On the
autobiography that captures both the myths and realities of the American frontier.
For those scholars who like to
identify and define certain dominant American narratives—a group that, it will
surprise no reader of this blog, would include a certain AmericanStudier—the
Western frontier presents a particularly challenging topic. On the one hand, no
one could dispute that many of our most mythologized, iconic, and heroic
national figures are Western in origin; but on the other hand, what do those
figures symbolize? Do they represent the carving out of a path for American
“civilization” as it moved west (Daniel Boone)
or an attempt to escape that path (Natty Bumppo)?
Did they take the law into their own hands (outlaws like Billy the Kid) or maintain law and
order in a wild society (marshals like Wyatt
Earp)? Were they cowboys and railroad men, doing the dangerous but somewhat
corporate work of settling the frontier? Or Indians and bandits, existing
outside of, and perhaps (as the kids’ game implies) in opposition to, those
types?
The answer, of course, is yes, our
frontier myths encompass all of those roles and identities and many others as
well. After all, of the many ways in which we could argue that the frontier
exemplifies America (an argument that AmericanStudiers as diverse as Richard
Slotkin, Annette
Kolodny, Frederick
Jackson Turner, and Alexis de Tocqueville
have all made), to my mind the most convincing is in its thoroughly
cross-cultural community, the ways in which every prominent Western event and
site and place were constituted out of at least a couple different cultures and
identities, peoples and perspectives. Many of those cross-cultural contacts
were far from ideal, violent
clashes and conflicts between the army and Native American tribes, Irish
and Chinese rail workers, California squatters and Mexican landowners, and many
other variations. Yet while such violent encounters have understandably been
the focal point of many of the recent revisions of frontier history—just as the
violence of the Wild West was a focal point for many of the original stories of
the region—these cross-cultural and combinatory Western communities could also
produce unique and impressive American identities, lives and stories that
embody the best possibilities of such a hybrid setting. And at the top of that
list would have to be Nat
Love (1854-1921).
Much of what we know of Love we
have learned from the man himself, courtesy of his engaging and mythologizing
autobiography, Life and Adventures of
Nat Love (1907). That book’s subtitle is over forty words long and yet
still manages only to highlight some of the diverse worlds and identities
through which Love moved in the course of his very Western and very American
life: from his birth in slavery to dual frontier careers as a cowboy on the
cattle ranges and a prize-winning rodeo competitor known as “Deadwood Dick.” The
subtitle doesn’t even get to Love’s final iteration as a Pullman conductor,
returning to the West where he had made his name and fortune as a buttoned-up
representative and spokesman (quite literally, as this section of the narrative
reads at times like an advertisement) for the technology and comfort of the new
railway lines. These hugely diverse stages and worlds can make the narrative
feel scattershot in tone and focus, and Love similarly divided in perspective,
but that’s precisely what makes the book and the man so emblematic of the
frontier—this is a man who was born a slave and who still experienced frequent
racism in his Pullman work, but who also became one of the period’s most
celebrated rodeo performers and a frontier legend; a man who worked as a cowboy
alongside peers from every culture and community in the west, went to work for
one of the Gilded Age’s most successful corporations, and closes his book
addressing eastern audiences who have likely never been further west than the
Mississippi.
There’s no way to boil that life
and identity down to a single type or narrative; his subtitle couldn’t even
boil it all down to forty words. Many of the frontier’s cross-cultural
experiences were, again, not nearly as successful as Love’s, but that too is
central to the point—a narrative of the frontier, like a narrative of America,
would need to include both Love and Little Big Horn, and everything and
everybody in between and alongside. “Cowboys and Indians,” that is, can and
must mean both mythic confrontations and the possibility that the “and” does
indeed symbolize connection and community.
Last
autobiographer tomorrow,
Ben
PS.
What do you think? Other life writings you’d highlight for the weekend post?
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