![]() ![]() It will never disappear.Īny discussion of the conquest of the West may be likened to an animated gabble down the length of a long dinner table. It is still around, over thataway just a piece, bounded on three sides by credulity and on the fourth by the television screen. Mark Twain reported as fact some grisly rumors about one of it’s heroes Aaron Copland composed the music for a ballet that glorified one of its most celebrated killers Puccini wrote an opera about it George Bernard Shaw confected an exceedingly silly play about it.Īnd it has not disappeared. ![]() Even artists of the first rank have drawn upon it. It has, of course, afforded wondrously rich pickings for the journeymen of the mass entertainments scores of writers for pulp magazines, motion pictures, comic strips, radio, and television have hacked their way over its trails. Thousands of books have been written about it, many of them purporting to be history or biography all but a very few are fiction, and rubbish to boot. Yet this sinful world is, by any test, the most popular ever to be described to an American audience. The history is compounded of lies, the ethic was based on evil, the language was composed largely of argot and cant, the wars were fought by gangs of greedy gunmen, the geography was elastic, and the code and costume were both designed to accommodate violence. The world of the Wild West is an odd world, internally consistent in its own cockeyed way, and complete with a history, an ethic, a language, wars, a geography, a code, and a costume. ![]()
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