COLUMN ONE : We’re Wild About the West Again : From memorabilia to music, frontier interest is riding high. Our recurring infatuation often follows a national identity crisis, some experts say, helping Americans find a renewed sense of purpose.

When Ted Hake of York, Pa., held an auction of cowboy-hero collectibles this year--Lone Ranger billfolds, Roy Rogers ranch lanterns, you get the idea--someone forked over a whopping $173 for a pair of Hopalong Cassidy boy’s underpants.

At another auction house, one of Annie Oakley’s guns recently sold for $108,000. Cowboy poets are turning up on “The Tonight Show.” Western history, literature and film are booming. And television is awash in documentaries about cowboys, cattle drives and Custer.

Americans are in the throes of another infatuation with things Western. From best-sellers to Oscar winners to gourmet cactus, the West is back again as a force in popular culture as well as literary and intellectual life.

To some extent, the surge might have been predicted. Fascination with the West waxes and wanes on a regular cycle. A generation raised on ranch furniture and Hoss Cartwright, pushing 40, is revisiting its childhood haunts.

But something else is at work, many observers believe. Interest in the West follows shifts in the national mood--just as Western movies went out during the Depression, came back in the 1950s and were banished after Vietnam.

This time, experts credit a national crisis of confidence, a post-Cold War, end-of-the-millenium funk. Knowingly or not, they say, Americans are rooting through the attic trunk of their history in search of a renewed sense of identity and purpose.

For some of them, the West simply symbolizes a simpler life. It caters to fantasies, often escapist, particularly among white men at a time when the world as they once knew it is in befuddling flux.

For others, the West is a way of exploring the past in a new light. Historians have turned the spotlight recently to new themes. Women, minorities and the environmental price of economic progress have become the focus of much Western history, literature, television and film.

“As a nation, we are reassessing some very basic questions about race, gender, class, family, what the role of government should be in our lives, where we think we’re going as a society,” said Richard Slotkin, director of American studies at Wesleyan University.

“At such a moment of crisis, any culture goes back to its traditions, its myths,” said Slotkin, the author of “Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America.” “It takes them all out of storage and dusts them off and looks them over again. And, hopefully, it rewrites them.”

The evidence is everywhere.

In Hollywood, after a drought that dragged on for two decades, at least 16 Westerns and frontier movies are reported to be in development--an outpouring fueled in part by two best picture winners: Kevin Costner’s 1990 revisionist Western, “Dances With Wolves,” and Clint Eastwood’s 1992 film, “Unforgiven.”

One of the new projects is a film about Davy Crockett by David Zucker, a director of comedies including “Airplane” and “Naked Gun” who first encountered Crockett on television in 1955, courtesy of Walt Disney. His collection of Crockett memorabilia now ranges from letters to a 1950s lunch box.

“We’re just doing the adult version,” said Zucker, who intends to include the “adult themes” in Crockett’s life, such as his politics and marriages. “We saw the legend on TV and in movies. For me, personally, I have a great curiosity to find out what the actual facts are.”

Television, meanwhile, is teeming with documentaries. One series, “The Real West,” was the highest-rated show ever on the Arts and Entertainment cable network when it premiered last fall. Hot on its heels came another series, “The Wild West,” linked to a special issue of Life magazine.

Two documentaries that aired on public television stations last fall received unusually high ratings for non-commercial television. Nearly 4.3 million households tuned in to a film on the Donner Party, and almost as many watched a program about the Battle of Little Bighorn.

The documentary flood owes its origins in part to the hugely successful 1990 series “The Civil War,” which received the highest ratings ever for a series on public television and appears to have dispelled programmers’ prejudices that history makes meager entertainment.

Ric Burns, who co-produced the series with his brother, Ken, has embarked on a four-hour series on Western history from the Gold Rush to Wounded Knee, scheduled to be aired on public broadcasting stations next year. His brother is doing a 10-hour series on the West scheduled for airing in 1996.

“After the Civil War, the other great story is the expansion west,” said Burns, who also co-produced the Donner Party documentary. “As history exploded back onto the scene, 999 people had the same idea at the same time. That is, go west.”

Sales of country music--much of it Western--are growing faster than any other category of music. The phenomenal crossover success of country singer Garth Brooks has helped fuel the explosion, along with a boom in country radio stations, dance clubs and videos.

In publishing, there is a much-discussed flowering of Western writing, likened by some to the Southern literary renaissance in the 1930s. Among the new authors are American Indians, Mexican-Americans, Asians and women; increasingly, one common topic is environmental destruction.

The traditional frontier novel is changing too, editors say. It is longer, its characters are stronger, its history is more accurate. Longtime publishers of Western novels, including Bantam and Berkley, have upped their production. Western histories, too, are increasingly popular among mainstream publishers.

In an old barn on a farm in Layton, Utah, between the Wasatch Mountains and the Great Salt Lake, a 23-year-old publishing house called Gibbs Smith Publisher happened upon a mother lode of Western interest and has been mining it ever since.

About 10 years ago, the company published an anthology of cowboy poetry from the late 1800s to the present. The book, “Cowboy Poetry,” has since sold 90,000 copies--an extraordinary number for a book of verse. It has also spawned a sequel and helped spur the spread of cowboy poetry readings from San Francisco to Washington, D.C.

Gibbs Smith followed up with a book on cowboy boots, published 16 months ago. That has already sold 100,000 copies. A book on the cowboy tradition in furniture has sold 25,000 copies. Due out shortly are an anthology of cowgirl poetry and books on the movie-cowboy image and on 100 years of Western wear.

The cowboy boot and Western wear books are the work of Tyler Beard, a 38-year-old Texan from the town of Comanche, who eight years ago with his wife, Teresa, started buying up and reselling cowboy memorabilia--everything from chaps and spurs to bucking-bronco lamps and cowboy bedspreads.

At one point recently, the Beards were buying 800 to 1,000 pairs of vintage cowboy boots a month (catering to a demand that Beard says surfaced first, like many fads, in Los Angeles). But the supply of originals, in all areas, is drying up. So they are now reproducing rodeo-pattern china, popular 40 years ago, and selling three times as much as they had expected.

“Lamps, textiles, furniture, even toys--everything you can imagine is being reproduced,” said Beard. “When you had every other baby boomer from Kokomo, Ind., to L.A. wanting to do their little kid’s room Western, it just went berserk.”

At Ted Hake’s auction in January, the Hopalong Cassidy underpants were just the beginning. The top seller in the auction was a cardboard box of Cassidy’s Favorite Honey Roll Sugar Cones: $727.

“Never have there been more Hoppy collectors and never have the prices been higher,” said Hake, who owns a phone and mail-order auction house called Hake’s Americana & Collectibles. “It’s just been growing like crazy over the past few years. It’s really a mystery to me.”

The story of the West has always dazzled Americans, as well as foreigners. It represents the great adventure, the American dream; it is the country’s creation myth. Rightly or wrongly, the West is fused in the popular mind with such notions as freedom, opportunity, self-sufficiency, a better life.

“We’re still just absolutely captivated by the West,” said Paul Hutton, who teaches history at the University of New Mexico and is also executive director of the Western History Assn. “It has emerged again as a way for Americans to identify themselves as distinctive.”

But why especially now?

One factor is probably demographic: The population balance in the United States is shifting westward. In the eyes of many, the Western states represent the country’s future. Along with political and economic power comes some cultural clout.

Another factor may be the much-ballyhooed ferment in Western history--the cacophonous debunking of frontier myths in recent years in favor of a more critical view of Western expansion and an exploration of the roles of American Indians, Latinos, African-Americans, Asian-Americans and women.

In their revisionism, the so-called New Western historians and their predecessors have unearthed a wealth of new stories which, in turn, have become the raw material of art. Historians have helped translate their findings into the films and books of the New West.

“If you picked up your phone for a while, there was a 50-50 chance that it was a documentary film maker who wanted to do the West,” said Patricia Limerick, a professor of history at the University of Colorado and the best known of the New Western historians.

New Western history may have also helped expand the appetite for things Western, particularly on the part of groups long left out of the story. By including perspectives once ignored, films and books of the New West have broadened the appeal of a saga long seen as the domain of white men.

“It filters down because people are looking for new stories,” said Paul Stekler, who made the Little Bighorn documentary. “You begin to have women’s stories and Native American stories and small features about Chinese-Americans and their role in California and building the railroads.”

But a striking number of historians and other observers also trace the interest in the West to the zeitgeist --a mood of national introspection and self-doubt, which they ascribe both to recent domestic and international turmoil and to the approaching end of the century.

Slotkin of Wesleyan believes the ebb and flow of interest in Western movies, at least, is always linked to social and political flux. Since Westerns draw their material and power from “the basic mythology of American culture,” they are used to comment upon events of the day.

According to Slotkin, the Western’s popularity grew steadily in the 1920s. But when the Depression arrived, the Western faded. The Western view of history, as a story of American progress, was supplanted during those years by gangster movies, dramas of social criticism and escapist musicals.

When the Depression ended, the Western came back, Slotkin says. But then World War II made war films the action movies of choice. As soon as peace returned, the Western returned with it and reigned as the most popular type of action film between 1946 and 1972.

“The Western becomes an allegory for anything you want to say about American culture,” said Slotkin. It weighed in on the Cold War, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War. But when Vietnam ended in an American defeat, Westerns went out of favor.

In 1971, U.S. studios produced about 25 Westerns; that number dropped to five in 1974 and one or zero a few years after that, Slotkin said. In his view, the Western had become identified with values that went out of vogue with the end of the war.

“The Western had always lived by the idea that certain kinds of violence can produce great good. . . . Vietnam convinced us that the violence was too much; we were killing and dying too much for what we were trying to achieve. (Thus) the Western loses its role as the rationalizer of American history.”

Now it’s back.

“At this moment of a real crisis in our values, we are looking back into history to see what the American past is all about,” Slotkin said. “The West is essential to that. It is about economic development and what it costs, race relations and how we screwed up in the past.”

B. Byron Price, executive director of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center in Oklahoma City, offers a slightly different explanation. He sees the West--in particular, cowboys--as embodying basic American values to which society turns to regain lost equilibrium.

“Every time that Americans get involved in things that take us away from our roots and create periods of uncertainty, we always come back to our core beliefs,” he said. “The Depression ripped the fabric of our country; one way we knitted it back together was by calling on old myths.”

This time, Price said, “it was the excesses of the ‘80s. The savings and loan situation and all of the everybody-get-yers kind of deal has come back around full circle. We’re now looking to value something; we’re looking for an understanding of our problems in Western mythology.” Sometime soon the interest will wane. But to historians, at least, it will have left a mark: “It may be a fad and maybe it will pass,” Hutton said, “but I think that when it’s over, no one will look at our Western history in the same way again.”