Made In America (26 page)

Although Wister introduced many of the conventions of cowboy fiction – the use of a hero without a name, the introduction of a climactic shoot-out between the hero and villain, the immortal line ‘When you call me that,
smile!'
– his main achievement was to make the cowboy a respectable figure for fictionalization. He began the process with a now
forgotten novel called
Lin McLean,
but brought it to full fruition with
The Virginian.
The story of an easterner (unnamed of course) who goes west, it struck a chord with millions of Americans, but particularly among the better educated at whom it was aimed. The book sold 50,000 copies in its first four months and three million copies overall, went through fifteen printings in its first seven years, and was made into a Broadway play that ran for ten years, and subsequently into a seminal film.

The mythologizing of the West was consolidated in the immensely popular novels of writers like C. J. Mulford, creator of the absurdly uncowboylike Hopalong Cassidy, and Zane Grey, a New York dentist who knew almost nothing of the West but refused to let that get in the way of a good tale.
²⁵
The first movie western,
The Great Train Robbery,
came in 1903. By the 1920s, westerns accounted for nearly a third of all Hollywood features. But their real peak came in the 1950s on television. During their zenith year, 1959, the American television viewer could choose among twentyeight western series running on network television – an average of four a night
²⁶

It is decidedly odd that these figures of the West, whose lives consisted mostly of herding cows across lonely plains and whose idea of ultimate excitement was a bath and a shave and a night on the town in a place like Abilene, should have exerted such a grip on the popular imagination. As the historian William W. Savage has put it: ‘The cattle business and cowboy life were hardly the stuff of which legends are made ... The cowboy is a symbol for many things – courage, honour, chivalry, individualism – few of which have much foundation in fact.‘
²⁷

Cowboys certainly didn't spend a lot of time shooting each other. In the ten years that Dodge City was the biggest, rowdiest cow town in the world, only thirty-four people were buried in the infamous Boot Hill Cemetery, and almost all of
them had died of natural causes. Incidents like the shoot-out at the OK Corral or the murder of Wild Bill Hickock became famous by dint of their being so unusual. Those who
were
shot seldom got up again. Scarcely a western movie has been made in which at least one character hasn't taken a bullet in the thigh or shoulder but shrugged it off with a manly wince and continued firing. As one observer has put it: ‘One would think that the human shoulder was made of some self-healing material, rather like a puncture-proof tire.‘
²⁸
In fact, nineteenth-century bullets were so slow, relatively speaking, and so soft that they almost never moved cleanly through the victim's body. Instead, they bounced around like a pinball and exited through a hole like that created by a fist punched through paper. Even if a bullet miraculously missed the victim's vital organs, he would almost invariably suffer deep and incapacitating shock and bleed to death within minutes. For the most part, trust and goodwill were no more lacking in the lawless environment of the West than elsewhere. As Boorstin notes, it is no accident that the term
pardner
– originally conveying a sense much deeper and more trusting than that of a casual friendship – entered the language in the gold fields of California around 1850.
²⁹
Justice was often peremptory and swift – thieves and cheats on riverboats were generally put down on the nearest sand-bar and left to make their way back to civilization, if they could – but at least justice there was. Land-based miscreants were often dealt with by
kangaroo courts
– impromptu convocations that seldom bothered with the niceties of due process. This rather odd and interesting term has been traced to Texas, a place notably deficient in antipodean marsupials, and was first recorded in 1849. It appears to have no connection to Australia – the expression was unknown there until introduced from America – and may derive from the idea of a criminal being bounced like a kangaroo to the gallows, but that is no more than conjecture.

Among other terms that appear to have arisen in the West are
bogus, rip-roaring, joint
in the sense of a gathering spot,
piker for
an untrustworthy character (it is sometimes said to be a reference to the inhabitants of Pike County, Missouri, but more probably comes from
turnpike), to be caught between a rock and a hard place, six-shooter
for a Colt revolver,
gunplay, holdup,
and
crook,
plus scores of others that didn't survive into the twentieth century, such as
dying with throat trouble
and
the big jump
for being hanged.
Bogus
is wholly mysterious and
crook
only slightly less so.
Crook
may have something to do with the fact that a shepherd's crook is not straight but bent
(bent
was in the nineteenth century a common adjective for a criminal, and still is in Britain) but written evidence is lacking.

Many of the terms we most closely associate with cowboys and life amid the purple sage didn't appear in the West until much later, if at all.
Dogy,
a motherless calf, memorialized in the song lyrics ‘git along, little dogy, git along', has not been found earlier than 1903.
³⁰
Hoosegow,
for a jail, didn't enter the language until 1920. Bandits were seldom called that;
banditti
was the more common term.
Bounty hunter, gunslinger
and
to have an itchy trigger finger
were all the inventions of Hollywood scriptwriters.
³¹

The lexical creations of cowboys, miners and other western Americans become incidental when compared with the legacy of Spanish terms from the West. These at one time numbered well over a hundred. Among the more notable survivors we find
lasso
(1819),
sombrero
(1823),
patio
(1827),
corral
(1829),
lariat
(from
la reata,
'the rope', 1831),
canyon
(1834),
plaza
(1836),
burro, stampede
and
rodeo
(1844),
bonanza
(1844),
bronco
and
pronto
(1850),
alfalfa
(1855),
cinch
(from
cincha,
a saddle girth; 1859),
pinto
(1860) and
vigilante
(1865).
³²

Often these words had to be wrestled into shape.
Wrangler
comes from
caballerangero. Vamos
became
vamoose
and then
mosey. Vaquero,
literally ‘cow handler', went through any number of variations –
buckhara, bakkarer, backayro, buccahro
– before finally settling into English as buckaroo. The
ten-gallon hat
is named not for its capacity to hold liquids (it would have to be the size of a bath-tub for that) but for the braid with which it was decorated; the Spanish for braid is
galón.

Sometimes the English spellings of Spanish words took some time to become established. As late as the 1920s,
bronco
appeared in a famous ad for Jordan cars in this manner: ‘Somewhere west of Laramie, there's a broncho-busting, steer-roping girl who knows what I'm talking about.' In the same way, G. M. Anderson, the first cowboy movie star, was sometimes represented to his fans as
Broncho Billy,
and the evidence suggests that it was pronounced by some as spelled, Meanwhile,
rancher,
from the Mexican-Spanish
rancho,
or ‘mess-room', was often originally pronounced ‘ranker'.

The first English-speaking immigrants to the south-west also encountered Spanish-Mexican cuisine for the first time: tacos, enchiladas, tortillas and the like. Nachos are said to be named tor a certain Ignacio who made them particularly well, but the story, if true, is unsubstantiated. Unquestionably apocryphal is the old tale that Mexicans began calling Americans
gringos
because a popular marching song during the Mexican war contained the words ‘Green grow the rushes'. In fact,
gringo
is not a New World term at all. It was in common use in Spain in the eighteenth century. It is a corruption of
Griego,
'Greek', signifying unintelligible foreign babble, in much the same way as we say ‘It's Greek to me.‘
³³

Many other terms that are sometimes lumped in with Spanish expressions brought into English by cowboys and ranchers actually entered English much earlier, among them
adobe
and
mesa
as early as 1759,
calaboose
(from
calabozo,
'dungeon') by 1792, and
mustang
(from
mesteño
or
mestengo,
signifying stray animals) in 1808. One of the more
breathtakingly complex of these early adaptations was
maroon.
In the sense of being stranded, it began life as the Spanish
cimarrón
(literally ‘one who lives on the mountain tops'), and originally signified a fugitive slave in the West Indies. Then it came to mean the offspring of such a slave. Finally it arrived at its modern sense of suffering abandonment. But the Spanish also applied the word to a tribe of Muskhogean Indians (the ones we know as
Seminoles).
In the mean time, the French had picked up the word, changed it to
marron
(their word for chestnut), and it was from there that the English naturalized it ‘into
maroon.
Ironically, when the Seminoles were eventually driven from Florida, they were resettled in Oklahoma near the Cimmaron River. Rather less challenging was
el lagarto,
'the lizard', which became naturalized in English as
alligator.

Further north, French-speaking trappers provided many useful words to the settlers, notably
gopher, rendezvous, peak
for a mountain top (from the French
pic), badlands
(translated literally from the French
mauvaises terres),
and
park
in the sense of a mountain valley. This last named didn't survive in a general sense but lives on in some place names, such as Estes Park, Colorado. As with Spanish, many French words came into English well ahead of the western migrations, among them
chute
(1804),
butte
and
picayune
(1805),
coulee
(1807),
depot
(1832) and
to sashay
(1836). Often they, too, went through convoluted transformations.
Lagniappe,
usually attributed to the French of New Orleans, in fact originated among the Kechuan Indians of Peru as
yapa.
The Spanish adopted it as
ñapa.
The French then took it from the Spanish and we from the French.

If the English-speaking settlers of the West didn't shoot each other much, they did shoot a lot of buffalo and a lot of Indians. The two were not unconnected. Between 1830 and 1895, the 70 million buffalo that roamed the great plains
were reduced in number to just 800, most of those in zoos or touring shows. The virtual extermination of the buffalo was not simply a matter of sloppy overkill, as we are often led to believe, but the result of ‘a conscious policy connived at by the railways, the army and the cattle ranchers as a means of subduing the Indians and keeping them on their reservations'.
³⁴
During roughly the same period, the number of Indians fell from 2 million to 90,000 as war, disease, and poverty born of the loss of their lands and livelihood took their brutal toll.

To say that the Indians were often treated abysmally barely conveys at the scale of the indignity heaped upon them. Again and again, they were uprooted and moved on until they were crowded on to the meanest, most unproductive land. Though America's wars with the Indians ended in 1886 with the surrender of the great Apache chief Geronimo, their mistreatment did not end there. Between 1887 and 1934, they were deprived of a further 86 million acres. Altogether, as Howard Zinn notes, the United States made 400 treaties with the Indians and broke every one of them. They weren't even made citizens until 1924.
³⁵

Today no one knows how many Indians there are. All we know is how many people think they are Indians, which is of course not the same thing. Some two million Americans claimed on the 1990 census to be Indian, but that was a rise of almost 40 per cent from the 1980 census – clearly not in line with population growth.
³⁶

Some 300 tribes remain in America today, but much of the linguistic diversity that once existed is gone for ever. According to Dr Duane King of the National Museum of the American Indian, ‘fewer than 200 [Native American] languages are spoken today, and 80 to 100 of those will probably disappear within a generation'.
³⁷
Among those most perilously on the brink of extinction are Mandan (with only six known speakers left in 1991), and Osage (spoken by
only five). Lakota, the language used in the movie
Dances with Wolves,
appears to be dead. No native speaker could be found to act as adviser to the film crew. In only half a century or so America conquered the West, but at a terrible price to its own native cultures.

By the early 1830s America’s cotton trade with Britain had become so vast that up to a thousand ships at a time, a significant portion of the Atlantic fleet, were engaged in carrying cotton to Liverpool. The problem was that most made the return journey largely empty. Seeking out a convenient cargo for the return trip, the shipowners hit on an unusual one: people.

Never mind that their ships were never intended for passengers, that a crossing could take up to three months with the human freight crowded into fetid holds that were breeding grounds for diseases like trachoma and malignant typhus, which in the nineteenth century was so closely associated with Atlantic crossings that it was called
ship fever.
People were willing to endure almost any hardship to get to America if the price was right, and by packing the passengers in and giving them almost nothing in the way of civilizing comforts, the fares could be made not just low but effectively irresistible. By mid-century a one-way ticket in steerage (so called because it was near the ship’s steering mechanism and thus noisy) could be had for as little as $12 from Liverpool to New York, and for less than $10 ftom Dublin. All but the most miserably destitute could scrape together that.
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