Cowboy historian rates 13 Wild West scenes in movies and television
Cowboy and Old West historian Michael Grauer rates 13 Wild West scenes in movies and television for realism.
Michael Grauer debunks common tropes in Western films, such as the realism of quick-draw duels, gunslingers, and the effects of the Gold Rush era in "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," starring Clint Eastwood; the commonality of saloon fights and bank robberies in "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs," with Tim Blake Nelson, James Franco, and Liam Neeson; and the frontier town shootout in "The Magnificent Seven" (2016), with Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke, and Chris Pratt. He discusses the common misconception of the American Frontier as lawless, such as the role of bounty hunters and sheriffs in "Django Unchained," with Jamie Foxx, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Christoph Waltz; federal lawmen stopping an outlaw gang in "True Grit" (2010), with Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and Hailee Steinfeld; and the connection between outlaws and former Confederate soldiers after the Civil War in "Westworld" S1E5 (2016). Grauer also comments on the portrayal of Native Americans and cowboys in film, such as the depiction of the Comanche people in "The Searchers," starring John Wayne; the bison-hunting scene with the Lakota people in "Dances with Wolves," starring Kevin Costner; and the cattle-grazing scene in "Open Range." He also breaks down scenes based on real-life events and people during the Wild West period, such as infamous outlaws like Cherokee Bill and Rufus Buck in "The Harder They Fall," with LaKeith Stanfield, Regina King, and Idris Elba; Charles Goodnight in "1883," starring Tim McGraw; and the depiction of the Gunfight at the OK Corral — a shootout involving the "Cowboys" gang and the federal posse including Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday — in "Tombstone," with Val Kilmer and Sam Elliott.
Grauer is a public historian focusing on cowboy history and Western American culture. He is the McCasland Chair of Cowboy Culture and Curator of Cowboy Collections and Western Art for the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. With 40 years of experience as a museum curator, he has curated over 150 exhibitions on Western art, culture, and history and authored around 65 publications. He also does a living history cowboy presentation called "Cowboy Mike."
You can learn more about the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum here:
https://nationalcowboymuseum.org/
Michael Grauer debunks common tropes in Western films, such as the realism of quick-draw duels, gunslingers, and the effects of the Gold Rush era in "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," starring Clint Eastwood; the commonality of saloon fights and bank robberies in "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs," with Tim Blake Nelson, James Franco, and Liam Neeson; and the frontier town shootout in "The Magnificent Seven" (2016), with Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke, and Chris Pratt. He discusses the common misconception of the American Frontier as lawless, such as the role of bounty hunters and sheriffs in "Django Unchained," with Jamie Foxx, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Christoph Waltz; federal lawmen stopping an outlaw gang in "True Grit" (2010), with Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and Hailee Steinfeld; and the connection between outlaws and former Confederate soldiers after the Civil War in "Westworld" S1E5 (2016). Grauer also comments on the portrayal of Native Americans and cowboys in film, such as the depiction of the Comanche people in "The Searchers," starring John Wayne; the bison-hunting scene with the Lakota people in "Dances with Wolves," starring Kevin Costner; and the cattle-grazing scene in "Open Range." He also breaks down scenes based on real-life events and people during the Wild West period, such as infamous outlaws like Cherokee Bill and Rufus Buck in "The Harder They Fall," with LaKeith Stanfield, Regina King, and Idris Elba; Charles Goodnight in "1883," starring Tim McGraw; and the depiction of the Gunfight at the OK Corral — a shootout involving the "Cowboys" gang and the federal posse including Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday — in "Tombstone," with Val Kilmer and Sam Elliott.
Grauer is a public historian focusing on cowboy history and Western American culture. He is the McCasland Chair of Cowboy Culture and Curator of Cowboy Collections and Western Art for the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. With 40 years of experience as a museum curator, he has curated over 150 exhibitions on Western art, culture, and history and authored around 65 publications. He also does a living history cowboy presentation called "Cowboy Mike."
You can learn more about the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum here:
https://nationalcowboymuseum.org/
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TechTranscript
00:00This scene is just
00:06just ridiculous. As far as cowboys versus Indians, which becomes a very common
00:11misconception, that almost never happened. Howdy, I'm Michael Grauer.
00:15I'm a public historian focusing on cowboy history
00:18and Western American culture, curator of cowboy collections
00:21and Western art at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma
00:26City, Oklahoma.
00:27Today we'll be looking at Wild West scenes in movies and television
00:30and judge how real they are.
00:39The greatest myth about the West is everybody was a gunman.
00:42That's a bunch of nonsense. That's what you have here is a basically a shootout,
00:46an artificial shootout,
00:47between three outlaws. So the period of what people usually understand as the
00:50Wild West is
00:51is primarily the second half of the 1800s.
00:55The only people carrying firearms were criminals and the army and also
00:59lawmen.
00:59Virtually every cow town, it was illegal to carry
01:03your firearms in town. Yes, there were firearms in the West, but not nearly as
01:07as you see in Western films.
01:15So this whole idea of the quick draw is just nonsense. One is the revolver was
01:19still
01:20somewhat new. It had been around since the 1830s, but they're notoriously
01:24inaccurate.
01:25And they're standing so far apart, they'd have
01:28emptied each of their cylinders probably to make one good shot.
01:32And as far as quick draw, there are documented cases where Doc Holliday
01:36quick drew and never hit anything.
01:39And so the lack of accuracy in the quick draw is one of the things that
01:43never comes through
01:44in the movies and television.
01:54Everyone wants to get rich quick, and so gold fever
01:57was very common throughout the entire 19th century
02:01in the US, particularly because of the gold strikes in California,
02:05later on in Idaho, later on in Nevada, Colorado, etc.
02:10And in this case, it's coinage, I'd say a four. And these guys are
02:13armed to the teeth constantly. I mean, it just defies
02:17defies credulity.
02:19This corpse is worth $70,000.
02:25Parts are real.
02:27Real-ish, let's call it. So they're just weren't enough formal lawmen.
02:31So ultimately, you have bounty hunters who are
02:35eventually deemed to be law enforcement on some level, and they
02:40tended to operate beyond the fringes of proper behavior for a lawman.
02:45There were some law women, not very many,
02:48and that's an important distinction. Now as far as a $7,000 bounty, that seems
02:52excessive to me.
02:54Most of these counties, most of these towns were so poor,
02:57cash poor, they couldn't offer up bounties of any size.
03:07Them partnering up and him teaching him
03:09the quick draw and being proficient with firearms.
03:13I think we really ought to start with the German emigrant. Germans
03:17to a person were abolitionists. They didn't believe in slavery at all.
03:20And so the fact that he helps to free the Jamie Foxx
03:24character eventually, that's probably fairly unusual, but not
03:29terribly inconsistent
03:30with their feelings on slavery.
03:33Your ass!
03:38What did you just do to our sheriff?
03:40It's still surprising to me that westerns that are being made
03:45in recent years still show that you could shoot someone down on a street
03:50with no repercussions. You committed a crime, you went to jail.
03:54You were indicted, you were arrested, you were arraigned, and eventually you had a
03:58trial.
03:59I will say something about the sheriff that he shoots,
04:03that he claims is an outlaw Willard Peck.
04:06That happened quite often. You would have an outlaw
04:09who decided to reinvent themselves as a lawman.
04:12Five, as far as the storyline, in some respect again belies credulity because
04:17of course
04:18Tarantino exaggerates everything.
04:25This Tim Blake Nelson character, Buster Scruggs, is hysterical
04:29because he's a singing cowboy right out of the 1930s
04:34suddenly appearing in the Old West. No one wore a costume like that
04:37in the Old West. I mean that's all an invention of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry,
04:41everything that he's wearing.
04:42Movie cowboys from the 30s and 40s.
04:46Strolls into a saloon which has batwing doors, which most did not by the way.
04:50The swinging doors is an invention of movies and television.
04:53You gentlemen mind if I take his spot?
04:56If'n you play his hand.
05:01Saloons variably attracted a criminal element.
05:04Either gamblers, gambling was quite common,
05:07and of course alcohol consumption was a big part of that.
05:12Oftentimes you saw them as gathering places, but typically they were gathering
05:15places
05:15for criminals and gamblers.
05:18And if'n I don't.
05:23You did have saloon fights, that part is true,
05:26and in some cases someone might pull out a concealed weapon
05:30sometimes, but most the time it was with fists
05:33and they didn't last nearly long. You didn't have the great scenes like you
05:37see where everyone
05:38everyone's punching everybody else, breaking furniture and so on.
05:41It was usually just a couple of people.
05:50On a frontier town like that there wasn't a whole lot of cash
05:52available. It was largely a cashless society. It was more on barter
05:57than anything else, and so only banks
06:01in more established communities, larger communities really had
06:04the cash that was worth the effort
06:08that bank robbers might undertake to rob one. I'd call it a seven.
06:11They were poking fun, gentle fun to be sure,
06:15at the singing cowboy films of the thirties and forties.
06:21I don't think that it happened as often as
06:24we might think, although public executions were held.
06:27Fort Smith, Arkansas of course
06:30ruled by Judge Isaac Parker, aka the Hanging Judge.
06:34That's all been exaggerated over time
06:38and used to effect in both True Grit movies and also in the
06:42novel.
06:49I think outlaw gangs were pretty prominent, especially in Indian territory.
06:53This was federal territory and therefore
06:55the scarcity of lawmen
06:59really made it very attractive
07:02and that and the geography. It was such a vast territory
07:07that outlaws could go and escape any sort of jurisdiction.
07:11So the Rooster Cogburn character is taking on the role of one of those
07:16federal marshals to round up a criminal gang
07:19led by Lucky Ned Pepper.
07:26Riding across the open field, it's almost
07:29become its own movie trope. Outlaw gangs were notoriously cowardly.
07:34They didn't like to fight lawmen. They would bushwhack, certainly,
07:38if they had an advantage. It's not real sexy to get shot in the back
07:41or from ambush, so you have to dramatize it and then have them ride across an
07:45open field.
07:54So that was actually doable
07:55if you were a marksman. There is a very famous
07:59long shot made by a man named Billy Dixon
08:03at Adobe Walls in what's now the Texas Panhandle
08:07in 1874 of
08:111,538 yards using a Sharps Buffalo rifle, which is the same kind of rifle
08:16that Matt Damon is using. And I think this probably
08:19falls in the seven or eight category.
08:24Why don't we do it for real? On my gun.
08:29It's a farce.
08:35Why don't we do it for real? I mean, seriously, come on.
08:38I mean, somebody's gonna get killed or somebody's going to jail.
08:41In spite of the alleged fairness of this remake
08:46of The Magnificent Seven, the key that this
08:50Asian actor is an assassin speaks to the whole idea that there's a belief that
08:55Asians were devious.
08:56There was a large population of Asians primarily on the West Coast
09:01moving inland into the mining communities
09:05as well as part of building the Transcontinental Railway.
09:09But they tended to be looked on as some kind of
09:14other and of course ultimately untrustworthy.
09:18I got a goddamn Gatling gun!
09:26It's become a Western trope, you know, inspiring the townspeople to fight for
09:30themselves, but rarely. I mean, I don't know of any instance
09:33where townspeople line up sandbags along the balconies and fortifications all
09:39over town.
09:40And then, of course, you've got the Old West equivalent of a machine gun
09:45with the Gatling gun. And, of course, he's 500 yards away.
09:47So how accurate is that from 500 yards away?
09:51I mean, come on.
09:55These two warriors are both Comanche, which really means that if they're
10:00fighting each other, they could be from different bands more than likely.
10:05I think one of the greatest misconceptions about Native people in
10:08the Americas is that they were all unified as a tribe.
10:12Invariably, they were divided into bands or clans.
10:16There were upwards of about 13, possibly 15 different Comanche bands
10:20who were quite spread out all across Comancheria from Colorado out onto
10:25the western Kansas all the way down to Mexico.
10:27And so this does not divide plausibility.
10:30It's actually entirely possible.
10:32It seems to me the philosophy in this entire scene was the more bullets
10:36the better. Four.
10:42Great film.
10:45John Ford.
10:46But this scene is just ridiculous.
10:48Monument Valley in Utah becomes the setting for Comanche territory,
10:54which is way too far west for Comancheria, where they have the
10:58Comanche warriors in full regalia and paint attempting a full frontal
11:05assault through a river at a fortified position.
11:10That's just utter nonsense.
11:11Native American warfare was always based in an advantage, either in
11:16numbers or surprise.
11:23As far as cowboys versus Indians, which becomes a very common
11:27misconception, that almost never happened.
11:29Usually, when a herd was met by a group of Native Americans, they
11:35might ask for a, let's say, a toll or a tax.
11:39Most cattlemen were willing to do that.
11:40So as far as fights between actual cowboys and Native people, almost
11:45never happened.
11:50So the character that John Wayne plays, he's wearing fairly accurate
11:54costume for being a cowboy. Hats came in all different kinds of
11:57creases, individualized to the person, especially a cowhand.
12:02So what I'm wearing is a rig from a typical drover or cowhand from
12:08the 1880s. He's wearing denim trousers, which would put this in
12:12after 1873. My pants that I'm wearing are Levi's, altered to look
12:18like 1873 models, which only had one back pocket.
12:22They all came with suspender buttons because there were no belt
12:24loops. And his boots are pretty spot-on. By the 1860s, there is
12:28not something as a recognized cowboy boot yet.
12:39The Searcher's film is based on a real set of events where a young
12:44white girl named Cynthia Ann Parker was kidnapped by Comanches in
12:48the 1830s. When she was rescued during a battle with Comanches, she'd
12:53become fully Comanche by that time.
12:55And so that's an important part that they don't tell here in the
12:58Searcher's story. Even though he uses Native American actors, they
13:02have no lines for the most part.
13:04And of course, the leader of the Comanches, I think he's German.
13:07The women, for the most part, are all Navajos in this film, and
13:11they're all wearing Navajo female costumes.
13:13You know, there's a great blending of Native cultures.
13:17So this particular scene in the Searcher's, I would put no higher
13:20than a two or a three. It defies any sort of documented
13:25Native American battle with whites.
13:27They just simply didn't do that.
13:33One of the great myths of the American West is that everyone got
13:37to where they're going by covered wagon.
13:39Well, more than likely, they got there by train. By 1883,
13:42of course, there were railroads crossing from Texas up to Oregon.
13:47And in this case, these are German immigrants trying to get to
13:51Oregon.
13:53It had some tall grass waiting.
13:59Of course, there were dangers everywhere.
14:02And so that part's pretty accurate. Animal attacks were rare.
14:06Rattlesnakes, of course, were across the West, and that could
14:09happen. Disease was the primary killer on wagon trains, and
14:13usually that had something to do with bad water.
14:15Our father moved camp a little farther away.
14:19Women are critical.
14:20Of course, it was a patriarchal society for the most part, where
14:25women didn't become necessarily captains of wagon trains or
14:29anything like that.
14:30But they also made it clear that if they were to be asked to do
14:34certain things, cooking, gathering of things, acting as nurses,
14:38that they ought to have a vote.
14:40I would give that scene a 7 or an 8.
14:42Who are they?
14:45They call themselves the Army of New Virginia.
14:47Everyone else calls them the Confederados.
14:50There were, of course, Confederates and even members of the
14:53Confederate government that did not, that refused to surrender
14:57and remained renegades, ultimately outlaws.
15:02They crossed the border into Mexico, and then some of them crept
15:05back over into the frontier regions in New Mexico and Arizona,
15:10West Texas, and so on.
15:13My associates and I are here to relieve you of your ride.
15:18Four armed gun robbers, basically, are going to rob a contingent
15:23of soldiers of anything.
15:25It doesn't make any sense.
15:26And they're driving an army ambulance, which was not used necessarily
15:30for medical reasons, but it was used for transport of people.
15:34So they're not using the right wagon, first of all.
15:36It's not a freight wagon.
15:37Any freight that came to a U.S.
15:40fort or was used in transport, they used hired teamsters and often
15:44sent a party of soldiers to guard that shipment.
15:47There would have been a lot more soldiers, not terribly many,
15:50but certainly more than that.
15:52We're going to blow these cactus eaters back to the dirt holes
15:55they crawl from.
15:56Hiring a mercenary, that was not uncommon at all.
15:59It's important to remember that well after the Civil War, a lot of
16:02Confederate soldiers who had actually become prisoners of war were
16:06offered the opportunity to either stay in a POW camp during the Civil
16:10War or to be sworn into the U.S.
16:13Army and sent out west.
16:14They were what they called galvanized Yankees.
16:16After the war is over, after their obligation was fulfilled, they
16:19may have become mercenaries because they had a specific training
16:23set that could be useful to criminals.
16:25For sure.
16:26It's probably a three or a four.
16:29Lakotas are depicted reasonably accurately as far as using what we
16:41call the short bow from the back of a horse to hunt bison.
16:45They were the primary food source, tool source for virtually
16:48everything.
16:49One shot would not have killed them.
16:50Likewise, with a Henry rifle that Kevin Costner is carrying, he would
16:55have had to shoot the bison multiple times to kill it because he's
16:59riding horseback.
17:00These buffalo hunts were long, drawn-out affairs because the animals
17:04would run for miles.
17:05You know, for a film, you had to compact time and space to make it
17:10fit on the screen.
17:18To take a bite of the liver is a way to consume part of that animal
17:23spirit, and that's a form of gratitude, as I understand it, in Native
17:28life ways.
17:29And to offer that to this white soldier in the Kevin Costner character
17:34is a way to kind of bring him into their life way.
17:37The attention to detail in depicting the Lakota people, and I think
17:41ultimately Native people in general in this scene, is critical because
17:46it shows great sensitivity.
17:47I'd put this at an eight.
17:49The instant kills, you know, that's just perhaps a minor quibble, but
17:53overall, the drama of a buffalo chase is just really one of the best
17:58handled that I've ever seen in this on the silver screen.
18:00All right, stay calm, everybody.
18:03My name is Cherokee Bill.
18:08Complete fantasy. Rufus Buck and Cherokee Bill were notorious outlaws.
18:13That part is true.
18:14But I'm not sure in this kind of presentation, this serves
18:20that particular movement, agenda, philosophy.
18:25As I mentioned before, outlaws fled to Indian Territory in huge numbers,
18:32but it also included displaced people from the eastern or southeastern
18:37United States who brought their enslaved people with them in the 1830s
18:43and 40s.
18:43And ultimately, you have mixed-race people there who are part Native
18:47American and part African American.
18:50And so both Rufus Buck and Cherokee Bill come from that demographic.
18:54So the zeal to track them down and bring them to justice did not just
19:00fall to federal lawmen.
19:02It also fell to tribal lawmen. And to create this fantasy story here with
19:08the Cherokee Bill story, just tell the truth.
19:11And it'll make for a better movie anyway.
19:21This is a specially designed prisoner train, evidently.
19:28Well, the U.S.
19:29Army did not get involved in legal disputes.
19:31Their job was to keep people safe from depredations, but they almost
19:36never got involved with outlaws.
19:39Almost never.
19:40They had federal marshals that did that kind of transport of prisoners.
19:43And usually they had special jail cars, usually by wagon, rarely by
19:49train.
19:50So the fact that you've got a mythical, fictional group of soldiers
19:55assigned to this specially designed prisoner cage, built inside a train
20:01car.
20:02I mean, it's like the Will Smith movie, The Wild Wild West.
20:05I would say the rating of this is 3.
20:12Stealing an entire herd of animals was pretty uncommon because it was
20:17so obvious.
20:18They notice when you steal the whole herd.
20:19And the fact that these thieves, these rustlers, have stopped on the
20:26prairie doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
20:28Their whole thing was based on stealth and speed.
20:38They just charge riflemen.
20:42That's just stupid.
20:43This posse, let's call it, led by Sam Elliott and Tim McGraw and others.
20:48They're all armed with rifles.
20:50The thieves are all armed with revolvers.
20:53Remember, accuracy versus inaccuracy.
20:56They're not going to fight for that.
20:57Heck no.
21:05Charles Goodnight is a giant in Old West history, having been an Indian
21:10fighter.
21:10He'd been a Texas Ranger.
21:11Very successful cattleman.
21:13He would have had his men go with him, his hired men go with him.
21:16Plus, he was from Illinois, and he was notoriously gruff and notoriously
21:21profane.
21:21So the fact that he talks like a southern gentleman in that, little
21:26flies in the face of reality.
21:27As far as the cattle wrestling scene, 4.
21:31We're here to disarm you.
21:32Throw up your hands.
21:37That's not what I want.
21:38That whole confrontation at a place called Lukaoka Corral is repeated
21:43over and over again, and ultimately becomes a trope.
21:45An outlaw game called the Cowboys tries to take over Tombstone, and
21:50another criminal element, also known as the Earps, try to push back for
21:55who's going to take, who's going to control this town.
21:58You know, Tombstone was one of those
22:02hells on wheels that popped up because of the mining industry.
22:05In the grand scheme of things, in terms of history of the American West,
22:08it's a blip.
22:14So we don't really know what happened.
22:16Anybody who was an eyewitness had an agenda, either against the Earps or
22:21with the Earps, or just wanted their town back.
22:24We know that some people were killed.
22:27The Earps and their people, along with Doc Holliday, were implicated.
22:31The scene's probably six.
22:33I think they stage it fairly reasonably, who the combatants were.
22:44Open Range is a great movie.
22:46It's one of the few that actually depicts cowboys or drovers with some
22:51accuracy, and particularly because it takes on the whole idea of free
22:55grazing, which was the range tradition up until about 1880.
23:01And what that meant was, you could graze cattle on those grasslands as
23:05long as you wanted without really any title or really any claim.
23:16The primary tool of the drover and the cowboy was not a firearm.
23:21It was a rope, or a short whip, initially made of rawhide,
23:25as that tradition comes out of Mexico.
23:28That actually comes from Africa, ultimately.
23:31And so that's an important distinction.
23:33People, unfortunately, don't realize that this is the cowboy's main tool,
23:39not a six-shooter.
23:45Yeah, and unfortunately, as communities were established,
23:49elections could be corrupted.
23:51And eventually, hand-picked candidates would come to the fore.
23:55And so that whole idea of a lawman not enforcing laws except selectively
24:03against certain peoples, that really was fairly common in the West.
24:08This film?
24:09This is an eight.
24:10Few quibbles about the gunfight, but it's one of the best cowboy movies,
24:14in my opinion.
24:15And I don't mean Western.
24:16I mean a cowboy movie.
24:17So my favorite Wild West movie that's accurate is The Cowboys,
24:20because literally, the John Wayne character
24:22has to hire young men and boys to be his trail hands.
24:27And the things they encounter along the way
24:30are pretty accurate to the real story.
24:32Much obliged for watching this video.
24:33If you enjoyed it, mosey on over to watch for the next one.