Popular Fiction and Biography??

?Yet, important though these insights are, we cannot reduce the Western to a series of statements about the meaning of history. It is, in its narrative structures and visual aesthetics, more than that. And sometimes rather less.

Cawelti's phrase 'at a certain moment in the development of American civilization' is a rather highfalutin description of, say, False Paradise, a Hopalong Cassidy outing from 1948 in which Hoppy helps an elderly butterfly collector and his daughter hold on to their silver mine against the machinations of a crooked banker. A major source for such stories and characters, so typical of the B-Western, was a far more popular kind of fiction than that written by Cooper. The hundreds of dime novels turned out by publishers such as Beadle and Adams in the last third of the 19th century entrenched as heroes of the popular imagination the scout, the cowboy and the outlaw. In volume after volume intrepid and dashing frontiersmen took on hordes of painted savages or masked outlaws and defeated them single-handed, while beautiful young women swooned in admiration at their feet. In the dime novel especially we can find the roots of the simple and elemental conflict between individual goodness and villainy, and the impulse towards physical action and adventure, that form the basis of the B-Western. The larger-than-life characters and sensational situations of the dime novel
had their origins largely in the fevered imaginations of hack writers. Yet there was a connection, albeit often tenuous, with reality. Some of the heroes of the dime novel, such as Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill and Jesse James, did in fact exist, even if they performed in reality very few of the exploits attributed to them. Popular biographies of such celebrities made a distinctive contribution to the corpus of Western material. The nineteenth-century historian Thomas Carlyle notoriously remarked that 'history is the biography of great men.¹ Many of the major actors on the scene of westward expansion, such as General Custer, wrote their memoirs, in which they were only too willing to play up their role in deciding the course of history. Buffalo Bill famously remarked, as if to echo Cawelti's description of the central opposition within the Western: '1 stood between civilization and savagery most all my early days.' Biographies of Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett and Kit Carson played an important part in popularizing a view of the West as a land peopled by extravagantly heroic characters. Some of this material, such as the outrageously fanciful Davy Crockett Almanacs of the 1840s, is indistinguishable from fiction, and John Cawelti's description of the function of the hero in the Western can equally well apply to the role envisaged, by both biographer and subject, for some of the real-life personalities discovered on the frontier: 'The situation must involve a hero who possesses some of the urge towards violence as well as the skills, heroism and personal honor ascribed to the wilderness way of life, and it must place this hero in a position where he becomes involved with or committed to the agents and values of civilization.' In the course of the 19th century a variety of forms of popular expression such as biography, cheap fiction and drama begin to distil out from an amorphous and heterogeneous mass of material something we can identify as 'the Western'. In this evolving genre, the quintessential Western character is defined as the man of action, the hero brave in the face of physical danger. Popular stage melodrama also made a contribution to the growth of a distinctive Western repertoire. Frank H. Murdoch's play, Davy Crockett, first produced in 1872, was hugely successful. The Qreat Train Robbery had been a stage play before becoming one of the very first film Westerns in 1903. The legitimate theatre, in fact, fed straight into the cinema. The greatest Western movie star of the pre-1920 era, William S. Hart, had appeared in 1905 in the stage play The Squaw Man, which became in 1914 one of the first feature-length Westerns. Before beginning his movie career Hart also played in the stage version of The Virginian in 1907, taking over the lead role from Dustin Farnum, who likewise went on to become a star of Western films. ?