The Wild West is an alluring yet
tricky historical setting, partly because despite how comparatively recent and familiar it is to most of us, the lines between the
realistic and the fantastic are
astoundingly blurry.
A lot of that confusion can be attributed to the emblematic character archetype of the cowboy.
In real life,
they did exactly what their name implies: herd cows; and that was it.
But the trope has a truly staggering amount of a historical character baggage attached.
In popular culture, it's more often portrayed as...
(eagle cry, and McCree from Overwatch) It's HIGHH NOOON
Blue: Oh. nonoNoNoNO!
(offscreen scuffle)
Whew! That was a close one.
Almost allowed my abiding love for roguish Matthew Mercer characters to derail this number completely.
Now, (*gruff sherrif voice*) the name's Blue.
Let's do some history. (*normal voice*) Ok. So right off McCree actually helps make my point. He doesn't ride around herding cows.
He's a gunslinger, a noble vigilante out on the frontier defending justice, the American Way and the payload
(sometimes). Unfortunately for our boy Jesse, the archetype of the gunslinger is just that: an
archetype. And you'd be really hard-pressed to actually find one in the real-life West.
It sounds surprising, but nearly all settlements had strict
firearms regulations precisely to stop things from being quite so wild!
Because, turns out everyone having guns tends to cause a lot more problems than it solves.
The Wild West had gun control! Who knew?
Now, there were lawmen and some famous ones to boot, like Wyatt Erp and the
legendary 3,000-arrests-of-badass extraordinaire Bass Reeves.
But they were the exceptions rather than the rule. So, to get a proper picture of the American West,
let's jump way back to where it all started.
Oddly enough, the West really began in
17th and 18th century Central America, where the incoming Spaniards used their skill as horsemen to herd cattle.
(See where I'm going here?)
After a couple hundred years, the Viceroyalty of New Spain
gained independence to become Mexico, and the practice of cattle herding passed down into the tradition of the vaqueros
Which is surprise, surprise,
Spanish for "cowboy." Thing is, a third of modern America used to be Mexico,
so nearly the entire West was originally a mix of Mexicans and Native Americans, and unsurprisingly
there's been some linguistic and cultural bleed. Loads of Western iconography from chaps and lasses to bandanas and hats all
transferred from a foundation of Mexican traditions, which is a really cool surprise.
But stuff got really interesting when American settlers moved westward and then themselves
adopted lots of those elements and started working as vaqueros, or if you can't pronounce Spanish, buckaroos.
Westward expansion had been going on from the instant
the east coast was colonized, but with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803,
discovery of Californian gold in
1848, and the subsequent construction of a buttload of railroads to bring goods and people back and forth across the country in a way that
was way more efficient than the Oregon Trail, Manifest Destiny kicked into overdrive.
Tons of people left their cushy eastern lives to cross the Mississippi River and catch a train towards those sweet, delectable homestead subsidies.
Yeah... far from being the last refuge against the big awful tyranny of the American government,
the West was only settled by extensive government sponsorship of communities railroads and more.
In 1803, at the rate the expansion had been going, most Americans assumed
it would take another couple centuries to push all the way across the continent.
But hey, that's what happens when you have really effective federal directives.
Much of that development was peaceful
but a lot of it wasn't. So
speaking of, I've said elsewhere that cowboys versus Indians is a two gallon barrel of worms with dynamic
jack-in-the-box launching action and in brief,
here's why. That story typically portrays the noble cowboys as defending the Western
settlers from the savage Indians who were in turn seeking to destroy all that was
star-spangled and good.
But the cowboys didn't even fight the Native Americans; the government did.
Specifically, they used two key tactics during the Plains Indian Wars of the
1850s, 60s, and 70s to stake their claim on the west and shoo away its previous inhabitants. The first and most obvious one is
outright fighting. Now, cowboys vs
Indians sort of presupposes a level ish playing field,
but the reality was anything but.
Government soldiers pushed West and killed natives, which in turn drove the natives to retaliate. And things just kept escalating,
getting worse and worse and worse as each fought for the land. And the second strategy involved the mass extinction of bison,
which was a staple resource in the Native American economies. In the span of a century a
combination of outright hunting and indirect habitat loss tanked bison populations from 40 million to just a few hundred.
If you've seen my previous video about Buffalo Bill, you can get a sense of just how massive an operation this really was.
So yeah, I take issue with cowboys vs
Indians because 1) no cowboys and 2) the American government was insanely
overpowered by comparison on account of guns and the literal decimation of Native American populations from smallpox a century earlier.
I wish it was just a cinematic fight between two colorful bands of warriors,
but in reality
it was a calculated subjugation of the native population by any means available to take their land and resources because they could.
So less...
(Pocahontas - Savages!)
And more
(Pocahontas - Mine, Mine, Mine)
Okay, so now America has all this land to itself, California's off doing its old Gold Rush II coastal seaport metropolis thing, but what about
the rest of the West, all that middle stuff?
Well, compared to the rest of the country,
it's pretty sparse today, and it was pretty sparse then. Aside from
family-owned homestead ranches, society took shape along railway lines near pockets of natural resources and
hilariously, but perhaps unsurprisingly, around brothels, with the sole notable exception of that one time in the
1860s that American nearly ripped itself in half. Westward expansion and settlement and
development
continued at quite a clip; and honestly, a hundred years might not sound like it was that fast.
But consider the comparison: the pre-United States' eastern seaboard took several different European powers nearly
300 years to colonize. Now,
it was the same rough length as the coastline between Amsterdam and the Straits of Gibraltar, and they crossed an ocean to do it.
So still not bad.
But then, in the span of a century and some change, the United States by itself had developed a functioning and lucrative
territory ten times the size of the original colonies.
That's a metric Roman Empire's worth of land in just a hundred years! With all this history now laid out,
I'll be a hundred percent honest: In my personal opinion,
the West was not wild. Between the strong military presence, the pervasive government administration, and economic assistance, and the strict law enforcement,
I don't see much of an argument for why it was any more wild
then than it is now. The main difference is there's more stuff there now, okay?
So now that I've thoroughly de-romanticized the West (yeah, sorry about that),
where did the myth that we all know actually come from?
I think that its roots really lie in a handful of colorful characters: the people who took this new,
larger-than-life land and did things that no one else could people like Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, Butch Cassidy, Billy the Kid,
real-life Old West Batman Bass Reeves, and loads of others with personal stories that are truly wild.
Their lives in turn launched a demand for entertainment like Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show,
which spread across America and Europe like crazy. Then, after the characters and demand were established,
technology kicked in and Hollywood movies put the Wild West into overdrive. At the risk of getting
WAY further down the rabbit hole than I want to, I'll do my best to keep this to the point.
Hollywood got its start because Thomas Edison was being an asshole. As Thomas Edison is want to do, he had a lot of patents for
the new motion picture tech, but filmmakers found that if they were all the way on the other side of the country,
Edison could do anything to stop them from using it without his permission.
Truly, the lawlessness of the West is on full display in this daring show of corporate trickery.
I'm honestly kind of surprised the Hollywood sign doesn't just say "Suck it Edison."
Anyway,
a combination of good weather and handy geography for various
locations quickly made Southern California the go-to place to make movies, and their favorite genre was the Western. It took a little bit of time
to find their footing, but John Wayne's
1939 Stagecoach was an absolute hit and kicked the genre into high gear. And Hollywood remained obsessed with Westerns through the 1960s.
On paper the movies evoked a lot of the excitement in people's
imaginations of the West, with plots like the construction of railroads, lawmen hunting outlaws, outlaws running from lawmen,
cowboys protecting their ranches, the US government fighting the Native Americans, typical if a bit exaggerated Western stuff.
But the unifying thread was that nearly all of the protagonists were white,
which is not only generally annoying but blatantly untrue in this case,
especially with the West being such a massively multicultural place in reality. Okay. Let's see:
there were white Americans (duh), Native Americans, Mexican vaqueros,
Chinese immigrants (who essentially carried the railroad effort), and black Americans (who at one point made up a quarter of all cowboys), and I haven't
even had time to talk about them because they've been so focused on Native Americans and Mexicans.
There was so much diversity going on out there, all in large numbers and all in roughly the same rural Western boat.
It was a team effort through and through. The archetypal cowboy
myth bothers me so much because there is no archetypal cowboy.
This is such a pervasive and resilient misconception that plays into so many gross American xenophobias, and it's
overwhelmingly the fault of these Westerns.
cUrSE yOU, Hollywood! And then on the other side of the Atlantic there was another type of western movie.
It started with Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars,
starring Clint Eastwood. This Italian brand of Western, dubbed the "spaghetti Western" because they were made by Italians in Italy, (Yay, stereotypes!)
became hugely popular in Europe and America, because they were good ass movies. In the decade after Fistful of Dollars
half of Italian movies were Westerns. And unlike American Westerns,
which attempted to ground themselves in history of theoretically plausible characters,
protagonists like Eastwood's Stranger were neither outlaw nor lawmen.
They were completely unattached wanderers, unaffected by local politics and quite unbothered by violence. And that became a staple trait of spaghetti westerns.
For example,
Franco Nadeau's Django has almost no dialogue, but a ton of murder (Yikes)!
Hollywood, for all its drama and popular appeal, had certain rules for censoring violence.
But Italy had none of that, so spaghetti Westerns were far more
action-packed and brutal. A dude gets his ear cut off in one of these movies; it's nuts!
And that's the key difference. These guys wanted to tell exciting stories. They didn't care if it was accurate or not,
so they leaned into that fantasy of the West and created the myth of the wandering
gunslinger as a one-man army against the world.
The general distinction here is that Hollywood made cowboys white but Italy made cowboys badasses.
So to recap, the myth and the history of the American West are two wildly different things.
The truth is that the frontier was a diverse place that was won by conquest and developed through effective administration and lucrative economics.
The myth of course is
(McCree: IT'S HIGH NOON!)
Yeah, what he said. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with
romanticizing history to tell an engaging story and just have fun IF you are being upfront about it.
But misrepresenting history while feigning authenticity is always extremely dangerous.
In short: have fun while you're playing Red Dead Redemption - but recognize that the damaging elements of the Western
myth won't go away unless we confront them.
To put it another way:
??: Justice ain't gonna dispense itself!