The Significance of the Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner

 

The American Frontier Rough ‘n’ Tumble mindset has a psychology of its own. What occurred in the clash of cultures in the Wildlands of the New World was not a mere transport of ideas and ways from The Old World, i.e., Europe.

Be those ideas combat, trade, politics, economics, law, hell, even the sciences took their own doglegged tack in the new land.

We can get a broad overview on how this unprecedented mindset manifested in Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 thesis, The Significance of the Frontier in American History.

The ideas were later developed in greater detail, notably by the eminent Librarian of Congress historian, Daniel J. Boorstein, in many linked works on the uniqueness of this era.

Let us begin with Mr. Turner as our guide into this roughshod, pragmatic, self-made mindset, this psychology of pluck and grit.

Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.

·        Each new environmental or social encounter, be it the land itself with its own peculiar climate, or the inhabitants of that region called forth the need for new skills, new ways, adaptations, adjustments, and in some cases abandonment of old ways.

In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization.

The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier—a fortified boundary line running through dense populations. The most significant thing about the American frontier is, that it lies at the hither edge of free [unsettled] land.

·        Old World history [European] is a long tale of the same familiar landscapes played upon a stage explored and settled long ago.

·        Much of Old World history struggles against quite similar folks in quite similar lands.

·        The Americas were a different stage altogether with all the players cast in unfamiliar roles.

In the settlement of America we have to observe how European life entered the continent, and how America modified and developed that life and reacted on Europe. Our early history is the study of European germs developing in an American environment. Too exclusive attention has been paid by institutional students to the Germanic origins, too little to the American factors. The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American. At first, the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American. As successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics. Thus the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines. And to study this advance, the men who grew up under these conditions, and the political, economic, and social results of it, is to study the really American part of our history.

·        Keep this uniqueness in mind as you ponder not merely the cultural and survival differences, but how this separation from “Motherland” creates modes of thought that see little regard in fealty to Old Ways, and, yes, that includes kneeling abjectly before lines of lineage or dedication to dogma be it religious or even old martial/combat ways.

[Mr. Jackson on how the Indigenous was the original Pathfinder, and those who followed not so much “tamed” the “Savage” as were molded and forged by the “Savage.”]

And yet, in spite of this opposition of the interests of the trader and the farmer, the Indian trade pioneered the way for civilization. The buffalo trail became the Indian trail, and this became the trader's "trace;" the trails widened into roads, and the roads into turnpikes, and these in turn were transformed into railroads. The same origin can be shown for the railroads of the South, the Far West, and the Dominion of Canada. The trading posts reached by these trails were on the sites of Indian villages which had been placed in positions suggested by nature; and these trading posts, situated so as to command the water systems of the country, have grown into such cities as Albany, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Council Bluffs, and Kansas City. Thus civilization in America has followed the arteries made by geology, pouring an ever richer tide through them, until at last the slender paths of aboriginal intercourse have been broadened and interwoven into the complex mazes of modern commercial lines; the wilderness has been interpenetrated by lines of civilization growing ever more numerous. It is like the steady growth of a complex nervous system for the originally simple, inert continent. If one would understand why we are to-day one nation, rather than a collection of isolated states, he must study this economic and social consolidation of the country. In this progress from savage conditions lie topics for the evolutionist.

[Many think of the roots of “Democracy” as coming from European philosophers but…those in the know then and what is being rediscovered now is how much the influence of freedom was found within the Indigenous peoples and then carried back across the pond, to only be regurgitated back to us in the prose of the “Great Minds.” See The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow for a massive scholarly work on the enormous debt both sides of the Atlantic owe to what they found preexisting upon these shores.]

But the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe. As has been indicated, the frontier is productive of individualism. Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of primitive organization based on the family. The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control. The tax-gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression. Prof. Osgood, in an able article, [30:1] has pointed out that the frontier conditions prevalent in the colonies are important factors in the explanation of the American Revolution, where individual liberty was sometimes confused with absence of all effective government. The same conditions aid in explaining the difficulty of instituting a strong government in the period of the confederacy. The frontier individualism has from the beginning promoted democracy.

[On this new psychology.]

The men and women who made the Middle West were idealists, and they had the power of will to make their dreams come true. Here, also, were the pioneer's traits,—individual activity, inventiveness, and competition for the prizes of the rich province that awaited exploitation under freedom and equality of opportunity. He honored the man whose eye was the quickest and whose grasp was the strongest in this contest: it was "every one for himself."

[And this from a letter of the time.]

"Some of our fellow-citizens may think we are not able to conduct our affairs and consult our interests; but if our society is rude, much wisdom is not necessary to supply our wants, and a fool can sometimes put on his clothes better than a wise man can do it for him." This forest philosophy is the philosophy of American democracy.

[Consider this but please read the bracket afterwards.]

Western democracy included individual liberty, as well as equality. The frontiersman was impatient of restraints. He knew how to preserve order, even in the absence of legal authority. If there were cattle thieves, lynch law was sudden and effective: the regulators of the Carolinas were the predecessors of the claims associations of Iowa and the vigilance committees of California. But the individual was not ready to submit to complex regulations. Population was sparse, there was no multitude of jostling interests, as in older settlements, demanding an elaborate system of personal restraints. Society became atomic. There was a reproduction of the primitive idea of the personality of the law, a crime was more an offense against the victim than a violation of the law of the land. Substantial justice, secured in the most direct way, was the ideal of the backwoodsman. He had little patience with finely drawn distinctions or scruples of method. If the thing was one proper to be done, then the most immediate, rough and ready, effective way was the best way.

[These same “lawless” ones taking the “law” into their own hands, were not mere capital storming rowdies. They were improvising in a land where legislation hadn’t reached. The stories of meetings and observance of habeas corpus and other niceties of common law being observed in a meticulous manner show no mere slip-shod emotionalism. The germs of self-organized order are to be found here. Rough n rowdy, rough n ready? Yes. Slipshod, fly-off-the-cuff—No.]

[The below was the general attitude towards Old World thought that considered its ways superior to the untutored, “uneducated.”]

"A fool can sometimes put on his coat better than a wise man can do it for him,"—such is the philosophy of its petitioners.

[The next observation from Turner and echoed by Boorstein is KEY. The “mythology” here was an actuality. Much of it can still be appreciated for its difficulties. I invite anyone to accompany me on any back country expedition to see just how quickly things can go South even in the 21^st century when confronting some of these physical barriers, ofttimes a mere handful of miles from a modern city. Extrapolate these meagre difficulties to NO “civilized” refuge Anywhere---then you have a scintilla taste of what realities created this so-called American “mythology.”]

The first ideal of the pioneer was that of conquest. It was his task to fight with nature for the chance to exist. Not as in older countries did this contest take place in a mythical past, told in folk lore and epic. It has been continuous to our own day. Facing each generation of pioneers was the unmastered continent. Vast forests blocked the way; mountainous ramparts interposed; desolate, grass-clad prairies, barren oceans of rolling plains, arid deserts, and a fierce race of savages, all had to be met and defeated. The rifle and the ax are the symbols of the backwoods pioneer. They meant a training in aggressive courage, in domination, in directness of action, in destructiveness.

[The above shows us how the environment helped forge new physical skills in response to environment, the next points the light on how this in turn shapes cognitive possibilities for the ambitious and self-sufficient.]

Besides the ideals of conquest and of discovery, the pioneer had the ideal of personal development, free from social and governmental constraint. He came from a civilization based on individual competition, and he brought the conception with him to the wilderness where a wealth of resources, and innumerable opportunities gave it a new scope.

[Next Jackson delves into how it shaped Man’s relationship with other Men.]

Among the pioneers one man was as good as his neighbor. He had the same chance; conditions were simple and free. Economic equality fostered political equality. An optimistic and buoyant belief in the worth of the plain people, a devout faith in man prevailed in the West. Democracy became almost the religion of the pioneer. He held with passionate devotion the idea that he was building under freedom a new society, based on self government, and for the welfare of the average man.

·        Note: Jackson is Not discussing democracy with a large D as we think of it now in political theater.

·        He is referring to the democratic relationship in the “man to man” “how we get things done” sense of the word.

·        More along the lines of the spontaneous organization for wagon trains, mountaineering expeditions, or the group dynamics of small LRP [Long Range Patrol] units in warfare.

·        The democracy here is small scale reality, not large-scale theory.

American democracy was born of no theorist's dream; it was not carried in the Susan Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth. It came out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier. Not the constitution, but free land and an abundance of natural resources open to a fit people, made the democratic type of society in America for three centuries while it occupied its empire.

·        Again, I highly recommend the work of historian Daniel Boorstein to deeply highlight this principle of small-scale self-creation, that later is assumed to be the product of Aristocratic Tinkering.

·        And again, see Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything to see exactly where the “original” political writers cribbed their democratic ideals from. Enlightening illuminating stuff.

The moment you acknowledge that the highest social position ought to be the reward of the man who has the most talent, you make aristocratic institutions impossible.

·        The above idea is key. The class/aristocratic levelling was demonstrated ability, not tweeted, touted, claimed ability.

All that was buoyant and creative in American life would be lost if we gave up the respect for distinct personality, and variety in genius, and came to the dead level of common standards. To be "socialized into an average" and placed "under the tutelage of the mass of us," as a recent writer has put it, would be an irreparable loss.

·        Contact with reality, time in the wilderness, true effort vs. true struggle not gym struggle or “emotional” struggle creates our differences both physically and in the gray matter within our skulls.

·        These venturers forth were created and forged by the venture, not by mere word of the venture or study of the venture, or affiliation with the venture no matter how passionately one touts it.

·        One must make the trek to claim to be the voyager, the rest of us just wear the t-shirts donned like the Varsity jacket donned to show we are going steady with the person who actually earned the jacket.

These slashers of the forest, these self-sufficing pioneers, raising the corn and live stock for their own need, living scattered and apart, had at first small interest in town life or a share in markets. They were passionately devoted to the ideal of equality, but it was an ideal which assumed that under free conditions in the midst of unlimited resources, the homogeneous society of the pioneers must result in equality. What they objected to was arbitrary obstacles, artificial limitations upon the freedom of each member of this frontier folk to work out his own career without fear or favor. What they instinctively opposed was the crystallization of differences, the monopolization of opportunity and the fixing of that monopoly by government or by social customs. The road must be open. The game must be played according to the rules. There must be no artificial stifling of equality of opportunity, no closed doors to the able, no stopping the free game before it was played to the end. More than that, there was an unformulated, perhaps, but very real feeling, that mere success in the game, by which the abler men were able to achieve preëminence gave to the successful ones no right to look down upon their neighbors, no vested title to assert superiority as a matter of pride and to the diminution of the equal right and dignity of the less successful.

·        The Rough n Tumble, Frontier mindset, Venturer’s Psychology is not mere wistfulness for a past that never was.

·        It was [and can be again] a lived fact, a living breathing day-in/day-out Vision Quest of Life.

But…

To grasp that mindset, one must Live it, not simply agree with it.

Tragg’s Choice by Clifton Adams

 

One of the mules was down in the traces.

“Busted foreleg,” the driver announced sourly.

“Well, what you're goin’ to do about it?” Morrassey demanded, as if the driver had broken the axle on purpose just to plague him.

The driver, whose name was Hugh Garden, made an impressive show of pretending that Morrassey did not exist. Garden and Ernie Nash methodically began unhitching the three sound mules. When they were free, the cowhand led them away a good distance from the wagon. The driver stood for a moment, looking down at the injured mule, and the mule, with great hurt eyes, looked back at him. “I ain’t proud to do this, old son,” Garden said quietly.  He drew an ancient converted .44, cocked it, and gently placed the muzzle behind one tufted ear.

This fine novel won the Spur Award for Best Novel in 1969. It is yet another in Mr. Adams’ fine streak of novels that combine a bit of noir brevity with laconic Western formulary elements and turns them all into fine entertainment.

All the Adams novels I have read thus far feel as if you will be traipsing into familiar territory and yet he always finds a way to slightly subvert expectations and deliver both tried and true Western entertainment while bumping against the edges of the mere formulary and providing a truly mature experience.

He delivers terse hard-edged poetry throughout, as the next extract demonstrates.

Morrassey knew that he was not a “gunman.” Up to now his killing had been mostly luck. So the two cowhands rode on, unaware that death had reached out to take them, and then had shrugged and passed them by.

An excellent read from a solid craftsman.

With General Crook in the Indian Wars by Captain John G. Bourke

 

In 1866, savages, somewhat more daring than usual, attacked and massacred the last of a party of eighty-six Chinamen on the way to the mines near Boise, when even frontier stoicism and military apathy were aroused to a semblance of vitality, and everybody agreed with owl-like solemnity that “something must be done.” But who has to do it? Who was to bell this cat that, with the subtlety of the serpent, the agility of the tiger, and the cruelty of both, preyed upon ranchos and mines and wagon trains? Fortunately, the questions suggested his own answer, and without a dissentient voice that answer was General Crook.

This brief nonfiction narrative first appeared in The Century Magazine, the March issue of 1891. It is much on par with Bourke’s equally excellent, On the Border With Crook which is an expansion of this work.

This brief work is vital, alive, rife with incident and compelling in a way that fiction can seldom touch.

Captain Bourke has done us all a favor by recording what he saw, what he experienced.

Highest recommendation.

The Gun Man Jackson Swagger: A Western by Stephen Hunter

 

They were older than you might expect, with many miles and much dust showing on grave faces. It wasn’t a merry crew, more a crowd of sullen individualists. Even at rest, all wore their pistols, as if their sense of the fragility of life demanded perpetual protection. It had the feel of death row in a federal penitentiary, and lacking booze to liberate their weighted spirits, they simply contemplated reality, mildly celebrated life, and thought about the violence they’d seen and the violence they’d unleash. It was the way of a certain kind of man, not the soldier, as Jack had seen and been, but the professional adventurer who roams from war to war and country to country, selling his skill for gold but really for the thrill of battle and the satisfaction of the kill.

We finally get a true-blue Western from Mr. Hunter, whose well-written ballistically accurate tales of lawmen have teased at the genre’s edges for years. Well, like Robert Parker and his Virgil Cole novels, it was well-worth the wait.

Jackson Swagger is offered as a frontier ancestor to the protagonists in Hunter’s lawman universe, and he is a damned worthy addition—I kept wanting to get Kurt Russell on the phone and say, “Snatch this up and deliver this dialogue true.”

Case in point, the following.

“I’m Jack,” he said. “I follow you.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said either Billy or Matt. “We hear you’re the best man on the spread with a rifle and can see like an eagle.” “We feel well protected. You can also tell us stories of the war and your life roaming the West. Rumors say you knew the great gunfighters now passed.”

“Rumors are rumors because they ain’t true. And I won’t be telling you a thing. Let me explain how it works. I’m invisible. You don’t see me, you don’t talk to me, you don’t look to me to join in your conversation. If I speak, you listen because I feel it’s important. But don’t look at me or nod, and I promise to never say anything funny, so you’re spared the need to laugh. I may be with you, I may be ahead of you, I may have gone on the scout, climbing a hill for a better view, looking for sign. That’s my only job and I have to do it at full pitch. It’s when you relax that the ruckus will start, that I can guarantee. So I don’t relax, and if a ruckus starts, being ready before is all that counts. You boys hear me good?”

Mr. Hunter, being a firearm aficionado also gets his violence right. His gunfights have always been less about machismo and more the dry-mouthed, bowel loosening fear that is reality. Mr. Hunter has no patience for mock heroics [nor does this reader] and for that I am eternally obliged to be spared one more scene of adolescent derring-do.

“Don’t these things always go wrong?” said Billy through a raspy throat. “Yes, normally. But it’s better to have them go off plan so that you got something to get back to than to have no plan and just let them tumble along crazy. Then it goes way wrong and that’s when the wrong people get killed.

Another snippet of the fun to be had in these pages.

He slid the revolver across the bar. “Sir,” said the barkeep, “I’ve tended bar in all the bad Western towns for thirty-odd years. I’ve seen more gunfights than any man alive. I’ve seen Wyatt and Doc, I’ve seen Bat, I saw Wild Bill even, and John Hardin. But I’ve never seen gun handling like that. Are you with Buffalo Bill’s big production?”

“I don’t hold with showing off. The exhibition was to turn it around, so I didn’t have to kill nobody. It’ll scare most of your weaker gun people clean out of their pants.”

“Who are you? As I said, I knew ’em all, or heard of ’em, and I know I’d know of you.”

“Just an old man in a dry season, waiting for rain.”

Where Parker’s Virgil Cole novels are laconic marvels composed almost exclusively of dialogue, Hunter handles the dialogue like a pro and sets scenes with equal aplomb.

Her name was Yolanda. She looked to be about fourteen, and under certain circumstances she would have grown to be a pretty, possibly even beautiful girl. These were not such circumstances. She had the zest and bounce of a seventy-seven-year-old. Her face collapsed quickly from artificial glee to a mask of despair. Her eyes held no light, her face no spontaneity. She had been hard used, then put away wet. The makeup, crudely applied, could not mask that pain. Worse, she seemed to favor her left side, so Jack peeled back the shoulder of her dress on the right, to reveal a bruise in brown and yellow with the shape of a billy club to it.

Or this marvelous distillation of a night in a saloon and the “Old West” itself.

Folks came and went, the place filled with smoke, the piano man played on. A fight broke out over cards, but no guns came into play, just fists. It was over so fast—big guy pounding little guy—many missed it, and the others laughed. Whores cruised, mostly connecting with foolish young cowhands, off to get their cherry busted. It was another night in the Old West, except nobody in the joint thought of it as old: it was new, it was fascinating, it was the present. Whatever tales would be told, whatever lies inflated like balloons, whatever form of narrative would offer chronicle of this time and place, it mattered nothing to anyone there, and their imaginations, in any event, were incapable of stretching so far. They had no idea they were the urtext of a myth.

Our protagonist, Jackson Swagger is full of Bushido-like wisdom.

“Do you think—?”

“You clamp it down now, Chandler,” said Jack. “Leave it be where it now is. No chatter, no palaver, no debate exercise. That time is past. You’ll only confuse matters and yourself as well. Doubts? Every soldier has ’em. But you have chosen a course and that’s what will happen.”

“If you’ re not—”

“Clamp it down as well, Charles. Things will happen as they happen. Don’t think otherwise, you’ll just be stirring up your mind.”

Even minor characters who will appear for but a page are given terse lines that paint entire histories and present pictures.

Mrs. Hansen was in a foul mood because she was always in a foul mood and tonight was a part of “always.” You would be too if Indians had killed your husband when you were twenty-two, burned your ranch, and kidnapped your children, thus forcing you into a career in the whore trade. At least she had risen to the executive ranks of that profession, even if such success did little for her mood.

If this reader were to concoct a “Best of Western Novels” list, well, this one would be given serious consideration.

More, please, Mr. Hunter, and thank you for this one.

The Trail to Ogallala by Benjamin Capps

 

Blackie killed two newborn calves on that bed ground, splitting their skulls with the butt of the axe, and they buried them in hasty graves to hide them from their mothers. It was barely light when they prodded the cattle up and tried to make them graze; the cattle did not have the eagerness of the morning before. They were sullen as they walked north. They had used up too much moisture the first day.

This trail drive novel won the Spur Award for Best Novel in 1964 and won a spot on Jon Lewis’ 100 Best Western Novels.

Well, how is it?

In a word—Superlative.

Those looking for shoot-outs, steely-eyed slim-hipped heroes slacking into chairs will find none of the formulary here.

No, this novel plays more like a documentary of a trail drive, a cowboy procedural if you will.

It’s all about the work, the struggle, the bonding, the sweat, the weather, the gripes, the politics of tired men doing a damned difficult job.

It is essentially a novel of Work.

The novel lacks the usual shoot-em-up aspect of the Western, hell, there’s not even a romantic subplot—it’s all Pure OD “We got a job to do, Boys.”

The novel is better for this strict adherence to realism.

We are offered educated glimpses of the realities of a trail drive; I offer a few extracts below to give the flavor.

[While riding night-herd before an impending storm. I’ve ridden in a cracking storm with lighting in the tree line—this nails it.]

They sang church songs. The thunderstorms which had surrounded them and now threatened to engulf them from the west produced awe and some degree of reverence in the riders. They could see up into the vast reaches of the clouds, see the varied lightings, see the upward depths with murky streaks and puffy fingers, writhing in contrary currents. They could hear the rumbles of thunder that seemed to penetrate even into the ground. They understood the belief of many peoples in the past that the sun is a God and the storm is an angry God, a belief not caused by simplicity of mind, but by a nearness to these forces, an involvement, sometimes a feeling of standing naked and alone in nature.

[At the burial of a comrade along the way.]

Blackie found a clean sheet of writing paper and a pencil in the saddle bag and said to the Professor, “I guess we ought to put where he come from and where he was born--stuff like that.”

“All right. Where did he come from and when was he born?”

It developed that no one knew. They had no doubt that he had actually been a colonel, and that about him there must be many important facts that should be recorded, but no one knew. In fact, no one even knew the day of the month he had died, except Scott. Professor wrote: “Colonel Horace Kittredge” and “Died in a stampede” and the date.

They wedged it into a split in the oak. It might last six months in the rain and the wind.

[Upon discovery that one had a harmonica and knew how to play.]

He got into the swing of it, and he played it. He played “Oh, Susanna” and “Turkey in the Straw,” and “Way Down Yonder,” and “Buffalo Gals.” They tapped their boots in the dirt. After more than two hard months on the trail, the music was nothing less than magic. It was possible the Kid was not really much of a musician, but they could hear in his little harp with ten holes in it all the violins and sweet voices they had ever heard. He played “When You and I Were Young, Maggie,” and they all became motionless and silent. Ostler stopped puttering over the cow-chip fire. Then the Kid tried to play “Home, Sweet Home.” He got halfway through the chorus before he started having trouble; he played a little further, roughly, and gave up. He pounded the contrary harp on his leg to get the saliva out of it.

At his age, Kid might have been justified in falsely believing that he had a good home and remembering that he was a long way from it. But they all, even Ostler, four times his age, were thinking about things far away, and hardly a word was spoken during the evening meal.

[The experience borne trail craft of the characters, all based on real men, reminds us of what we lose by too much soft livin’ among artificial lights.]

In the north the Big Dipper had swung low and its handle curved out across the western sky. He got up and tugged the wagon tongue around and pointed it at the North Star.

They knew things about the heavenly bodies and their apparent motions, such things as they learned from familiarity, from watching the night sky as hours pass and as months pass, from watching it as they move north on the surface of the earth. The kinds of things they knew were such as been known for thousands of years by sailors standing watch at night or by nomadic herders standing watch at night, and such as are rarely known among people who live among artificial lights under a roof. They knew that the stars seemed to rotate in fixed patterns and that one point about which they rotate is the North Star, that the moon and planets wander across the face of the fixed patterns, that as one trails north the southern constellation sink but the North Star rises until at last the Big Dipper swings clear of the ground and is like a giant clock in the sky, and the moon falls behind almost an hour each night, that the fixed stars gain on the days so that during a three month drive a star which comes up as darkness falls will rise so that is overhead when darkness falls. And a trail driver who has been north with cattle every year for the past ten years might have been able, awakening suddenly like Rip Van Winkle and gazing at the night sky, to tell about how far north he was and the month of the year, however, if he were a shrewd guesser, he might have been able to say, “We’re a few days drive south of the Nebraska line and it's a little past the middle of June.

I repeat—Superlative.

Christmas Western Spotlight: Daniel Boone “The Christmas Story”

 

This season two episode premiered on December 23, 1965.

A blizzard sends settlers to the central fort for refuge, provisions are low and an expectant Indian couple arrive to discover there is no room at the inn and are relegated to an animal stall.

The story stops leaning on the nativity there and rather provides us with a tale of survival, suspicion, and a moral about prejudice in the end.

On one, hand minor stuff, on the other, Fess Parker’s calm integrity as Daniel Boone and a script a tick or two above standard fare make this not bad Yuletide Western viewing.

My first experience with Parker as Boone as opposed to Davy Crockett. It won’t be my last.

Christmas Western Spotlight: Bonanza “A Christmas Story”

 

This Yule offering debuted December 25, 1966, and was penned by Thomas Thompson, author of many a fine Western tale.

Overall, a slight episode of this long-running series. Here guest star Wayne Newton regales us with a song or three, and fellow guest star Jack Oakie gives us an able turn as con man who finds his way Christmas Day.

Lorne Greene bows out for the majority of the episode leaving us in the hands of Hoss and Little Joe who provide a comic thread to the episode with all their usual fine chemistry.

The episode is no world-shaker, predictable as can be but…it still goes down easy as good-hearted holiday viewing.

If you’re a fan of the show, well, what’s not to smile about?