Warshow’s core insight: the Western hero was not a solitary yet indomitable figure but rather a tainted and failed one. “The pictures… end with his death or with his departure for some more remote frontier,” wrote Warshow. “What we finally respond to is not his victory but his defeat.”

Warshow didn’t live to see The Searchers, director John Ford’s Western masterpiece, which was filmed the following year. And there’s no evidence that either Ford or his screenwriter, Frank Nugent, ever read the essay. But their protagonist, Ethan Edwards, played by John Wayne at the height of his rough-and-ready powers, snugly fits Warshow’s description.

Which brings me, 66 years later, to The Power of the Dog, Jane Campion’s ultra-contemporary take on this classic American genre.

Now, I’m not arguing that British-born Benedict Cumberbatch is cut from the same rugged denim as Wayne (though he sure knows how to fake it).  Nor would I suggest that Campion, a high-octane, highly cerebral New Zealander, is anything like the dour, hard-drinking, Irish-American Ford. But what I am saying is that The Searchers and The Power of the Dog have a lot in common, boast some of the same striking visual and narrative elements—and center around two powerful but deeply troubled protagonists.

Together, these films make a strong case for why the Western remains one of our most compelling cinematic inventions.

On the surface, the stories seem very different. The Searchers, set in frontier Texas in 1868 (but filmed in picturesque Monument Valley, Ford’s favorite Western location), is about an uncle’s quest to rescue Debbie, his 9-year-old niece, who’s been kidnapped by Comanches in a raid in which most of her family members were slaughtered. Ethan Edwards is a Civil War veteran who has stayed away from the family ranch for three years in large part because he is secretly in love with his brother’s wife, and she with him. After both brother and wife are murdered, he sets out to wreak vengeance on the killers.

But as the years pass, he also resolves to kill his niece, because she has grown into a young woman and become a Comanche wife. It’s an honor killing: she’s had sex with Indians, willingly or not, and therefore she must die. He is accompanied on his five-year search by Martin Pawley, Debbie’s adopted brother, who respects Ethan’s superior knowledge and leadership but is determined to prevent his uncle from harming his beloved sister.

The Searchers is a morally complex film and remains a controversial one. Its Comanche warriors are depicted as killers and rapists, but as the story unfolds, we begin to see that they and their families have also been slaughtered and victimized during the brutal, 40 year war of civilizations between Texans and Comanches, the longest conflict on American soil. And we also begin to see that Ethan, our charismatic hero, is a deeply disturbed racist.

The Power of the Dog takes place on a prosperous Montana ranch nearly 60 years later. But violence and family are also central to the story. Phil Burbank (Cumberbatch) and his soft-spoken younger brother George are equal business partners, but Phil is the alpha male—he’s cunning, arrogant, and abrasive, calling his brother “Fatso,” and repeatedly deriding George’s quiet decency. Phil rides herd over cattle, horses, and ranch hands with a macho swagger that includes castrating a bull.

The incident that triggers the film’s plot isn’t an Indian raid but George’s decision to pursue and marry Rose, a struggling widow operating a small-town boarding house. Her arrival at the Burbank mansion along with Peter, her sensitive, artistically inclined teenaged son, enrages Phil, who smells out her painful fragility, bullies her, and drives her to drink, all the while hurling homophobic slurs at Peter and inciting his ranch hands to join in the collective mockery.

Campion and Cumberbatch slowly allow us to see that Phil’s hyper-masculinity is an elaborate disguise. It turns out that Phil graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale, where he studied the classics (“so he swears at the cattle in Greek or Latin?” quips a distinguished dinner guest). He learned his Western lore from an older cowboy named Bronco Henry, whose grooming of Phil clearly went well beyond the handling of livestock. Although Henry has been dead for two decades, Phil still worships him. Phil also keeps a stash of male magazines in a trunk that Peter discovers.

Each movie slowly zeroes in on the changing relationship between the main character and his younger male companion. In The Searchers, Ethan starts out by deriding Martin’s naïveté and lack of frontier experience but comes to admire the younger man’s grit and refusal to quit the search, despite having a good job and impatient fiancée waiting for him at home. When the two men finally discover the Comanche village where Debbie is living, Ethan grudgingly accedes to Martin’s demand that he be given the chance to rescue her before the camp is attacked by cavalrymen and Texas Rangers. “It’s your funeral,” Ethan tells him.

(Left to right) Jeffrey Hunter as Martin and John Wayne as Ethan in The Searchers. Courtesy of Warner Bros.

In The Power of the Dog, Phil, too, begins to warm to Peter, partly because he knows that Rose hates this budding friendship and partly because he is seeking to groom Peter the way Bronco Henry once groomed him. But Peter has his own subtle agenda, one that he successfully conceals from Phil, and he rescues his mother from her tormentor, just as Martin Pawley saves his sister from Ethan.

Like their angry, damaged protagonists, the two directors, Ford and Campion, have much in common. Both are visual poets who move deftly between the obliterating grandeur of their remote outdoor settings and the intimate emotions and conflicts played out in the dark, claustrophobic confines of ranch houses.

Ford bookends his movie with two of the most memorable camera shots in film history—framing a character within a doorway that opens onto the stunning vistas beyond. Campion too offers glimpses of the untamed wilderness through the windows of the ranch house’s kitchen and barn. Neither director lets us forget that we are at the edge of civilization, a place of raw power, harsh beauty, and abiding mystery, and the testing ground where both Ethan and Phil, true Men of the West, were forged.

Each director prefers pictures over words. Ford famously cut large chunks of dialogue from the Searchers script, leaving viewers to determine for themselves the true nature of Ethan’s feelings for Martha and the reason why he spares Debbie’s life at the movie’s thrilling climax. Similarly, Campion allows the faces and physical movements of her characters to convey emotions they themselves can’t or won’t admit to. And in the case of Peter, she uses his careful stare and eerie stillness to conceal his lethal plan and purpose.

But the human centerpiece of each film remains its solitary and deeply disturbed protagonist.

Ethan, deranged by his hatred and grief, uses gun violence to resolve his inner conflicts. Yet he doesn’t kill his niece, who reminds him of her dead mother, the only woman he has ever loved, and the brilliance of Wayne’s performance lies in the way he conveys his internal struggle while never articulating it. Phil is compelled to hide his sexuality from the men he leads, and perhaps from himself as well, and Cumberbatch skillfully conveys Phil’s inner turmoil.

Each man will be defeated by his younger companion. And in both movies, love finally triumphs over hate. Ethan will survive—you can’t kill John Wayne, he’s too strong—but he is too violent to dwell in the civilized world, and he is doomed like the Comanche corpse whose eyes he shoots out early in the film. He will wander forever between the winds.

Phil is an even more tragic figure. Set adrift like a ship without an anchor once George weds Rose, he tries to find stability by nurturing Peter, who ultimately brings out his better nature. But it’s too late. Peter has already determined that to save his mother, Phil must die.

Warshow’s essay foretold both men’s fates: to die or depart for an even more remote corner of the vast but ever-shrinking frontier. As Martin Scorsese once noted, the Western ultimately is a ghost story, its tales set in a past that can be evoked but never retrieved.

Or as film historian Edward Buscombe, another wise student of American cinema, has observed, “One way or another, Westerns are always about death.”

The post Why the Western Remains ‘One of Our Most Powerful Cinematic Inventions’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At the turn of the century with reports of innumerable mineral resources and a limitless agricultural potential surfacing, this little-known U.S. possession suddenly grabbed the world’s attention. As pioneers and settlers rushed into the frontier and returned during this period, Alaskans founded many of today’s cities (including the two largest, Anchorage and Fairbanks), birthed a structure of highway and railroad transportation, and established a judicial system and a rudimentary form of self-government, which led to statehood a half-century later.

All this activity took place during the Progressive Age in American politics. It was a time of social and economic reform, when Congress and federal agencies recognized the need to regulate large corporate trusts, manage extraction of natural resources, ensure some level of fairness for consumers and workers, and build much-needed infrastructure projects. At the heart of the Progressive movement was the conviction that a strong federal government could be the agent of change, because government was the only entity with power sufficient to produce broad reforms.

The swelling Alaska population benefited from the Progressive movement in a number of ways. By 1900, Congress had enacted criminal and civil codes and appointed judges to serve each of the Alaska territory’s three newly established judicial districts. In 1906, a new federal law allowed Alaska residents to elect a delegate to represent them in the U.S. House of Representatives. And in 1912, Congress responded to Alaskans’ demands for self-government by creating an elected territorial legislature.

But the greatest of all Progressive Age accomplishments for Alaska was passage of the Alaska Railroad Act in 1914.

The act provided $35 million to build and operate a railroad from an unspecified tidewater port into the Alaskan interior. President Woodrow Wilson viewed Alaska as a storehouse that should be unlocked, and a railroad was, in his words, the means of “thrusting in the key to the storehouse and throwing back the lock and opening the door.”

It was significant that it was the federal government, and not private sector enterprise, that did this job. At the time Railroad Act passed, Progressives nationwide were at war with the monopolizing power of corporate trusts.

In Alaska, two of the biggest business entities in the world had combined to form an enterprise that controlled nearly every sector of the economy. The Morgan-Guggenheim Alaska Syndicate, owned by New York financier J. P. Morgan along with the international Guggenheim mining company, dominated the mineral extraction and transportation infrastructure in most of the territory. The syndicate sent teams of lobbyists to Washington to block efforts to build a government railroad, which would interfere with its monopoly on transportation. The syndicate was—as James Wickersham, Alaska’s non-voting delegate to Congress, described it—the “overshadowing evil” that darkened the prospects of every struggling pioneer in the new and developing territory.

“Which shall it be?” Wickersham thundered from the floor of the US House of Representatives in arguing for the Alaska Railroad Act. “Shall the government or the Guggenheims control Alaska?”

The answer from a Progressive-minded Congress and White House was clear: it would not be the Guggenheims.

Never before in the history of the westward movement of Americans had Congress stepped in to build a transportation system where private enterprise could likely have provided comparable service. Moreover, the railroad was quite explicitly an expression of the country’s anti-trust, anti-monopoly mood.

Progressives saw Alaska as a wide-open place where their ideals could be put into practice, a model of the democracy they wanted. It would open vast areas of mineral and agricultural wealth, creating jobs and opportunities for the working public; it would demonstrate the Progressive conviction that government at its best was an agent for progress and improvement in people’s lives; and it would make a statement of the strength of federal regulatory control in the era of popular reaction against the workings of corporate trusts. It would operate in a place where the giant Alaska Syndicate threatened to monopolize every sector of the economy.

Of course, Progressive-age politics was not the singular reason why Alaska was developed. The opportunities to be had in this northern frontier were exciting enough on their own to attract multitudes of pioneers, settlers, and entrepreneurs. Infrastructure would surely have been built even without the benefits of Progressivism’s considerable influence.

Alaskans were not always happy about the federal government’s investment—or lack thereof. During the Progressive Era they complained endlessly about what they perceived as neglect and ill-treatment at the hands of the federal government. “Think of it!” a Skagway newspaper cried in 1906. “Here we are a people denied the right of self-government, taxed without representation.” The editor concluded that Alaska lived under “a system compared with which the government of the American colonies under George III was broad and liberal.”

Alaskans in that moment had good reasons for their outrage: The territory’s vast coal deposits remained off-limits to mining, and hundreds of workers sat idle for eight years starting in 1906 as Congress failed to pass legislation providing for a fair leasing system on federal coal lands. This was only one example of government delays and red tape that infuriated residents of the North.

Such treatment led Alaskans to feelings of abuse and what amounted to a split personality in regard to their relationship with the federal government. They decried the lack of assistance where they saw a need while at the same time they wanted the government off their backs, leaving them free to develop the resources without interference.

Federal help did come to Alaska, but it arrived piecemeal over the course of decades. Over time, the government responded with many projects and benefits that enriched Alaska. These included highways, national parks, systems of public education and health care, and military bases, to name just a few. From today’s point of view, we can see that Alaska as a territory and a state has been enriched far more than neglected or abused by the federal government.

By 1916, Progressivism had run its course, though in its 20 years of life it had accomplished much in the way of social, political, and economic reform. Its legacy includes antitrust legislation, regulation of interstate commerce, child labor laws, direct election of U.S. senators, conservation of natural resources, and a movement toward women’s suffrage. The forces underlying all these advances were a commitment to the rights of the masses and a belief in the power of the federal government to effect change.

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In movies, it is horses that pull the wagons through the Great Plains, through the deserts, and over the Sierra Nevada: Horses are graceful and elegant, and Hollywood producers and directors chose beauty over reality. But over the three decades of westward emigration, oxen comprised half to three-quarters of the animals that pulled the wagons. Unlike horses, they were steadier, stronger, and less likely to be stolen by Native Americans.

The 2,000-mile journey west took three to five months, depending on the route. Emigrants brought many things with them, including household goods, farming equipment, and supplies for the animals, such as whiffletrees—a swinging bar that connects the harness and the wagon—and, of course, yokes for the oxen.

The emigrants also carried with them religious ideas about how to care for their animals. By the mid-19th century, Protestant ministers taught the importance of being kind to animals and reminded emigrants that Sabbath rest also applied to livestock. Ministers, such as the Reverend J. H. Avery, pastor of the Congregational Church in Austinburg, Ohio, delivered sermons to travelers warning them not to overdrive their teams, and to walk alongside the oxen instead of riding in the wagons to save the animals from pulling the extra burden of the travelers’ weight. Avery could only hope that his congregation listened carefully to his words of advice. During the same era, teachers also taught schoolchildren to be kind to animals, and taking care of animals became part of middle-class ideology.

While they were well-versed in what religion and schoolteachers taught them, the emigrants never anticipated they would develop a relationship with their oxen that turned into a type of friendship and companionship. The overlanders came from all over the United States, as well as Europe, and not all of them knew how to take care of the animals. For many on the trails, working with oxen was a new experience.

Generally, emigrants purchased their oxen at jumping-off towns near the eastern end of the trail, such as Independence or St. Joseph, Missouri, for $13 to $30 each. In these Missouri River towns, it was often Mexicans who participated in the trade on the Santa Fe Trail who taught the emigrants how to handle the oxen. The trainers and even some emigrants offered tips: The emigrants must speak to the oxen in a manner that the oxen preferred, giving commands in English rather than in the emigrants’ native languages. The emigrants should avoid cuss words, because foul language might provoke the oxen into behavior such as running or generally being unwilling to take orders. Whistling songs often calmed the animals as they pulled the wagons.

During their few days of training, the emigrants and oxen learned to understand one another, opening the door to a closer relationship as their time together went from days to weeks to months. The emigrants came to consider the oxen gentle, calm, patient—even noble.

Once the journey began, overlanders quickly learned the significance of the proverb “haste makes waste,” and tried to travel distances that lessened the number of miles to their journey’s end while keeping their oxen as strong and healthy as possible. The health of the oxen came first—so much so that travelers put themselves in danger to protect the animals. During hailstorms, emigrants stood next to their oxen holding blankets or tarps over them so the animals would not be injured by hailstones that were sometimes the size of hens’ eggs or peaches. During thunderstorms, they rushed to their oxen when lightning struck close to the wagon train, which might cause the animals to fall to their knees.

Finding good campsites with water and grass nearby often proved difficult, requiring teams to push further on to find a good location to rest, sometimes arriving only at midnight. Scarce water and food caused health problems for the emigrants and their oxen companions. Other ailments arose, too. Occasionally, oxen’s hooves broke off, causing death within days; bad shoeing, or no shoeing, likely caused the deterioration. Sometimes emigrants poured hot mutton tallow on oxen’s hooves to help. In 1852, Mary Jane Long, a traveler headed to Oregon, cried for wounded oxen as they received this treatment. She knew the journey was especially hard on their hooves, she wrote in her diary.

Overlanders fervently wished to heal their animals, but they possessed few medicines to ease the pain of sores caused by ill-fitting yokes and other wounds. Sometimes solutions materialized. Overlanders initially believed that one series of mysterious and rapid oxen deaths, for example, had been caused by anthrax, which causes blisters to become ulcers and can form in the lungs, on the skin, or in the intestines. But in 1859, when traveler William Babcock cut open an ox that had died suddenly, he discovered that the ox’s lungs and windpipe weren’t infected by the disease, but instead were filled with dust from the trails. Immediately, Babcock’s group began putting more space between each wagon and its team so that the oxen next in line were not forced to breathe in so much dust.

When the trials of the journey proved too much for the oxen, they sometimes simply laid down on the trail. If overlanders could spare the time, they pulled off the trail to let their oxen rest and recover for a few days. More frequently, the oxen had to be abandoned and left behind to fend for themselves. Overlanders often despaired when this happened, their writings show. Some reported that the oxen tried to follow the wagons, but soon fell victim to the wolves.

In 1849, Joseph Bruff found three abandoned oxen in Nevada’s Humboldt Desert, and wrote that their eyes seemed to beg for help from the passing emigrants. Sometimes overlanders believed that the abandoned oxen cried their last farewells to the other animals that slowly passed by them. The oxen’s human companions admitted to shedding tears as they walked by starved and worn out oxen that had given the overlanders their last efforts before collapsing on the side of the trails. Many didn’t have rifles, so they could not end the animals’ suffering.

Emigrants occasionally wrote of returning to a spot where they had abandoned an ox hoping to find it and return it to the wagon train. Sometimes luck was with them and the ox rejoined the journey. Other times abandoned animals were found by another overlander several days later and added to that traveler’s team. In 1852, Lodisa Frizzell encountered an abandoned animal with a note pinned to its head asking that whoever found it should not “abuse her as she had been one of the best” and deserved a good owner if she was found alive. Frizzel’s family took the recovered animal with them as it had recuperated enough to continue the journey.

To describe the innumerable dead animals on the trails, the emigrants used words such as “thick,” “everywhere,” and “scarce out of sight.” They also understood that those that they saw were only a small percentage of the animals that died helping the emigrants cross the continent. In their diaries, some hoped that the oxen might now “rest in peace.”

Once the wagon trains reached their destinations, the relationship between the humans and the oxen generally came to an end. The emigrants needed to sell the oxen for the highest price they could get in order to start their new lives in the West. The relationship between the emigrants and the oxen had been mutually beneficial; the travelers successfully arrived at their destinations and the oxen were treated better because of the affection the emigrants developed for them.

When the animals were put on the auction blocks in California and Oregon—where draft animals were scarce—many emigrants reported that their hearts ached. But they could not turn down $150 to $200 per yoke, which was an increase of nearly three hundred percent over their initial cost—even though the animals were worn out by the journey.

In the end, the emigrants understood that the relationship they forged with the oxen was temporary and practical. Still, the animals reminded some travelers of the families and friends they left at home. In diaries and letters, overlanders admitted being surprised that they paid as much attention to the oxen as they did—attention far greater than simply using the animals to pull their goods west.

On the long journey, the emigrants and oxen had suffered together, but the travelers came to understand that their success in crossing the continent depended more upon the oxen than their own actions. The special bonds they’d formed with the oxen, although temporary, brought them to their new lives in the West. On the journey, they learned the true merit and meaning of the lessons they’d been taught by ministers and teachers—their success depended on the oxen.

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The Navajo Nation sued the company for copyright infringement of its name and, after a five-year court battle, the two sides settled. At a 2012 Victoria’s Secret fashion show in New York, model Karlie Kloss wore an extravagant feathered headdress and turquoise jewelry, inciting a backlash that led the company to issue an apology. Two years later, Ralph Lauren used historic photographs of Native Americans confined on reservations to tout his line of rugged, Western-style clothing. He removed those images and expressed his regret after Indian groups and others complained about his insensitivity.

The public debate led by Native American advocates, scholars, and other commentators focused less on the issues of copyright and profits and more on a lack of historical awareness. Feathers, turquoise, and patterned prints might represent superficial and fleeting aesthetic choices, but they also reflect indigenous traditions that have endured centuries under assault. Clothing style may seem innocuous, but it often expresses profound cultural meaning. In the battlegrounds of conquest, dress can become an important weapon when one group usurps the symbols of another. The past that Urban Outfitters, Victoria’s Secret, and Ralph Lauren failed to appreciate was America’s long and troubled history of cultural appropriation in the service of empire.

That history might have begun with buckskin. Perhaps Americans do not equate putting the sueded and fringed jackets on rugged men with draping feathered headdresses on lingerie models or printing Navajo patterns on panties. But the familiarity of buckskin as an emblem of the West—of ’60s counter-culture, and of American manhood—has obscured its native origins.

Indigenous groups across the continent wore garments of treated hide from a variety of species. The abundance of deer, however, led to widespread use of their skins. Native designers adapted it for their specific needs. The characteristic fringe, for example, served as an efficient means to shed water. Narrow strips drew moisture away from the body and allowed it to drip from the ends. By the 17th century, European traders and backcountry settlers recognized its value, and began bartering for buckskin jackets, trousers, and moccasins. During the American Revolution, colonial rebels adopted the style for its utilitarian and symbolic value. According to historian Philip Deloria, “playing Indian” permitted colonial fighters to assert their Americanness by differentiating themselves from Great Britain.

The appropriation continued after the United States established its independence. As the country moved toward a concerted policy of Indian removal, buckskin clothing—with its projection of rugged individualism and ostentatious fringe—became a highly visible tool in the cultural project of territorial expansion. By adorning themselves in the indigenous wear, Anglo-American men symbolically wrested the Native American masculinity that they admired, practicing what ethnographer Renato Rosaldo terms “imperial nostalgia”—the act by which agents of empire replaced guilt and shame with mourning and celebration of the very peoples they had destroyed.

Alfred Jacob Miller, Trappers (1858-1860). Image courtesy of Walters Art Museum/Wikimedia Commons.

As such, during the 1820s through the 1840s, as the United States extended its economic influence into the interior of the continent, removed Eastern Indian groups to lands beyond the Mississippi River, and invaded Mexico, buckskin chic achieved iconic status, ostensibly demonstrating the Western male’s attainment of an imagined Indian-ness. In literature and art, white Americans invented aspects of indigenous cultures—emotional liberation, privileged violence—that they desired to emulate.

In an 1837 account of buckskin-clad Rocky Mountain trappers, Washington Irving noted that it became a “matter of vanity and ambition with them to discard every thing that may bear the stamp of civilized life, and to adopt the manners . . . of the Indian.” When Irving referred to the mountain man’s aversion to “civilized life,” he identified a counter-culture symbolism encoded in buckskin. Many Anglo-American men of this period fled to the West to escape the avarice and heartlessness that market competition and pursuit of profit had created in the East. By dispossessing the Native male of his self-dominion, these interlopers claimed to have embodied an original, essential manliness that contrasted with the materialist dandy of the city.

Authors like Irving, James Hall, and Timothy Flint, and artists like George Catlin, Alfred Jacob Miller, and Charles Deas communicated these ideas to an eager audience. When James Fenimore Cooper first introduced his frontier hero in The Pioneers (1823), he adorned him in “[a] kind of coat, of dressed deer-skin” as well as breeches, from which the character acquired the moniker Leatherstocking. In the popular A Tour on the Prairies (1835), Irving wrote of the rangers Jesse Bean and John Ryan “equipped in character; in leathern hunting shirt and leggins [sic].” Such was the fashion that in an 1833 biography of George Washington, author Mason Weems described the young Virginian as “Buckskin” to set him apart from the British general Edward Braddock.

Buckskin became a fixture of the wardrobes of fur trappers, overland merchants, and volunteer soldiers of the 19th century who sought connection to an ideal of the exceptional American male. For many, careers in the contested regions of the West had promised transformation from inconsequential greenhorns into conspicuous veterans—and grimy, worn, fringed garments attested to the perils and hardships that had forged their vital manliness.

Sometimes newcomers presumed too much, and put on the outfit before they had earned it. In 1839, Francis Lubbock, future governor of the Lone Star State, volunteered for the campaign to remove Cherokees and allied groups beyond the borders of the Republic of Texas. In his enthusiasm, he commissioned a tailor to provide him with “a pair of fine buckskin pants such as worn by frontiersmen.” Unfortunately, while he slept in camp, rain soaked his prized skins, and when he awoke and sought the warmth of the fire, his pants quickly and uncomfortably shrank. “They got tighter and tighter all the time until . . . ,” he recalled, “I had in a manner to cut them off my limbs.”

With the nation’s attention drawn away from the West and toward the controversies between the North and South, the vogue of tanned hides and fringe seemed to have waned by the Civil War. During the decades after, however, it enjoyed a resurgence. During Reconstruction, emasculated Southerners and battered Northerners sought common ground by resurrecting Western manhood, and buckskin served as a ready symbol. During his campaigns against indigenous groups, Lt. Col. George A. Custer wore jackets of that type, one of which is currently on view at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

Buckskin coat, worn by George Armstrong Custer, around 1870. Photo courtesy of the National Museum of American History.

The showman William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody wore the style. So did “Kit” Carson and “Davy” Crockett in the dime novels of the time. Theodore Roosevelt was so enamored with the image and its message of masculine superiority that he famously posed in buckskin for a series of photographs to accompany a book about his experiences out West. By donning the fashion of the Native American, these white men outwardly exhibited their extravagant manliness and celebrated their roles as agents of empire.

Images of buckskin-clad Westerners continued to reassure American audiences during the 20th century. Between 1930 and 1960, for example, John Wayne wore the style in at least eight film performances, including his Custer-esque portrayal of Capt. Nathan Brittles in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and his turn as Davy Crockett in The Alamo (1960). Along with Fess Parker’s popular Crockett (and whose movie prop coonskin cap made of raccoon is also in the collections of the museum), these iterations of the honest, just, vital, and abjectly American frontiersmen reinforced the perception of the United States as the defender of freedom and democracy during the Cold War—in contrast to its missions of self-serving economic expansion and sponsorship of right-wing dictatorships.

By the late 1960s, counter-culture groups like the hippies emerged to oppose the American mantra of progress, consumption, and power—and they adorned themselves with buckskin anew, this time as a rejection of U.S. materialism and empire. They imagined that the garment endowed them with Indian simplicity and respect for nature. As historian Sherry L. Smith has shown, some hippies actively participated in the Red Power Movement. Others supported ecological causes, but many, if not most, were faddists who followed the superficial chic of the moment without understanding the cultural significance of their adoption of Native American imagery.

The history of the misappropriation of buckskin as an emblem of Anglo-American exceptionalism helps explain the criticism of 21st-century fashion designers’ marketing of indigenous symbols. Fashion houses may believe that the incorporation of feathered headdresses or Navajo geometrics celebrates Indian-ness, but they are mining an unfortunate past in their attempts to achieve a fresh aesthetic for profit. Much like generations of men in the United States who donned buckskin, they disregard the centuries-old project of usurping Native American emblems as a tool for conquest and subjugation.

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This legend, repeated for more than a century, blends truth with fiction, and reminds us that history is as much about forgetting as it is about remembering. Flagler and a woman named Julia Tuttle stand at the center of the story: The importance of Flagler’s East Coast Railroad and Royal Palm Hotel led some residents to propose naming the city after him, and he is often depicted as the city’s “father.” Tuttle, a businesswoman who lured Flagler to Miami and otherwise promoted the region during the 1890s, earned the title of “Mother of Miami.” But Tuttle and Flagler did not create something out of nothing. On the contrary, Tuttle’s home and Flagler’s hotel stood precisely where earlier settlers had already left indelible marks over 2,000 years of continuous occupation.

These Miamians included Tequesta Indians who lived in the area for more than 1,500 years, and Spanish missionaries who tried to convert them; African enslaved persons tasked with turning the land into sugar fields, who instead created orchards of fruit trees; Seminole Indians who came to trade and harvest the local bounty, and U.S. soldiers who waged a war to exterminate them; and a continuous stream of Bahamian mariners, fugitive soldiers from various armies, and shipwrecked sailors. These earlier generations have been forgotten largely because Tuttle and Flagler were master illusionists who engaged in a combination of physical sleight of hand and intellectual misdirection. Rather than create something out of nothing, they built upon the storied history that preceded them—and then helped others forget it.

Julia Tuttle, widely known as the Mother of Miami. https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/29793>State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.

Tuttle clearly knew that she was not the first occupant of her waterfront property. Recently widowed, she relocated in 1891 from Cleveland to the mouth of the Miami River on Biscayne Bay, where she worked tenaciously to promote the region as a commercial and agricultural opportunity. Tuttle moved into a 19th-century plantation house that had been built by enslaved Africans in the early 1830s, and constantly referred to it as “Fort Dallas,” which had been the name given to it when it was turned into a military outpost during the Second Seminole War (1835-1842). Tuttle’s property contained a man-made well, a stone wall, and several gravestones. There was a decades-old road that connected her home to the community on the New River—today’s Fort Lauderdale—and elsewhere up the Atlantic coast.

Still, despite all this evidence of earlier occupation, Tuttle declared to all who would listen that she was a founder of a new community. In words that would be widely repeated, she explained her ambitions. “It may seem strange to you but it is the dream of my life to see this wilderness turned into a prosperous country,” she wrote. One day, she hoped, “where this tangled mass of vine brush, trees and rocks now are to see homes with modern improvements surrounded by beautiful grassy lawns, flowers, shrubs and shade trees.” Tuttle wanted to “settle” a place that had been settled for centuries and turn it into an agricultural or commercial entrepôt.

James Henry Ingraham, president of the South Florida Railroad Company of the Plant System, was but one of the newcomers she impressed. Ingraham proclaimed that Tuttle had “shown a great deal of energy and enterprise in this frontier country where it is almost a matter of creation to accomplish so much in so short a time.” But his description of Tuttle’s efforts, too, revealed the preexisting history that made her successful. Tuttle, he wrote, “converted [Fort Dallas] into a dwelling house after being renovated and repaired with the addition of a kitchen, etc. The barracks … is used as office and sleeping rooms.” Despite her “improvement … on hammock land which fringes the river and bay,” Ingraham explained, the natural world remained largely untamed. “Lemon and lime trees,” which were planted by the earlier waves of Spanish, Bahamian, and American occupants, “are growing wild all through the uncleared hammock.” Ingraham, Tuttle, and others knew that citrus was not native to South Florida. Their claims about untamed wilderness were disingenuous.

Tuttle ignored evidence of the ancient Indian world that surrounded her. Like others of her generation, she recorded the presence of several large man-made mounds and shell middens in the area. Some were ancient burial sites or ceremonial centers, and others were basically landfills, built from generations of discarded shellfish and tools. They were all constructed by the Tequesta Indians, who had first settled the waterfront site 2,000 years earlier and lived there into the 17th century, when they attracted the unwanted attention of slave raiders, Spanish missionaries, and others moving in. Tuttle, like others who declared themselves to be on the frontier, deemed the Indian past to be inconsequential to the development that would follow.

With Tuttle engaged in acts of intellectual misdirection, Flagler and his construction crews took care of the physical destruction. Flagler, like most Gilded Age industrialists, is more typically associated with building than with razing. He earned his fame for helping found Standard Oil with John D. Rockefeller in 1870 and then creating Florida’s modern tourist industry with his railroad and luxury hotels in St. Augustine, Palm Beach, and elsewhere along Florida’s Atlantic Coast. Tuttle lured Flagler to Miami with gifts of orange blossoms after a brutal frost had destroyed the citrus crop in central Florida, and clinched the deal by dividing her property on the Miami River with him.

In 1896, Flagler’s laborers at the mouth of the river leveled the ancient Tequesta mounds that stood in the way of progress. They were unabashedly brutal about it. One of the workers noted that a burial mound “stood out like a small mountain, twenty to twenty-five feet above water” and “about one hundred feet long and seventy feet wide.” Flagler’s African American workers struggled to remove “a poison tree” that grew on the top of the mound, as it “would knock them cold.” Those workers “who were not allergic to it” leveled the mound, uncovering and hastily removing “between fifty and sixty skulls.” One of the workers took home the bones, “stored them away in barrels and gave away a great many … to anyone that wanted them.” When construction ended, he dumped the remaining skeletons “nearby where there was a big hole in the ground.” Another bayside mound was hidden behind a “great tangle of briars and wild lime trees.” The midden materials from these and other mounds were strewn across the property, becoming the foundation for Henry Flagler’s opulent Royal Palm Hotel.

The city of Miami incorporated in July 1896, a bit more than a year after the railroad reached the site of the Royal Palm Hotel. Thanks to the vision of Tuttle and marketing genius of Flagler and others, Miami quickly became a tourist destination. City boosters built roads and canals, plotted new communities, constructed man-made beaches, and established new civic organizations. The real estate boom that followed incorporation pushed the residential community out from the mouth of the river and in only a couple of decades turned the small town into a bustling city. Tuttle died in 1898 and Flagler in 1916, but their collective imprint on Miami survived the hurricane of 1926, even as it destroyed the Royal Palm Hotel and temporarily slowed the city’s growth during the Depression. Miami remained a city committed to reimagining the future rather than one interested in celebrating the past.

Tuttle and Flagler shared an illusion that they were settling untouched wilderness—even as they were surrounded by evidence of earlier occupation. In this way, their story is no different than those of settlers across the continent whose shared myth of the frontier allowed them to ignore the history that preceded them. In the 1880s, the frontier was a fairly simple but magical idea: It allowed white Americans to ignore the ancient history of Native America. The myth of the frontier—that pervasive and most-American idea—allowed Tuttle and others in Miami to see “unclaimed lands” in the United States as an untapped and disappearing resource, and to imagine that white American ingenuity transformed wilderness into civilization.

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