I was recently thinking about the Wagons West series of Western novels by Dana Fuller Ross. These books were published from 1979 through until 1999, and it shows - while they are good stories, they are quite dated in their representations of anyone who isn’t Caucasian. I’ll make a confession at this point; I haven’t read many Western novels beyond this series, so the following is an attempt to clarify my own thoughts on what I know of the genre.

What spurred me to write about the Western genre was this article (https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/07/how-the-western-was-lost-and-why-it-matters/278057/). It made me look at the entire genre in a new light, encapsulated in the following paragraph (quote) “Through the past century of Western movies, we can trace America’s self-image as it evolved from a rough-and-tumble but morally confident outsider in world affairs to an all-powerful sheriff with a guilty conscience” (end quote).

There is definitely some appeal in the idea of the frontier. The idea of travelling for days without limitations (or fences), and of not bumping into anyone else is, and has been, a seductive one for a long time. The Australian poem Clancy of the Overflow published in 1889, shows that daydreaming of an escape from urban life and office jobs is nothing new. There are a few modern equivalents to the lifestyle that allows people to be in their own company for extended periods of time. Probably geologists and prospectors are two of them, and the beautiful song “Wichita Lineman” (Wichita Lineman) refers to a similar lifestyle (although by now, that job is probably done at least in part by electronics and drones).

Yet it’s not something that most people actually aspire to. After all, being a cowboy (or drover, or stockman) is a hard life. You’re out in all weathers, a long way from anywhere, and you are responsible not only for your own safety, but dealing with some large, unpredictable animals who don’t always take kindly to humans trying to move them along. The food is basic, and finding water is a constant challenge. Nor does it necessarily pay well. As far as employment and social life goes, for most people now, and even back then, there are/were many better options. In actuality, most of us just want the freedom not to work, and to enjoy time in natural surroundings, rather than the actual cowboy lifestyle.

So where did these men (and the mythology around them) come from? I wonder how many of them were the minor sons of various European gentry sent away to “make something of themselves” (with the unspoken implication being not to bother returning home if they didn’t manage it). Likewise, how many were victims of the Industrial Revolution, which upended more traditional lives with its gigantic economic and social changes? In many respects, cowboys are also somewhat like European knights that have been transported to a different setting.

I suspect that when examined closely, much of what happened on the American frontier (and in other nations where colonisation occurred) was really dark and horrible. Taking other people’s lands was a violent, dangerous and stressful process. Once that takeover had occurred in any given area, I imagine the cowboy life was much like a modern security guard’s job - namely, 98% boredom and repetition, and 2% sheer terror (when the cattle stampede from something like thunder, or merely getting spooked).

At least in later stages, it appears that many of them were veterans of the American Civil War, which stands to reason. Having been professional soldiers, some of these men may have committed mass murder in the name of manifest destiny. What if they had nightmares every night about what they had done, and actually suffered what we would now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)? Several things would come out of such experiences. First of all, I suspect their life expectancy was not all that long. Secondly, many such men likely couldn’t down a more steady job for the same reasons, and would find it hard to know who to trust. There are parallel themes running through the experience of Vietnam War veterans, as outlined in the song Khe San by Cold Chisel.

In many places across North America, there may have been a lot of rootless young men away from family support and values in a ruthlessly capitalist American culture that exploited them. There has always been concern about such men in many cultures, and I can’t imagine many of them being welcomed into genteel Yankee society.

But if such men were shunned on an individual basis, then doing so on a broader scale was potentially hazardous to “civilised” towns. It’s possible, I think, that they kept getting sent further out by mayors and other local dignitaries. In lionising cowboys as doing brave and useful work, yet still moving them on, such settlements could (a) remove the threat of such men (b) keep pretending they had nothing to do with the rapes and murders committed on the frontier, and (c) excuse themselves for not dealing with the loneliness and mental health issues the cowboys were potentially struggling with. Over time, I think it’s possible that such men were so brutalised that they couldn’t do any other job, and as the U.S.A became more and more urbanised, the work opportunities available for poorly educated men dwindled.

Yet the cowboy myth hung on because of nostalgia for a time and place where they didn’t have to answer to “the man”, and because, for a while at least, they could avoid engaging much a changing world that they didn’t much like and couldn’t understand. In all honesty, I think what settler cultures and the Western genre have done is to create a virtue out of behaviours that wouldn’t stand up in a modern court of law (let alone in a church).

The stereotypical cowboy is a loner (or at least doesn’t like urban settings where they have to engage with lots of strangers) and they often respond to threat to their “honour” with violence, especially using guns. They are often taciturn, brooding sorts not much given to conversation. Rather than talking any differences through, cowboys tend to shoot first, and ask questions later. This is actually rational behaviour if you’ve been living in a war zone, and you don’t know who to trust.

To make this set of attributes more palatable to urban readers, the inability to engage socially is flipped to highlight the cowboy’s “ruggedness” and “self-reliance” - both qualities important on the frontier, but with less chance to be overtly expressed in urban settings. Likewise, cowboys are often shown are being gallant to women, which sounds honourable but is really rather shallow. If a man has never really spent much time with women, then he may struggle to talk to them in any depth, and also to see women as individuals in their own right. Ditto for anyone from another ethnic background.

Cowboys are also often portrayed as helping defend small settlements from a bunch of villainous robbers. But what was to stop them actually being part of the next band of robbers if there was no work about, or drought had wiped out their stock, or they’d been fired for being drunk, etc - especially if they had seen how defenceless the settlers were? Likewise, the cowboys usually get justice of a sort - either they save the day, or they apply their own rough justice, and ride out of town before the law catches up with them. Both of these things could equally apply to many standing military forces around the world, which are often a law unto themselves.

What cowboys aren’t, though, is role models for anyone in the modern world. In the Western genre nearly everything functions as a duality - most things gets painted as being either black or white, with no shades of grey. If this assumption holds true, then there’s no need for cowboy characters to show any lack of confidence, to think about the consequences of their actions, or for any self-reflection, is there? Essentially, though, in modern Western cultures, these attributes are the clearest indicators of the differences between fully evolved adult men, and those men who are still essentially boys.

While many Western novels are a welcome bit of escapism from time to time, they don’t have much to offer in terms of values that teach us how to navigate our fast-moving, multicultural, communications-addicted modern world. For the most part, while there are recent exceptions, the attitudes that have defined the genre essentially make it uninteresting and obsolete to many modern readers.

What do you think? Do you know of some Western novels that do include shades of grey, and some development of character? Is there something else that we can take from Western novels that is relevant to the 21st century?