How the Western Rewrote History

After our recent competition I wanted to expand on my entry and decided last Saturday to spend a few hours writing a couple thousand words on it. It's not perfect and will get a rewrite or three in the coming weeks but for now it's yours to read.

How the Western Rewrote History


As a society we tend to assume that the greatest threat to our cultural heritage is an abject terror which will come from the outside and lay waste to all that we hold dear. We look at the totalitarian systems of past generations and fundamentalist terrorist threats of now, yet we constantly fail to recognise what is perhaps the greatest threats to our cultural heritage, the entertainment industry and the manner in which it gleefully rewrite the past in order to separate us from our hard-earned money.

Over the past century cinema and television has carefully blurred the line between fact and fiction to such a degree that many viewers are unable to decipher one from the other. Often it is not the viewers fault but rather the filmmaker who use every trick in the book in order to convince the viewer that what they are watching is an onscreen depiction of factual events. Suspension of disbelief has long been the corner-post of cinema and given how history illiterate the average viewer is, film makers are easily capable of manipulating fact and reworking it in a manner which best suits their agenda.

Many people argue that this is a modern occurence which has gained in popularity since the attacks on the twin towers and how Hollywood waged a war on terror in which the good guys always won. Those who subscribe to this belief are as wrong as the films they so swiftly attack. Rewriting of the past in cinema has existed since the dawn of the medium and nowhere is this more prevalent than in the Western genre.
western is the perhaps the oldest genre in the American film industry, providing as it does a nostalgic glazed view of the dawn of the untamed American frontier, an expanse as great as man had ever crossed, the last line between civilisation and the wild.

The western has managed to single-handedly characterise's the American mythos unlike no other. To the casual viewer it is the romanticized view of a time long forgotten that appeals to them but to film makers and those interested in cinema the Western is viewed as one of the building blocks of cinema, a genre from which many others have evolved and one which can reflect both current and past events in a manner which is easily digested. It is in essence the definitive American genre, one which around the world has long been seen as a reflection of America and her past, a dusty, bloody, horse **** strewn mirror of the past if you will.

The Western as a genre has allowed us to look at contemporary political and social ills through reinterpretation of past incidents. During the 1930s when America was in grasp of the great depression, white hat sporting, gun tooting, singing cowboys offered the viewer a sense of hope in which the good guys always triumphed and come the end credits any chaos which had ensued was replaced by a return to the status quo.

It was in the 1941 film Jesse James at Bay, that Roy Rogers starred as one of the west's most infamous outlaws. In the film Rogers plays the roles of both Jesse James and Clint Burns a fictional character whom in the film is often mistaken for James, giving their striking resemblance, a trick more familiar to modern audiences from the classic 90s action films of Van Damme. Fact is played with so fast and loose that any sense of reality soon disappears as the film descends into a farcical mess in which Burns is hired to impersonate James only for James to kill Burns and then impersonate him, it's the kind of pitch that Eddie Murphy would wet himself over. Of course the incident is complete fiction with no basis in fact though to be fair it would be somewhat pedantic to argue fact versus fiction in a film starring a singing cowboy.

In the years following the release of the film the tale of Jesse James became one of the corner posts of the western genre and with over 60 interpretations of the character the sad fact remains that the vast majority of them have as much basis in truth as the Lord of the Rings saga. Think about it, 60 films based on a real life character and only the long forgotten 1972 The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid and 2007s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford coming close to the truth. More often than not James is painted as one fo the following, a clever outlaw who stole from the wealth to finance a lavish lifestyle, a robin hood figure who stole from the rich and gave to the poor or a dastardly villain who used the ill-gotten gains to help finance another civil war. These widely conflicting depictions of James life have led a number of and this outlook largely depends on which attempt to dramatise his life they accept as truth.

One can argue that this desensitising of a ruthless killer allows the viewer a level of empathy which otherwise would be missing from any depiction of the man as the casual cinema goer does not want to watch a film in which the despicable actions of a cold-blooded killer and outlaw are served to them as entertainment. The rewriting of James role in history is just one example of how Hollywood can a violent killer into a robin hood figure who robbed from the rich to give to the poor.

When people discuss the western they often point to how it white washes atrocity after atrocity committed upon the indigenous people but fail to notice the perhaps the greatest white washing of all is more a black washing than anything else.

A century of western cinema has taught us that the wild wild west was a place in which hardened killers sat around playing pokers in a whiskey soaked stupor as attractive women went from table to table plying their trade. From out of nowhere a gun removed from its holster as a card cheat falls to the floor as a pair of aces slip from his cuff or depending on the film the card cheat faces his accuser on a dusty street as the huddled masses await bloodshed, in the distance the sound of a bell tower ringing out. As the last echo dies two mew draw their weapons and as shots ring out in the midday air one falls, the other stand victorious.

The manner in which violence could suddenly erupt in the west has been depicted so often that we now accept it as truth, we accept that a barbaric game of rock, paper, scissors was the manner in which disputes were settled and that casual murder was so common that it fazed no one.

The truth is drastically different. In reality the west was far from the lawless place so often portrayed on-screen, believe it or not but the most murders ever recorded in any western town for a single year is 5, with the average yearly murder rate from town to town being a rather unimpressive 1 and a half.

In American mythos the town of Tombstone is recognised as being one of the most lawless settlements with films such as Tombstone, Gunfight at the Ok Corral and a dozen others portray the town as one in which death could be just a step away until that was the benevolent yet forceful Marshall Wyatt Earp ame to town. It was in Tombstone that the feud between the Earp's and the Clanton's and McLaurys, immigrant ranchers began. In film and in life the feud escalated into the now legendary confrontation at the infamous OK Corral. In the films which chronicle this event it is portrayed as a blood bath in which people fell to a hail of gunfire and as the smoke cleared the Corral lies awash in a river blood.

In reality only 3 people were killed during the gunfight and the subsequent retribution depicted so gleefully in cinema is in fact a far cry from the truth. The films of the event allow home-grown heros to stand firm against foreigners who use violence and intimidation to bring a town and it's people under their control. That each of these films was released during a time when America was engaged in conflict with a foreign country may be no coincidence.

During the 50s and 60s the western was recognised as one which could help boost morale and as such all american heroes routinely fought against the evils of the foreign oppressors. The story of Wyatt Earp and Tombstone was one which allowed Hollywood film makers to reinterpret the past and turn it into something much more than a simple land dispute.

As we have seen from the above examples the western routinely allows for events to be manipulated in a manner which leaves the truth a foreign concept awash in a sea of fiction. Perhaps the greatest example of this is the way cinema has rewritten the history of the indigenous people.

There are more films about the Native American people than books, and with only a small number of factual text on the people, their customs, way of life ect, most of the knowledge we have of them comes from their depiction in cinema, prominently in the western genre. The cinematic role of the native American has simply became the Indian, generally used as little more than a plot device.

The Indian in cinema quickly turned into a stereotype which was repeatedly wheeled out. This stereotypical ethnic depiction of the Native American appears in two distinct forms, the red skinned, white man hating, fire water drinking savage who would sooner rape and scalp a settlers wife than he would wash himself or the kind-hearted, apache scout who helps the valiant army track down renegade parties of Indians who are laying waste to the lands belonging to the heroic settlers.

The arrival of foreign settlers and their acquisition of the natives land ,is in reality a genocide similar to those that occurred in Bosnia yet the cinematic interpretation of these events depicts anything but a genocide. It is a white washing akin to German cinema deciding to depict Hitler and the Nazis as a glorious and brave movement.

It was John Ford's 1939 classic Stage Coach which defined how Indians would be portrayed on-screen for generations to come. They were an obstacle to be over come and in doing so allowed the colonising heros a manner in which to prove their heroic nature.

The film follows a group of settlers led by the iconic John Wayne and his attempts to protect the wagons as they travel through hostile Indian territory. The Indians led by the ferocious Geronimo are depicted as blood thirsty animals who seem intent upon destroy the wagon train for no discernible reason. So fearful of their women being captured by the savages that in the films finale one of the settlers is prepared to shoot and kill a female passenger rather than let her be taken by the Indians. As one would expect the Indians are all slain by the heroic settlers who live happily ever after.

By turning the Native Americans into such an evil race who routinely raped and killed settlers it allowed the american people to reinterpret a history of genocide and greed and turn it into a history of heroism. It is a whitewashing of the past on a level that is unprecedented in modern history.

johnny_ultimate

Good article. Alas, early American cinema - and, let's be honest, contemporary cinema - has always rewritten the 'truth' for entertainment purposes. From Birth of a Nation to the plethora of WW2 propaganda films (on all sides), the 'truth' has always been second to the motivations of the creators. These were made in a time where civil rights weren't guaranteed in any case - could cinema reflect a more realistic interpretation of history when not everyone was considered equal anyway?

A generation or two ago, the 'Old West' was definitely looked upon differently than it was today. Old heroes such as John Wayne were replaced by the grittier, 'revisionist' likes of Eastwood. Not realistic still, but the presence of the Indians is generally lesser in more modern Westerns - not whitewashing as much as ignoring.

The Western will always be looked upon as entertainment, harking back to a time and attitude that doesn't exist any more. The simple 'Cowboys vs Injun' conflict was an easy one for audiences to get a grasp on. If they were villified on screen, it's the same in reality - even today, they are treated like crap by society, resigned to the likes of running gambling casinos. Cinema was just part of the whole process. Reinterpreting history with a clear ideological motive is nothing new - we as a country have experienced the same, with the likes of Michael Collins or Wind That Shakes the Barley - but the Western rewrite was definitely significant.

You could write a few hundred pages on how cinema rewrites the past and not even cover half of it. That there are more films about Indians than actual factual text relating to Native Americans says it all really.

Evac105

Hrm - unless someone is going to post some factual evidence to support it I'm going to cry foul on "more films about Indians than actual factual text relating to Native Americans". A brief search or Amazon generates almost 30,000 books relating to Native Americans, a number which, although inaccurate itself due to including new age spiritualist bunkum, wouldn't include academic papers or limited run research papers on Native Americans prior to, say, 1900 to be fair, anthropological publications regarding Native Americans from 1200-->1650, etc, etc. I'm not denying that the Native American has been grossly misrepresented in cinema by and large but that single statement would seem, both on the face of it and with a small amount of research, to be so completely insupportable that I had to take issue.

norrie rugger

It is not new, or begun by cinema.
History is written by the victors is very apt, in all aspects.

Look at the Roman's depection of the Northern European tribes as savages, when it would seem that they had intricate social caring structures.

Britain labelled Africans as savages, when they had entire kingdoms/societies.
Christendom spread the view of the Muslim world as barbaric, during the crusades
Also Asians were viewed as "simple" (for want of a better word) recently, by Europeans

Every society, it would seems, strives to deamonise those that is displaced/exploits in order to justify their past/present actions

Cinema just seems to be the media of the recent past.

jaykhunter

norrie rugger wrote: »

Every society, it would seem, strives to demonize those that are displaced/exploited in order to justify their past/present actions

That's a powerfully accurate statement. Make them my enemy, now I have the 'right' to do/take whatever I want.

bnt

No mention of Zane Grey? He played a major part in shaping the Western image and mythology, most famously with Riders of the Purple Sage, and his books were the primary sources used by Hollywood in their early Westerns, as early as 1918. Before becoming a full-time writer, Grey was a dentist who liked fishing, and pretty much pulled the settings of his early books from his imagination. Later in life he was able to travel and see the locations first-hand.

The movies tended to over-simplify his stories, though e.g. Riders of the Purple Sage was filmed several times, but it took a TV mini-series to do it properly - it has major themes relating to religious and gender politics among Mormons in Utah. I haven't read many of his books, but the few I have tended to include complexities you don't find in Hollywood Westerns.

Evac105

Evac105 wrote: »

Hrm - unless someone is going to post some factual evidence to support it I'm going to cry foul on "more films about Indians than actual factual text relating to Native Americans". A brief search or Amazon generates almost 30,000 books relating to Native Americans, a number which, although inaccurate itself due to including new age spiritualist bunkum, wouldn't include academic papers or limited run research papers on Native Americans prior to, say, 1900 to be fair, anthropological publications regarding Native Americans from 1200-->1650, etc, etc. I'm not denying that the Native American has been grossly misrepresented in cinema by and large but that single statement would seem, both on the face of it and with a small amount of research, to be so completely insupportable that I had to take issue.

Have a look through those near 30,000 results and the vast majority are not factual texts but rather fiction, new age mythism, cook books, etc. Only 10,000 of the books are classified as nonfiction. Also take into account how many of the 10,000 aren't actually factually correct aswell as how many of that number are copies and that number dwindles even further. Including research papers is fine in theory but considering how limited access to them is it's impossible to get a figure. Also consider that many of the research papers aren't on the subject of Native Americans and their history but rather subjects such as NAtive Americans and Slavery, Native Americans vs African-Americans, etc.

norrie rugger wrote: »

It is not new, or begun by cinema.
History is written by the victors is very apt, in all aspects.

I never said it was a new trend or that cinema started but rather over the past century the rise of cinema made doing it far easier.

Evac105

So, it's your opinion that your statement is true but you have no actual facts which support it? Fair enough

Evac105

Evac105 wrote: »

So, it's your opinion that your statement is true but you have no actual facts which support it? Fair enough

No, it's not just my opinion. The fact comes from a an extract from a book on cinema which was handed out during a college lecture on the western.

The 30,000 stat you came to is way off the actual number, have a flick through a few pages of the 10,000 or so non fiction results on amazon and it includes everything from cook books to books on spirituality.

Evac105

Might I enquire as to the source material - having shared a house at one point in Cork with a 1/4 Lakota social anthropologist and seen how many books he toted around with him regarding the southern 'plains' Native Americans, my fathers library on the Yupik, Inuit and Aleut because of the 15 years he spent working in Alaska and northern Canada and the hundreds of articles in National Geographic I've read over the last 30 or so years all would cause me to believe that there's far more original factual treatises and texts on Native Americans then misleading movie references.

It bothers me that a sentence like "more films about Indians than actual factual text relating to Native Americans" is used in an otherwise harmless piece. It might have been true if the statement was made 40 years ago (though I would still have my doubts) but I would have to see some very well researched numbers to support it.

<edit>

Checking at my friends alma mater, the South Oregon University, shows electronic copies of over 300 texts purely related to the 'First Tribe Nations' (tribes in the Oregon region) stored on their website. From the introductory page to the website "From July of 2001 through December of 2004, IMLS funding enabled Hannon Library to create a digital library of over 1,500 documents in two collections, the Bioregion Collection and First Nations Collection". While Oregon is a large state, it's still one of 49 continental states. This is without even looking at the 59 separate tribes in the area encompassed by modern day Mexico or the 61 tribes native to Canada though obviously both regions would have a bleed over into the USA tribal populations.

purple_hatstand

"more films about Indians than actual factual text relating to Native Americans"

While there may well be more films featuring Native Americans as characters than there are factual books about them, I dare say a very small percentage of said films are documentaries. This on its own would appear to negate your claim somewhat - in order to make proper comparison, you should include fiction texts as well or exclude non-documentary films.

One doc you should definitely watch (if you haven't already) is Reel Injun - an examination of the history of Native Americans in cinema and TV (predominantly Hollywood).

Good article.

purple_hatstand

purple_hatstand wrote: »

While there may well be more films featuring Native Americans as characters than there are factual books about them, I dare say a very small percentage of said films are documentaries. This on its own would appear to negate your claim somewhat - in order to make proper comparison, you should include fiction texts as well or exclude non-documentary films.

One doc you should definitely watch (if you haven't already) is Reel Injun - an examination of the history of Native Americans in cinema and TV (predominantly Hollywood).

Good article.

The point was that the manner in which the Indian has been depicted onscreen has become the manner in which people now view them. You compare the western genres depiction of native americans and that of nearly any other race depicted onscreen and you'll see the impact cinema has had on them.

I've been eyeing that documentary on the DVD shelf at home for a while now, really must grab it next time I'm down.

conorhal

We can hardly blame films and entertainment for public for perception of other cultures or peoples understanding of history and it's players, after all, Jessie James was mythologized in his own lifetime by the ‘penny dreadful’s, and as 'The Assassination of Jessie James' aptly illustrated, Jessie James was a contempory folk hero, and his mortuary photo sold thousands of copies. To blame a medium for what appears to be human nature seems unfair.

Perhaps we have veered too far from a Socratic educational system that included logic and ethics as part of the curriculum and encouraged students to think, and perhaps learning facts by rote only encourages an unquestioning acceptance of every printed word, but I don't see that a fictional entertainment product has any duty to be educational or historically accurate, nor is it the purpose of an artistic or entertainment medium to compensate for the failure of an educational system that has so poorly equipped it's students to distinguish between fact and fiction or made them too lazy to question either.


The western, like science fiction, has always been a genre that has been used to explore the morality and concerns of the contemporary society through the filter of ‘what if’ fiction. Those genres allow their characters and their morality to be tested in extreme environments or hypothetical situations beyond the experience of the contempory audience. And so the western is not revisionist but reflective of contempory society, for which the genre is merely a filter. Thus an art form cannot be blamed for misconceptions or historical misunderstanding. Blaming 'Stagecoach' for preconceptions about the Indians is a bit like blaming 2001 for a future that didn't turn out to be full of alien wonders.
And so we come to the two age old questions concerning art. Does art reflects society or society reflect art? And to what extent should art have a duty to be moral?

Blaming the western for a collective fictional narrative of history is like blaming videogames for violent acts, now you might blame videogames for fueling violence, but not the violence itself, and you could blame to western for perpetuating historical and cultural misperceptions, but not the ignorance itself, for that you must blame the society that the art reflects and thus you are painting a bullseye on the wrong target by blaming the entertainment industry.

My belief is that art reflects society, and that ‘Hondo’ and ‘Dances With Wolves’ (every bit as much as ‘Them!’ and ‘Avatar’) reflect the ever changing and evolving morality of out society. Art generally reflects the morality of a society also,to contemporize the morality of a past society’s art seems pointless to me and to blame it for a collective moral failure seems lazy.
Ultimately the merging of fact and fictional narratives is a failure of education, society and government, not the art itself, and I sometimes worry when I see people 'editing' the history of our artforms to reflect current social mores, revisionism is a form of colective delusion about historical context also, and politics has no place in art.