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Whose West Is It Anyway? or, What's Myth Got to Do With It? The Role of “America” in the Creation of the Myth of the West

Little more than a year ago, I was sitting in a darkened cineplex on a Saturday afternoon with four small boys (two of them mine) munching popcorn and drinking cherry slushes, waiting to see Shrek for the third time. Suddenly, on the screen appeared a trailer for an animated film due out last summer--a Dreamworks production called Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, directed by Kelly Asbury and Lorna Cook, with a screenplay by John Fusco, who has been credited with the retro Westerns, Young Guns and Young Guns II. The trailer opens as a horse paws a cliff, before panning alongside an eagle flying over the plains, into steep canyons and mesas, finally tracking alongside a herd of wild horses running freely (with John Williams'-style music on the soundtrack). That's all the context we're given, with a voice-over reminding us of the countless stories told of how the West was won, though never a story from the horse's point of view. "I remember when the horses ran free ... this is that story." As the film's official website states: "The movie features photo-realistic horses set against panoramic vistas and very little dialogue. The whole story will be told from the viewpoint of the horse, with his thoughts heard as narrative." (1) The producers were reputed to have searched far and wide for the supposedly perfect horse "voice," finally settling on Matt Damon for his airy exuberance and innocent tone, though the site helpfully reminds us that horses don't actually talk, they "just whine and make horse noises." Here is the rest of the website's description: Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron follows the adventures of a wild and rambunctious mustang stallion as he journeys through the untamed American frontier. Encountering man for the first time, Spirit defies being broken, even as he develops a remarkable friendship with a young Lakota brave. The courageous young stallion also finds love with a beautiful paint mare named Rain on his way to becoming one of the greatest unsung heroes of the Old West. Through the eyes of Spirit, we follow the story of the westward movement, as the mustang runs free across the American countryside and sees his life changed by the slow but inexorable push of civilization in the wild. The film first introduces Spirit in the freedom of the wild, only to have him caught by the cavalry and trained to be a war horse. However grim this may seem as cartoon, the film offers only the most recent version of a recognizably American "myth of the West," incorporating the idea of free land and spectacular landscapes; of a wild, untamed spirit resisting the encroachments and suasions of civilization; and finally of lost freedom as civilization advances and the claims of responsible citizenry are made. And while nothing about the materials per se precludes their being Canadian or Mexican, or for that matter Australian, Brazilian, or South African, something about the myth requires American citizens to imagine it as intrinsically American. In short, a recognizable "myth of the West" exists for America but not for Canada or Mexico; while I am not an expert, the proximate causes for this are not hard to find, beginning with the fact that Canada continued much longer as a colonial dependency, as part of the British Empire. Or that the "garden" image of the American West was more suitable for mythic appropriation, unlike the far bleaker, more severe, more "terrifying" landscapes of Mexico and Canada. Or that (notwithstanding the Spanish rodeo and the Calgary "stampede") neither Mexico nor Canada had much experience of the nineteenth-century cattle trade, with those "western" activities that helped transform the cowboy into a mythic figure: the roundup and long drive, the battles with farmers and Indians, the drunken escapades and deadly confrontations in cow towns and trail heads. Popular culture has celebrated the cowboy, the mythic descendant of American frontiersmen, as an independent laborer posed against the industrial working stiff, ever a stranger to the factory floor, unsupervised during the working day, free to roam on horseback with a six-gun at his hip (the only worker actually allowed to do so). …