Table Of ContentGunfighter nation
1. Gunfighter nation
2. >$^G.□a
3. BOSTON PUBLIC LlBl^RY
4. Table of Contents
5. Introduction
6. Regeneration Through Violence: The Language oj the Myth
7. The Frontier Myth as a Theory of Development
8. 'Trogressives” and ''Populists*’
9. 1 The Winning of the West
10. The Historian as Hunter
11. The Winning of the West: A Progressive Myth of Origins
12. Recovering the Frontier: Regeneration Through Imperialism
13. The White City and the Wild West
14. Mob, Tribe, and Regiment
15. ''1008 Dead Niggers'’: The Logic of Massacre
16. Mythologies of Resistance
17. The Pinkerton Detective: Hawkeye Among the Communists
18. The Outlaw/Detective: Heroic Style as Ideology
19. The Significances of Dime-Novel Populism
20. Aristocracy of Violence
21. Recovering the Savage: Remington,
22. London, Garland
23. The Virginian (1902) and the Myth of the Vigilante
24. Democracy or Civilization: Dixon’s The Clansman (1904)
25. The Political Uses oj Symbolic Violence
26. From the Open Range to the Mean Streets
27. Zane Grey: The Formula Western, 1911—1925
28. The Virginian in Nighttown: Origins of the Hard-boiled Detective, 1910—1940
29. PART III
30. Cinematic Form and Mythographic Function: Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915)
31. Icons of Authenticity: The Movie Star as Progressive Hero
32. The Epic Western, 1923—1931
33. The Studio System, the Depression, and the Eclipse of the Western, 1930—1938
34. The Two-Gun Man of the Twenties: Gangster Films, 1931-1939
35. The Worldscale Western, 'Wictorian Empire''
36. Movies, 1935—1940
37. “Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch . . . Westerns, 1931-1939
38. The Western Is American History, 1939—1941
39. The Renaissance of the Feature Western
40. The Cult of the Outlaw
41. The Apotheosis of the “B” Western: John Ford's Stagecoach (1939)
42. Last Stands and Lost Patrols
43. ’ ■ ‘ ’■-‘'■‘•intw'i
44. PART
45. Cult of the Indian: Devil’s Doorway and Broken Arrow (1950)
46. 57)-
47. Killer Elite
48. High Noon (1952): The Hero in Spite of Democracy
49. A Good Man with a Gun: Shane (1953)
50. The Gunfighter Mystique
51. Imagining Third World Revolutions
52. Coloring the Looking-Glass: Mexico as Mythic Space, 1912—1952
53. The "Zapata Problem": The Strong Man Makes a Weak People
54. The Man Who Knows Communists: The Heroic Style oj Covert Operations (1953—54)
55. Fast Guns for '‘Zapata'*: The Counterinsurgency Scenario and Vera Cruz (1954)
56. 14
57. Search and Rescue/ Search and Destroy: The Indian-Hater as Counterguerrilla
58. The Magnificent Seven (1960) and the Counterinsurgency Paradox
59. i:
60. Conquering New Frontiers
61. John Wayne Syndrome: The Cult of ''The Duke”
62. Blockbuster Tactics: The Green Berets (1968) and the Big-Unit War
63. Attrition
64. Recovering the Mission: Mexico Westerns,
65. 1965-1968
66. Cross-over Point
67. The Demoralization of the Western: Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969)
68. Lunatic Semiology: The Demoralization of American Culture, 1969—1973
69. Conclusion:
70. The Crisis of Public Myth
71. Back in the Saddle Again?: The Reagan Presidency and the Recrudescence of the Myth
72. Imagining America
73. List of Abbreviations
74. Vf j&,.r,V 4 l
75. Notes
76. Notes to Chapter 4
77. Notes to Chapter 5
78. Notes to Chapter 6
79. Notes to Chapter 7
80. Notes to Chapter 8
81. Notes to Chapter 9
82. Notes to Chapter 10
83. Notes to Chapter 11
84. Notes to Chapter 12
85. Notes to Chapter 13
86. Notes to Chapter 14
87. Notes to Chapter 15
88. Notes to Chapter 16
89. Notes to Chapter 17
90. Notes to Conclusion
91. 764
92. 765
93. Bibliography
94. 784
95. [].
96. 33 - 6 -
97. Selected Filmography
98. Index
99. 834
100. S35
101. 836
102. S3 7
103. 8s8
Gunfighter nation
Richard Slotkin
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O n July 16, 1960, John F. Kennedy came to
_the podium of the Los Angeles Coliseum to
accept the Democratic Party’s nomination as candidate for President. As is customary in American
political oratory, Kennedy used his acceptance speech to provide a slogan that would characterize his
administration’s style of thought and action.
“I stand tonight facing West on what was once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch 3000 miles
behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a
new world here in the West....[But] the problems are not all solved and the battles are not all won,
and we stand today on the edge of a new frontier—the frontier of the 1960s, a frontier of unknown
opportunities and paths, a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.”
By invoking the Frontier as a symbol to trademark his candidacy, Kennedy also tapped into one of the
most resonant and persistent American myths. As Richard Slotkin shows in this extraordinarily
informed and wide-ranging new book, the myth of the Frontier has been perhaps the most pervasive
influence behind American culture and politics in this century.
Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America brings to completion a
distinguished trilogy of books that includes The Fatal Environment and the award-winning
Regeneration Through Violence. Beginning in 1893 at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago
with Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous address on the closing of the American frontier and Buffalo
Bill’s Wild West Show, Slotkin examines the transformation from history to myth of events like
Custer’s last stand and explores the myriad and fundamental ways the myth influences American
culture and politics.
Although Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” became the dominant interpretation of our national experience
among academic historians, it was the racialist theory of history (the ascendancy and superiority of
the Anglo-Saxon race), embodied in Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West that was most
influential in popular culture and government policy-making over the course of this century. The
explicit assumptions about race and civilization
(Continued on hack flap)
No ioiiger fee* property of the
Bostor?
Library.
Sate of this material benefite ti© Lsferar/
BOSTON PUBLIC LlBl^RY
Books by Richard Slotkin
FICTION
The Return of Henry Starr (1988)
The Crater (1980)
NONFICTION
Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in 20 th-Century America (1992)
The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800—i8go (1985)
So Dreadfull a Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip’s War, 1675—1677 (with James K.
Folsom; 1978)
Regeneration Through Violence:
The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600—1860 (1973)
Democratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be;
in this direction their unbounded imagination grows and dilates beyond all measure. . . . Their eyes
are fixed upon . . . [their] own march across these wilds, draining swamps, turning the course of
rivers, peopling solitudes, and subduing nature. This magnihcent image of themselves does not meet
the gaze of Americans at intervals only; it may be said to haunt every one of them in his least as well
as his most important actions and to be always flitting before his mind.
Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America (1835)
You couldn’t find two people who agreed about when it began, how could you say when it began
going off? . . . Anyway, you couldn’t use standard methods to date the doom; might as well say that
Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along, the turnaround point where it would
touch and come back to form a containing perimeter ....
Michael Herr Dispatches
It’s time to see the frontiers as they are. Fiction, but a fiction meaning blood . . .
John Berryman
“The Dangerous Year” (1942)
Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/gunfighternationOOslot
Acknowledgments
I began researching this book more than twenty years ago, and over the years have benefited from the
advice and criticism of more colleagues, friends, and students than I can readily list. I want
particularly to thank the Trustees of Wesleyan University, and former President Colin G. Campbell,
for their consistent support of my research through the university’s sabbatical and research grant
programs; and for helping to create and maintain an academic environment in which undergraduate
teaching and research are mutually reinforcing. Parts of this study were completed with the aid of
grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the
Humanities. Thanks also to Jim Belson, who invited me to participate in the NEH Symposium on
“The Western” at Sun Valley, 1976.
I am indebted, in ways that footnotes don’t quite cover, to the ideas and suggestions of: Jeanine
Basinger, Sacvan Bercov- itch. Hazel Carby, Mark Cooper, Michael Denning, Eric Greene, Joan
Hedrick, David Konstan, Lary May, Richard Ohmann, Robert O’Meally, Joseph Reed, Michael
Rogin, Mark Slobin, William Stowe, Alan Trachtenberg, Elizabeth Traube, Dufheld White and
Christina Zwarg. I am grateful to Iris Slotkin for the understanding and support she has given me, for
years of good conversation about the ideas in this book, and for introducing me to “systems” theories
of psychological, familial, and social interaction. Thanks also to Joel Slotkin, for helping with the
bibliography and setting up my computer.
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