Readers and writers of
Western fiction are always interested in the verisimilitude that
historically accurate references provide. When it comes to coffee,
quite a bit of which cowboys and other men of the West drank on a
regular basis, it was, more often than not, Folger's in their cups.
The fact that such men
enjoyed a morning cup of joe is reflected in the fact that they made
room for sacks of coffee beans
aboard their wagons, the additional weight be damned.
The beans were green,
though, so they had be roasted over an open fire or atop a stove
before they were fit to use—after they were ground. Since boiling
the grounds didn't guarantee there'd be no grounds in the resulting
beverage, the coffee was poured into a saucer, blown upon to cool it,
and then slurped to filter out any stray grounds that might remain.
As this process suggests,
it took time to brew up a decent cup of coffee. James
Athern Folger would make the process easier, buying out the
partners in Pioneer Mills and renaming it the James A. Folger
Company. When he died in 1889, his oldest son, James
A. Folger II (1835-1889), took over as the company's president,
and expanded the business. In 1963, the company was sold to Procter &
Gamble. Today, the coffee is a member of “the J. M. Smucker
Company's family
of brands.”
John Arbuckle's coffee was
also a Wild West winner. By using “an egg and sugar glaze”
that contained “Irish
moss,” he “sealed in the flavor”of unground roasted green
beans, selling them in “one-pound bags” as Arbuckle's Ariosa
Coffee.
Arbuckle also began to
include such offerings as “coupons . . . scissors . . . . [and]
peppermint
candy.” On cattle drives, cooks bartered the candy for the service
of a cow hand who'd agree to turn the coffee grinder's crank.
Later, he ground
the beans as well, saving his customers the time and trouble of
grinding them themselves.
By the time he died, in
1912, Arbuckle had become a millionaire
several times over, thanks to his coffee.
A great source for both
readers and writers of Westerns is available online—free of charge.
The Online Etymology
Dictionary lets writers
check the dates from which words were first and lets both authors and
fans check out the often-interesting histories associated with the
words.
For
example, the first appearance of the word “six-shooter,”
referring to “a revolver with six chambers,” is “attested” in
1844. Obviously, novels set before that year shouldn't refer to a
six-shot revolver as a “six-shooter,” while stories involving
later periods are free to do so.
Courtesy
of the June 18, 1864, ScientificAmerican,
the dictionary's same page offers this intriguing nugget concerning
the Gatling gun:
For
the first time in this war [the American Civil War], the Gatling gun
was used by Butler in repelling one of Beauregard's midnight attacks.
Dispatches state that it was very destructive, and rebel prisoners
were very curious to know whether it was loaded all night and fired
all day.
“Brand,”
as a verb, referring to the impression or burning “of a mark with a
hot iron,” originally referred to the performance of this act as a
means of marking criminals, to both stigmatize and identify them as
such. The word thus acquired the “figurative sense” of fixing “a
character of infamy upon.” by the 1850s, the verb became associated
with marking items to indicate one's ownership of them. The use of
“brand” as a noun didn't occur until 1828, when it referred both
to the instrument of branding and to the resulting mark.
“Spitoon”
was first used in 1811. Before there were “spitoons,” there were
“spitting boxes.”
In
the Middle Ages, a pommel
would be found on the handle of a sword, not on a saddle; the term
originally referred to “ornamental knob . . . . at the end of a
sword hilt.” It first began to be used as the name of the 'front
peak of a saddle” in the mid-fifteenth century.
There
are lots of other words that may be of interest to Western readers
and writers. Online Etymology
Dictionary may
not include every one of them, but it lists plenty. Make a list and
dig in or return again and again to this etymological gold
mine (“late 15c., "place where gold is dug out of the
earth," from gold (n.) + mine (n.). Figurative use "anything
productive of great wealth" is by 1882.”)
Obituaries. I never read
them when I was younger. I don't read many of them now. Anyone who
does, though, soon realizes what an odd, rather grotesque type of
essay they are, part biography and part eulogy.
Most death notices also
provide a handy, if not dandy, summary of the times in which the
dearly departed lived. (In obituaries, almost all of the departed are
“dear,” regardless of the what they may or may not have done
during their lifetimes.)
Wyatt Earp's obituary.
The Internet Archives
website stores the Los Angeles Times's
January 14, 1929, obituary of Wyatt Earp. The death notice's headline
reads, “Tamer
of Wild West Dies.” The piece's subtitle offers a tad more
information, even as it further characterizes the decedent: “Wyatt
Earp, Picturesque Gun-Fighting Marshal of Frontier Days, Passes
Without Boots On.”
Wild Bill Hickok
The article begins with
name-dropping, as its anonymous author reminds the newspaper's
readers that Earp was friends and “colleagues” with the likes of
“Wild Bill” Hickok, Bill Tilghman, Ben Thompson, and “Bat”
Masterson. (No mention is made of Earp's greatest friend and
colleague, Doc Holliday.
Some of the information
the obituary reports isn't altogether reliable. Earp may have met
Hickok, but the marshal of Abilene, Kansas, wasn't a “friend” of
Earp's, and, although Earp knew Thompson on a casual basis, the
outlaw was far from one of Earp's pals.
Shootout at the OK Corral.
The obituary notes that
Earp helped to bring “law and order into the rough cow camps of
the West with .45-caliber bullets.” While it's true that Earp did
exchange bullets with his adversaries in the Shootout at the OK
Corral and during the equally famous vendetta ride that followed this
event, he more often buffaloed his adversaries than shot them.
However, it seems that the Times
author wanted to sell his readers on the image of Earp as a
“picturesque” figure; to do so, he apparently thought it
necessary to exaggerate the facts a bit.
Doc Holliday
In mentioning the OK
Corral gunfight, the writer makes no mention of Holliday, although
the other participants are named. Perhaps the author supposed that a
mention of Hickok would detract from the luster of Earp or would
tarnish the carefully contrived image of the deceased that the author
appears to have labored to depict.
Josephine ("Sadie") Earp
Another possibility might
be that allusions to Holliday were omitted in deference to Earp's
widow, who took pains to preserve a pristine, rather than a
picturesque, view of her late husband. References to his association
with a drunken, boozing gambler and gunfighter whose common-law wife
had been (like Earp's own second wife) a prostitute might not fit
with the idea that Earp was a heroic lawman who helped to “tame”
the Wild West.
Bob Fitzsimmons (left) and Tom Starkey
Other of Earp's endeavors
are cited, including his prospecting for gold in the Klondike;
his controversial refereeing of the Fitzsimmons-Starkey boxing match
in Oakland, California; his taming of Colton, California; and his
management of the copper mine and “four oil wells . . . near
Bakersfield,” California, that he owned and his “breeding of
horses.”
As much a
jack-of-all-trades in his advanced years as he'd been in his prime,
Earp also offered “technical advice” to early Hollywood
filmmakers concerning “their productions.”
William S. Hart
At the end of the
obituary, the writer again drops a few names: actor “Bill” Hart,
movie producer Wilson Mizner, boxing promoter Tex Rickard, Earp's
widow Josephine (“Sadie”) Earp, and his sister Mrs. W. Edwards.
Earp's “honorary pallbearers,” readers learn, included Hart and
Mizner.
First published in 1855,
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (later
Leslie's Weekly) ended its run
in 1922. As its title suggests, the periodical provided engravings
and Daguerreotypes (and, later, photographs) as illustrations of the
news of the day.
According
to Joshua Brown, author of The Great Uprising and Pictorial
Order in Gilded Age America, the
newspaper's illustrated articles concerning the American Civil War,
which were often shocking and sensational, catapulted the publication
to success (20).
Frank Leslie
In
producing the 16-page newspaper, a laborious sort of assembly-line
approach was taken to produce each illustration. It took artists and
engravers eight hours to produce one completed illustration—and
this period of time represented an increase in speed; before the
assembly-line process was introduced, producing a single finished
illustration took as long as an entire week (Brown, Beyond
the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of
Gilded Age America33).
However,
a “beeswax mold” then had to be the finished picture then had to
be made of the page bearing the illustration, after which this mold
was immersed “in an electrocharged bath containing copper
particles” so that it could be copperplated—a process which took
“between thirty and forty-eight hours” (Beyond the
Lines 33).
Over
time, this process was expedited so that “by the 1880s three sets
of Frank Leslie's,
comprising forty-eight pages, were being electroplated in three
hours” (Beyond the Lines 39).
Critics
pointed out that the newspaper's claim that the resulting pictures
provided “'eye-witness' recordings of events” was far from the
truth, as they tended to be based more on the artists' imagination
than on a “direct observation” of the events they supposedly
depicted (Beyond the Lines
33).
The
printing of the newspaper itself was also a time-consuming
enterprise, but, like the production of its illustration, the time
required for the printing of the publication also decreased thanks to
technological developments and other innovations. For example, the
newspaper's purchase of a Taylor Perfecting Press in 1858 allowed
1,200 copies per hour of the newspaper to be printed (Beyond
the Lines 40). As a result,
Frank Leslie's could
report on the current events of the day while they were still
current.
To
appeal to the public, the newspaper routinely printed lurid stories;
as Brown points out, such fare included engravings of details of
“notorious crimes, . . . sexually charged cheap amusements and
“violent” rough sports” (Beyond the Lines 41).
Indeed,
the covers of the newspaper indicate the lurid nature of the
publication's contents.
After
almost 80 years, Frank Leslie's periodical ceased publication.
Leslie died in 1880. As the result of an expensive train trip that
he'd taken with his second wife, Miriam, and a bevy of their friends
in 1887, which Miriam describes in her book From Gotham to the
Golden Gate, an an economic recession, the publication was in
poor financial shape (Woman
of the Century459).
Frank Leslie
Upon
her husband's death, Miriam changed her name to his (Dictionary
of American Biography,
Vol. 11, 186), and, as Frank Leslie, ran the business until 1992,
when, tiring of the task, she sold the publication “and its German
edition for between $300,000 and $4000,000” (Woman
of the Century
459).
William ("Willie") Charles Kingsbury Wilde
As a
result, “in her early fifties,” she was “extremely rich”
(Beyond the Lines 233). She married yet again, to her fourth
husband, Oscar Wilde's younger brother William (“Willie”) Charles
Kingsbury Wilde, who was seventeen years younger than she (Beyond
the Lines 233).
Sherry
Monahan offers another interesting account of a different type of
Western woman in her 2013 book, Mrs Earp: The Wives and Lovers of the Earp Brothers.”
Among the women of whom Monahan provides profiles are Aurilla
Sutherland (1850-1870), Sarah Haspell (1853-1919), Celia Ann “Mattie”
Blaylock (1850-1888), and Josephine Sarah Marcus (1861?-1944),
identified, collectively, as “Mr. & Mrs. Wyatt Earp”;
Magdalena C. “Ellen” Rijsdam (1842-1910), Rozilla Draggoo
(1853-1870?), and Alvira “Allie” Packingham Sullivan (1851-1947),
identified, collectively, as “Mr. & Mrs. Virgil Earp”; Louisa
A. Houston (1855-1894), the wife of Morgan Earp; Bessie Catchim
(1840-1887) and Mrs. H. J. Earp, identified, collectively, as “Mr.
& Mrs. James Earp”; and Kate Sanford (1855-?), the wife of
Warren Earp.
More
has been written about some of these wives and lovers than about
others, mostly because little is known about the second group. Here
are a few of the facts that are known about the latter group of
ladies. Unfortunately, no known photographs of the Rozilla Draggoo has been authenticated.
Rozilla
Draggoo
Virgil Earp
Rozilla
Draggoo, who was born in France “around 1853)”; Virgil Earp's
father, Nicholas Porter Earp (1813-1907), a justice of the peace, performed the
ceremony in which the couple were lawfully wed on May 30, 1870. For a
time, the newlyweds lived in Lamar, Missouri, “with Virgil's
parents” and Virgil's siblings, Adelia (1861-1941) and Warren (1855-1900); brother Wyatt
(1848-1929) and “his first wife, Aurilla” (c. 1849-1870) lived “nearby” (65).
Magdalena
“Ellen” Rijsdam
A bit
of a scandal and a lot of pathos surround Virgil's marriage to “his
first wife, Magdalena 'Ellen' Rijsdam,” whom Virgil “secretly
married” in 1860 (59). Ellen “was underage,” as was Virgil,
and, presumably for this reason, both Virgil's and Ellen's parents
opposed the couple's union (59-60).
Nineteenth-century Utrecht, Netherlands
Born
in Utrecht, Netherlands, she immigrated with her parents, Gerritt
Rijsdam and Magdalena Catrina Van Velzen, to the United States on
November 25, 1842, living in Baltimore, Maryland, and Pella, Iowa,
where the Earps then lived (59).
Although
an 1889 newspaper article states that the couple lived apart, Virgil
and Ellen produced a daughter, “Virgil's only known child,”
Nellie Jane Earp, who was born on January 7, 1862 (60). At the time,
the mother was seventeen years old—eight months the senior of her
husband, which, Monahan speculates, may explain “why her father was
so upset” (60). When “Ellen's pregnancy began to show,” the
couple “announced their marriage” (60).
At the
outbreak of the Civil War, Virgil joined the Union Army, and the
elder Rijsdams told Nellie that her father had been killed in combat
(60). Ellen, Nellie, and Ellen's parents then moved to the Oregon
Territory, apparently without notifying Virgil; when he returned home
to Pella, he “discovered Ellen was gone,” Monahan reports, but
“whether he thought she abandoned him or died is unknown” (60).
Monahan's
book is replete with other intriguing accounts of the Earp brothers'
spouses and paramours and, like Roach's volume concerning authentic
cowgirls of the American Wild West, provides historical facts and
psychological and sociological insights into these special ladies and
their times.
Not much is often written
about the authentic cowgirls of the American West. However, a few
authors' works contribute to this interesting topic.
According to one such
work, Joyce Gibson Roach's 1990 The
Cowgirls,
the Civil War transformed the retiring, well-mannered homemaker of
the aristocratic South into a hardy pioneer woman who took an active
part in her family's “survival” on the frontier.
“The
cowgirl was no Guinevere,” Roach observes. “She did not stay at
home weaving the events of her life into a tapestry and awaiting the
hero's return” (xix). Nor were the displaced women who wandered
west all from high society or from the South, for that matter: “Rich
or poor, refined or rough, high born and low found that the frontier
experience was a great leveller [sic]” (xix).
As
in the antebellum South, women on the frontier were often called upon
to do work usually reserved for men. In the absence, temporary or
permanent, of their husbands, women “had to take charge of a cattle
ranch” (xix), and desperate circumstances sometimes produced
innovative and unusual solutions. For example, “a crippled husband
caused a Montana woman to drive a team for the local stage line, in
addition to managing the ranch” (ix).
The
demands of ranching, driving a stagecoach, or other duties afforded
cowgirls some privileges their sisters back east didn't have;
cowgirls were free to “dress as they pleased” (xx), and many
likely wore “britches” under their skirts (xx). Some rode horses
and learned to use the weapons they carried on their persons for
self-defense, including “guns . . . ropes, knives, [and] whips”
(xx).
Roach's
brief anecdotes about authentic cowgirls of the Old West provide her
readers with an idea of these stalwart women, the lives they lived,
and the adventures they experienced.
Minta
Homsley
During
the “early 1870s," Roach writes, while her husband was away from
home, Mrs. Minta Homsley received a telegram indicating that a cattle
buyer wanted an immediate delivery of their ranch's steers. She saw
that the cattle were shipped; as a result, she “got top price." Two
days later the bottom dropped out of the market” (8).
Lizzie
Johnson Williams
Using
a pen name, schoolmarm Lizzie Johnson Williams supplemented her
income by writing articles for Frank Leslie's Illustrated
Newspaper (later called Frank
Leslie's Magazine), earning
enough money to purchase “$2,500 worth of stock in” a cattle
company (9).
She started branding her own cattle, expanding her herd
by hiring hands to capture the many unbranded cattle that wandered
among South Texas “thickets” (9).
Before
marrying, at age 36, Lizzie insisted that she and her future spouse,
Hezekiah, would each take charge only of his or her own business
dealings, and she and her fiance signed an agreement stipulating that
Lizzie's personal property would remain hers alone after their
marriage, as would “future profits made by her.”
Lizzie
also instructed their ranch's foreman to “put the best steers in
her herd” and to steal “unbranded calves” from Hezekiah's
cattle and “mark them with her brand” (9).
After
marrying, Lizzie drove her own herd of cattle up the Chisholm Trail,
while Hezekiah drove a second herd along the same trail (9).
When
her husband “went broke” through a bad investment, she loaned him
$50,000 “to re-establish his business,” but made him "pay back the
money” once he was on his feet again.
Despite
her scheming ways, Lizzie “was fond of” Hezekiah, and, when he
died, she bought a $600 coffin for him, writing on the bill she
paid, “I loved this old buzzard this much” (9).
Although it's not unusual
for Western movies (and books) to express religious themes, such
dramas and narratives rarely have supernatural elements. Two
exceptions to the “rule” are Clint Eastwood's films High
Plains Drifter (1973) and Pale
Rider (1985).
In the
former picture, certain of the protagonist's characteristics and
abilities suggest that there may be more to him than is first
apparent, and the movie provides a clue or two as to the possible
nature of the stranger.
First,
as James L. Neibaur points out in his chapter “High Plains Drifter”
in The Clint Eastwood Westerns,
the “stranger” whom Eastwood plays “is mysterious, he is
controlling, he is all-knowing, and he is powerful” (104).
Second,
Sarah Belding, the wife of hotel operator Lewis Belding, tells the
stranger that the town's previous sheriff, Jim Duncan, was buried in
an unmarked grave, adding “the dead don't rest without a marker”
(104).
Third,
in a dream it is revealed to the stranger that the town's leaders
conspired to have the sheriff beaten to death by three brothers with
whips, before allowing the murderers to be arrested. Having been
released from prison, the killers are now on their way back to the
town, Lago, to avenge themselves on the town.
Fourth,
after painting the town red and renaming Lago “Hell,” the
stranger abandons the townspeople, just as the killers return. In his
absence, many of the citizens are killed, and the town itself is
burned to the ground. It is only then that the stranger returns and
kills one of the murderers, Dan Carlin, using a whip, which he
then throws into the saloon, “alerting the two surviving brothers,”
whom he kills (104).
Fifth,
as the stranger rides out of Hell, Mordecai, a dwarf whom the
stranger had named mayor and sheriff of Lago, is in the town's
cemetery, carving a marker for a grave. “I never knew your name,”
Mordecai says. “Yes, you do,” the stranger replies. The marker
Mordecai carves bears the name Marshal Jim Duncan; it is for the
sheriff's once-unmarked grave. Presumably, now that his grave is
marked, the stranger will be able to “rest.”
As
Neibuar observes, There has been some discussion as to the identity
of the stranger”:
The script originally indicated that the stranger was
the marshal's brother . . . and the scenes alluding to this
[identity] were filmed, but Eastwood had them excised. In the film,
the stranger is more a ghostly figure, perhaps a reincarnation of
Duncan, based on the final lines between him and Mordecai and the
supernatural air of the story” (107-108).
The New York Times's
1973 review of the film also suggests that the movie is intended to
have a supernatural angle:
High
Plains Drifter, with Eastwood as
director as well as star, is part ghost story, part revenge Western .
. . . It exalts and delights in a kind of pitiless Old Testament
wrath . . . Eastwood's characterization of The Stranger [is that of a
figure] who settles God's score with Lago . . . (108).
The
fact that Eastwood, the director, cut the scenes that represents the
stranger as the sheriff's brother and the clues that the character is
a ghostly or reincarnated avenger, seem clearly to suggest that
Eastwood himself wants the movie to be understood as having a supernatural theme.
Twelve
years later, Eastwood would make another Western with a supernatural
slant, Pale Rider
(1985). Like the ghostly stranger in High Plains Drifter,
The Preacher of Pale Rider
“is mysterious, he is controlling, he is all-knowing, and he is
powerful,” or, as Neibaur describes him, “he seems to have a
mysterious, mystical quality, able to evade people in a gunfight by
seeming to disappear. He comes from nowhere; he leaves when the job
is done” (149).
The
Preacher's association with Christianity is made plain by his
arrival, just as fourteen-year-old Megan Wheeler is praying that God
will send someone to deliver her mother, herself, and the other gold
prospectors from the gunmen who just stormed through and destroyed
their camp, killing her dog.
When
she sees The Preacher riding into the ruins of the prospectors' camp,
Megan believes that he is the answer to her prayer, and, indeed, he
rides a pale horse, just like one of the four horsemen of the
apocalypse, of whom she has just read in the book of Revelation: “And
I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was
Death, and Hell followed with him.”
In
discussing The Preacher, the Chicago Tribune's
editorial writer, Stephen Chapman points out that he is not Christ
the Savior, but the Jesus “who brought not peace but a sword, the
one of Revelation who raises the righteous into heaven and casts the
wicked into the depths” (149).
The
Preacher's supernatural origin is also suggested by the feats he
accomplishes single-handedly, exploits that the men among the
prospectors are unable to accomplish collectively. He fights off
several men, defeating them with no other weapon than an axe handle;
he defeats a Goliath-size adversary with the same sledgehammer he
uses to cleave a boulder in half with a single blow; he outguns a
group of gunfighters notorious for their skills with a pistol; when
he departs, he leaves behind him a courageous and united community
who, before his arrival, were divided and afraid.
As
Neibaur suggests, Eastwood underscores the supernatural dynamics of
Pale Rider by ensuring
that it shares similarities with his other supernatural film, High
Plains Drifter:
The
setup [of Pale Rider]
has immediate similarities to High Plains Drifter
(1973) upon the Eastwood character's entrance. In that film [High
Plains Drifter], he enters a
very quiet town. In Pale Rider,
he arrives as the town has quieted down from a most recent attack.
Among the first things the stranger does in High Plains
Drifter is respond with stoicism
to men confronting him in a saloon, later shooting them down when
they physically accost him in a barber shop soon afterward. In Pale
Rider, the stranger comes to the
rescue of a man being attacked by a group of others, effectively
beating them down. . . . The man he rescues, Hull Barrett . . . the
leader of the miners, invites the stranger to his house for dinner.
He appears wearing a clerical collar and is thereafter referred to as
The Preacher. These initial scenes establish the character's
abilities as well as a mystery about his backstory (148).
The
scenes also establish a link between the two supernatural films and
their supernatural heroes. However, the older movie invokes
reincarnation to explain Sheriff Jim Duncan's return from the dead,
while the later film invokes the Bible, solidly grounding Pale
Rider's supernatural aspects in
the Christian vision of death and judgment.
In
High Plains Drifter,
the stranger creates Hell; in Pale Rider,
he is death, delivering the wicked to judgment, for, although Chapman
sees Eastwood's Preacher as Jesus, the movie itself offers several clues that suggest a different identity for The Preacher: the film's very title, which is an allusion to Revelation 6:8, the Bible verse that equates
the “pale rider” to Death, the apocalyptic horseman who ushers in
hell, and the nature of The Preacher as a supernatural figure
delivered by God in answer to Megan's prayer clearly indicate that he
is Death personified, not Jesus.
Whereas
the stranger in High Plains Drifter
abandons “sinners” to hell, The Preacher in Pale Rider
kills the wicked and appears to leave their eternal fate to the
judgment of God.
Supernatural
Westerns are so unusual that their existence—and their raison
d'être—seem
to beg explanation. Despite the mystical undertones of High
Plains Drifter
and the Christian overtones of Pale
Rider, it's
likely that neither film is an expression of religious faith on the
part of Eastwood himself, who told movie critic Gene
Siskel that he is an atheist. However, Eastwood also admitted
that he does “feel spiritual
things,” declaring that “if I stand on the side of the Grand
Canyon and look down, it moves me in some way.” He's also a devoted
practitioner
of Transcendental Meditation.
Eastwood's
own take on his supernatural Westerns is that both are allegories.
High Plains Drifter,
he says, is “just an allegory . . . a speculation on what happens
when they go ahead and kill the sheriff and somebody comes back and
calls the town's conscience to bear.There's
always retribution for your deeds” (The
Clint Eastwood Westerns,
105). Likewise, Eastwood explains, “Pale
Rider is
kind of allegorical, more in the High
Plains Drifter
mode: like that, though he isn't a reincarnation or anything, but he
does ride a pale horse like the four horsemen of the apocalypse . . .
It's a classic story of the big guys against the little guys . . .
(The Clint Eastwood Westerns,
149).
For
Eastwood, perhaps each of his supernatural movies is “just an
allegory,” but, of course, the creator of a work of art doesn't
determine its meaning, except for himself. Any interpretation that is
supported by the details of the story itself is both reasonable and
possible, and there seems more internal evidence in Pale
Rider for a Christian
interpretation than for an atheistic or a secular one.
After
all, the movie deliberately alludes to Christian beliefs, to a
specific Biblical account of apocalypse and judgment, and to a
supernatural order of existence that transcends the ordinary world of
the Wild West in which the movie is set.
Western
culture is suffused with the traditions of the Christian faith;
allegories which include supernatural characters and events,
especially when they are informed by specifically Christian doctrine
and tradition, can certainly be reckoned to possess and to
communicate Christian themes.
Bane
Messenger, the protagonist of my own series, An Adventure of the Old
West, has a name of religious significance as well. Bane (the
nickname by which Banan goes) derives from the Old English word bana,
meaning “killer, slayer, murderer, a worker of death”; the Late
Latin word angelus means
“messenger.” Putting them
together, Bane Messenger can be read as meaning Angel of Death,
which, the books of the series, Good With a Gun,
The Valley of the Shadow,
and Blood Mountain,
suggest, as does the short story “Bane Messenger, Bounty Hunter,”
a prequel that introduces the series, is how Bane regards himself.
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His
skill with a gun, like his indomitable will, his steely nerve, and
his love for justice, equip him as an instrument of divine
righteousness and wrath. It's his mission, he believes, to use the
“gifts” he's received to ensure that justice triumphs and the
innocent are protected from “the worst sort of men,” those, as a
bounty hunter, he tracks down to kill or, as a lawman, risks his life
to stop. Believing himself on a mission sanctioned by his Creator,
Bane puts his own fate in the hands of God every time he draws his
gun, putting his life in mortal danger in order to bring desperate
killers to justice, dead or alive.
In
Part 1 of this series, I explained how I strip the particular
incidents of a plots to the bone, transforming them into generic
expressions of action similar to the narrative motifs, or functions
or dramatic personae, identified by Vladimir Propp in Morphology
of the Folktale.
By
doing so, I have developed a good size list of the types of incidents
(and, indeed, their relationships to one another) that typically
occur in Western movies (or novels).
The
same technique, of course, can be applied to any other genre as well,
providing similar indices of motifs for any type of fiction from
action-adventure thrillers to science fiction or young adult novels.
In
addition to the generic incidents I compiled on the basis of James L.
Neibaur's summary of A Fistful of Dollars,
I added additional generic incidents his summaries of other plots of
Clint Eastwood's Westerns.
Neibaur's
summary of A Fistful of Dollars
(1964) disclose these generic incidents:
The
hero proves his worth.
The
hero is hired to join a gang.
The
hero plays two rival gangs against one another.
While
the gangs fight each other, the hero seeks to benefit himself at
their expense.
The
hero commits an act that makes him somewhat sympathetic but does not
make him less mysterious.
To
avenge and protect his injured friends or supporters, the hero
tricks the villain and kills him.
These
generic incidents are based on Neibaur's summary of A Few
Dollars More.
A
hero's rival acts.
A
hero acts.
A
hero's rival acts again.
A
hero's rival and a hero exhibit their respective skills, trying to
intimidate one another, but, instead, impress each other and join
forces against a common enemy.
To
carry out their plan, a hero's rival and a hero split up.
The
plan of a hero's rival and a hero's unites them after they earlier
separated.
A
hero's rival and a hero attempt to double cross a villain, but they
are discovered and captured.
A
hero's rival and a hero are released by a member of a villain's gang
so the gang can hunt them down and kill them.
A
villain plans to double cross his gang, but a member of the gang
figures out the villain's plan and partners with the villain.
A
hero's rival and a hero kill off a gang, one by one.
A
villain gains the upper hand against a hero's rival.
A
hero intervenes, restoring the balance of power between a hero's
rival and a villain.
A
hero's rival kills a villain.
A
hero's rival reveals a secret, telling a hero what motivated the
rival to hunt down and kill a villain.
A
hero's rival rewards a hero.
A
hero eliminates a final threat.
These
generic incidents are derived from Neibaur's summary of Hang 'Em
High.
An
innocent man runs afoul of the law.
An
innocent man is punished.
A
lawman rescues an innocent man, but takes him into custody and
presents him to a judge.
An
innocent man is found to be innocent.
An
innocent man receives the means to avenge himself.
An
innocent man kills one of the men who unfairly punished him.
An
innocent man receives information about his other persecutors'
whereabouts.
An
innocent man arrests a second persecutor.
An
innocent man teams up with a sheriff.
An
innocent man and a sheriff arrest three more of the innocent man's
persecutors.
An
innocent man defends two of his persecutors in court, because they
had no part in punishing him, but to no avail; they are sentenced to
be executed.
An
innocent man is paid money that is due to him.
Two
of the innocent man's persecutors flee, but three others conspire to
kill the innocent man who now also hunts them.
Three
men ambush and attack an innocent man.
Injured,
an innocent man survives; he is nursed back to health by a woman for
whom he develops feelings.
An
innocent man shoots it out with two men who attacked him earlier,
killing them; the third attacker kills himself.
An
innocent man rides out of town, seeking the two remaining men who
persecuted him.
These
generic incidents are extracted from Neibaur's plot summary of Two
Mules for Sister Sara (1970):
A
villain is violent toward an innocent woman.
In
an unexpected way, a hero responds to a violent act against an
innocent woman.
A
villain flees; a hero shoots him.
Both
a female victim of violence and a hero support a revolutionary force
or cause.
A
female victim of violence poses as a person different from herself,
a pose which alters a hero's behavior.
A
hero is attracted to a female victim of violence posing as someone
other than herself.
A
hero acts in such a way as to protect and impress a female victim of
violence posing as someone else.
A
hero is wounded as he supports a revolutionary cause.
A
female victim of violence follows a hero's instructions, removing a
bullet from the wounded hero.
A
female victim of violence posing as someone else discloses her true
identity.
A
hero fights alongside a revolutionary force.
A
hero is rewarded.
A
hero and female a victim of violence ride off together.
These
generic incidents make up the plot structure of Joe Kidd
(1972):
A
young man is in jail with two older Mexican men who disparage him.
A
jailed young man assaults one of the two heckling Mexican men who
share his jail cell.
A
judge fines a young man for poaching; when the young man is unable
to pay the fine, he is jailed for several days.
Several
Mexican men storm a courtroom, holding the judge at gunpoint while
they complain that their land has been stolen, but their proof has
been destroyed.
A
young man helps a judge to escape from men who hold him hostage in
his own courtroom.
A
wealthy landowner forms a posse to capture the leader of a group of
Mexican men.
A
Mexican leader bails a young man out of jail and invites him to join
his band, but the young man declines.
After
a Mexican leader raids a young man's ranch, he joins a wealthy
landowner's posse.
When
a wealthy landowner holds Mexican villagers hostage until a Mexican
leader surrenders himself, a young man who just joined the
landowner's posse saves the hostages and leaves the posse to capture
the Mexican leader by himself.
A
young man returns to town with a captured Mexican fugitive, only to
find a wealthy landowner and his posse waiting to kill his captive.
A
young man kills the members of a corrupt posse.
In
a one-on-one duel, a young man kills a wealthy landowner who led a
corrupt posse.
These
generic incidents are extracted from Neibaur's summary of The
Outlaw Josie Wales (1976):
A
man's family is murdered.
A
man seeks revenge.
A
man joins a group of other men.
A
man kills to protect a group of which he is a member.
A
man teams up with one of the survivors of a group of which he was a
member.
A
man seeks vengeance by himself.
A
reward is put on a man's head; bounty hunters pursue him.
A
man gathers a diverse group of people.
A
group overpowers an adversarial group.
A
man attacks another man.
A
man attacking another man is himself killed with his own weapon.
A
man rescues a woman from a gang of would-be rapists.
A
man rescues women from a physical attack by a group.
A
man passes on the chance to fight his chief adversary after the
adversary has been seriously wounded.
In
listing these generic incidents, I separated them by movie to show
how such incidents have been structured to generate plots for
complete stories (i. e., films). However, there's no reason generic
incidents cannot be mixed and matched, as long as doing so doesn't
disrupt or destroy the narrative continuity of the selected
incidents.
These
generic incidents are derived from Neibaur's summary of Unforgiven
(1992):
Men
commit a despicable act against a woman.
A
sheriff is lenient in dealing with men who commit a despicable act
against a woman.
A
reward is offered for killing men who commit a despicable act
against a woman.
A
young man plans to collect a reward offered for killing two men who
committed a despicable act against a woman.
A
young man seeks to recruit an older man to help him to kill two men
for whom a reward is offered.
An
old man, having no interest in helping a young man kill two wanted
men for half the reward offered for their deaths, refuses to partner
with the young man.
An
old man who'd refused to partner with a younger man changes his mind
and agrees to help him track and kill two wanted men in exchange for
half the reward for their deaths.
A
sheriff and his deputies beat an old man and throw him out of a
business establishment.
A
young man and an old man's former partner nurse the old man back to
health after he has been brutally beaten.
A
group of men find one of the wanted men they are hunting.
A
group of men ambush another group of men, killing one of the
latter's members.
A
young man finds the second of two wanted men whom he and his partner
are hunting, and he kills their quarry.
A
young man and his older partner escape the wrath of a group of men,
one of whose members he young man earlier killed.
Distraught
over having killed a man, a young man dissolves his partnership with
an older man and leaves.
An
old man learns that his former partner was killed and that his
former partner's corpse is on display in a coffin on a town street.
An
old man instructs his former partner, a young man, to deliver his
original (past) partner's share of a reward to his widow and to
deliver the old man's own share to his children.
An
old man avenges his murdered former partner.
As
a sheriff forms a posse, an old man kills the sheriff's recruits.
An
old man kills a sheriff.
An
old man returns to his children.
Having
been paid his share of a reward, an old man relocates to a new part
of the country, where better opportunities await him.
In
listing these generic incidents, I separated them by movie to show
how such incidents have been structured to generate plots for
complete stories (i. e., films). However, there's no reason generic
incidents cannot be mixed and matched, as long as doing so doesn't
disrupt or destroy the narrative continuity of the selected
incidents.
