TV Hits a Mother Lode of Frontier Lore, Legends

Television rode into many of our lives on the backs of Westerns.

At one point in the late 1950s, seven of the 10 top-rated series were Westerns, and just spending the evening in front of your set could give you saddle sores, to say nothing of a mythic view of American history.

Whether “Gunsmoke” or “The Virginian” or “Rawhide”--which found a youthful Clint Eastwood playing cowhand Rowdy Yates in dress rehearsal for future stardom--Westerns clustered in prime time as buffaloes once did on the great prairie.

Today, only “Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman,” Jane Seymour’s new CBS hit series about a struggling 19th-Century doctor in rural Colorado, represents the endangered Western species on TV.

Instead, the Old West is now being corralled in documentaries.

Premiering tonight on KCOP-TV Channel 13 is “The Wild West,” a 10-hour syndicated series that continues Tuesday through Thursday and concludes on Sunday (8-10 each night). Meanwhile, another documentary series titled “The Real West” continues rerunning at 9 p.m. Thursdays on cable’s Arts & Entertainment network, with new episodes scheduled to resume April 1.

Covering much the same turf with some of the same historians, both series are rich mother lodes of frontier lore, affirming that despite TV’s past preponderance of Westerns, there remain vast amounts of brawny, seductive, fascinating material that contemporary producers have overlooked or ignored. Probably because the myopic networks they serve are continually obsessed only with what’s hot at the moment.

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Cowboys are not hot. They’re just incredibly charming: Witness Part 1 of tonight’s two-hour premiere of “The Wild West,” a sort of Dances With Longhorns take on a romanticized U.S. subculture that rough-riding Theodore Roosevelt once accurately called “a much misrepresented set of people.” That didn’t stop him from riding his own embellished cowboy image into the White House.

Stylistically, “The Wild West” is of the Ken Burns tradition, artfully using voice-overs from actors, photographs, paintings and period music to follow the intersecting trails of individuals and class groups across lands that narrator Jack Lemmon calls a “wide and unpredictable paradise.”

The best thing about the unseen Lemmon is that he’s not noticed, in contrast to Kenny Rogers, the overproduced host-narrator for A&E;’s “The Real West,” who opens and closes each episode wearing his saloon gambler’s outfit on a generic Western set.

We learn from “The Wild West” that perhaps one-third of open-range cowboys were black or Mexican and that they were largely males in their late teens or early 20s who drove herds averaging 2,500 steers up to 15 miles a day, later letting off steam in towns like Abilene and Dodge City, where there were plenty of dance halls and dance hall girls to fill them.

“We wasn’t respectable and didn’t pretend to be,” young cowpoke Teddy Blue wrote in his journal.

Producers John Copeland and Jamie L. Smith cover the economic and other developments that reduced the great trail drives and ultimately cowboydom, whose heyday began after the Civil War and lasted about 30 years.

Part 2 chronicles the great migration of settlers who turned the far West into the nation’s melting pot within a melting pot. What some of them giddily titled “God’s country” as they arrived was already the American Indian’s country, of course--something that “The Wild West” addresses in a future episode.

Other settlers were less enamored, seeing the great openness that so exhilarated their fellow pioneers as nothing less than a great void. Battered by weather and encumbered by debt, many would ultimately return East.

Using an extraordinary collection of old photos, producer Steven Manuel captures both the beauty and the hardship of the settlers’ world: A man and his horse almost hidden by tall grass; a woman and child in a field of flowers a la Wyeth; wagons drawn by oxen; children peeking from a rudimentary schoolhouse; a baptismal cleansing in a stream.

You would see no such scenes in the Wild West shows of William F. Cody, whose slaughter of buffaloes in the 1870s would earn him the title of Buffalo Bill. A typical Buffalo Bill show would co-star Arizona John Nelsen and the Pawnee Scouts, sowing the seeds from which would grow the heroic cowboy-and-cutthroat Indian mythology that lingers even today in some of the old movies available on television.

A subsequent episode humorously devotes an entire section to Buffalo Bill’s exploits as part of a vast body of Western mythology, which also includes Wild Bill Hickock singlehandedly clearing a town of ruffians and Jesse James giving part of his loot to the poor.

Also here are the dime novelists, much like a smarmy character in Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-nominated Western “Unforgiven,” who hyperbolized or fabricated their way into history with hero-making accounts of cowboy and outlaw adventures that were devoured by readers back East.

Here, in a dime novel, is Buffalo Bill confronting a villain who is threatening a damsel: “Touch but a hair of her head and, by the Lord that made me, I will bespatter that tree with your brains!”

Another series of dime novels featured a fictional outlaw hero named Deadwood Dick, who sometimes was teamed in print with the real-life Calamity Jane. “This helped to confuse even more what was real and what was fiction,” says a historian, sounding as if he were describing re-enactments on TV tabloid shows.

The biggest myth perpetuated by these propagandists, the program notes, is one that also still endures in old Westerns that can be seen on TV: that the West was inhabited by savages, making it free for the white man’s taking.