Cowboys and Indians - Dare I Write It?
Once upon a time, in a land not far away, in a time not so long ago, a bunch of kids got together to play outside. Regularly. So regularly, it was daily. Numbers predicated on the weather conditions. Yes, that was a reality.
When we were young,we played Cowboys and Indians, or Cops and Robbers, in the spruce nap (or woods, or thicketfor the non-nap-understanders) on the hill behind the house. When I say"we", it was the collective "we" of the young crowd in thecommunity, forty, fifty, or sixty youngsters from toddlers to teens, girls and boys, loosein the woods just behind our family’s back fence for hours on end, summer mostly, but often in winter.
We were alwaysworried about a counting equality so we would do half and half of whoever waspresent and the choice of the leader of the day determined if you were the goodguy cowboy or cop, or the bad guy Indian or robber. You had no say unless you were the leader, but everybody got their turn at some point.
Living in St. Mary's Bay, we had no idea what the word Indian meant, nor cowboy for that matter though we did have horses around which was definitely a condition of employment for a cowboy. But I digress. I guess the early TVshows influenced the idea of the worth of the cowboy or the Indian and whereequality factored into that.
Television, for themost part, made us believe that an Indian was the bad guy just because he was born an Indian. Though, when we wore the hat or proverbial feathers of Indians onthe trail, I don’t recall feeling like a bad guy and believed we had a side to protect,and we wanted to win as a team. Unlike the westerns, sometimes, as Indians wedid win. It was really a game of tag - you were caught, herded, and congregated and the lastone standing made the team a winner.
We also got theidea of the cowboy being the good guys from the same westerns. But the ordinarycowboy was rarely the hero. It was the sheriff, or the lawmen, or the army,that came in and saved the day and sometimes were even fighting against cowboysnot just the Indians.
Generally speaking,John Wayne was rarely a plain old cowboy in any of the 9 million westerns thathe starred in. But he was always the hero, only being killed once that I recalland that was by plain old bad guy cowboys and not the dreaded bad Indians. Sometimesin the John Wayne movies there even got to be good Indians. Imagine. But, that sentimentdidn’t always shine through, nor was it as emblazoned on our minds.
When we played copsand robbers, the robbers always stole the play money from the bank. That’s howit repetitively started. The fortified structure made from pared sticks and wasdouble dutying as a bank and a jail stood out more than the regular boughstructures for the town dotting the trails along the hill. So as a robber, we knew we were bad,we did something wrong. We entered where we shouldn’t have, took the monopolymoney that wasn't ours, and went to jail for it if we were caught. As the cops,we were the good guys and were defending the property of somebody else. It wasclear - good and bad. Even in the picking, the cops seemed to always have thestronger team.
Cowboys and Indianswasn't so clear. We were bad just because we were Indians in the eyes of the cowboys. We didn't rob the bank. We just existed. So when we were the Indians being chased for the sake of being chased wedidn't feel like we were bad. But we ran. Some of us enjoyed the power of beingthe cowboy more than the subservience of the Indian but some wanted to be theIndian and tried harder to win. Not that it would change the course of history,but maybe it would.
Once the log jailhouse slash bank was constructed, our young minds gravitated to the nuance of Cops and Robbers - good and bad. It was easier to understand.
I'm sure there issome lesson that I should learn from it. Maybe a person is not bad just becauseof who they are, or where they come from. I don’t know, that sounds too simpleto be true.
Maybe we just have to run the trail in the woods behind the housewhile being chased by a passel of (toy) gun-toting cowboy wanna be's tounderstand that concept with a slathering of a misconstruedness of who we areand how the cowboy rose to become mightier.
Or maybe we justhave to be kind. Nothing else. Let’s try that. No woods running required.
