CowboyLands

We have Daniel Boone’s ADHD to thank for the western two-thirds of the United States. June 7 is a day that lives in glorious Disney colors or one that lives in infamy, depending on whether you were not or were a Native American. 

On June 7, 1769, Daniel Boone crested a summit in the Appalachians and looked down upon the present-day Kentucky.

Not a breeze shook the most tremulous leaf. I had gained the summit of a commanding ridge, and, looking round with astonishing delight, beheld the ample plains, the beauteous tracts below.

Because of these words, how many raccoon-tail hats have been sold in the continental United States alone?

How many people were uprooted and massacred? How many people left home and family to search for beaver pelts, gold, uranium, the silver screen? How many people tried their hand at homesteading, ranching, cowboying, mining, teaching, farming, oil rigging, acting, tricking, gambling, computing, green jobbing…?

Being asked “why he had left that dear Kentucke, which he had discovered and won from the wild Indian, for the wilderness of Missouri,” [Boone’s] memorable reply betrays the leading feature of his character, the primum mobile of the man: “Too crowded! too crowded! I want elbow-room!” 

Primum mobile–referring to the outer sphere of the geocentric universe, and that which imparts movement to other spheres. The networks had theirs. The 1964-70 “Daniel Boone” series chose Fess Parker because of “… Parker’s everyman appeal — a poor man’s Gregory Peck for the TV airwaves.” 

Daniel Boone’s restlessness tipped the balance so that Europeans spilled across the Midwest and the Plains and the Mountain states to the Pacific, crossing the waters to take Hawaii and Guam.

And bringing me to my primum mobile, from pre-rye and western writing, Boone’s Farm “flavored malt beverage.” 

Happy Boone’s day!

June 7th, 2009 | Tags: boone's day, boone's farm, daniel boone, june 7 | Category: On This Day in Western History, Origins and Originals | Comments (1)

A Western definition:

Dude (dood) n.

Usually an Easterner, but it can be used to call anyone obviously unready for the West–such as if a person is wearing street shoes, too-fancy clothes, or unable to ride a horse or track game or make coffee in a tin can. A dude is usually mocked mercilessly (see The Virginian, by Owen Wister). A dude, however, can rise above his dudeness (see Theodore Roosevelt) and in fact, may bring other virtues to the word (see The Big Lebowski). 

Legends of America also describes it as originally, a word that means a boil on a tenderfoot’s backside, gotten after riding in a saddle all day for the first time. (I will now call any pimple I get “dude.”)

An example of how to use “dude” in a sentence:  

Savvy Westerners don’t walk through a clump of chollo cactus, much less ride through on an ATV. This dude should’ve ridden a horse–they can be smarter than their riders. 

June 3rd, 2009 | Tags: chollo cactus atv, dude, the big lebowski, the virginian, theodore roosevelt, western lingo | Category: CowboyLands Lists, Men Were Men and Women Were Women, Origins and Originals, What Would Gary Cooper Do?, Wild Western Web | Comments (2)

The cover of Denis Johnson’s new novel Nobody Move screams KITSCHPULPNOIR with red and yellow letters and bullet holes spangling the jacket.

Famously serialized in Playboy, the story has plenty to like, or plenty to dislike, depending on how cooked you like your femme fatales, gun-toting heavies, and convoluted plots. I take mine hard as nails, so I count myself a fan.

Nobody Move is set in the American West, but it’s not the Pioneer West, the Cowboy West, Deadwood West, or even Polanski’s Chinatown West, although that comes close. It’s set in a nowhere-ville around Bakersfield, California, a locale that is promptly forgotten the moment you’ve driven through it. He’s too good a writer to write for the sake of convenience (he’s probably very familiar with the Interstate highways of California). His choice is unusual.

Ever since Chandler, noir is as soaked in California sun as it is in New York City smog. It would be fair to assume that the action would take place in the seediness of Los Angeles, or even Las Vegas’s garishness. Instead, the protagonists linger at the Feather River and drive toward the Mojave desert and past swaths of agribusiness crops. They shoot each other at rest stops, hide in culverts below a highway, and hole up in a ramshackle restaurant/camp in the mountains, the kind usually frequented by transient bikers. It is not a West made glamorous by the Coen Brothers or Tarantino. He chose a West that is forgettable. He chose brilliantly.

Both Western films and novels usually begin with a view of the land, an Alpha* that, at the story arc’s end, is matched by an Omega, an end that is a beginning. 

Owen Wister describes The Virginian’s vista as a “land without evil, a space across which Noah and Adam might come straight from Genesis.” Shane begins with a sweep of Edenic mountains, which is broken by the entrance of a rider, Shane himself. At the end of Westerns, the rider disappears again into the vista, or breaks from it, sinking into the world of civilization, leaving the wilderness as vast and unsullied as before. 

The majestic and stark land of the West is code for the asceticism of the Western hero: Be hard. Be awe-inspiring. Be rugged. Within the arms of this landscape, he becomes even more heroic, and he knows it. He is devoted to the power of the land, and desires this power. This is the real romance of the Western.

The authors and directors of the genre understand this: Ford’s Monument Valley and Zane Grey’s Colorado River are as iconic as their stars. Their camera or words on a page travel over bluffs and along wide rivers, tracking the hero’s progress through the landscape and providing an almost tactile sensation of experience, which viewers and readers crave. The land is everything, both the “destination and the way.” 

What is the land of Nobody Move?

It’s a region where fields are laced with pesticides. Where waters are siphoned off to fill the swimming pools of Los Angeles. Where gold mines spew poison. Where empty tract homes wait blankly for bankrupt owners to return. If anyone actually gazes at the landscape, it is only to toss an empty Coke can out the car window. It’s a “through place”–not a destination. It’s a commodity or a product, to be used and tossed when it is spent. His land is code for the throw-away manner Jimmy Luntz, Gambol, Anita Desilvera, and Juarez talk, have sex, drink, and die, and for their hard little nuggets of desperation and want that they discover and hoard.  

In Johnson’s world, human beings have used up their Eden.

The protagonists neither seek to become “one with the West,” nor strive to differentiate themselves from it. The desert, the riverbank, the mountain roads are present only to be used and manipulated by humans. There is little tactile experience for the reader–the land passes by as removed as if the reader is riding in an air-conditioned car.

The river, a potent symbol is mentioned early and often, and appears and reappears at nodal points in the story. However, it is ghostly and blurred–more like the River Acheron, for which the ancient Greek souls needed a guide to cross into Hades, than a physical (and wet) presence. 

There is one moment when the land appears fully with scent, color, and sensation–the horrific and darkly funny burial scene. Two characters wrestle a bloody corpse into the ground and are marked with its gore and mud. The only time that a human being becomes one with the land is when that character–one of the more humane ones–must be literally forced into it, dead. 

What is brilliant about Johnson’s choice is how he continues the genre’s movement away from the idyllic frontier of early westerns, and the recent troubled and tragic landscapes of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man and the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men.  

His land is not the End All and Be All. It is not the snake that troubled Eden. His is a land that is spent and used, forgotten and kicked aside. It is a vacuum of moral indifference and blighted progress. And like the landscape in all good Westerns, it is code to what we are as human beings–what we came from, what we are, and what we desire to be. Ouch. 

…OK, I can’t end like that! That realization won’t keep me from rereading Nobody Move. It’s dark and fast-paced and noir to the core. And you get a kind of a riding-off-into=the-sunset bit, except without the sunset. 

*I am indebted to Jane Tompkins’s West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns.

May 28th, 2009 | Tags: american west, bakersfield, denis johnson, eden, feather river, jane tompkin, nobody move, noir, owen wister, shane, the virginian, west of everything, western fiction | Category: Cowboy Mythos, Pulp Westerns and Paperbacks; Book Reviews, WestWays: Traveling in the American West | Leave a comment

The wash of wind. The flat land stretching to the mountains. Sunset. 

Heavy work week. Nephew in trouble and I can’t do anything about it. No time to write. Barely keeping relationships intact. And then I dream. I dream of: 

May 16th, 2009 | Tags: cowboy song, mojave desert, road trip, western mythos | Category: Cowboy Moments, WestWays: Traveling in the American West | Comments (1)

Rugged individualism takes you far, especially if you’re a misanthrope. For the rest of us, it’s helpful to be nice to the neighbors, to let in the ConEd man to check the meter, and to obey street signs.

What has gotten my goat since Day One of Politics with the Sore-Loser Republican Party is how unobservant they seem to be. I know about having to use one-liners that make a statement at the expense of nuance (see Exhibit A: the first line of the post) but how is it possible that so many ultra-conservatives use the power of the Cowboy myth so poorly? The daily comparisons to Americans and cowboys have diminished, but many Republicans and conservative pundits are still compelled to evoke sweeping open spaces where your spirit can blow free (I want to know: does it get as tangled as hair does? Cuz that sux).

That open space is still the West of the imagination, because it seems that ultra-conservatives can only think in terms of the past, and the frontier of the late 1800s (you know the one–in which many native Americans were bullied, cheated, and killed to get their land?) And the hero of that open space is the cowboy. Not the common cowhand but the uncommon gunfighter. And not Billy the Kid but celluloid gunslingers, who have really great lines and are lit from attractive angles. 

My whole take is that what keeps getting referred to is a fictive device kind of region, not the real down-and-dirty and totally awesome and scary and fantastic Western states. And lo, I find a smooth-shaven white man who can not only talk the political talk, but has also seen his western movies and actually observed. 

May 4th was my birthday (yippie-yi-ki-yay!) and the day when David Brooks, op-ed columnist for the New York Times, described what many classic westerns portray, and it isn’t the shoot-from-the-hip crap. For a full read, click here.

Republicans generally like Westerns. They generally admire John Wayne-style heroes who are rugged, individualistic and brave. They like leaders — from Goldwater to Reagan to Bush to Palin — who play up their Western heritage. Republicans like the way Westerns seem to celebrate their core themes — freedom, individualism, opportunity and moral clarity.

 

But the greatest of all Western directors, John Ford, actually used Westerns to tell a different story. Ford’s movies didn’t really celebrate the rugged individual. They celebrated civic order.

 

For example, in Ford’s 1946 movie, “My Darling Clementine,” Henry Fonda plays Wyatt Earp, the marshal who tamed Tombstone. But the movie isn’t really about the gunfight and the lone bravery of a heroic man. It’s about how decent people build a town. Much of the movie is about how the townsfolk put up a church, hire a teacher, enjoy Shakespeare, get a surgeon and work to improve their manners.

 

The movie, in other words, is really about religion, education, science, culture, etiquette and rule of law — the pillars of community. In Ford’s movie, as in real life, the story of Western settlement is the story of community-building. Instead of celebrating untrammeled freedom and the lone pioneer, Ford’s movies dwell affectionately on the social customs that Americans cherish — the gatherings at the local barbershop and the church social, the gossip with the cop and the bartender and the hotel clerk.

 

Today, if Republicans had learned the right lessons from the Westerns, or at least John Ford Westerns, they would not be the party of untrammeled freedom and maximum individual choice. They would once again be the party of community and civic order.

God bless those who can refer to the themes of My Darling Clementine. Maybe we are a bunch of cowboys. In the best possible way. 

May 7th, 2009 | Tags: david brooks, my darling clementine, rugged individualism, social order, sore-loser republicans | Category: Cowboy Mythos, Film Reviews, State of the Union '09, What Would Gary Cooper Do? | Leave a comment

Language is a dynamic tool–it shapes us as much as we shape it. I will weep if I go into the whole “torture” vs. “harsh interrogation tactic” brouhaha (just call a spade a spade–we did torture, and we shouldn’t) so I will instead shine my small but powerful flashlight on words we no longer choose to use.  

Mystery Ranch, by Max Brand

cover illus. Stanley Borack

Pocket Books, 1952

from the collection of ES

We’ve moved beyond a primarily agricultural mode of existence, yet all too often modern city people are faced with a linguistic puzzle that wreaks havoc in time-sensitive situations, such as the computer-centric workplace. I’m talking about when people use heretofore time-honored cliches that are rooted (cliché) in a past that no longer has much bearing on who we are now and apparently desire to be. 

Case in point: How many of you have had a similar conversation? 

(and thanks, Scott, who is otherwise a linguist extraordinaire)

Scott’s Friend: Yeah, that was a tough row to hoe.

Scott: What?

Friend: A tough row to hoe.

Scott: What the fuck’s a rodaho?

Friend: A. Row. To. Hoe.

Scott: A rodaho?

Friend: A row, like a row of crops. And hoe, like the tool.

Scott: Oh. Ohhhhhh . . . That’s an expression?

I have used “tough row to hoe” before, and in doing so have realized that I have never hoed an entire row of anything. Why wouldn’t I use an expression rooted in my everyday existence, like “it’s a tough avenue to cross during rush hour,” or “it’s a tough eight-story walk-up to climb”? 

One of the reasons I am driven to tap out the words in this blog is the dreadful mistakes people make when they talk about cowboys (see Cowboys Gone Wrong here). Most people don’t know what they talk so much about, and some of the worst mixed metaphors come from people who clearly have never laid a foundation, reeled ‘em in as a fisherman, bit the dust as a bronco buster, roped a calf and tried to catch as catch can, had to hunt a human being down to bring him in dead or alive, mined and hit pay dirt, or had to figure out who the hell owned that maverick calf. 

Instead we have the dubious distinction of asking for feedback (isn’t that the sound that hurts your ears?), of being hardwired for certain predilections, or being a blip on someone’s radar. 

Clearly Americans are in a crisis of identity–we’re part cowboy, fisherman, construction worker, computer technician. Perhaps we’ll always have a soft spot for the ancestral farmer, hunter, and cowboy. Perhaps we’ll always be a mishmash of this and that, and speak like it too. 

And–this may really be a tough row to hoe–we may one day stop using euphemisms for the word torture.

Here’s a good site for the linguistically impaired: “Do You Speak American?” by pbs.org.

The End of the Trail, by Peter Field

cover illus. Earl Bergey

Pocket Book, 1945

from the collection of ES

April 23rd, 2009 | Category: Cowboys Gone Wrong, State of the Union '09 | Leave a comment

Pioneer Woman is the reason I can’t lie when people ask if I am a real cowboy. I say no. There’s no getting around it.

• I don’t live in the middle of nowhere (although there actually is plenty of alone time in NYC).
• I can’t cut off calf nuts.
• I don’t even eat calf nuts.
• I don’t ride a horse anymore, not since a certain moment when my life flashed before my eyes and I hit the ground with the thought “I DO NOT HAVE TO RIDE WHAT PEOPLE TELL ME TO RIDE.”

I am a sorry-ass cowboy, but that’s okay, because the West is a big place, and there is plenty of room for fauxcowpokes like me. (Um, right, Ms. PW ma’am?)

On one LOL post, Pioneer Woman shows the sweetest-looking calf ever, as white as virgin snow. She has to show the awesomely gorgeous face of this animal, because just a click away are photos of a poor cow’s prolapsed uterus, as red as…well, blood. 

It’s grisly, but, hey, that’s what happens when you have a herd of cattle. You do what you have to do, even if it entails stuffing a bovine’s reproductive organ back into place (a procedure that appeared to be successful). Kinda sorta wish I had the reproductive organs to be that good of a field vet. 

It’s the beauty and the balls of the American West that I makes me visit every year, half eager to test my mettle, half scared to death I’ll never measure up. Of course, we never really measure up to such an awe-inspiring place, but Pioneer Woman and her family come close. Check out their shenanigans here. 

April 18th, 2009 | Tags: cowboy life, Cowboy Mythos, pioneer woman | Category: Men Were Men and Women Were Women, The Good the Bad the Fugly, Wild Western Web | Comments (2)

In a flurry of pink prose, headlines across the virtual Web are proclaiming the primacy of love: despite the sinking economy, people are still ponying up a few bucks to read the latest in love in lust: 

Along with chocolate and Big Macs, romance novels are showing a brisk level of sales. Here’s a fact that makes my pulse pound: Every four seconds, someone buys a Harlequin (and well they should, as I copyedit for Harlequin, so purchasing a bodice-ripper helps me, too!). Check out a witty capsulation of the trend from the LA Times here.

In honor of recession romances, I offer the following cover and priceless back copy of a Popular Library Western from 1932. Unlike the menacing gunslingers from the 1940s and 1950s, this is the kindler, gentler version of the West, when the word frontier meant good sex, not just a bullet in the back. Perhaps I can take this as a sign that America, too, is able to approach the world differently. That although the U. S. “wears the killer brand” it also can find love on a global level (only without the “throb of guns,” although that is clearly a euphemism for sexual organs). 

The Deputy at Snow Mountain, by Edison Marshall

illustrator unknown

Popular Library, 1932

The Deputy at Snow Mountain, by Edison Marshall (back cover)

This just in–Western lust isn’t only for women anymore!

The movies made Westerns into testosterone-fests. But popular Western novels, on the other hand, are seeped in estrogen. Go into any K-Mart, and you’ll see the fringe-jacket-and-bodice-rippers right alongside the lean-handsome-and-mean-tortured-loner stories. The first are in shades of pink, the second in browns and blues–they might as well put signs for Ladies and Gents on them. But I would argue that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. And what’s good for the flock is good for the economy. Buy a romance today, buckos! Keep the economy, and my budget, from tanking. 

April 15th, 2009 | Tags: edison marshall, harlequin sales, Popular Library, purple prose, recession, romance sales | Category: Men Were Men and Women Were Women, Pulp Westerns and Paperbacks; Book Reviews, State of the Union '09 | Comments (3)

Another appropriation of the Cowboy myth struck this past week. It was buckshot heard around the world, from the coastal waters of Somalia to a pop star’s son’s yearnings.

A showdown always brings out the best and worst, as is the case of the Somali pirate/ U.S. warship standoff that happily ended with the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips, and unfortunately, with the deaths of three of the pirates.

(Yes, I live my life preferring negotiation over death. Just don’t try to break into my house. I’ll toss you out the window.) 

It was a test for President Obama, who was elected because he didn’t have the kind of shoot-from-the-hip mentality that Bush brought to the table for eight years. A test he either failed, or won, depending on whether one loves Obama/America or hates Obama/America. That’s all Global Politics As Usual, but for the fact that both sides drew in Exhibit A: The Cowboy as a sterling example of what to do or what not to do. 

From Australian news site www.australia.to

Spin-doctors are on it with high revs and on both sides of the Atlantic - in France (Le Grand Bastion or still La Grande Nation ?) as well as in the apparently Re-United States of America under Obama. While the cowboy spin-doctors have to cover up and prepare for more evolving “Lt Col. Custer”-like operations, they wrongfully reported through their media-outlets that the mediation efforts of Somali elders and respected leaders to save all the lives and free Captain Phillips unharmed had broken down. 

It’s clear that to our Aussie jackaroo friend, Obama is one more warmongering American, and he uses as an example a truly reckless soldier, George Armstrong Custer, who was all about being too cowboy for his own good (check out his story at pbs.org).  

Then there is the other side of the cowboy coin. Obama succeeded because he did not act like a gunslinger. Within Runnin’ Scared: Exploring the Right-Wing Blogosphere, a scathing round-up of far-right-wing blogs, there lies an underlying scorn for the “cowboy-Bush,” whom right-wing bloggers have held up as the paradigm of protector of the American Way. 

Then just as Cowboy-bashing reached a fevered pitch, chimes in Don Osmond, a gentle Mormon and son of the inestimable Donny, to speak about all things good with the cowboy, namely, it’s a great way to score with girls. In his lament for Mormon Times, “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” he says:

Call me old-fashioned, but what woman doesn’t want to be swept off her feet, riding off into the sunset with her cowboy?… I guess the point I’m trying to get across is this: Can we all try a little harder to be more chivalrous, or gracious to accept chivalry? Guys, this is probably more of a call for us to step it up. It’s about time we dust off the boots of chivalry, tip the hat of courtesy and cowboy up.

I was getting overwrought with the idea that my cowboy heroes are bloodthirsty thugs, and now I can rest assured that under that blood lies very nice gentlemen. 

If only his golden vision were true. The real rough-and-tumble frontiersmen and ranch hands of the 1800s were as chivalrous as anyone would be while believing a woman’s place is in the kitchen and on her back in bed.

But the Far-Right’s appropriation is just as much in soft-focus. The real cowboy of the 1800s tended to use brute force to acquire and to protect because often there was no other recourse, not because of some knightly urge to spread the virtues of civilization. They didn’t have the luxury of engaging in gunslinger jousts: They ganged up and shot people in the back, and more. 

Those were  are our heroes, buckos. It’s best to know what you are talking about, don’t you think? But honestly, God bless you, Don…

[post corrected for accuracy 4/13 thanks to eagle-eyed commentator, Jeni. Don Osmond, son of Donny Osmond, was the writer of the article that I referenced. Shows me the limitations of too much cowboy coffee and not enough sleep.]

April 13th, 2009 | Tags: cowboy obama, donny osmond, right-wing blogosphere, showdown united states, somali pirates | Category: Cowboy Mythos, State of the Union '09, Wild Western Web | Comments (2)