| terns based on millions of years of biological evolution. Or the West is the sound of mountain water to our ears, the smell of dust in our nostrils, the sight of vast lava beds stretching to the horizon. All of those elements of nature become sensations in the human mind and stimulate wonderfully rich ideas and feelings; but to restrict the place only to those inner meanings would be extremely arbitrary. A place like the West must be discovered as well as invented. |
| Our culture, both in its popular and elite forms, frequently denies this more complex truth. For example, one of John Ford's film masterpieces, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, released in 1962, illustrates how popular storytellers have sometimes forgotten what truly has made the West what it is. The story opens on a scene of bustling civilization, filled with railroads, brick buildings, and middle-class homes that have replaced the wild frontier. Most of the rest of the movie is a flashback to explain how it all happened. Violent men once fought for supremacy, the film recalls, but law won out. The town moved from rule by might to rule by democratic elections. According to the film, the story of the West is one of turning nature into artifact. As the leading female character says near the end, looking from a railroad car window onto the improved scene, "It was once a wilderness, now it's a garden." |
| By modern ideas of justice, Ford may not seem adequately enlightened because he puts white males in the foreground of that creative process. Today, many historians would insist that the making of the West must be seen as the work equally of women and of men, and of Indians, Hispanos, African-Americans, and other citizens, too. But commonly historians along with filmmakers, liberals along with conservatives, and humans of all varieties agree on one conclusion: nature was passive and ineffectual, a blank slate without form or meaning, before humans arrived, and the land contributed nothing to the triumph of civilization. Human imagination and human labor have made the region what it is and have given meaning to the West. |
|
