When I was a kid, I loved Westerns -- movies, books, anything. John Wayne and Clint Eastwood were my heroes to some degree and there was a time when Louis L'Amour was my favorite author. Part of that, I think, was borne out of a desire to know the history of where I was living (I was from Arizona and New Mexico), so for me, the Old West was always places like Southern California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, West Texas, and if you really wanted to push it, maybe some part of Oklahoma, too. Well, the "histories" I got were really more like mythologies and most of them were fairly violent, too (especially Eastwood's Man With No Name trilogy). And if you watch a Peckinpah film or read one of Cormac McCarthy's Western novels, you'll see that there is a possibly still more violent side to the "Old West" myth. So I think Wyoming's myth of the West is competing against something else, something more accurate, though still celebrated, because the West has been seen as a place for the rough, macho crowd.

Also, if you look at the list of states I gave above, you'll see that many of them border with Mexico. Because of that, the myth of the West I've been given is one where America and Mexico are deeply intertwined, where the young cowboy who left his home and family back east (probably the foothills of Tennessee or Kentucky, another place where tough people live) and after learning the ways of the West, takes a Mexican woman for his wife. I wonder if Wyoming gets to profit from placing itself within the myth of the West, while still having some distance from Mexico and all the negatives that go along with it (whether real or perceived).

Rachel's point is also othering. She uses the "we" pronoun, but knowing she's not a cowboy (gender biguity aside) I'm left hypothsizing that "we" refers to White people. I suspect this is intentional by the author to illustrate her point. There's also a comment on gender in there somewhere.

i grew up in germany and when i was young, i read so many novels and books about indians and cowboys it felt like a revelation to drive through whyoming one day on a road trip and recognize names of places and rivers and such. but i also knew it was a romantization... my favorite books were of someone who had actually never been to the places he wrote about.

i was wondering if you could write more about the "victor owns the narrative" phrase you mention. i often use that phrase when describing what happens with the history and lives of people in east germany. different to the other countries of the former ussr who went through the break down as a whole, the smaller part of germany that was communist was eaten up by the bigger, richer, 'victorious' capitalist/democratic germany. now the narrative is completely owned by the 'west' -- there are no institutions of power in east germany (influential media and companies). it's sad to see that 40 years of 'our' east german lives were lived wrongly. i would be glad about any commentary or, better, book suggestions.

thank you! i LOVE this blog because it changes my world view. keep up the good work!

The clip is a great example of the way we socially construct both places and times. Wyoming, a stand in here for “The Old West,” is mythologized as a place where people haven’t changed much.

Is it the Old West itself or our awareness of it that is socially constructed? If the former, then can we make it as we traditionally believed it to be? Also if the former, what if different social groups disagree?

I grew up where a lot of people think cowboys come from, and tons of people move there to be this weird idea of what they think "authentic" is. I'm sure that happens all over but it's really funny to see people from wherever put on a kind of costume (or sometimes a real one) or artifice while trying to capture something genuine they feel they're missing. They build these cartoonish houses to fit with their idea of the area and embrace all the touristy activities. It's a bit like if I went to Paris in a beret, a striped shirt and a red scarf, carted around a loaf of bread and started speaking fake French ("Hongh hongh hongh!!") to everyone on the street :)

So yeah, people have some strange ideas about the wild west, often tied up with escapism I think. There also seems to be a common theme of people who move to the area as adults having a "conquerer" personality, as well.

The romanticization of past times is essentially the only way that the majority of people think of past times at all. There are certain time periods that seem to get special attention for romanticization - the wild west, Victorian England, the American Old South, the 1950s, European Medieval times, the Edo period of Japan, etc. To be fair, we also tend to romanticize what we expect to happen in future times and what we think it would be like in other countries right now. I suspect there is very much a the-grass-is-greener factor at play.

Also, I agree not to demonize the pasta people.

I don't know that I agree that revisionist history is an issue as it relates to the Native Americans. I don't know anyone who isn't aware that the Native American's were royally screwed over. Popular culture in the earlier part of the 20th century may have lionized the cowboy, and demonized the Indians, but I can't think of a movie made in the last 30 years that promoted this point of view. In fact, I would argue that the most popular western of the last quarter century, Dances With Wolves, takes the exact opposite approach.

Grizzly, I'd say the main catch with history as it pertains to the Native Americans is that American pop culture went almost directly from Indians-as-enemy to Indians-as-noble-savage. They got romanticized in a completely different way, and I don't think that's done the Native Americans any favors--now the view is that they are this exotic, blameless people who lived in a kind of Shangri-La until the white man came and ruined it. Don't get me wrong--I'm not denying the genocide and other horrors visited by Europeans and their descendants on the indigenous people of the Americas. But I do think the Indians get idealized, infantilized, and subsequently dehumanized by mainstream American culture--the Indian as noble savage basically serves to enrich the white man and teach him meaningful lessons about life. (See also,"magical Negro.") Even your example, Dances With Wolves, illustrates this--white guy stumbles upon Indian tribe, white guy gets adopted into Indian tribe, white guy becomes the most revered and special member of the tribe.