AMERICAN PRAIRIE

So much has been written about the American prairie and its culture.  Some is an "Orientism" making a myth of an historical situation that only lasted the century before the railroads were built, intended and succeeding in replacing the bison.  On the other hand it is depicted as an Arthurian tale of heroism and the fight against plutocrats or culture destroyers.  (I can't think of any of those who aren't plutocrats.  Maybe missionaries aren't rich, but their churches are. 

We all know Westerns from depictions.  Ever fewer know it from a personal, experienced, sensory point of view -- the smell and temperature of it.  Few of us know any cowboys, let alone ranchers, or what pushed them into a category, which was largely economic pressure.  We don't know much about the death rates of poorly nourished men sleeping "rough," drinking too much, often rejected by families or brutalized by war against neighbors.  (The Civil War -- much different from Tutsis and Hutu?  Except for a third category with no power, this time black?)

In the Fifties and Sixties I was enthralled by this cowooy trope -- not the war part, not even war between whites and Indians or ranchers and settlers -- but about the toughness, the survival, and the gear.  I still love cowboy gear but not with the devotion to detail, sources and uses that today's aficionados collect along with the objects.  I don't even know the technical names, but the feel of them

I've written before in terms of the Western television shows exploring "stand-down" ideas, with the most powerful man in the show trying to find some way to find peace and justice without using guns, though he is a powerful marksman.  "Broken Arrow" even tried to explain friendship between whites and indigenous leaders, which was based on real people.  In fact, even in our combat-intoxicated war stories, even in a real story like "Restropo", there are images of two cultures of men sitting together in peace.

But now the writer's room seems only interested in explaining that evil people are powerful.  Good people are just stupid.  And weak.  Women must save them or there will be no children.  Every era's favorite trope is defensive, making them feel better without thinking through what they are doing.  

Many of the patriarchal types who love classic Westerns think of themselves as the hero.  I don't pay attention to that, which offends men where I am who consider themselves to be Big Men.  They try to impress me that I should feel for their importance what I felt for Bob Scriver (they assume) which is respect for success and money.  They are wrong.  But they like to argue with Bob's presumed expertise.  (They don't think I have any.)  Their own is usually based on limited info, fenced by sexism and ignorance.

Technically, the category called "Western" should have more to do with the land that is "out west", mostly distinguished by being dry.  If you're growing corn, you're midWestern.  The plots of stories move among the ecosystems of grazing, small grains, mining or oil, and the new energies like wind and solar.  So far, the last two have not developed Big Man theories, which is one of their advantages.  To me the West is tactile, the clink and tension of buckles, horsehide still on the horse, the pressure of wind, the makes-you-squint, humbling sky.  

Someone some time ago told me about some place where he rode up over a ridge at the tail end of one of our catastrophic winters and looked over a valley full of dead cow-calf pairs.  Brought north a little too soon, they should have been fed daily, but weren't. So they died.  The obligation to protect animals in one's care is more ancient than farming.  To abandon them is evil.  (Today's politicians don't know that. Nor some parents.)  I don't know what happened to the bones.

Kevin Costner has tried being a hero in the water.  Now he's back to the West.  "Dances with Wolves" was a fantasy that included all the imaginings about the West, the befriendings, the isolation, the injustice between peoples, etc.  The tragedy of one culture overrunning another is much more acute in a Western because the first prairie treaties were as recent as 1850 -- far more recent than the East Coast where the matter was still complicated by war with Britain and France.  One tribe went this way and the next went that way.  There was no massive dependence on one food source (bison) and the sweeping disasters of smallpox were more isolated and quiet.  So far as I know, no Eastern tribe was menaced with anything as smallpox pandemics, which were obvious and devastating, though no less so than starvation.

Taylor Sheridan wrote  "Yellowstone" for Costner's return to the West.  "As an ex-actor, Sheridan has explained that the amount of expositional dialogue he read for television caused him to form an "allergy to Exposition" in his writing. He has also said that he looks for "absurdly simple" plots in order to focus solely on character."

Michael Blake wrote a book, "Dances with Wolves", that he later made into a movie specifically for Kevin Costner, who specializes in wry heroes.  It was riffing off "Bury Me Not at Wounded Knee," a book written by a scholar, Dee Brown, an academic, working in the context of a people's history, rather than being a celebration of oppression.  It was research-based rather than experience-based.

In fact, if one moves from traditional thinking to experience-based thought, at once it becomes obvious there are no indigenous novels that have become this obsessive about actual experience except maybe "Biography of a Grizzly".  Much less Asian, female, black, etc. though "cowboys" were all these sorts, including women.  The prairie is the broad paper -- the print is European, paraphrases of old stories from across the Atlantic.  ("Little House on the Prairie" is actually mid-western.  Mari Sandoz comes closer but "Old Jules" is no cowboy. Willa Cather, maybe. Where's the Chinese laundry boy who is burned out?

But that's not fair.  The main thing I've learned, sad as it is, great writing is not about the writer.  It is about the publisher and promoter, but -- more than that -- it is about the near-secret mythic life of those who buy books and CD's.  If one strikes a chord that they can hear and it sings in them, it's a great book.  What is that chord now?  Will it keep greed from destroying the prairie?  Only maybe.