seek their fortunes, marked out the territory, and Theodore Roosevelt's The Winning of the West turned what had often been a rather patronizing Easterners' view into an epic vision.

IN 1902 Owen Wister, a dude from Philadelphia, produced what is, by common consent, the first true Western novel, The Virginian, containing many of the genre's basic elements and one phrase--"When you say that, smile"--which stuck in everyone's mind. Zane Grey, who was inspired by The Virginian, Clarence E. Mulford, who created Hopalong Cassidy, and William MacLeod Raine, who was English-born but grew up in the West, led the thundering herd that followed.

Meanwhile, the myth had been shaped by a variety of hands. In 1870, six years before Custer's defeat at the Little Bighorn, Wild Bill Hickok himself transported six buffaloes, four Comanches, and a bear to Niagara Falls, where he presented a show called "The Daring Buffalo Chase of the Plains": but the buffaloes failed to cooperate, the bear proved disappointingly tame, and the Indians complained of not being paid. Wild Bill returned to Kansas and his own place in the legend. Twelve years later Bill Cody bought the Deadwood coach, took it to North Platte, Nebraska, and staged a show featuring a holdup, a buffalo chase, whooping savages, and the last-minute rescue of a pioneer family. He followed it with a more lavish production, called originally "The Wild West Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition" but afterward, more snappily, "Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show." He brought it to England, where he played in front of Queen Victoria.

The first of 1,700 dime novels by Ned Buntline, who coined the name "Buffalo Bill," was on sale as early as 1869. Prentiss Ingram, having acted briefly as Cody's press agent, launched a rival series, of which a typical specimen was called Adventures of Buffalo Bill from Boyhood to Manhood. Deeds of Daring and Romantic Incidents in the Life of William F. Cody, the Monarch of the Bordermen. Edward L. Wheeler created an alternative heroic cycle--about Deadwood Dick. Such simple narratives were still being churned out in the 1930s, with titles like Buffalo Bill's False Trail and At War with the Sioux, a Tale of Redskin Rage and Paleface Pluck.

Artists had established the look of the West. Rufus F. Zogbaum's Hands Up! was reproduced by Harper's Weekly in 1885. The following near Harper's published Frederic Remington's first important cowboy picture, In from the Night Herd. Currier and Ives issued a pair of etchings, The Last Shot and The Emigrant Train. What became the most widely seen picture of all, Custer's Last Fight, was acquired by Anheuser-Busch in part-payment of a debt, and distributed in lithograph form to saloons across the country.