This raises such rather intriguing possibilities. And so I began thinking, like Foday(?) asking for explanation, in sort of our Net terms about models. Well....
i. There's the Sergio Leone model for the Wild West--with great consequences for Fast-Gunners, say, Clint Eastwood, and on the whole rather hard knocks for any and all (especially Aboriginal) Mexican/Southwest types.
ii. The (Mercenary) model of recruited black slaves--the Buffalo Soldiers--who incidentally were very often **the** relieving cavalry soldiers who have since turned white in most Hollywood cowboy movies. Or else, in this model, working on the divisions among Tribes, etc. We try to remember which President actually said the only good indian is a dead indian; which Other one's honest enough convictions about democracy, yeoman agriculture/etc. was necessarily conjoined with "indian removal" from lands needed for democracy and yeoman farmers.
iii. The (Invisible Hand of [Foreign] Labor) model. My students study this by trying to answer the question: How do on earth do High Noon gunfighters get their clothes clean after those saloon fights (alcohol/mud/horse troughs/etc.) One possible answer? We look at, say, Chinese Migrant Labor and the infrastructural roles they played in real time and at the edges of the movies.
iv. The (Owners of Production) model. We pay serious attention to, say, that movie about the Winchester Rifle, to the evolution of the Colt Six-Shooter, the Dynamite Manufacturer, the Horse Breeder--and to the modes of production and distribution. You see, in the movies nobody actually **makes** guns. They, especially rifles, simply occur inside boxes and are distributed--sometimes by renegade whitemen to renegade Indians, generally Apaches.
v. The (Road/Rail Commerce) model. We sort of try to follow all those trains to some kind of terminal--hardly ever shown in standard representations. They are always in transit to and fro. Here, Maxine Hong Kingston's *China Men* subsidizes, so to speak, the otherwise immaculate conception of commerce in railroad making. So, too, Archibald MacLeish's poem, "The Making of America in Five Panels," helps us make the transition to Rail Commerce as Corporate Control & Finance at the turn of the century.
vi. The (Land Tenure) model. Folk from Patricia Limerick to Annette Kolodny to Richard Slotkin--to Daniel Boone (in Kentucky) & Kit Carson (in the Southwest)--all help in working this one out. How does one get access to strategic territory, say, Wounded Knee, from and within which to mount defense or offense? derive resource for ambush or expansion? Or for the settling, say, central European immigrants in the nineteenth century. We sort of poke around in, say, Willa Cather's Nebraska, etc. in, say. *My Antonia*, rather a nice read. (For this and for all old timers at the Grammar School who did Vergil, especially the Georgics? Remember that marvellous epic of patria and farming and nationalism. Good stuff, I remember from our Latin Teacher Miss Northway.)
v. The (Paper-Trail/Treaty) model--this does get to be both national and international: involving local treaties (with Indians); and international (with Mexico for half its territory in 1848); buying up Louisiana; Alaska acquisition/etc. Resource or will or power, or sense, to buy up buffer zones....
vi. Etc. Etc.
Perhaps the complication of the Far West Model for Sa. Leone may be that it was, in fact, all of the above and a few more knotty bits, maybe?
The Best of the New Year to One and All.
And a special expression of gratitude and regret to Salone Gal.
Stay well; stay in touch. Eljay.