The Mammoth Book of the West (59 page)

Put another way, nobody really wanted to make Spaghetti Westerns. They wanted to make real ones.

Only the opportunities for doing so were scarcer and scarcer. Eastwood himself largely departed Westerns for cop movies, somehow personifying the crime flick’s long expropriation of Western elements. (After all, what is a cop but a sheriff gone to town?) And then, there was only one Western star left standing: John Wayne. The Duke made his final screen appearance in
The Shootist
(1976), playing a dying gunfighter in a dying West. The movie began with clips of Wayne’s earlier films; it ended with Wayne’s character dead on a bar-room floor. The Western might be belly up,
The Shootist
seemed to declare, but Wayne held true to cowboy virtue and valour throughout. Three years later Wayne himself was dead of cancer.

The next year they finally wrote the Western’s obituary. The catastrophic failure of Michael Cimino’s $50 million
Heaven’s Gate
ensured that studio executives would bankroll no more oaters. In truth, Cimino’s panoramic recounting of the Johnson County War was not so bad as some would have, and even approached John Fordian heights in its visual panache, but it was overlong and underplayed. And nobody much bothered to go to see it.

The Western, though, hadn’t quite ridden off into the sunset. There were sporadic sightings (
Silverado
and
Pale Rider
in 1985, the “brat-pack” re-enactment of the Billy the Kid saga,
Young Guns
, in 1988) and then in 1989, the return of the Western was confirmed. On the silver screen’s poor sister, TV, a CBS mini-series based on Larry McMurtry’s
Lonesome Dove
attracted 40 million viewers a night. Always a nose to the wind, Hollywood executives took note and stumped up the funds for the personal project of hot star Kevin Costner. Released in 1990,
Dances
with Wolves
, a movie notably sympathetic in its portrait of Native Americans (complete with Lakota sub-titles) was a sure-fire hit and the first Western to win the Oscar for best picture since
Cimarron
. Any doubts about the Western’s comeback were quelled by the success of Eastwood’s
Unforgiven
in 1992, which featured the star as a reformed gunslinger (turned pig farmer) enticed out of retirement for the bounty on a cowboy who sliced up a prostitute. It also won Best Picture. And suddenly there were Westerns galore.

What this new posse of Westerns had in common was a desire to debunk. So it was that Wyatt Earp was cut down to significantly human size in
Tombstone
(1993) and
Wyatt Earp
(1994). There were feminist takes on the West in
The Ballad of Little Jo
(1993),
Bad Girls
(1995, in which Andie McDowell, Drew Barrymore, Madeleine Stowe and Mary Stuart Masterson played saloon gals turned gunslingers) and
The Quick and the Dead
(1995, again with a woman as shootist). There was a Black revisionist West in Mario Van Peeble’s
Posse
, the first significant Afro-American Western since the blaxploitation oater pics of Jim Brown and Fred Williamson back in the early 1970s.

Revisionist and debunking certainly, but all these movies made as much myth as they de-mythologized. After all, Belle Starr and Rose of Cimarron aside, woman gunfighters were as rare as blue moons in the historical West.

Who cares? Everybody, after all, eventually gets the West-U-Like in the movies.

It’s now almost 100 years since that ten-minute reeler,
The Great Train Robbery
, started the epic story of the West in cinema. Or put another way, the West has survived in Hollywood almost three times as long as the “Wild West” – classically defined as the mid-1860s to mid-1890s – survived in reality. That tells much about the Western. Some of this phenomenal longevity can be accounted for
in sly shifting accommodation to the
Zeitgeist
, but there is something transcendental at work, too. The great theme of the Western is Civilization v Nature (played out in a score of variants such as Cowboys v Indians, Settlers v Gunslingers), where the conflict is resolved by a moment’s action by an individual with a smoking gun. Order is made from chaos. Not in a biblical, godlike way, but in an all too recognizably human way.

When push comes to shove, when it’s time to reach for your gun, people go to the Westerns to find a place where things seemed simpler, where life has more meaning and excitement than industrial society (be it the din of Henry Ford’s conveyor belt, the “tap-tap” of the word processor in Silicon Valley), where a single person might have importance, be a hero, be their dream.

Pretty much the same reasons, then, that folks went to the real West.

The history of the Western never really comes to an end. There’s always a sequel.

c. 30,000
BC
    First humans enter North America, via land bridge over the Bering Straits.

AD
1400    Aboriginal population reaches 5 million.

AD
1000    Pueblo communities of Acoma and Hopi established.

1492    Columbus lands in the Bahamas.

1513    Ponce de Leon discovers Florida.

1521    Gregorio de Villalobos ships cattle from Caribbean to Mexico.

1528    Survivors of Panfilo de Narvaez’s expedition to Florida blown ashore on the Texas coast – the first Europeans to see the American West. After numerous adventures four of the expedition, including Black Moorish servant Estevan, reach Mexico on foot in 1536.

1534    Jacques Cartier explores Gulf of St Lawrence.

1539–42    Francisco Vasquez de Coronado leads Spanish expedition from Mexico, penetrating as far into the West as Arizona and Kansas.

1542    Spanish explorer de Soto buried in the Mississippi.

1598    Juan de Onate founds Spanish settlements in northern New Mexico.

1607    English colonialists establish permanent settlement at Jamestown, Virginia.

1608    Quebec founded.

1620    English Pilgrims settle at Plymouth.

1637    Pequots of Connecticut battle English colonialists in a failed bid to retain hunting grounds.

1650    Captain Abraham Wood leads expedition along the Piedmont’s Roanoke Valley.

1664    English seize New Amsterdam and rename it New York.

1669    John Lederer explores Blue Ridge Mountains.

1670s    Tidewater in Virginia and Maryland almost fully settled.

1671    Thomas Betts and Robert Fallum enter the Great Appalachian Valley via the Staunton River.

1675    Uprising by Wampanoag chief King Philip kills 600 New Englanders, but Wampanoags and their Narragansett allies are then slaughtered and enslaved.

1680    Revolt of the Pueblos.

1681–2    Sieur de La Salle sails down the Mississippi to Gulf of New Mexico.

1689–97    King William’s War between France and England.

1700    Comanche established on Southern Plains.

1702–13    France loses Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Hudson Bay to England in Queen Anne’s War.

1744–8    King George’s War between England and France results in stalemate.

1748    Jose de Escandon grazes the first cattle in what will become Texas.

1750    Dr Thomas Walker leads surveying party into “Kentucke”.

1754–63    French and Indian War ends in victory for Britain, and places a third of the American continent in her hands.

1763    British Government issues Proclamation limiting White settlement to east of Appalachian crest in a bid to appease American Indians.

1769    Daniel Boone explores the Bluegrass region of Kentucky.

1775    American Revolution begins; Judge Richard Henderson purchases large tract of Kentucky from Cherokee; Daniel Boone clears the Wilderness Road from the Cumberland Gap to the Kentucky River, founding Boonesborough at its terminus.

1777    Shawnee raids against White settlements in Kentucky reach their peak.

1779    Retaliatory campaign by Generals Clinton and Sullivan razes 40 Iroquois towns in the Mohawk Valley.

1783    By the terms of the Treaty of Paris America is granted independence from Britain.

1785    Congress approves Ordinance to survey the old Northwest as a prelude to the public auction of its land.

1787    Northwest Ordinance passed by Congress, establishing process by which US territories can achieve statehood.

1790    Miami chief Little Turtle inflicts defeat on US force under General Arthur St Clair, killing 900.

1792    Kentucky enters the Union.

1794    General “Mad Anthony” Wayne wins the Battle of Fallen Timbers against the Miamis.

1795    Spain yields Yazoo Strip to United States in the Treaty of San Lorenzo.

1803    Ohio becomes a state; President Thomas Jefferson purchases Louisiana from France for $15 million, doubling the size of the USA.

1804–6    “Voyage of Discovery” led by Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark explores Louisiana Purchase.

1805–6    Lieutenant Zebulon Pike leads expedition along upper Mississippi as far as Leech Lake.

1806–7    Zebulon Pike explores Colorado and the Southwest; John Coulter becomes the first White man to see the Yellowstone.

1809–11    Tecumseh of the Shawnee campaigns for Native American unity and independence but is defeated by General William Henry Harrison at Tippecanoe, Indiana.

1811    The
New Orleans
journeys from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, inaugurating the great era of Western steamboating; the National Road links the East and the Ohio Valley; Astoria founded near the mouth of the Columbia River.

1812–15    War of 1812 between Britain and USA ends with no clear advantage to either side, although a Creek uprising is decisively defeated by the Americans at Horseshoe Bend, in the Mississippi Territory.

1819    The United States acquires Spanish Florida for $5 million.

1820    Major Stephen Long leads expedition to the Red River country.

1821    Mexico secures independence from Spain; William Becknell opens the Santa Fe Trail; Stephen F. Austin founds an Anglo colony in Texas.

1823    Mike Fink killed by Talbott after drunken shooting match.

1825    William Ashley establishes a rendezvous for fur trappers on the Green River, Wyoming; the Creek Nation cedes remaining lands to Georgia; the 363-mile long Erie Canal between Albany on the Hudson River and Lake Erie is completed at the cost of $7 million; trapper Jim Bridger discovers the Great Salt Lake.

1826    Stephen F. Austin organizes a corps of “watchmen”, the beginnings of the Texas Rangers.

1827    Jedediah Smith makes first crossing of the Sierras.

1828    Cherokee nation surrenders its lands in Arkansas and agrees to relocate west of the Mississippi; Andrew Jackson elected president.

1830    John Jacob Astor secures agreement with the Blackfeet allowing his American Fur Company to trap beaver in their territory.

1832    Nathaniel Wyeth and other emigrants make pioneering journey to Oregon; Andrew Jackson re-elected president.

1834    Protestant mission established in Willamette Valley, Oregon.

1835    Samuel Colt of Connecticut patents revolving gun. Texas Revolution begins.

1836    Siege of the Alamo, February–March; Texas secures independence from Mexico after the 18-minute Battle of San Jacinto, April.

1837    Michigan admitted to the Union, January; smallpox epidemic devastates Indian tribes of the West, including the Mandan, of whom only 39 survive; last great fur trappers’ rendezvous, Green River, June; Seminole nation defeated in Battle of Lake Okeechobee.

1838    Some 38,000 Cherokee are driven from Georgia to the West along the “Trail of Tears”.

1842    The Seminole, the last of the Indian tribes remaining in the Southeast, lose their long guerilla war and agree to removal from Florida, although a few bands remain hidden in the Everglades; Oregon Trail established, a 2,000-mile route from Independence, Missouri, to the Pacific Northwest; a branch of the route will take pioneers to California.

1844    Telegraph invented by Samuel B. Morse; Joseph Smith killed by Illinois mob.

1845    Texas annexed by United States.

1846–8    United States declares war on Mexico, eventually gaining land in Texas and California.

1846    “Bear Flag Revolt” led by John Frémont secures California from Mexico for the USA: pioneer party led by George Dunbar becomes trapped in high sierras and resorts to cannibalism.

1847    Mormons arrive in Utah.

1848    James W. Marshall discovers gold at Sutter’s Mill, California; Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ends Mexican–American War, and adds 1.2 million square miles to USA.

1849    Gold rush of miners (dubbed “forty-niners”) to California begins; Mormons attempt to form theocratic state of Deseret.

1850    California enters the Union.

1851    San Francisco’s first vigilance committee formed.

1852    California mines yield $81 million in gold.

1857    So-called “Mormon War” sees nearly a sixth of the US Army dispatched to Utah; Fancher wagon train massacred by Mormons and Indians at Mountain Meadows.

1858    Overland stage route opened by John Butterfield.