A century ago, the American West, and the process of homesteading and Americanization that took place in the lands West of the Mississippi River was seen as a triumph of American drive, ingenuity, and courage; a sheer act of will that required hard work, perseverance, and above all, a spirit of independence and individualism.
In the decades following the closing of the Frontier (as pronounced by Frederick Turner in 1890), this perception of the West changed dramatically. The old view of a divinely inspired spread of Americanism changed to a more ambivalent view by mid-century, and finally, to an openly hostile view today that Western society was (and is) violent, murderous, and chaotic. We are now told that the West, after the coming of the white man, was a land of sadistic Indian murderers, psychopathic outlaws, and misfits who had abandoned the more peaceful life back in the good ol’ civilized U.S. of A. [MORE]
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This piece is outstanding. Very informative.
“…records indicate that in many places around the country, violent crime increased by as much as 50 percent following the war [to Prevent Southern Independence].”
I had never thought of this consequence of the war.
The article is excellent, but I disagree with the assessment of The Unforgiven. This film is classic Eastwood libertarianism. A cowboy cuts up a prostitute. The sherrif of the town, representing established “law and order,” passes judgement, originally intending to whip the cowboy (a sentence too lenient for the prostitutes), then deciding to force the cowboys to pay the prostitutes’ pimp compensation. This again illustrates how the actual victim is left out.
The prostitutes then decide that they can’t turn to the state for protection, and so hire private protection. The sheriff then brutally punishes any private protectors, thereby enforcing his monopoly on the use of force throughout the town and illustrating the conflict between the state and anarcho-capitalism.
In most of Eastwood’s films, especially westerns, the bad guys are the government, established power.
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