Myths of the Wild West

In the 1840s, white Americans began to head west from the middle of the country. The picture we get nowadays comes largely from novels, comics and, especially, films. But is it really true that the Wild West was won by families in wagons travelling to California and fighting Red Indians on the way? When George Bush said that Osama bin Laden was “wanted dead or alive”, quoting the famous words on the posters we all know of Billy the Kid and Jesse James, was this something from American history or Hollywood westerns?

The Americanisation of the continent did not begin with an adventure, but with a sale. In 1803, the French Emperor Napoleon sold President Thomas Jefferson 800,000 square miles (2,072,000 km²) of land in what is today the USA. This made America three times bigger than it was the year before.

By the 1840s, newspaper men were writing that (white) Americans must take the whole continent. It needed liberty and self-government. It was the right of every American. And it was their job to travel and push these ideas so that all the land from Boston in the east to California in the west and New Mexico in the south should follow one great democratic American dream.

This, perhaps, seems strange to us nowadays, but it is important to remember that Texas, Arizona, southern Utah and New Mexico in the south had been Spanish and, later, Mexican and there were very few Americans in these areas. Oregon was British and California still mainly Spanish. The middle of the country was not even filled in on maps. When the first wagons started from the mid-western states on their way to Oregon and California, they were called ‘emigrant trails’ because the lands they were going to were like foreign countries.

Some families left because they wanted to get rich quickly. There were wonderful stories of the healthy climate of California, where people could live till they were two hundred years old. A newspaper even had a story about a man who died on the way but came to life again when his body arrived in California. Others thought that the streets were covered with gold – and it’s true that gold was discovered a couple of decades later – and that men could grow whatever food they wanted and become rich. So, people travelled from the poor mid-west states to new lands of promise.

Others were more interested in getting out of the old land than arriving in the new one. Many could not pay their debts; others lost their homes or had farms without enough water or grass to feed their animals. Some were desperate young criminals with nothing to keep them in the towns where they had grown up. But it seems true that as many people were pushed out of their mid-west homes as were pulled to California by promises of a new land of milk and honey.

What is definitely not true is that the wagons they drove were always attacked by Red Indians. In fact, the Native Americans were often very helpful and showed the Americans how to cross wide and dangerous rivers or where to find food. Many Americans died – probably about one in ten - but this was often because they drowned in the rivers or because there was not enough to eat. Even after they crossed the rivers, there were still mountains to climb, with small children, wagons and cattle. It was a hard journey. But, as we know from the cinema, the families in the wagon train always helped each other when they had problems!

Or, actually, they didn’t! The Donner Party of 1846 gives us a picture of some of the terrible things that could happen: they couldn’t read maps and so always went the wrong way; they took short cuts that ended in deserts or mountains and had to return; they had fights and killed each other; they shot their Indian helpers and ate them, as well as the dead bodies of their white American neighbours; some families would not look after small children whose parents had died on the way; and most of their animals were stolen or killed. When they got to California, there were only forty-eight of the eighty-seven people that started the journey. One woman on the trip, Mary Graves, wrote to her friend back home in 1847:

“I will now give you some good and friendly advice. Stay at home – you are in a good place, where, if sick, you are not in danger of starving to death.”

But nobody was listening. From 1841 to 1848, only fifteen thousand people headed west. In 1849 and ’50, there were 75,000 and from 1855 to 1861, the year the American Civil War began, a quarter of a million. They went for gold and to work with the new railways; young men went to steal (and murder if people tried to stop them); young women soon followed them to sell their bodies or to get married.

So, why do we have the idea that the families in the wagons going west were the American ideal? Were they people trying to control the wild and working hard to realise their dreams, while offering freedom to one and all as they moved about this new continent? Several American presidents have used the image whether it was true or not.

Abraham Lincoln actually grew up in a small cabin made of wood and eventually lived in the White House. Thirty years later, Theodore Roosevelt wrote ‘The Making of the West’ and spoke of the courage and adventurousness of these long-dead people. He wrote like he knew them. In reality, he was born rich and went to Harvard, the best and most expensive university in the country.

Ronald Reagan became Governor of California and one of the most popular presidents that America has ever known, but started out as an actor who played macho cowboys. Finally, George Bush, with his talk of ‘wanted dead or alive’ often spoke of Hollywood films and TV series that taught him about the West – a history that never happened, just as the great American hero, the ever-moving farm worker that we call a cowboy, is also a work of the imagination.