Bass Reeves was born into slavery in Crawford County, Arkansas, in 1838. When his owners joined the Confederacy during the Civil War, they took him along — until he got into a fight with one during a poker game. So he fled to Indian Territory, where he lived among those driven off their homelands by the European incursion and herded onto reservations there. He learned to speak Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Seminole and Creek, and became an expert horseman, marksman and tracker in a racially mixed world of cattle rustlers and horse thieves, murderers, gamblers, bootleggers and con men.
After Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Reeves returned to Arkansas as a free man — and farmer, rancher, church deacon and occasional preacher. He signed on as a deputy U.S. marshal in 1875, when the government was recruiting men to bring law and order to the wilds of western Arkansas and the lands that would become Oklahoma in 1907. On that frontier of 75,000 square miles, where more than 120 fellow deputies would be killed before Oklahoma reached statehood, Bass Reeves became a legend.
In his 32 years as a peace officer, he brought to justice some 3,000 outlaws. He was a tenacious and artful tracker, and lightning quick with a gun.
Because of his gunfighter proficiencies, his code of honor, his habit of handing out silver dollars and his riding the range with a Native American partner, he is widely believed to have been the inspiration for the Lone Ranger, fictional star of radio, movies, novels and comic books. As a kid, I watched The Lone Ranger on television. I was enthralled by the adventures of the masked avenger and Tonto, his faithful companion.
I also watched The Rifleman, Wagon Train, Have Gun – Will Travel, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Maverick, Rawhide, Bonanza, and Wanted Dead or Alive with Steve McQueen. Gunsmoke was on the air for two decades. It was my father’s all-time favorite show; we watched it together every Saturday night.
In 1958, when I was 6 years old, eight of the 10 most popular shows were Westerns, with more than a dozen airing during prime time. Nine years later, when I was 15, the three major networks were still showing 18 hours of Westerns each week.
America’s appetite for tales of the Wild West is as old as the cowboy era itself, a relatively brief period in our country’s history with an outsized impact on our national consciousness. Already in the late 1800s, pulp fiction writers captivated readers with stories of cowboys and Indians, villainous gunslingers and heroic lawmen. The 20th-century writer Louis L’Amour published almost 100 Westerns, selling more than 200 million copies. And Larry McMurtry’s 1985 epic, Lonesome Dove, could make the short list of great American novels.
Eastern newspapers of the time followed the adventures of notorious outlaws, reporting on bank robberies, train heists, shootouts and getaways, romanticizing the daring, deadly feats of Frank and Jesse James, Cole Younger, Bloody Bill Anderson, the Dalton Gang, John Wesley Hardin and Billy the Kid along with those of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson and Wild Bill Hickok — men given badges but who often blurred the line between good guy and bad.
But no medium could tell the cowboy story as boldly and as richly as film, because only giant screens in darkened theaters could give a Western’s most essential character its due: the land itself.
To storytellers largely dismissive of the peoples who had inhabited the continent for 20,000 years or more, the American narrative is the saga of taming and developing the wild and bounteous expanses of a newfound world. So, the panoramic views of Monument Valley, snow-capped mountains and arid seas of sagebrush and cactus were not just beauty shots. The cowboy story, specifically, decluttered America’s post-Civil War vision of itself and restored its sense of wide-open promise. Few images of the American hero are more evocative than the distant lone rider dwarfed against a majestic backdrop of empty space, loping alone and unencumbered, leaving behind some undisclosed past, drifting bravely into an unknown future.
Cowboy life was the subject of almost 400 silent films, including The Great Train Robbery of 1903, based in part on Butch Cassidy and the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang’s holdup of the Union Pacific Railroad near Wilcox, Wyoming, just a few years before. More than 4,000 Westerns were made between 1926 and 1967 — one-fourth of all the movies produced during that time.
Like any culture’s storytelling, the Western was instrumental in weaving together reality and myth to shape, define and convey our national identity, playing all the right notes in our subconscious hymn of place and destiny. The gist is this: A stranger rides into town, highly skilled at gunplay but of uncertain history, and evil is afoot. Bad guys are threatening the earnest, law-abiding community: weaponless farmers and merchants, schoolmarms and ineffective sheriffs. Perhaps there’s a personal vendetta, a score to settle from some dark past. The mysterious yet honorable stranger takes care of the problem — always by shooting and killing — earning the respect of the townsfolk and the affectionate admiration of a woman, always left behind as the hero-stranger rides off again. Evil is vanquished, as it must be vanquished for civilization to dig its roots securely into the soil of tomorrow.
Along the way, other cultural messages are deftly transmitted and reinforced. Problems are best, most easily negotiated through violence. Street smarts are favored over book smarts. Americans should be wary of city folks and city slickers, outsiders not rough and brawny enough to be at home on the range or in the local saloon.
“To breathe free on the land,” writes Garry Wills in John Wayne’s America, “the real American must shake off the weight of institutions — not only of laws and government, but of schools and libraries.” Significantly, the cowboy hero is not an official lawman, not a member of any agency, alliance or established organization. He is outside the system. Our American hero is a freewheeling outlier, a renegade, a maverick. He is a rule-breaker dispensing justice beyond the constraints of legalisms and social norms. He travels alone, on horseback, with no inclination to settle down.
If emotion exists within the heart of a cowboy, it is buried deep within. He is stoic in the face of danger, death, brutality and a woman’s love. Women are secondary players in the Western movie. They always play supporting roles, and the hero cowboy treats them as such. Weak, domestic, fawning, in need of saving. He remains aloof and distant from their amorous seductions, unless they be dance-hall girls with a room above the saloon. “Love ’em and leave ’em” was the code of the West.
The cowboy is a man of few words; he communicates through action. Or by staring, expressionlessly, gazing off into the distance, seeing what others cannot. He is rugged, whiskered and slightly unwashed. He is quick on the draw, decisive in trouble, kind to his horse, reclusive from the ways of society. Relationships are like a wolf pack — lots of growling, sparring and jousting to determine the alpha male.
Generations of American boys — flashing toy six-shooters and Winchester rifles — played cowboys and Indians and saved their neighborhoods from rustlers, outlaws, bank robbers and swarthy desperadoes preying upon innocent victims in need of some macho savior. By watching Gary Cooper, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, American boys learned what manhood looked like. Those who wanted to be real men emulated the tough guy, the solitary hero whose fears and feelings were sealed.
While Hollywood does not turn out Westerns like it once did, the genre persists even now as filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, John Sayles, Jane Campion and the Coen brothers have used the Western to explore the perennial human themes of vengeance, morality, courage and redemption — and the human propensity for violence. The setting and storylines lend themselves to tensions between good and evil, the individual and society, freedom and constraints, and the archetypal garden, fall and sins of human civilization.
That period of American history — roughly 1860 to 1890 — is deeply embedded in the American psyche and its power persists today, from cowboy hats to foreign policy.
Of course, stereotypes come from real life, and the cowboy stories were drawn from the lawless days of a very wild West. By 1865, several million head of cattle roamed Texas, needing to be rounded up and delivered to northern markets depleted by the Civil War. The work was grueling and dangerous. There were long days in the saddle driving feral herds through Indian Territory, shepherding weekslong migrations to train depots in Kansas. A good many of these cattle drivers were Mexicans, freed slaves and Civil War veterans. At boomtowns along the trail, and certainly by the time they reached Abilene or Dodge City, the cowhands had money in their pockets, drank and got rowdy, shooting their pistols and challenging each other in foolish games of bravado.
The expanding West offered plenty of space to evade the law, and many cowpokes found it more appealing and profitable to steal livestock and rob stagecoaches than to drive cattle. In 1880, a newspaper in Tucson, Arizona, reported, “Cowboy is a name which has ceased in this Territory to be a term applied to cattle herders. The term is applied to thieves, robbers, cutthroats and the lawless class of the community generally.” A year later the Arizona Star wrote vividly of cowboys and the times: “They are worse than the Apache and should be treated as such — wherever they are found, let them be shot down like an Apache.”
For several decades the West was a melting pot of trappers, miners and mountain men, Indians and Indian fighters, homesteaders and cowboys, lawmen, outlaws and self-appointed vigilantes as mean, brutal and reckless as the culprits they hunted down. Little effort was made to bring a gunfighter before a judge; it was much easier to shoot to kill or to simply hang one on the spot. Deadly frictions arose between cattlemen and sheepherders, between those putting up fences and those wanting open range. When gold was discovered in the Black Hills in 1874, the U.S. government sent troops to claim that land and to build a series of forts through Indian country to clear a path and to exterminate or confine to reservations the original inhabitants.
Some of the era’s most colorful characters became folk heroes, exposing an American fascination with bad guys, with taking vicarious pleasure in those who defied custom, code and convention — even the deadly among them. In a country that only a century before had been forged in rebellion and war, and suffering the fresh wounds of a devastating national conflict, a tolerance for violence was ingrained into our national disposition.
There is myth and there is reality. It is hard to know where one leaves off and the other begins. We are still shaped by both.
Kerry Temple is a former editor of this magazine.