The story of the American West is still being told today even though most of historic events of the Wild West happened over more than a century ago. In movies, novels, television, and more ways stories of the old west are still being retold, reenacted, and replayed to relive the events of the once so wild and untamed land of the west that so many now fantasize about. After reading about the old west and watching early westerns it is amazing how much Hollywood still glorifies the history and myth of the old west. It may not be directly obvious to every one, but if you look closely there is always a hint of the Western mentality such as honor, justice, romance, drama, and violence. The most interesting thing about the Old West is the fact that history and myth have a very close relationship together in telling the story of the West. The relationship between history and myth in the story of the West go hand and hand with each other for the most part. Why? The myth of the West came around just as the history of the West was happening. So a lot of history was often though of as myth and a lot myths were often thought of as actual history. For example, Buffalo Bill was extremely important to the West because he was mythical and historical figure at the same time. There were myths about him that were actually true and there were also myths about him that were made up he made them true. Author Lee Clark Mitchell states in his book, that some writers who wrote westerns such as Stephen Crane confronted "the intersection of history and fiction, fact and legend, without in the end appealing to either at the expense of the other." Also, "refusing to acknowledge that legends are more interesting than history (art, that is, surpassing life); Crane's stories at the same time resist any simple equation of the legendary with the fact itself (art matching life)" (Mitchell). The cowboys of the frontier have long captured the imagination of the American public. Americans, faced with the reality of an increasingly industrialized society, love the image of a man living out in the wilderness fending for himself against the dangers of the unknown. By the end of the 19th century there were few renegade Indians left in the country and the vast expanse of open land to the west of the Mississippi was rapidly filling with settlers.
To many families the prospect of owning land was the central driving force that brought them to the land known today as the wild Wild West. Much propaganda wa...
According to the thesis of Fredrick Jackson Turner, the frontier changed America. Americans, from the earliest settlement, were always on the frontier, for they were always expanding to the west. It was Manifest Destiny; spreading American culture westward was so apparent and so powerful that it couldn’t be stopped. Turner’s Frontier Theory says that this continuous exposure to the frontier has shaped the American character. The frontier made the American settlers revert back to the primitive, stripping them from their European culture. They then created something brand new; it’s what we know today as the American character. Turner argues that we, as a culture, are a product of the frontier. The uniquely American personality includes such traits as individualism, futuristic, democratic, aggressiveness, inquisitiveness, materialistic, expedite, pragmatic, and optimistic. And perhaps what exemplifies this American personality the most is the story of the Donner Party.
...to Americans: if their prospects in the East were poor, then they could perhaps start over in the West as a farmer, rancher, or even miner. The frontier was also romanticized not only for its various opportunities but also for its greatly diverse landscape, seen in the work of different art schools, like the “Rocky Mountain School” and Hudson River School, and the literature of the Transcendentalists or those celebrating the cowboy. However, for all of this economic possibility and artistic growth, there was political turmoil that arose with the question of slavery in the West as seen with the Compromise of 1850 and Kansas-Nebraska Act. As Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in his paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” to the American Historical Association, “the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”
For many Americans, the image of the cowboy evokes pleasant nostalgia of a time gone by, when cowboys roamed free. The Cowboy is, to many Americans, the ideal American, who was quick to the draw, well skilled in his profession, and yet minded his own business. Regardless of whether the mental picture that the word cowboy evokes is a correct or incorrect view of the vocation, one seldom views cowboys as being black. The first cowboy I met was from Texas and was black. After he told me that he was a cowboy, I told him that he had to be kidding. Unfortunately, I was not totally to blame for my inability to recognize that color has nothing to do with the cowboy profession; most if not all popular famous images of cowboys are white. In general, even today, blacks are excluded from the popular depiction of famous Westerners. Black cowboys were unheard of for almost a century after they made their mark on the cattle herding trade, not because they were insignificant, but because history fell victim to prejudice, and forgot peoples of color in popular depictions of the West and Western history.
TheNative American culture were very intresting when it came to how they lived.They told all types of stories to explain where, what,when,and how things came to be .An example is the amount of respect that the Cherokee Tribe showed and gave to animals.In the story it repeadtly says “The Fox said...The Possum said..The Buzzard said”.This shows that theNative American culture favored and
When one thinks of the cowboys the first thing that comes to their mind, or at least my mind would be a white man riding in the open parries of the West. But in many cases that was extremely untrue. "Nearly a third of all cowboys who helped build the American west were black (Black Pioneers Pg.16)". Many people do not know about this due to segregation. Mainly if not only white cowboys were given recognition due to the fact that slavery had just ended and many people were getting use to the fact that blacks were free and equal to them.
Sanitary conditions in the West were practically non-existent. In the cities, horse manure covered the streets. Housewives emptied garbage, dishwater, and chamber pots into the middle of the city streets where free-roaming pigs devoured the waste. The pigs left their urine and feces on the streets. It was not easy to wash clothes. Many people had clothes splattered with manure, mud, sweat, and tobacco juice. Privies, or necessary houses were often to close to the homes with a very noticeable odor on hot and/or windy days. If a family had a kitchen, all the members washed at the sink each day, without soap, rubbing the dirt off with a coarse towel. Eventually, many cold bedrooms had a basin, ewer (pitcher), cup, and cupboard chamber pot. Bed bugs and fleas covered many of the travelers’ beds. “Isaac Weld saw filthy beds swarming with bugs.” These insects followed the travelers, crawling on their clothes and skin.
True west is a story about two brothers that have nothing in common, they grew up becoming opposites and now as they are in their thirties and forties finally a common connection between them. Austin a happily married man with children, also a writer and owns a home in the north. Austin lives a normal middle class life with no added drama, he went to college and is an upstanding citizen. But, Lee on the other hand is a free spirit that does not have a permanent address unless you count the desert as a home, he steals and barraters items to earn money, his effortless mutilation and confidence makes it easy for him to always get his way.
After the Civil War, Americans abandoned the sectional emphasis caused by slavery and developed a national focus. During the period from 1865-1890, Americans completed the settlement of the West. For the farmers and ranchers, the American West was a land of opportunity because land was cheap and the Homestead Act provided land to farmers, including immigrants and blacks, in order to grow crops, raise cattle and make a profit. The American West was also seen as a land of opportunity for miners due to the gold and silver rush in the far west which they believed would make them rich. However, both groups faced many challenges and few achieved great wealth.
There are many ways in which we can view the history of the American West. One view is the popular story of Cowboys and Indians. It is a grand story filled with adventure, excitement and gold. Another perspective is one of the Native Plains Indians and the rich histories that spanned thousands of years before white discovery and settlement. Elliot West’s book, Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers and the Rush to Colorado, offers a view into both of these worlds. West shows how the histories of both nations intertwine, relate and clash all while dealing with complex geological and environmental challenges. West argues that an understanding of the settling of the Great Plains must come from a deeper understanding, a more thorough knowledge of what came before the white settlers; “I came to believe that the dramatic, amusing, appalling, wondrous, despicable and heroic years of the mid-nineteenth century have to be seen to some degree in the context of the 120 centuries before them” .
The Western Frontier The western frontier is full of many experiences that changed the frontier. Each significant event has an important role in the shaping of society and how it influences a new nation. Each author brought a new perspective and thought process to the western experience which either contradicted Turner or supported his theories. The frontier ideas that interested me include topics such as trading frontier, farming frontier, nationality and government, and the neglect of women. Frontiers shaped the west and how settlers approached it.
"Relocating the Cowboy: American Privilege in "All the Pretty Horses"" Pepperdine University: Global Tides Seaver Journal of Arts and Sciences. Maia Y. Rodriguez, 2014. Web. 2 May 2016. . The Western typically illustrates the journey of a man, usually a horse riding cowboy, into the Western frontier where he must conquer nature "in the name of civilization or [confiscate] the territorial rights of the original inhabitants... Native Americans" (Newman 150). What this brand of mythology promotes is precisely the values of American culture: rugged individualism, achievement and success, activtity and work, democracy and enterprise, and--most importantly--
When we look back to their original history that we can see they were not only work against the nature for their life but also fight against the bandits to protect their hometown. Based on this situation, people live and work in west place paying more attention on functional stuff is not strange thing. As we all know, cowboys has a cowboy suit and that one formed a new style during the following decades of years and was famous of its durable and this style almost be loved by everyone who was going to the west to explore the gold and dream of becoming rich in one night. When we talk about the cowboy suit, we usually connect it with horses and wilderness and that one also indicates one main characteristic of cowboy – freedom. In the western movies or books we can often see that cowboys save or help one’s life while he is riding a horse or when a group merchant is trying to across one wide Gobi, they always can find a vagabond cowboy to protect them. This spirit always evokes Americans to fight against injustice and discrimination and many writers write about liberty by learning this kind of spirit. Although many people consider cowboy as a man with no property, no schooling, no social standing, no ambition for money, cowboy has boundless courage, competence, self discipline, physical
The main techniques that the author Mark Twain uses to show you a little of what it is like to be in the Old West during the Gold Rush is contrasting East with West with the use of the characters and the use of language and plot are distinctly good examples of realism and regionalism. In late 19th century American society/culture, the East was known for being civilized, cultured, and advanced while the West was seen as less educated and refined and naive or easily duped. Mark Twain uses these bias/stereotypes in his characters. Simon Wheeler, a American Western storyteller, is a old uneducated man who tell tall tales in a monotone with no storytelling techniques and vernacular language and his use of vernacular language supports the stereotype
The myth of the frontier applies to the romanticism of the west frontier where the unsettled land and the unlimited resources nurture immigrants into individuals with pioneering spirits. Similarly, the optimistic vision of the myth of progress on the tech frontier raises the deification of technology development. As Frederick Jackson Turner suggested in "Frontier Thesis" that the West was a "purifying and liberating force" that transformed Americans into innovative individuals with restless energy, the worship of enterprising spirits fueled the myth of progress on the tech frontier where people fantasized about infinite advantages of technology advancement with a belief that progress is always favorable (Colombo 215).