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PAUL CHRISTENSEN

The "Wild West": The Life and Death of a Myth

We all know something about myths, their strange power to explain events that hardly seem rational; their flight from the literal world to a kind of dream space in which gods and nature play roles in an intricate drama of vengeance, conquest, and the creation of identity. In some myths, girls turn into trees; in others, an ordinary mortal flnds himself gifted with superhuman powers to lie, escape from giants, seduce goddesses, and find his way home through a sea that hates him. Odysseus is at the center of Greek mythology hut, as is often pointed out, he may not he one person hut rather the whole of Greek experience from the moment some Persians decided to migrate south down the Peloponnesian peninsula to found a new country, a trek that lasted eight or ten centuries that Homer summarizes in the life of the West's first hero.

Myth has now taken on the connotation of lying or pretending, an ahsurd story spun out of one's fantasies. The Greek root of the word is muthos, meaning mouth, or word of mouth, in other words a folklore, some sort of informal tale of the trihe passed down the generations. Why some narratives get elevated to the role of myth over others remains something of a mystery in their dispersion, their great ap- peal to people who demand some core of helief in which to identify themselves, and find their coherence as a trihe or nation.

I want to hazard a very wild guess ahout myth and say that the very nature of myth is that it tells the story of how a people hecome a na- tion. Myth is ahout the formation of a national "I" pitted against a wilderness that is the national not-I, and the indigenous people rooted there hefore invasion and usurpation also form the not-I to he over- come, ahsorhed, used as a kind of fuel in the making of the nation's selfhood. Virgil is eloquent on the nature of the half-human cannihals and nomads Aeneas found upon entering the "uncivilized" Italian peninsula after leaving Troy. This demonized Other was justifiably

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destroyed to make way for the Roman state, a bringer of culture and literacy for the good of all. It is little wonder that Virgil's epic poem The Aeneid became a best seller in sixteenth-century Venice, a must- read for kings wishing to colonize the New World and to crush the cannibal hordes thought to he living there.

Every nation's principal myths are about starting out, meeting the wilderness head-on and taming it, breaking the spirit of indigenous enemies and declaring the land and the inhabitants the food of this new collective self. Myth is a sort of family history, an account of the migration to a new world, and who the heroes were in the great struggle to make a home on someone else's property. Myths don't look for justification; the great thrust of each is the boldness and aggression needed to turn strange, unknown territory into a collective self.

The making of England's national self lies in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regnum Britanniae and Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur and is the narrative of Celtic migration and conquest. Every myth has to have its Caliban, some monster in the way of the people's progress, some resistant force that lives deep inside nature and draws strength from its primal energy. Antaeus leaps to mind as the quintessential monster here, who when thrown to the ground after losing his breath in the arms of Heracles, suddenly springs back full of life, until Heracles is told that Earth is Antaeus's mother, who nurtures him each time he touches ground.

Myth is history turned into a powerful archetypal dream about the ego tearing itself from a mother (or mother country) and facing a series of terrihle ordeals to prove its courage but also to devour the not-I that will expand its powers and command of the new world. It's almost as if myth as narrative recapitulates the stages of human life from infancy to manhood, but only if that passage to manhood is successful and brings rewards and honors to it. Myth is good news writ large to include what a whole people does to feather its nest and crow over its victories. Even with the mythic founding of England authors eagerly associated the principals with the battle of Troy, that ultimate source of heroism in which Europe defeats Asia in a war of continental cultures.

It should also be noted that the body of myth as national histories includes the caveat that once the not-I of national selfhood is exhausted, so is the fuel of expansion. Camelot dies when the enemies no Ion-

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ger inspire the knights of the Round Table to action; the court is a shambles of intrigues and adulterous affairs, a corrupt state that also ends King Lear's reign. Without an adversarial Other, a nation begins to atrophy from lack of food. A healthy nation must constantly recall its myth and invent new forms of adversary—foreign wars, wars on poverty, drugs, illness, terrorism, or any other avatar of the not-I in order to provoke courage and willingness to risk all—the stakes are high, but so are the rewards of further expansion, perhaps even to the creation of an empire.

Richard Slotkin calls this mythological process "regeneration through violence," and in locating the "frontier" as the source of the American myth, he also identifies Daniel Boone as our Odysseus in the struggle for nationhood. Boone is a refined version of Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo, the half-European half-Indian (though of European parentage) scout and explorer. Boone has all of Bumppo's skills but he is the pure European afoot in a strange new world west of the colonies, Shawnee territory that later became Kentucky, which he conquers with a drawknife and the occasional musket ball. He hunts, he knows his enemy like his own mind, he is sympathetic to the nature that feeds his adversary and also feeds him, and he possesses a selfiess devotion to breaking the spirit of wilderness to found a nation. He established the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap, through which 200,000 settlers poured, and his spirit was the model for succeeding generations to emulate. Boone is the collective embodi- ment of Europeans in the New World, a combination of experience boiled down into one man whose face could be that of Paul Bunyan, Ahab, the victorious Union soldiers, a cowboy of the Plains, the dog soldiers of the world wars, Luke Skywalker, and Rocky Balboa. Boone is the template of the hero in the American myth, and each generation projected a new one onto the retreating boundary of the frontier.

Once we reached the Pacific shore, of course, we ran out of untamed land and human rivals, and the fuel of self-expansion ended. Frederick Jackson Turner pegged that moment at 1890, based on a Census Bureau report that found no remaining frontier in its new census, and wrote about it three years later in his ground-breaking essay, "The Signifi- cance of the Frontier in American History," delivered at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Jackson was our own Homer, in a way, outlining the narrative by which we made a nation. He gathered

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up all the loose strings of two centuries of immigration, colonial or- ganization, and v êstw ârd movement and located the not-I along that demarcation between the settlements and the ground lying in someone else's possession. He thought of our history as a kind of gestation, in which violence, aggression, and sheer doggedness overwhelmed our opponents, and in the process we not only made a place for ourselves hut formed our character as winners, risk takers, opportunists, invad- ers, and conquerors.

But he also clarified an important aspect of our national character— its essentially conservative hias as a glorification of European racial stock encountering primitive indigenes and an anarchic wilderness. Male traditions are idealized and the Enlightenment rationality of Paris and London are compacted into the hero's self-reliance, supe- rior logic, and desire to break nature and rule over it as the apostle of reason. Turner's American is composed of Emersonian self-reliance, Thoreau's loner following a different drummer, and the plucky hunter and Indian fighter. Out of such materials rose the image of the stoic, taciturn adventurer cut off from others, depending on his own instincts and his compulsion to win. This is not the hero projected out of Greek or Roman experience, through which hoth Odysseus and Aeneas de- pended upon others to aid in their common struggle, and who called upon the help of the gods when the going got really tough. Instead, the American myth refiected the unassimilated masses of immigrants living in isolated ethnic enclaves, and crafted its hero out of a lack of social honds and made him content with his own solitude.

Whitman's Leaves of Grass, self-published in 1855, would have passed unnoticed had not Ralph Waldo Emerson unwittingly endorsed it in a private letter to the poet, an excerpt of which was then reprinted on the spine of the 1856 edition. The original thirteen poems fiy in the face of the still-forming American myth of the solitary hero on the frontier. Even Whitman's trapper (in "Song of Myself") takes an Indian squaw for a wife, and everywhere else in these poems Whitman seems to roll into a ball the multitude of themes and ideas left out of the main myth: solidarity of workers; equal rights for women,- emancipation of blacks; concern for failures and cowards; an embrace of death as well as life; a table set for the diseased and the heroic, the unwanted and the admired; but above all a very French esteem for fraternity and for candor in all things sexual, including the young Southern housewife

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whose erotic fantasies involve twenty-eight young male bathers vis- ihle from her window.

While the book never became a favorite with the common reader, its great significance lies in its opposition to the myth of origin taking hold in the American imagination. Whitman had a masterly command of the language of that myth and how to oppose it from all sides, and nearly any other discourse that opposed the heroic myth can trace itself back to ideas in these signal poems, from unionism to equal rights for women and minorities, to anti-war sentiments, and a reaching out to the marginalized and the pariahs of American society. Where the frontier myth is adamantly conservative in politics and vision, a patriarchal code of power and rewards, Whitman's egalitarian vision is the language of group esprit and cohesion, a liberal philosophy emerg- ing alongside the frontier myth like its shadow, its spiritual opponent in the pendulum swing of political life.

Put another way, Whitman's vision is post-European, and unwit- tingly anticipates the emergence of an alternative narrative: the return of the exiled son to his tribe or ethnic group. After 1900, this New World narrative would come to voice almost every minority culture's desire for a return to roots, to homelands, to the embrace of the tribe and its elders. Exile meant living among whites in cities, where alien- ation, poverty, alcoholism, and dependence were the dark consequence of being cut off from tribal nurture. By contrast, the frontier myth spoke to. the desire of the European settler to break out of the group and distinguish oneself through ordeals of courage and self-initiative, a drive away from family and kinship toward wilderness, where op- portunity lay in some unbounded form.

If the frontier myth, soon to evolve into the myth of the "Wild West," glorified aggression and racial supremacy. Whitman's counter mythology could be boiled down to three words: reconciliation of op- posites. Driving the frontier myth toward greater militancy and the emergence of the cowboy as gunfighter, toward the absolute of vio- lence, was the South's quest for a heroic ideal after its surrender to the North. Southern adult males inherited a taint upon their masculinity for being born on the losing side of America's Civil War, the confiict that shattered national unity for a century and a half. The South had lost its participation in the frontier myth, which had passed it by on its way west, leaving writers and cartoonists the opportunity to malign

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the white-haired colonel, the Southern belle, silver-tongued corrupt lawyers, and politicians of a fading order. Only the South's youths could fashion a new way of participating in American mythology by new ordeals of courage played out on the unpaved Main Streets of mining camps and frontier settlements. The gunfighter replaced almost every other stereotype of the cowboy era, except for the cattleman and the local sheriff, a corrupt official who is the extension of the Southern lawyer and ex-slave holder of a generation before.

Youth redeemed the South and won back its badge of courage through lawlessness and an all-male anarchic rebuke to the encroachment of civilization, signaled by the arrival of circuit-riding preachers and their congregations, followed by mail-ordered brides, and the presence of school marms and war widows, the arts matrons of the bigger ranches. The gunfighter was the fraying ends of the Daniel Boone prototype, a decadent figure marred by excess and romantic hyperbole. He was a little too fast with his gun, too reckless with the women he deserted, and too eager to down his whiskey and ride all night to the next gun fight or Indian raid. As the frontier died out, his fictional character was infiated into a desperate fantasy of the pioneer spirit, with only the towns to pester with his futile search for an edge of wilderness in which to demonstrate his skills as a killer.

His glorification occurred first in the dime Westerns, which ran from the 1860s to the 1900s. The last publisher cancelled his series in 1919, at about the time Western film fastens onto his image and propels him to mass audiences on the wings of Buffalo Bill and Kit Carson, and such villain archetypes as Billy the Kid and Jesse James. Film as a medium bore its own implicit romantic prejudices against the city as a corrupting influence on human nature. Its proclivities as a visual medium were to lavish attention on the epic landscapes of Utah's Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon, the vast grasslands and deserts of the Southwest, with the towns pockmarking the otherwise pure desolation, with a graveyard full of slow draws and executed bad men. The town was the vortex of human failings while the ranches were centers of power created by kingpins of the meat industry, who ruled their outfits like medieval lords and bullied the wayward, unreli- able help that drifted into its perimeters for temporary work.

By 1880, a decade before the Census Bureau declared the frontier closed, the Wild West was disappearing in the last buffalo kills, the

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resettlement of Native Americans, and the arrival of photographers and writers exploiting its mystique as the ground where America completed its territorial conquests. Charles Lummis, the region's first travel agent and hooster, began advertising the Southwest as a place of romance and sightseeing. Lummis credited himself with heing the first to call the region the American Southwest, and sold its charms through photographs and tour books like A Tramp across the Continent (1892) and Some Strange Corners of Our Country: The Wonderland of the Southwest {1892). Buffalo Bill Cody's "Wild West" show debuted in 1883 as a circus act that later included Sitting Bull and twenty braves, reenactments of Indian raids on pioneer wagon trains, the rifle skills of Annie Oakley and her husband Frank Butler, and a dramatization of Custer's Last Stand with Cody serving as General Custer. In an ironic commentary on Turner's "Frontier" essay, Cody's "Wild West" show performed at the same Chicago World's Fair in 1893, within earshot of his lecture.

As Audrey Coodman argues in Translating Southwestern Land- scapes: The Making of an Anglo Literary Tradition, the moment the Wild West disappeared, imperial aggression turned into nostalgia, a longing for a raw edge on which to reinvigorate the American soul. The West was no longer wild but a vast psychological longing. Indians were made up and posed for Edward Curtis's studio cameras, often with the wrong tribal gear, including makeup and phony bead ware. A recent biography of Curtis by Laurie Lawlor, Shadow Catcher: The Life and Work of Edward S. Curtis, explores his thirty-year obsession with capturing Native Americans at the point of what many feared was their extinction. All things to do with the buffalo were now charged with totemic powers—even Theodore Roosevelt ordered a small herd to be corralled in front of the Smithsonian Institute,- he was not alone in fearing that the demise of the buffalo had diminished American masculinity. The buffalo nickel, also called the Indian head nickel, was minted from 1913 to 1938, and served to remind those paying for a shave or a cup of coffee of America's symbol of wilderness and male courage. It went out of circulation just as Hitler annexed Austria into Greater Germany, stirring up American war passions that no longer needed the buffalo totem for solace.

The significance of the cowboy may well be the fact that the frontier myth had leapt over its own extinction by attaching itself to a new

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figure and a new career in the last leg of the westward iourney. If it could leap one gap, it could leap another, and by this means achieve immortality by acquiring a power to change shapes and faces, and find itself carried forward in time by presidents Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan; by inventors like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison; by oil pioneers like John Rockefeller; and football coaches like Knute Rockne and Ara Parseghian; by Audie Murphy and anyone who could be characterized as fighting a vast enemy or opposition that he overcame by pluck, self-reliance, and his zeal to spread American civilization into the unknown. And so long as the world supplied new forms of the national not-I to oppose and conquer. Behind all such heroes was the uninterrupted rise of America's for- tunes, which sanctioned and validated the successful struggle of the lone individual out on the raw edge.

But with every new permutation of the mythical hero came counter- myths of the hero as ioiner and unifier. Two legs of the three legged stool of myth-making were a constant supply of enemies to conquer and America's juggernaut of economic and military expansion. Should one or the other leg buckle, the hero myth process stalled, or let in the opposing argument for solidarity and reconciliation. One such instance of momentary stalling occurred in the Great Depression, when the usual values of enterprise and expansion were halted by economic collapse. An anti-hero suddenly veered into focus in the form of Steinbeck's Joad family, and other collective heroes like the Bundrens of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, the renewal of socialism and populism and the demonization of tycoons and bankers, as in Erskine Caldwell's God's Little Acre (1933), when mill workers laid off at the local mill riot against the owners. The film version in 1958 stresses the Marxist implications of the riot and of Ty Ty Walden's futile search for gold on his farm.

Economic crises halted the progress of the hero machine; Holly- wood's new matinee idols of the 1930s were singers with tenor voices, slender epicene dancers like Fred Astaire, and singing cowboys like John Wayne, whose character "Singin' Sandy Saunders" appeared in Riders of Destiny in 1933, his one and only singing role (with voice dubbed) but nonetheless the first such film presentation of a minstrel herdsman. He was followed shortly after by Gene Autry in 1935 and Roy Rogers two years later, along with Tex Ritter. The minstrels

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of the plains softened the predatory, solitary hero's image during the Depression, hut with the advent of World War II, new heroes turned dark, driven hy enmity with Indians and eager to claim land hy open conflict.

The cowhoy hero, emhodying the history of American conquest as far hack as the colonial era, could now serve as an allegorical mouthpiece for almost any event hefalling the nation. His mythical character could he plugged into any emergency and he would emerge victorious, on the march to greater things. As early as 1948, Howard Hawks's Red River, starring John Wayne, consciously sets out the terms of empire huilding for a newly victorious America after World War IL Wayne's character, Tom Dunson, wants to go it alone and leave behind a long caravan of settlers coming into Indian territory. The winning of the West, he soon learns, is more important than one man's amhitions, even though he remains the hard-nosed individual as others work to sustain a communal effort at cattle ranching. Hawks was the first di- rector to seize upon the macho huhris of the returning veteran and to slip a thin skin of cowhoy costume over him and set him down in an arena where he holdly conquers the Indians who oppose him. America, Dunson declares, must now feed the world from its heef herds, and nothing can stop it from growing into a full-fledged empire.

Hollywood inherited a sense of the West that was made amhiguous hy the very fact that it was not only the place where westward expan- sion ended; it was also the arena in which competing ideologies came to fight it out. One side saw itself as victorious over Catholicism and lingering resentments over the Mexican War of 1836, and over the indigenous life of the Plains. The other West appeared to plead for preservation of its ethnic diversity and customs, its languages and tribal gods. The West was not one thing hut two, and hoth versions of its meaning lay in the hedrock of myth formation in the eighteenth century and during the American literary renaissance. Conquest and the remorse and longing for wilderness arose in the same moment. One could read the West from two sides, hut not simultaneously. Their signs were mutually exclusive, and would figure prominently in the great pendulum swings of political life—a Wild West that meant victory over aliens, and a tragedy of violence and waste of American's great native heritage.

The vast majority of the films produced since the 1930s have stressed

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the heroic qualities of the cowboy—his boundless energy and obsessive emotions, his resilience in the face of adversity, his loyalty to a cause greater than himself. His character is stretched thin carrying out the Anglo cause, but after 1938 the softer features of the celluloid hero disappear, to be replaced by a brasher, more war-like and intemper- ate soldier and law and order champion. The Indian and the indolent Mexican subtly alter their characters to become a new menace of yelling, screaming, ruthless mobs descending from the hills to raid innocent pioneers new to dry-land farming. Their behavior takes on the qualities of the Japanese enemy, when the winning of the West becomes an international struggle.

But the counter mythology was not far behind in expressing itself on film on a broad range of issues including racism, Native Ameri- can abuses, land seizures, and lynchings, the latter condemned in the 1943 film The Oxbow Incident, considered by some as the first anti-Western filin to come out of Hollywood. Native Americans who fought in World War II returned to find their reservations in tatters and a federal government eager to pursue a policy of termination of reservation life altogether in the name of assimilation. Some 25,000 Native Americans fought in the war; another 40,000 left home to work in war-related factories. In 1950, two films tackle the plight of Native Americans, Delmer Dave's Devil's Doorway and Anthony Mann's Broken Arrow. Both films follow the lives of decorated Civil War veterans returning home to find whites bearing homestead claims against their property, allusions to the disenfranchisment felt by Indians returning from World War II.

Broken Arrow tries to imagine a dual system of assimilation and of reservation culture, but Devil's Doorway rejects assimilation and explores the corruption and greed of settler society, thus reversing long-held stereotypes of the "bad Indian" and "good settler" in film tradition. Native Americans are depicted as noble warriors with superior vision and fighting skills, and whites come across as small- minded opportunists and thugs. The release of Devil's Doorway was delayed because "MGM feared the 'pro-Indian' theme would put off audiences." Its financial success, however, prompted the release of Broken Arrow shortly after. The romances of both films promised interracial marriages that were foiled in the end, at which point the historic camoufiage of the Western evaporated into a direct com-

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mentary on civil rights four years before the Supreme Court's call for desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

The Searchers, with John Wayne, goes a step further in 1956 by reversing the entrenched values of the captivity narrative. Such narra- tives borrowed from myth to suggest a descent into an underworld of savage devils in order to rescue a white woman, a kind of heroic ordeal in which paradise is the white settlement to which she is returned. In this film, Ethan Edwards sets out to rescue his nine-year-old niece from Chief Scar, whose party killed his brother's family. But the search goes on so long that the niece, Debbie, eventually marries Chief Scar, a nice parallel with the real-life captivity of Cynthia Ann Parker and her marriage to Nocona. Both women assimilated into Indian society and were happy in their marriages. But in this rescue, the mission turns murderous when Edwards's hatred of miscegenation consumes him in general rage. The film is one of the darkest commentaries on racism in the era.

Other films delivered left-wing assaults on the House Un-American Activities Committee and rampant McCarthyism of the early 1950s. fohnny Guitar (1954) is ahout a suspicious community that forces townspeople to testify against one another. Sterling Hayden, the film's star, had earlier named names hefore HUAC, and as one critic of the film remarks it must have been "cathartic" for Hayden to play the role of a man running away from his sordid past only to reconcile with who he really was. High Noon from 1952, finds a community unwill- ing to aid the marshal (Gary Cooper) in stopping a returning criminal bent on vengeance for his prison time. The left, as Tom Wolfe once remarked, controlled the scripts and shooting of Westerns during the 1940s and 1950s, and got its digs in when Carl Foreman, blacklisted from Hollywood, co-wrote the screenplay for High Noon and produced it anonymously. The Cold War comes in for general condemnation in William Wyler's 1958 film The Big Country. Gregory Peck plays a sea captain, James McCay, betrothed to a wealthy rancher's daughter. Patsy Terrill, played by Carroll Baker. Like her powerful, feuding father, she favors confiict over reconciliation and is ashamed when Peck refuses a fight with the ranch foreman. The feud is between the Terrills and the Hennessys, and only when both patriarchs are killed can there be peace in the region. As Peck later observed of the film, it was intended as a left-wing allegory of the Cold War.

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Vietnam was treated from a variety of antiwar perspectives beginning as early as 1972 with Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter, in which a stranger comes to the rescue of the town of Lago, only to find the citizens as corrupt as the gang who menaced it. Once he kills the gang, he fills the office of mayor and sheriff with a midget and torments the very people he saved. The Vietnam era's brutal cynicism about good and evil is writ large in a film in which the westward movement ends in hypocrisy and moral indifference. Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch thinly disguises the massacre of My Lai a year before in a vengeance plot of a gang shooting up a Mexican village until outnumbered and slaughtered by Mexican regulars. There are no heroes on the Anglo side, only bloodlust and a broken moral system spreading anarchy as they move south. And on the Mexican side, the general and his soldiers are portrayed as worthless drunks and murderers.

Demonizing Mexicans, especially as soldiers and roving gangs of banditos, had more to do with justifications for usurping their land than it did with reality. Pancho Villa and Zapata were more often given heroic treatment by European and Mexican films than they received in Hollywood Westerns. The Latinos were accorded less worth than Native Americans, and their association with revolu- tion and civil war made them the enemies of order in their own land. Rarely if ever has reconciliation been stressed between Anglos and Latinos in Western films. As far back as 1927, when B. Traven's novel The Treasure of Sierra Madre appeared with a bloody tale of gold lust and murder, the federales aie portrayed as a lawless band of robbers; John Huston's 1948 film of that title takes pains to de- humanize them still further.

Latinos were demonized and associated with the post-revolutionary chaos of the 1920s. Pancho Villa, a general in the 1911 Revolution, was converted to a kind of Maoist revolutionary zeal against imperialism by his teacher Evan Bury, whose violent attempts to overthrow the government made him a direct threat to post-World War I America and its own imperial ambitions. Elia Kazan's 1952 film Viva, Zapata!, starring Marlon Brando, renders Zapata a Romantic hero opposed to the excesses of Porfirio Diaz's dictatorship. Unwittingly, Kazan may have supplied a new image of the communist provocateur at America's back door. Brando's social rebel resurfaces a year later as Johnny Stabler, the gang leader in The Wild One, and, in an ironic switch, as Terry Malloy,

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a union buster, a year later, in Bud Schulberg's right-wing script for On the Waterfront.

The "Wild West" evaporated from the surface of the Southwest to hecome an ideological trope, a fantasized place where America's final shape was wrested away from an arid, jaggedly mountainous terrain to he rehorn in guidehooks, photography, calendars, movies, and travel hrochures. Mirages, illusory histories, and a continuous unfolding of an inadequate version of events piled up a vast array of ephemeral metaphors and hasty symbols, most of which did not adhere to the surface of the primary myth. But however vague and airy the my- thologizing hecame in the hands of commercial filmmakers and script writers, there was always a partly visihle suhstrate of real events and people to anchor the "story." Even though the westward rush to the Pacific hroke up Native American life, its remnants were still there and could not he ignored.

Not only had developers and popularizers taken advantage of free range country, others had also been drifting in from New York to look over the region on which the American character matured. Photographers, as Walter Benjamin was to observe, were voyeurs "of past crimes," documentary artists who followed Matthew Brady's ex- ample in capturing the wages of the Civil War and who now shot the results of widespread genocide and the decimation of wildlife. But as Audrey Goodman writes, from 1870 to 1940 photography constructed a "regional ideal." The photographer Carleton Watkins hegan photo- graphing the Yosemite range in the 1860s, framing his photographs in the rhetoric of the picturesque school of American painting, with its roots in English landscape painting of the Romantic age. The con- ventions of this and other photography of the region were religious; the Jacoh's ladders, craggy canyons, and outcrops resemhled the Alps of Wordsworth's poems, the cataracts that Shelley argued were the face of a frightening creator. The land of pagan savages now took on a Christian significance, and this tradition produced a syllabary of spiritual images—sun dogs, wild fiowers, intricate rock formations, the great mesas and eroded tors of Monument Valley.

The new photography was greeted by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who saw the Oversoul at work in these epic landscapes. Something else worked its way to the surface of these studies of time and erosion, a sense that America was not only the New World hut perhaps one of

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the oldest in Earth's history. Soon, dinosaur and other primordial hones and footprints were uncovered to suggest the region was a cradle of organic life. Vanished seas left their floors intact, like the rim of the Permian Basin, where ancient surf gouged its marks into the granite coastline. Man was dwarfed hy these images of eternity; the individual seemed a fragile creature, less hardy and enduring than the reptiles that eked out an existence there. The Native American communities that thrived in their adohe villages seemed all the more resilient as pioneers came and went, leaving ghost towns in their wake.

A renewed interest in pueblo life drew other artists, notahly the wealthy heiress and patron of the arts Mahel Dodge, a close friend of Gertrude Stein, Picasso, and Matisse. Her move to Taos, New Mexico in 1919 led to her marriage to an elder of the Taos Puehlo, Tony Luhan. Thereafter she wore native costumes and jewelry, participated in ritu- als at the Taos puehlo, and invited D. H. Lawrence to join her. Georgia O'Keeff e was lured from New York as well and distinguished herself as the premiere painter of the New Mexican deserts. Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and Eliot Porter would all contribute photo- graphs to the newly formed Sierra Cluh press, and would estahlish the region as the place where America's soul lay in the powerful jaws of nature. The cluh opened a new discourse on the Anglo relation to the Other, which no longer seemed either hostile or alien, hut allied in some fundamental way in the quest for spirit.

At the heart of Native American life were the honds of community, which gave new vigor to Whitman's prophetic poems ahout amity and cohesion. The frontier myth had driven Anglos to destroy and conquer, to shatter delicate human structures huilt like lacework hetween the desert and the meager water and foliage, the elusive wildlife. Here was the truce with the wild that had not entered the Anglo imagination until now; it had heen glimpsed and hypothesized hy the Transcenden- talists hut never put into practice. The great wealth of spiritual ideas that swirled in the American Renaissance was eclipsed hy the higger, more hostile myth of conquest and profiteering, hut it remained a gospel of community opposing the ravages of unfettered capitalism. As the Southwest gave way to greater exploitation and urhanization, the communal ethos of a half-extinguished native world was a reminder that even vast nations can exhaust their resources and suffer hard- ships. The native world of the Southwest, set amid the monuments

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of eternity, was a warning and a source of consolation to artists and writers. In the space of three or four decades after the 1890 closure of the frontier, the Southwest was no longer the national not-I to he devoured hy the hunger of a growing nation, hut a part of its character and conscience.

The career of the "Wild West" myth enjoyed a continuous metamor- phosis as the U.S. turned away from its own horders to conquer the sense of Other elsewhere in the world. Its victorious participation in the world wars strengthened its confidence in itself as a mythic warrior. Not even the paralyzing scandals of the Watergate episode weakened the frontier myth at the heart of mainstream American identity. Hol- lywood continued to evoke the myth in new western films, thrillers, the Rocky, and Ramho sagas. Only Vietnam would sap the nation's confidence and leave it deeply wounded, its mythical self-image hat- tered. The second half of the twentieth century seemed like a treacher- ous road toward confiict and sethacks in national esteem. America's superpower status was seriously eroded by the proliferation of nuclear homhs in Russia, India, Pakistan, China, and Israel, whose stature came to complicate American supremacy. The rise of Japan and South Korea as industrial powerhouses hegan to hreak America's monopoly on the car industry, steel, heavy manufacture, and capital investment. The world was no longer a frontier to he invaded and conquered with the ease of its former campaigns; instead, foreign policy hecame a game of increasing suhtlety and finesse, as nations interlocked and formed greater trading hlocs like the European Union.

With its entry into Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, America found itself mired in guerilla warfare and insurgency, ethnic cleans- ing and religious civil war that sapped its military resources and its wealth. The closing of international frontiers was marked hy a failure to negotiate disarmament with North Korea, to hridle Al Oaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, to outmaneuver the intransigence of Iran and Syria. Each sethack isolated America and tainted its image as a messenger of human rights and democracy. It no longer stood for those great political virtues hut seemed narrow-minded and religiously provincial in its treatment of others. Its imperial amhitions were frus- trated hy a new international huhris and economic might that hegan to express its power in the U.N. and on the ground. The falling dollar in the international currency markets seemed an appropriate symhol

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of America's decline in the global community. The final closing of the American frontier may v̂ rell be in Iraq, where the myth of the go-it-alone gunfighter, the Plains drifter, the New World individual- ist is in its death throes. Behind Washington's militant gaze on the world is the Southwest, once the home of easily deracinated Native Americans, and now the source of spiritual ideals pointing the way toward community, social cohesion, and a more modest footprint on the natural world.