In Death Westerns Hero Clint Walker Provides Source of Reflection on American Heritage

It wouldn’t surprise me if you missed his obituary, but Clint Walker died last Monday. He was 90 (https://nyti.ms/2LoTEY2).

Walker held a special place in the Forseter household from the mid-1950s to early-1960s. Tall, rugged, Adonis-shaped with a laconic, baritone voice, Walker portrayed Cheyenne Bodie in the ABC-TV series Cheyenne that aired Sunday nights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheyenne_(TV_series).

It was among my mother’s favorite shows, not the least reason being her pleasure at ogling Walker, especially when he took off his shirt. In the small of his back Cheyenne had a scar, a divot shaped like an arrowhead.  (She also favored William Hopper who played private detective Paul Drake on the CBS-TV series Perry Mason. Hopper never took his shirt off). 

Perhaps it was a reflection of the era, but westerns made up a considerable volume of the television fare enjoyed by our family more than six decades ago. A quick list of the prime time oaters we watched included Maverick (we preferred the episodes featuring James Garner as Bret Maverick over those with Jack Kelly (Bart) or Roger Moore (Beau), The Rebel, Have Gun Will Travel, Gunsmoke, The Rifleman and Wagon Train. I never knew why, but we mostly resisted tuning into Sugarfoot, Bonanza, and Rawhide, the series that launched Clint Eastwood’s career. 

My father was a big fan of westerns. There were, of course, westerns targeted at children that I watched without him: Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, Broken Arrow, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Wild Bill Hickok, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Sgt. Preston of the Yukon, Broken Arrow, Sky King (a “modern” western—the hero piloted a twin-engine Cessna instead of riding a horse around Arizona territory), and, my personal favorite, The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin, because its main human character was a boy just a few years my elder. 

I cannot remember any episode but one, wherein the young orphan Rusty is saved from a deadly buffalo stampede by the appearance on a hill of a mystical white buffalo that caused the herd to stop its charge, but I often called out, “Yo, Rinny,” as Rusty did at least once each show to get his faithful German shepherd dog to spring into action to save the day (to be honest, I always said “Yo, Rinty,” but in researching this blog I listened to part of the first episode and heard Rusty say, “Rinny.” Ah, well, so my memory is not infallible).

These westerns were small morality plays. Aside from life lessons, the mini horse operas imparted a bit of historical context to the saga of America. Don’t dwell on their accuracy. They were no more true to facts than most Hollywood biopics or history-based films. 

Yet, they provided background to our collective national experience, with one glaring omission—rarely, if at all, did they portray the lives and contributions of Black Americans, or those of Mexican and Asian heritage, in exploring, taming and settling the Old West, unless they were shown in servile positions (Hey Boy in Have Gun Will Travel is an example). Their more meaningful achievements were not part of small screen fare (http://www.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=4807). 

Star Trek, Star Wars and their ilk, along with superhero movies that defy credulity, have replaced westerns as the genres beloved by juveniles. They’re OK, if you like computer aided graphics, but I wonder how much the younger generation has lost identification with the American experience. Has the Millennium Falcon’s speedy Kessel run replaced the cumbersome Conestoga wagon trudge along the Oregon Trail as the touchstone for intrepid treks? 

Westerns were not alone in glossing over the full reality of our multi-cultural history. Textbooks I used in elementary and high school neglected non white contributors. I cannot say what today’s textbooks include, but if the behavior of our president and many of his supporters is any indication, I would guess we still do not count Native Americans, African Americans, Mexicans, Chinese and numerous other immigrant nationalities among the heroes and shapers of America. 

Learning the Difference Between New Mexico and Arizona

If there is one thought you come away with after driving 1,100 miles across the southwest desert from Phoenix through Tucson, eastward to Alomogordo, NM, then northward to Santa Fe and Taos and back down to Albuquerque, as Gilda and I did last week, it is that pioneer men and women had grit uncommon to most humans. 

What took us just some 20 hours of driving in air-conditioned comfort over a week’s time probably took as much as 73 days in a covered wagon averaging 15 miles per day. If the pioneers arrived after late spring when temperatures hover for months between 85 and 106 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on the location, you had to wonder what made any of them want to stay in this natural convection oven. Forget that hooey about it being “dry heat.” A furnace blast of hot, 100 degree air is hot, hot, hot.

Yes, there are points of breathtaking beauty. But even now, with air conditioning universally available in your home, your car, your place of business unless it is outdoors, the heat is oppressive. Weighty. Energy sapping. What could have tempted the early settlers who did not have the benefit of air conditioning? Surely the local Native Americans did not weave a welcome mat for them.

Time out. Let’s take a step back. Most of you, no doubt. have a Western European orientation. And by Western European I mean Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy and North Sea and Baltic Sea countries. When I wrote “early settlers” you probably thought of Americans and immigrants of European heritage heading west in wagon trains. 

Yet the reality is the southwest was colonized by the Spanish almost a hundred years before the first successful English settlement in Jamestown,VA. In elementary school my teachers barely taught the history of western America. For us, the history of the American Frontier began with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and Lewis and Clark. But that same frontier was largely a Spanish and then Mexican territory until the United States captured it in the Mexican-American War of 1848.

We didn’t covet all that we took. Sure, California had gold. But Arizona and New Mexico had lots of Catholic, Spanish speaking residents. Our white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Congress had no desire to extend citizenship to that type of resident. The U.S. Congress denied New Mexico’s repeated applications to be admitted to the Union from 1850 until 1912 when New Mexico and Arizona finally matriculated from territory to statehood.

Given the current debate on immigration and the antipathy of many toward Hispanic newcomers, it is enlightening to note New Mexico’s and Arizona’s respective attitudes toward their Spanish-speaking residents as embodied in their state constitutions.

New Mexico includes two specific sections I’ll reproduce here:

“Text of Section 8: 

“Teachers to Learn English and Spanish 

“The legislature shall provide for the training of teachers in the normal schools or otherwise so that they may become proficient in both the English and Spanish languages, to qualify them to teach Spanish-speaking pupils and students in the public schools and educational institutions of the state, and shall provide proper means and methods to facilitate the teaching of the English language and other branches of learning to such pupils and students.”

“Text of Section 10: 

“Educational Rights of Children of Spanish Descent 

“Children of Spanish descent in the state of New Mexico shall never be denied the right and privilege of admission and attendance in the public schools or other public educational institutions of the state, and they shall never be classed in separate schools, but shall forever enjoy perfect equality with other children in all public schools and educational institutions of the state, and the legislature shall provide penalties for the violation of this section. This section shall never be amended except upon a vote of the people of this state, in an election at which at least three-fourths of the electors voting in the whole state and at least two-thirds of those voting in each county in the state shall vote for such amendment.” 

Arizona’s constitution is silent on both areas.