Not So Pretty Horses, Too

William Eastlake once gave William Kittredge a piece of advice about writing as a Westerner. Never allow a publisher to put a picture of a horse on the cover of your novel: "The people who buy it will think it's some goddamned shoot-up. And they'll hate it when it isn't."

For more than a century, picking up a "western" meant caressing a myth. The plot rarely varied. Decent folk who'd left behind the corrupt world--always somewhere to the east--came to a land of primeval beauty and promise and set about turning a little chunk of it into a nice, prosperous garden. But there were a few corrupt souls lurking in the vicinity, and before long they showed themselves: heedless savages, horse thieves, men with pistols on their hips. The good folks had no choice but to confront the bad guys on their terms--often with the aid of a mysterious and taciturn stranger on horseback. Violence, regrettable but necessary, ensued. The good guys were wounded. The bad guys were killed. Our happy homesteaders returned to taming the wilderness, cultivating their corner of paradise, a little less innocent but having earned in blood their claim to the land. The taciturn stranger was saddled and gone by morning, having left neither a card nor a silver bullet.

Louis L'Amour wrote more than a hundred works of fiction along those lines, 260 million copies of which are moldering on cheap pulp paper all over the world. In the second half of the nineteenth century alone, 1,700 novels about Buffalo Bill were published. Our appetite for the myths of law-bringing and wilderness-taming is as old as America itself. The pulp western simply spruced it up with big hats, six-guns and blue roan appaloosas. Hollywood seized on the concept and tinkered with its variations for more than thirty years; John Wayne had one of the longest runs of any male movie icon of the past century.

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