W A R R E N F R E N C H University of Missouri at Kansas City West as Mytk: Status Report and Call for Action I don’t know what the kids in our big Eastern cities do today on long, dreary winter Saturday afternoons; but when I was grow ing up in Philadelphia in the thirties, one could depend upon finding almost every youngster congregated devoutly for what surely must have been one of the longest and least expensive rituals in modern history— the matinee at the neighborhood theatre. For one dime— admittedly not always easy to come by during the depression— one could hole up for at least four, more likely five hours of cartoons, chapters of one and sometimes even two serials, and two full-length features. If there were any problems in those days about keeping the kids off the streets, they certainly couldn’t be laid at the doorstep of Hollywood and its constellation of third, fourth, and fifth-run theatres— focal centers of almost every cluster of stores. What all this has to do with a Western Literature Association is that much that flashed by on the screen on those distant Saturday afternoons presented Hollywood’s version of the Old West. The feature-length “Saturday special” was almost invariably a Western, and chances were good that at least one of the serials was, too. Western motifs were not unusual in the cartoons, and even the featured attraction of that day, which would also be served up in the evening— without all the trimmings— to the adult audience, might be a Western, too. The movies, of course, didn’t create the myth of the West; they simply borrowed it. Long before Bill Hart had become the kids’ silent screen idol, pathfinders and cowboys had ridden and shot their virtuous ways through thousands of dime novels. These 56 Western American Literature were succeeded by the multitudinous “pulp” Western magazines of the twenties and thirties that succumbed at last only under the combined onslaught of the war-time paper shortage and television. Even before the pulps disappeared from newsstands, however, cow boy books had become staples in the new, somewhat more respect able paper-backed book lines that began to flourish in 1939. Finally no one needs be reminded that television has taken over the West ern literary tradition. For almost a century, wherever Americans have looked for entertainment, they have been able to find a cowboy. The beginnings of this vogue for the virtuous West can be precisely dated. The centennial is almost at hand. There had been a few books about the Western mountains and prairies as early as the 1850’s and during the Civil War; but the enthusiasm for the free life in the remote and still mysterious West gained its greatest impetus from the transformation of a still living buffalohunter , Bill Cody, into a legendary figure that would emblemize the plains and Rockies in the late nineteenth century as Davy Crockett had the older forest frontier east of the Mississippi in the second quarter of the century. After the success in 1869— ironically the very year in which the completion of the trans-continental rail road marked the triumphant encroachment of civilization on the Western wilderness— of “Ned Buntline’s” novel and play, “Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men,” shrewd public relations turned the co-operative Cody into an archetypal figure that has inspired thousands of copies. These copies have, however, been far more often admired, con demned, and talked about than studied. Everyone admits that a myth of the Old West has developed and exercised great influence in this country and abroad, but little has been done to determine the exact nature of the contributions to this myth or their influence upon their audience’s thought and action. Discussions of the printed and filmed fiction of the West of nostalgic myth have usually been summarized with the curt comment that it is all alike, except for a few offbeat products bearing the clear mark of a master— the novels of Eugene Manlove Rhodes, for example, or the films of John Ford. This easy generalization, however, simply can...