RIDING HERD by Lee Pitts
The West That Wasn’t
I
was reading a “Legends and Lies” book about the old West and it stated that the toughest town west of Chicago was Palisades, Nevada. I found it odd that as a student of the West I’d never heard of the place. According to the book the town had more than 1,000 showdowns, bank robberies and Indian raids in three years in the mid 1870s. Then the book explained that all those incidents were fake, meant only to scare weak-kneed Easterners who came in on the stagecoach. Then the eastern dudes went home and told newspapers and anybody who’d listen about the dangerous West. It was akin to Chicago’s Chamber of
Commerce promoting its murder rate in though it was our gold and silver that paid hopes of attracting tourists. their debts accumulated during the Civil There were a lot of myths about the West War. They thought of us as new kids on the created by people who’d never been here. block when in fact the West had been Henry David Thoreau wrote about the explored by white men half a century wonders of the West but he’d never been before the first colonists set foot on Virginwest of the Mississippi River. Little Miss Sure ia’s beaches. The West was portrayed as Shot, Annie Oakley, performed before Kings nothing more than a sad collection of and Queens in Europe portraying herself as miners, cowboys, saloonkeepers, gamblers, a woman of the West but she’d never been prostitutes, con men, mule skinners and here either. bull whackers. Easterners thought of WestThe myth making continued unabated. erners as the dregs of society who in the When I was a little tyke with my Roy Rogers East probably would have been in jail. Sadly, six gun and chuckwagon lunchbox, half of that’s how they still see us. all motion pictures were westerns and there Mark Twain came here for a short period were 37 westerns on television. Gunsmoke before being run out of the West and wrote was a television series that ran for an that, “The West was fabulously rich in unheard of 20 seasons from 1955 to 1975. thieves, murderers, desperados, lawyers, Cecil Smith, of the LA Times said, “Gunsmoke Christians, Indians, Chinamen, Spaniards, was the dramatization of the American epic gamblers, sharpers, coyotes, poets, preachlegend of the west. Our own Iliad and ers and jackass rabbits.” Odyssey, created from standard elements Owen Wister who wrote the classic book of the dime novel and the pulp Western as The Virginian said the West was full of romanticized by Ned Buntline, Bret Harte “horses better bred than the women who and Mark Twain.” ride them and dogs with pedigrees better All those movies, TV shows and dime than their masters.” novels were mostly about a wild West It was said the West was a dangerous that wasn’t. place where no one died naturally. Elmer For 150 years Easterners have looked Kelton, wrote, “It was man’s country good down their snooty noses at the West even for men and mules but Hell on women.” The West was portrayed as a place “30 miles to water, 20 miles to wood and 10 miles to Hell.” And the characterization stuck. Today America really is two countries. There’s the West where 93 percent of all federally owned land lies in 12 western states and the feds in Washington, DC control more than 50 percent of most states west of the Rockies. Whereas in northeastMaintenance, Rust ern states it’s less than 1 percent. How & Worry Free... would easterners like it if the boot was on Livestock & the other foot? The Forest Service and the Wildlife Tanks Bureau of Land Management employ 40,000 people to manage 446 million acres Fresh & Potable in the West and the words written in the Water Tanks Declaration of Independence regarding Feed & Fertilizer Tanks King George III could easily apply to Westerners today: “He has erected a multitude AGRICULTURAL of New Offices and sent hither swarms of PETROLEUM officers to harass our people and eat out ENVIRONMENTAL their substance.” CUSTOM Maybe it’s time we take a page out of the Tanks approved for history books and do what they did in PalNRCS Cost Share Program isades, Nevada, and greet every plane full of easterners with a welcoming committee of murderers, desperados, lawyers, con men, mountain lions, gunslingers and wild Indians so they’ll get scared and stay in Washington, DC and leave us the Hell alone. 800.487.4834
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