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Westerns
I INTRODUCTION
Westerns, works of fiction, radio or television programs, or motion pictures that have the American West as their subject matter. In searching for a subject unique to their young nation, some American writers of the 1800s turned to the land itself—the vast, largely untamed territory that stretched from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. As settlement moved westward from the eastern seaboard, the West came to symbolize the qualities associated with that land—open, wild, and full of opportunity. Artists of all kinds found this symbol so evocative that a new genre emerged in literature and the arts: the Western. Over time the Western became identified with the basic values and struggles of the American experience.
Americans have been revisiting and revising the Western experience for more than 150 years. Once seen as the story of hope, the simple life, equality, and open space, the Western today has become a cultural crossroads where diverse viewpoints meet, and as such continues to shape and reflect American cultural identity.
II LITERATURE
Much early writing about the West had its roots in Manifest Destiny, a 19th-century belief that the conquest and settlement of the American continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean by people of European ancestry was not only inevitable but also an expression of the will of God. Thousands of settlers moved West, especially following the discovery of gold in California in 1849 and after the American Civil War (1861-1865), when much land west of the Mississippi River became open for settlement.
Easterners had read about the West for many years before the first Western fiction appeared. Tales of frontier heroes Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett set the stage for the Western hero, although most of their exploits took place east of the Mississippi. The Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804-1806) gave readers some of their first visions of the landscape and native peoples of the West in 1814, when an abridged version of the journal from the expedition was published. Later explorers added to the colorful picture of the West.
The Leather-Stocking Tales, a series of five novels by James Fenimore Cooper, can be seen as a precursor to the Western. The series, which included The Last of the Mohicans (1826), was among the first successful fiction to feature an American frontiersman living among Native Americans in an American wilderness setting, in this case wilderness scout Natty Bumppo in the forests of the Northeast.
Cooper's novels contained several elements that, when transplanted to the West, became standard features of the Western: a strong central figure who represents life in the West, a plot in which this character overcomes some obstacle specific to life in the West, and a Western setting. In the simplest sense the Western is an adventure story with fictional solutions to the real challenges of life in the West, in which civilization and its virtues prevail over the wild or the lawless. Action-packed plots were characteristically built around the settling of wilderness, cowboys and cattle drives, range wars between cattle ranchers and farmers over the use of prairie land, Indian wars, and the extension of the railroad.
The earliest Westerns were stories serialized in magazines and then sold in an inexpensive paper binding, a format later termed the dime novel for its price. This format was first used by New York City publishing house Beadle and Adams to issue Maleaska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter (1860) by Ann S. Stephens, a popular novelist and literary editor in New York City. Maleaska was Stephens's most famous work and it sold more than 300,000 copies in its first year. Beadle and Adams eventually published more than 3000 dime novels by various authors, which were also known as Beadle Westerns. In these stories, frontiersmen such as Deadwood Dick (a character in a series created by Edward J. Wheeler) and frontierswomen such as Calamity Jane displayed shooting and riding skills, fought Indians, and tamed the frontier. Other notable dime novelists include Edward Judson, who wrote under the pen name Ned Buntline about scout, guide, and showman Buffalo Bill; and Edwin Mulford, who wrote about cowboy Hopalong Cassidy.
The dime novel eventually gave way to more serious Western novels and stories that portrayed frontier life with greater realism and paid closer attention to historical fact. Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902), for example, told of a Southerner who goes to Wyoming and works as a cowboy and ranch hand. The story was inspired by Wister's own travels to Wyoming. It was one of the first Western novels to receive critical acclaim. The Virginian, as the character is known throughout the story, set the standard for many future Western heroes: soft-spoken, well-mannered, and chivalrous, but iron-willed in the face of evil.
Westerns written in the 20th century represent many different realities of life in the West. One of the most prolific Western writers, Zane Grey, described the demanding conditions of the frontier and the hardy people who survived them. He is best known for the novel Riders of the Purple Sage (1912). Mary Austin wrote about California's Owens Valley region in such books as The Ford (1917). Conrad Richter's novel Sea of Grass (1937) depicted cattle ranching in the American Southwest. A.B. Guthrie, Jr.'s, novel The Big Sky (1947) told the story of a Kentucky man who worked in the Rocky Mountains as a trapper, trader, explorer, and guide. Walter van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident (1940) rendered the events leading to a hanging in Nevada. Another prolific writer, Louis L'Amour, chronicled three families over many generations.
As the realities of the West changed, so did the focus of writers who used the West as subject and symbol. Land became less available and the uses of land came into question. The environmental movement led to a reevaluation of humanity's relationship to nature. As the region was settled a mix of cultures—Native American, Anglo-American, African American, Hispanic, and Asian—came into play. Writers now have come to emphasize the complexity of Western life, rather than its simplicity. Contemporary Westerns sound with more diverse voices than ever before. Writers of the New West, as they are often called, include Louise Erdrich, Larry McMurtry, Terry Tempest Williams, N. Scott Momaday, Gretel Ehrlich, Leslie Marmon Silko, Sherman Alexie, James Welch, William Kittredge, and Rudolfo Anaya.
III MOTION PICTURES
Early Western films affirmed the idea of Manifest Destiny and treated many of the same themes as the popular western fiction from which they were often adapted. Film was used to record a mythical vision of the American West as early as 1898 in a short feature called Cripple Creek Barroom. In 1903, however, Edwin S. Porter directed a short silent film, The Great Train Robbery, whose theme, crime and retribution, became a standard of Western filmmaking for 75 years. The Western film reached the height of its popularity from 1930 to 1950. After 1950 television Westerns drew audiences away from big-screen Westerns.
Pioneering movie director D.W. Griffith introduced the panoramic view, which became a characteristic feature of Westerns. William S. Hart is noted for his insistence on realism in Westerns based on his own life in Dakota Territory. Hart directed and starred in silent movies from 1914 until 1925 and was perhaps best known for his final movie, Tumbleweeds (1925). Hart was followed by the most influential of all Western filmmakers, John Ford.
John Ford began his directing career in 1917 and became widely known for The Iron Horse (1924), a silent film depicting the completion of the transcontinental railway, a feat that symbolized the final triumph of man and machine over nature. Ford's 1939 movie Stagecoach introduced Monument Valley in Utah as the representative Western setting and actor John Wayne as the perfect example of the tough and taciturn Western cowboy. Both became icons of the movie Western.
In Ford's classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Ransom Stoddard, played by Jimmy Stewart, is a naïve Eastern lawyer who moves West and meets tough gunslinging Tom Doniphon, played by Wayne. Together the two rid their town of notorious villain Liberty Valance. At the film's end Stoddard's wife congratulates him on his role in civilizing the West: “It was once a wilderness. Now it's a garden. Aren't you proud?” The irony is that Stoddard built a successful political career on the killing of Valance, and the bringing of law and civilization to their region, when in fact it was Doniphon who shot Valance.
In the 1950s Western films emphasizing action and adventure were joined on screen by a subcategory, the adult Western. Adult Westerns focused more on the psychology of the characters than on action, and generally had more complex characters than the good guys and bad guys of earlier films. A classic example of the genre is Fred Zinneman's High Noon (1952), starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. In the film the town marshal must decide whether to defend a town, unwilling to defend itself, against a gunman seeking revenge. Shane (1953), directed by George Stevens, and Rio Bravo (1959), directed by Howard Hawks, are other examples of adult Westerns.
Another subcategory was the spaghetti Western, so called because these films were made cheaply on foreign locations, especially in Italy. The man who popularized the spaghetti Westerns was Italian director Sergio Leone. Leone's early films A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) made a star of their lead actor, Clint Eastwood, and restored the vision of the West as a place built by tough, uncomplicated men acting on such motives as revenge.
In the 1970s and 1980s Westerns began to lose box-office appeal as social protest movements caused many Americans to question the cultural values presented in Westerns. Parodies of the genre, such as Blazing Saddles (1974), directed by Mel Brooks, had some success, however. In the early 1990s, two Westerns won Academy Awards for best picture. Dances with Wolves (1990), directed by Kevin Costner, incorporated a Native American point of view. Unforgiven (1992), directed by Clint Eastwood, revisited the lawlessness-to-civilization theme, often seeming to parody the image of the strong, silent Western hero while at the same time resurrecting it.
IV RADIO AND TELEVISION
From 1933, the year “The Lone Ranger” series premiered, to the introduction of “Gunsmoke” in 1952, children were radio Westerns' biggest audience. As in early fiction and motion pictures about the West, action plots, heroic characters, and conflicts between cowboys and Indians were standard fare.
Besides continual action and adventure, “The Lone Ranger,” which ran until 1955, featured a strong friendship between the white cowboy Lone Ranger and the Native American Tonto, who helped the Lone Ranger fight evil. Another popular radio Western of the 1930s was “Tom Mix,” which aired for ten years. Tom Mix, once a popular actor in low-budget Western movies, was portrayed on radio as a patriotic cowboy hero. Cowboys Gene Autry and Roy Rogers both had popular radio shows.
Many Western radio programs were later adapted for television. “The Lone Ranger” was broadcast as a television series from 1949 to 1957. The series “Gunsmoke” was adapted for television in 1955. With “Gunsmoke” came a significant change in the Western formula: The lone hero was replaced by a community or family of heroes, including sheriff Matt Dillon, hotel manager Miss Kitty Russell, “Doc” Adams, and deputy Festus Haggen.
Television Westerns reached their peak popularity from the late 1950s through the 1960s. In 1958, 24 Western serials were televised each week. In 1959 two more Westerns featuring a community of heroes premiered: “Rawhide,” about a cattle drive headed by trail hands Gil Favor and Rowdy Yates, and “Bonanza,” which featured a father and his three sons who managed a Nevada ranch.
Like the motion-picture Western, the television Western lost its audience in the 1970s and 1980s and was resurrected in the 1990s, finding success with nontraditional points of view. The lead character of “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” for example, is a resourceful woman doctor in a small frontier town.
V IMPACT
For 150 years, Westerns have provided a means for expressions of American identity, typically as a conflict between self-determination and community, open space and civilization, home and migration. Their evolution to some extent reflects American history. Because the traditional Western symbolizes America's feelings of self-confidence, it has fallen out of favor in periods of American self-doubt. Today many historians see the West not as a closed frontier but as a place of ongoing contact among cultures. There is no longer one story about the West, but many, reflecting the rich diversity of voices that keep the Western genre alive.
Gene Autry
Known as the Singing Cowboy, Gene Autry was the star of nearly 100 Westerns during his career as an actor. Autry also had his own television show and recorded a number of pop music hits, such as “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (1949).
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