The myth of the cowboy is always a precarious thing, challenged by the history of America, often used to suppress that history.
We all know the story: a poor troubled frontier town has been set on by no good outlaws. The outlaws live even further afield than the little town which sits on the edge of civilization. The town protects American ideals in the face of forces that would see the hard fought Empire brought low. The avatars of these ideals are the general store, the stagecoach, the telegraph office, the saloon, the humble sheriff’s office. The scared men and women of the town are at their wits’ end. They’ve been living under the regime of these outlaws and no one in their kindly community is big enough or bad enough to dispense justice to the outlaws. That is until one day when some stranger, a dust-coated knight errant in a white hat, rides into town to answer the prayers of the citizens. He stoically sips whiskey while the townsfolk plead their case and eventually agrees to take pity on them, stoically. From there it’s just a matter of waiting for high noon when the outlaw leader makes himself known, making use of that “fastest hand in the West,” then humbly denying any reward money before he rides off into the sunset. Manifest Destiny saved from the forces of evil.
All of which, given the last thirty or so years of “anti-cowboy” movies, and a long canon of skepticism before that, I probably don’t need to tell you, is bullshit.
In fact, at this point, in American culture, I would argue that we’ve sort of fully subsumed the myth of the cowboy story. The story’s been told and retold and inverted and subverted and had the perspective changed and swapped good guys for bad guys and sometimes blended with aliens.
Cowboys have been heroes in our tales, anti-heroes, sympathetic villains, aloof observers in a vast unfeeling Western expansion, and forbidden lovers. We’ve used them up and wrung them dry and they’ve ended up in this strange post-symbolic state in our collective conscious, where the mythology of the cowboy is still around, but only in the most purely dry and ironic capacity. For cool examples of this see Bone Tomahawk or No Country for Old Men. Otherwise, if cowboys are considered now with any attempt at sincerity it is only in the most kitsch of circumstances or cliched attempts at genre redefinition. We have The Mandalorian, for cowboys who are, like, in space I guess, but otherwise completely unchanged. We have whatever slop is on the new Fox News streaming platform (I think there’s one called Marshals?) where modern cowboys are members of any assorted rural SWAT teams who just seem to like flannel a bit more than their coworkers and prefer Budweiser to mocha grande frappa—ugh, I can’t even do it ironically. And of course we have every truck commercial since…I mean at least when we invaded Iraq, but I would imagine the deep vaguely paternal cowboy voiceover truck commercial has gone on longer than my own waking memory that ties them pretty specifically to the pickups of the Global War on Terror.
It seems that the almost innate desire that American media has to take these characters out of the context in which they lived is too conspicuous to not be the very point of cowboy media. What’s so great about Warlock is that it called out the dangers of this consideration outside of real material history back in 1958, about twenty-five years after the first pseudo-fictitious cowboy biography began to convert history to myth.
Much of Oakley Hall’s fun within Warlock is had at the expense of Stuart Lake, the author of Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal. Lake published his “biography” in 1931 and, over the next quarter century, before Oakley Hall gave us the modern semiotics of the cowboy, much of Lake’s biography was exposed via journals and other primary sources as having mythologized Earp to the point of fraud.
It’s this dialogue between Hall and Lake that gave birth to the modern need to subvert the cowboy, to demonstrate how thin the line is between lawman and outlaw. Every actual question that’s been asked of cowboy media since Lake’s archetypal cookie cutter job has been the result of Hall’s own meditation on why someone like Lake felt the need to do what he had done. If Lake gave us our first taste of Old West derring-do and cowboy bravado, then Hall was the first person to actually make the people in these stories into interesting, human characters.
But one important thing has been stripped out of cowboy stories that have ridden on his coattails since Hall wroteWarlock: the world outside of the drama of the cowboys. This view of the full machinery surrounding the cowboys as they live out their violent skirmishes is what makes Warlock so special.
The town of Warlock is a character in this book. It writhes and wriggles and pulses with the rumors blown about by its citizens. The town has memory that can be accessed and converted to fuel for feuds. It has social dynamics that create factions and cabals that have very real goals and desires. It turns out that, in Warlock, cowboys don’t play their usual role as the only sentient agents in a world of complacent frontier life. They’re the avatars and representatives of conspiracies that began far before them and will continue long after them. They are the wooden forked animals that dance out of the doors of the cuckoo clock, promptly on the hour, controlled by a system of preconditioned machinery that sits beneath the clock’s chassis. The flight of their bullets was predetermined by the archons of wars to which they could never be privy in their small attempts to carve out something that resembles freedom.
The cowboys are sacrificial goats, crucified while the people who hired them to protect their property and wage their wars cower behind shopfront parapets. If we are concerned about cowboys—law men and outlaws staging their operatic duels at high noon—then we forget to ask important questions. Who hired the law man? What is he really here to protect? If the law can be hired then can it ever really protect the moral interests of a populace that, on average, doesn’t have much money? Or, my personal favorite: hey, weren’t these “outlaws” the same guys hired by the mine owners to violently break up that strike a few months back?
It turns out that the Old West outpost town is as shallow as the modern reconstruction, a set of chintzy storefronts propped up by petit-bourgeois stage trusses while the miners are crushed beneath the machinery that hired the law man. Because as much as Oakley Hall was writing about Wyatt Earp and the mythos of the cowboy, he was writing about the Ludlow Massacre and the countless battles fought by the preterite laborers who carried that mythology on their backs. As much as he was writing about the anonymous Citizens’ Committee, he was writing about the Western Federation of Miners and the organized groups of individuals who toed the line between lynch mob and decentralized congress for liberty. He was writing about the faceless nature of violence and its disturbingly banal charges of protection.
It turns out that the frailty of society isn’t represented by the law man’s duel with the outlaw, it’s represented by the ease with which machinery of safety and protection can be converted into engines of punishment and class violence. The drama played out by the cowboys is just that, a stage act for boys, while the real presence that haunts the stage is only evoked when you stop paying attention to the slaughtered calves and start asking why there isn’t enough food to go around.
So there is irony in the longevity that Oakley Hall’s consideration of the cowboy myth has had. But with that irony comes the dandelion seed of hope that was packaged in that story. Some will of course wonder “what if the cowboy had a jet pack this time,” but, inevitably, some will pay a bit more attention and accidentally discover history ensconced within the mythology using artifacts like Warlock. May it empower them.
