Shooting Cowboys and Indians: Silent Western Films, American Culture, and the Birth of Hollywood by Andrew Brodie Smith (review)

B o o k R e v ie w s 4 6 5 Broken into three “books” with epigraphs from the Iliad, Modoc Sundance suggests correlations between the Trojan War and the U.S. Army’s engagement with the renegade band following Captain Jack. And the analogy works, if only superficially. Equating Achilles’ rage with the Modocs’ growing anger at injustices on the reservation they “share” with long-time enemies, the Klamath, the book ends by equating Captain Jack, goaded into insurrection by his own warriors and ultimately hanged by an army tribunal, to Hector, whose head was “dishonored in the dust” (174). The Modoc woman Queen Moon, a translator for the army, is a rather underplayed characterization of Toby Riddle, Modoc wife of white man Frank Riddle; her role in the real-life conflict was more profound. Belanger is more interested in the dual betrayals that put Jack at rope’s end—the conniving of the ranchers who want Modoc land at Lost River and the rebellion of Jack’s own men against him and his subsequent desire to work out an agreement with the U.S. government. Aficionados of Modoc lore and Indian wars can likely forgive Modoc Sundance’s shortcomings in favor of its attention to historical detail and for its engaging battle skirmishes. Stylistically, the stacking up of sentence fragments does hurry one’s eyes across the landscape or through a character’s thoughts. But readers who expect more novel in their historical novels may despair the absence of a more demanding editor. Shooting Cowboys and Indians: Silent Western Films, American Culture, and the Birth of Hollywood. By Andrew Brodie Smith. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003. 230 pages, $34.95. Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis, Professor Emeritus University of Oklahoma, Norman Writing about films is difficult enough, but Andrew Brodie Smith faces the additional difficulty ofwriting, for the first half ofhis book, about films that neither he nor most living people have seen. Nevertheless, in concentrating on the cast of characters who made the early films and the drama of getting them financed and distributed, Smith pro­ vides fascinating details not only about early Westerns but about the growth of the film industry. For example, William N. Selig entered show business as “Selig the Conjurer” and morphed into the impresario of “Selig’s Mastodon Minstrels,” which featured Bert Williams, along with “five whites, four blacks, and a ‘Mexican’ who drove the horse team and played trombone” and then into the owner of the Selig Polyscope Company that made and licensed pro­ jection equipment (11). Later he was rescued from near-bankruptcy by the Armour Company, which wanted his help in combating bad publicity from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906). Selig turned to Westerns partly because of Harry H. Buckwalter, a pho­ 4 6 6 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e W in t e r 2 0 0 5 tographer and pitchman for Colorado tourism who had a keen eye for what is now called product placement and brought to Western films authenticity of background, if not of plot. Here and throughout ShootingCowboys, Smith traces carefully and clearly the ways in which technology, commerce, and audience reaction caused the Western to expand in length and change in themes. Perhaps even more important, he traces changes in the location not only of films but of the manu­ facturing process, especially the factory ofThomas H. Ince, who “turned Santa Ynez Canyon into an elaborate outdoor studio” that ultimately had its own power plant, telephone exchange, and on-site vegetable and beef production for cast and crew (115). Smith foregrounds a number of forgotten or ignored people and issues prominent in early Westerns but later shunted aside: very active female heroines, Indians as leading men and women, even Mexicans. Then he shows how—because of the influence of Wild West shows, of fear of the growing independence and influence of women, and of the emphasis on muscular Christianity—the Western cowboy hero evolved away from theatrically trained actors like Hobart Bosworth, William S. Hart, and Gilbert M. (Bronco Billy) Anderson...