The Rest Is History - 42. The Wild West

Episode Date: April 12, 2021

Podcasting’s answer to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - that’s Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook of course - explore the Wild West in both fact and fiction. Does the romantic representation in both fiction and film bear any resemblance to the historical truth? And why are we still so intrigued by the myth of the American western frontier? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Yee-haw! Not since Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid first rode the planes in search of trains to Rob has a double act resonated with its audience quite like Tom Holland and me, Dominic Sandbrook. When they come to make the film of The Rest Is History,

as they surely will, Tom Holland will be played by an aging Clint Eastwood. And by a miracle of science, they'll bring back a youthful CGI Robert Redford to take on my role. It does say Yul Brunner. It does say Yul Brunner in the script, but I don't want to say that.

Gene Hackman, I think. Well, what I usually get is the fellow who played Tony Soprano. I can't remember what his name is. James Galdofini. Whenever he appears on the screen, my wife kind of looks at me

and she says, don't you feel that's a bit weird? You're just staring at yourself on the screen. Anyway, the movie will end according to the script with a pair of us

looking out from a cave at a host of gun-toting historians. This is quality script work, isn't it? Dan Snow, their grizzled leader. And we'll smile, nod at each other, and then burst forth in a blaze of glory.

This is great stuff, isn't it, Tom? I like that. Yeah. Let's just run with this. Well, clearly. I mean, we don't write these introductions. Our producer writes them. And they're great, as you can tell.

Well, welcome to The Rest Is History. And today's topic for the avoidance of doubt is the Wild West. So the era of gunslinging, cattle ranching, lasso throwing, madams, bordellos, stagecoaches, the Pony Express, the Indian Wars, and the expansion of European settlers across the American continent. Tom Holland, you're a big Wild West fan. This was your idea, so you must be. I am. Well, I'm a fan of the Wild West as a myth. I'm not going to pretend to have any great specialist knowledge about it. continent tom holland you're a big wild west fan this was your idea so you must be i am a well i'm

a fan of the wild west as a myth um i'm not going to pretend to any great specialist knowledge about it but um i've been out west i've been to wyoming i've been to montana i've visited the site of the battle of the little bighorn so um i'm kind of i'm i'm a fan i guess that's a long way to go tom why was what what brought you out there that's not an obvious destination for a classical historian well i went there because i'm very interested in dinosaurs um and i don't want to measure too much in this because perhaps we could we could do a separate podcast on dinosaurs but um the the the um the 1870s 1880s was the golden age of paleontology in the wild west it's absolutely full of bone fields so i basically went out to

look at the paleontological museums but it's absolutely woven in with the history of the wild west so um there's this place called medicine bow which was um a stop on the railroad just after it had you know transcontinental railroad had opened up um and a huge quarry just north of medicine bow is where they found the first uhropod, so a huge long-tailed, long-necked dinosaur. But Medicine Bow is also the place where the shootout takes place in Owen Wister's novel, The Virginian, which in a way is the kind of... The great Western novel, yeah. Yeah, it's the foundational Western novel with, you know, the shootout, the saloon, all that kind of stuff. So it kind of stuff so um so it kind of it interwove and and um you know being in in uh

in montana and being in wyoming of course i was going to go visit the site of the battle of little bighorn because that's an amazing story as well and i think that um in a way characters like custer and sitting bull and crazy horse for me they have the resonance of homeric heroes i mean they these are these are figures who are larger than life and and who in a sense kind of exist beyond the dimension of history almost yes um homeric heroes but but tom don't you think that we're probably the last generation of whom that's true i mean i grew up in 70s britain and cowboy films on tv and i remember i had a brilliant picture book an italian picture book translated translated into English, called Ernest and the Wild West. But a fellow called Ernest, and he meets Calamity Jane, and he goes on steamships, and he meets Sitting Bull and Custer,

and it ends at the Battle of Little Bighorn. But you don't really see that in pop culture today to the same extent, do you? I wonder if you're 20 or if you're 10, you know, stories about, as it were, cowboys and Indians have the same resonance as they did for us and for our parents. I think that's almost certainly true. And I think that one of the reasons why the Wild West is so fascinating as a topic of historical inquiry

is that the myth itself is profoundly influential as a fact of history. And in a way, it's a kind of lightning rod for so much that is being debated and contested in america at the moment because of course what makes it gripping and fascinating as a theater for narrative is also what makes it kind of terrifying because this is a place of violence and aggression and um kind of unmediated confrontation between whether it's um native americans and settlers or cattle rustlers

and vigilantes or whatever um these are all very very contested areas and i think one of one of the things about the wild west that perhaps even more than the question of race and of indigenous rights is the fact that it is very, very masculine. Yeah, it is. And of course, it's huge in playing, creating American masculinity, isn't it? Basically, the image of the cowboy and the macho frontiersman in the classic i mean even in even in the virginian um the virginian is kind of tamed by uh an east coast school mom and that there's a very kind of you know the ambivalence towards the feminizing instinct runs throughout all these kind of narratives and indeed through through the authentic history as well i think so i think that it's it's it's a it's a hugely contested and i guess the word is problematic oh don't go there i didn't i didn't do this podcast

to talk about i know i knew that that would prompt you to get you you've triggered me tom you've triggered you let's let's rewind a bit and and talk before we get into the myth let's talk a little bit about the history so um you'll be delighted to know that, of course, that there's a religious element to this story. So it feels remiss not to start with this question from Rory Martin. He says, Tom, you love Christianity's impact on the West. You're not wrong, Rory. How do you explain the influence of manifest destiny

and the city-on-a-hill the Western Expansion of the United States. So do you want to say a little bit about that? Well, I guess that in a sense, the moment that English settlers land on the shores of North America, they're dealing with a Western frontier, aren't they? Yeah. I mean, you know, the moment you step onto Plymouth Rock, everything west is a frontier from you. And of course, those early settlers are very motivated by the idea that they're living out the Book of Exodus, that they've been given a promised land. And that, of course, is a part of what drives people westwards. But shockingly, I don't think it's the same thing.

This is very unusual yeah so i think one of the one of the fascinations of the west is that um it's it's clearly essentially driven by by greed i think i mean it's it's it's a need for land it's it's a need for for for fur i mean you know to begin with it's it's the desire for trapping that leads them down these rivers, killing all the beavers. I do think that, of course, religion plays a huge part in the narrative of the West. The figure of the preacher is an absolute kind of standard. And I think also that when you look at Native American responses to it, the influence of christianity is fairly huge so um right at the end of of um the wild west period the kind of the tragic story of the ghost dance the ghost dance that's an amazing story where native americans are are suffused with a kind of distorted sense

of the christian apocalyptic uh you know they have this idea you know they're living among the absolute ruins of their world and the ghost dance is this kind of messianic message that if they dance then the white men will will vanish will be kind of buried beneath five foot of soil and the buffalo will come back the buffalo have been wiped out and with the destruction of the buffalo the whole native american way of life has been destroyed and that um all the native americans who are dead will come back to life. And it's kind of terribly, painfully tragic reworking of the Christian story. But, of course, the fact that it does have this Christian element that has been brought by the settlers show that the kind of stark division between rival sides is simplistic. Because the West is a hugely contested area.

And I think that despite talking about the influence of Christianity on the West, actually in the classic period, what's telling about it is the lack of Christian morals. I mean, this is an era where the shootout is an authentic fact of Wild West history. That really happened. It is a world sort of steeped in violence, isn't it, from the very beginning? I mean, there's a couple of sort of stats. I know we don't really happened. It is a world sort of steeped in violence, isn't it, from the very beginning?

I mean, there's a couple of sort of stats. I know we don't really normally do stats and facts. We've got a fact-free history podcast. But, you know, people argue about how many Indians there were at the beginning when the first sort of settlers arrived in North America. But there were probably – I mean, the estimates vary massively. But let's say there were between 5 and 10 million.

But by 1890 or so, there were 250,000. So a colossal decline in just a short time. But an even more shocking figure, actually, which I only found this morning when I was swatting up for this podcast, is that in the late 18th century, there were 60 million bison in North America. And in 1889, there were 541. So as you say, the bison, which the Native Americans depended on the bison, they had this kind of symbiotic relationship. And when the bison were

destroyed, their world just completely fell apart. And the story of this, which basically is not the story that we got as children, is just the utter extermination. And extermination is the word. I mean, American generals talk about exterminating the Indians quite freely, and their men behave often with appalling savagery. That's really the sort of story that is still slightly obscured by the romantic myths, isn't it? Well, oddly, not for me, actually,

because actually the destruction of the buffalo bison whatever you want to call them is is for me it's it's the probably the thing that more than anything else haunts me um when i uh when i went to to uh to white to wyoming um they they have they have them in in yellowstone national park and that more than anything else was what i wanted to see i wanted to see them moving um and the scale of the ruin the scale of of the destruction is just monstrous and the accounts that you get i mean essentially it's the railroad that opens it up isn't it because suddenly the hunters insufficient volume to get out and wipe these you know herds of millions yeah it's

available and you have these terrible stories of people riding along in the in the carriages with their their rifles just shooting all the buffering that they see and then terrible accounts of the of people moving out and having to pour water on the rifles to to um stop because they've got so hot and then when they run out of water urinating on them oh god and the mania for slaughter the yeah you know the volume of hides that get sent back to the east for carpets and conveyor belts and whatever and the the bone being crushed up into fertilizer and then there's nothing and there's this this terrible story of, I think, in the 1920s, that there's a settler farm somewhere in Montana or something. And one day, a buffalo walks into town.

And it's like everyone in the town goes, what is this? You know, they know what it is, but it's a legend to them. It's like a ghost has appeared. So the whole town comes and stands around this buffalo. And they just stare at it. And they stare at it for about 20 minutes. and they don't know what to do with it. So a guy gets a gun and shoots it. Oh, God.

I knew that was going to happen. That's so depressing. That's unbelievable. And, of course, the same thing happens to the beavers. Yeah. The scale of environmental destruction that the Westward expansion of the United States brings, I think, is devastating. I mean, to some extent. It focuses what happens wherever European settlers move.

Yeah. It really focuses it. It's a story about capitalism, isn't it, to some extent? You'd expect this from a Marxist historian like me, of course, Tom. But it's a story about the cost of capitalism. Stephen Cook has a question picking up on something you said about railroads. He says, did the railroad tame the Wild West? And clearly, I think the railroad played a huge part. So the sort of, in some ways, the heyday of the Wild West, I mean, the Old West period, I suppose, runs from, well, I mean,

it runs from American independence through to the end of the 19th century. But the kind of heyday of it is the years around the Civil War and just after the Civil War, sort of 1860s, 1870s, 1880s. And that is, of course, as you said, the age of railroad expansion. So you have these kind of Union Pacific lines and so on, these colossal lines that are carrying people across the US. But it's not just, I mean, that would have happened with or without the railroads because it happened with the wagon trains and all these trails and all that sort of thing.

And as you say, I think profit, the desire for profit is a big part of this. But the question that sort of nags at me is where we've talked about so often in this podcast about counterfactuals and inevitability. And there's a great what if at the beginning of this period. So in 1812, after the 1812 war, when the British and the... It was 1814, so the British and the Americans have had their war

and they're trying to get a peace treaty. And the British wanted an Indian buffer state in what's now the upper Midwest. And the Americans said no, because they already had their eyes on it and they'd sort of earmarked it for expansion. And I wonder if some kind of Indian state and a kind of British patronage had been created, whether we'd be telling this story in the same way. But of course, the Americans wouldn't count on such a state for obvious reasons. I don't think that was ever possible because I don't think it was within the remit even of an American government that was willing to sign that to agree to it. Because essentially, if you look at what happens in the 1840s, basically, the process of westward expansion runs away from the federal government.

So you've got the war against Mexico, which is incredibly brutal. That's the backdrop for Cormac McCarthy's great novel, Blood Meridian, which is a terrifying portrayal. Yeah, we talked about that in the historical fiction podcast, didn't we? And that essentially is organised by gangs of vigilantes. And it's one that the United States then piggybacks onto. But also you've got the gold rush and 1848 you know there's nothing yeah so there's nothing that that any federal government could do to stop people going on that gold rush um no the government's simply not powerful enough to control yeah as you say i mean it doesn't have the institutional resources

doesn't have the manpower actually yeah yeah and and then of course you've got the the the civil war which again means that vast reaches of the west essentially are beyond federal control yeah so you got the the texas rangers who you know played prominent role in the in in the war against mexico and then particularly against the comanches they go back and fight on the side of the confederacy and that's where the west really becomes wild because it's an absolute free-for-all there is a the civil war and the wild west kind of bleed into each other and that's one thing that you get from um so people who don't know much about the civil war

but or the wild west but have seen dancers with wolves will get a sense of this because kevin costner is his character is a civil war veteran as so many of the the soldiers and indeed the scouts and the sort of these classic figures you know sort of the wild bill hickox and the buffalo bill coders i mean a lot of them have been involved in general custer yeah custer is a classic custer of in a cavalry officer hadn't in the civil war and his career had gone nowhere afterwards he'd fallen out with president grant ulysses s grant former civil War general who'd become president. And he was basically trying to revive his political career, Custer, when he goes off on this doomed attempt. Well, I think, I mean, I think Custer, actually, I mean, he just loves it, doesn't he?

He loves the West. He thinks it's fun. He relishes the excitement of it all. I can't believe you're speaking up for custer tom i never saw this coming well custer's a terrible man really he is a terrible man but he's also a charismatic man because he enjoys everything that he does and yeah so when he when he gets told by uh grant that he can't go with his you know with the seventh cavalry he he basically falls down on his knees before general terry kind of begs him and and that's it and there's a it's it's the kind of

the flamboyance and the histrionics of custer that i think people actually really respond to he's a he's a much loved figure among the mill i mean he has a lot of enemies but he's also very loved and i think that part of of what makes custer success, and he is a success right the way up to Little Bighorn, is that he's the kind of the model of what every cavalryman would like to be. He's a creature of whim and impulse whose reaction to a buffalo is to go off and shoot it, to seeing a war band of Indians is to charge it. And essentially there's this fantastic from Sitting Bull who was not at Little Bighorn, but was asked to say, you know, what,

what, what, what do people who fought at Little Bighorn say? How did Custer die? And he says, well, the very last thing that Custer did as he died was first to kill someone and then to burst out laughing.

And that's how he died. That is basically, you know, but, but there is a kind of charisma there but before we go to a break time which i want to do in a bit i'll just say one thing which i think you've absolutely picked up on which is celebrity custer was a celebrity custer took journalists with him on his on his expeditions and he manicured his image in the papers and actually this whole subject of the West, one reason that it's such a great subject, and it's been so glamorised, and it's been so debated, is that it is wrapped up from the outset of the Civil War-ish period, the sort of heyday of the Wild West,

with photography, with dime novels, with journalism, and with Wild West shows and all those kinds of things. So Sitting Bull appears in shows, in kind of reenactments. And actually, almost all of these people that we've talked about are engaged in the media. So they're either putting on shows for the public or they're writing, Custer writes stories in the papers. And that's what makes it such a great subject.

And the exception that proves the rule, the one celebrity from the Wild West who is never photographed is Crazy Horse. Yeah. Who in a way is the most kind of charismatic figure of the lot, precisely because of that. And although he dies in a kind of squalid reservation brawl, his body then gets spirited away and nobody knows where it's buried. But that obviously, that's the that's the legend isn't it that's so he's the king arthur of of the wild west and and the whole thing of that you know he will come again there's this um a kind

of fascinating example of how of of the contest between the the westward imperial expansion of the united states and the reluctance of people like crazy horse to be memorialized is this incredible kind of statue wars that's going on in the black hills you know so you've got mount rushmore obviously with the with the sculptures of the four presidents but then you've got this um this polish sculptor who's over the course of his life trying to sculpt a huge statue of crazy oh yeah i've seen. Would be the second largest statue in the world. But is hugely contested because a lot of, you know, the Iglaagla Lakota people say, well, you know,

the whole point about Crazy Horse, he wasn't photographed, we don't know where he's buried. Don't do this. Such a good story. Great stuff. All right, Tom, listen, it's time to get off your horse and drink your milk. There's a saloon bar in town and I fancy me three fingers of bourbon.

Who writes this stuff? Anyway, we're off for a break. We'll see you in a minute or two. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. and on our Q&A,

we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to the rest is history with me dominic sandbrook and tom holland and a reminder that on wednesday the 21st of april we will be doing this podcast live on the internet everybody

is welcome it's free to join and we will be talking about assassinations failed and successful and we'll put out a link on twitter a few days beforehand and this thursday we are talking as if one holland wasn't bad enough we've got a veritable united provinces we've got a netherlands very good dominic very good tom's tom's brother james who knows more about the Second World War than just about anybody, is coming on on Thursday, and he will be talking about 1940, perhaps the most consequential, the most mythologized year in recent history. So that's something to look forward to. Now, Tom, let's get into the myth. So we've got a couple of questions here. We've got a question from Anand. What was the West really like? can we separate fact from fiction and that kind of tallies with julian hoffman's question which is about the history of westerns is it more influential than the actual history of the west

of course in many ways it it is so tom fact and fiction um you're a great devotee of the fiction aren't you the kind of myth of the west yes um i think i think i mean i think in a way yeah i definitely just as the myth of king arthur is probably more important than whatever the you know if it even existed the the uh the bedrock of fact um i i think that the myth of the western has been hugely influential hasn't it on on 20th century america and on the way that america is understood i think it's absolutely central in america's self-image i mean this there was an argument so something that all people who do sort of american history um at university learn is about frederick jackson turner's frontier thesis so he yes he presented this so where are you on that actually and so alex massey distinguished um journalist actually

asked about that he said um you know, what's the current state of academic thinking on that? Dominic, what is the current state of academic thinking on that? So in 1893, I think it is, Frederick Jackson Turner, who's an American historian, presents this paper, or he writes this paper. And he basically says, the US census has declared that the frontier is closed, that America has been completely opened up. There is no Wild West anymore. And he writes this paper basically saying the frontier is key to America. It's what makes America different from Europe.

This is the point at which Americans are sort of straining for a sense of national identity and a sense of distinctiveness from Europe. And he says it's the frontier, and it gives you democracy. It gives you freedom. It's very violent, it gives you self-reliance, and all these things make America different from Europe. And the frontier is key to our identity. And ever since historians have argued how true this is, and of course there's lots of historians who have disagreed with it,

I actually think America clearly is a society shaped by the experience of the frontier. I mean, the American relationship with guns is only really explicable if you think about the violence of so much North American history. And, of course, there's more to American history than just the frontier, but I think it does make sense.

What do you think, Tom? Well, also the myth of self-sufficiency, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. So, Andrew Jackson, who we talked about the myth of self-sufficiency, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. The idea that you go and live in a log cabin. So Andrew Jackson, who we talked about the War of 1812, that was his great victory against the British. I mean, he defined himself as a frontiersman. He kind of ended up in Nashville, I think, didn't he?

And Lincoln. Lincoln and his log cabin. And Lincoln is, yeah, the classic example. The sort of self-made man. I think that's absolutely central to American identity. And masculinity, which you talked about earlier on. the idea of the frontiersman the cowboy i mean the cowboy is such a huge figure in american popular culture i guess i guess that um that the the criticism of of the idea of there being a single frontier is that actually there are multiple frontiers and in fact there are often so many frontiers that it makes better sense really to think of it as a kind of you know a kind of zone of of of exchange because as well

as as yankees and native americans you've got canadians you've got french you've got mexicans you've got people from all kinds of different traditions all kind of meeting up and i guess for much of the 19th century the what we the west is a kind of zone where all of these are meeting yeah that makes it so it is it is the kind of classic um sort of border zone the sort of melting pot isn't it so i mean a lot of cowboys there were black cowboys you know asian americans there were you know lots of of mexicans it's it the sort of image of the john wayne stagecoach kind of image the searchers is not chinese laborers building the the railroads um yeah and of course the other thing to remember is that um the uh the native american tribes are also

kind of expanding it's not like you know, the myth now might be that they are rooted to the soil, that they, you know, they live in one particular place, but that's not the case. They also are expanding often eastwards. They're all kind of sweeping. So, I mean, the Comanches are, you know, they have this kind of huge,

I mean, you could call it an empire, couldn't you? Comanche empire. There's Comanche, people talk about the Comanche empire. Exactly exactly yeah yeah yeah so so it's it's a very contested area but of course ultimately it because it's the united states that wins out it's the idea of a united states frontier moving westwards westwards westwards and of course eastwards from california symbolized by that joining up of the two the two railroads but just on the western genre i think what's so interesting about that is that it's not completely created afterwards.

So the Wild West show, which is key in creating the romantic image of the West. So the people who do these shows, the sort of Buffalo Bills and Calamity Jane and these kinds of characters, I mean, they're doing the shows at the same time as the Wild West is still in its final stages. And it's extraordinary to think how popular those shows are.

So they kind of peak in the 1880s, 1890s. They're incredibly popular in Europe. So among the people, if you look into it, among the people who saw Buffalo Bill's show, the Kaiser saw it. He was a big fan. Queen Victoria saw it. Edward VII saw it. George V saw it. He was a big fan. Queen Victoria saw it. Edward VII saw it. George V saw it. I mean, this is massive entertainment for Europe's kind of,

not just for the sort of common man, but for the European elite. Hitler grew up reading cowboy stories and loving cowboy stories. It's extraordinary the extent to which it was embedded in the kind of western imagination between let's say 1880 and 1920 but i think even before that because i think the moment that the buffalo cleared and you have this sense of there being land up for grabs there is a kind of just a few years where all kinds of european aristocrats are going out to the west so you've got um i think churchill's aunt there's a french aristocrat who builds a

chateau the the red baron's grandfather moves out there that's a good i didn't know that very very fleetingly they and then of course you know it all goes wrong because the terrible winter all the cattle get wiped out and people start putting up barbed wire fence and everything and then you have dust bowls and stuff and essentially the west becomes an empty an empty space a flyover zone but um that of course is what what then it because it's empty it's possible then to project fantasy back onto it well let's just say something before we get into lots of questions a quick um a nice pub quiz fact for you tom do you know what the first western was the first western film it's not the one that um wyatt eep advised on no no no no no tell me so do you want to know and give me do you want to know where it was filmed

probably i think it was i do know this it was filmed in the lake district wasn't it it was filmed in blackburn in lancashire yes yes i did know that yes so it's a film called you can see it online it's called kidnapping by ind. So it's a film called, you can see it online, it's called Kidnapping by Indians. And it was a film by Mitchell and Kenyon, the great sort of cinema pioneers. So it's filmed in Blackburn in 1903 and it's the first Western movie. It's a minute long.

And there's a sort of a woman with her baby or a toddler and a couple of Indians attack her and then a cowboy appears and fights them off and then that's the end of the story. But that in itself tells you just how international this was right from the very beginning. You know, obviously later on you have the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone and so on, but even at the beginning...

But doesn't it also, does it not also point out what, in a sense we were talking about right at the beginning, which is that actually to understand the West, you have to imagine yourself back into a world where you could be kidnapped by Indians. And, you know, if you get kidnapped by the Comanche, you know, it's going to be pretty horrible. You know that, you know, you're going to be buried up to your neck and have your eyelids cut off or have your testicles cut off and stuffed in your mouth. I mean, it's all fairly unspeakable stuff and so the element of danger of real jeopardy then of course once that sense of

danger jeopardy has gone it provides a perfect stage for film i mean that it does and i think as well the wild west don't you think though tom that the wild west also flourishes i mean this is also the period when tolkien is writing and when kind of medievalism is super popular and in other words the wild west is is a is a legend created for people who live in cities who who who you know they they don't see the great plains they don't live in communion with nature they don't get out you know they don't get out of their factories and their offices very much and this it's a bit like the boy scouts in a way you know baden powells and the romance of kind of king solomon's mines and all these sort of british imperial adventure stories it's

escapism for people for an increasingly urban population that's what i say we've got a dominant we've got a question here from salva uh derfusich uh who says what is it about this period that led to the creation of the mythic cowboy gunslinger and why throughout our culture has this warrior legend become so enduring so i think in a way you've you've you know you've basically answered that but although it also the gunslinger your point but your point about masculinity tom there's a lot of that in it isn't there the gunslinger don't you think i mean there's a sort of the clint eastwood sort of stereotype or the john wayne stereotype of this sort of taciturn granite jawed figure i mean is it

coincidence that that emerges at the time when the women's suffrage movement is taking off you know when men are seeming maybe more feminized i don't know so so that's that's why i think almost the most interesting western i don't and you as an american specialist i don't know whether you agree with this but but as a kind of mirror held up to American culture would be High Noon. Because the plot of High Noon is, you know, there's a bunch of bandits who are riding down on the town to gun down the sheriff who'd put away the leader of the bandits who's been let out of prison. And he is Quaker bride, and they're due to go off and enjoy their

honeymoon but he feels that he has to stay in the town and and defend it and the quaker bride uh grace kelly um says you know if you if you do this i'm going to leave you and her husband the the the marshal uh played by gary cooper insists on saying because he feels that that's his duty um and it's this that then makes it's basically it's ronald reagan's favorite film and bill clinton's and interesting you mentioned tony soprano is tony soprano's film and tony soprano is tony soprano is kind of saying i want you know why aren't people strong and silent like gary cooper anymore uh and for for Reagan and Clinton, it's about overcoming, you know, because the townspeople in High Noon

are feckless and cowardly and won't back him. It's about doing the right thing in the face of everything. Both Hitler and Stalin loved Westerns, Tom. So that sort of, there's something about that, isn't there, about the sort of the male hero, the defying, you know, defying, I guess. But there's also a sense of doom that hangs over a lot of these hero the defying you know defying i guess but there's also a sense of doom that hangs over a lot of these westerns because you know that not only is maybe the protagonist potentially doomed but the world is doomed as well i think that was what gives it this

sort of romantic edge don't you think yes and again it's it's the sense that this masculine age of heroism is actually threatened by what is often cast as the kind of feminizing impulses of peace. So the Grace Kelly figure in High Noon, she's kind of persuaded that actually it's her duty to stand by her man. You know, do not forsake me, oh my darling, the famous song. And she ends up shooting the baddie in the back. But if she hadn't, then, you know, the marshal would be shot. It's also the plot, Tom, of Once Upon a Time in the West. So Sergio Leone's great film. So the woman is the protagonist.

Claudia Cardinale is the protagonist. There's the coming of the railroad. All the sort of old gunslingers basically end up dead. Henry Fonda and go. And she is left alone at the end, basically. She is now the defining person who's going to sort of rule the West. The railroad has come. The old age is gone. And that's part of, I think, that sort of sense of a vanished age,

of a lost age of chivalry. And chivalry often sort of plays a part in these things. There's a kind of, I think that you can map on to the stories of the Old West, like High Noon and like The Searchers or Stagecoach or whatever. Stories about knights, stories about the hero in shining armor and so again to go back to owen wister and the virginian i mean he was kind of overtly racist in his sense that the anglo-saxon race were this kind of you know they were the night original knights errant and that in a sense inferior races had to be cleared out of the way which would include you know mexicans as well as native americans um and i think that that's another kind of element in the cultural development of the Wild West myth that makes it obviously furiously contested at the moment.

Let's do some questions. Let's do some questions. Do you want to pick one? Well, that's an interesting one from Gregory Doyle. How different were the American and Canadian experiences of the Wild West? Because, of course, Canada had a Wild West as well. Are the gunslinging sheriffs versus the unarmed Mounties both caric Wild West? Because of course, Canada had a Wild West as well. Are the gun-slinging sheriffs

versus the unarmed Mounties both caricatures or demonstrative of fundamental differences? I hope you're going to answer this, Tom, because I actually know. You've got no views on that at all? I have no views. I'm like H.A.P. Taylor

on the very first question time when they asked him a question about housing. And he said, I have absolutely no opinion about this at all. And I've always admired him for that and looked for an opportunity to do it. And the first mention of Canada is my chance to do that. Well, Canada had a gold rush as well with the Klondike.

Yeah. And it had a frontier. I mean, and it had Native Americans. Yes. But much less heavily settled. Yeah. So Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, after the Battle of Little Lick, Bighorn were able to retreat across the frontier and stay there. They didn't like it, but they found it so boring that they crossed back.

Basically, but having said that, so I went to a place called Drumheller, again, because it has the world's best dinosaur museum, but it also has saloons where there are bullet holes over the mirror carefully preserved so there were the occasional shootout but the klondike um that's kind of that's where the myth of the mounties essentially comes from because it's it's a classic you know there are the bordellos and the shootouts and the uh gold prospectors and everything happening there and the mounties go in and they go in and they kind of muscle it down. But also the Klondike Gold Rush is the setting for Jack London's two great novels,

The Call of the Wild and White Fang, which is kind of brilliant explorations of that whole theme. And they're set in Canada. So I think there are Canadian dimensions to the Wild West myth. Well, not just Canadian dimensions. So Andrew Jay has a really good question. He wants to ask about Russia. He says, how does it compare with Russian expansion under the Romanov?

So Russia expanding east. Both saw massive expansion. They meet to a certain extent near Alaska. Do Russians have a similar sense of manifest destiny? And I would say, absolutely, they do. That is, to me, a really interesting parallel. The Russians are expanding at pretty much exactly this point. So they're going east into Siberia, which is obviously not very settled,

but they're also going into Central Asia. And to some extent, the Russian equivalent of the cowboys, the Cossack. They're on the frontier. They're unregulated. They are armed. They are hyper-masculine. They're outlaws. They're freebooters all this sort of thing so you know cowboys do have analogies outside the americas yeah yep good stuff um okay well here's are we how much longer we got

are we loads of time okay well well, this is a great question. Jeff Anello, what's the stickiest myth about the Old West that is patently wrong? Gosh, that's a good question. AJP tailoring again. Yeah. No, a lot of the myths are anchored in, have a grain of truth, though, don't they? So you mentioned bordellos. I mean, bordellos,os you know they were a thing um partly to they they sprang up to there were so many miners and and cowboys obviously i suppose

but did all the tarts have hearts well well everybody's got a heart tom surely you know that yeah yeah uh i've never met a tart without a heart that's for sure yeah um anyway on the kermit what about cowboys i think cowboys that our sense of cowboys is probably i mean being a cowboy was unbelievably boring i mean you sort of spent so much time in the saddle then you did your two roundups every year where you separated out the calves to be branded from the rest of the sort of herd um it's very grueling the cowboys are often young they're kind of they start off when they adolescents, and later on some of them are Civil War veterans. And there's much less shooting, so cowboys do carry rifles sometimes,

but they're not the same people as the gunslingers. So often the gunslingers, who we think of as cowboys, are scouts or trappers or Civil War officers, but they're not cowboys. They're different kind of people. So I would say maybe the cowboy is the big myth. And would you expand that to say that actually the idea of cowboys and Indians is a myth?

Because isn't the point about cowboys that the cowboys are moving the Texas Longhorns or whatever it is from up into Wyoming and Montana because the buffalo and the Indians have gone? Yeah. Basically, there isn't, you know. Yeah, so actually you're right. The cowboys, the people who really kill a lot of Indians in the army, or sort of vigilante bands, as you say, but they're not really cowboys.

I mean, that's not a cowboy's job. A cowboy's not there to kind of go and kill lots of Indians. A cowboy's there to look after the cattle, basically. So, yeah, you're right. The cowboys versus Indians myth is not quite right. Yeah, so maybe that one. Okay, so perhaps another one would be the idea, actually, that there are goodies and baddies in the Wild West, that there are entire groups of people with white hats and black hats.

But that's obviously been turned on its head, hasn't it? So now there's no question. I was only reading this morning an essay by an American historian talking about how the moral lens has completely changed. So now Anglo-American capitalist settlers are often painted as uniquely bad. You know, they are just the baddies. And the Indians are sort of, you know, what are the Indians doing? They're sort of taking drugs and communing spirits and and being close to nature and stuff and and what's sort of

slightly lost from that is the fact that the you know indian culture was often incredibly violent in a way that we would now find really quite quite off-putting well yes we mentioned that the comanche record with torture which is really quite something and terrifying. But I guess also what we think of as the Great Plains culture is very, very influenced by what Europeans are bringing. So it's dependent on the horse. It's dependent on the rifle. Again, it's that sense of there being It's dependent on the rifle. Yeah. And I think that again, it's that sense of there being a stark division isn't quite true.

Both of kind of influencing the other. Cause actually a lot of Indians spend most of their time fighting each other, not fighting the white man. So, I mean, what's one reason why they are, um, why they,

they fail to resist, um, American expansion is because they, you know, it's the classic story of imperialism and conquest that often the, the indigenous people spend as much time fighting each other or quarreling or thinking how they can, they can use the settlers to play against their enemies as much as they do,

as much as they do in kind of resisting the newcomers. But actually Alex Shiphurst has this question, which is the question underlying this whole subject. Can the killing and atrocities carried out on local native populations be categorised as genocide? Or is it more nuanced? I mean, can we talk of a genocide of Native Americans? Tom, what do you think?

This is such a difficult but necessary question, I think. I think that the annihilation of the buffalo was an attempt at cultural genocide that basically pretty much worked. I don't think that, you know, they didn't want to wipe out every last Native American, but that expansion westwards with the railroad and the army moving in coincided with a kind of a cod Darwinism. It's when Darwinism is really kicking in as a kind of a cod darwinism it's it's when darwinism is really kicking in as a kind of a popular idea and then it seems to to have lent to large elements of the american elites

the sense that um it was kind of you know if you like the manifest destiny yeah of the red man to retreat and be diminished before the rise of the white man and there was definitely a kind of racial component to that and um when uh when when general sheridan gave the order that the buffalo should be wiped out he was consciously set you know he had this kind of famous phrase that it would, you know, the prairies would be covered with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy. You know, there was nothing festive about it. He knew what he was doing. General Sheridan is the man, Tom, who says the only good Indian is a dead Indian.

You know, it's kind of hard to – the weird thing is that for so long people would quote that as sort of almost an amusing, swashbuckling saying. Whereas now I think it's very hard. I mean, I speak as somebody who's very un-woke. I mean, I'm basically fast asleep by kind of woke standards. But I find it hard to read some of this stuff without feeling very conflicted, very moved. I think people, the weird thing with America is that people talk about America's original sin being the importation of slaves. And, of course, America is now a society suffused with arguments about the legacy of slavery and about the injustices

that have been done to African-Americans. But for me, so many of these American states are founded on basically the extermination of their native population. I mean, I don't think you have to be terribly woke to see that and to see that as, well, not something that should be swept under the carpet. I mean, I think it is worth discussing.

And I think that it's possible to kind of be true to the tragedy and the horror of what happened to the Native Americans and not merely view it from the point of view of the 21st century because there were plenty of people who were horrified by what was happening and stunned by it. So when Sitting Bull is in his reservation and getting all kinds of grief from the guy running the reservation, the person who comes and tries to sort it out is Buffalo Bill Cody, who, as you said, you know, took Sitting Bull with him around the world. And there's this terrible story that when Sitting Bull gets shot, his horse has been kind of trained to do this dance routine as part of the show.

And he hears the gunshot. And as Sitting Bull is lying there bleeding to death, the horse is doing this dance routine. And I think that, you know, Buffalo bill responded to that you know i mean he he he he sensed the the cruelty of that and the tragedy of it and and the scale of the loss and in that sense i'm burying my heart at wounding knee which is you know the the famous book that essentially recalibrated um i i don't think it's you know i think that that is that is true to the the myth of the west in the same way that the kind of more triumphalist westerns are as well i think that i

was always part of the story i think the sense of that that's you know it's it's and that's why i compared it to to homer and to um and to king arthur is that those myths are powerful because they're not just about braggadocio and, and, and violence and, and, and masculine glory. They are also about an understanding that you can't have that without destruction and ruin and death. Well,

on that note, um, that's my, to my, to my braggadocio and martial glory and to Tom's destruction and death. Um, well, uh,

now, now I'm going to, I'm going to read out the, the jolly script ending that the producer has written just to cheer people up and he's written the wild west has been tamed time to hang up our spurs and kick off our boots this town ain't big enough for the both of us tom see you next time so if people complain this these are one note podcasts they're quite wrong because we do all kinds of emotions in the space of 60 seconds tom see you next time yeehaw thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.