Why Americans Need the Old West and the Art It Inspires

We not only need the Old West, we desperately need it.

“Fight for the water,” by Frederic Remington

We need to dread an Indian attack and then grab a rifle and fight it out.

(Tribal peoples dreaded attacks by other tribes, as well as by whites).

We need to walk beside our wagon train, across the prairie, thirsty, hungry, tired and scared.

We need to stalk Tombstone’s  streets, on our way to a gunfight, the way Wyatt Earp did.

We need to live in a time when just getting through the day was a challenge–when people faced everything from rattlesnakes to backbreaking work that began at sunup and went on until the moon went down.

If we were really able to do these things, it would mean living fully, testing ourselves against nature, working with our bodies, venturing everything including, most of all, our lives.

And here’s why we need it.

Americans live a cramped and largely passive existence.

Many of us are bored. Law takes care of us (for the most part), government takes care of us (too much so, some people say), 9-11 takes over in emergencies.

Some people are so bored they take drugs, drink too much, or watch too much TV.

“Conjuring back the buffalo,” by Remington.

Our struggles are mostly emotional or financial.

Since Western culture is gone and cannot save us, the art it inspires will have to do. It has never been more important.

If we could not escape to the Old West (or into science fiction, or into a thriller or a mystery) our lives would be that much more  restricted, like pecans shoved into nut-crackers.

by Remington

In some ways, this is a contradiction.

I’ve said we lead passive lives and then I said we need to escape into more passivity. Reading, for one, can be considered a passive activity.

But not really. Because when we read, we are using our imaginations, we are living second hand, but it seems real to us.

Remember what it’s like to finish a book and feel utterly contented? We have fought our way through a situation with the protagonist–we WERE the protagonist–and now we can rest.

Movies are passive, but here’s this. When we watch movies like “Rio Bravo” on DVD (God bless John Wayne), we let the movie folks supply the imagination but our hearts are released through the story.

Right resists wrong. Strong men and women fight a threatening enemy. And it was all up to them. No one saved them but themselves.

Every emotion we release, every need we express, through the book, the movie or the art, is heightened because the west was, once upon a time, a real place.

To humans, space is still a black void and thrillers are just entertainment.

But Montana is the place the Sioux and Cheyenne destroyed Gen. George Custer and more than 200 of his men.

It’s not a dream. It’s not space. Custer and his Seventh Cavalry troopers died above the Little Bighorn River.

We can visit the spot. Ancestors could have died there (on both sides).

Custer’s Last Stand, by Remington.

Born 150 years earlier, we could have died there ourselves.

It gives western books and movies an added edge.

So many of us long for western freedom.

Were they more free than we are? Really?

Yes. Men could settle their quarrels with their fists without being charged with assault. If they killed in self-defense, they walked free.

People could pick up stakes and move (if they survived) to a new land with new opportunities: You could pan for gold in California, you could round up the mavericks in Texas and head’ em north, you could pack a mule and traipse to the Rockies then trap beaver for a living.

You could explore (like Kit Carson), you could become an Army scout (again like Carson) and spend your life tracking hostile tribes (if you kept your hair), you could leave Boston or Philadelphia and head west to teach school (become a school marm), etc. etc.

You could even become a painter like George Catlin and travel west, visiting more than 50 Indian tribes to leave a legacy of portraits for the future.

Buffalo-Bulls-Back-Fat, a chief of the Blood tribe. A painting by George Catlin.

Some women protest opportunities in the Old West were reserved for men!

No, plenty of women fought side-by-side with the men and some took over when the men were killed, including many who ran ranches.

One Texas woman took her herd to Kansas.

Do I believe historical novels or westerns show us the real Old West? No. That’s impossible.

Societies are made up of so much, not just clothes, but customs no one remembers, social rules, jokes, medicine, political debates and words: “Nose paint” used to mean whiskey, according to Ron Scheer, at BuddiesintheSaddle.com.

But we can daydream through art, and some of us can write our flawed historical novels.

I once dreamed about the West, but at night.

I was walking across a wide prairie beside a covered wagon. It was spring and the sun was rising.

Miles of wild flowers covered the land in front of me and golden slopes loomed in the distance.

And this is what I saw.

 

“Morning Zion” by Kathryn Stats

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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