The Problem of the "Popular" in the New Western History

STEPHEN TATUM The Problem of the "Popular" in the New Western History To see this commercialized vision of the Old Frontier in concrete, threedimensional form, the best place to go is Disneyland in Anaheim, California . When they enter Frontierland, visitors might ask Disneyland employees for directions, but they do not have to ask for a definition of the frontier. The frontier, every tourist knows, was the edge of Anglo-American settlement, the place where white Americans struggled to master the continent. This frontier, as everything in Frontierland confirms, was populated by a colorful and romantic cast of characters—mountain men, cowboys, prospectors, pioneer wives, saloon girls, sheriffs, and outlaws. . . . These images are very well understood. Tourists do not need any assistance in defining Frontierland. Patricia Nelson Limerick, "The Adventures of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century" (1994) My West is the American West: that fabled land where the restless pioneer moves ever forward, settling one frontier after another; where the American charactet becomes self-reliant, democratic, and endlessly eager for the new; where we strip offthe garments ofcivilization and don a rude buckskin shirt; where millions ofdejected immigrants gadier from around the world to be rejuvenated as Americans, sounding together a manly, wild, barbaric yawp offreedom. That is my West: precisely that and nothing more. "Oh," my colleague [in Chinese studies] ventures, more perplexed now than cantankerous, "you mean 'the West'—the frontier, Indians , Clint Eastwood?" I nod vaguely and sidle off. It is all so hard to convey over a single, polite glass of academic sherry. Donald Worster, Under Western Skies (1992) IN one of the early chapters in his We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher, E. C. "Teddy Blue" Abbott describes Arizona Quarterly Volume 53, Number 2, Summer 1997 Copyright © 1997 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-16 10 154Stephen Tatum his adventures in 1880 while he worked for the cy Ranch out of Wyoming. Teddy Blue was born in England and grew up in the Lincoln, Nebraska, area where, as a young man being pressured to take up the life of a farmer, he routinely saw Texas cowpunchers and Texas cattle moving north to Wyoming and Montana, following the open range. Unlike his fathers and brothers before him, who did become farmers, and unlike one brother who in Teddy's words "ended up the worst of the lot—a sheepman and a Republican" (29), Teddy Blue left home at the age of eighteen to learn the cowboy way. In the summer of 1880, the then twenty-year-old Teddy Blue was supposed to rendezvous in Cheyenne with a few other cowpunchers and travel to Oregon so as to bring cattle back to stock the cy Ranch. But while waiting for the others to arrive, Teddy Blue met a man who had just come back from Oregon and who complained mightily about the rainy weather that plagued everyday work and travel on the trail. Hearing this news, Teddy Blue and one comrade "quit the layout and went south" (41), heading for New Mexico to work on ranches there after a brief stop in Denver to see the sights. The "sights" for Teddy Blue invariably means saloons and brothels, and on this particular occasion he recalls getting "well lit up" and attending a "hot show" on Blake Street with some other cowpunchers (46). The show they saw was entitled "Poor Nell," a melodrama which featured a scene of a burglar beating his wife to death. One of the drunk cowpunchers, Teddy Blue recalls, had passed out during the performance, but was awakened by noise made by the actor playing the burglar, who would stamp his foot on the floor as he shook his co-star's head, so that it sounded like her head was hitting the floor. Upon being awakened by the noise and seeing the scene before him, this drunk, chivalrous cowpuncher jumped "onto the stage and busted the fellow on the head with his six-gun before he remembered where he was. The woman got up and began to cuss him, all hell broke loose, somebody pulled Bill off the stage, they called for the police, the boys shot out the lights, and...