Made In America - Bill Bryson [86]
The mythologizing of the West was consolidated in the immensely popular novels of writers like C. J. Mulford, creator of the absurdly uncowboylike Hopalong Cassidy, and Zane Grey, a New York dentist who knew almost nothing of the West but refused to let that get in the way of a good tale.25 The first movie western, The Great Train Robbery, came in 1903. By the 1920s, westerns accounted for nearly a third of all Hollywood features. But their real peak came in the 1950s on television. During their zenith year, 1959, the American television viewer could choose among twentyeight western series running on network television – an average of four a night26
It is decidedly odd that these figures of the West, whose lives consisted mostly of herding cows across lonely plains and whose idea of ultimate excitement was a bath and a shave and a night on the town in a place like Abilene, should have exerted such a grip on the popular imagination. As the historian William W. Savage has put it: ‘The cattle business and cowboy life were hardly the stuff of which legends are made ... The cowboy is a symbol for many things – courage, honour, chivalry, individualism – few of which have much foundation in fact.‘27
Cowboys certainly didn’t spend a lot of time shooting each other. In the ten years that Dodge City was the biggest, rowdiest cow town in the world, only thirty-four people were buried in the infamous Boot Hill Cemetery, and almost all of them had died of natural causes. Incidents like the shoot-out at the OK Corral or the murder of Wild Bill Hickock became famous by dint of their being so unusual. Those who were shot seldom got up again. Scarcely a western movie has been made in which at least one character hasn’t taken a bullet in the thigh or shoulder but shrugged it off with a manly wince and continued firing. As one observer has put it: ‘One would think that the human shoulder was made of some self-healing material, rather like a puncture-proof tire.‘28 In fact, nineteenth-century bullets were so slow, relatively speaking, and so soft that they almost never moved cleanly through the victim’s body. Instead, they bounced around like a pinball and exited through a hole like that created by a fist punched through paper. Even if a bullet miraculously missed the victim’s vital organs, he would almost invariably suffer deep and incapacitating shock and bleed to death within minutes. For the most part, trust and goodwill were no more lacking in the lawless environment of the West than elsewhere. As Boorstin notes, it is no accident that the term pardner – originally conveying a sense much deeper and more trusting than that of a casual friendship – entered the language in the gold fields of California around 1850.29 Justice was often peremptory and swift – thieves and cheats on riverboats were generally put down on the nearest sand-bar and left to make their way back to civilization, if they could – but at least justice there was. Land-based miscreants were often dealt with by kangaroo courts – impromptu convocations that seldom bothered with the niceties of due process. This rather odd and interesting term has been traced to Texas, a place notably deficient in antipodean marsupials, and was first recorded in 1849. It appears to have no connection to Australia – the expression was unknown there until introduced from America – and may derive from the idea of a criminal being bounced like a kangaroo to the gallows, but that is no more than conjecture.
Among other terms that appear to have arisen in the West are bogus, rip-roaring, joint in the sense of a gathering spot, piker for an untrustworthy character (it is sometimes said to be a reference to the inhabitants of Pike County, Missouri, but more probably comes from turnpike), to be caught between a rock and a hard place, six-shooter for a Colt revolver, gunplay, holdup, and crook, plus scores