Lassoing the myths

Silver and gold turned this into a 19th century boomtown, a seminal city of the Old West.

Then the ore dwindled, and Virginia City died. It was “Bonanza,” the venerable ‘60s TV western that helped put it back on the map. When the Cartwright clan galloped into town from the Ponderosa, Virginia City was the destination.

But the real history can’t be found in reruns. It’s in the dirt.

Over the last decade, archeological digs have revealed a legacy veering sharply from the myth-making of Hollywood.

To historians and physical anthropology students, it was no surprise. Fibbing on history is a Tinseltown tradition.

But now the professors are pushing back a bit.

Consider the Hollywood hubbub at a conference earlier this year in York, England. Scholars vented over misplaced nuance and twisted facts set on film.

Exhibit A: “Bonanza.”

The TV western portrayed Virginia City as rough around the edges and mostly white.

But beneath patches of blacktop and sagebrush-strewn lots, archeologists have found shards of fine china, buttons off elegant gowns and other trinkets whispering truths of the frontier.

This was once a wealthy and cosmopolitan city of 25,000.

“In reality, there were probably a dozen languages spoken, wealthy men in suits and bowler hats, and stores rivaling any in New York,” said Julie Schablitsky, an archeologist affiliated with the University of Oregon’s natural history museum.

Still, the Cartwrights got off lucky. Hollywood transformed African American pioneer Jim Beckwourth, who has a mountain pass and a Sierra town named after him, into a white man for 1951’s “Tomahawk.” A few years later, “Hell to Eternity” did the same to World War II hero Guy Gabaldon, a Latino.

Such blunt sins are nearly forgotten relics in today’s Hollywood, which has embraced the Oscar-worthy biopic with a vengeance in recent years. But among academicians, even the most authentic productions remain a cause of qualms.

Be it pirates or patriots, Vikings or vamps, they say, movies get lots of the details wrong and even foist whoppers on a public relying on Hollywood instead of history books.

Lawrence E. Babits, the George Washington Distinguished Professor of History at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C., characterizes it this way: “What’s the difference between a diamond and a piece of paste glass? One is a fake.”

Consider “The Patriot,” Mel Gibson’s 2000 ode to Colonial breakaway.

Babits has participated in digs at Revolutionary War sites. He also spends many a weekend with buddies, reenacting key battles. So when producers hunted for extras to fill out the ranks of “The Patriot,” Babits and his chums were naturals.

They spent the entire production guffawing and grimacing over historical inaccuracies being captured on film.

Filmmakers amassed far more troops than actually fought, he said, and the cinematic cannons were much bigger than anything available at the time (Babits and friends dubbed them “Gunzillas”).

Babits said he and others engaged in an endless tug of war with the filmmakers, mostly to no avail. Although he considers the film one of the best cinematic depictions of the Revolutionary War, Babits concludes that its historical tinkering cheapens the experience of those who survived and those who didn’t.

“It’s every man’s history,” he says. “And the reality is better than the Hollywood version.”

Film has also given pirates the swashbuckler treatment.

Charles R. Ewen, an East Carolina University colleague who joined Babits in York, said archeological analysis of pirate shipwrecks hardly resembles the cinematic myth.

For starters, there was rarely any buried treasure. Most of the bounty, Ewen said, was far more prosaic -- mercantile cargo that was bartered and sold at ports. And digs have produced no peg legs, hooks or parrot skeletons.

Hollywood even butchered the truth about horned helmets.

If filmdom is to be believed, horned helmets were everywhere -- from serious attempts, such as 1958’s “The Vikings” with Kirk Douglas, to the sendup film “Erik the Viking” in 1989.

Yet there is no evidence of the headgear being worn by the ancient Norse, according to Jon M. Erlandson, an anthropology professor at the University of Oregon who has spent summers sifting a Viking site in Iceland.

What bugs him even more are film depictions of Vikings as drunken barbarians.

While the Norse were a tough crowd before they adopted Christianity, archeologists have discerned that they were primarily farmers and fisherman. They kept domesticated animals, developed advanced metallurgy and an early form of democracy. “When I go to a movie, I don’t expect reality -- I expect to be entertained,” Erlandson conceded. “But there ought to be some responsibility to depict things a bit more accurately.”

Film’s most insistent twist on history comes in the Western saloon. We think swinging doors, pale-faced cowpokes, dancehall girls and gunfights. But archeological digs in Virginia City found few bullet casings to prove that saloons were bastions of violence, said Kelly Dixon, an anthropology professor at the University of Montana. Instead, archeologists discovered remnants of fine crystal stemware. They found beads off fancy dresses. One dig yielded glass shards of the oldest known bottle of Tabasco sauce.

“The artifacts, as my professors always said, don’t lie,” said Dixon. “Cultural diversity was rampant in the West, but Hollywood rarely tells that story.”

And the Hollywood version is what most people know.

Ron James, historic preservation officer for Nevada, remembers how his mother became an inveterate “Bonanza” fan soon after the show debuted in 1959.

A year later, his family toured the crumbling remnants of the real Virginia City. They saw a multistory school house for 1,000 kids and an opera house that once drew the likes of Lillie Langtry and John Barrymore.

Mom, James said, “was very disappointed.”

Despite this real-world deviation, tourist hordes flooded Virginia City during “Bonanza’s” long TV lifespan, and life began to imitate art. On vacant lots, entrepreneurs erected wood storefronts. “Cartwright-era architecture,” James calls it.

With Hollywood kitsch threatening true heritage, Nevada lawmakers formed a historical preservation district.

Reruns of “Bonanza” still lure visitors, who amble by the antique storefronts, digital cameras their side arms.

At the Gold Hill Hotel, the last vestige of “Bonanza” is a photo of Ben Cartwright and Adam, Hoss and Little Joe, along with the famous map of the Ponderosa -- the one that burned at the start of each episode.

Many a tourist pauses to snap a photo. “People from all over the world have seen that burning map, and they have to come here,” says hotel manager Melody Reynolds. “ ‘Bonanza’ is part of our history -- from the 1960s.”