The first of an undetermined number of bite-sized musings on the history of the American West.

Some time ago, I was browsing through the pages of A Bar Cross Liar, W.H. Hutchinson’s bibliography of Eugene Manlove Rhodes. I was particularly struck by a letter quoted at length in the book’s preface, a letter from the ex-cowboy author Rhodes to an acquaintance who was preparing a nonfiction article about him and his work (emphases his own):

The star system has never obtained on the Free Range. Better way to state it is ‘in open country’ for the same code was held by miners and merchants. No superlatives! ‘He’s a good man’ ‘He’ll do to take along.’ That was the highest praise…

…Any ’sclusively old time cowboy…was just as good a man as Ed Borein, Charlie Russell, Will Rogers, Gene Rhodes or Will James. These last five would hope and expect and deserve to be recognized as equals by the [rest]—but no man ever lived they would recognize as the best. The best in some one line—Certainly! But when these lads said a good man—they meant a man who would do his damndest every time. More particularly, they meant by a good man the man who would help you out of trouble, sickness, danger, debt, disgrace or damnation. Their way of putting it was: ‘I’d be glad to see Bob Martin saunterin’ along when I was in a tight.’ Meaning, in a tight place…

That is what I have zealously tried to put in my stories. ‘Good Men’—never a hero. Good MEN and TRUE. Bransford and McGregor and Pringle—Johnny Dines and Charlie See and Jerome Martin, and Pete Henderson and Judge Hinkle and George Scarborough—every one just as good as any other one.

People say, ‘Yes, Mr. Rhodes—your story people are amusing but you dreamed them. They never happened.’ I didn’t dream them. They were twice as interesting in the flesh than my poor report ever was. Twice as witty. And they went through more hazardous adventures practically every month of the year than those I have set to paper. There is a reason—When they got wind of an adventure roundabout they went to look-see. Whereas most of us, at any hint of adventure, lock the door and telephone to the police.

And so on and so on. But if—if you want to please me—this is the line to take. Just bear in mind that Will Rogers, and we know he would be a good man in any company and any place, just passed as one of the boys and excited no remark. So of the others, if all of them went to a round-up tomorrow and did their work well, this would excite no remark. That was what was expected of them. That was what they were there for.

What strikes me about this point of view is how very different it is from the one you find in your average Western film or fiction. The “Western” as most people know it promulgates almost a kind of superhero culture, where lawmen, outlaws, and gunslingers form a breed of men set apart who spend their time alternately terrorizing and defending the helpless common folk.

What that has done is to mightily obscure the fact that those common folk had a good deal more backbone and were far better able to take care of themselves than they have been given credit for. But operating on the principle that Gene Rhodes describes here, they wouldn’t have considered themselves exceptional for being so! It’s easy for us to look back and exclaim with wonder over the hazardous adventures and exploits that our forbears survived, but it’s also easy to fall into the trap of judging people from another time and place by our own standards and imagining that those exploits made them heroes (or superheroes) among their peers. Or more pertinently, to project a lack of appetite for going to look-see more suited to city folk, or 21st-century folk, onto the supporting cast when we frame such frontier adventures into stories, for the sake of making the protagonists (and the villains) appear larger-than-life by contrast.

image: “Blue Harmonica” by Duane Bryers