The Origins of the Mythic West

Question for Discussion: According to Athearn and
Butler, what factors helped create and still create
the "Mythic West" in American culture and
society ?

Reading: Athearn, "The Genesis of the Mythic West";
Butler, "Selling the Popular Myths"; DeVoto, " The
Eighth City of Cibola"

Video: Red River (1948); The Shootist (1976)

Red River (1948)

The Cowboy's West

The Mythic West and the Turner thesis

The West as Myth and American Ideal (in-class)
The Cowboy's West (in-class)
Playing Cowboy in the West of the Pulp Novels
(in-class)
DeVoto, The Eighth City of Cibola (in-class)
U.S. Territorial Growth, 1775: See the
trans-Appalachian West (in-class)
Athearn, The Origins of the Mythic West (in-class)
Butler, Selling the West (in-class)
American Indian Tribes: 1600 (in-class)
Popular Western Novels that (in-class)
have shaped the Western Myth
Classic Western Movies that (in-class)
have shaped the Western Myth
The Old West Lives On: Western Rodeos (in-class)
The West Web (in-class)
Western Artists (in-class)
The Charles Russell Art Gallery (in-class)
Frederic Remington Art Gallery (in-class)
Western Magazines (in-class)
Gunslingers and Outlaws (in-class)
Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show Poster (in-class)
Wild West Show Posters (in-class)
The Marlboro Myth (in-class)
Advertising Age: The Marlboro Man
The Marlboro Man and Freedom (in-class)
Reagan as Cowboy (in-class)
George W. Bush as Cowboy (in-class)

DeVoto, The Eighth City of Cibola

There are two visions of the West:

1. "Out yonder is nature's treasure house and we'll do better in a new country where a man can stand on his own two feet. On the far side of the hill the soil is deeper than it is on these familiar acres, the crops more bountiful, the wind gentler, the winter shorter and less severe. Much of the Western character was shaped by the impact on this expectation of desert, drought, alkali, and dust."

2. "The other vision is pre-American. Cibola, Quivira, El Dorado, innumerable palaces of porphyry and gold have always shimmered in the sunset light... What seems an ambiguity or contradiction in this mirage is not truly one. The substance is greed, cupidity, cruelty, treachery, and massacre. It is also courage, fortitude, gallantry, the unrest of aspiration, the hunger for knowledge, the will
to achieve."

"No one need be bothered by contradictoriness and unreality in various of the areas where these two visions meet. "Wilderness," "the wild lands," "the western waters," "the virgin country," "the unspoiled West"--
among the components of such phrases has always
been a protean poetry. If the American West was to
be an agrarian Utopia, it was also the earthly paradise."

Athearn, The Genesis of the Mythic West

Playing Cowboy in the West

"Carey McWilliams said that his father, a pioneer cattleman in northwestern Colorado, had "no end of difficulty" in keeping the hired hands from playing cowboy. He recalled that these employees spent long hours in the bunkhouse on dull days, "devouring cheap romances" of the West, and they insisted upon wearing the proper garb and acting in the manner of their favorite fictional characters. McWilliams was sure that many of their activities and pranks had a literary origin."
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Athearn, The Origins of the Mythic West

"From the outset the emergence of the mythic West was a sure thing. Along the way it has been nurtured by many things--economic frustrations and dreams, an awakening sense of history, a feeling of kinship with the land, and suspicions about the modern world, to mention only a few. But at the start and forever afterwards one of the basic ingredients has been ignorance."

"The successive waves of Americans who rushed westward in leapfrogging frontiers were not mythical; they were real. But in many cases they developed because of highly inflated stories of continuing success in this new land, overblown advertising, much of which was not even true. Also, in later stages of the great invasion--the occupation of the trans-Missouri West--the color of cowboys, cavalrymen, stagecoach drivers, wild Indians, spectacularly rich miners, and many other sets of "characters" discussed earlier, themselves added to the legend."

"Over the years, as settlement had edged westward, the frontier simply had been a place where the majority of Americans did not live; to them it was a great vacant parcel of land awaiting ultimate settlement. While it lay there, raw and undeveloped, it was the original "open space," a place where nature ruled and where valuable lessons were to be learned. "

"The latter group, faced by the technology and impersonality of a modern world, grasped out for roots, for tradition, for a past whose values one could lean upon or at least look to for guidelines. Older nations had their legends, and for Americans the great westward sweep, with all its implications, had been the national epic."

"We did invent the cowboy, a man who was armed, who was a horseman, and who did violent but presumably good things even though he was largely a nameless, faceless figure who simply herded cows on the open range for a living. In our short history we have probably created more "heroes" by means of publicity and manufactured myth than have any of our older sister nations during their long histories."

"Perhaps it was the notion of individualism that popularized the cowboy myth, rather than the colorful trappings he wore or the presumed acts of derring-do he carried out at his lonely prairie outpost. The boots, big hats, chaps, and holstered guns were just the means of identifying this particular westerner. "

"This myth is firmly set in one part of the country, that ephemeral West found somewhere between the Missouri and the Sierra. But those who are trying to assess and explain its strength and longevity often underestimate the obvious--that this myth's appeal and implications are more national than regional. "

"They have imagined the frontier in a certain way, and whether or not that time, place, or condition ever existed is Iess important than the fact that their beliefs give psychological support to those who have that vision."

"The legend is rooted in a story with which just about anyone will identify. It tells what happened when ordinary people moved into an extraordinary land. Often enough they overcame the challenges that they met there, but the real point of the story is not what happened to the land, but what happened to the people. They were changed, the legend insists--transformed, reborn. And they were better for it. The ordeal in the wilderness created the American, we believe: free thinking, open, tough, optimistic, self-reliant--the litany goes on and on. The western hero has embodied these virtues and this message. He is us, only a little bigger, tougher, braver. "

"But much of the reason is the land itself, its exaggerated weather and topography, its yawning distances that seem to swallow sound and time, its lingering dangers, its feel of great forces that will not be tamed, its beauty that can clutch your stomach and make you want to cry."

"Born of the closest thing we have to a collective experience, fed by our need to discover or invent who we are, the myth endures. C. L. Sonnichsen put it so well: "It comes closer than the fiction of any other region to providing an index to America." Within us the wilderness still lingers, another writer has argued, the legacy of the pioneers: "What they dreamed we live; what they lived, we dream. That is why our western story still holds us, however ineptly it is told."

"This audience has paid its admission fee expecting to be enchanted, and the fact that it understood that this was all an illusion does not mean it was not satisfied. Nor does it mean that the characters were not telling the truth in their own way. If believed ardently enough, long and strongly enough to shape the way in which we live our days, anything becomes true.

"The mythic West, then, is more than an emotion or a state of mind, more than a fantasy floating around the American mentality on gossamer wings--ethereal, hard to define, impossible to corner. It is real. It is not only the westerner but also the American at large who, knowingly or not, lives in two worlds: the day-to-day scene and the make-believe or fantasized world that has, for a great many people, actual substance."

"We created this dream as we were growing up as a people, though we realized it only dimly as it was happening, and in turn the dream has continued to give us back a sense of who we are. It has been a case of mutual midwifery, with Americans and the myth helping each other into the world."

Butler, Selling the West

"White males controlled the central roles in America's popular West. They explored and settled a tough environment and battled its equally tough peoples.
They handed over to the nation more than vast lands.
On these champions, Americans hung their sense of winning and, perhaps even more important, their sense of adventure. Cowboys, miners, trappers, soldiers, outlaws, and even farmers seemed to prove to an adoring public that once life had held no tedium, no sense of entrapment. Rather, each day brought risks
and challenges that enlivened the spirit and promoted American democratic principles. "

"Other indigenous populations fared badly too. Hispanic groups played a less central but no more dignified part in the tale of Anglo chauvinism. Cast as "colorful" standbys, Spanish-speaking people assumed rigidly defined roles in the popular vision of western history. Painted in the hues of docile peasants, ferocious bandits, or sensual fandango dancers, Mexican Americans provided the "humorous" proof of Anglo superiority."

"To some degree, this representation applied to all western women--they filled the background as decor. Simplistic definitions of womanly roles gave credibility to the romantic visions of the West, as understood by men. Although the "good" women of the West presumably white, married, middle-class pioneers-- received a sort of obligatory nod in the western scenario, their status could be truly clarified only if they appeared in contrast to the "bad" women of the West. These, of course, included the prostitutes, dance-hall girls, and female outlaws."

"In the Western, the hero, in the face of nearly overwhelming odds, acted to secure the betterment of the community. This equation required simply a hero, a person to be saved, and an evil force to be defeated--vicious Indians, corrupt cattle ranchers, or heartless bandits. Audiences, well versed in the stock characters of the Western, comfortable with the cowboy as the protector of social values, and familiar with these plot lines, easily accepted the reduction of large movie sets onto the small screen. "

"In the deceptively simple stories, they saw the conflicts and dilemmas of American society--its contradictions, its goals, its fears, and its hopes for itself. Regardless of these sophisticated, often highly perceptive critiques, ordinary folk idolized screen cowboys for their bedrock devotion to American values and codes of behavior seemingly lost to the modern world. Scrubbed and polished in one era, rougher and dirtier in a more recent time, cowboys of film continued to suggest that within the confines of the rocky, barren West could be found valor, freedom, and, above all, justice."

"The Reagan conviction that the West defined the country and democracy revealed itself clearly in the administration's rapid-fire acquisition of numerous works of western art. By 1982, the White House permanent collection boasted forty new pieces--paintings, prints, and sculptures--with western themes. Additionally, almost 130 pieces of art on loan from around the country decorated the halls and offices of the White House. In the official West Wing and Oval Office, Frederic Remington bronzes, Thomas Moran landscapes, and George Catlin Indians surrounded those privy to the inner circle. Upstairs, in their private quarters, Ronald and Nancy Reagan gazed on western landscapes painted by Thomas Moran and Thomas Hill."

"In all these ventures, from the nineteenth through the twentieth century, the West meant something special to American consumers. From wilderness tales to splashy television productions, a substantial group of Americans derived national meaning from western expansion, and the experience touched the country's collective spirit. Although the fad-like aspects of western commercialism ebbed from time to time, the affection these Americans harbored for the West never totally died."