The Way We Weren't: Images of Women and Men in Cowboy Art

Abstract

The scene boils with action: Indians are attacking the wagon train. A courageous man stands on the platform of his covered wagon, shooting around a board hastily placed there for protection. Wounded, a warrior falls off his white stallion, while another brave surges past him, tomahawk raised. Yet another Indian draws back his bow. In the foreground, a bearded white man astride one of the rearing horses of the team pulling the wagon fires point blank at a fourth Indian with upraised tomahawk. Yet another brave is shot from behind just as he prepares to strike a blow with his warclub. Up from the rear of the wagon run a band of rescuers: a white man, a young boy, and several others bent on saving the beleaguered party. In the wagon, a young man falls back, blood gushing from a wound over his heart. Cradling him in her arms, a young woman with long blonde hair attempts to stanch the blood. Behind her, an older woman with dark hair turns away, shielding a baby. Fear on her face, she stares over her shoulder at the distant viewer, as if pleading for help. The painting, Attack on an Emigrant Train by Charles Wimer, tells everything one needs to know about the history of the American West as seen through the eyes of artists: he fights, she cringes. The purpose of this paper is not to retell that already familiar story but to show how paintings helped mold-and continue to reinforce-the myth of the West as his land.1 Western art, or cowboy as its artists and patrons prefer to call it, is narrative and representational. It tells a story based on the frontier myth and set against a natural backdrop. Further, it uses realistic detail and specific artistic techniques to convey traditional values about the role of men and women in the West. That the paintings tell stories that are false and stereotyped is in fact the point, for artists do not paint the real West. They paint instead the romantic West; the West of myth and legend; the West the way the culture wants it to have been. The function of art, therefore, has been to paint stories that freeze the frontier myth in the cultural subconscious. Until very recent years, as we shall see, these stories have been different for men and women. Although there were a few exceptional heroines such as Mountain Kate, who is shown fighting a bear on the cover of one of Beadle's Dime Novels, the images and stories about frontier women have almost always emphasized their gentility and passivity. Painting after painting has featured a woman in a wagon, babe in arms, being led across the plains. Metaphorically carrying American civilization westward as she literally cradles the next generation, the pioneer woman has little opportunity to act as an individual in her own right. Men, on the other hand, lead very exciting lives, for their encounter with the frontier frees them from domestic life and liberates them from the constraints of society. Cowboy art for men is the tale of action and adventure, danger and violence. Paintings such as Charles Russell's The Jerk Line, Wimar's Attack on an Emigrant Train, and Frederic Remington's Stampeded by Lightning are so charged with energy that they almost jump from the canvas. Even paintings that do not depict action scenes have an intense, barely suppressed potential for explosion.