The West of the Imagination
Buffalo Bill Cody and His Wild West Show
In 1893, Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West show arrived in Chicago, popularizing the image of the West as a region of gun-toting scouts and cowboys and marauding Indians. For more than thirty years, from 1883 to 1916, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was one of the most popular entertainments. It toured the United States and Europe. It contained rodeo-like displays of cowboy skills, feats of marksmanship, riding and roping, and horse races. It also featured attacks on stage coaches and settler’s cabins, a cyclone, and a prairie fire.
Until 1869, William F. Cody had been a farmer, teamster, trapper, soldier, Pony Express rider, army scout, and buffalo hunter. He achieved fame as the result of a dime novel loosely based on his life that was published in 1869 and was adapted into a stage melodrama in 1871. The Wild West show helped to transform the West into a mythic space, more primitive and natural than the eastern cities.
No region is more shrouded in myth than the area west of the Mississippi River. In popular films and best-selling novels, the late nineteenth century western frontier was represented as a place where heroic, ruggedly independent pioneers struggled against an unfamiliar environment and brought civilization to a savage wilderness.
Throughout much of the twentieth century, the cowboy and the western lawman were the classic American heroes. While other episodes from the American past faded, such as the era of the whale-hunting harpooner or the lumberjack, the western frontier remained a staple of American popular culture.
The very first movie to tell a story, Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) had a western setting, and for thirty years, from 1939 to 1969, the Western was Hollywood’s most widely produced action film, and John Wayne was Hollywood’s most consistently popular star. Roughly a quarter of all Hollywood movies made before 1970 were westerns.
American Characters
William Mulholland
He took on the task of bringing water to a city that was depleting its only source, the Los Angeles River. Secretly, Los Angeles bought up the water rights to the Owens River in a valley 233 miles north of the city. He supervised the construction of an aqueduct that brought water from the Owens River across the Mojave Desert to Los Angeles. For five years, in 110-degree heat, men labored to create an aqueduct twice the width of Massachusetts.
A second aqueduct was built, sucking the Owens Valley dry. Ranchers in the valley attempted to dynamite the aqueduct. Soldiers and police officers had to be brought in to protect it.
As part of the project, Mulholland built the San Francisquito Dam, which collapsed in 1928, unleashing a 200-foot wall of water that killed 200 people. He was not prosecuted, but the disaster was judged to be his fault, and he resigned his position. But the process of building aqueducts continued. Today, Los Angeles draws its water from as far as 600 miles away.
John Wesley Powell
As an explorer, anthropologist, geologist, and geographer, John Wesley Powell was post-Civil War America’s leading student of the Far West. Even though he lost an arm at the Battle of Shiloh, he became the first American citizen to navigate a thousand miles of the Colorado River from Wyoming through the Grand Canyon. He also spent considerable time among the Indian peoples of southern Utah and northern Arizona. Convinced that these cultures deserved study and understanding, he founded and served as director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology.
Powell was convinced that the federal government needed to inventory the West’s natural resources and develop the region in an orderly, democratic, and balanced manner. He convinced the federal government to create the U.S. Geological Survey in 1879, and served as the survey’s director from 1881 until 1894. Powell understood that the distinctive feature of the Far West was its limited water supply and that one of the most important questions the West faced was how to properly allocate this scarce resource. His Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States was the first government study to examine such environmental issues as how to fairly apportion water resources, regulate grazing, manage forests, and prevent unbridled exploitation of the nation’s rangelands.
Envisioning Manifest Destiny
