Real Heroes of the West

I do not like the article by your reviewer, Kenneth Turan, titled “Bloody Marvelous Peckinpah” (Calendar, Feb. 26). It is a good article and it is no doubt a very well-made movie but there is no excuse, ever, for the glorification of bloody violence. A tour of duty in the Navy, 1941-45, cured me of any lingering juvenile interest I had in blood and gore. I will never see any movie--especially at $7.50 a pop--that depicts violence, so that eliminates 95% of Hollywood’s output. Thank God for “Little Women.”

But my point is that Hollywood continually depicts these mindless characters in so-called “Westerns.” I argue that these were not the people who built the West; in their mindlessness, they would have destroyed it. I modestly turn to my own family as examples of those who built the West. I am piqued that Hollywood finds them so uninteresting.

My great-grandfather, Dr. W. W. Stillwagon, was the first M.D. to set up a practice in Napa-Lake County in 1850. (He walked West with a wagon train. Great-grandmother followed a year later by taking the train from Illinois to New York, by steamer to the isthmus of Panama, across the isthmus by mule and then by steamer to San Francisco--what a wonderful reunion scene, surely Hollywood could do something with that!)

He not only made house calls, he made ranch calls (he might not get back for three days if there was a bad storm--but spattering mud is not as satisfying as spattering blood to today’s Peckinpahs). He saved an Indian chief’s son from dying of smallpox (hundreds of thousands of the native people died of our European diseases) up at Clear Lake and was presented by the chief with a beautiful white horse that he rode for many years. (Yes, there is that pioneer woman doctor on TV, but she hardly counterbalances hundreds of blood-and-guts oaters.)

During the Civil War, the Confederates were anxious to get California out of the Union as the gold was keeping the U.S. Treasury solvent, thus there were many Southern agitators here. Dr. Stillwagon organized a Vigilance Committee (not Vigilante Committee) in Napa (along with others throughout the state) to dissuade the agitators. He was examining a patient when he looked out his office window and saw an agitator agitating. He excused himself and, being 6 feet 4, went out and knocked the guy out. (A little blood might have splattered.) He returned to his patient but noted after a while that the agitator was still out cold. He excused himself again, having taken the Hippocratic Oath, and gave the man first aid.

He left the Whig Party in 1871 and became a Republican to run for the state Legislature. He was elected and served one term, during which he persuaded the Legislature that Napa was the ideal location for the second state hospital. He died of TB, acquired in his practice no doubt, in 1885. His son, also an M.D., died of TB, as did one of his daughters. His other daughter survived and was my paternal grandmother.

Another great-grandfather was the first Congregational minister in Pasadena in 1880. His son, my maternal grandfather, was a shirt manufacturer. Nothing much to splatter there. Dr. William Brooks (my paternal grandfather) was a young dentist, affiliated with an older dentist in San Francisco. One noon hour, the husband of one of the older dentist’s patients came in and shot the older dentist to death. (Ah, blood and gore here, what am I complaining about?) Grandfather was also credited with inventing dental braces as well as casting a fly 102 feet during a contest at the San Francisco Fly Casting Club.

In 1903, at age 17, Dad (Clifton Brooks) shipped out on an American Mail line steamer as a deckhand. He survived that two-month voyage to Sydney by eating out of the passengers’ garbage. After the 1906 earthquake, he rescued Grandpa’s dental equipment (less the chair) from the advancing flames and dynamiters (no water to fight the fires so they were knocking down the buildings--surely Peckinpah could do something with that scene). So Grandpa was one of the few dentists still in business right after the quake.

One of my father’s proudest boasts, as a recent Boalt Hall graduate and classmate of Earl Warren, was that he helped throw the Southern Pacific Railroad out of the State Capitol when he worked to elect Hiram Johnson governor (and U.S. Senator for many years). Dad was later Minute Clerk of the Assembly, secretary of the Senate and was elected to the state Legislature from Oakland for two terms. My mom was a princess in the Rose Parade (when they had no queen--a better system) and died of TB when I was 8. What would Peckinpah do with that?

I had a stepmother, Dr. Charlotte Singer-Brooks, who in 1935 proved that the vaccine still used today for pertussis (whooping cough) was effective. Oh, yes! I must mention that a great-uncle of mine, Fred Emerson Brooks, wrote the official poem for the Panama-Pacific Exposition in 1915 and was the postmaster at Tombstone during the shootout at the OK Corral. But, then, there was very little splattering at the post office. Even those mindless ones were too smart to shoot the postmaster!

And the family has not been exempt from the glitter of Hollywood. Cousin Mary Brooks performed on the silent screen as Ann Little, and Fred Emerson Brooks wrote movie scripts. I could go on. I restate my point. These men and women were the ones who built this wonderful West of ours, thus I can never take kindly to the bloody oaters about weak, destructive men who only left lore appealing to their modern counterparts. How about a fair shake for those who really built this West!