Cowboy historian rates 13 Wild West scenes in movies and television
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00:00This scene is just
00:06ridiculous. As far as cowboys versus Indians, which becomes a very common
00:11misconception, that almost never happened. Howdy, I'm Michael Grauer.
00:15I'm a public historian focusing on cowboy history
00:18and Western American culture, curator of cowboy collections
00:21and Western art at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma
00:26City, Oklahoma.
00:27Today we'll be looking at Wild West scenes and movies in television
00:30and judge how real they are.
00:39The greatest myth about the West is everybody was a gunman.
00:42That's a bunch of nonsense. That's what you have here is a basically a shootout,
00:46an artificial shootout,
00:47between three outlaws. So the period of what people usually understand as the
00:50Wild West is
00:51is primarily the second half of the 1800s.
00:55The only people carrying firearms were criminals, and the army, and also
00:59lawmen.
00:59Virtually every cow town, it was illegal to carry
01:03your firearms in town. Yes, there were firearms in the West, but not nearly as
01:07as you see in Western films.
01:15So this whole idea of the quick draw is just nonsense. One is the revolver was
01:19still
01:20somewhat new. It had been around since the 1830s, but they're notoriously
01:24inaccurate.
01:25And they're standing so far apart, they'd have
01:28emptied each of their cylinders probably to make one good shot.
01:32And as far as quick draw, there are documented cases where Doc Holliday
01:36quick drew and never hit anything.
01:39And so the lack of accuracy in the quick draw is one of the things that
01:43never comes through
01:44in the movies and television.
01:54Everyone wants to get rich quick, and so gold fever
01:57was very common throughout the entire 19th century
02:01in the US, particularly because of the gold strikes in California,
02:05later on in Idaho, later on in Nevada, Colorado, etc.
02:10And in this case, it's coinage, I'd say a four. And these guys are
02:13armed to the teeth constantly. I mean, it just defies
02:17defies credulity.
02:25Parts are real.
02:27Real-ish, let's call it. So they're just weren't enough formal lawmen.
02:31So ultimately, you have bounty hunters who are
02:35eventually deemed to be law enforcement on some level, and they
02:40tended to operate beyond the fringes of proper behavior for a lawman.
02:45There were some law women, not very many,
02:48and that's an important distinction. Now as far as a $7,000 bounty, that seems
02:52excessive to me.
02:54Most of these counties, most of these towns were so poor,
02:57cash poor, they couldn't offer up bounties of any size.
03:07Them partnering up and him teaching him the quick draw and being
03:12proficient with firearms. I think we really ought to start with the German
03:15immigrant.
03:16Germans, to a person, were abolitionists. They didn't believe in slavery at all.
03:21The fact that he helps to free the Jamie Foxx
03:24character eventually, that's probably fairly unusual, but not
03:29terribly inconsistent
03:30with their feelings on slavery.
03:40It's still surprising to me
03:42that Westerns that are being made
03:45in recent years still show that you could shoot someone down on a street
03:50with no repercussions. You committed a crime, you went to jail.
03:54You were indicted, you were arrested, you were arraigned, and eventually you had a
03:58trial.
03:59I will say something about the sheriff that he shoots,
04:03that he claims is an outlaw Willard Peck.
04:06That happened quite often. You would have an outlaw
04:09who decided to reinvent themselves as a lawman.
04:12Five, as far as the storyline, in some respect, again, belies credulity because
04:17of course
04:18Tarantino exaggerates everything.
04:25This Tim Blake Nelson character, Buster Scruggs, is hysterical
04:29because he's a singing cowboy right out of the 1930s,
04:34suddenly appearing in the Old West. No one wore a costume like that
04:37in the Old West. I mean, that's all an invention of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry,
04:41everything that he's wearing.
04:42Movie cowboys from the 30s and 40s.
04:46Strolls into a saloon which has batwing doors, which most did not, by the way.
04:50The swinging doors is an invention of movies and television.
04:53You gentlemen mind if I take his spot?
04:56If you play his hand.
05:01Saloons variably attracted a criminal element.
05:04Either gamblers, gambling was quite common,
05:07and of course alcohol consumption was a big part of that.
05:12Oftentimes you saw them as gathering places, but typically they were gathering
05:15places
05:15for criminals and gamblers.
05:18And if and I don't.
05:23You did have saloon fights, that part is true. And in some cases
05:27someone might pull out a concealed weapon, sometimes.
05:31But most of the time it was with fists, and they didn't last nearly long. You didn't
05:35have the great
05:36scenes like you see where everyone's punching everybody else,
05:40breaking furniture and so on. It was usually just a couple of people.
05:46On a frontier town like that there wasn't a whole lot of cash
05:52available. It was largely a cashless society. It was more
05:56on barter than anything else. And so only banks in
06:02more established communities, larger communities, really had the cash that
06:05was worth the effort
06:07that bank robbers might undertake to rob one.
06:10I'd call it a seven. They were poking fun, gentle fun
06:15at the Singing Cowboy films of the 30s and 40s.
06:18I don't think that it happened
06:22as often as we might think, although public executions were held.
06:27Fort Smith, Arkansas, of course,
06:30ruled by Judge Isaac Parker, aka the Hanging Judge.
06:34That's all been exaggerated over time
06:37and used to effect in both True Grit movies and also in the
06:42novel.
06:49I think outlaw gangs were pretty prominent, especially in Indian Territory.
06:53This was federal territory and therefore
06:55the scarcity of lawmen
06:59really made it very attractive.
07:02And that and the geography. It was such a vast territory
07:07that outlaws could go and escape any sort of jurisdiction.
07:11So the Rooster Cogburn character is taking on the role of one of those
07:16federal marshals to round up a criminal gang
07:20led by Lucky Ned Pepper.
07:26Riding across the open field, it's almost become
07:30its own movie trope. Outlaw gangs were notoriously cowardly.
07:34They didn't like to fight lawmen. They would bushwhack, certainly,
07:38if they had an advantage. It's not real sexy to get shot in the back
07:41or from ambush, so you have to dramatize it and then have them ride across an
07:45open field.
07:54So that was actually doable
07:55if you were a marksman. There is a very famous
07:59long shot made by a man named Billy Dixon
08:03at Adobe Walls in what's now the Texas Panhandle
08:07in 1874 of
08:111,538 yards using a Sharps Buffalo rifle, which is the same kind of rifle
08:16that Matt Damon is using. And I think this probably
08:19falls in the seven or eight category.
08:24Why don't we do it for real? On my gun.
08:33It's a farce.
08:35Why don't we do it for real? I mean, seriously, come on.
08:38I mean, somebody's gonna get killed or somebody's going to jail.
08:41In spite of the alleged fairness of this remake
08:46of The Magnificent Seven, the key that this
08:50Asian actor is an assassin speaks to the whole idea that there's a belief that
08:55Asians were devious.
08:56There was a large population of Asians primarily on the West Coast
09:02moving inland into the mining communities
09:05as well as part of building the Transcontinental Railway.
09:09But they tended to be
09:12looked on as some kind of other, and of course
09:16ultimately untrustworthy.
09:26It's become a Western trope, you know,
09:28inspiring the townspeople to fight for themselves, but rarely.
09:32I mean, I don't know of any instance where townspeople line up
09:35sandbags along the balconies and fortifications all over town.
09:40And then, of course, you've got the Old West equivalent of a machine gun
09:45with the Gatling gun. And, of course, he's 500 yards away.
09:48So how accurate is that from 500 yards away?
09:51I mean, come on.
09:56These two warriors are both Comanche.
09:58Which really means that if they're fighting each other,
10:01they could be from different bands, more than likely.
10:05I think one of the greatest misconceptions about Native people in the Americas
10:08is that they were all unified as a tribe.
10:11Invariably, they were divided into bands or clans.
10:16There were upwards of about 13, possibly 15 different Comanche bands
10:20who were quite spread out all across Comancheria
10:23from Colorado out onto Western Kansas all the way down to Mexico.
10:27And so this does not divide plausibility.
10:30It's actually entirely possible.
10:32It seems to me the philosophy in this entire scene was
10:35the more bullets, the better.
10:36Four.
10:44Great film.
10:45John Ford.
10:46But this scene is just ridiculous.
10:48Monument Valley in Utah becomes the setting for Comanche territory,
10:54which is way too far west for Comancheria,
10:57where they have the Comanche warriors in full regalia and paint
11:03attempting a full frontal assault through a river at a fortified position.
11:10That's just utter nonsense.
11:12Native American warfare was always based in advantage,
11:15either in numbers or surprise.
11:19As far as cowboys versus Indians,
11:25which becomes a very common misconception,
11:28that almost never happened.
11:29Usually, when a herd was met by a group of Native Americans,
11:35they might ask for a, let's say, a toll or a tax.
11:39Most cattlemen were willing to do that.
11:40So as far as fights between actual cowboys and Native people,
11:45almost never happened.
11:49So the character that John Wayne plays,
11:52he's wearing fairly accurate costume for being a cowboy.
11:55Hats came in all different kinds of creases,
11:58individualized to the person, especially a cowhand.
12:02So what I'm wearing is a rig from a typical drover or cowhand from the 1880s.
12:09He's wearing denim trousers, which would put this in after 1873.
12:14My pants that I'm wearing are Levi's, altered to look like 1873 models,
12:20which only had one back pocket.
12:22They all came with suspender buttons because there were no belt loops.
12:25And his boots are pretty spot on.
12:27By the 1860s, there is not something as a recognized cowboy boot yet.
12:39The Searchers film is based on a real set of events
12:43where a young white girl named Cynthia Ann Parker
12:46was kidnapped by Comanches in the 1830s.
12:50When she was rescued during a battle with Comanches,
12:53she'd become fully Comanche by that time.
12:55And so that's an important part that they don't tell here in the Searchers story.
12:59Even though he uses Native American actors,
13:02they have no lines for the most part.
13:05And of course, the leader of the Comanches, I think he's German.
13:07The women, for the most part, are all Navajos in this film.
13:11And they're all wearing Navajo female costumes.
13:13You know, there's a great blending of Native cultures.
13:16So this particular scene in the Searchers, I would put,
13:20no higher than a two or a three.
13:21It defies any sort of documented Native American battle with whites.
13:27They just simply didn't do that.
13:33One of the great myths of the American West
13:35is that everyone got to where they're going by covered wagon.
13:39Well, more than likely, they got there by train.
13:41By 1883, of course, there were railroads crossing from Texas up to Oregon.
13:47And in this case, these are German immigrants trying to get to Oregon.
13:59Of course, there were dangers everywhere.
14:02And so that part's pretty accurate.
14:05Animal attacks were rare.
14:06Rattlesnakes, of course, were across the West.
14:09And that could happen.
14:09Disease was the primary killer on wagon trains.
14:13And usually, that had something to do with bad water.
14:19Women were critical.
14:22Of course, it was a patriarchal society, for the most part,
14:25where women didn't become necessarily captains of wagon trains or anything like that.
14:30But they also made it clear that if they were to be asked to do certain things,
14:35cooking, gathering of things, acting as nurses,
14:38that they ought to have a vote.
14:40I would give that scene a 7 or an 8.
14:50There were, of course, Confederates and even members of the Confederate government
14:54that refused to surrender and remained renegades, ultimately outlaws.
15:02They crossed the border into Mexico.
15:04And then some of them crept back over into the frontier regions
15:09in New Mexico and Arizona, West Texas, and so on.
15:19Four armed gun robbers, basically, are going to rob a contingent of soldiers of anything.
15:25It doesn't make any sense.
15:27And they're driving an army ambulance, which was not used necessarily for medical reasons,
15:31but it was used for transport of people.
15:34So they're not using the right wagon, first of all.
15:36It's not a freight wagon.
15:37Any freight that came to a U.S. fort or was used in transport,
15:41they used hired teamsters and often sent a party of soldiers to guard that shipment.
15:47There would have been a lot more soldiers, not terribly many, but certainly more than that.
15:56Hiring a mercenary, that was not uncommon at all.
15:59It's important to remember that, you know, well after the Civil War,
16:01a lot of Confederate soldiers who had actually become prisoners of war
16:06were offered the opportunity to either stay in a POW camp during the Civil War
16:11or to be sworn into the U.S. Army and sent out west.
16:14They were what they called galvanized Yankees.
16:16After the war is over, after their obligation was fulfilled,
16:19they may have become mercenaries because they had a specific training set
16:23that could be useful to criminals.
16:25For sure.
16:26It's probably a three or a four.
16:32Lakotas are depicted reasonably accurately.
16:35As far as using what we call the short bow from the back of a horse to hunt bison,
16:40they were the primary food source, tool source for virtually everything.
16:44One shot would not have killed them.
16:46Likewise, with a Henry rifle that Kevin Costner is carrying,
16:50he would have had to shoot the bison multiple times to kill it because he's riding horseback.
16:55These buffalo hunts were long and difficult.
16:58Because he's riding horseback.
17:00These buffalo hunts were long, drawn-out affairs
17:03because the animals would run for miles.
17:05You know, for a film, you had to compact time and space to make it fit on the screen.
17:18To take a bite of the liver is a way to consume part of that animal's spirit.
17:24And that's a form of gratitude, as I understand it, in Native lifeways.
17:29And to offer that to this white soldier in the Kevin Costner character
17:34is a way to kind of bring him into their lifeway.
17:37The attention to detail in depicting the Lakota people,
17:41and I think ultimately Native people in general in this scene,
17:45is critical because it shows great sensitivity.
17:47I'd put this at an eight.
17:49The instant kills, you know, that's just perhaps a minor quibble.
17:53But overall, the drama of a buffalo chase is just really
17:57one of the best handled that I've ever seen on the silver screen.
18:00All right, stay calm, everybody.
18:03My name is Cherokee Bill.
18:09Complete fantasy.
18:09Rufus Buck and Cherokee Bill were notorious outlaws.
18:13That part is true.
18:14But I'm not sure in this kind of presentation
18:19this serves that particular movement, agenda, philosophy.
18:25As I mentioned before, outlaws fled to Indian territory in huge numbers.
18:32But it also included displaced people from the eastern or southeastern United States
18:38who brought their enslaved people with them in the 1830s and 40s.
18:43And ultimately, you have mixed race people there
18:46who are part Native American and part African American.
18:50And so both Rufus Buck and Cherokee Bill come from that demographic.
18:54So the zeal to track them down and bring them to justice
18:59did not just fall to federal lawmen.
19:02It also fell to tribal lawmen.
19:05And to create this fantasy story here with the Cherokee Bill story,
19:10just tell the truth.
19:11And it'll make for a better movie anyway.
19:17This is a specially designed prisoner train, evidently.
19:28Well, the U.S. Army did not get involved in legal disputes.
19:32Their job was to keep people safe from depredations.
19:35But they almost never got involved with outlaws.
19:39Almost never.
19:40They had federal marshals that did that kind of transport of prisoners.
19:43And usually they had special jail cars, usually by wagon, rarely by train.
19:50So the fact that you've got a mythical, fictional group of soldiers
19:55assigned to this specially designed prisoner cage built inside a train car,
20:02I mean, it's like the Will Smith movie, The Wild Wild West.
20:05I would say the rating of this is 3.
20:08Thirteen.
20:12Stealing an entire herd of animals was pretty uncommon because it was so obvious.
20:18They notice when you steal the whole herd.
20:20And the fact that these thieves, these rustlers, have stopped on the prairie
20:26doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
20:28Their whole thing was based on stealth and speed.
20:38They just charge riflemen.
20:42That's just stupid.
20:43This posse, let's call it, led by Sam Elliott and Tim McGraw and others,
20:48they're all armed with rifles.
20:50The thieves are all armed with revolvers.
20:54Remember, accuracy versus inaccuracy.
20:56They're not going to fight for that.
20:57Heck no.
21:02You are a beautiful sight, Charlie.
21:04Bandits and strays.
21:05Charles Goodnight is a giant in Old West history, having been an Indian fighter,
21:10he'd been a Texas Ranger, very successful cattleman.
21:13He would have had his men go with him, his hired men go with him.
21:16Plus, he was from Illinois, and he was notoriously gruff and notoriously profane.
21:22So, the fact that he talks like a Southern gentleman in that
21:25little flies in the face of reality.
21:27As far as the cattle wrestling scene, four.
21:30We're here to disarm you. Throw up your hands.
21:36Oh, that's not what I want.
21:38That whole confrontation at a place called Loca O.K. Corral is repeated over and over again.
21:44And ultimately, it becomes a trope.
21:45An outlaw gang called the Cowboys tries to take over Tombstone,
21:50and another criminal element, also known as the Earps,
21:54try to push back for who's going to take, who's going to control this town.
21:58You know, Tombstone was one of those hells on wheels that popped up because of the mining industry.
22:05In the grand scheme of things, in terms of history of the American West, it's a blip.
22:14So, we don't really know what happened.
22:16Anybody who was an eyewitness had an agenda, either against the Earps or with the Earps,
22:22or just wanted their town back.
22:24We know that some people were killed.
22:27The Earps and their people, along with Doc Holliday, were implicated.
22:31The scene's probably six.
22:33I think they stage it fairly reasonably, who the combatants were.
22:44Open Range is a great movie.
22:46It's one of the few that actually depicts cowboys or drovers with some accuracy.
22:52Particularly because it takes on the whole idea of free grazing,
22:56which was the range tradition up until about 1880.
23:01And what that meant was, you could graze cattle on those grasslands as long as you wanted,
23:06without really any title, or really any claim.
23:16The primary tool of the drover and the cowboy was not a firearm.
23:21It was a rope, or a short whip, initially made of rawhide,
23:25as that tradition comes out of Mexico, that actually comes from Africa, ultimately.
23:31And so, that's an important distinction.
23:33People, unfortunately, don't realize that this is the cowboy's main tool, not a six-shooter.
23:46Unfortunately, as communities were established,
23:49elections could be corrupted, and eventually hand-picked candidates would come to the fore.
23:55And so, that whole idea of a lawman not enforcing laws,
24:01except selectively, against certain peoples,
24:05that really was fairly common in the West.
24:08This film? This is an eight.
24:10A few quibbles about the gunfight, but it's one of the best cowboy movies, in my opinion.
24:15And I don't mean Western, I mean a cowboy movie.
24:17So my favorite Wild West movie that's accurate is The Cowboys,
24:21because literally the John Wayne character has to hire young men and boys to be his trailhands,
24:27and the things they encounter along the way are pretty accurate to the real story.
24:32Much obliged for watching this video.
24:34If you enjoyed it, mosey on over to watch for the next one.