In a comfortable house in New York,
Walt Whitman, in his old age, thought back to the West of his youth.
The enormous skies, the ramparts of the mountains.
The uninhabited silence, the ocean of sage.
And ever the cowboy with his broad-brimmed hat,
with loose arms raised, and swinging as he rides.
So far, in the history of the West, we've looked at explorers, scouts, hunters, gold rushers -
people who crossed the wilderness and exploited some of it,
but didn't domesticate any part of it.
In the 1840s, there suddenly appeared an astonishing body of people.
Led by a second Moses, they walked into the West, 1,000 miles beyond anybody else,
right across that enormous gap of the continent,
right over the crest of the Rockies.
And in a desert basin, right here, they founded the first successful Western community.
And this is it.
The City of the Saints.
(CHOIR SINGS "COME, COME, YE SAINTS")
(COOKE) To the rest of us, this is Salt Lake City, Utah,
but to the faithful, it is Rome and Mecca.
The Mormon capital of the world, conceived in the nightmares or visions of a 15-year-old boy
who was told by God and Jesus Christ and the Angel of the Lord
to found the only true church.
When he died in the Midwest, the first Mormons were led 1,500 miles to this spot
by an autocrat named Brigham Young.
He looked down on this valley and said, "This is the place where the devil cannot dig us out."
# To see the saints their rest obtain
# Oh, how we'll make this chorus swell
# All is well
# All is well #
All is well in a secular sense, too, for the Church owns most of the office buildings, theatres,
real estate, insurance, banks.
The Church's hold on the social and economic life of the faithful is as strong as ever,
except in the famous matter of polygamy.
Perhaps nothing annoys a man with one wife more than another man with many wives
who doesn't even feel guilty.
Utah was denied statehood for 50 years
until the Mormons agreed to have and hold one wife at a time.
(MAN) We've come to one of the most interesting rooms
in the Visitors' Center on Temple Square in Salt Lake City.
This room is called the Pioneer Room.
And here portrayed in beautiful painting, and also in film,
is the coming to the West of the Mormon people.
(COOKE) Its founder, Joseph Smith, that visionary farm boy,
tried to plant the Church first in New York, then Ohio, then Missouri,
but his flock was beaten and raped, and their banks burnt out.
For the Mormons were not only holier than thou, they were thriftier.
Their prosperity was as nauseating as their polygamy,
and always their banks were burned.
0n into Illinois, the rumour went ahead that they were nothing but wholesale adulterers,
so their next settlement was burned down, and Joseph Smith was jailed, and then dragged out
and shot.
Then Brigham Young took over.
Over there in the next scene is shown the trek across the plains.
(COOKE) Across Nebraska and Wyoming, over the Rockies into the Salt Lake Valley.
He was the most iron-willed of the survivors,
and here he began his iron rule.
Sagebrush was what they found,
and this is what they made of it.
This belt of land which stretches through central Utah, about half the length of England,
is, as you see, all fertile now,
and it is so because, in the beginning, of the dictatorship, you might say, of Brigham Young.
This was desert.
And so, within six days of their arrival, Brigham Young put out a set of decrees.
Land was not to be bought or sold.
It was to be assigned - parcelled out - to individual settlers.
If they couldn't make it productive, they would have it taken away from them.
All timber and all water resources were to be held in common.
In the two months remaining before the fall, they were to plant crops and dig irrigation ditches.
Water would be allotted according to a strict system of fair division - which still holds.
There is a rota, and according to the condition of your soil and the needs of your crops,
you are released water at a given time on a given day.
If the land that was assigned to them turned out to be barren, that was just bad luck.
They were not allowed to desert it. They must try and make it fruitful.
This didn't always happen,
and some people died in the winter snows, and others tried to exist on thorns and grasses.
Anyway, against the odds of nature,
and the suspicion and interference of the United States government,
against cheating whites and warring Indians, they sowed and they planted and they reaped.
It took half a century to make this desert bloom, but they did it.
The Church receives a regular share of their income,
and the Church organises the herds, the feed and the sale of crops.
In the depression of the 1930s, the Mormons were the only American farmers
who steadily refused all help from the federal government.
"The Lord alone giveth, and the Lord taketh away."
(CHOIR) # Hallelujah!
# Hallelujah! #
Every Tuesday, at Salt Lake airport,
a group of 19-year-olds goes off for two years on a proselytising mission.
They journey to India, Mississippi, Sweden, Japan...
To the farthest lands that will take them.
This team is off to reclaim the heathens of Sheffield, Glasgow and Manchester.
So, away they go.
The latest generation of the first domesticators of the West,
whose present aim is to convert sinners, both foreign and domestic,
into Latter Day Saints.
(CHOIR) # All is well #
But to come down to earth, where most of us sinners live,
how did the majority of Americans go about domesticating the wilderness?
Well, they didn't. The majority always has to be prodded by a fear,
or inspired by a symbol.
Let me show you what did the inspiring.
This splendid mechanical beast,
which now we condescendingly call a "Puffing Billy" or an "Old Iron Horse".
100 years ago, this was as magical as a spaceship.
It fired the American people with the idea that once the Civil War was over,
and the Union had held,
it was now possible to unite the continent in fact as well as in theory, and this would do it.
Right after the Civil War, two railroad companies,
one pushing west from Omaha, the other starting back from the Pacific,
would build a track across 1,700 miles of prairie and desert and mountains
that lay between the railheads of the east and the coast of California.
People said it couldn't be done,
but in 1866, it was begun by crews that eventually grew to 10,000 men
and as many animals.
In the east, the gangs were recruited from the defeated south,
and from the sons of the Irish who had fled in the potato famine of the 1840s.
It took 400 tons of rail and timber for every mile of track.
The eastern company had a continuous supply line back to the Atlantic,
and they could move at a clip across the endless flatlands ahead.
But it was very much tougher for the western company - the Central Pacific -
which had to fetch most of its materials in by sea, 12,000 miles round the Horn,
including the locomotives,
not to mention the workforce, which pretty soon came in from China.
It was said that, whereas the Union Pacific was sustained by whisky,
the Central Pacific was kept going on tea.
These men in the West soon came up against the mountains.
While the easterners were racing along,
these men were stripping forests and painfully bridging and tunnelling.
All in all, summer and winter,
it took the western company two years
to hurdle the formidable barrier of the California High Sierra.
1,000 miles back east, on the plains,
while the Irish gangers frequently fainted from the midsummer heat,
the company officials were revived by the thought
that the government had promised a subsidy of $16,000 per mile of track.
And once they started to climb the Rockies,
it went up to $48,000 per mile,
with great stretches of free land bordering the track thrown in.
So they cheerfully stripped vast stands of virgin forest
for bridges, trestles and sleeper ties.
All this was done by men moving a mile a day,
working 100 hours a week for two dollars a day.
They slept in dormitory trains.
They raised Cain in mobile track towns with fly-by-night saloon keepers, gamblers, whores.
They might look like a bunch of roughnecks,
but they had special skills with such exotic titles as Backfiller, Head Spiker,
Track Winder, Tie Hack.
After three years, they'd come almost 1,000 miles
and were on the high spine of the Rockies.
And now, it was downhill.
Congress had stipulated that the junction should be at the California border,
but in the end, it allowed them to build hell for leather, and meet wherever they met.
Which they did, at a place they christened "Promontory Point" in Utah.
The eastern company sent out a special train for its directors and their ladies,
and riding along were three companies of infantry, and a regimental band.
But this genteel company was swamped by the men who'd done it,
who had their own accompanying dignitaries in the shape of cooks, gamblers, touts,
madams and molls.
The ceremony began with a prayer.
The telegraph operator was finally connected with San Francisco and New York,
and ready to flash the first coast-to-coast commentary.
It began with an historic warning - "Stand by, we've done praying."
This motley crowd then watched the governor of California lift a hammer over a golden spike
to drive it into the last sleeper - a piece of California laurel. He missed.
But the faithful telegraph men dubbed in the clang,
and the word went around the world - it was done.
New York fired a 100-gun salute.
Chicago's parade was seven miles long.
Philadelphia rang the Liberty Bell.
A San Francisco paper announced the annexation of the United States.
The country was excited by railroad mania as a novelty, a tourist fashion,
but much more as the missing link between the enormous gap of the plains
and the people who had settled them.
The example of Promontory Point spurred the railroads to put out branch lines
into open country.
We're in Kansas, in Abilene,
and here in the spring of 1867 was where the railroad ended.
There came through a 29-year-old livestock trader from Chicago named Joseph McCoy.
And he looked at the railroad
and he looked at a map and he had an idea.
He knew there was good grassland all the way to Southern Texas.
What could be simpler than to connect the cow with the railroad, make a fortune,
and add beef to the diet of millions?
First, he had to buy the town - there wasn't a town.
It was 450 acres and a few cabins,
but, luckily, they were owned by another man from Illinois, Tim Hersey.
Hersey sold the whole lot to McCoy for five dollars an acre.
By the way, Mrs Hersey, a God-fearing pioneer,
one day opened the Bible at the Book of Luke,
and she read there, chapter three, verse one,
"The tetrarch of Abilene in the province of Judea."
And she liked it.
So she christened the cabins Abilene.
McCoy spent $5,000, which in those days was a tremendous price,
getting out advertising circulars
and sending riders down to Texas to promise the cowboy
a safe trail and a fair price at the railhead.
And so began the heyday of the Chisholm Trail.
Scattered through Southern Texas
were three million of these raw-boned, half-wild cattle known as longhorns.
Till now, they'd been slaughtered only, for tallow and hides at four dollars a head,
but at the end of a 4,000-mile trail, there was Mr McCoy's bait of $40 a head.
The trail ran directly north through largely unsettled and also Indian territory.
The longhorns were as nervous as cats,
and they could be stampeded by a thunderstorm or a howling coyote.
That meant a loss of ten pounds in weight,
or a 10-to-20,000-dollar loss on the herd at the railhead.
The Indians exacted heavy tolls for crossing their lands,
or they acted as guides and misled the cattle into marshes and quicksands.
After 100 days, the village of Abilene heard a thunderstorm of hooves coming from the south.
It was the start of the cowboy legend.
The arrival of this first herd made McCoy the emperor of the cattle kingdom.
He boasted that he could deliver 200,000 cattle in the first decade.
He was wrong.
He shipped out of these stockyards, in the first four years, over two million.
He was a man who delivered, hence the expression "the real McCoy".
Obviously, some bare acres and a few cabins
couldn't possibly cope with as many as 5,000 cowboys paid off in a single night.
McCoy did build them some cabins - shacks -
but mostly the cowboys slept out on the prairie,
then wheeled their chuck wagons into town and left them in front of their favourite haunts,
namely the saloons, the gambling joints and the brothels.
At the peak of the cattle trade, Abilene was as rough as any town on this continent.
Marshals came and went by the simple application of the six-shooter,
until the arrival of James Butler, Wild Bill Hickok.
He was nothing like the Gary Cooper impersonation.
He was something of a desperado himself.
He was also a very fancy dude.
But a murderous shot.
He could take a hat, skim it into the air
and perforate the rim with a circle of bullet holes before it hit the ground.
Happily, he decided to exercise his marksmanship
by joining the law and not fighting it.
And this was the law. A ball and cap six-shooter.
It had been developed during the Civil War. It was very light, and I regret to say,
it was the law in many more places than Abilene.
For the next 10 or 15 years, it was the law west of the Mississippi.
The Wild West was exactly that.
Even in a sheriff's posse,
the difference between the good man and the bad and the lucky was very blurred.
Where every man toted a gun, a drunk could wind up like a rustler,
the victim of a neck-tie party.
In the last century, we've created a romantic legend of the West
which has sugared the truth of a harsh, sordid and violent life.
The death rate in these small cow towns
was certainly 20, 50 times as high as that of New York City today.
And out on the range where never was heard a discouraging word
but only the bellowing of poisoned cattle,
all the feuds and sneaky murders were about the three disputed necessities of life -
who owned the cattle,
who had the grazing rights,
who could secure the waterholes.
As bad as the cow towns, or worse, were the mining settlements
where footloose bachelors hoped for gold or silver,
but mostly hacked away at copper, tin or lead.
And when they came up from their dust-choked tunnels,
they came up to raise hell on the streets and in the saloons.
Their towns were as impermanent as their livelihood.
A vein gave out, and three years after this photograph, this town had gone to dust.
The miner, like the cowboy, didn't domesticate anything.
That had to wait for the railroads campaign to attract, not birds of passage, but settlers,
and not only from the eastern states, but from northern and central Europe.
The railroad agents searched the continent for landscapes with failed crops
and cities with browbeaten minorities.
But it was not only the poor and persecuted who were drawn to the western plains.
In the 1870s, the West was a fashionable caper
to upper-crust English and Scots.
There was one Sir George Grant who advertised in the papers for a team of young bloods,
preferably remittance men with money,
to join him and found an English colony in Western Kansas.
This is where they came. Within two years, he got his team.
They collected some horses and a pack of South Down sheep, and some Aberdeen Angus cattle,
and they sailed away.
When Sir George got to St Louis, he said he wanted a steamboat.
They said, "A steamboat on the western prairie where you've always got the wind,
"but where's the water?"
Nevertheless, this English team had a fixed and beautiful and very confused picture of the West,
which included riverboat gamblers and buffalo hunts and fox hunts,
and playing poker and faro, and having a brush with wild Indians,
and, who knows, maybe with wild women?
So... I'd love to have seen this.
These crazy Englishmen dragged this steamboat 200 miles across the prairie.
They didn't find a river. They found a creek and they dammed it up,
and made a little lake, navigable for about eight or nine miles.
Then they simply barged up and down the lake.
Since they found there were no foxes,
they contented themselves with shooting coyotes and jackrabbits.
It turned out that they were not very good at cattle-raising,
and the women were not up to the legendary standard,
and there was a withering drought and the heat was infernal,
so in the end, as one of them said, the whole thing was a deuced bore,
and the colony broke up.
Sir George Grant did have the satisfaction of having introduced to this country
the Aberdeen Angus breed.
And he saw that the township was named after her gracious majesty Queen Victoria.
Today, his name is given to a school baseball park.
And here, in Western Kansas at least, are the last soldiers of the Queen.
The Englishmen left of their own free will,
but there were many peoples who came here, who, if they failed, they were stuck.
America, more than most countries,
owes more to the persecuted of other nations.
This church was built by a band of Russian Catholics
who came in here only a couple of years before the Englishmen went home.
They were the descendants of German Catholics who had been persecuted at home
and invited by Catherine the Great to go into the Volga basin to improve the farming.
Then, 100 years later, more persecutions, so they came to America,
and, in her honour, as the Englishmen had named Victoria, they called this place Catherine.
They had seen the advertisements of the Union Pacific
offering cheap passage and free lands in the dream world beyond the seas.
Now, why should they come to the empty prairie?
Well, all farmer immigrants had an instinctive feel for the familiar land.
Where does a Greek sponge-fisherman ply his trade in the United States?
Tarpon Springs, Florida.
And the Poles went like homing pigeons to Wisconsin and the eastern end of Long Island
for the familiar sandy soil and the potato growing.
These Russians, like most immigrants, did one thing, and they did it here.
Each of them brought one bushel of their native strain of wheat - Turkey Red Wheat.
They'd been told that this was no good for wheat farming,
but they were stubborn and knew they had a very resistant strain of wheat,
that could stand heat and dryness, and it flourished.
It took only 20 years from the arrival of the so-called "Roo-shuns",
to the day that Kansas became the wheat bowl of America.
Today, and for the past 40 or 50 years, they've had more wheat than America could use.
They've left it to rot, or been paid not to plant it.
But 100 years ago, their forefathers came out to arid land,
and these were the first true inhabitants of the plains.
The homesteaders, given by the government 160 free acres,
on the gamble that they could make it productive within five years.
They introduced the new and stable element - the family,
beginning a raw life with very raw materials.
No trees on the plains, so their houses were made of dried sod,
whimsically known as "prairie marble".
For fuel, the dung of the buffalo. No doctors and much sickness,
and many men like this widower, for whom not only the roof caved in.
If his wife had lived, she like many another might have literally gone mad from the scrimping,
the infernal summers, the Arctic winters, the ceaseless wind and the loneliness.
# I am looking rather seedy now
# While holding down my claim
# And my victuals are not always of the best
# And the mice play shyly round me
# As I nestle down to rest
# In my little old sod shanty in the West
# Oh, the hinges are of leather and the windows have no glass
# While the board roof lets the howling blizzards in
# And I hear the hungry coyote
# As he slinks up through the grass
# Round my little old sod shanty on my claim #
I don't have to tell you
that the element that was the curse and the blessing to the prairie farmer was the wind.
Now, there's a simple thing. Any city child knows that it heads into the wind and it draws water.
It was one of three things
that made it possible for those homesteaders that you've seen to make a life on the plains.
You know, I think we tend to believe
that the roots of civilisation are architecture, music, painting,
but these were the late flower.
Athens, Rome, Paris, London, New York could not have been
if the farmer had not been able to plant and reap by the sun and the rain
and the rhythm of the seasons.
Civilisation, in fact, is based on a few discoveries of awful, dramatic simplicity -
the wheel, a staple crop, the plough.
Now, for centuries, the European had prepared the good ground
with a plough that didn't work on the American prairie.
This matted sod which bakes under a midsummer temperature of over 100 degrees,
and is petrified in winter at 40 below zero, which is 72 degrees of frost,
and is baked all through the year by this constant wind to the consistency of concrete.
It was like trying to plough a crocodile's back,
until a man named John Deere - not surprisingly, he was a blacksmith -
invented a plough with a steel face.
This broke the sod.
This turned it upside down.
And for the first time, the homesteader was able to break the prairie sod.
Those were the two things. The third thing was simpler still.
Barbed wire.
To us, it's as obvious as a brick or a sheet of paper,
but a century or more ago,
if you and I could have seen these early variations of barbed wire,
I don't think we'd have had the faintest idea what they were for.
You see, the homesteader could get a crop and make a livelihood and make a farm,
but here on these vast plains, he had no timber,
no way of making a wooden fence,
of being able to fence in his farm and say, "This land is mine."
And so it was invaded all the time by animals and thieves
and most of all by cowboys whose herds simply came and trampled down his crops.
And then came barbed wire, and what a blessing it was,
because it redrew the domestic geography of the United States.
For the first time, it defined the prairie farmers' private property.
It's a very humble bit of hardware, isn't it?
But, incidentally, it killed off the cowboy, or, by denying him the open range,
it turned him into a rancher.
The longhorn gave way to quicker-fattening breeds - the Hereford and Angus.
The cowboy rancher has become a family man, a mechanic,
a salesman separating his product from the other men's with the identity of a brand.
The cowboys were outraged by the invention of barbed wire,
and attacked the homesteaders with wire cutters.
They provoked endless battles, both legal and bloody,
with families whose bales of barbed wire were to ring their farms like a protective moat.
In the end, the West was won by the homesteader and his woman,
the mother of the first generation raised on the plains.
She was mother, mistress, nurse, seamstress, cook, accountant, comforter, teacher,
who was known and treated, even by the cowboys and the miners,
as the untouchable madonna of the plains.
Slowly, she acquired the symbols of respectability. The dignity of a pony and trap,
a frame house, and such high-tone city amenities as wallpaper, carpets, pictures.
We're back in Abilene, Kansas, but 20 years after it was a wild cow town.
By the 1890s, it was possible for a strict and pious mother
to raise a proud family in a house like this,
and she it was who usually accompanied the family hymn singing,
and in the evenings read aloud books, especially the Good Book,
maintaining the frontier tradition which lasted long, perhaps too long in American life,
that culture belonged to the women.
In her spare time, if she had any,
she made the coverlets and the counterpanes and the quilting, and hooked the rugs.
This mother, who came to Abilene in 1892, made this throw for the chair,
and also on this cushion wove the names of her seven sons.
One of them died in infancy, but six of them grew to manhood in this house.
It's interesting, to say the least,
to reflect that one of those boys, 50 years later,
was able to lay down the law
to a boy born in the marble halls of Blenheim Palace.
He, of course, was Winston Churchill,
and you must have guessed we're talking about the boy who became the man known as
General and President Dwight D Eisenhower.
This is Ike's boyhood home.
And there you see his mother reading a letter from Ike,
telling her that he's been promoted to a four-star general
and given the command of the invasion of Europe.
The year he was born,
the last big tract of Indian land was declared open for settlement in Oklahoma.
The claimants and the speculators were lined up and ordered to wait for a starting gun.
The itchy ones jumped the gun, and were ever after known as "Sooners".
Oklahoma is still called "The Sooner State".
They raced off for the good land, and the waterholes,
and what might turn into a city centre.
They banged in their stakes, bedded down.
They quickly filed a legal claim,
for in the past 20 years, much blood had been spilt over disputed land claims.
This picture goes to prove that even 80 years ago,
behind every successful American sits a good lawyer.
Rome, the schoolboy knows, was not built in a day,
but the Oklahoma schoolboy knows that Guthrie, the first state capital,
went up in an afternoon.
The West was no longer wild or uncharted.
All across the plains, the interior was being conquered and domesticated.
It had taken less than 30 years for the whole progression,
from bare ground to camp ground, to prosperous home town.
It was some sort of high-water mark of civilisation on the plains
when the Dodge City Amateur Dramatics Society put on "A Midsummer Night's Dream".
When the city fathers began to dress up as cowboys, available for weddings and picnics,
the Wild West declined into the title of a travelling entertainment,
presided over by the veteran slaughterer of the buffalo, Colonel William Cody,
now a prosperous impresario,
and owner of a troop of Indians tamed and trotted out as actors
before large audiences at home and abroad,
and even in the pop-eyed presence of Queen Victoria.
How about the Indians?
The thousands who'd never heard of Buffalo Bill?
What happened to the Indian tribes?
Did they just vanish?
You may remember that first they were banished to the wilderness.
Then, in the last decades of the 19th century, they were chased there and cornered
and conquered.
And it's not too long ago - it occurs to me
that Churchill was born in the year of the last pitched battle with the Indians
and Eisenhower was born in the year of their final massacre - 1890 -
which happened on this bare hillside in South Dakota.
In fact, there could even be people listening to me now who remember the news of it,
and its curious, poignant name, "Wounded Knee".
It was the last violent episode
in one of the most constant and certainly the most miserable themes of the American story.
Let me tell you about it.
After the Civil War, the government had sent commissioners out west
to sign a final set of treaties which would confirm and celebrate
the Indians' new trust in the white man.
In fact, they were rounded up in vast internment camps
which could cover over 1,000 square miles of arid land.
But these reservations were still too confining for the nomadic tribes,
and if ever they thought of breaking loose,
the army was on hand to contain them.
By that time, the buffaloes had been slaughtered and their skins shipped east.
The theory - the hope - was
that the Indians would obediently troop to the reservations
for their rations of government beef. If they stayed away, they would starve.
In other words, they were harmless wards of the government.
Well, in 1876, the country had a stunning reminder
that some of them were not yet cowed into a breadline.
Out of the blue came the news
that one third of the Seventh Cavalry under the command of General Custer
had been massacred.
In its fury and humiliation,
the army mapped a series of campaigns
to ensure that the Indian would never again be anything but a reservation prisoner.
Even the great Sitting Bull, who'd escaped to Canada after Little Bighorn,
was cajoled into coming home.
Late in the '80s, the dejected Indians were suddenly heartened by news of a saviour.
An Indian John the Baptist
whose disciples came among the tribes and offered a miraculous regeneration of their pride.
If they performed an ancient spirit dance,
the white man's bullets would be as harmless as hailstones.
The white man himself would disappear, and the buffalo would be reborn.
This pathetic ritual was enough to alert and alarm the military.
Buffalo Bill volunteered to parley.
He had no success,
for the shifty reason that the authorities had sent him to talk with the wrong men.
The army, in fact, was itching for a showdown.
In autumn 1890, near the reservation town of Pine Ridge,
the Seventh Cavalry - the regiment chopped up at the Little Bighorn 14 years before -
mustered for the kill.
This time, they were taking no chances.
Their jumpiness was triggered by the menacing news
that old Sitting Bull had been shot,
and the Seventh took off to search out a band of renegade Sioux.
They found them - over 200 men, women and children.
And annihilated them.
This was the frozen corpse of the chief.
This wretched episode was known to the white man
as "The Battle of Wounded Knee", December 29th, 1890.
Next day, the army dug the bodies from the snow and carted them off.
They buried them in a common grave.
This is that grave.
Well, that was the end of it.
Through three centuries,
there had been good, even magnanimous relations with the Indians.
But the simple, ruthless fact is
that wherever the Indians had something that the white man wanted, the Indians lost it
by expulsion, by warfare, by treaties signed and treaties broken.
After all, the white man wanted North America. And he took it.
In the end, the Indians were put on reservations.
The white man banished the Indian to lands where no white man could possibly survive.
The Indian fooled him. HE survived.
And so, after a fashion, he still does.
(DRUMMING)
Today, the longhorn is a stuffed emblem in an annual parade.
The independent cowboy of the plains is a lost ideal
to which city men pay their playful tribute.
(ANNOUNCEMENTS OVER TANNOY)
(COOKE) In many a western town on the anniversary of the city's founding or naming,
the Western males go through this skittish ritual.
As for the Indians,
they consent once a year to demonstrate their own domesticated status.
The women as picturesque dependants.
The men as make-believe warriors.
Imitation pioneers do for show what their forefathers did for survival.
These cheerful citizens may pretend, like Huck Finn,
that they have still not been got by a woman and civilised,
but, like you and me, they are corralled in towns and suburbs
and tethered by mortgages, parent-teacher meetings, alimony payments
and the other ties of domestic bliss.