Film Culture (1956)

years, he achieved the required status of maturity, graduated with honor into folklore and legend, and stood from then on as a living symbol of the Wild West, of the truly original American Frontier period. The transformation of the word’s meaning was complete. From the bucolic atmosphere of the British farms to the horrors of partisan warfare in the American East to the conquest of untamed land in the West, the term Cowboy finally came to synthesize the “grandeur et servitude’ of one of the most amazing events in history. For the swiftness and proportion of the Westward march of colonization can only be matched by the Russian conquest of Siberia, begun by the great Yermak in 1579 and highlighted in 1638 by the founding of Ochotsk, an event that brought the Slavs to the shores of the Pacific, after they had crossed an entire continent. The American trek to the West and the leap to the Pacific started to materialize in the fifty years following 1770. When the great AngloSaxon immigration declined, there came German political refugees, discontented Englishmen, starving Irish and Italians, adventurous Russians and Poles—all of whom looked to the New Land with hope. They were the advance patrol of an army of 35 million immigrants that was to land on American shores in the 19th century, filling those Eastern cities deserted by Americans who had migrated to virgin lands, or simply followed in the wake of the Westward, Ho! march. Thus, in an incredibly short time, the colonists and farmers of the Oregon and Overland Trails learned the cattle trade from the Mexican vaqueros in California, and Santa Fe routiers tasted the acrid sense of competition with the Russians and the British in their development of the Fur Trade Empire. With the discovery of gold, farmers and merchants became adventurers; with the advance of railroads, they became buffalo hunters; with the establishment of property (great land and great cattle) they wore guns and fought on opposite sides of the barbed wire fence—the era’s symbol of revolution and change. The shrinkage of the wide, open spaces brought about the rapid and progressive destruction of the “Permanent Indian Frontier,” and in a few years, the American Indian and the American Bison were forced to relinquish their prairies. Shortly after the turn of the century, this great 8 colonization and expansion, following (as Carl Schurz publicly stated in 1871) rigidly isothermic lines, ceased its marauding and settled down. A great event in the Union’s history had taken place. From then on, the Frontier was no longer “contemporary time,” but the best and most efhcient proof of the vitality of a new nation, of its dynamic imperialism based on racial arrogance, economic realism, and wistful idealism. Its impact on successive decades of American life and progress has amply proved the Frontier's existence in the hearts and minds of Americans as something much more fascinating than a splendid period of history. The Frontier is, in fact, the only mythological tissue available to this young nation. Its gods and semi-gods, their passions and ideals, the fatality of events, the sadness and glory of death, the struggle of Good and Evil—all these archaic themes have found in the Western myth the ideal ground for a liaison with the Olympic world, in a refreshing symbiosis between Hellenic thought and Yankee dynamism. The Frontier for the American is what the “Risorgimento e Garibaldi” are for the Italians, Peter the Great for the Russians, July 14, 1789 for the Frenchman, Mohammed for the Islam. This epoch represents the combined, collective efforts of great and different masses of people, sparked with the manifestations of a striking individualism. It is an eta in which the American believes, for his intellectual and physical approach to it 1s, on a personal basis, fully satisfied. The individualist finds a saturation of ideals in the conquest of Nature and the law of the gun. And the collectivist realizes that the Frontier movement took the combined efforts of masses to plough the earth, raise satisfactory hoof and horn cattle, create towns and cities. The Frontier that became a state of thinking, born of actual past events in the West, was gradually received with enthusiasm in the Eastern states through a literary tradition formed by such writers as Washington Irving, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Owen Wister, O. Henry, Stewart Edward White, A. B. Guthrie, Stuart Lake, Francis Parkman, Mari Sandoz, and Walter Van Tilburgh Clark. Old and new fiction of quality now perpetuate the saga, while a tabloid industry goes on printing pulp centered about the deification and glamorization of an otherwise drab and grim pioneer activity.