Wild west was pretty tame—professor

Press, 13 February 1986, Page 11

Wild west was pretty tame —professor

By LEE MITGANG of the Associated Press (through NZPA) New Brunswick, New Jersey Most cowboys could not shoot well. The streets of New York were meaner than the dusty paths of Dodge City. And “heroic” Wild Bill Hickok was sacked for incompetence as marshal of Abilene, Texas.

A Rutgers University history professor, William Gillette, is aiming to shoot down time-honoured, Hol-lywood-bred myths of the Wild West

His class, “Cowboys and Indians,” has grown into

the most popular history course on campus since Professor Gillette first offered it six years ago.

On a recent rainy evening hardly a seat was empty in the 300-seat auditorium when Professor Gillette, a graying 52-year-old, strode to the podium, dressed in a red checkered shirt, blue jeans with a thick leather belt and what has become his trademark: a straw cowboy hat.

As an added touch of atmosphere he hung up a nineteenth-century advertisement for Levi’s saddleman boots and jeans, and began his lecture on cattle towns and

the decline of the openrange cattle industry during the 1880 s. His weekly lectures are deliberately witty and iconoclastic, followed always by a classic western film. But Professor Gillette insists that the lore of “Cowboys and Indians” is “serious, revisionist history.”

He assigns his students western novels with a ring of authenticity, like “The Ox-Bow Incident,” “The Big Sky,” and “Tsali.”

"It must be said in all candour that the history of the west has had its problems. It has been concerned more with stereotypes than with accuracy.”

The Wild West, Professor Gillette says, just wasn’t that wild. Other historians have tried to set students straight on western myths and realities: most notably, the late Ray Billington, at Northwestern University, and Howard Lamar, at Yale. But on eastern campuses especially, such scholarship has not been taken seriously enough, Professor Gillette says.

“We have a conception of the west that Hollywood has inflicted on us.” Movies and television painted the old cow towns that grew up after the civil war as violent and lawless. “The west was

quite peaceful. The extent of homicides was exaggerated. People didn’t lock their houses. Can you imagine that in twentiethcentury America?”

A recent lecture on cattle drives and cattle towns examined the role of saloons and brothels in the west

Western saloons, names ranging from the ironic “Little Church” to the more accurate “Road to Hell,” were the “message centres” of the west. There, cattlemen drank themselves silly, got into lying contests or pie-eat-ing contests, listened to politicians pander and preachers preach and, above all, found willing

women after lonely months on the range.

Yet for al! the rough edges, western towns were very much a part of the Victorian age.

“Cowpunchers were most respectful of ‘ladies.’ If a woman kept her place, she was respected. But if she stepped off her pedestal, a cowboy lost his inhibitions in a hurry,” he said.

There were coy, Victorian names for the mostly black, Indian, Mexican or Chinese prostitutes who populated western brothels. They wre “shady ladies,” “painted jezebels,”

“strumpets,”. “calico queens,” “soiled doves,” “daughters of sin.”

The brothels reflected the racial attitudes of the era. Many towns had allwhite brothels where only white men were welcome, along with multiracial brothels that anyone could frequent Cow towns such as Dodge City had-' very short-lived heydays. (Most died out when .poor weather, the coming- of railroads and. overspeculation virtually ended open-range cattleraising by the mid-1980s. The cow towns were ending, Professor Gillette said, "but the legends were just beginning.”