The real American Cowboy: the real men and women of the Old West were truly as legendary as classic Hollywood cinema and traditional Western fiction have led us to believe.

When the legend becomes filet, print the legend.

So says Maxwell Scott, the newspaper editor in the Western film The Malt Who Shot Liberty Vallance, when Sen. Ransom Stoddard, played by Jimmy Stewart, discloses the truth about the day he supposedly felled the famous outlaw.

Though the townspeople thought Stoddard shot Liberty Valance, he didn't. John Wayne's rough-and-tumble character, Tom Doniphon, selflessly shot Valance, knowing it would mean he'd likely lose the girl he loved to Stoddard. We call such fictive men legends because we mistakenly assume reality does not comport as comfortably with these symbols of Western lore as we want to imagine. Yet the real men and women of the West were as legendary as we want to believe they were, as legendary as Doniphon. They were easily fictionalized symbols of the American character and the unflinching triumphalism of westward expansion precisely because they were real. They were as tough as Wayne portrayed them in films from Stagecoach to Red River to True Grit. They had to be. or the West would have remained an unsettled, vast wilderness.

Still, modern ideological revisionists of the left would deny and destroy a simple truth about the West: the men and women who rode west on Conestoga wagons, fought the Indians, domesticated the range, and built the cattle ranches were mostly good Christians and sturdy, daring Americans. They were Scots-Irish Confederates escaping Reconstruction. They were Swedes and Norwegians. They were galvanized Yankees from Birmingham and genuine Yankees from Boston. The revisionists would destroy that truth to portray these individuals as nefarious encroachers on the peaceful Indian, to delegitimize not only the story of the American West, but also the whole of the American experience from Columbus to Carson. Their ultimate target is the European Christian cultural identity that underlies that storied experience in its entirety.

The leftists strive for their goal, how ever, not by denying history outright. Instead, they distort the history and subvert symbols one at a time, then replace them with symbols of their own: Crazy Horse supplants Custer. The new symbols, as the late conservative commentator Samuel Francis wrote so eloquently, disguise the character of the radical anti-American agenda behind them, for they cannot be criticized without inviting the false but irrefutable charge of bigotry. Thus although the history is there to be read, once the exceptional symbols of that history are destroyed and replaced, the history is insidiously deconstructed as myth.

But now, the deconstruction takes an even longer leap from portraying cowboys and Western figures as "evil" because they subdued the Red Man and nature alike, to portraying them as "good" because they might be the closet homosexuals depicted in Brokeback Mountain.

This film is a cultural watershed not because it celebrates perversion. That is old hat. Rather, the film malevolently continues what the leftist cultural elite sees as an indispensable tactic in its strategy to undermine the Christian moral order: to replace the traditional symbols of our culture with its own. Brokeback Mountain then, undermines the romantic and masculine image of the cowboy as a man's man and a lady's man by substituting a debaucherous duo who are neither. (See "Homos on the Range," page 17.) Given the movie's significance on that level, it is unsurprising the film occasioned the usual accolades from the usual suspects. Of all the outrages Hollywood has heaped on iconic American figures and history, this must be one of the worst, although it cannot alter the truth about what most cowboys and Western heroes were: archetypes of masculinity and courage.

Truth is, maladjusted and selfish homosexuals who would betray their families never could have conquered the West, nor could they have formed the substance for the mythic Western characters Americans love to see depicted in films. And old or new Hollywood notwithstanding, nothing is mythical about the history of the Old West.

The Real McCoys

The gap between the real men of the West and those of cinematic lore is smaller than one is led to believe. We often hear the standard refrain: "That's just a movie, it wasn't really like that." In many cases, the history was like that. Separating legend from fact often reveals that the many virtues and derring-do of cinematic cowboys and other Western characters, fiction or not, pale next to the attributes and exploits of real men. One example is James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok--plainsman, scout, and marshal.

Hickok's example validates what Americans believe, or used to believe, about cowboys. His courage was peerless. He was a crack shot. He was solicitous of women, children, and animals. And he lived a wild and woolly life, which ended when he was shot from behind in a saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota. Hickok served in the Union Army during the War Between the States and once made a hair-raising escape from his Confederate foes. He also once breached an encircling wall of 350 Kiowa warriors after they surrounded him and 40 men.

Yet of all Hickok's escapades, only one inspired the standard fare in Western film: his fast-draw duel with Dave Tutt was the impetus behind a bevy of classic showdowns on the silver screen. If it wasn't on the street, it was some other venue. In True Grit, the showdown occurs when John Wayne's Rooster Cogburn faces four gunmen led by Lucky Ned Pepper, but the fight is conducted from horseback. "Fill your hands, you sonof-a-b***h," the Duke says as he as spurs his mount and charges into a hail of lead. In High Noon, Gary Cooper is left alone to face a gang, and in Shane, Alan Ladd drills Jack Palance's Wilson inside Grafton's saloon.

But we owe the showdown to Wild Bill, who wore a pair of ivory-handled Navy Colt .44-caliber pistols. Typically, gunfighters of the Old West did not meet at high noon in the street for a fair fight reminiscent of a Southern duel. That might be why Hickok's legendary exchange of bullets with Dave Tutt, a former Confederate, is so remembered.

It was July 21, 1865, Springfield, Missouri. The two men were playing cards, the story goes, with Tutt winning $200. Taking his winnings, Tutt also demanded payment of a previous debt. Hickok disputed the amount he owed, and put his pocket watch on the card table as collateral. Tutt said he would keep the timepiece until Hickok paid up, but he didn't let it go at that. Tutt bragged around town that he had taken Hickok's watch and told the plainsman, known as Prince of the Pistoleers, he would wear it in the town square. Hickok warned Tutt that he would not tolerate the slap at his manhood.

At 6 p.m., Tutt unwisely surfaced in the town square, with Hickok approaching from either the west or south, depending on the account. He warned Tutt not to proceed. When the men were about 75 to 100 feet apart, Tutt reached for his pistol, Hickok drew his, and history was made. Hickok's ball thudded squarely in Tutt's chest.

Yet Hickok was no bully. He defended the weak and once thrashed a man who whipped a horse. No less a personage than Libby Custer, wife of the ill-fated Son of the Morning Star, George Armstrong, had a high opinion of Hickok. Custer gave Hickok high marks with a gun. One of the most notorious outlaws in the West, John Wesley Hardin, said Hickok was the bravest man he knew. One elderly lady recalled Marshal Hickok's visits to her ranch to protect the family when the trail herds, led by rough-and-ready cowboys, came by. Hickok brought the woman and her siblings candy. "Oh, I tell you, I tell you," she recalled, "he was a grand man was Marshal Hickok, a grand man!"

More familiar than Hickok's confrontation with Tutt is the shootout at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, which has been put to film grandly, if fantastically, on a number of occasions: My Darling Clementine, Gunfight at the OK Corral, Hour of the Gun, Tombstone and Wyatt Earp. The Earp brothers, the lawmen in town, were feuding with the Clantons when they met at the most famous piece of real estate in the West. It was fast. It was furious. Thirty shots, 30 seconds. When the smoke cleared, three of the Clanton crew were dead. Whatever the particulars about the Earps and the Clantons, why they fought and who was right, no one can say they were cowards.

If Hickok was the legendary figure who, along with the Earps and Clantons, fixed the showdown at noon in the American mind, other men fixed the cowboy as a mythic figure. Among them was Buffalo Bill Cody, who at age 12 was already leading men across the West and fighting Indians.

Another forgotten cadre of great heroes were the mountain men and trailblazers: Kit Carson and Jed Smith, to name just two. If these men shared a single virtue, it was cast-iron courage. Indeed, such was their fearlessness that films are nearly incapable of depicting it. Otherwise, writers would have had nothing upon which to build the fictional myths in the contemporaneous dime novels of the 19th century and the films of the 20th, and the West would not have its unique place in literature and film. As the novelist Charles Portis termed it, men such as Hickok and Cody had "True Grit."

The Cowboy on Film

It was only natural for such characters to capture the imagination of the public, first with the dime novels, then, with genuine literature such as Owen Wister's The Virginian, another character played by Gary Cooper.

The emergence of Brokeback Mountain contrasts with Hollywood's previous portrayals of men such as Earp and Hickok and fictional cowboys. Two fine examples of what Americans knew cowboys to be are seen in John Wayne's effort in 1972, The Cowboys. and Alan Ladd's Shane, one of the best Westerns ever made.

The Cowboys is the story of Wil Andersen. a rancher in Montana whose ranch hands quit their jobs to pan for gold. Problem is, they quit just before Andersen must drive his cattle to market. As with all Westerns, The Cowboys is a wagonload of cowboy wit and wisdom. "Big mouth don't make a big man," Andersen tells one defiant, angry teenager. That raises the question of what does make a big man, and the film answers it unequivocally.

Faced with no alternatives, Andersen hires school boys to work the cattle drive. The trip is a story of courage and conquering hardship, of boys becoming men. Outlaws who followed close behind the cattle drive steal the herd, and that's when the boys bloom ... in full. Wayne's character becomes a father to each, showing them, as a father should, how real men behave. Thus, The Cowboys is more than a story about a trail drive. It's about coming of age and what it means to be a man, and not in the way Hollywood's enlightened would have a boy coming to age now, by coming out of the closet.

The Cowboys" first climactic are illuminates the point. When Longhair, played by Bruce Dern, rides into Andersen's camp, he roughs up one of the boys and breaks his glasses.

"All right!" Andersen says. "We've seen what you can do with a boy. How are you when they come a little bigger."

"You mean you?" Longhair says.

"Yeah," Andersen replies. "Why don't you tell your boys to just sit this one out."

"Oh. Mr. Andersen, you love to make it happen, don't ya."

"You havin' any of it?"

"Well, sir," Longhair replies almost deferentially, "you're a pretty old man."

"Yeah, 30 years older'n you. Had my back broke once and my hip twice, and on my worst day I could beat the hell out of you."

"I don't think so," Longhair replies, deference turning to arrogance.

"You will...."

With that, Andersen wallops him twice and the fight begins.

Good Westerns typically had this kind of defining moment. They imparted a lesson about life. They provided a model of manhood to which modern men, watching in the theater or on the late show, wanted to aspire in small ways around home, even if they could not punch cattle and shoot desperados. The sales floor at the Chevy dealership is a far cry from the canyon floor in Monument Valley, but father and son alike could view a Western and learn something about how a man is supposed to behave.

Such is true of Shane, the story of a mysterious gunfighter who arrives at homesteader Joe Starrett's humble patch and lands in the middle of a range war over water. The conflict plays out between Ryker, a rancher who pacified the range and expects to graze his cattle freely, and homesteaders building small farms and fencing off land, which prevents Ryker's cattle from getting water. In the end, Ryker hires a gunfighter, Wilson, to settle matters.

As with Wayne's Andersen, Ladd's Shane embodies the attributes of a real man: he fights when he has to, but reluctantly. He is a quiet man who laughs easily. Starrett and Shane form a firm friendship, admiring each other for the skills and virtues each lacks but sees in the other. Shane wants the life that Starrett has: a wife, children, his own small place. Starrett needs what Shane has, the ability to handle a six-shooter.

Starrett is a hale and hearty man of oaken principle. He is big and strong. A man of the earth, he swings an axe, builds fences, raises livestock, and plants crops. He doesn't want a sprawling cattle ranch, just the small few acres he cleared and settled. He adores his wife dearly. For him, Marian is everything. His boy ... his future. He wants to build a good life for his Marian and Joey on his home on the range.

A Southerner, Shane is thoroughly deferential to Marian. The relationship between Marian and Shane is significant for what it teaches us about adults of the opposite sex and, feelings notwithstanding, how they should behave. Although the film hints at Marian's falling in love with Shane, the rules of marriage and hospitality remain unbroken. Far from tumbling into bed together, their unspoken affection remains exactly that. They admire each other from afar, and that's as far as it goes. When they say goodbye and Shane rides off for the fated showdown with Wilson, they don't sneak behind the barn for a kiss. They shake hands. Shane and Starrett provide perfect models of manhood for Starrett's son, Joey. He is star-struck by Shane, and he asks his father if he, the father, could take Shane in a fight, which foreshadows the fight Shane and Starrett have over who is going to face Wilson.

An early scene in the film has Shane about to brawl with Ryker's men at Grafton's. When Joey implores Shane to leave, saying "there's too many," Shane gives the ineluctable answer for a man who lives by the code of honor: "You wouldn't want me to run away, would you?" At film's end, after the inevitable gunfight with Wilson is over, Shane, bleeding from a bullet wound in his side, imparts a simple bit of wisdom to Joey: "Grow up strong and straight."

Aside from The Cowboys and Shane, fine Western films abound--The Searchers, The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to name only three--all of them stories about honor, courage, sacrifice, and what a man is expected to do not only by those around him but also by his own refined sense of what it means to be a man.

Modern Culture and the Cowboy

Brokeback Mountain would have none of it, and celebrates the perversion of masculinity by inoculating the characters with the trite sayings of the age. Real men come out. Forget about betraying their wives and children. They have to be true to themselves.

Perhaps this is why the cowboy of old is almost extinct in American cinema. Although Larry McMurtry's fine novel, Lonesome Dove, was turned into one of the finest Westerns ever made, fictive characters such as those he depicted seem few and far between. Apart from Westerns, many men depicted in films embody little or no virtue. They are either feminized or homosexual, or amoral, megaviolent killers.

The cowboys of old, and even those today, do not comport with the definition of a modern man: feminized, metro-sexual, in touch with his feelings. And that, of course, the cultural elite in Hollywood had to change. This view of the modern man, who is unsure of himself, unsure of what is right and wrong, and fighting "inner demons," is the genesis of the homosexual "cowboys" in Brokeback Mountain, touted as "the year's most daring love story." Sadly, for all the fine writing McMurtry has done, he wrote the screenplay for this gallop to Gommorah, something hard to reconcile with the characters he created in Lonesome Dove.

It is characters such as those in Lonesome Dove Americans need to see, but not because they present an idealized icon of the American man in the cowboy's equipage. Rather, we need to see those characters because they present a genuine picture of the stalwarts who won the West and why they became symbols. If, as they say, all stereotypes are true, then the stereotypical cowboy is also a truth. They are legends only because what we believed them to be they really were. So when we print the legend, we are printing the fact more often than we know.

R. Cort Kirkwood has been writing about American politics and culture for more than 20 years.

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