Narrating the American West: New Forms of Historical Memory By Jo ...

This regression to primitive life was essential, Turner contended, for the survival of American democracy: “frontier individualism has from the beginning promoted democracy” (53). Importantly, the “perennial rebirth” (32) of American democracy on the frontier is rationalized by the erasure of indigenous people from Turner’s vision of “free” land. As Turner’s thesis naturalizes the process through which “primitive Indian life had passed away” (40), Native people are figured as relics of a premodern, ahistorical past.⁷

Turner’s mythologizing history dovetails with the ideological work of formula Westerns. In its lamentation for the closed frontier, the Turner thesis inspired “a nostalgia that might fuel endless reproductions of a mythical last West” (Lawlor 45). Indeed, Owen Wister’s seminal Western The Virginian (1902) nostalgically portrays a heroic man who brings law and order to a nineteenth-century frontier town. Wister depicts Medicine Bow, Wyoming, as “voiceless and unpeopled” (29) and deflects histories of racial conquest by emphasizing the struggle between cattle barons and cattle rustlers.⁸ Wister justifies the lynching of cattle rustlers as the only way that “justice [could] be dealt in this country” (240). Wister and Turner strip western conflicts of their broader social and political complexities in celebrating the heroism of individual male figures who “tame” a wilderness and sanction Euroamerican patriarchal rule over racial and female “others.”

Despite changing historical circumstances, the Western has been marked by a “persistent obsession with masculinity” (Mitchell 3) and is “deeply haunted by the problem of becoming a man” (4). Like Turner’s vision of the West after the 1890 “closing” of the frontier, Wister’s novel looks nostalgically back on the era of the masculine “cowpuncher, the last romantic figure upon our soil” (x): “It is a vanished world. No journeys, save those which memory can take, will bring you to it now” (ix). It is precisely this image of a “vanished world” that imbues the cowboy figure and the “open” frontier with mythic significance. In this regard, Turner “invented the ‘Western’ by opening the possibility for repeating the loss of the West in fiction” (Lawlor 46).