American frontier

The American Old West comprises the history, myths, legends, stories, beliefs and cultural meanings that collected around the Western United States in the 19th century. Most often the term refers to the late 19th century, between the American Civil War and the 1890 closing of the frontier. Terms Old West and Wild West refer to life beyond the settled frontier. While this terminology could logically place the setting as far back as the American colonial period, it is usually meant to signify the area from the "Frontier Strip" (i.e., the six U.S. states from North Dakota south to Texas) west to the Pacific Ocean. Sometimes the tier of states just east of the Frontier strip (Minnesota to Louisiana) are also seen as the "Wild West" because of their stance as gateways.

As the setting for numerous works of fiction, the period and region quickly became so popular that it now defines its own genre, the "Western."

Historical revisionism has noted that certain interests (notably cowboys, Indians, businessmen, and the United States government) repeatedly clashed in these conflicts, and a few accounts refer to them as a "western civil war of incorporation" that established United States authority over the region. Violent small scale range wars between settlers, such as the Pleasant Valley War, Lincoln County War, and Johnson County Range War appear to have been common. Accounts of corrupt and criminalised justice systems are also common.

Wild West: 1865-1889

While the Eastern United States was beginning to experience the Second Industrial Revolution (which started around 1871), the frontier was beginning to fill up with people. In the early days of the wild west, a great deal of the land was in the public domain, open both to livestock raising as open range and to homesteading. Throughout much of the Old West, there was little to no local law enforcement, and the military had only concentrated presence at specific locations. Buffalo hunters, railroad workers, drifters and soldiers scrapped and fought, leading to the shootings where men died "with their boots on."

In the towns, state houses, dance halls and saloons catered to the Texas cattle drive trade. The historic Chisholm Trail was used for cattle drives. The trail ran for 800 miles (1,290 km) from south Texas to Abilene, Kansas, and was used from 1867 to 1887 to drive cattle northward to the railhead of the Kansas Pacific Railway, where they were shipped eastward. Cattle rustling was a sometimes serious offense and was always a hazard for the expeditions. It could result in the rustler's lynching by vigilantes (but most stories of this type are fictional). Mexican rustlers and bandidos allied with comancheros were a major issue from the antebellum period through the American Civil War and towards the closing of the 19th century with the Mexican government being accused of supporting the habit. Texans in reprisal often stole cattle from Mexico and made punitive expeditions into Indian territory.

Dodge City

Fort Dodge, Kansas, was established in 1864 and opened in 1865 on the Santa Fe Trail near the present site of Dodge City, Kansas (which was established in June 1872). The fort offered some protection to wagon trains and the U.S. mail service, and it served as a supply base for troops engaged in the Indian Wars. By the end of 1872, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad crossed Kansas. Dodge City acquired its legacy of lawlessness and gun-slinging and its infamous burial place — Boot Hill Cemetery. It was used until 1878. Dodge City was the bison capital until mass slaughter destroyed the huge herds and left the prairie littered with decaying carcasses. Law and order came into Dodge City with such law officers as W. B. 'Bat' Masterson, Ed Masterson, Wyatt Earp, Bill Tilghman, H. B. 'Ham' Bell and Charlie Bassett. The city passed an ordinance that guns could not be worn or carried.

Wild Bill and Calamity Jane

After the Civil War, Wild Bill Hickok became an army scout and a professional gambler. Hickok's killing of Whistler the Peacemaker with a long range rifle shot had influence in preventing the Sioux from uniting to resist the settler incursions into the Black Hills. In 1876, Calamity Jane settled in the area of Deadwood, South Dakota, in the Black Hills region where she was close friends with Wild Bill Hickok and Charlie Utter, all having traveled in Utter's wagon train. Jane later claimed to have been married to Hickok and that Hickok was the father of her child; however, this story is viewed with skepticism.

On August 2, 1876, while playing poker in Deadwood (then part of the Dakota Territory but on Indian land), Hickok could not find an empty seat in the corner where he always sat in order to protect himself against sneak attacks from behind, and he instead sat with his back to the door; unfortunately, his previous caution proved wise, since he was shot in the back of the head with a double-action .45 caliber revolver by Jack McCall. The motive for the killing is still debated. It is claimed that, at the time of his death, Hickok held a pair of aces and a pair of eights, with all cards black; this has since been called a "dead man's hand".

In 1876, Jane nursed the victims of a smallpox epidemic in the Deadwood area. She married Clinton Burke in 1891 after the couple had been living together several years.

The Mountain Man - The Enigmatic John "Liver-Eating" Johnston

John "Liver-Eating" Johnston earned his macabre name the easy way - the result of a joke. During a battle with the Sioux in 1868, Johnston ran a Sioux warrior through with his knife. When he withdrew his knife, there was, purportedly, a "sliver of liver" attached to the blade. He pretended to eat the piece of liver, hence, the name "Liver-Eating.

Johnston was, indeed, a real old west character. Sailor, hunter, miner, whiskey runner, stage coach operator, Mexican and Civil War veteran, woodhawk (providing cut timber for steamboats), lawman at Coulson/Billings, Montana, chief-of-scouts for General Nelson A Miles during the Indian Wars of 1876-1877, star feature with the Hardwick Wild West Show, alcoholic, and pathologic in his hatred for Indians.

According to a new Johnston biography, written by Dr. Dennis McLelland, entitled, The Avenging Fury of the Plains, John 'Liver-Eating' Johnston, Exploding the Myths - Discovering the Man, Johnston was portrayed by actor Robert Redford, in the movie, Jeremiah Johnson as a character separate from the historical facts. The book details, and corrects, the many errors about Johnston's life as found in the historical fiction of Thorpe and Bunker's The Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson.

Lincoln County War

The Lincoln County War (1877) was a conflict between two entrenched factions in the Old West. The "war" was between a faction led by wealthy ranchers and another faction led by the wealthy owners of the monopolistic general store in Lincoln County, New Mexico. A notable combatant on the side of the ranchers was Billy the Kid, the infamous 19th century American frontier outlaw and murderer. The Kid is reputed to have killed 21 men, one for each year of his life, but the figure is probably closer to nine (four on his own and five with the help of others).

James gang

The outlaw Jesse James and the James-Younger Gang were infamous for their activities in the Old West. Though often cast by the sensationalist media of the time as a contemporary Robin Hoods, most were hardbitten men of violence who escaped to or embraced the frontier life. James and his compatriots were almost entirely former Confederate veterans and/or Partisan Rangers. Most were denied parole or pardon following the end of the war and through principle or survival joined the outlaw society of the period. Groups like the James-Younger Gang operated as highwaymen to fund their other resistance activities in the post-bellum period. The James-Younger Gangs most notorious events included the robberies of banks, trains, stagecoaches, and stores from Iowa to Texas and from Tennessee to California. Eluding even the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, the gang took upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars in today's value, disrupted railway operations, killed scores of men, cowed Robber Barons into hiring hundreds of bodyguards and detectives, and became the cause celebre of Confederate sympathizers and small farmers alike during the Gilded Age. James is believed to have carried out the first daylight bank robbery in peacetime, stealing over $1,000,000 dollars in today's money from a bank in Liberty, Missouri. While James did harass railroad and corporate executives who unjustly seized private land or squashed small business for the railways and big business, modern biographers tend to stress that he did so for personal gain; forgetting that he and individuals like him were made outlaws by acts of Congress, Reconstruction, and powerful business interests.

Western Indian Wars

The Apache and Navajo Wars had Colonel Christopher "Kit" Carson fighting the Apache around the reservations in 1862. Skirmishes between the U.S. and Apaches continue until 1886, when Geronimo surrendered to U.S. forces. Kit Carson used a scorched earth policy in the Navajo campaign, burning Navajo fields and homes, and stealing or killing their livestock. He was aided by other Indian tribes with long-standing enmity toward the Navajos, chiefly the Utes. He later fought a combined force of Kiowa, Comanche and Cheyenne to a draw at the First Battle of Adobe Walls, but he managed to destroy the Indian village and winter supplies. On June 27, 1874 'Bat' Masterson and a small group of buffalo hunters fought a much larger Indian force at the Second Battle of Adobe Walls.

Red Cloud's War was led by the Lakota chief Makhpyia luta (Red Cloud) and was the most successful war against the U.S. during the Indian Wars. By the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868), the U.S. granted a large reservation to the Lakota, without military presence or oversight, no settlements, and no reserved road building rights. The reservation included the entire Black Hills.

Captain Jack was a chief of the Native American Modoc tribe of California and Oregon, and was their leader during the Modoc War. With 53 Modoc warriors, Captain Jack held off 1,000 men of the U.S. Army for 7 months. Captain Jack killed Edward Canby.

The Black Hills War was conducted by the Lakota under Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The conflict began after repeated violations of the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) once gold was discovered in the hills. One of its famous battles was the Battle of the Little Bighorn, in which combined Sioux and Cheyenne forces defeated the 7th Cavalry, led by General George Armstrong Custer.

The end of the Indian Wars came at the Massacre of Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890) where Tatanka Iyotake's half-brother, Big Foot, and some 200 Sioux were killed by the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment. Only thirteen days before, Tatanka Iyotake had been killed with his son Crow Foot in a gun battle with a group of Indian police that had been sent by the American government to arrest him.

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral

The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral was an event of legendary proportion in the Wild West. 'Bat' Masterson visited Wyatt Earp in Tombstone, Arizona, and left shortly before the famous event. The gunfight occurred on Wednesday afternoon, October 26, 1881, in a vacant lot, known as lot 2, in block 17 behind the corral in Tombstone. Thirty shots were fired in thirty seconds. Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Virgil Earp, and Morgan Earp fought against Billy Claiborne, Frank McLaury, Tom McLaury, Billy Clanton, and Ike Clanton. Both McLaurys and Billy Clanton were killed.

Buffalo Bill Wild West Show

The frontiersman and showman Buffalo Bill (William Cody) toured the United States starring in plays based loosely on his Western adventures. His part typically included an 1876 incident at Warbonnet Creek where he scalped a Cheyenne warrior, purportedly in revenge for the death of George Armstrong Custer.

In Omaha, Nebraska, in 1883, Cody founded the "Buffalo Bill Wild West Show," a circus-like attraction that toured annually: Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull both appeared in the show. In 1887, he performed in London in celebration of the Jubilee year of Queen Victoria and toured Europe in 1889.

Frisco Shootout

Elfego Baca became a legendary lawman near the end of the wild west. On December 1, 1884, in the town of Frisco (now Reserve, New Mexico), Baca arrested one of a group of cowboys who had been shooting up the town and had fired shots toward Baca. After threats from the cowboy's friends, Baca took refuge in the house of Geronimo Armijo. A standoff with the cowboys ensued, and a gang of 80 cowhands attacked the house.

The story has it that the cowboys fired more than 4,000 rounds into the house; not one of the rounds hit Baca. During the siege Baca killed four of the attackers and wounded eight others. After 36 hours, the attack ended when the cowboys ran out of ammunition. Baca walked out of the house unharmed. In May 1885, Baca was charged with the murder of one of the cowboys who had attacked the cabin, and he was jailed until his trial for murder. In August 1885, he was acquitted after the door of Armijo’s house was entered as evidence. It had over 400 bullet holes in it.

1890 and beyond

Closing of the frontier

The eleventh U.S. Census was taken in 1890, and the superintendent announced that there was no longer a clear line of settlement; Frederick Jackson Turner concluded the frontier was over. His highly influential Frontier Thesis dealt with a much earlier period. With the discovery of gold in the Klondike in 1896, a new frontier was opened up in the vast northern territory. Alaska became known as "the last frontier."

Cross-border raids

Pancho Villa, after leaving his father's employ, took up the life of a banditry in Durango and later in the state of Chihuahua. He was caught several times for crimes ranging from banditry to horse thievery and cattle rustling but, through influential connections, was always able to secure his release. Villa later became a controversial revolutionary folk hero, leading a band of Mexican raiders in attacks against various regimes and was sought after by the U.S. government.

Johnson County War

"The Invaders" of The Johnson County Cattle War. Photo Taken at Fort D.A. Russell near Cheyenne, Wyoming May 1892.

The Johnson County War was a range war which took place in Johnson County, Wyoming, in the Powder River Country in April 1892. The large ranches were organized as the Wyoming Stock Growers Association (the WSGA) and hired killers from Texas; an expedition of 50 men was organized, which proceeded by train from Cheyenne to Casper, Wyoming, then toward Johnson County, intending to eliminate alleged rustlers and also, apparently, to replace the government in Johnson County. After initial hostilities, the sheriff of Johnson County raised a posse of 200 men and set out for the ruffians' location. The posse led by the sheriff besieged the invading force at the TA Ranch on Crazy Woman Creek.

After two days, one of the invaders escaped and was able to contact the acting governor of Wyoming. Frantnic efforts to save the besieged invaders ensued, and telegraphs to Washington resulted in intervention by President Benjamin Harrison. The Sixth Cavalry from Fort McKinney was ordered to proceed to the TA ranch and take custody of the invaders and save them from the posse. In the end, the invaders went free after the court venue was changed and the charges were dropped.

Fiction and non-fiction

The Old West has had a lasting impression on the American psyche, and the fiction concerning the Old West has been a popular genre, featuring authors such as Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour. Movies such as those featuring John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, radio dramas, television, pulp novels and comic books all had popular Old West themes. In German culture the genre was so popular that it spawned another genre, the Kraut-Western. Karl May is the best-selling German writer of all time. His Wild West adventure novels feature the protagonists Old Shatterhand and Winnetou.

Non-western genre television and movies use the Old West as a setting occasionally as well, such as the science fiction television series Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Enterprise. The old west has comic book representation. Older Western comics include Tex Willer and the Two-Gun Kid. Jonah Hex is a Western hero that is a conscious subversion of the genre. Loveless is another comic. Cowboy Action Shooting is one of the fastest growing American sports today, combining marksmanship with the theatrics of a historical reenactment of the gunslinging Wild West days.

Locations and characters

Some famous locations and characters originate in fiction such as the television shows Gunsmoke and Bonanza, and Western movies and fiction. For example, while Dodge City, Kansas, the setting of Gunsmoke, was briefly a wide-open town and Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp were lawmen there, Marshall Matt Dillon and the other regular characters of Gunsmoke are fictional characters. Likewise, while Virginia City, Nevada was a significant mining boomtown, the Ponderosa Ranch and the Cartwright family of Bonanza are fictional.

Considerable poetic license has been taken with numerous actual events and characters such as Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid as they have been portrayed in ways which reflect contemporary concerns more than the historical record. Certain books and movies such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Shane, High Noon, and the novel The Virginian stand out. The American Old West has recently experienced a renaissance period in entertainment via the television series Deadwood and the video games Red Dead Revolver and GUN. The comic book series Preacher follows a modern day cowboy and makes use of multiple Old West motifs.

Movies

While the Western has been popular throughout the history of movies, it has begun to diminish in importance as the United States progresses farther away from the period depicted. The western film genre often portrays idealized themes, such as the conquest of the wilderness and the subordination of nature (usually in the name of civilization) or the confiscation of the territorial rights of Native Americans.

A sub-genre of Western film, referred to as Spaghetti westerns, emerged in the mid-1960s. Spaghetti Westerns are so named because most of them were made in Europe, especially Italy. The Spaghetti Western removed many conventions of earlier Western films because of cultural differences and generally lower budgets. Typically, the cast and crew of Spaghetti Westerns hailed from the countries that were producing the film (such as Italy or Spain). Because of this, when Spaghetti Westerns were shown in the United States, they required large voice-overs for much of the cast. Poor lip-synching became synonymous of Spaghetti Westerns. However, American actors often took the lead roles in these films in order to boost publicity. Some well known actors who appeared in Spaghetti Westerns include Clint Eastwood, Henry Fonda, Yul Brynner, James Coburn, and Charles Bronson.

Western movie locations usually form the backdrop that identifies the genre. Tom Mix, Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry and The Lone Ranger films were usually shot near Lone Pine, California, where since the early 1920s, over 300 movies have been filmed. It was director John Ford who first pioneered the "out of California" on-location western, when he began packing up the crew and heading out to Monument Valley, Arizona to film big budget movies like Stagecoach (1939). Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, southern Arizona became the new location for Westerns to be filmed. Hundreds of Westerns were filmed in and near the expansive Old Tucson studio in Tucson, Arizona.

Western literature

Cowboy poetry is a form of poetry that focuses on the culture, features and lifestyle of the West, both the Old West and its modern equivalents. It is not defined by any particular scheme or structure, but by subject matter. Western novels, or cowboy novels, portrayed the west as both a barren landscape and a romanticized idealistic way of living.

Semi-Western

Certain fictional works, while not Westerns in of themselves, have undeniable influences of the romanticized old west. These include television series Firefly and its movie sequel Serenity, along with the role-playing game Deadlands, the Dark Tower fiction series by Stephen King, and the video game Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath. However, because the definition of a "Western" is somewhat ambiguous, it can be difficult to define what does and does not include western elements. Some works, such as anime television series Cowboy Bebop, and role-playing game Deadlands have been noted by fans as having elements similar to those in Westerns, though such claims have generally not been substantiated by their creators.

It is a common misconception that Akira Kurosawa's film Yojimbo was influenced by certain spaghetti westerns, though quite the reverse is true. Yojimbo is influenced most directly by the works of Dashiell Hammett. A Fistful of Dollars, starring Clint Eastwood, was a remake of Yojimbo in a western setting; this was not credited until Kurosawa sued the filmmakers. Similarly, Kurosawa's Seven Samurai became The Magnificent Seven.

In a mix of Western and modern societies, the 1950s radio and television series Sky King covered the exploits of "America's favorite flying cowboy." Skyler King, who owned the Flying Crown Ranch, his niece Penny, nephew Clipper, and various townspeople of Grover City, Arizona, lived in the post-World War II transitional period of the American West, and dressed in the appropriate Western garb of the time. In some episodes, Sky was shown using his airplane, Songbird, to perform some ranch chore. Sky generally did not wear a pistol but kept one in his plane, and when needed would take a long gun from the rack near the door to his home. The series plots were generally some form of the classic Western theme of "making the wrong things right."

Some "Westerns" are not set in the West at all (such as most of those involving riverboats, which were rare west of the Missouri River), or even in North America. The 1990 film Quigley Down Under is the tale of a cowboy who goes to Australia. Though not set in the American West, MGM includes this in their "Western Legends" line of videos.

Notes

References

Lamar, Howard, ed. The New Encyclopedia of the American West (1998); this is a revised version of Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West ed. by Howard Lamar (1977)
Mitchell, Lee Clark, Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (1998)
Jules David Prown, Nancy K. Anderson, and William Cronon, eds. Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West (1994)
Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (1998)
Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1960)
Smith, Henry Nash, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Unversity Press, 1950 ISBN 0674939557
Tompkins, Jane, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (1993)

External links

Culture

Western Folklife Center

History

"New Perspectives on 'The West'". The West Film Project, WETA, 2001.
Dodge City, Kansas 'Cowboy Capital'
Fort Dodge, Kansas History by Ida Ellen Rath, 1964 w/ photos
Old West Kansas
WWW-VL: American West History
Western Mining History

Media

1908 Book on the Real West Free to read and full text search.
Lone Pine Film History Museum
Monument Valley film history
Old Tucson film history
Plundered Province: Examining The American West As A Literary Region - Tucson Weekly, September 2, 1999