Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

Trails of Thought, IV: Quickness and Death

by Leave a Comment

A series of bite-sized musings on the history of the American West (and its portrayal in film and literature).

A few months ago, some interesting discussion on Twitter about genre tropes got me thinking again about the prevalence of the quick-draw gunfighter trope in Westerns—one of the signature elements of the genre that seems to be least based in fact but most popular in film and fiction. This time I found myself looking not just at the fact of it, but the “why,” and came up with a theory about it which I fondly imagine to be original (but I’d be very interested to know if anyone else has reasoned on these lines).

My theory: the preoccupation with the quick-draw gunfighter is, on some level, a fascination with the concept of a man having the power of life and death (literally) at his fingertips.

At its most basic, a story’s villain having this power makes him seemingly invincible, creating high levels of danger and suspense—while in a more complex story, a morally good or conflicted character with this power becomes the subject of conflict over how (or whether) he ought to use it. Most gunfighter Westerns are ambivalent about this, with the hero’s gunfighter skills being necessary to save the helpless ordinary folk from the villains, while at the same time those very ordinary folk—and sometimes the gunman himself—deplore his possessing those same skills. The classic example of this is Shane, of course, and in some slight degree the movie version of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

In such stories the man with the power of life and death is often presented as an outcast, a “marked man” simply because of that power, not even necessarily his own moral character. This problem is either resolved by his remaining an outsider and riding off into the sunset, unable to become part of the community he rescues, or by his forswearing the use of his powers in order to join it. I wonder if one could say the former resolution expresses the belief that power itself is morally evil, while the latter leans more toward the idea that only the improper use of it is evil (yet still not going all the way in this direction, since the gunman is required to hang up his guns to achieve his happy ending).

It’s also interesting to ponder that the gunfighter plot, while to some degree engaging with the idea that force or even violence is necessary to protect the innocent from wrongdoers and civilize a wilderness, edges round it a bit by putting all the forceful or violent action in the hands of a character who is at least partly outside that civilization—a sort of “necessary evil for thee but not for me” situation. A man who is already morally suspect or tarnished handles the dirty work—even if he’s allowed to reform afterwards.

It’s an intriguing paradox: a fascination with the power over life and death, but an apparent compulsion or obligation to depict power in itself as morally suspect. There’s a lot of interesting food for discussion there, I think. But that is as far as we will go for the moment.

image: “A Fight For the Cabin” by Harold von Schmidt

Previously: Outlaws and In-Laws

Trails of Thought, III: Outlaws and In-Laws

by 1 Comment

A series of occasional bite-sized musings on the history of the American West.

I have never been interested in famous outlaws, but over the last couple years I’ve ended up reading a couple of nonfiction books about them, because I am fascinated by the fact that the demise of two of the Old West’s most famous outlaw gangs—the James-Younger gang in Northfield and the Dalton Gang in Coffeyville—took place at the hands of ordinary citizens rather than famous lawmen. I don’t know why the significance of this in overall Western history and culture doesn’t get more attention. That, however, is a bigger topic for another day.

Reading about the outlaws themselves, it strikes me that the most successful ones—meaning those who avoided capture longest—achieved that success largely through having plenty of friends and relatives who were ready to give them a meal and a fresh horse and say “nope, haven’t seen them” to anyone who came around asking questions. These allies might be of the variety who knew exactly what was going on or simply those who made a policy of not inquiring too closely into where Cousin Bill had been lately.

This seems like a reality that wouldn’t fit too tidily into Production Code sensibilities, and also one a little too prosaic for the sensation-craving moviegoer or magazine-reader. Romantic outlaws, of course, have always been in fashion, and Production Code morality never hindered the embellishment of their legends in the slightest—witness the plethora of glossy Technicolor productions from the 1940s and ’50s that portrayed figures such as Jesse James, Belle Starr, Billy the Kid, the Daltons et al as noble Robin Hoods or tragically misunderstood victims. But depicting ordinary folks aiding and abetting outright villains, or plain garden-variety crooks, wouldn’t have quite the same effect. And where the most dastardly villains were concerned, to admit that their success in villainy depended largely on the ability to go to ground at Cousin John’s farm would make them seem much less powerful and threatening, wouldn’t it. Therefore in the most dramatic stories anyone who aids an outlaw must be at least slightly unsavory and threatening themselves.

Having gotten this far in my reasoning, I received some support for my theory from an unexpected source. In Performing Flea: A Self-Portrait in Letters, a volume of letters by P.G. Wodehouse to his friend and fellow author William Townend (an author of sea adventure stories), I came across the following passage of advice:

Mogger (my Heaven! what names you give your characters!) whom you have established as a sinister menace, is weakened by that scene where Teame hits him. It is an error, I think, ever to have your villain manhandled by a minor character. Just imagine Moriarty socked by Doctor Watson. A villain ought to be a sort of scarcely human invulnerable figure. The reader ought to be in a constant state of panic, saying to himself: ‘How the devil is this superman to be foiled?’ The only person capable of hurting him should be the hero.

…You must not take any risk of humanizing your villains in a story of action [emphasis mine]…Taking Moriarty as the pattern villain, don’t you see how much stronger he is by being an inscrutable figure and how much he would have been weakened if Conan Doyle had switched off to a chapter showing his thoughts. A villain ought to be a sort of malevolent force, not an intelligible person at all.

The key point here is that Wodehouse is talking about a specific type of story, the action/adventure genre, and in that context, he’s exactly right. And, like it or not, for most of its lifetime as a genre the Western story has been relegated to the category of action-and-adventure, where the target audience wants and must get thrills and spills rather than subtlety (or even too large a helping of historical fact). In that context, a malevolent force who is only able to elude the obscure deputy marshal who’s hunting him by hiding in Cousin John’s hayloft just wouldn’t do.

image: “The Pitcher and the Well” by W.H.D. Koerner

Previously: Law and Lenience

From the Archives: Emily’s Journey

by Leave a Comment

This is a revised and expanded version of a blog post from ten years ago.

As you might expect from my name, I’m considerably Irish in ancestry. More than half Irish, in fact, when you add it all up, but it doesn’t all come from the paternal side—as I’ve put together my family tree I’ve discovered a strain of Irish in practically every line. They’re often the hardest lines to trace, given the predominance of the same surnames and common given names being used over and over in Irish families! But at the same time, one of the few stories from my family history that has actually been passed down directly to me through the few intervening generations also comes from an Irish line—the story of one of my maternal great-grandmothers.

Her name was Emily, and she was born in 1891 in a brick row house in South Dublin, the third of four children and the second to live past infancy. Her father, the son of a farmer from Limerick, was a police constable; her mother was the daughter of a Tipperary groom; and her maternal grandmother lived with the family. I discovered for the first time when I located the family on the Irish census that Emily’s full name was actually Mary Emily, though she went by her middle name for most of her life, and by the end of it was using the “M” as a middle initial. (She had also trimmed a few years off her age by the end of her life, so that her tombstone gives her birth date as 1894!)

And in 1908, when she was seventeen years old, she and her fifteen-year-old brother Joseph set out across the Atlantic together, bound for America, to join their older brother John who had emigrated three years earlier. They sailed from Liverpool on the RMS Celtic, traveling second-class, and arrived at Ellis Island on November 14th, 1908, after an eight-day voyage. Their final destination was further up the Hudson in Troy, then a thriving industrial city of steel and textile mills, where John had settled with American-born cousins. Emily lived with a female cousin and worked as a stitcher in one of Troy’s famous collar shops, and in 1919, she married a first-generation American, the son of a German father and Irish mother, newly returned from serving in World War I. She would become the mother of eight children, five of whom would outlive her, and one of whom would be my grandfather.

Emily’s father never made it to the New World, but twelve years later, in 1920, her now widowed mother Margaret emigrated to join her children, her passage across the Atlantic paid by her eldest son. Possibly the onset of World War I in the same year her husband died prevented her traveling sooner.

(An interesting footnote that I only uncovered in recent years is that Emily’s grandmother Maria died in the infirmary of the South Dublin workhouse in 1913—though likely not because of poverty, since the record of her death lists her home address as with her son-in-law’s family. The likely reason was that Irish hospitals of this period would not take patients suffering from chronic illnesses, such as tuberculosis, and so those who could not afford other treatment were sent to a workhouse infirmary. Since chronic nephritis (a kidney disease) was listed as Maria’s cause of death, this explanation makes sense. Just three years later, the South Dublin workhouse was one of the buildings occupied by Irish rebels during the Easter Rising of 1916.)

I never knew my great-grandmother. I’ve only seen a few snapshots of her as a stout, white-haired elderly woman, and heard relatives speak of her who knew her in later years. But in a way, I think it almost makes it easier for me to picture her as that little Irish girl of more than a hundred years ago; to imagine the emotions and the untold stories of her journey. Five feet two, brown hair, blue eyes, able to read and write, ten dollars in her pocket…the passenger records fill in some of the details. I wonder what kind of a girl she was. What did she feel about leaving her homeland—was the thought of America exciting or intimidating to her? Was her younger brother (three inches taller) a companion she could lean on, or was she the leader of the two? What was the ocean voyage like for her? And how did she feel when she had her first glimpse of New York City from the deck of the Celtic?

Years of digging among genealogy records have filled in some more pieces to the story of their decision to emigrate. I found that eldest brother John had already tried his luck working abroad in England, and that one of their American cousins had visited Ireland shortly before John set out to join that same cousin’s family in Troy—probably at his encouragement. But the more personal aspects of the story still can only be conjectured. What kind of family discussions were held, what letters exchanged across the sea…what made their parents decide to send Emily and Joseph on alone? Those stories I may never know…stories that will have to live only in my imagination, stirred and prompted, perhaps, by the accounts of thousands of other families who lived the same story of crossing the ocean to a new life. But still it brings my knowledge of history closer and makes it more real, more lifelike, to know that someone connected with me walked the streets, saw the sights, and lived their life in an era that I research and read about and write about today…because it’s my history, too.