Storming the Gates of Paradise (5 page)

Such frontier heroes as Fremont and Carson were adored for their authenticity, for the physical courage and stamina that made their involvement in the blood-drenched exploration of the West possible, and for their encounters with the grit of real mountains and real prairies. Yet the details of their adventures and their characters were often fabricated. For the inhabitants of the Wild West they founded, there seems to have been no clear border between the world and its highly embroidered representation. Buffalo Bill (William Cody) and Wild Bill Hickok (James Butler Hickok), respectively a scout and buffalo hunter and a gunman and lawman, had been the subjects of laudatory fictions published in the East, and they collaborated with the mythmaking by lying extensively about their own lives afterward—or perhaps they had become true inhabitants of that murky borderland. They began in 1872 to reenact their adventures for audiences, helping to create a pageantlike docudrama that drew equally from circus, theater, and rodeo. This hybrid reached its apotheosis with the Wild West Show that Cody founded in 1882 with the pseudononymous Ned Buntline, who wrote more than a hundred
novels about his partner. The circus, formerly a blend of the fabulous and the exotic, became a vehicle for presenting the celebrated characters, skills (shooting, roping, riding), and events of the West as entertainment. The West had already ceased to be a place and become a genre: it had become the Western.

In his autobiography, Cody wrote about fashion and fiction:

At the last minute I decided to take along my buckskin suit. Something told me that some of the people I had met in New York might want to know just how a scout looked in his business clothes. . . . I was still wearing the wonderful overcoat that had been given me by the Grand Duke Alexis, and it was a source of continuous admiration among the officers, who pronounced it the most magnificent garment of its kind in America. . . . In the papers the next morning I found that I had had adventures that up to that time I had never heard of. The next evening I had my first adventure in high society.

Cody was born in 1846, the year the United States began its war with Mexico for what is now the American Southwest, and died during the First World War; he began his career as a buffalo hunter and army scout and ended as a silent-movie producer. He is the crowning achievement of this proto-shape shifting, a prefigurative mix of Andy Warhol and Steven Seagal and Michael Eisner. There is now a Buffalo Bill Museum in Colorado, and, like the Gene Autry Museum in Los Angeles, it presents Western history and theater as though they were one—and in crucial respects they were. To comprehend the Wild West Show, imagine that Colin Powell toured the country in a theatrical production simulating the bombing of Baghdad, and that Saddam Hussein joined him occasionally for a command performance. The stars played themselves, and actors played the smaller parts. Enemies on the battlefield became co-stars of the circus, and Cody harbored an outlaw for a while who played himself—Gabriel Dumont of Canada’s Riel Rebellion. For many of the most prominent characters of the West, crime, law enforcement, and entertainment were not distinct categories: Las Vegas already existed in spirit.

In the 1880s in Montana, some young outlaws were apprehended with saddlebags
full of dime novels—they must have been copycat criminals, egged on by their reading. In his book
Spaghetti Westerns
, Christopher Frayling recounts, “Emmett Dalton, the last surviving member of the Dalton Gang specializing in great train robberies, actually collaborated on a book in 1937 (subsequently filmed) entitled
When the Daltons Rode
. This book told the story of how Emmett Dalton had died a romantic death at Coffeyville, Kansas, forty-five years previously.” Wyatt Earp’s sister-in-law Allie, married to Virgil Earp, tells of an occasion when Kate Holliday, the common-law wife of Doc Holliday, accidentally stumbled upon Earp’s other identities, in the presence of Mattie, Wyatt Earp’s wife:

Kate had been leanin’ against the closet door, her hand on the doorknob. As she flipped around, the door flew open. There was a bang and a clatter. Out of the closet tumbled a big suitcase, spewin’ out on the floor some things that made my eyes pop out. Wigs and beards made of unravelled rope and sewn on black cloth masks, some false mustaches, a church deacon’s frock coat, a checkered suit like drummers wear, a little bamboo cane—lots of things like that! Mattie gave a scairt little cry and fell on her knees in a hurry to gather all those things up.

Earp was a gambler, a criminal, and sometimes a Wells Fargo stagecoach guard; he and Doc Holliday used this Cindy Sherman-like collection of disguises to cover up that they were working both sides of the law.

After he and his brothers shot and were shot by a few rivals at the OK Corral, Wyatt Earp jumped town and dedicated himself to his own myth. He was always seeking someone to write his version of the facts about his two years in Tombstone; toward the end of his life, he served as a film consultant on Western movies. The love of his life was a San Francisco actress, and by the time he died in California in 1929, he had transformed himself from a petty criminal into the paradigmatic law-and-order marshal of American movies and, eventually, TV. Among his coffin bearers was Tom Mix, the most popular Western actor of his day; a few decades later, Henry Fonda would play Earp in a John Ford movie. Wyatt Earp had arrived in the pictures.

This is what Jim Jarmusch was trying to get at in his 1996 Western
Dead
Man
, in which Johnny Depp eventually becomes the notorious gunman he is initially mistaken for, as he wanders across a West where wanted posters bearing his likeness have preceded him—and the rock star Iggy Pop cross-dresses, in a calico-and-sunbonnet cameo role. For all the ethos of manliness, gender became as malleable as any other aspect of identity in the West, whose foundational document was Jessie Fremont’s ventriloquism. In the 1870s, Calamity Jane was following George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry dressed as a man. Elizabeth Custer was wearing a wig made from her husband’s golden ringlets. Custer himself was writing articles celebrating Wild Bill Hickok as the quintessential plainsman, and Calamity Jane made up a story that she had married Hickok; she claimed him as the father of a daughter eventually demonstrated to have been born four years after his death. Both Hickok and Buffalo Bill did stints with Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at various times, but Hickok was shot in a bar in 1876 shortly after playing the part of himself in a three-act entertainment entitled
Scouts of the Prairie
, the same year that Custer and his cavalry were wiped out by the Oglala Sioux at Little Bighorn. In
Son of the Morning Star
, Evan S. Connell tells the tale of a much-married laundress for the Seventh Cavalry who was posthumously discovered, by her fellow female camp followers preparing her for burial, to be a man. (During the California Gold Rush, dances were often held in which some members of the all-male society took the part of, or dressed as, women; and Western newspapers of the era tell of same-sex couples of both genders.) The berdaches—the gay men who took on female roles in Plains Indian society—are another story; Crazy Horse, one of the Oglala leaders who creamed Custer, was said to have had a berdache wife.

Pictorially, the Old West existed in the interval between the development of wet-plate photography and the development of motion pictures and exists still in the timelessness of pictures and movies. Photography came of age with the settlement of the West, which became the first place to become widely known to the rest of the world through photographs. (Carleton Watkins’s large-plate photographs of Yosemite, for example, were winning medals in Paris before more than a few hundred white people had ever seen the place, and Yosemite would become the great
national shrine of nature as a work of art.) The Western photographers already knew what Foucault would preach, that knowledge was power: surveying the landscape was a military exercise, and places were often invaded so that they could be documented and measured. An information age had begun.

But the Western took place in the suspension of history. The Western is a conservative genre, intimating that cowboys and their environment of rough authenticity are how things have always been, or ought to have been, and that change is about to ruin both. Its sentiments echo still in conservative speeches claiming a Platonic steady state for the Heraclitan flux zones of family, culture, and nation. The nostalgia may be not for a past but for an impossible condition: the Western enshrines the self-conscious desire to be unself-consciously masculine, enshrines a condition in which masculinity has achieved the status of nature rather than culture. The only people who
had
been cowboys long enough to be traditional were the Mexicans and their indigenous ranch hands, and even gringo cowboys’ accoutrements and skills—lassoes, the high-cantled saddles with saddle horns, cowboy boots—were borrowed from Spanish-speaking vaqueros (and even the word
vaquero
was anglicized, as
buckaroo
). But when movie cowboys—like the gun-slingers of
The Magnificent Seven
(1960)—ride into Mexico, all they find are campesinos and a few inept bandits.

The great Kansas-bound cattle drives that form the basis for Texas Westerns like John Ford’s Oedipal
Red River
(1948) took place in the brief years between 1866 and 1886, before the fences and trains reached Texas. The Western depended on the delicate balance between a wild space and a tame audience, between Texas plains and Chicago slaughterhouses, between the authenticity of cowboys and the insincerity of actors. The first narrative feature film is 1903’s
The Great Train Robbery
, which was almost simultaneous with the events it fictionalized, but afterward technology appears largely as a threat in an ever more sophisticated Western cinema. In Sam Peckinpah’s
The Wild Bunch
(1969), trains, cars, and automatic weapons are making it hard for traditionalist horse-riding thieves. In Clint Eastwood’s
Unforgiven
(1992), the same sense that the spirit has gone out of the times prevails. Clint, as the protagonist, has hung up his guns, and everyone else except tired fellow retired gunman Morgan Freeman is despicable: the easterner
who has come out to write about the bungling Duke of Death, the sadistic sheriff, the nearsighted would-be young gunman who idolizes the bloodshed of the past, the fat guy whose attack on a prostitute who giggled at his tiny dick sets the rest of the events into motion. It is an austere Western because it lacks the lush homoeroticism of almost all the movies in this genre, in which men represent Nature and women are the intrusive force of Culture come, like Huck’s Aunt Sally, to civilize them (“We won’t play culture to your nature” could be the rallying cry of Western feminism).

Late twentieth-century entertainers have reversed the trajectory of the frontier heroes, from acts to representations, from nature to culture. Ted Turner in Montana and Robert Redford in Colorado, Ronald Reagan in Santa Barbara, and costume maker Ralph Lauren in New Mexico celebrate their entertainment successes with the purchase of the ultimate reality, real estate. They become ranchers, and the lifestyle they impersonated becomes the one they take up in life (though rather than exiting the picture, they seem to be moving into an enlarged arena in which to carry out their cultural enactment of the nature and value of manliness and westernness). Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull went from the landscape of the West into the theater of the Western. This reversal always reminds me of children’s tales of toys like the Velveteen Rabbit and the puppet Pinocchio becoming flesh and blood: if they love you enough at the box office, you can become a real cowboy. After Fremont, what could be a more perfect precession of simulacra than the career of Clint Eastwood, who clambered up from playing in TV’s
Rawhide
to the spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone to American Westerns to becoming a rancher, a landowner on a vast scale, and, for a while, the mayor of Carmel?

One of the most spectacular moves from the solid ground of the West into the nebulous genre of the Western was made by Sitting Bull, the great Hunkpapa chief who had been instrumental in wiping out Custer and his Seventh Cavalry. He became an actor who played himself. In 1884, Sitting Bull and his entourage exhibited themselves
as “representations of wild life on the plains” in a New York City wax museum, already relics of the authentic only eight years after the Battle of Little Bighorn. He toured the West and then joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show with his entourage (and contractually retained the right to sell photographs of himself).

As a spectacle, Sitting Bull fit into this new West; as a speaker, he did not. In 1883, he had given a public address at an event commemorating the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad, another commercial artery slicing up the West’s open spaces and bleeding off its resources. Abandoning his text, he stood up and told the white audience that he hated all white people, that they were thieves and liars—but his army interpreter decided not to depart from the script and translated Sitting Bull’s speech as a flowery welcome full of faux-Indian clichés. The audience applauded enthusiastically. A speech he gave in Philadelphia, this time about the end of fighting and the importance of education for his people, was “translated” as a lurid account of Little Bighorn. The inherent inadequacies of language so beloved of deconstruction had, in the case of Sitting Bull, become a political gap between signifier and signified that effectively silenced him. In his public speeches, Sitting Bull described a territory neither east nor west, but central: home, a complex, real place. His translators relocated it to the fictional zone of the Western, assimilating him into that authenticity they had to simulate.

Back on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota during the heyday of the Ghost Dance cult and its bloody repression, Sitting Bull was shot down by the reservation police sent by the U.S. Army to capture him, a side note to the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. In the midst of the gunfight, the white horse Buffalo Bill had given him began to go through his circus tricks. In
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
, Dee Brown writes, “It seemed to those who watched that he was performing the Dance of the Ghosts. But as soon as the horse ceased his dancing and wandered away, the wild fighting resumed.” Sitting Bull had exited the picture, but his horse was still performing on cue.