I am an avid bibliophile and audiobook listener.  It is hard for me to just “do nothing,” so I am rarely not multi-tasking in some way or other.  Yes, I know the drawbacks and downside, but I have to save that for another post. So, since I walk for an hour each day, audiobooks are a perfect way for me to read and get in my exercise at the same time.  But when you read as much as I do, one of the great things audiobooks affords, is being able to “read” things you would not likely have the time to do otherwise.  One of my favorites recently, is “The Life and Adventures of Nat Love Also Known as Deadwood Dick.”  Nat (pronounced Nate) was a black real-life, ride-the-range cowboy who began life as a slave, eventually headed west, and ended up writing his own incredibly good book about it.  When the trains took the place of cowboys and the plains were populated by humans rather than cows, Nat became a Pullman Porter and rode the rail for decades more. The book was very well written, extremely exciting and, best of all, reminded me of how much I liked westerns.

Since finishing his book a couple of weeks ago, I have re-discovered my love of westerns.  I even subscribed to the Western Mania channel on cable.  Heaven.

Watching old western movies and TV shows has reminded me of so much I had totally forgotten.  One of my few childhood memories is of my beloved black corduroy cowgirl suit with the white plastic fringe that I received for Christmas when I was four or so.  Although my mother kept telling me I should, I refused to take it off while going to bed for my nap, only to wake up and discover the black corduroy covered in white lint.  I cried my eyeballs out.  Watching reruns of the very popular 60s and 70s TV show “Bonanza” made me remember that I’d loved the actor, Pernell Roberts, who played the oldest son, Adam.  Not only was I actually in his fan club at about age 12 or so, but my walls were plastered with his photos from the fan club and fan magazines (remember those?)

What is even more interesting to me now is looking at these westerns from my perspective as a much older adult (now age 68 rather than 4 or 12), and as one whose life work has been diversity and inclusion work.  This would seem to be TOTALLY at odds with liking westerns.  But don’t be fooled.  I am really sad to see the decline of westerns because I realize how much they taught us about American history—selective tho it was.  I see so much more now and understand it so much better.

When I watch westerns, I am not just looking at a story about the west.  As a lover of history, a sociology major in undergraduate school, as a lawyer and diversity and inclusion scholar, as a mother, as a head of household, as an African American and a female, and as a great-great grandchild of those who were enslaved, I’m thinking about things that got our country to where it is today.  It is so easy to think the dance did not start until we arrived on the scene.  But understanding what got us to that point where we entered is tremendously enriching for me.

When I look at westerns, I am dealing with the idea of Manifest Destiny and what absolute and unmitigated gall it took to decide that you wanted to just go and take over a place, regardless of what was going on when you got there, and make it your own.  Imagine someone just showing up in, say, sparsly populated North Dakota today, liking what they see, and deciding that they had discovered it and wanted to stake it out for themselves and proceed to do so.  Of course, that is precisely what happened with the Native Americans inhabiting the west and the settlers and cattle ranchers that operated on the basis of Manifest Destiny.  Seeing that play out is incredibly interesting to me and teaches me so much.

Then there are the fights between the cattle ranchers who wanted the wide open spaces for grazing, vs. the homesteaders who wanted to lay claim to what the federal government, in an effort to populate the area, had told them they could have if they went and staked a claim and lived there.  Naturally, if you were a farmer trying to eke out a living for you and your family by turning open prarie into farmland (being a “sod buster”) the last thing you want is for thousands of cattle to trample on your efforts.  So, of course, you put up a fence to keep them out.  Major fight.  Cattle ranchers vs. homesteaders.  Barbed wire fences vs. open range.

Then there were the cattle owners vs. sheep owners.  They hated each other.  As wide open as the west was, you’d think there would have been room for both, but not according to them.  They battled long and hard.

Cowboys who could take up to three months getting longhorns from, say, Texas to  markets in Kansas before the railroads came along and took out the necessity for most of their job needed a place to come to at trail’s end.  The trail offered nothing in the way of creature comforts or much else other than survival.  Cowboy songs arose as a genre for a reason.  It was pretty much the only entertainment on those long nights on the praries.  Places like Abilene, where the trail ended, popped up as a natural place for them to blow it all out and let ‘er rip at the end of long trail run.  Heading into town and letting off steam by spending your entire pay in the saloon on liquor and pretty women, simply made sense to them.

Of course, it did not make sense to the townsfolk who had to live with what it meant in the wake of a town full of drunken, hell-bent-for-leather, out-of-control cowboys at the end of the trail.  Random drunken shootings, drunken brawls, gun fights over little or nothing, prostitution,gambling and the crime that generally accompanies it such as theft, cheating, robbery, accosting law-abiding townspeople, were all by-products that law abiding citizens, especially those with children, did not care to live with.  Thus, cowboys vs. town folks.

Do we allow them to come in and spend their money in town or do we restrict their access and protect our townfolks?  Who do we make the most money from, the cowboys who come in for a few days at the end of the trail or the town folk who live here year-round and need not only a saloon, liquor and prostitutes and maybe some new duds or a gun that the cowboys do, but also seed, feed, cloth, wagons, wheels, and the other accoutrements of living?  What is the role of the church that the law-abiding town folk attend?  Should it look upon the visiting, riotous-living cowboys with disdain and exclude them or try to bring them into the fold and convert them?  Should they meet them where they are at the saloon or wait for them to come to church?  Was it permissible for a town or farm female to fall in love with a passing cowboy and try to get him to settle down, or she leaves with him or would she be an outcast?  Were the cowboys to be judged as a group since they seemed to travel in packs and take on a group mentality, engaging in acts that they may likely not do if they were solo, and dismiss them all as unruly derelects, or judge them as individuals?  All important questions that get played out in the west.

And then there’s the actual criminal element.  Train robbers, bank robbers, stage coach robbers, roving gangs, land swindlers, illegal gamblers, cattlemen and land barons who wanted more and more and were not above using their minions to browbeat or physically persuade others to give in, snake oil salesmen, con artists, and others who were ready, willing and able to take advantage of the newly-arrived less-than-savvy that this new wide open land welcomed daily.

And, of course, undergirding all of this is the almost complete and total absence of black folks, Native Americans, Mexicans and women, the latter in few roles other than bar maids, saloon entertainers, or homemakers. How do you tell the story of Texas, which was originally a part of Mexico, without Mexicans in it? Happens all the time.  Right up to this day. In fact, when I googled Deadwood Dick, the first few entries said he was a fictional character.  I was so confused.  I had just read his autobiography from 1920.  He finally showed up in the google results.  But it was typical of the way that black folk were left out when the story is told, just like the story of America’s “greatness.”

We rarely, if ever, have that story told in its full truth.  That we got to be the most successful economy on the planet in a comparatively very short period of time is the story.  Conveniently left out is the fact that that laudable happenstance was largely the result of cotton, and that cotton was made profitable only because of the unpaid labor, i.e., slavery, that made it happen.  It’s like singularly declaring yourself the world champion fighter when you got the title by having the advantage of performance-enhancing drugs or by tying one of your opponent’s hands behind his back.  You really don’t have legitimate claim to the title at all if you told the entire truth, so you don’t.

And because most of us just sort of take the story as it’s written, we go from that point on.  Rather like looking at a cowboy and Indian movie and rooting for the cowboys the way folks of my generation did as kids.  When the Indians were depicted as savages who were violently attacking these peaceful settlers who wanted nothing more than to find a safe place to raise a family and they were being helped out by the cowboys, why wouldn’t you root for the cowboys?  Conveniently left out of the picture is why the Indians were attacking in the first place, and the fact that the place the settlers sought was already inhabited by the Indians who were brutally and violently rousted to make way for the settlers.  Violence that came after the Indians had done what they could to try to help the first arrivals adjust, only to learn that this may not be the best policy.

As I look at westerns, I also think about things like the fact that it is reported that as many as 60 million buffalo roamed the Great Plains in 1840 and less than 50 years later there were less than 100.  Think about that.  60 million to less than 100.  In an effort to take away the primary food, clothing and other source for the Native Americans that the federal government wanted to be rid for for the settlers moving to the west under Manifest Destiny, buffalo were killed almost to extinction.  And that is only one animal.  There were countless others, as well as the flora that was sacrificed to Manifest Destiny.  NBot to mention, of course, the biggest thing eradicated from the Plains (and any other place where they dwelled—which is to say everyplace in the US: The Native Americans themselves.  Watching the treatment of them in westerns is jaw-dropping.

I am not a Luddite who abhors progress.  I believe in progress.  I simply don’t believe in progress at the expense of entire races of people.  I am not condemning everything that happened.  Rather, as I watch westerns, I think about it.  I’m not saying that places like Witchita, KS, or Laredo, TX, or Los Angeles, CA should not exist as we know them today.  But, as I watch the westerns that I enjoy, it makes me appreciate them more as I think about what we are not seeing, as well as the implications of what we are seeing.  It teaches me more about what it took to get us where we are as a country.  It tells me not only about the values of hard work and being fair and just and helping neighbors and doing the right thing, but it also teaches me about who gets left out of that picture, what is valued, what is not, who we are as a people and gives me a deeper appreciation and understanding of those with whom, by dint of where I was born (in the US), I am a part of.  I like the idea of having those who were willing to stand for what was right despite the odds, or being willing to take on the “bad guys” to stand up for admirable values.  I just don’t think white men should have been the only ones depicted in that equation since that was not the reality.

Yep, I get all that out of watching entertaining, interesting westerns.

Talk about multi-tasking!  🙂