Now the Western has long been considered one of the finest institutions of American culture, and the cowboy, a hero universal. And historically speaking the supreme era of the cowboy was one that was surprisingly short lived. It lasted from the end of the American Civil War in 1865 until just the 1880's. It was a time when the cry was for beef to feed the hungry growing nation. These were the days of the epic cattle drives up those famous trails - as in the Chisholm and the Goodnight trails, the time of the cattle empires, of the wide-open cow towns like Abilene and Dodge City, of range wars and murderous rivalries - the raw material of cowboy legend. But disastrous weather, terrible management and the decline of the beef market would bring this boom to a crash halt, the arrival of homesteaders and the spread of barbed wire terminated the once open range. Cowboys, technically did persevere and plied their respective trade; but the old, expansive free-wheeling life had now come to an end. Many cowboys simply moseyed on and the destination for some of those spurred fellers was Hollywood. By the Twenties, it was estimated some 500 a year made their way to Hollywood from their ranches in Colorado and Arizona that were heading for chapter nine.
The earliest Westerns not only reconstructed the story and the lifestyle of the Old West - they overlapped with it and actually continued its legacy. Real-life western characters appeared in films that focused on their exploits; outlaws, in the names of Emmett Dalton and Bill Jennings and lawmen and gunfighters such as Bill Tilghman, Kansas's finest and last of the great western marshals. Tilghman made numerous films and would famously interrupt the shooting of one of them to round up some real live bank robbers, thus mingling fantasy and reality with a vengeance. For the epic film North of 36 (1924), the director Irving Willat staged the first longhorn cattle-drive for nearly thirty-five years, precisely reproducing the conditions of the drives in the 1870's.
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| Those North Follies of 36 |
But for all the documentary style realism of some of these Western reconstructions, the mass audience went to Westerns primarily for dashing heroes and action aplenty - preferably in impressive locales. Thus the films that real life cowboys helped produce in Hollywood would give worldwide currency to a romantic archetype which had been previously established well before the motion picture industry came to its fruition. The cowboy was considered the embodiment of the virtues of America's frontier. These had been described by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893.
The characteristics of the cowboy were blended with the essential elements of the chivalrous Old World gentlemen with their refinements, courtesy and temperance. These traits would indeed facilitate the quintessential Westerner. And its indelible image however was perfected by three men, all close friends who happened to be from the East and were all respectively intoxicated by the heroic vision of the West and all destined to influence the Hollywood version of it.
Owen Wister, a Philadelphia native whose central character - the cowboy was the hero of his novel The Virginian which was first published in the year 1902. It was the first Western novel that held gravitas and would give the cowboy pride of place over the previously preferred heroes, the dime novel staples - the outlaw, the lawman, the trapper, the pioneer and the scout. NewYorker Frederic Remington, in his paintings of cattle drives and round-ups, gunfights and hold-ups, recorded a West made up of swirls of action and color, with manly cowboys at its hub. Theodore Roosevelt, aristocratic President, explorer and big-game hunter, preached in his life and in his books a militant Anglo-Saxonism of which the cowboy was the proud exemplar.
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| J.Warren Kerrigan and Lois Wilson in the first silent Western epic The Covered Wagon (1923) |
The first epic Western film, 1923's The Covered Wagon, was to be dedicated to his memory. The impact of the cowboy can be gauged from the fact that the terms ' Western film' and 'cowboy film' became interchangeable, although many Western films actually featured no cowboys as such.
Although the cowboy was being ennobled for the very first time, the process was built on the tradition of the dime novels. From the 1860s onward - as the West seized the imagination of America, a flurry of cheap novels written according to a few formulas had arrived fast and furious, pouring from the presses, dramatizing the adventures of both real and fictional Western heroes. Dime novels were now the chief source of film content, reinforced by stage melodramas with Western backdrops and the Wild West Shows which popularized what became the great set-pieces of Western films - the stagecoach chase, the wagon-train attack and the cavalry charges.
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| Shooty, Shooty Bang Bang! |
One such figure tapped all these sources of inspiration - Colonel William F. Cody, 'Buffalo Bill' himself. A real-life scout and buffalo hunter, he was taken up by the leading dime novelist, Ned Buntline, who started a long string of novels describing his fictional adventures. Cody took to the stage in 1872 in a rather ropey drama called The Scouts of the Plains and on his discovery that he lacked aptitude as an actor - launched his celebrated Wild West show in 1883. Towards the end of his life, he brought the wheel full circle by producing and starring in a film of his own Western exploits made in 1913 and known by various titles including the Adventures of Buffalo Bill. His career is the quintessential demonstration of how historical reality shaded into cinematic fiction.