Commentary: Family values in the western

Two westerns have been on my mind lately: Elmore Leonard’s Last Stand at Saber River (1959) and Louis L’Amour’s The Quick and the Dead (1973). Add to that another, Jack Schaefer’s Shane (1949). All of them concern small nuclear families on the frontier that are being menaced by villains.

In Schaefer’s Wyoming, the villain is a cattle baron who simply wants settlers off his open range. The mysterious stranger Shane, takes up residence with a settler family, the Starretts, then defends them by killing the cattleman’s hired gunslinger. The story is told by a boy, who has only a boy’s understanding of conflict and danger, so the violence is muted.

A decade later, Leonard’s novel, set in Arizona, whittles this story down to a long confrontation between a settler and a whole family of villains. Civil War veteran, Cable, has been off fighting for the Confederacy. After being wounded several times, he is sent home. There he finds that Union sympathizers have taken over his house and pastures. He has to evict them by force in chapter 1, and for the rest of the novel he must defend family and property. It’s kill or be killed.

L’Amour blends these two stories and sets his short novel in Colorado, where his family, the McKaskels, is protected from a nasty gang of villains by a Shane-like frontiersman and gunman, Con Vallian. The atmosphere from the start is another one of kill or be killed. While the killing in Shane takes place at a saloon in town, Leonard and L’Amour bring it right to the family’s doorstep.

Fiction, including westerns, is a product of the time when it was written. And put in chronological order, from 1949 to 1973, these three westerns make an interesting progression. While the central situation is the same—family vs. menacing villains—the escalation of violence from Schaefer to L’Amour is notable.

Shane. I have come to read Shane as a postwar story in tune with the reentry of WWII soldiers to the homeland. Trained to kill, many of them survivors of fierce combat, these returning veterans were not all successful making the transition to peacetime. We know now from modern psychology, especially after Vietnam and with wars in the Middle East, that the stress of life-and-death conditions can be traumatizing.

Shane can be read as a return from the killing fields to hearth and home. Like the combat veteran, Shane has a history he does not speak of, and he attempts to leave it behind by becoming another kind of man, a farmer like Starrett. Unlike the film, which preserves Shane’s identity as a gunman, Schaefer has him actually put away his gun belt, like a past he wants to disown.

The lesson of the story is that Shane is forever marked by his past. Like the returning veteran forever changed by his experience on the battlefield, he’s fated never to settle down into family life and the workaday world. Most of all, he can never find peace.

There is sadness and a sense of loss as he rides off at the end, but only after there is no longer need for his services as a gunman. His job is done. For Starrett, the range war and the killing are also over, and the novel ends with him at the center of stability and restored order—husband, father, and respected community leader.

National Day of the Cowboy

Today, July 24, 2010, is National Day of the Cowboy. A while ago, I invited western writers and fans of western writers to observe the day here at Buddies in the Saddle with a Fictional Cowboy Hall of Fame. I asked everyone to consider the novels and short stories they’ve read and to say a few words about the one character they believe best exemplifies the Code of the West.

Here’s what they had to say:

ChuckTyrell over at Outlaw Trail said...

 “I have to vote for Will Penny. The movie was based on one segment of a series called The Westerner. Sure shows the loyalty and honesty of the cowboy. According to Wikipedia, Heston said it was his favorite film, bar none, and that means he rated it higher than The Ten Commandments or Ben Hur. That's saying a lot for Will Penny.”

Will Penny was a creation of writer-director Tom Gries, who contributed to a good many TV westerns, like “The Westerner” and “Wanted: Dead or Alive,” plus a few films, starting with a B-western, The Bushwhakers (1959). After Will Penny (1968), he directed 100 Rifles (1969) and Breakheart Pass (1975).

David Cranmer over at Education of a Pulp Writer said...

 “Interesting that my mind wanders to Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. Interesting because Earp was not a fan of the term cowboy and hunted a group of them during his famous ride. But for books, the latest Robert B. Parker series featuring Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch sum up the code you speak of.”

Known maybe best for his crime fiction character Spenser in a series of at least 40 novels, and made into a successful TV series “Spenser for Hire” (1985-88), Robert B. Walker also wrote this series of Cole and Hitch westerns: Appaloosa (2005), Resolution (2008), Brimstone (2009), and Blue-Eyed Devil (2010). These came at the end of a long, award-winning career. Parker died in January of this year.

Walker Martin said...

“I vote for Hashknife Hartley, a character invented by long time western author, W.C. Tuttle. Hashknife was a rangeland detective who often worked for such organizations as Cattlemen's Associations. He appeared as the lead character in dozens of stories, serials, and books, mostly from such pulps as ADVENTURE, SHORT STORIES, WEST, and WESTERN STORY, during the 1920 through 1945 period. He certainly observed all the tenets of the Code of the West.”

W. C. Tuttle (1883-1969) sold 1000+ magazine stories and dozens of novels, almost all of them westerns. Hashknife Hartley and Sleepy Stevens were among his best known characters. He can be heard here reading two of their stories, recorded for radio broadcast in or about 1950. If you enjoy old radio drama, you’ll love these.

 Tuttle also wrote screenplays – imdb.com gives him story credit for more than 50 films, mostly in the 1920s. His last credit there is for an episode of the TV series, “Cheyenne” in 1958, called “Noose at Noon.”

Gary Dobbs, over at The Tainted Archive said...

 “I'd vote for Edge - the series character from George Gilman - he may in fact be an anti-westerner but they were damn exciting books.”

Gary has been talking up the Edge series recently and reprinted an interesting interview with author George Gilman at his blog. If you want to get the story behind the creation of Edge, the interview starts here. 

Shane (1953)

Myth, reality, and 20th-century history meet in this classic western from the 1950s. In Jack Schaefer's postwar novel Shane and the Hollywood adaptation by George Stevens, a gunfighter appears out of nowhere, befriends and eventually defends a frontier family, and then disappears again. In a way, he represents every returning soldier from the killing fields of WWII and Korea who needed to be reintegrated into the communities they came from. The difficulty of this process is reflected in Shane's hyper-vigilant behavior and unwillingness to talk about his past, in both the book and the film, which suggest a man more than a little afflicted with PTSD. So the coming together of the western-movie gunslinger and the peaceable nuclear family in this story was surely a way for audiences to understand in fictional form the real drama going on in so many of their personal lives. That the gunslinger disappears, the family is saved, and the next generation is now free to grow "strong and straight" must have been greatly reassuring.

Meanwhile, the actual historical context of Schaefer’s story is the time of the Johnson County War of 1892, as Wyoming cattlemen attempted to force out rustlers, homesteaders, and other intruders on the open range. Cattleman Ryker (aka Fletcher in the novel) and his cowboys come riding up in the opening scene of the film to begin making their threats to the Starrett family to get off their land. So what we see in the film as the pressure on the homesteaders becomes increasingly violent has some basis in history.