Sold Out on the Romanticized Sagas of the Old West

I do not give up easily my belief that the American West was much as it is portrayed in Western movies.

I grew up on Western movies; they provided most of my knowledge of and feeling for the old West.

So I visited the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum for the first time the other day with some misgivings. Revisionists are tearing our myths apart, and the West has been spared.

But I came away unshaken in my belief that there were good guys and bad guys, strong women, mean horses, cattle drives, stagecoaches, shootouts, incredible hardship, skulduggery, heroics and romance.

Through cards, audios and videos, however, the museum cautions us that the legend is romanticized and exaggerated. We are reminded that the movies have shown us a West dominated by white males, while women, Mexicans and blacks are given minor and often disreputable roles.

A diorama of the notorious “Shootout at the O.K. Corral” shows dummies representing Wyatt Earp and his brother and Doc Holliday facing half a dozen bad guys. “The shooting lasted only a few seconds,” we are told. We hear several shots. The voice-over says that three men were killed; the Earps and Holliday were tried for murder and acquitted.

So it was not the imaginative, geometric, long-drawn-out gunfight we have seen in the movies, with the gunmen dashing from shelter to shelter while firing dozens of shots at one another. So what if the movies take a few liberties with the facts?

A card with Frederic Remington’s famous sculpture, “Bronco Buster,” rather disparages the Western artist. “While viewed by many as a documentary artist, Remington glorified and romanticized a masculine frontier of his own vision.”

I imagine that’s the West that Remington saw. If Edgar Degas had visited the West, no doubt his legacy would be a number of charming statuettes of women washing clothes, pumping water and chopping wood. That was their lot.

A display on Annie Oakley shows Annie as a good-looking young woman when she rode in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. It shows her gold-plated pistols and two of the small glass balls she shot out of the air. Annie was no myth.

We walk through a short street of the kind seen in Westerns, with a dentist’s office, a Wells Fargo office, a post office, a general store, a harness and saddlery shop and a balcony of the kind from which stuntmen are always falling. The museum points out that wherever people went, they formed communities.

I caught a video just as John Wayne walked through the door into the windy desert sunset in that last scene from “The Searchers.” Surely that’s the way it was.

A restored Wells Fargo stagecoach, bright red, is pulled by a team of horses. A man and a woman ride inside. We are reminded how hard travel was and how long it took to get from here to there. In 1857, a card says, mail from St. Louis to Los Angeles took 25 days.

A restored fire engine gleams with brass fittings. A full-size bar with two carved nudes standing before the mirrored back bar reminds us that the West was wet. A piano, a card table and a roulette table symbolize its culture.

A chuck wagon stands in a room dedicated to the cowboy. “When not working,” a card says, “cowboys told stories, read, smoked, chewed, drank, gambled and prayed, made music and danced, and cleaned up and went to town.”

Voices sing a series of familiar cowboy laments: “For I’m a poor cowboy and I know I’ve done wrong. . . .”

Displays of chaps, rifles, bridles, saddles, spurs, hats and shirts suggest that cowboys really lived and dressed the way we have seen them in the movies. Of course their lives are romanticized. Life on the frontier must have been dirty, hard, dangerous and cruel, although women did what they could to civilize it.

The museum’s first exhibit is given to such cowboy heroes as Hopalong Cassidy, the Lone Ranger and Gene Autry himself. It is lined with familiar lobby posters of their movies. We hear Autry singing “Back in the Saddle Again.”

A card reflects the museum’s candid style, noting that these idols of young America capitalized on their popularity by loosing an avalanche of toys and gadgets on their hordes of admirers. We see guns, spurs, masks (the Lone Ranger), games, dishes, cereals, bread, milk, bedspreads, curtains and lunch boxes, each bearing the name and picture of a hero. (In its first week, the Hoppy pocket knife sold 1 million.)

The museum allows that these items represented neither the historical West nor their cowboy namesakes, but that they promoted such virtues as honesty, good health and kindness. “Western heroes transmitted social values, and in that guise they sold merchandise.”

Hi yo, Silver! Away!