“In these anxious days,” wrote Aaron Latham in the original Esquire article that inspired the movie Urban Cowboy, “some Americans have turned for salvation to God, others have turned to fad prophets.” But more and more people, Latham noted, were turning to the cowboy for guidance.

When Latham’s article was published in 1978, only about a quarter of the U.S. population reported that they could trust their government “at least most of the time.” Radically shaken by the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, barreled under stagflation at home, and facing the threat of nuclear holocaust abroad, the public, unable to put their faith in their nation’s institutions, were increasingly putting it in one of its most durable myths.

Is it any surprise then that when Urban Cowboy premiered two years later, the movie ushered in a cowboy boot craze so frenzied that, at its height, farmers and ranchers reportedly struggled to get their hands on the footwear. It took the rise of Lycra-blend aerobics gear to finally tip the scales of ’80s fashion.

For over a century and a half now, the cowboy boot has continued to rise up in the nation’s culture like a Rorschach test, reflecting back to us ideas of what it means to be American. But though the cowboy boot is often used to suggest one version of Americanness, that of John Wayne and the Marlboro Man, its history should remind us that the boots were made for everyone.

The iconic cowhide work boot was not destined to be affixed in the American popular imagination this way, just like the term “cowboy” itself was not originally associated with the ideas it now summons. A Revolutionary War-era holdover, cowboys first referred to British Tories using guerilla tactics against the rebel colonists. The boots that would become synonymous with them emerged as the term evolved a century later, as cowboys, of many and multiple races and ethnicities, began driving livestock on the cattle trails from Texas to Kansas railheads for transport to markets in the East. Some of the earliest working cowboys were Black, as Katie Nodjimbadem has noted in Smithsonian magazine. The reason there became so many Black cowboys (historians estimate that in Texas they made up as many as one in four) was because the job was one of the few dignified professions open to them after the Civil War.

Inspiration for the cowboy boot itself was global: It derived from the short-heeled square-toed English Wellington boot worn by cavalry and artillery drivers during the American Civil War, the German Hessian knee-high boot, and the Vaquero riding boot worn in Mexican ranchero culture. As the footwear evolved beyond its initial utilitarian function, it increasingly incorporated Native American designs, such as fringed buckskin.

This shared heritage is what led the design historian Sonya Abrego to characterize the cowboy boot as a reflection of “the material index of the diversity of the American West,” in her 2022 book Westernwear: Postwar American Fashion and Culture.

But it’s the parallel story around the cowboy boot, spun out of traveling Wild West vaudeville shows and Westerns, that’s proven more enduring.

Wild West shows were already mythologizing the cowboys and their boots by the time the railroad made its way to Texas, sunsetting the era of the widespread cattle drive that the footwear was created for. These productions increasingly linked them to the nation’s vanishing frontier (which was officially “closed” by the Bureau of the Census in 1890), and to a whitewashed narrative of America’s genocidal manifest destiny. The most popular, Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West, which began in 1883, ran for three decades in the U.S. and overseas, its story of the West often understood by its audiences to be fact not fiction. Native actors were cast as heels, while romanticized cowboys, increasingly portrayed by white actors on the stage, were held up as symbols of rugged individualism.

Mail-order catalogs of the day began to sell this narrative to consumers as the boots shifted beyond their solely utilitarian purpose (as early as the 1890s, ad copy began calling attention to not just their functionality but their “unique, showy appearance”). Hollywood did much of the rest.

With the rise of the Westerns, the footwear underwent a movie makeover in the ’40s and ’50s, emerging out of it with even more colors and artistry and a newly signature pointed toe. The revamped boot was popularized by Western stars like Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, the “King of Cowboys” and “Queen of the West,” who portrayed one idea of the cowboy. Viewers who saw their exploits on screen created a mass demand for the boots to emulate it. (The trend even inaugurated a new concept, the “sidewalk cattleman”—a name for people who wore cowboy boots but did not own cattle.)

Cowboy boot booms have come and gone since. Each time the cowboy boot returns in vogue, one can see their artisanry and craft, which continues to be reimagined and reinvented by successive waves of fashion. (Already in the 1950s, country stars were popularizing the rhinestone cowboy boot, now part and parcel of the Nashville bachelorette circuit.) But it can be hard to see the boot, and its style evolution, in a neutral way because it remains so saddled with the heavy load of representing the contested values of a nation.

That tangled history of the cowboy boot is why I’m still trying to figure out what I want to say with my own pair shelved in my closet.

I got them in the late 2000s when friends and I started going line dancing at the college night at Borderline Bar and Grill, a country western bar near my hometown in Ventura County, California. The boots were not just an aesthetic purchase; the heel, which once allowed cowboys to feel secure in stirrups, also allows for twisting, sliding, and stomping on the dance floor.

We loved the big ballads and achy heartbreak numbers the bar featured, dancing until we got tired and then playing the songs again on the car rides home, sweaty from trying to keep up with all the step work we’d put our shoes through.

But as much as I enjoyed going to the bar, I never felt comfortable laying a claim to the boots I wore there. I couldn’t see myself in their story, as modern country music often suggested one idea of who they were for. As I watched the genre continue to go in the direction the cowboy boot went in vaudeville, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to invite that association. More and more when I’d turn on a country radio station, I’d hear pandering songs that felt, at best, like a parody of the genre’s best songwriting traditions, and at worst, like dog whistles about who belonged in those small towns and dirt roads they sang about.

I can’t remember the last time I went to Borderline before a shooter opened fire there, killing 12 people, including himself, during a college night like the ones my friends and I used to go to. That was 2018. My local community fixture was suddenly part of the nation’s horrific, never-ending mass shooting nightmare.

Cowboy boots have been on my mind since, especially as they go through another trend cycle today.

I want to think that there’s a hopeful story in the boots that speaks to the diversity of the American West that the design historian Abrego wrote about. Not to mention the complicated story about life and myth in the U.S. that the boots can uniquely shed light on.

Though I haven’t been wearing my old pair again just yet, I know that I want to. For now, they sit at home, a story of America waiting for me, when I’m ready to put them on.

The post Cowboy Boots Were Made for Everyone appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But real cowboys—who worked long cattle drives in lonely places like Texas—mostly led lives of numbing tedium, usually on the fringes of society. They were the formerly enslaved, poor farm boys, and downtrodden Native Americans. They enjoyed little autonomy on the trail. It was Hollywood, and men like Roosevelt, who whitewashed the cowboy, elevating him to the epitome of personal freedom, manly courage, and rugged independence. 

For centuries, whether in the British Isles, the Iberian Peninsula, or the Americas, herding livestock to market put meat on the tables of city dwellers and money in the pockets of rural livestock owners. “Drove roads,” the term for routes through which livestock were driven, laced the countryside of rural England and Colonial America, connecting local communities to urban centers and generating millions of dollars in trade.

While turning cattle into capital could be lucrative for livestock owners, herding this “cash on the hoof” remained the job of low-status workers. In southern Appalachia during the 18th and 19th centuries, “cow keepers” used whips and dogs to control their herds, and if the term “cowboy” was used it was almost certainly pejorative. During the same era, in Mexico, the task of herding cattle fell to vaqueros, a multiracial, low-status group who transformed what had been a pedestrian chore into an equestrian art. Their lazo (rope with a slip knot) became a lasso, chaparajos became chaps, and sombrero became the ten-gallon hat. Because vaqueros were largely of indigenous descent, one could say that all of these early cowboys were in fact “Indians.”

In mid-19th-century Texas, millions of cattle grazed the open range—and many Texans preferred to gather wealth in cattle, which multiplied every year, to amassing wealth in land. But the rough task of gathering and herding cattle was considered an occupation beneath the dignity of respectable people. Herders roamed the mesquite thickets, coastal savannahs, and brush lands of eastern Texas capturing and branding any cattle they could find, seldom bothering to determine an animal’s ownership before taking it to market. Texas newspapers warned against “this roving class of worthless characters” who “may forget that there is a distinction between ‘mine’ and ‘thine.’” Polite families would no sooner invite a cowboy to dinner, Montana rancher Nannie Alderson wrote, than they would a rattlesnake.

Things changed after the Civil War when Texans began driving longhorn cattle hundreds of miles to the railroads in Kansas, in what became the longest, largest forced migration of animals in history. In Texas a steer might sell for only a few dollars; in Kansas, where livestock could be transported by rail directly to stockyards in Chicago, it might bring $30 or $40.

Texans who could marry their backcountry herding skills to the entrepreneurial demands of the Gilded Age stood to make fantastic profits. Some of these successful Texas cowboys became leading symbols in the new Western myth. Charles Goodnight found instant fame when he teamed with renowned cattleman Oliver Loving, hired a crew of impoverished ex-Confederates and a formerly enslaved person named Bose Ikard, and pushed a herd through the west Texas desert into New Mexico and then north to Denver. Selling the animals at $60 per head, he returned to Texas with $12,000 in gold, enough to build a fortune, as a legendary cattle driver and rancher. He is sometimes called “the father of the Texas Panhandle.”

Still, what actually occurred on these long drives wasn’t glamorous. Cattle herding was no place for free thinkers or independent minds. Like any other industrial-age enterprise, the cattle drive was built around guiding principles of centralized control, monotonous routines, and a disciplined labor force. It was “systematically ordered,” as Goodnight said.

Driving two or three thousand cattle over 1,000 miles required a dozen or so cowboys, each with four or more horses, working for three to six months. The trail boss, who might be the ranch owner but was more likely an experienced ranch hand, rode ahead of the herd to control the pace and direction of travel and tolerated neither unruly cattle nor rebellious laborers. Cowboys took orders and worked for wages typically lower than skilled factory pay.

Each herder had a regular position in the herd, from lead to flank to swing to drag, with status and sometimes pay according to position. According to Montana cowboy Edward Charles “Teddy Blue” Abbott, this “cowboy rank” meant that “every man knew his place and what to do.” Drag riders had it the worst. Responsible for bringing along the poor, weak, or wounded animals, drag riders would end the day “with dust half an inch deep on their hats and thick as fur on their eyebrows,” Abbott said. Even worse was the dust in their lungs, which had them coughing up brown phlegm for months after the drive.

Most riders on the drives were out-of-work farmers’ sons, some as young as 12 years old, who saw the opportunity to trail cattle as both a rare paying job and a rite of passage. African-American cowboys earned less and were often required to take on more dangerous tasks. Vaqueros also worked the herds. Bosses recognized their superior roping and riding skills but paid them less than Anglo riders. A few women went up the trail, mostly as wives in wagons accompanying the herds. In 1888 a young girl named Willie Matthews disguised herself as a boy and worked, rode, and roped along with the rest of the crew.

These diverse workers, a proletariat on horseback, shared in the grinding monotony of the trail—and often said as much. According to 19th-century Kansas journalist Henry King, who interviewed many trail riders as they arrived in Dodge City, repetitious chores caused cowboys to feel “adrift on these great, vague, and melancholy prairies.” One cowboy complained, “The trip that was once so exciting and thick with adventure has come to be an unspeakably cheerless and tiresome thing.”

Even the food was monotonous: Beans and biscuits constituted the standard fare. While the cowboys were surrounded by beeves—as they called cattle destined to become meat—eating into the boss’s profit margin was not an option. According to 19th-century Kansas cattle buyer Joe McCoy, who established the first cattle trading center in Abilene, Kansas, and later wrote a detailed description of the cattle trade, the unhealthy diet, along with a lack of tents, blankets, or even clean water, sapped the youthful vigor of cowboys and caused them to become “sallow and unhealthy” and “half-civilized only.” For some, “gloom” and “depression” descended on the crew until “conversation dwindled into monosyllables.” The legendary strong, silent type—so well-known from so many classic movies—may have emerged from the unspeakable boredom of trail life.

Wearisome dullness was occasionally interrupted by the sheer terror of the stampede. Longhorns had a strong flight instinct and a thunderstorm, an unexpected noise, or even the shake of a blanket could send them scattering. This sudden, unexpected, and seemingly aimless mass flight would shake the ground like an earthquake and crush any luckless herder caught in its path. At best, a stampede meant several days and nights of chasing after stray bunches of cattle. Combined with regular shifts of riding night duty, this meant that cowboys stayed in the saddle for three days or more. In such times coffee was not enough, Teddy Blue Abbott said. The only way to stay awake was to rub tobacco juice in one’s eyes.

For some cowboys, the hardest moments along the trail were the almost daily killings of newborn calves. Some herds were entirely steers (neutered males) headed for market, but others consisted of cattle of mixed sex, including pregnant cows. Newborn calves could not be tolerated because they slowed the herd. According to his biographer Charles Goodnight said, “We killed hundreds of newborn calves on the bed grounds. I always hated to kill the innocent things, but since they were never counted in the sale of cattle the loss of them was nothing financially.” The duty to “murder the innocents” each morning typically was assigned to a lower-status worker, either one of the younger members of the crew or an African-American, who shot the calves dead. One such worker, Branch Isbell, became so disgusted with “being the executioner” that he swore off using or owning guns for the rest of his life.

Despite the prevalence of lethal firearms and “Indian” fights in Western movies, there wasn’t much evidence of either in the actual cattle drives. Many trail bosses required their workers to keep their pistols in the chuck wagon, for fear that gunshots would cause a stampede. A cumbersome six-shooter was heavy to wear and had no real use in most trail situations. And besides, carrying pistols in public was illegal in Texas settlements and in the Kansas cattle towns at the end of the trail.

The famous Chisholm Trail passed through Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma, and some Native nations along the path, notably the Creeks, Cherokees, and Chickasaws, charged a fee for cattle crossing their land. Some Texas drovers claimed they fought back, and told manly stories of staring down the menace while brandishing their Winchesters. More commonly, however, they hired Native American cowboys to help herds across rivers or to find strays after a stampede. While the “Indian” threat loomed large in the Texas imagination, trail drives were marked more by cooperation than conflict.

There was one way in which actual cowboys helped forge the cowboy myth—in the downtime herders enjoyed as soon as they arrived in Kansas cattle towns. After bathing and shaving, but before heading to the saloon, they traded in their homemade trail clothes—straw or felt hats, flannel shirts, durable pants—for what some called the “working costume” of the cowboy: ten-gallon Stetsons, fancy shirts, leather chaps, star-topped boots, and sometimes a fancy pistol. Thus styled, they went to the photographer, posing for photos that wound up in newspapers, galleries, and archives across the country.

This visual legacy is about as accurate as using high school prom pictures to portray the typical attire of today’s teenager. But it made an indelible impression. Through popular culture, fictional cowboys became the antidote to worrisome urbanization and soul-killing industrialization that Gilded Age Americans needed.

Buffalo Bill Cody borrowed the image of the heroic cowboy for his Wild West shows, choosing a trail rider from Texas, Buck Taylor, to perform riding and roping tricks for his Eastern audiences. Tall, lean, and handsome, Taylor quickly became known as “King of the Cowboys,” a moniker he kept when he became the model for dime novels in the 1880s, written in as little as 24 hours and sold to millions of Eastern readers seeking escape from the regimented world of cities and factories. The books, like later Hollywood Westerns, thrived on the notion of the cowboy as individualist and gun-toting adventure hero. They had no use for the monotony and hardship of a cattle drive—the real life of the cowboys.

The post How the Gilded Age Turned Cowboys Into ‘Adventure Heroes’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Consider this passage from the 2013 British crime novel, Missing in Malmö, by Torquil Macleod:

“The drive to Carlisle took about twenty-five minutes. The ancient city had seen its fair share of violent history over the centuries as warring Scots and English families had clashed. The whole Border area between the two fractious countries had been like the American Wild West, and Carlisle was the Dodge City of the Middle Ages.”

So, just how bad was Dodge, really, and why do we remember it that way?

The story begins in 1872, when a miscellaneous collection of a dozen male pioneers—six of them immigrants—founded Dodge astride the newly laid tracks of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad. The town’s early years as a major shipping center for buffalo hides, its longer period as a “cowboy town” serving the cattle trails from Texas, and its easy accessibility by rail to tourists and newspaper reporters made Dodge famous. For 14 years, the media embellished the town’s belligerence and bedlam—both genuine and created—to produce the iconic Dodge City that was, and remains, a cultural metaphor for violence and anarchy in a celebrated Old West.

Newspapers in the 1870s crafted Dodge City’s reputation as a major theater of frontier disorder by centering attention on the town’s single year of living dangerously, which lasted from July 1872 to July 1873. As an unorganized village, Dodge then lacked judicial and law-enforcement structures. A documented 18 men died from gunshot wounds, and newspapers identified nearly half again that number as wounded.

But the newspapers didn’t merely report that news: They interwove it with myths and metaphors of the West that had emerged in the mid-century writings of Western travelers such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Albert D. Richardson, Horace Greely, and Mark Twain, and in the “genteel” Western fiction of Bret Harte and its working-class counterpart, the popular yellow-back novels featuring cowboys, Indians, and outlaws.

Consequently, headlines about seriously lethal doings in Dodge echoed the make-believe West: “BORDER PASTIMES. THREE MEN BORED WITH BULLETS AND THROWN INTO THE STREET”; “FROLICS ON THE FRONTIER. VIGILANTES AMUSING THEMSELVES IN THE SOUTHWEST . . . SIXTEEN BODIES TO START A GRAVEYARD AT DODGE CITY”; “TERRIBLE TIMES ON THE BORDER. HOW THINGS ARE DONE OUT WEST.”

One visiting reporter remarked that, “The Kansas papers are inclined to make mouths at Dodge, because she has existed only one month or thereabouts and already has a cemetery started without the importation of corpses.” Another quipped, “Only two men killed at Dodge City last week.” A joke circulated among Kansas weeklies: “A gentleman wishing to go from Wichita to Dodge City, applied to a friend for a letter of introduction. He was handed a double-barreled shot-gun and a Colt’s revolver.”

Ken Curtis and James Arness in “Gunsmoke,” the hit TV show that popularized Dodge City’s Wild West aura. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The bad news out of Dodge made its major East Coast debut in 10 column inches in the nation’s then most prestigious newspaper, the late Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Titled “THE DIVERSIONS OF DODGE CITY,” it condemned the village for the lynching of a black entrepreneur. “The fact is that in charming Dodge City there is no law,” it concluded. “There are no sheriffs and no constables. . . . Consequently there are a dozen well-developed murderers walking unmolested about Dodge City doing as they please.”

Conditions of well-publicized anarchy, though they sold out-of-town papers, were not what Dodge City’s business and professional men wanted. From the town’s founding they had feared more for their pocketbooks than for their lives. Their investments in buildings and goods, to say nothing of the settlement’s future as a collective real-estate venture, stood at risk. For their common business enterprise to pay off they had to attract aspiring middle class newcomers like themselves.

And so, in the summer of 1873, Dodge’s economic elite wrested control of the situation. The General Land Office in Washington at last approved its group title to the town’s land and the electorate chose a slate of county officers, of whom the most important was a sheriff. Two years later Kansas granted Dodge municipal status, authorizing it to hire a city marshal and as many assistant lawmen as needed.

From August 1873 through 1875 apparently no violent deaths occurred, and from early 1876 through 1886 (Dodge’s cattle-trading period and during its ban on the open carry of sidearms), the known body count averaged less than two violent deaths per year, hardly shocking. Still, the cultural influence of that infamous first year has colored perceptions of the settlement’s frontier days ever since. Part of the reason was a Swedish immigrant, Harry Gryden, who arrived in Dodge City in 1876, established a law practice, inserted himself into the local sporting crowd, and within two years began penning sensationalist articles about the town for the nation’s leading men’s magazine, New York’s National Police Gazette, known as the “barbershop bible.”

In 1883 a Dodge City reform faction briefly assumed control at City Hall and threatened to start a shooting war with professional gamblers. Alarmist dispatches, including some by Gryden, circulated as Associated Press stories in at least 44 newspapers from Sacramento to New York City. The Kansas governor was preparing to send in the state militia when Wyatt Earp, arriving from Colorado, brokered a peace before anyone got shot. Gryden, having already introduced both Earp and his friend Bat Masterson to a national readership, penned a colorful wrap-up for the Police Gazette.

With the end of the cattle trade at Dodge in 1886, its middle class citizenry hoped that its bad reputation would at last subside. But interest in the town’s colorful history never disappeared. This enduring attention eventually led to Dodge’s inauguration in 1902 as a staple item in the upscale mass-circulation magazines of the new century, including the very widely read Saturday Evening Post.

With that, the dangers of Dodge became a permanent commodity—a cultural production that was retailed to a primary market of tourists, and wholesaled to readers and viewers. Thereafter writers catering to the public’s fascination with the town’s violent reputation seemingly tried to outdo one another in lurid generalizations: “In Dodge . . . the revolver was the only sign of law and order that could command respect.” And: “The court of last resort there was presided over by Judge Lynch.” And: “When one was ‘bumped off,’ the authorities just hustled the body out to Boot Hill and speculated upon what else the day would bring forth in bloodshed.”

Dodge’s local handful of yarn-spinners endorsed such nonsense, and bogus estimates of those interred on Boot Hill ranged from 81 to more than 200. By the 1930s the town’s consensus had settled on 33, a number that included victims of illness as well as violence—but a best-selling biography of Wyatt Earp, published in 1931 by the California writer Stuart Lake and still in print, boosted the body count back up to 70 or 80. Lake’s book’s success, a burgeoning auto-borne tourism, and the Great Depression’s severe economic effect on southwest Kansas collaborated in wiping out any remaining local resistance to memorializing Dodge City’s bygone days.

Movies and then television also got into the act. As early as 1914, Hollywood had discovered the old frontier town. In 1939 Dodge got major film treatment. But it was a TV series set in Dodge that ensured its continuing cultural importance. “Gunsmoke” entertained literally millions of Americans for a phenomenal twenty years (1955-1975), becoming one of the longest-running prime-time serials ever aired. Ironically, because the hour-long weekly program appears to have prompted the “Get outta Dodge” trope, the population of Hollywood’s Dodge was an interesting soap-opera collaborative of reasonable citizens beset with weekly onslaughts of assorted trouble-making outsiders. It was a dangerous place only because of the people who did not live there.

Imaginary Dodge is still hard at work helping Americans chart their moral landscape as the archetypal bad civic example. Inserted into the national narrative, it promotes belief that things can never be as dreadful as they were in the Old West, thereby confirming that we Americans have evolved into a civilized society. As it reassures the American psyche, the Dodge City of myth and metaphor also incites it to celebrate a frontier past brimming with aggression and murderous self-defense.

The post How Dodge City Became the Ultimate Wild West appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

And then there was Wenona, the Sioux girl.

Wenona, Cummins proclaimed, was not only the “champion rifle shot of the world,” but also the daughter of a chief named Crazy Horse and a white woman, born in a “tepee on the south bank of the Big Cheyenne, near Fort Bennett, Dakota,” and only 18 years old. Cummins offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who could best Wenona with a rifle at the Exhibition. Her extraordinary shooting prowess, he crowed, had been bestowed upon her by supernatural spirits of the Indian world.

In fact, “Wenona” was not a Sioux teen. She was 29-year-old Lillian Frances Smith, the daughter of a white Quaker couple from New England. A former performer in William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West show, she had earned the scorn of the legendary Annie Oakley and had been cast aside to make her own way in the world.

Lillian Smith, probably age 15. Probably a Buffalo Bill’s Wild West publicity photo. Image courtesy of University of Oklahoma Libraries, Western History Collection, Rose Collection, No. 787.

At the cusp of 30, the so-called “California Girl” may have thought that adopting a Native American persona was her last chance to differentiate herself from Oakley. At least, this is what my original thesis was, when I first examined the sparse records that Smith left in her own writing before her death in 1930. I had been casting about for a California figure to write about, and tripped over mention of Smith in a footnote in an article about someone else. I had to piece together a sparse collection of Smith’s letters, newspaper accounts, playbills, accounts of those who worked with her, and genealogical sources to find her “real” story. And her real story, I found, had little to do with Oakley. It was not even so much that a “rehabilitated” Indian could sell a lot of tickets at that time—though that was certainly part of it. As I collected more and more sources, I concluded that the primary purpose of Smith’s transformation into Wenona was so that Smith could completely erase her past and start all over again, in typically American fashion.

Smith was a darling of Buffalo Bill’s 1886-1887 Wild West Show. One was at a loss, exclaimed one observer of the show in New York, whether “Miss Lillian Smith, Miss Annie Oakley, Johnnie Butler, the ‘Kid’ [cowboy Jim Willoughby], or Buffalo Bill himself” deserved the highest praise for marksmanship. As soon as Smith joined the show in April of 1886, Oakley shaved 12 years off her own birth date, insecure about the talented young teen stealing the spotlight. And Smith did not waste any time getting on Oakley’s nerves, bragging that the latter was “done for,” once the public had seen “her own self shoot.”

Yet, I learned through my research, Lillian was far less concerned with a feud with Annie Oakley than with getting away from her controlling father, Levi, who traveled with his daughter on the American leg of the Wild West tour. Levi followed Smith everywhere, and prevented her from making friends when he could. Under normal circumstances, this might illustrate good parenting—she was, after all, just a teen. But Levi exploited his daughter, and later, her younger sister. I found many examples of this, but perhaps the most poignant is mentioned in a letter Smith wrote to a friend, lamenting her sister’s situation: “The best thing she [Nellie] could do would be to marry or go with some man who was smart enough to manage her—else she will never win with this old man around her neck.” This is exactly what Lillian did when she married the cowboy “Kid” Willoughby, who was a dozen years her senior, in 1886. By marrying Willoughby, Smith put a trusted friend in charge of her finances and virtue while overseas, and pushed her father out of the picture. By all accounts, they were smitten with each other, and Willoughby staunchly supported his wife when Oakley and husband Frank Butler took her to task in the newspapers.

Lillian Smith as Princess Wenona, taken at the 1901 World’s Fair in Buffalo, New York. Centered in the photo is Geronimo. An inscription on the photo says, “General Milles–Indian Congress,” probably meant to commemorate General Nelson Miles’s winning of Geronimo’s surrender in 1886. Image courtesy of Library of Congress.

The marriage failed in 1889 when Willoughby left with Buffalo Bill on a second European tour and Smith did not—possibly because Oakley made Smith’s absence a condition of her own return to the show. Newspapers hinted at Smith’s dalliance with a “half-breed” as the reason for the breakup, but it is more likely the young sharpshooter simply lost interest in marriage with Willoughby so far away. Levi Smith immediately took control of his daughter’s career again, and the family traveled up and down the West Coast, living off Lillian’s exhibition earnings.

In 1897, Smith impulsively married a saloonkeeper in Santa Cruz, and just as quickly left him when she met Charles “Frank” Hafley, sheriff of Tulare County, at a gallery in Visalia the following year. Hafley was not conventionally handsome, but he was witty, athletic, and very intelligent. Additionally, he was an extraordinary sharpshooter in his own right, and a very competent equestrian. The two may not have ever legally married, but they began a decade-long romantic and business partnership that packed in more adventure than most people saw in their lifetimes. They traveled to Hawaii as a sharpshooting act, to the East Coast to perform at the 1901 World’s Fair, and to the Jamestown Exhibition in Virginia in 1904. The pair even created their own program called “California Frank’s Wild West,” and started an Indian curio business on the side (Smith created her own brand of tomahawks). It was Hafley who helped Smith morph into “Princess Wenona,” helping her write a “new” biography that included him, “Fighting Frank” Hafley, as the cowboy who brought this fair Indian maiden into a culture of civilizing whites.

Wenona’s costume often included a fully fringed, suede tunic with intricate beadwork and a fantastic feathered headdress, which she wore even while shooting moving objects while astride a galloping horse. Her “Indianness” helped differentiate her among other Wild West stars, but her costuming was also practical. Smith had struggled with her weight since puberty, and her tunic let her hide her voluptuous figure. Additionally, it gave her freedom of movement to do the physically demanding feats she was known for, like shooting glass balls thrown all around an arena while galloping full speed on her horse while flipped on her back.

Perhaps most importantly, Wenona’s adopted Sioux identity forever severed any connection between her and her parents. In 1900, we know from one of her letters, she was still trying to convince her younger sister to leave Levi’s sphere of influence on the West Coast and move east to be closer to her. The Smith girls’ mother died in 1901, and their father in 1908. Wenona did not see either of them again after she met Frank in 1898.

Lillian Smith as Princess Wenona. Publicity photo from Pawnee Bill’s Wild West, circa 1905. In this image, Wenona is Minnehaha, the fictional Native American woman in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1855 poem “The Song of Hiawatha.” Image courtesy of Library of Congress.

Audiences were more than willing to receive Wenona as a member of a “noble race,” albeit one doomed by the progress of civilization. As Philip Deloria, Laura Browder, and other historians describe it, Native Americans were icons of American identity, and citizens wanted to feel a natural affinity with the continent. Indians could teach them such “aboriginal closeness.” Lillian Smith was not the first or last performer to try to bridge this gap. In her book, Real Native Genius: How an Ex-Slave and a White Mormon Became Famous Indians, Angela Pulley Hudson describes how in the mid-1800s, Warner McCary and his wife Lucy, who was not only white but divorced, traveled the United States as singers and comedians before turning to lecturing on medical healing. They used “Indianness” as a way to disguise their backgrounds, justify their marriage, and make a living—much as Wenona did. Smith’s popularity spurred a number of wannabes on the Wild West circuit: “Princess Kiowa,” “Princess Winonah,” “Princess Mohawk,” and others. One notable “Princess Kiowa” was Nellie Smith, Lillian’s younger sister, who was also an accomplished sharpshooter, but was never quite as good or as famous as her older sister. Nellie fades from the historical record after 1916, when she was performing for Yankee Robinson’s circus.

Wenona retired from show business in 1925 or thereabouts. She had a brief relationship with cowboy Wayne Beasley just before World War I, but her last substantial romantic entanglement was with Emil Lenders, one of the great painters of the American West. Lenders had also “gone native.” His first marriage had ended when his wife could no longer tolerate his traipsing off with various tribes instead of helping to take care of his family in Philadelphia. He had first met Wenona at the Buffalo Exhibition, and got reacquainted with her around 1920 when Joe Miller of the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch in Ponca City, Oklahoma, brought Lenders in to paint buffalo and other animals. Wenona had performed with the 101’s traveling wild west since 1915, and Joe Miller generously allowed many of his performers to live on the working ranch. It was only natural, when Lenders and Wenona fell in love, that they shared a house there.

The couple parted ways amicably in 1928, when Lenders met and married another woman. Wenona lived on in a tiny cabin on the outskirts of the 101, and passed the time caring for her many chickens and dogs. At age 59, she developed a heart condition, and quickly deteriorated over the Christmas season of 1929.

She still always wore her Sioux garb, and asked to be buried in it upon her death. When she passed away in February of 1930, her friends obliged.

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After dinner Spiller exuberantly showed off a sample of “cotton ball,” a weird, semi-translucent rock formation containing borax. Spiller suggested to his hosts that fortunes awaited those lucky enough to find a generous deposit of the stuff. He showed them how to test for the mineral’s presence with a combination of alcohol and sulfuric acid. After Spiller left the next day, Aaron told Rosie he had seen a material very similar to this out on the desiccated lakebed of Death Valley.

That morning the couple set off to collect samples of the opaque dirty white bulbous material that resembled a handful of dirty cotton balls spread across the desert floor. They made a camp and (so the story goes) “when the shadows had closed in around them, Winters put some of the salt into a saucer, poured the acid and alcohol on them, and with trembling hand struck a match.” Watching anxiously, Aaron exclaimed, “She burns green, Rosie! We’re rich, by God.”

Getting rich by finding gold, silver, or oil is a California tale as old as the Gold Rush and as new as the Beverly Hillbillies. But the story of 20 Mule Team Borax is also the story of one of America’s defining brands, a product that came to sit on a shelf in every household, offering an only-in-America promise that by using this particular washing powder, immigrants from around the world could share in the heritage of the Wild Wild West and join the upper middle class.

Winters staked his claim in the middle of Death Valley and quickly sold the land for $20,000 in 1883 to William Tell Coleman, a Kentucky native turned San Francisco borax magnate who built Coleman’s Harmony Borax Works on the property. Forty Chinese workers scraped the mineral from the harsh desert floor for $1.50 per day, except when summer temperatures reached above 120 degrees Fahrenheit—not to give the workers a break, but because the borax could not crystallize properly under such extreme conditions.

Coleman used mules to transport the borax 162 miles due west to a railroad shipping spur in Mojave, California. The teams that later became infamous as “20 Mule Teams” in fact consisted of 18 mules and two draft horses. The animals were hitched to two massive wooden wagons with 7-foot-high rear wheels, carrying over 10 tons of processed borax apiece. Two fully loaded wagons with a full 1,200-gallon steel water tank and additional supplies weighed in at 36.5 tons. Just two men operated the wagons—one driving and operating the brake of the lead wagon, the other minding the rear wagon’s brake. The trip took 10 grueling days across the hot desert and was both monotonous—moving in a straight line was not much of a challenge—and dangerous on cliffside curves where an entire wagon train could fall off, driver and all. Specialized sections of the mule team were trained to angle their bodies while stepping sideways so that the preceding animals could navigate curves.

20 Mule Team Borax Soap Chips

 
Coleman got so much borax out of Death Valley that the market crashed. In 1890, he sold out for half a million dollars to Francis Marion “Borax” Smith. Coleman died broke three years later.

Encouraged by young employee named Stephen Tyng Mather, Smith capitalized on the “lore and mystique” of Death Valley by creating the 20 Mule Team brand in 1894. Never mind that by 1896 borate ore from the region was shipped entirely by rail; the company created personalities like feisty William “Borax Bill” Parkinson, who was hired and trained as a driver for the 1904 St. Louis Exposition and other promotional tour events across the U.S. When Parkinson died suddenly another man became the new “Borax Bill.”

Borax Bill, said an early brochure, spoke to his balky mules in language “that would not sound well in polite society.” If it seems strange that housewives of the time embraced the idea that a man with a dirty mouth would help them get their clothes clean and white, it helps to remember what hard labor laundry was before the advent of washing machines and sophisticated detergents.

Smith’s goal was to “put a box of borax in every home” and he succeeded at doing exactly that. By the 1920s the brand was considered a legendary triumph of American advertising, lauded for creating such demand that prices fell for consumers.

The brand’s popularity coincided with a push toward cleanliness and germ eradication in both the U.S. and Europe. Besides being promoted as a laundry detergent, borax was touted as an essential part of personal health, hygiene, and cosmetics. A 1919 advertising pamphlet titled Borax: The Magic Crystal read, “Perfect health depends on perfect hygienic cleanliness; and perfect sanitary cleanliness is secured by the use of nature’s greatest cleanser and most harmless antiseptic—Borax.” The product materials spoke in a kind of code to hard-working women who wanted to better their lot. Borax pitched itself as “a very popular powder for whitening the faces of ladies who are too much tanned, or have faded in some way.” The pamphlet said the product could remove freckles, be used as a sunscreen—or a deodorant—and soften hands that had done too much manual labor. The message that being clean—and paler—was the ticket to the American Dream was almost explicit in advertising of the time, which was aimed at a big melting pot of recent immigrants. As ad executive Albert Lasker told his staff in the 1920s, “We are making a homogeneous people out of a nation of immigrants.”

In 1930, the company pulled off another trick of turning itself into not just a shared soap but a shared memory of bygone frontier days, producing a radio show called Death Valley Days. These Western morality tales ran weekly for 15 years on the radio and then another 18 years and 600 episodes on television, where it was one of the longest-running Western programs in broadcast history. Ronald Reagan hosted the program from 1964 to 1965, and actors including Angie Dickinson, Clint Eastwood, James Caan, and James Coburn did guest appearances early in their careers.

Death Valley Days was Reagan’s last TV show before he ran for governor of California. In his ads hawking Borax, he is simultaneously a character of the old West, a glamorous actor, and the father of Patty Reagan, who shows how domestic Borax can be. It’s a neat trick, and it foreshadows Reagan’s uncanny ability to evoke a mythic past with a vision of domestic tranquility for political purposes.

But underneath all of the ideals of the frontier, of blockbuster marketing, and of the melting pot, what’s probably given 20 Mule Team Borax its sticking power is that it speaks to the core American value of hard, dirty work—even if it only took 18 mules.

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Even in the ball-room, the place, above all others, consecrated to pleasure, and where personal encounters should be least expected, these instruments of death are carried.      —Little Rock Times, February 28, 1835

At an interesting time in our history, folks started wearing weapons as a part of their daily attire, to work and to play. In the 1830s, citizens of the Mississippi River Valley, in such communities as New Orleans, Natchez, Vicksburg, and Little Rock, armed themselves. They chose small weapons popular at the time—single-shot pistols, sword canes, and knives—as business accessories. Unlike some weapons advocates of today, they had no particular wish to make a point regarding “open carry.” Theirs was a response to changing circumstances, brought on, or at least assisted by, a technological advance: the steamboat. At least that’s my theory.

While weapons were universal on the frontier—almost every household had a rifle and all had a few good knives—communities prided themselves on order and stability. People moved west from such communities and settled into new places with the same desire to have order established, bringing with them the solid influence of law, religion, and women. The violence that seemed to plague every new outpost represented growth pangs of civilization, the friction between the wild and the settled, an anticipated, if unpleasant, transition.

Carrigan knife by James Black, Washington, Arkansas, in the Historic Arkansas Museum collection

This was the situation on the Mississippi and its tributaries once Louisiana opened to immigration after the Purchase in 1803. The influx proved disastrous for the native populations there, whose relations with France and Spain had been mutually respectful for generations. New American communities popped up all along the rivers, and the newcomers seemed to absorb everything before them. Initially, travel to and from these communities consisted of overland treks, under animal or human power, or water journeys, in flatboats or keelboats. Flatboats only went one way—downstream—and keelboating was slow and arduous, at least upstream. So travelers arrived in dribs and drabs: a few wagons here, a flatboat there.

Because of universally acknowledged dangers, traveling with weapons was a social convention. The influx of armed folks in small groups offered no problem for the communities of the West. But then, with the advent of the steamboat age after the War of 1812—and ever larger steamboats—the streets of the West suddenly had to accommodate hundreds of armed travelers with the arrival of each boat. This armed invasion and a related increase in gambling and other dodgy activities encouraged the citizens of these towns to arm themselves, even when they weren’t traveling.

Dirk-styled bowie, by Samuel Bell, San Antonio, courtesy of Michael A. Worley

Weapon choices were limited in their basic form, be it pistol, sword cane, or knife. But elaborations on the theme of knife blossomed for the fashionable consumer. The men of the 1830s and 1840s could choose among a delightful (or frightening, depending upon your perspective) assortment of self-defense knives, as they sought to maintain the balance of power in the communities of the West. Indeed the market demanded a new name for these bladed weapons, and the country settled on two: bowie knife and Arkansas toothpick.

Jim Bowie killed a man with a knife in a duel gone bad—Jim was not one of the duelists, but he was an after-the-duel fighter—near Natchez in 1827. Some folks later declared that moment the birth of the bowie knife. “All the steel in the country was immediately converted into bowie-knives,” remembered one 1837 newspaper. About the same time, “Arkansas knives” came to be referred to in newspapers and advertisements, later to become “Arkansas toothpicks.” The Arkansas connection likely stemmed from the frontier nature of the place—where the unkind stereotype suggested violence settled all disputes and folks picked their teeth with large knives—and perhaps from the presence of James Black, a pioneering cutler whose knives were copied widely.

Half-horse/half-alligator bowie by L. C. Wragg, Sheffield, England, courtesy of Michael A. Worley

Black made a knife utilitarian in form but highlighted with silver wrapped around the end of the pommel and on the other exposed metal areas of the handle. These knives didn’t include a cross guard or a clipped point, both of which became among the defining characteristics of a bowie knife. Daniel Searles of Baton Rouge, and, early on, Henry Schively of Philadelphia, were inspired by the traditional Mediterranean dirk knife, as more and more knife makers from around the country answered the surging demand. But American cutlers were soon eclipsed, at least in terms of the volume of production, by the powerful cutlery industry of Sheffield, England, which jumped into almost every market around the globe.

In terms of design, knives could be works of art: witness the production of Samuel Bell and California cutlers before the Civil War. Bell’s skill as a silversmith left us with beautifully crafted knives and integrally connected sheaths, and California knives often featured local resources—including abalone and gold—to punctuate the maker’s creativity.

All things considered, the bowie knife world offered every variation in handle, guard, blade, and sheath. You could choose among handles of different woods, ivory, horn, silver, even those California abalone shells, enhanced by precious metals, or nickel silver, in a variety of shapes, some with elaborate pommel caps (crowns, horse-heads, and the like) or with panels that might include an image of the notorious half-horse/half-alligator or a reclining lion, as some makers seemed to forget that these were tools meant to fit comfortably in a hand. Guards went from none at all to simple projections to eagle wings to elaborate pressed metal. And there was the matter of blades to consider, from 6 to 12 inches and beyond, flat-backed, clipped pointed, spear shaped, with etched, stamped, or engraved decorations involving patriotic slogans, interesting images, or anything that might entice the buyer. The result: a flowering of style the humble self-defense knife had not seen for centuries.

Today, bowie knives and Arkansas toothpicks are prized collector items. Long lost to the modern definition of these knives is their early incarnation as fashionable weapons for the fashionable man (gone by the time of the Civil War). And those who use knives all the time—cooks and hunters, especially—wouldn’t normally chose bowies. But the creativity spent on the early knives is not lost to us today. Popular culture regularly returns to the 1820s and 1830s for historical stimulation. “Andy” Jackson, “Davy” Crockett, the legendary brawler Mike Fink, Jim Bowie, and the saga of the Alamo all evoke a time when the most effective weapon in one’s arsenal was likely a knife. The life-and-death nature of these objects heightens our appreciation of them as tangible links to our pioneering past.

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As a description of where Earp—a professional gambler and occasional lawman—had spent the notable moments in his life before 1883, this made little sense. Earp was not a stranger to California; he lived on a rented farm in San Bernardino as a teen after his family had trekked there from Iowa in 1864. But he had left San Bernardino by 1868. If he returned to California before 1883, it was only for brief visits.

But as a prediction of where Earp would spend most of the last 55 years of his life, the tabloid’s identification of him as a Californian could not have been more accurate.

Not only would Earp live out his days in California, but two of the most important developments in his life happened there:

1.) His participation in 1896, as referee, in a reputedly fixed heavyweight championship prizefight in San Francisco that tarnished his reputation.

2.) His friendships with Hollywood filmmakers, beginning in the late 1910s, that restored his reputation. Though we think of Earp as an artifact of the Old West, he was much more a product of the New West. And of an urban, 20th-century media culture based in California.

When Earp first settled in California in 1887, he chose San Diego as his home, shortly after the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad extended a branch line to the city. In San Diego, Earp speculated in real estate, ran several gambling halls in the rough Stingaree district south of downtown, and promoted bare-knuckle prizefights and horse races both in San Diego and Tijuana.

By 1891, however, the real estate bubble in San Diego had burst, and Earp, virtually penniless, had relocated to San Francisco, where he trained racehorses. There, in 1896, his longtime association with gamblers—and his reputation in boxing and horse racing circles as a man willing to fix matches or races to win a bet—led to his 11th-hour selection as the referee of a heavyweight championship prizefight at the Mechanics’ Pavilion in San Francisco. In the eighth round, the champion and favorite, Robert Fitzsimmons, knocked the challenger, Tom Sharkey, to the mat and appeared to have won the bout. Yet Earp ruled that Fitzsimmons had struck Sharkey with a low blow, and awarded the fight and championship to the challenger. In the days after the fight, rumors circulated that Sharkey’s camp had paid Earp $2,500 to ensure his victory.

The Sharkey-Fitzsimmons controversy was the biggest gambling scandal in championship sports until the Chicago White Sox threw the World Series in 1919. It was unsurpassed in boxing until the infamous “long count” in the heavyweight championship fight between Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey in 1927. Earp’s boxing decision may have inspired Ernest Hemingway to write the short story “Fifty Grand.”

And, not least of all, the fight vaulted Wyatt Earp into national prominence. Before the bout, the violence in Arizona in the early 1880s had been mostly forgotten. After the fight, newspapers printed and reprinted stories of the infamous gunfight in which Earp, two of his brothers, and his friend Doc Holliday killed three cowboys—and of the vigilante violence that followed, in which one of Earp’s brothers and two other cowboys were killed. The papers also circulated stories—some credible and some not—of Earp’s alleged misdeeds as a gambler and con man.

Stung by the criticism, Earp sought to remove himself from the public eye. He left California for a few years and ran a saloon in Nome, Alaska; he also made the rounds of mining camps in Nevada, dealing cards. But by 1911 he was back in California; the Los Angeles Police Department bunco squad arrested him that year for running a crooked card game. His reputation as a scoundrel seemed secure.

In 1914, while living in Los Angeles, Earp took a step toward repairing his image by visiting Paramount Studios—the first of what would be many visits to Hollywood. He charmed Raoul Walsh and Charlie Chaplin, regaling them with largely invented tales of his past. He established himself as an informal adviser on Westerns, and became a close friend of the most prominent Western film star of the 1910s and early 1920s, William S. Hart.

Hart encouraged Earp to collect his tales into a memoir that could provide the basis for a film script. Earp took to the task enthusiastically, starting over from scratch three times with new writing partners when results proved unsatisfying to him. In each new iteration of his life, he tweaked his account, editing out his missteps and embarrassments, neglecting to mention his 1911 arrest in Los Angeles and his arrests in the 1870s for horse theft and consorting with prostitutes.

He modeled the character he created in his memoir—tough and taciturn—on Hart’s screen persona. Earp cast himself as a lifelong proponent of law and order, an avenging angel of justice. His was a story of the redemptive power of violence. But Earp’s real story is about the redemptive power of the media.

Earp’s as-told-to biography was published in 1931, two years after his death; Frontier Marshal, the first film based on the book, was released in 1934. Screened and broadcast repeatedly, the film rooted Earp in American collective memory.

Ever since, Earp’s adventures have been decontextualized through time and repetition. The manipulations started with Earp but continue to this day because of the work of generations of actors and filmmakers. Earp’s stories are now open to manipulation by all; they have become part of our collective memory’s invented tradition. Ironically, the media culture that Earp so resented after 1896 because it foisted on him an unwanted celebrity became, after his death, the engine of his ongoing redemption.

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