Fluent Essays

Wild West Readings Paul Christensen, “The ‘Wild West’: The Life and Death of a Myth” Kevin Britz, “Boot Hill Burlesque”: The Frontier Cemetery as Tourist Attraction in Tombstone, Arizona and Dodge City, Kansas.” 1. According to Britz, how did the memorializing Dodge City and Tombstone differ? (In other words, how did they differ in recreating their past?) What was the overall goal of these two towns in highlighting their history? 2. Why did Boot Hill hold such significance to these two towns? What were some of the problems with memorializing Boot Hill? 3. How does the “Frontier Myth” relate to the Wild West – according to Christensen? 4. What function do myths provide to a nation and its citizenry? Why are they necessary in other words? How does all this fit into the West being settled? PAUL CHRISTENSEN The Wild West: The Life and Death of a Myth We all know something about myths, their strange power to explain events that hardly seem rational; their flight from the literal world to a kind of dream space in which gods and nature play roles in an intricate drama of vengeance, conquest, and the creation of identity. In some myths, girls turn into trees; in others, an ordinary mortal flnds himself gifted with superhuman powers to lie, escape from giants, seduce goddesses, and find his way home through a sea that hates him. Odysseus is at the center of Greek mythology hut, as is often pointed out, he may not he one person hut rather the whole of Greek experience from the moment some Persians decided to migrate south down the Peloponnesian peninsula to found a new country, a trek that lasted eight or ten centuries that Homer summarizes in the life of the Wests first hero. Myth has now taken on the connotation of lying or pretending, an ahsurd story spun out of ones fantasies. The Greek root of the word is muthos, meaning mouth, or word of mouth, in other words a folklore, some sort of informal tale of the trihe passed down the generations. Why some narratives get elevated to the role of myth over others remains something of a mystery in their dispersion, their great ap- peal to people who demand some core of helief in which to identify themselves, and find their coherence as a trihe or nation. I want to hazard a very wild guess ahout myth and say that the very nature of myth is that it tells the story of how a people hecome a na- tion. Myth is ahout the formation of a national I pitted against a wilderness that is the national not-I, and the indigenous people rooted there hefore invasion and usurpation also form the not-I to he over- come, ahsorhed, used as a kind of fuel in the making of the nations selfhood. Virgil is eloquent on the nature of the half-human cannihals and nomads Aeneas found upon entering the uncivilized Italian peninsula after leaving Troy. This demonized Other was justifiably Christensen / 311 destroyed to make way for the Roman state, a bringer of culture and literacy for the good of all. It is little wonder that Virgils epic poem The Aeneid became a best seller in sixteenth-century Venice, a must- read for kings wishing to colonize the New World and to crush the cannibal hordes thought to he living there. Every nations principal myths are about starting out, meeting the wilderness head-on and taming it, breaking the spirit of indigenous enemies and declaring the land and the inhabitants the food of this new collective self. Myth is a sort of family history, an account of the migration to a new world, and who the heroes were in the great struggle to make a home on someone elses property. Myths dont look for justification; the great thrust of each is the boldness and aggression needed to turn strange, unknown territory into a collective self. The making of Englands national self lies in Geoffrey of Monmouths Historia Regnum Britanniae and Malorys Le Morte dArthur and is the narrative of Celtic migration and conquest. Every myth has to have its Caliban, some monster in the way of the peoples progress, some resistant force that lives deep inside nature and draws strength from its primal energy. Antaeus leaps to mind as the quintessential monster here, who when thrown to the ground after losing his breath in the arms of Heracles, suddenly springs back full of life, until Heracles is told that Earth is Antaeuss mother, who nurtures him each time he touches ground. Myth is history turned into a powerful archetypal dream about the ego tearing itself from a mother (or mother country) and facing a series of terrihle ordeals to prove its courage but also to devour the not-I that will expand its powers and command of the new world. Its almost as if myth as narrative recapitulates the stages of human life from infancy to manhood, but only if that passage to manhood is successful and brings rewards and honors to it. Myth is good news writ large to include what a whole people does to feather its nest and crow over its victories. Even with the mythic founding of England authors eagerly associated the principals with the battle of Troy, that ultimate source of heroism in which Europe defeats Asia in a war of continental cultures. It should also be noted that the body of myth as national histories includes the caveat that once the not-I of national selfhood is exhausted, so is the fuel of expansion. Camelot dies when the enemies no Ion- 312 I Southwest Review ger inspire the knights of the Round Table to action; the court is a shambles of intrigues and adulterous affairs, a corrupt state that also ends King Lears reign. Without an adversarial Other, a nation begins to atrophy from lack of food. A healthy nation must constantly recall its myth and invent new forms of adversary—foreign wars, wars on poverty, drugs, illness, terrorism, or any other avatar of the not-I in order to provoke courage and willingness to risk all—the stakes are high, but so are the rewards of further expansion, perhaps even to the creation of an empire. Richard Slotkin calls this mythological process regeneration through violence, and in locating the frontier as the source of the American myth, he also identifies Daniel Boone as our Odysseus in the struggle for nationhood. Boone is a refined version of Fenimore Coopers Natty Bumppo, the half-European half-Indian (though of European parentage) scout and explorer. Boone has all of Bumppos skills but he is the pure European afoot in a strange new world west of the colonies, Shawnee territory that later became Kentucky, which he conquers with a drawknife and the occasional musket ball. He hunts, he knows his enemy like his own mind, he is sympathetic to the nature that feeds his adversary and also feeds him, and he possesses a selfiess devotion to breaking the spirit of wilderness to found a nation. He established the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap, through which 200,000 settlers poured, and his spirit was the model for succeeding generations to emulate. Boone is the collective embodi- ment of Europeans in the New World, a combination of experience boiled down into one man whose face could be that of Paul Bunyan, Ahab, the victorious Union soldiers, a cowboy of the Plains, the dog soldiers of the world wars, Luke Skywalker, and Rocky Balboa. Boone is the template of the hero in the American myth, and each generation projected a new one onto the retreating boundary of the frontier. Once we reached the Pacific shore, of course, we ran out of untamed land and human rivals, and the fuel of self-expansion ended. Frederick Jackson Turner pegged that moment at 1890, based on a Census Bureau report that found no remaining frontier in its new census, and wrote about it three years later in his ground-breaking essay, The Signifi- cance of the Frontier in American History, delivered at the Worlds Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Jackson was our own Homer, in a way, outlining the narrative by which we made a nation. He gathered Christensen / 313 up all the loose strings of two centuries of immigration, colonial or- ganization, and v êstw ârd movement and located the not-I along that demarcation between the settlements and the ground lying in someone elses possession. He thought of our history as a kind of gestation, in which violence, aggression, and sheer doggedness overwhelmed our opponents, and in the process we not only made a place for ourselves hut formed our character as winners, risk takers, opportunists, invad- ers, and conquerors. But he also clarified an important aspect of our national character— its essentially conservative hias as a glorification of European racial stock encountering primitive indigenes and an anarchic wilderness. Male traditions are idealized and the Enlightenment rationality of Paris and London are compacted into the heros self-reliance, supe- rior logic, and desire to break nature and rule over it as the apostle of reason. Turners American is composed of Emersonian self-reliance, Thoreaus loner following a different drummer, and the plucky hunter and Indian fighter. Out of such materials rose the image of the stoic, taciturn adventurer cut off from others, depending on his own instincts and his compulsion to win. This is not the hero projected out of Greek or Roman experience, through which hoth Odysseus and Aeneas de- pended upon others to aid in their common struggle, and who called upon the help of the gods when the going got really tough. Instead, the American myth refiected the unassimilated masses of immigrants living in isolated ethnic enclaves, and crafted its hero out of a lack of social honds and made him content with his own solitude. Whitmans Leaves of Grass, self-published in 1855, would have passed unnoticed had not Ralph Waldo Emerson unwittingly endorsed it in a private letter to the poet, an excerpt of which was then reprinted on the spine of the 1856 edition. The original thirteen poems fiy in the face of the still-forming American myth of the solitary hero on the frontier. Even Whitmans trapper (in Song of Myself) takes an Indian squaw for a wife, and everywhere else in these poems Whitman seems to roll into a ball the multitude of themes and ideas left out of the main myth: solidarity of workers; equal rights for women,- emancipation of blacks; concern for failures and cowards; an embrace of death as well as life; a table set for the diseased and the heroic, the unwanted and the admired; but above all a very French esteem for fraternity and for candor in all things sexual, including the young Southern housewife 314 I Southwest Review whose erotic fantasies involve twenty-eight young male bathers vis- ihle from her window. While the book never became a favorite with the common reader, its great significance lies in its opposition to the myth of origin taking hold in the American imagination. Whitman had a masterly command of the language of that myth and how to oppose it from all sides, and nearly any other discourse that opposed the heroic myth can trace itself back to ideas in these signal poems, from unionism to equal rights for women and minorities, to anti-war sentiments, and a reaching out to the marginalized and the pariahs of American society. Where the frontier myth is adamantly conservative in politics and vision, a patriarchal code of power and rewards, Whitmans egalitarian vision is the language of group esprit and cohesion, a liberal philosophy emerg- ing alongside the frontier myth like its shadow, its spiritual opponent in the pendulum swing of political life. Put another way, Whitmans vision is post-European, and unwit- tingly anticipates the emergence of an alternative narrative: the return of the exiled son to his tribe or ethnic group. After 1900, this New World narrative would come to voice almost every minority cultures desire for a return to roots, to homelands, to the embrace of the tribe and its elders. Exile meant living among whites in cities, where alien- ation, poverty, alcoholism, and dependence were the dark consequence of being cut off from tribal nurture. By contrast, the frontier myth spoke to. the desire of the European settler to break out of the group and distinguish oneself through ordeals of courage and self-initiative, a drive away from family and kinship toward wilderness, where op- portunity lay in some unbounded form. If the frontier myth, soon to evolve into the myth of the Wild West, glorified aggression and racial supremacy. Whitmans counter mythology could be boiled down to three words: reconciliation of op- posites. Driving the frontier myth toward greater militancy and the emergence of the cowboy as gunfighter, toward the absolute of vio- lence, was the Souths quest for a heroic ideal after its surrender to the North. Southern adult males inherited a taint upon their masculinity for being born on the losing side of Americas Civil War, the confiict that shattered national unity for a century and a half. The South had lost its participation in the frontier myth, which had passed it by on its way west, leaving writers and cartoonists the opportunity to malign Chiistensen /31s the white-haired colonel, the Southern belle, silver-tongued corrupt lawyers, and politicians of a fading order. Only the Souths youths could fashion a new way of participating in American mythology by new ordeals of courage played out on the unpaved Main Streets of mining camps and frontier settlements. The gunfighter replaced almost every other stereotype of the cowboy era, except for the cattleman and the local sheriff, a corrupt official who is the extension of the Southern lawyer and ex-slave holder of a generation before. Youth redeemed the South and won back its badge of courage through lawlessness and an all-male anarchic rebuke to the encroachment of civilization, signaled by the arrival of circuit-riding preachers and their congregations, followed by mail-ordered brides, and the presence of school marms and war widows, the arts matrons of the bigger ranches. The gunfighter was the fraying ends of the Daniel Boone prototype, a decadent figure marred by excess and romantic hyperbole. He was a little too fast with his gun, too reckless with the women he deserted, and too eager to down his whiskey and ride all night to the next gun fight or Indian raid. As the frontier died out, his fictional character was infiated into a desperate fantasy of the pioneer spirit, with only the towns to pester with his futile search for an edge of wilderness in which to demonstrate his skills as a killer. His glorification occurred first in the dime Westerns, which ran from the 1860s to the 1900s. The last publisher cancelled his series in 1919, at about the time Western film fastens onto his image and propels him to mass audiences on the wings of Buffalo Bill and Kit Carson, and such villain archetypes as Billy the Kid and Jesse James. Film as a medium bore its own implicit romantic prejudices against the city as a corrupting influence on human nature. Its proclivities as a visual medium were to lavish attention on the epic landscapes of Utahs Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon, the vast grasslands and deserts of the Southwest, with the towns pockmarking the otherwise pure desolation, with a graveyard full of slow draws and executed bad men. The town was the vortex of human failings while the ranches were centers of power created by kingpins of the meat industry, who ruled their outfits like medieval lords and bullied the wayward, unreli- able help that drifted into its perimeters for temporary work. By 1880, a decade before the Census Bureau declared the frontier closed, the Wild West was disappearing in the last buffalo kills, the I Southwest Review resettlement of Native Americans, and the arrival of photographers and writers exploiting its mystique as the ground where America completed its territorial conquests. Charles Lummis, the regions first travel agent and hooster, began advertising the Southwest as a place of romance and sightseeing. Lummis credited himself with heing the first to call the region the American Southwest, and sold its charms through photographs and tour books like A Tramp across the Continent (1892) and Some Strange Corners of Our Country: The Wonderland of the Southwest {1892). Buffalo Bill Codys Wild West show debuted in 1883 as a circus act that later included Sitting Bull and twenty braves, reenactments of Indian raids on pioneer wagon trains, the rifle skills of Annie Oakley and her husband Frank Butler, and a dramatization of Custers Last Stand with Cody serving as General Custer. In an ironic commentary on Turners Frontier essay, Codys Wild West show performed at the same Chicago Worlds Fair in 1893, within earshot of his lecture. As Audrey Coodman argues in Translating Southwestern Land- scapes: The Making of an Anglo Literary Tradition, the moment the Wild West disappeared, imperial aggression turned into nostalgia, a longing for a raw edge on which to reinvigorate the American soul. The West was no longer wild but a vast psychological longing. Indians were made up and posed for Edward Curtiss studio cameras, often with the wrong tribal gear, including makeup and phony bead ware. A recent biography of Curtis by Laurie Lawlor, Shadow Catcher: The Life and Work of Edward S. Curtis, explores his thirty-year obsession with capturing Native Americans at the point of what many feared was their extinction. All things to do with the buffalo were now charged with totemic powers—even Theodore Roosevelt ordered a small herd to be corralled in front of the Smithsonian Institute,- he was not alone in fearing that the demise of the buffalo had diminished American masculinity. The buffalo nickel, also called the Indian head nickel, was minted from 1913 to 1938, and served to remind those paying for a shave or a cup of coffee of Americas symbol of wilderness and male courage. It went out of circulation just as Hitler annexed Austria into Greater Germany, stirring up American war passions that no longer needed the buffalo totem for solace. The significance of the cowboy may well be the fact that the frontier myth had leapt over its own extinction by attaching itself to a new Christensen / 31J figure and a new career in the last leg of the westward iourney. If it could leap one gap, it could leap another, and by this means achieve immortality by acquiring a power to change shapes and faces, and find itself carried forward in time by presidents Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan; by inventors like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison; by oil pioneers like John Rockefeller; and football coaches like Knute Rockne and Ara Parseghian; by Audie Murphy and anyone who could be characterized as fighting a vast enemy or opposition that he overcame by pluck, self-reliance, and his zeal to spread American civilization into the unknown. And so long as the world supplied new forms of the national not-I to oppose and conquer. Behind all such heroes was the uninterrupted rise of Americas for- tunes, which sanctioned and validated the successful struggle of the lone individual out on the raw edge. But with every new permutation of the mythical hero came counter- myths of the hero as ioiner and unifier. Two legs of the three legged stool of myth-making were a constant supply of enemies to conquer and Americas juggernaut of economic and military expansion. Should one or the other leg buckle, the hero myth process stalled, or let in the opposing argument for solidarity and reconciliation. One such instance of momentary stalling occurred in the Great Depression, when the usual values of enterprise and expansion were halted by economic collapse. An anti-hero suddenly veered into focus in the form of Steinbecks Joad family, and other collective heroes like the Bundrens of Faulkners As I Lay Dying, the renewal of socialism and populism and the demonization of tycoons and bankers, as in Erskine Caldwells Gods Little Acre (1933), when mill workers laid off at the local mill riot against the owners. The film version in 1958 stresses the Marxist implications of the riot and of Ty Ty Waldens futile search for gold on his farm. Economic crises halted the progress of the hero machine; Holly- woods new matinee idols of the 1930s were singers with tenor voices, slender epicene dancers like Fred Astaire, and singing cowboys like John Wayne, whose character Singin Sandy Saunders appeared in Riders of Destiny in 1933, his one and only singing role (with voice dubbed) but nonetheless the first such film presentation of a minstrel herdsman. He was followed shortly after by Gene Autry in 1935 and Roy Rogers two years later, along with Tex Ritter. The minstrels I Southwest Review of the plains softened the predatory, solitary heros image during the Depression, hut with the advent of World War II, new heroes turned dark, driven hy enmity with Indians and eager to claim land hy open conflict. The cowhoy hero, emhodying the history of American conquest as far hack as the colonial era, could now serve as an allegorical mouthpiece for almost any event hefalling the nation. His mythical character could he plugged into any emergency and he would emerge victorious, on the march to greater things. As early as 1948, Howard Hawkss Red River, starring John Wayne, consciously sets out the terms of empire huilding for a newly victorious America after World War IL Waynes character, Tom Dunson, wants to go it alone and leave behind a long caravan of settlers coming into Indian territory. The winning of the West, he soon learns, is more important than one mans amhitions, even though he remains the hard-nosed individual as others work to sustain a communal effort at cattle ranching. Hawks was the first di- rector to seize upon the macho huhris of the returning veteran and to slip a thin skin of cowhoy costume over him and set him down in an arena where he holdly conquers the Indians who oppose him. America, Dunson declares, must now feed the world from its heef herds, and nothing can stop it from growing into a full-fledged empire. Hollywood inherited a sense of the West that was made amhiguous hy the very fact that it was not only the place where westward expan- sion ended; it was also the arena in which competing ideologies came to fight it out. One side saw itself as victorious over Catholicism and lingering resentments over the Mexican War of 1836, and over the indigenous life of the Plains. The other West appeared to plead for preservation of its ethnic diversity and customs, its languages and tribal gods. The West was not one thing hut two, and hoth versions of its meaning lay in the hedrock of myth formation in the eighteenth century and during the American literary renaissance. Conquest and the remorse and longing for wilderness arose in the same moment. One could read the West from two sides, hut not simultaneously. Their signs were mutually exclusive, and would figure prominently in the great pendulum swings of political life—a Wild West that meant victory over aliens, and a tragedy of violence and waste of Americans great native heritage. The vast majority of the films produced since the 1930s have stressed .Christensen / 319 the heroic qualities of the cowboy—his boundless energy and obsessive emotions, his resilience in the face of adversity, his loyalty to a cause greater than himself. His character is stretched thin carrying out the Anglo cause, but after 1938 the softer features of the celluloid hero disappear, to be replaced by a brasher, more war-like and intemper- ate soldier and law and order champion. The Indian and the indolent Mexican subtly alter their characters to become a new menace of yelling, screaming, ruthless mobs descending from the hills to raid innocent pioneers new to dry-land farming. Their behavior takes on the qualities of the Japanese enemy, when the winning of the West becomes an international struggle. But the counter mythology was not far behind in expressing itself on film on a broad range of issues including racism, Native Ameri- can abuses, land seizures, and lynchings, the latter condemned in the 1943 film The Oxbow Incident, considered by some as the first anti-Western filin to come out of Hollywood. Native Americans who fought in World War II returned to find their reservations in tatters and a federal government eager to pursue a policy of termination of reservation life altogether in the name of assimilation. Some 25,000 Native Americans fought in the war; another 40,000 left home to work in war-related factories. In 1950, two films tackle the plight of Native Americans, Delmer Daves Devils Doorway and Anthony Manns Broken Arrow. Both films follow the lives of decorated Civil War veterans returning home to find whites bearing homestead claims against their property, allusions to the disenfranchisment felt by Indians returning from World War II. Broken Arrow tries to imagine a dual system of assimilation and of reservation culture, but Devils Doorway rejects assimilation and explores the corruption and greed of settler society, thus reversing long-held stereotypes of the bad Indian and good settler in film tradition. Native Americans are depicted as noble warriors with superior vision and fighting skills, and whites come across as small- minded opportunists and thugs. The release of Devils Doorway was delayed because MGM feared the pro-Indian theme would put off audiences. Its financial success, however, prompted the release of Broken Arrow shortly after. The romances of both films promised interracial marriages that were foiled in the end, at which point the historic camoufiage of the Western evaporated into a direct com- 320 I Southwest Review mentary on civil rights four years before the Supreme Courts call for desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The Searchers, with John Wayne, goes a step further in 1956 by reversing the entrenched values of the captivity narrative. Such narra- tives borrowed from myth to suggest a descent into an underworld of savage devils in order to rescue a white woman, a kind of heroic ordeal in which paradise is the white settlement to which she is returned. In this film, Ethan Edwards sets out to rescue his nine-year-old niece from Chief Scar, whose party killed his brothers family. But the search goes on so long that the niece, Debbie, eventually marries Chief Scar, a nice parallel with the real-life captivity of Cynthia Ann Parker and her marriage to Nocona. Both women assimilated into Indian society and were happy in their marriages. But in this rescue, the mission turns murderous when Edwardss hatred of miscegenation consumes him in general rage. The film is one of the darkest commentaries on racism in the era. Other films delivered left-wing assaults on the House Un-American Activities Committee and rampant McCarthyism of the early 1950s. fohnny Guitar (1954) is ahout a suspicious community that forces townspeople to testify against one another. Sterling Hayden, the films star, had earlier named names hefore HUAC, and as one critic of the film remarks it must have been cathartic for Hayden to play the role of a man running away from his sordid past only to reconcile with who he really was. High Noon from 1952, finds a community unwill- ing to aid the marshal (Gary Cooper) in stopping a returning criminal bent on vengeance for his prison time. The left, as Tom Wolfe once remarked, controlled the scripts and shooting of Westerns during the 1940s and 1950s, and got its digs in when Carl Foreman, blacklisted from Hollywood, co-wrote the screenplay for High Noon and produced it anonymously. The Cold War comes in for general condemnation in William Wylers 1958 film The Big Country. Gregory Peck plays a sea captain, James McCay, betrothed to a wealthy ranchers daughter. Patsy Terrill, played by Carroll Baker. Like her powerful, feuding father, she favors confiict over reconciliation and is ashamed when Peck refuses a fight with the ranch foreman. The feud is between the Terrills and the Hennessys, and only when both patriarchs are killed can there be peace in the region. As Peck later observed of the film, it was intended as a left-wing allegory of the Cold War. Christensen / 321 Vietnam was treated from a variety of antiwar perspectives beginning as early as 1972 with Clint Eastwoods High Plains Drifter, in which a stranger comes to the rescue of the town of Lago, only to find the citizens as corrupt as the gang who menaced it. Once he kills the gang, he fills the office of mayor and sheriff with a midget and torments the very people he saved. The Vietnam eras brutal cynicism about good and evil is writ large in a film in which the westward movement ends in hypocrisy and moral indifference. Sam Peckinpahs The Wild Bunch thinly disguises the massacre of My Lai a year before in a vengeance plot of a gang shooting up a Mexican village until outnumbered and slaughtered by Mexican regulars. There are no heroes on the Anglo side, only bloodlust and a broken moral system spreading anarchy as they move south. And on the Mexican side, the general and his soldiers are portrayed as worthless drunks and murderers. Demonizing Mexicans, especially as soldiers and roving gangs of banditos, had more to do with justifications for usurping their land than it did with reality. Pancho Villa and Zapata were more often given heroic treatment by European and Mexican films than they received in Hollywood Westerns. The Latinos were accorded less worth than Native Americans, and their association with revolu- tion and civil war made them the enemies of order in their own land. Rarely if ever has reconciliation been stressed between Anglos and Latinos in Western films. As far back as 1927, when B. Travens novel The Treasure of Sierra Madre appeared with a bloody tale of gold lust and murder, the federales aie portrayed as a lawless band of robbers; John Hustons 1948 film of that title takes pains to de- humanize them still further. Latinos were demonized and associated with the post-revolutionary chaos of the 1920s. Pancho … Arizona Historical Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Arizona History. http://www.jstor.org BOOT HILL BURLESQUE: The Frontier Cemetery as Tourist Attraction in Tombstone, Arizona, and Dodge City, Kansas Author(s): Kevin Britz Source: The Journal of Arizona History, Vol. 44, No. 3 (autumn 2003), pp. 211-242 Published by: Arizona Historical Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41696788 Accessed: 14-08-2015 22:56 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected] This content downloaded from 150.135.135.70 on Fri, 14 Aug 2015 22:56:50 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=azhs http://www.jstor.org/stable/41696788 http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp BOOT HILL BURLESQUE The Frontier Cemetery as Tourist Attraction in Tombstone, Arizona, and Dodge City, Kansas by Kevin Britz IN The one Magnificent of the early Seven scenes two unemployed of John Sturgess Tombstone 1960 epic and Western Dodge The Magnificent Seven , two unemployed Tombstone and Dodge City gunfighters played by Steve McQueen and Yul Brynner drive a hearse containing an Indian corpse to a boothill cemetery over the objections of the towns civilized element. The puzzled trav- eling salesman who hires them to forcibly deliver the body points out that boothill is the traditional final resting place of murder- ers, cutthroats, and derelict old barflies. As such, boothill ceme- teries have become testimonials to the violent nature of the Old West. At least, thats the way it is in the movies. A close look at two of the frontiers most famous cemeteries - in Tombstone, Arizona, and Dodge City, Kansas - reveals a different story. As towns with long-established Old West reputations, Tomb- stone and Dodge City in the 1920s were prime candidates for the national spotlight. Their histories were deeply intertwined, as the former southern Arizona bonanza camp and the Kansas cattle cap- ital shared similar origins, lurid media images, and famous charac- ters. And both communities experienced the rapid growth and inherent instability that characterized nineteenth-century boom- towns. Dodge City was established in 1872 as a center for the buf- falo hide trade, then rose quickly from 1876 until the adoption of Kevin Britz holds MA. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Arizona. He teaches in the American Studies Department at Kenyon College in Cambier, Ohio. [211] This content downloaded from 150.135.135.70 on Fri, 14 Aug 2015 22:56:50 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp THE JOURNAL OF ARIZONA HISTORY quarantine laws in 1885 as a major shipping center for Texas cattle. Tombstone grew into a town overnight, following the discovery of silver in 1878, and flourished until its mines flooded in 1887. Much to the chagrin of local boosters who desperately wanted their com- munities to be seen as pious, stable, and law-abiding, journalists and dime novelists painted lurid portraits of Tombstone and its Kansas cousin as western Sodoms. Despite the sanitizing efforts of turn-of-the-century promoters, dime novels and pulp magazines, the recollections of Bat Masterson and other gunmen, and the novels of Alfred Henry Lewis kept alive Tombstone and Dodge Citys wild-and-wooly reputations. Masterson s and Lewiss accounts of famous Tombstone and Dodge City characters provided rich sources for Old West chron- iclers. The series of popular books about Tombstone and the Earp brothers began with Frederick Bechdolts When the West was Young in 1922, followed by Walter Noble Burnss bestselling Tombstone: An Iliad of the Southwest in 1927. Dodge City acquired similar promi- nence in the popular imagination with the 1931 publication of Stuart Lakes Wyatt Earp , Frontier Marshal William MacLeod Rainess Famous Sheriffs and Western Outlaws , published in 1929, featured chapters on both towns. A parade of memoirs accompa- nied these popular chronicles. Robert Wrights 1913 recollection, Dodge City , the Cowboy Capital ; retired Tombstone lawman William Breakenridges 1928 autobiography, Helldorado: Bringing Law to the Mesquite, ; and former vaudevillian Eddie Foys 1928 reminiscence, Clowning Through Life , highlighted Tombstone and Dodge Citys wild heydays. William S. Harts 1923 film Wild Bill Hickok, along with Law and Order (1932), Frontier Marshal (Fox, 1934, and Twen- tieth-Century Fox, 1939), and Dodge City (Warner Bros., 1939), paralleled the historic works. These popular books and movies provided readers and view- ers with graphic images of the Old West that included swaggering gunslingers, stalwart lawmen, gamblers, painted women, lynchings, stage robberies, ramshackle buildings, and assorted vice and may- hem. Twentieth-century tourists expecting to encounter this ver- sion of the West, however, found a much different scene. Writer James Flagg, who drove to Dodge City in 1925 hoping to experi- ence the fierce romance of the old cow days - where so many herds were driven to and where so many cowpunchers raised their [212] This content downloaded from 150.135.135.70 on Fri, 14 Aug 2015 22:56:50 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp Boot Hill Burlesque simple hell until their pay gave out, instead discovered nothing but a litde town populated by lots of cowboys walking the streets in blue overalls. A New York Sun reporter was saddened to find that Dodge City had no landmarks of the brief era which fur- nished much of the material, real or imaginary, of the dime novel period of . . . American literature.1 The same was true of Tombstone. Journalist Charles Finger arrived in southern Arizona in 1931, expecting to enjoy life in a rollicking Wild West town. He found instead a placid little com- munity where an indubitable cowboy leaned against a drugstore wall while licking an ice cream cone. The first two hours in Tomb- stone, Finger confessed, proved beyond doubt, that this town, once so boisterous, has passed from its vivid youth to an age of repose and contentment. A New York Times correspondent shared the impression. Nowadays the citizens devote only an occasional reminiscent thought to the men who were laid to rest with their boots on in Boot Hill cemetery, he observed. Real Tombstoners are now more interested in paving bonds.2 In laying the foundations for their respective tourist indus- tries, Tombstone and Dodge City promoters recognized the impor- tance of satisfying visitor expectations, even if it meant dramatically stretching the truth. Tombstone enjoyed the advantage of retain- ing a large number of vintage buildings in various states of preser- vation. F. M. Loomis, the editor of Motor World and Motor Age, and Robert Manger, the field secretary of the National Automobile Dealers Association, were impressed in 1920 by the quaint appearance of the many old landmarks of pioneer days and expressed their satisfaction of a visit to the historic mining camp of which they had heard so many stirring tales. Dodge City, with few architectural remnants of its romantic past, was scarcely dis- tinguishable from a typical Kansas farm town. One visiting news- paper editor was surprised at how much Dodge City differed from the images created by blood and thunder stories that were told of the town. Only the street that fronted the railroad - lined with cafes and billiard parlors - and the crowded business district contained relics of the past. Aging residents in both towns, how- ever, remembered the frontier period and recalled especially the first improvised cemeteries. Increasingly, pilgrims sought out these boot hill graveyards for authentic relics of the Wild West.3 [213] This content downloaded from 150.135.135.70 on Fri, 14 Aug 2015 22:56:50 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp THE JOURNAL OF ARIZONA HISTORY The name boot hill may have originated in Dodge City, where it first appeared in print in the May 6, 1877, issue of the Dodge City Times. According to local historian Robert Eagan, who conducted extensive research on Dodge Citys original cemetery, the term frequently appeared in railroad cowtowns, where it referred to improvised municipal graveyards that ultimately became pot- ters fields. One of the first national uses of boot hill appeared in an article on New Sharon - a euphemism for Dodge City - in the March 1880 issue of Scribners Monthly . Unlike their Dodge City counterparts, who actually used boot hill to describe their orig- inal cemetery, Tombstone locals simply called their first graveyard the old city cemetery. In a 1926 speech, longtime Tombstone resident and former judge John C. Hancock attributed the use of the term to tenderfoot journalists who started to write up the west. Another Tombstonian, when asked about the origin of the term boothill, answered that the name probably was imported from Dodge City, which in its heyday . . . was fully as wicked as the southern Arizona silver camp.4 Like most boomtowns, Dodge City created its first civic ceme- tery as an ad hoc response to the need in 1872 to find a final rest- ing place for a dead transient. As the town expanded around it, the improvised burial ground quickly became prime real estate. In 1878, the Dodge City Townsite Company sold it to developers who planned to subdivide the plot into residential lots. To dispel the fears of potential homeowners who might object to living atop a graveyard, the owners persuaded the city to move the bodies to a new cemetery, called Prairie Grove, northwest of town. The coro- ner who disinterred the coffins in 1879 found the corpses resting quietly with boots on. The headboards, if ever there were any, had long wasted away, however. Consequently, he was able to iden- tify only a few individuals. The city, hoping to distance itself from its unsavory past, purchased a lot on Boot Hill and built a school- house. The Hays Sentinel hailed it as the proudest evidence of enlightenment upon the one surviving relic of barbarism. The building was razed in 1890 and replaced by a larger, three-story structure popularly known as the Boot Hill School, which func- tioned effectively for thirty-five years.5 Because the name probably originated in Dodge City, it was fitting that the reinvention of Boot Hill as a historic tourist attrac- [214] This content downloaded from 150.135.135.70 on Fri, 14 Aug 2015 22:56:50 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp Boot Hill Burlesque tion was the pivotal event as the former cattle town looked for ways to commemorate its past. In large part because of a strong post-boom economy, Dodge City lagged behind other Old West towns in developing its tourist trade. By the 1890s, the town had shrugged off its boomtown trappings, and by the First World War, it had evolved into a staid Midwestern community with a growing economy. As the hub of railroad commerce, agriculture, and live- stock, it was the political and mercantile center of western Kansas. Lacking the economic imperative that drove faded mining towns like Tombstone or Deadwood, South Dakota, to market themselves as tourist attractions, Dodge City hesitated to embrace any form of civic commemoration that even hinted at its sordid past. This attitude changed in 1927, when pioneer lawman, mayor, and auto- mobile dealer Hamilton Bell joined fellow business owners in prompting the city to purchase the long-abandoned Boot Hill. The transaction ignited a public debate over how the city should remember its past. When the Dodge City Board of Education announced in 1925 that it would close the outmoded Boot Hill School and sell the property, Bell and other business leaders, who were already involved in a project to mark historic sites in order to lure tourists to the old Santa Fe Trail, saw the opportunity to create an entic- ing local attraction. Boot Hill is known coast to coast and could be converted into one of the showplaces of the city, the Dodge City Daily Globe reported, there is a sentiment here that the historical value of the tract should be capitalized [on]. Kiwanis, Rotary, American Legion, Real Estate Mens Organization, and chamber of commerce representatives petitioned the Dodge City Commis- sion to call for a special election to purchase Boot Hill. Unfortu- nately, the community did not share their enthusiasm. On August 20, 1925, voters defeated the measure by a two-to-one margin. Subsequently, the city sold the site to the Presbyterian Hospital Association, who hoped to convert the old schoolhouse into a hos- pital. Interest in commemorating the site resurfaced two years later, however, when the Presbyterians abandoned their plans for the building and expressed their willingness to sell the Boot Hill parcel at public auction.6 The Dodge City Real Estate Board quickly launched a new campaign to save the old cemetery. Within hours of the hospital [215] This content downloaded from 150.135.135.70 on Fri, 14 Aug 2015 22:56:50 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp Hamilton B. Bell. This content downloaded from 150.135.135.70 on Fri, 14 Aug 2015 22:56:50 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp Boot Hill Burlesque associations announcement, a petition circulated among business leaders urging the city to purchase Boot Hill. The realtors suc- ceeded in postponing the sale until a $12,000 bond election could be held. In a newspaper ad that ran a week before the election, they reminded voters that to preserve this historic point is an investment that will return to the taxpayers much more than it will cost. Do not hold Dodge City back. Help push forward. Vote to save Boot Hill. Their tactic paid off. Voters endorsed the res- olution, and on April 20, 1927, Boot Hill became city property.7 Although the city now held the deed to Boot Hill, it remained unclear how the site would be preserved. Opinions divided sharply over how much of the valuable real estate should be allotted to historic commemoration and how much should be set aside for other use. Following eight months of discussion, in December 1927 the city passed a resolution supporting a pro bono proposal from longtime resident Dr. Oscar H. Simpson, a retired dentist and amateur sculptor, to install a large figure of a western cowboy at a commanding position on Boot Hill. The statue would adorn the entrance to a new city hall that also would be con- structed on the site. The buildings Spanish-style architecture would serve as a tribute to Dodge Citys location on the Santa Fe Trail and the towns heritage as a former outpost of the Spanish empire.8 The selection of Simpsons plan underscored the growing influence of the Boot Hill preservation movement. Like his friend Hamilton Bell, Simpson was a prominent Dodge City resident with a new-found interest in the towns early history. Following his retirement from dentistry in 1922, Simpson took up concrete sculpture and historical research, publishing several articles in local newspapers. He believed that Dodge Citys affiliation with the Old West gave the town great historical significance. It was unquestionably the most typically western in habits and customs of any town that ever existed, Simpson once told a reporter. In his opinion, it produced more national characters and notorious gunmen than all the rest of the wild towns of the turbulent west combined, and was longer passing through the gun age. Simp- sons romantic vision of Dodge Citys wild past had an ironic twist - he was a longtime prohibitionist who, in the 1880s, had strongly supported closing down the towns saloons.9 [217] This content downloaded from 150.135.135.70 on Fri, 14 Aug 2015 22:56:50 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp THE JOURNAL OF ARIZONA HISTORY As the first step in memorializing Dodge Citys controversial past, local businessmen encouraged Simpson to commemorate the cowboy, whose activities greatly influenced and colored the early day history of Dodge City. As the model for his reinforced con- crete statue, Simpson selected Dodge City chief of police Joe Sughrue. The Dodge City Journal described the completed artwork, which Simpson presented to the city in 1928, as a long, gaunt, rangy cowboy brandishing a trusty six shooter. In the newspa- pers eyes, it truly described the real cowboy as he was known in the early days. An inscription on the base proudly proclaimed: On the ashes of my campfire, this city is built. The statue was formally dedicated on November 4, 1929, as part of a larger cele- bration that included the laying of the cornerstone for the city hall. Members of the local preservation group scattered rocks, sage, cactus, and soapweed around the site to heighten the Old West atmosphere. The city commission, however, balked at covering the entire hill with native flora.10 Simpsons statue symbolized a confident and prosperous town ready to embrace its past. Boosters like Simpson and Bell wanted to claim Dodge Citys prominent role on the American frontier - a role that an increasing number of popular historians and film- makers were glorifying. By the late 1920s, Dodge City business leaders were flush with pride over their communitys commercial and political leadership. The construction of a new Santa Fe Rail- way terminal and Fred Harvey Hotel, combined with the WWI boom in wheat and livestock production transformed Dodge City into the shipping and financial center of western Kansas. Its popu- lation of 6,039 in 1921 represented a 17 percent increase over the previous year, making Dodge City the fastest-growing city in the state. By the end of the decade, the population reached 10,000, prompting the Kansas State Board of Agriculture and Editor and Publisher magazine to proclaim Dodge City the capital of Southwest Kansas. Many local boosters saw the towns triumphs as rewards for the pioneering values of perseverance and steadfastness.11 A decade later, commemoration of the past became an eco- nomic necessity. As the twenties ended, Dodge City reeled from the effects of the national depression even as it found itself at the center of the dust bowl disaster that destabilized the regions agri- cultural economy throughout the 1930s. The impact of the great [218] This content downloaded from 150.135.135.70 on Fri, 14 Aug 2015 22:56:50 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp The Simpson cowboy statue. dust-out was reflected in population figures - by 1940, the city had lost nearly one fifth of its residents, with only 8,222 remain- ing behind.12 Community remembrance took on a new meaning. The line between commemoration as a means of establishing historic iden- tity and as a commercial venture became indistinguishable as Dodge Citys economy eroded. How history would be memorial- ized in Dodge City was the subject of a decade-long public debate centered on Boot Hill. Spurred by a sense of economic urgency, the local preservation group formally incorporated as the South- west Historical Society in 1931. Hamilton Bell was the first presi- dent and Oscar Simpson served as a charter officer. Aware that Dodge City had been slow to capitalize on its history, Society members put atop their agenda the creation of a Boot Hill museum that they hoped would someday be known throughout the nation. The group was confident that the museum would appeal to a new generation of Americans who had succeeded the actual participants in episodes of those history making days. As evidence of this interest, they pointed out that the question most frequently asked by visitors was: Where is Boot Hill?13 [219] This content downloaded from 150.135.135.70 on Fri, 14 Aug 2015 22:56:50 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp THE JOURNAL OF ARIZONA HISTORY Even local businessmen who did not necessarily believe that a museum was the best approach to luring tourists agreed that it was time for the city to set aside any lingering reservations about its wild-and-wooly reputation and capitalize on Boot Hills notori- ety. Why should Dodge City be ashamed of Boot Hill, the Dodge City Globe asked. Have we become so goody goody that the days of the primitive, elemental west offends our fine sense of right and wrong? In a long letter to the Globe, prominent local banker C. C. Sales wondered why have newspaper men written story after story about Dodge City? Why do magazine writers continue to fea- ture Dodge City in stories which always go over big? In Saless eyes, the answer was obvious: It is because of historic Old Boot Hill. Unless the site was preserved, the inevitable march of progress would make old Dodge City a thing of the past. Sales recommended erecting a simple granite monument, so that a stranger visiting Dodge City may know he is standing on the site of the Old Boot Hill cemetery; and so future generations may not forget Boot Hill was a very important part of the stage on which was enacted that great melodrama, the Early Life of Dodge City.14 Furniture owner Joe Hulpieu, also a member of the preser- vation committee, set off a storm of controversy when he proposed installing metal sculptures of wagon trains, buffalo, Indians, and Wyatt Earp to line walkways replicating the Santa Fe Trail and the old-time cattle trails. The project addressed two of Dodge Citys pressing problems: providing work for the unemployed and attract- ing tourists.15 Hulpieu introduced his plan to the city commission in Feb- ruary of 1931, only to discover that another local organization felt that the Boot Hill site would better serve the community as tennis courts. The commission members tabled both proposals. When landscaping commenced on Boot Hill a few weeks later, however, rumors spread that the city was in fact levelling the hill in order to install the tennis courts. A rash of telephone calls to newspa- pers and a new Save Boot Hill campaign culminated in a large rally at the Lions Club. Forty club members volunteered to attend the next city commission meeting and protest any attempt to level the site they now referred to as the center of historical interest in the southwest. Mayor Harry Hart reacted quickly to squelch the rumors, reassuring the Lions Club and the historical society that [220] This content downloaded from 150.135.135.70 on Fri, 14 Aug 2015 22:56:50 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp Boot Hill Burlesque the city was only tidying up the hill. To avoid future misunder- standing, Hart created a special committee of Lions Club, Kiwanis, and Southwest Historical Society members to consult with the city park board and draft an official plan for the old cemetery.16 With the promise of attracting tourism revenue to the dust- choked town, the new committee enjoyed a surprising level of pub- lic support for a formal Boot Hill commemoration. A random telephone poll conducted by the Dodge City Globe in March of 1932 found that local sentiment strongly favored preserving the grave- yard site as a historic park. Although one respondent proclaimed Boot Hill the greatest asset Dodge City has as a tourist attraction, no one ventured a specific plan for the proposed park. A few weeks after the poll, the Southwest Historical Society offered a recom- mendation that set the tone for future discussion. The society envi- sioned erecting on Boot Hill a six-foot replica of a cowboy boot, including spurs.17 Although the historical societys proposal was never adopted, the shape of Boot Hills first commemoration took on the exag- gerated Old West symbolism that the giant boot represented. Paraphrasing the local Rotary Club motto with their slogan he profits most who shoots first, Oscar Simpson and Dodge City Rotarians - including Dodge City Globe publisher Jess C. Denious - constructed a parody of the Boot Hill graveyard, on the actual site, to entertain attendees at the state Rotary convention in May of 1932. Their whimsical recreation included fifteen concrete-cast faces and boots sticking out of mounds formed to resemble graves. Clever hand-painted epitaphs, some of them referring to actual persons, topped each burial plot. Among the more memorable epitaphs were: Shoot-em up Jake Run for sheriff in 1872 Ran from Sheriff 1876 Buried 1876 * * * * One Eyed Joe was Slow on the Draw He played five aces and now he plays the harp * * * * The Bones of Hiram Burr, who mistook a he-cow for a her. [221] This content downloaded from 150.135.135.70 on Fri, 14 Aug 2015 22:56:50 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp THE JOURNAL OF ARIZONA HISTORY The graves were haphazardly arranged to recreate the impro- vised nature of the original cemetery. Some were open to expose fake backbones, ribs, skulls, and other skeletal remains. As proof of Boot Hills authenticity, one grave featured an actual skeleton. A large dead tree, with a rope dangling from an overhanging branch, towered over the scene. A sign nailed to the trunk announced: Horse Thief Pete was hung on this tree in 1873. Although a Globe reporter found the scene all very sad, Simp- sons creation was so popular with visitors that the city allowed it to remain in place after the Rotary convention adjourned. It quickly became Dodge Citys main tourist attraction.18 For a Lions convention in June, Simpson dedicated at Boot Hill an officially sanctioned sculpture of a set of longhorn steer heads. Unlike his earlier graveyard parody, the concrete busts were the center of public fanfare that included a mounted parade of Dodge City Lions Club members dressed in cowboy costumes, a drum-and-bugle corps, and marching bands. The event indicated the communitys new willingness to officially embrace its wild- and-wooly past. To add authenticity, the base of the monument Dodge City Boot Hill . This content downloaded from 150.135.135.70 on Fri, 14 Aug 2015 22:56:50 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp Oscar H. Simpson and steer-head sculpture. This content downloaded from 150.135.135.70 on Fri, 14 Aug 2015 22:56:50 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp THE JOURNAL OF ARIZONA HISTORY was constructed of rock from the old county jail and bore the inscription: My trails become your highways. In his dedication speech, Southwest Historical Society spokesman C. C. Isley placed the monument within the context of national interest in the Old West. Dozens of magazines for sale in New York and Philadel- phia, Isley reminded his audience, reaffirmed the need to pre- serve a fragment of the Old West for our children.19 For the next decade and a half, Simpsons Boot Hill statues - sanctioned and satirical - were Dodge Citys only monuments to its past. Lack of money and failure to agree on a specific plan were to blame. Ideas for a Boot Hill memorial ranged from Joe Hulpieus miniature reproduction of the Santa Fe Trail to a two- room sodhouse, a diorama of old Front Street, and a brass buffalo. Most serious discussions involved Hamilton Bells museum idea, which city …