The story of how and why the
American West became so legendary,
and what caused its demise.
When my parents suggested that after we visited
San Francisco, we should “swing by” to see Maurice
Culhane in Rancho Mirage, I nearly blurted, “Hey, that’s
a two-day haul,” but caught myself. How many more
opportunities would I have to spend with my eighty-something-year-old parents? And I also wanted to
meet Maurice. Despite being dad’s first cousin and the
best man in their 1942 wedding, they had somehow
“lost track” of Maurice and now wished to reconnect.
And snoop, too.
Maurice lived in a very rich neighborhood, which
mom thought surprising, given that he was on his own
when he was sixteen years old. Dad was not willing to
admit that Maurice even lived in Rancho Mirage.
Never mind all of this idle speculation, I said, we
have a decision to make. After we visit San Francisco
we can head to Rancho Mirage via California’s scenic
Pacific Coast Highway, or we go east, cross the Sierra
Nevada range in the Lake Tahoe area, and then head
south on Highway 395. This route will add a day to
our trip but it will allow us to experience much more
of the old West.
Mom immediately offered that ever since she
was a little girl she wanted to visit the Wild Wild
West. Dad said, yes, same with me. Me? I already had
the maps and stops in hand. Sure, I had traveled in
the American West before, but usually to places that
have been tamed by air-conditioning, subdivisions,
and sprinkler systems.
The Wild West of my youth, of our country’s
youth, is disappearing. But was it ever that
Wild? How did this large section of our country—defined as the land west of the Mississippi
River—become so famous, not just in
America but throughout Europe?
Before the Europeans arrived in the
New World, there was no “Wild West.”
The many Indian tribes that roamed the West did so
in concert with nature. As Luther Standing Bear wrote,
We did not think of the great open plains, the
beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams
with tangled growth as ‘wild.’ Only to the
white man was nature a ‘wilderness’ and only
to him was the land ‘infested’ with ‘wild’ animals
and ‘savage’ people.
To properly frame the West, it helps to remember
that just thirteen states existed after we defeated
the British during the Revolutionary War, and those
were all on the east coast! It was the Spanish who
controlled much of our western lands well into the
early 1800s. And their view, just like those of the British
and French, was that the Wild West was a land to be
civilized and exploited.
According to David J. Weber, the Zunis, like most Indians,
in contrast to the Spaniards, “interacted more intimately
with the natural world…and tended to regard
the users of the land as possessing greater rights than
the nominal owners of land”—owners whose God was
outside of nature and who thought they had a “divinely
inspired message to subdue the earth.”
Wishing to find cities made of gold, the Spanish
moved northward from Mexico into the American
Southwest, trampling over the land and its native people
in their drive to find the precious metal. In 1848, or
a few decades after Spanish claims in the United States
had ended, gold was indeed found at Sutter’s Mill near
Sacramento. On the first day of our journey to Rancho
Mirage, mom, dad, and I stopped at this landmark, the
place where California’s famous Gold Rush began.
Does history repeat itself? Americans from the
east and people from around the world all raced to the
West, hoping, just like the Spanish had for centuries, to
strike it rich.
Our first travel night was spent in Lake Tahoe. After
dinner, dad gambled, while mom and I attended a
concert by a musical group that sang the Beatles standards.
Well, hello! As a young boy I never dreamed that
someday I would be dancing with my eighty-year-old
mother as she sang, “You say you want a revolution,”
but here we go!
On the following day, I thought mom and dad
would enjoy touring the restored old mining town of
Virginia City, Nevada, and they did, but what about
Bodie, California, several hours to the south?
“Sure, if Bodie is like Virginia City, let’s stop there,”
mom replied.
“No, mom, Bodie will be different. The state of California
keeps Bodie in a state of arrested decay, meaning
that remaining buildings will appear no better or worse
than when its mines closed in 1942.”
“Let’s go!”
A few hours later we arrived in Bodie, once the
richest and one of the most dangerous places in the
world. “Goodbye God, I am going to Bodie,” a young girl
once famously wrote in her diary, when she learned
her family would be moving to the godless town.
In the searing heat of the High Plains, we wandered,
stopping as it suited to peer through dust caked
windows and into the building’s past. Why, look, the
undertaker had a line of wooden coffins ready for his
next customers. Those bar stools and glasses look
ready for an evening rush. Gosh, the schoolroom looks
like the one I attended when I was young.
During its heyday, ten thousand people lived in
Bodie. The city had a Chinatown, and a Red Light district
where “ladies of the evening” sold their goods.
Like tens of millions of people around the world,
my earliest impressions of the West came from television.
In 1959, ten of our country’s most popular television
shows were “westerns.” Seems we never tired
of the gun-toting sheriffs, unshaven villains, warmhearted
women, and dim-witted Indians, as featured
in long running shows such as Gunsmoke, The Lone
Ranger, Ponderosa, and Death Valley Days.
But mine was hardly the first generation to be
so influenced by fictionalized depictions of the American
West.
In 1883, William F. Cody, better known as “Buffalo
Bill,” staged an outdoor extravaganza called the “Wild
West, Rocky Mountain, and Prairie Exhibition” in North
Platte, Nebraska. The show was a huge success. He
fiddled with the details until settling on “Buffalo’s Bill’s
Wild West,” a circus-like pageant that celebrated Western
life. He took the show on the road for four years,
attracting upwards of 20,000 people for his outdoor performances.
When he took his act to Europe, he again
gained great fame.
The allure of the West motivated the Irish poet
and playwright Oscar Wilde to travel to Leadville, Colorado.
He performed twice at the town’s opera house to
mixed reviews.
But when we examine the amount of television
shows, movies, stage performances, books, novels,
and short stories that have been produced on the
American West, we can see that only in recent decades
has attention been given to the long and sad story of
the native Indians.
South of Bodie we stopped again, this time because
a riverbed that was as bare as a stripped-out
mine caught my eye. We learned that at the turn of the
last century, Los Angeles diverted waters from the
eastern range of the Sierra Nevada range into its own
urban area.
My trip effectively ended at this dried out river bed,
a stark reminder of the conflict and forces that shaped
the West. Our native Indians lived in concert with the
land and its natural resources, while many of European-American stock believed that God created the land
and its minerals for their exclusive use, as something
to be tamed.
To mom’s delight and dad’s chagrin, Maurice Culhane
and his wife, Kaye, did indeed live in upscale Rancho
Mirage. I found them charming, but after an hour
or so, found it odd that Maurice and dad had barely exchanged
the first pleasantry.
“Dad, what is going on?” I asked him, in a corner of
the home.
“Maurice and I never got along when we were
young, and not much has changed!”
“Dad, I just hauled you and mom for hundreds
of miles to visit Maurice! You are eighty years old! Give
it up!”
“I guess you’re right.”
Fifteen years have now passed. Maurice and Kaye
died a few years after our visit to Rancho Mirage, and
while a few more family trips with mom and dad were
ahead of me, the trip to the Wild West would be the last
time that just the three of us would travel together.
And we had selected wisely.
Americana is a monthly column highlighting the cultural and historical nuances of this land through the rich storytelling of columnist Bill Fitzpatrick, author of the books, Bottoms Up, America and Destination: India, Destiny: Unknown.