Going western
After writing about Preacher, I began thinking about its peripheral influence. I got to grow up watching westerns. Clint Eastwood movies were the top westerns in my house. As a family, we watched our VHS collection of High Plains Drifter, Pale Rider, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Joe Kidd often- again, Clint Eastwood being a force of nature. Then there was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Young Guns, and Young Guns II. We had gone to see Dances with Wolves in the theater as a family, another movie that got me more interested in history- I was already fascinated with voyageurs and mountain men from Jeremiah Johnson and Ojibway (Ojibwe). Still, Dances with Wolves brought the Lakota to my attention.
I suppose I was drawn to the 1800s early on- pioneer history and manifest destiny were fascinating- Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder was the first chapter book I remember reading (around the same time as The Boxcar Children, anyway- which was something my mom read to my brother and I). The rest of Little House on the Prairie was also influential- the books and the television show.
The annual White Oak Rendezvous in Deer River exposed me to the fur trading era, and I became very interested in the voyageurs and tribes. There was also a man who went around to area resorts dressed in full voyageur garb and hauling a birch bark canoe around- we had campfire nights when resort guests would come and sit around the fire and learn about the fur trade and try out skills like using flint and steel to start the fire. Going to the rendezvous yearly and spending my allowance on rabbit furs, deer hide pouches, arrowheads, and frybread was a summer highlight.
My first-grade teacher was terrific and incorporated Ojibway culture into the classroom, and our K-6 school had a drum circle and traditional dancing in the gym. We made dreamcatchers in class, and when building forts in the woods, I made many attempts at constructing a wigwam. My love of and obsession with Westerns as an adult kicked in after I read Preacher, and it served to focus my college life and help me work toward a degree.
Going to see Unforgiven in the theater as a family was also a very memorable experience. Unforgiven was a fantastic Clint Eastwood western after westerns were primarily written off. Heck, Back to the Future went back to the Old West for the last feature in an incredible trilogy. Then there was The Quick and the Dead, Dead Man, Tombstone, Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill, and Geronimo, but I did not watch any new westerns for a few years until after reading Preacher…and then the amazing Deadwood series started. Deadwood was incredible, and as I got further into westerns, I got more interested in the West in the 1800’s. Deadwood and Preacher greatly influenced me and kept me interested in college and working toward a history degree. The remake of 3:10 to Yuma was a high point in the 2000s, though I already enjoyed the original with Glenn Ford and Van Heflin.
In Preacher, Jesse Custer began speaking to John Wayne as a coping mechanism for dealing with his father being killed in front of him and being stuck in a coffin and sunk in the swamp by Angelville with an air hose to breathe through for a month at a time. I had not watched John Wayne movies growing up, but once I began working at Blockbuster during college, I used many of my five free rentals per week, watching every John Wayne movie we had on the shelves and every western we had in the store. Movie studios ramped up remaking movies in the 2000s, a lot of horror movies were redone, but while I was working at the video store the remake of The Alamo was released as well- I much preferred the original John Wayne version where he played Davy Crockett.
The coonskin cap made famous by Davy Crockett was something that my brother and I both got and wore often- something my mom could get for us when she helped plan the North School Carnival one year. The life of Davy Crockett was certainly a part of the period I was interested in and the idea of the American Frontier that was so crucial to the westerns that followed.
The Searchers, Lonesome Dove, The Wild Bunch, The Fistful of Dollars Trilogy, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, High Noon, Shane, Magnificent 7, El Dorado, Rio Bravo, Red River, The Shootist, True Grit, The Long Riders, Fort Apache, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Broken Arrow, The Unforgiven, Cat Ballou, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Stagecoach, The War Wagon, Big Jake, Hondo, Winchester ’73, One-Eyed Jacks, Ride the High Country- there were so many incredible movies. I got into a very Bob Dylan-heavy music phase and was surprised to see him in the Sam Peckinpah film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. My DVD collection swelled during and after college, and westerns had the strongest representation among genre films.
I wrote my final Civil War seminar class project and presentation on William Clark Quantrill and the Missouri Border Guerillas during and after the Civil War. John Wayne had also been in Dark Command- a movie based on William Clarke Quantrill and the burning of Lawrence, Kansas- with the villain named William Cantrell. Frank James broke off from Quantrill’s Raiders after the war. The James and Younger gang robbed trains and banks, including a stay in Stillwater Prison in Minnesota…and Hollywood gave us The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid movie.
I have not many westerns in the last decade- maybe living out west and near where scenes of True Grit were filmed and not too far from Monument Valley where John Ford and John Wayne really set a scene for great stories, stories of grit.