Cowboys Need Not Apply

I was a little kid growing up in the 1960’s. By all accounts I should have been a fan of westerns. Most kids my age were. The 1950’s and 60’s were really the heyday of westerns. There was Gunsmoke, the longest running television drama of all time. But besides Gunsmoke there were tons of others: Cheyenne, Maverick, Have Gun Will Travel, Wagon Train, The Rifleman, Laramie, Rawhide, Bonanza, The Virginian, Daniel Boone, Branded, F Troop, Laredo, The Big Valley, The Wild Wild West, The Monroes, Iron Horse, Cimmaron Strip, The Guns of Will Sonnett, The High Chaparral. There were many more that I have not mentioned. This is remarkable when you realize that there were only three networks then (four after PBS came on, but they weren’t doing westerns). Most people in America did not have more than three channels. How did they fit all these westerns in? And this is just the television shows; if that wasn’t enough there were plenty of westerns at the movie houses and western novels. America was western crazy. Kids were western crazy. Not me. Why wasn’t I? Of the shows listed above I never watched any, except for F Troop, which was really more a comedy than it was a western, and The Wild Wild West, which was really more of a science fiction/spy show than it was a western.

On the face of it westerns do have a lot to offer. There are heroes, villains, conflict, and they can have compelling characters. The performances were generally good. A lot of great actors got started in westerns. So why didn’t I like them? Could it be racism? Westerns often had stereotypic and one-sided portrayals of Native Americans displaying covert or overt racism. Such depictions bother me today, but if I am honest, it was not something I thought much about in the 1960’s. Little white kids back then were not much exposed to the moral concepts of racism, at least not until the late 60’s.  And many of the television westerns did not even have Native Americans in them. So unfortunately, I cannot say that racism was the reason I disliked westerns.

How about violence? Westerns were pretty violent. Lots of characters died, it is true. But violence was prevalent on many of the shows of the day, from cop shows to war shows, to detective shows. But TV violence in the 60’s was sanitized. If someone was shot, they tended to die off camera. We never saw a victim’s guts spill out onto the road. So the violence was muted and unreal. I don’t think anyone was ever traumatized by TV violence in the 60’s. So that also is not the reason that I didn’t like westerns.

It is hard to say why some people favor one genre over another. Artistic preference is one of the things that make all of us unique. I do remember that I thought of westerns as dirty and dusty, and colorless. I was a kid who favored science fiction and silly comedies (hence The Wild Wild West and F Troop).

Later in life I came to a reconciliation with westerns, ironically this was as the western was all but disappearing from television. There were some good movies and an occasional brilliant TV series (Deadwood). Were they better than the older ones, or was I just more willing to give them a try? Who knows? The western will never be my favorite go-to entertainment, but I can enjoy a good story, well told, regardless of genre.

(My novel Star Liner, is now available as an ebook through Copypastapublishing.com, Amazon, or the other usual online sources. For those who like to turn physical pages, the paperback will be out soon).

Star Liner