Growing up in my East Yorkshire village, we were an ocean and many miles away from The American Wild West. And yet we were obsessed with cowboys and indians. When I say "we" I mostly mean boys. It was a story repeated throughout the British Isles.
The hats that cowboys wore seemed exotic. And we noted their leather chaps, the stirrups on their biddable horses and the leather holsters that carried their lethal handguns. Sheriffs wore badges in the shape of stars and so did their deputies. When they needed to sort out trouble, they frequently formed posses and together they would gallop off in plumes of dust to reestablish justice.
The indians or redskins seemed hardly human. They were fearsome savages who used tomahawks to scalp their victims. They could shoot arrows from their bows with incredible accuracy - even when galloping over parched plains. They said things like "White man speak with forked tongue" and bore names like Sitting Bull, Little Raven and Growling Bear. Their women were squaws who mostly stayed home in their tepees or tended fires.
Generally speaking the cowboys and the indians did not get along - with one notable exception being the relationship between The Lone Ranger and his faithful companion, Tonto. They were the stars of a Saturday TV drama called "The Lone Ranger" that involved plenty of cowboys and lots of indians too.
There were other dramas that focused on this endlessly fascinating conflict - including "Rawhide", "Maverick", "Bonanza" and "Wagon Train". In postwar Britain, shows about cowboys and indians took us away from ourselves to a faraway fantasy world. Later, I guess that space was to be filled by science fiction dramas like "StarTrek".
In the late fifties through into the early sixties, toy shops catered for the cowboys and indians obsession. You could buy cowboy outfits, sheriff badges, non-lethal bows and arrows and even rubber tomahawks. Millions of small plastic figurines must have also been sold - cowboys on horseback, cowboys kneeling with rifles, indian chiefs with removable feathered headdresses, squaws and braves and even papooses. And there were little plastic wigwams and model ranches and war paint and silver pistols into which you could insert rolls of "caps" that banged when the trigger hammered down.
Nowadays children don't fantasise about cowboys and indians and there are no popular dramas about them but back then it all seemed to fill a void and a need. We lapped it up and to a big extent so did the adult population of these islands. I haven't mentioned all the cowboy novels and Christmas annuals. There were many.
Life was cheap in The Wild West. I am ashamed to say that I never realised that those "redskins" or Native Americans were terribly wronged. They were trying to protect their homelands from invaders who often arrived with fencing and huge herds of cattle. In general, the indians were the victims and not the aggressors. They were fighting back in self-defence. To a large extent they had previously lived in harmony with Nature for generations. They could have taught those goddamn cowboys a thing or two.
I remember those shows and the "Western" movie nights at the cheaper cinema in town, every Thursday night, (payday) my dad and I would go and watch two cowboy movies separated by a cartoon, then Fridays I was always sleepy at school. I always knew the Indians were the victims. My brother and I had the outfits, he was the cowboy and I was the indian who always got killed off pretty quickly while the rest of the kids kept playing I was able to lie "dead" and read my books.
ReplyDeleteI now look forward to death so that I can catch up on some reading.
DeleteSame thing here with cowboys and Indians. I was not involved as there wasn't any money for that stuff. Since I am very interested in western Canadian history , I have a very good idea of the problems and the problems with treaties.
ReplyDeleteIt was convenient to view native Americans as thorns to be removed but it was their land. White men gave them diseases, guns and alcohol.
DeleteThe diseases were given on purpose. Blankets infected with measles or smallpox were given to them as "an act of kindness" for the winters.
DeleteIt's a good thing that we have a better understanding now but I doubt there was much harm caused by the generations of little boys playing cowboys and Indians
ReplyDeleteLooking back, it was a weird focus for playtime.
DeleteThere are still a lot of cowboys around these days, mostly disguised as builders or roofers.
ReplyDeleteRishi Sunak is an indian. He could have a pow wow with those cowboys.
DeleteMy cousin had all those cowboy and Indian books and I devoured them as a child. Yet we were being led down a completely false history of what really happened. We are at this time having our noses rubbed into the unfortunate fact that wealth was gained on the backs of slaves. The killing of indigenous people still goes on in the Amazon of course, we can't justify anything but greed always prevails.
ReplyDeleteMoney is indeed the root of all evil.
DeleteNot money itself, but the greed for money and more and more money.
DeleteThe natives only wanted to look after their land as they had done for generations, the cowboys just wanted everything to be the way they liked it and with guns they got their way. It was the same in Australia, but no cowboys. It took us far to long to realise the natives were doing the best for the world, shame it took so long.
ReplyDeleteIn the past, I was appalled by the attitudes white Australians I met expressed about aboriginal people.
DeleteEveryone was into the myth - think of the films, too. My brother had a most realistic toy six-shooter revolver gun with bullets you could take out, and the gun caps went inside the bullets. The barrel was blocked so it could but be used as a real gun. Now in the UK people are shot by the police for carrying far less realistic weapons in public, and there seem to be few toy guns of any kind.
ReplyDeleteDid your brother require you to dress up as a red indian so that he could chase you?
DeleteI was thinking the self same thing the other day that you don't get series about cowboys and Indians anymore. I suppose it is now not PC and rightly so. I do indeed remember all those series that you mention and as a child I used to have a crush on Robert Horton in Wagon Train.
ReplyDeleteModern filmmakers have sometimes done a much better job of creating realistic and believable portraits of The Wild West.
DeleteThere is still much to be learned from the people who have lived here for thousands of years.
ReplyDeleteHave you ever heard of the German author Karl May? He wrote dozens of books and created characters that have fed the fantasy of several generations of German children, Old Shatterhand and Winnetou being the most famous ones. He claimed he had first-hand knowledge of what he wrote about, and people believed every word. Much later it came out that he had never been in those exotic faraway places. Strangely enough, it did not stop the popularity of his books, and the films made after them.
ReplyDeleteThe older I get, the more I learn how the history that I learned when young was mostly inaccurate or flat out wrong.
ReplyDeleteOh Lord. We did all watch those things, didn't we? They were the morality plays of our day, I guess. The strong, rugged, handsome men who protected the hapless, helpless women from the savages. Strangely enough, one of my favorite shows was "Cheyenne" whose star, Clint Walker, was supposedly 1/4 Cherokee. Here's another fact- "Tonto" translates to stupid or silly. Nice, right?
ReplyDeleteSomehow it was always the Native Americans whom I found the most interesting and attractive. When it came time to play cowboys and Indians, I wanted to be the Indian.
I think your memories of the old westerns are shared by almost everyone of a "certain age." My mom (who is 15-20 years older than you?) also played with toy six-shooters as a kid. By the time I came along, westerns had lost some of their allure and we were moving into the era of space dramas. (I was an infant when "Star Trek" came out.) But I remember my dad watching "Gunsmoke," which I thought was incredibly boring. There ARE still popular westerns, like "Deadwood" and "Godless." And who could forget "Dances With Wolves," which told (albeit overly romantically) the Native American perspective?
ReplyDeleteDeadwood! I never heard so much swearing in a movie before! I still love Dances With Wolves.
DeleteWe Americans have a shameful history of treating native peoples horribly. I remember the first time I heard of "smallpox blankets" and how terrible it made me feel. What happened to them was genocide, pure and simple. The subsequent romanticizing of the "Old West" was almost unforgiveable.
ReplyDeleteWe've had so many lies and folktales told as truth in the US, it is getting difficult to know what to believe anymore. Now even when the truth is trying to be told, many politicians are fighting to hide it and distort it... it's shameful.
ReplyDelete