Part 2 of a two part series; you can read Part 1 here…

On March 1st, 1878, the Justice of the Peace, John Wilson, ruled Sheriff Brady’s actions to be fundamentally opposed to the spirit of justice, as understood by custom. Common law is meant to serve justice as it is understood, instead of justice as a means of establishing order or rule; it determines the law where nothing has been written, law as an attempt at expressing “right” in every sense of the word rather than as a fetish of authority. He appointed “Dick” Brewer as town constable, and as such, the Regulators were deputized to bring the murderers of John Tunstall to the scaffold. By March 9th, the Territorial Governor of New Mexico, trying to demonstrate his prospective worth as a Stately Governor (a Hang ‘Em High kind of feller) had reversed Wilson’s decision. The Regulators, upholders of the peace, assembled by righteous indignation, were now a group of outlaws. Sheriff Brady and his deputized bandits (the Seven Rivers Gang) were the only lawmen in Lincoln County.

Motivated by a conviction that by fighting for the rights of the smaller ranchers, they would break the medicine sent their way, the Regulators continued to clean Brady’s plough without the protection of the law. On April 1st, through holes in the adobe wall they hid behind, the Regulators bedded down the sheriff in a cloud of gunsmoke. This was a moment where the abstract violence of the state, violence in pursuit of maintaining order, was met by violence in pursuit of justice. This has always been the violence of the cowboy, the white-hatted kind anyway. The Magnificent 7 existed in such a place as well, the border between Mexico and the United States, the last hideout of cattle-rustlers and smugglers. In such a place, the cowboy always stands for justice. The Seven laid their lives down for the sake of raising a small village to its feet, giving them the confidence to oppose a gold tycoon, exposing them as, not a fact of life, not a Fair Shake between the forgotten “A” and the ultimate “Z”, but as nothing but a Robber Baron. The cowboy has a way of understanding and laying bare the violence of the rancher. 

The Fast Draw

Billy the Kid was “quick as a flash” when it came to pulling his equalizer. A cowboy is always quick, in more than one sense of the word. Not only are they fast with their hands, but when given the call to duel, within moments, at least one is in a meatwagon. It doesn’t even take words to be spoken for the moment to draw to be obvious. In The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the Mexican standoff sequence is over 3 minutes long, but their guns are all drawn and fired at once, signalled by nothing other than eye contact and a swell of music. In El Topo, a gun duel is signalled by one group of men dropping an inflated and untied balloon in front of their adversary. Without a word being spoken, it is clear to the men that they are meant to draw and fire when the whining of the balloon flattens. For a cowboy, any time a piece of land is seized, it is a distinct act of violence, originating in a present need. For the Rancher, it is only a new link on the chain to the referent “A.” The rancher doesn’t break the horses themself. They believe their livestock and land belong to them through the words “this is yours” and not the actions which substantiate the statement. They believe in a free lunch.

The ability to recognize violence in the abstract, coded in spoken and unspoken language, affords the cowboy the freedom to be silent, to communicate ones own terms rather than contributing to the homunculoid system of language as speech. Most importantly, it facilitates a functional language, intimately connected with the efforts accompanying it. As The Ugly said, “If you have to shoot, shoot, don’t talk.” In Redford’s first scene as Sundance, a barkeep stands up from a poker table, accuses him of cheating, and says to leave the money on the table and get out of dodge. His hand is just barely palming the revolver in his holster. Redford, remaining seated, says to Paul Newman’s Butch Cassidy, “if he tells us we can stay, we’ll go.” Newman talks to the player, “what would you think of asking us to stick around…you don’t even have to mean it.” The barkeep shoves him back and scrams them out again. Eventually Butch relents, “I can’t help you, Sundance.” Immediately the standoff transmogrifies; the barkeep knows he’s dealing with a faster gun than his. “I never knew you were the Sundance Kid when I said you were cheatin’.”

When someone accuses Redford of cheating, it evokes the very real images of hand-tools and waterboards in the soundproofed backrooms of any mob-era casino. “You’re cheating” ultimately refers to the institutions of violence that substantiate the claim. When his terrified opponent acquiesces and says “why don’t you stick around,” he forgives the violence of the accusation. Redford’s aim in this scene isn’t to kill anyone. As Butch remarks, “you don’t know how fast he is.” He is responding to the very real fear of savagery. Rather than asking the barkeep to drop his iron, he asks him to revise his statement. Inviting someone to stick around is taking your hand off the holster, speech and act understood together, illocution. Even the nom de guerre, “Sundance,” is so goofy that it unmistakably identifies Redford as the deadliest hand in the West. This is a speech act too. “Sundance,” when substantiated by a litany of dead lawmen and ravaged savings accounts, means stand down or draw fast.

Perhaps the arbitrary symbolism of a card’s suit or the pips on a die, contrasted by the ecstatically violent extortion of winnings from losers, is why many of the most famous gun duels have been initiated by gambling debts: Wild Bill Hickok and Davis Tutt (or pretty much anyone), Jim Leavy and John Murphy, Doc Holliday and Ed Bailey, John Selman Sr. and George Scarborough, just to name a few. Today we pretend the game of baccarat is enforced by the California prayer book and not the hobbled debtor, shaking his tin cup in the saloon. The way that the Cowboy understands language, as commanding, territorializing, and imposing, allows them the opportunity to face institutional violence head on rather than through the mystical rites of faro.

If It Don’t Scare The Cows…

You might forget, while watching Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger on Brokeback Mountain, that they often go without exchanging a word. The depth of their feelings is communicated by acts of kindness, like tending to one another, a little harmonica, or even the comfort of a shared silence. In watching the fidelity with which many emotions are non-verbally transmitted between these men, unsurprisingly, much of the cowpoke’s romance and mystique is tied to their quietness. In fact, the quiet allows for their relationship to begin, without having to define their feelings through a set of prescriptive symbols, generated by an incredibly homophobic society; they can express their love for one another without constantly referring to the linguistic violence that divided the “homosexual” from the “heterosexual” and “sex” from “sodomy.”

Calamity Jane was also afforded freedoms in the West, historically denied to women for centuries. The women of the Old West were the first to secure their right to vote. The “Pioneer Woman”  has always occupied a space of some reverence in the American mind. The Ponca City monument, dedicated to her name, testifies to this. Calamity Jane was given the freedom to create an identity for herself, beloved by men and women of the West, separate from the machine to which she was born. She aired her lungs like a parrot in a faro parlor and drank like a roughneck on payday. Shunning a bonnet, she was ragged proper in a Stetson and the uniform of an Army Scout. There’s much speculation as to where she got her handle. Some owe it to her generosity and compassion for the afflicted, others to the disaster a man might expect fer looking at her cross. Myself, I wouldn’t be discomposed if it wasn’t the extent to which she violated the norms of American culture that gave her “Calamity” for a title. A woman presenting herself like Jane did could find, in the West, a culture that understood her appearance as reflective of her character rather than her identity and didn’t problematize her for it. Upon her arrival in Deadwood, with her best friend Wild Bill in tow, the town’s newspaper printed a headline: “Calamity Jane [not Bill Hickok] has Arrived!” Upon her death, the same Newspaper, The Black Hills Daily Times would comment not primarily on her attire, her gruffness, or her generally masculine presentation, but on her generosity towards the poor and sick. She made a career in her later life as a storyteller, traveling the country on the force of her own personality, regaling crowds with tales of gunfights, revenge, the majesty of the West, and the legends she brushed shoulders with.

The West offered Jane Cannary a wide open space to craft an image for herself, to be a storyteller of her own life at a time when women were not allowed to effectuate their own political opinions. This freedom came from a culture respectful of the open range and the overwhelming web of material contingencies that might create a need for a person to present herself in a particular way: the durability and functionality of men’s clothes on the frontier, the importance of being inconspicuous in a world wanting trouble, etc. In fact, she was beloved for it. As were Annie Oakley and Pearl Hart, all showcased in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, and it was without question that a woman of the West should be a crack shot. While the damsel in distress is undoubtedly a character of the West, a woman could also come to her rescue. The experience of being a Western outlaw or soldier or cowgirl was open to women. Denying women this opportunity would be to deny the reality of life in the West, that shifting sands demand unrestricted movement. As the Wagon Master says when the bandits come over the hills, “All hands and the cook!”

Shooting straight is a language of mutual necessity. From time to time, a Cowboy finds themself in a position where partnering up with a stranger is incumbent. The West at the end of the 19th century was remarkably cosmopolitan (in its demographics). There were Cherokee, Comanche, and Apache Nations, there were Scotch-Irish, Irish, English, Germans, and all manner of European immigrants, workers from China, Japan, and Korea, Mexicans, whose cultural borders still transcend the national borders, and nearly a quarter of all Cowboys in the West were African Americans (very often formerly enslaved). The evidence of these disparate and likely prejudiced groups’ cohesion, their ability to work together, is in their very vocabulary: “lasso,” “buckaroo” (vaquero), the “banjo,” whose origin lies in West Africa. Of course there was incessant violence between these groups as well, but White, Black, American Indian, Mexican, and Asian ranch hands would spend years together riding up and down the Chisholm Trail, working side by side and simultaneously developing some of the most iconic modes of living in American history.

They developed a synthesis of culture and language, which allowed them to produce music, literature, art, and film. Many of these cultural features were both functional and aesthetic (the yodel as the cattle call, the fringe jacket as a water repellent, the creation of new vocabulary words as a means of reconciling a language barrier, etc.). More importantly, it allowed for any two Cowboys, or even any seven, to come together for the sake of achieving a particular goal. This could include fending off wolves or bandits or forming a posse. The Lincoln County War might have been one of the first American “wars” to have racially integrated armies. Billy the Kid himself, while despised by many, was a hero to poor Mexican-American farmers, who were discriminated against by the big ranchers and banks in the area, and who enjoyed his efforts to learn their dances and listen to their music. His last words were“¿quien es?” They had a “boxcar” culture, a language between nomads capable of communication without territorialization: one itinerant worker leaves a circle in chalk on the fence post of a ranch; all the Cowboys who pass know that the Rancher doesn’t pay fairly.  Yes, this is literally a communicative symbol but it is also an implicit free exchange of resources, an action, and a concern expressed by a stranger for the well-being of another: a collective ownership of goods and private property without being attached to transcendental continuity  (i.e. the “A” that must become “Z,” the cow that must trade hands).

This is also manifested in the life of the outlaw, in the 7-way-split. The 7-way-split is the tacit but inviolable agreement that anyone who participates in a heist shares equally in the spoils. Clint Eastwood (the “Good”) gives Eli Wallach (the “Ugly”) his share of the gold, despite finding him morally odious. The film as a whole portrays a collaboration between “the good” and “the ugly” against “the bad.” The Magnificent 7 are also full of ugly characters. Harry Luck is far more motivated by the potential of finding gold in the town’s surrounding hills than the well-being of the villagers. Britt, the knife expert, only wants the challenge of facing down a few score of bandits. Nonetheless, all of these dead men are buried in the same place, noble or ignoble. The good and the ugly make the big jump together.

Fish Or Cut Bait

 This is a call for us to be prospectors. We’ve lost the ability to be cowboys. The range has been sold, and we exist in a state of total abstraction from the land, from each other, from justice. All of us are the Pecos Mountains. Our bones are its rocky spires, and our blood is the river filling our veins with red gold and ferrying it away. Like the Pecos, we are godless. Our aggrandizement of our own potential to know has eclipsed the awe of the prairie. Snake-oil salesmen have laid claim to the future, each claiming that their particular discipline (alchemy, linguistics, mesmerism, etc.) holds the secrets of a peaceful homestead and that further investment will yield the final drippings of truth. Although the train routes have yet to be set, towns die and are born in advance of the rail. The known unknowables, like the location of gold in a mountain or the fastest hand in the West, are increasingly becoming unknown knowables. The prospector leans into this mystery, but the rancher boxes it up on a whim. The linguist terraforms the landscape of language. It becomes a cornfield, with every harvest justifying itself.

Beneath these sprawling swaths of green are hills and valleys, the gestures of the land, buried like treasure in an unmarked grave. The rancher makes no considerations of this. The depleting soil is shaded and obscured by a huge crop and an infusion of petrochemical fertilizers. It is a not-so-tacit denial of the violence inflicted on nature by the institution of corn farming itself, quite literally dragging up the planet’s dead of half a billion years to hide the state of the land, sucked dry of potential. The linguist does the same, making mará into the “root” of murder (etymology).

In 3:10 to Yuma, Glen Hollander, the big fish in Bisbee, Arizona, intends to sell the home of our hero, Dan Evans, to the local railroad. He says, “sometimes a man has to be big enough to see how small he is.” The linguist, or his agent in the fable, preaches defeatism: “the railroad is coming to Bisbee whether you like it or not.” Because every individual, to the linguist, is a variable in a regime of signs, each contributes to the singular and perpetual conversation of humanity. Like the snake oil salesman, every ingredient added to their elixir produces greater  insistence on its miraculous effects. This semiotic system constricts the landscape of language like a railroad, beginning at one point and ending nowhere in sight (the town expects the railroad, not the other way around). The first word, “A,” skitters across the earth, like the singular buffalo that begins the stampede. The final reply, “Z,” is, was, and will be told in every tongue on earth.

To this procession, we are like forty niners to a mountain, fearing that either salvation or ruin are determined by where we swing our picks, how we engineer the language machine. Davis Tutt was killed for wearing Wild Bill Hickok’s stolen watch in public, and it terrifies us. “What bridges the gap between the watch and the gun duel?” Then come the rainmakers, people who sell divination rods to tenderfoots. They have an answer to every question. The few witnesses of the gunfight are surrounded by curious and frightened townspeople. Wild Bill has long since fled the scene, and they are given the liberty to speculate on his reasons between gulps of Valley Tan: “I reckon the watch symbolized Bill’s relation to his father!”; “ah hell, that ain’t it. Bill saw him scratch it up on a fence post. You can’t treat a fine gold watch like a horse bit;” ”Shut yer trap Wilbur. Bill said he couldn’t abide seeing his watch on a man’s right hand. Bill’s a fella of class and social niceties.” When we believe there’s gold to be found, and its alternative is destitution, many can’t help but be convinced that their own claim contains a vein to the heart of the mountain. Even more can’t help but believe them. In Bill Hickok’s case, this inability to look at the mountain, instead fixating on a shiny, gold watch, hides the web of institutions before it which compelled Wild Bill and Davis Tutt to throw down.

One factor of note is the near bankruptcy of the Union Army towards the end of the Civil War. Hickok was a Union soldier by profession, and, not receiving pay for quite some time, resorted to gambling in order to cover his expenses. By stealing Hickok’s watch under the guise of taking collateral for a gambling debt, Tutt suggested that Wild Bill was financially insolvent. This would be a career-killer for a professional gambler. He wouldn’t be able to get a game in the whole state. The watch itself didn’t initiate the fight; Tutt’s insistence on wearing it publicly did. Said Wild Bill, “he shouldn’t come across that square unless dead men can walk.” Tutt, on the other hand, whose kin participated in one of the greatest family feuds in Arkansas’s history, couldn’t take this advice without appearing to be afraid of Bill. These details, and the conspiring circumstances behind them, are lost when we fixate on the essence of gold, the nature of language, rather than the mountain. The people of Missouri, only recently establishing laws beyond the “trail law,” perfectly understood how a gold watch could justifiably result in a fair fight and acquitted Bill for the killing.

This is what distinguishes the good prospector from the bad one. Humphrey Bogart, in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, can’t see the mountain for the gold underneath it. Having found a healthy vein and speculating at its value, he comes to loathe his compatriots for his fear of their betrayal. Each word uttered by them represents an unnecessary deviation from his own plans for his future, his “claim.” These are the prospectors we hate: paranoid, violent, condescending. The prospectors we love wear funny hats and chew on dirt to taste the ore. They have an intimate knowledge of the land, and for however successful they are, they always take their mules back into the mountains. They despise the Bogarts, who seek to rob the mountain and its workers and steal their riches back to the city.

The good prospector is Yukon Cornelius. He knows the arctic so well that he can “reform” the abominable snowman and teach him to put the star on a Christmas tree. He even knows that if he should fall off a cliff, he ought to ride the snowman (bumble) down because “Bumbles Bounce!” It is no surprise that it is a prospector who can make Rudolph feel like part of a family, befriend the vicious ‘bumble,’ and celebrate his own quirks along with the Island of Misfit Toys. He bothers to learn the language of the mountain because he lives on it. Bogart believes himself and the gold to be separate.

The language of the cowboy has all but disappeared along with the profession itself. Bleached bones remain. The fringe jacket, originally designed to wick water away and break up the torso’s outline (for camouflage) is now a fashion statement, suggesting the maverick sensibilities of the wearer. “Howdy,” a phrase which serves the functional purpose of shortening “How do you do?” has instead become a symbol of folksiness. While, for the cowboy, their means of communication were meant to reflect the very real demands of the communicants (fashion for the trail, speech to construct points of cultural coherence between buckaroos, etc.), cowboy language now refers to a place in time that may have never existed, meant to establish a particular narrative about how people spoke and behaved, for whatever benefit that it serves the powerful–suede manufacturers and the Toby Keith estate. Rather than emerging from the needs of the individual, the language has been reappropriated to serve the regime of signs.

The first step to honest self-expression is to stop discussing the perpetuation of the regime of signs as the purpose of language itself. We ought to be prospectors rather than treasure hunters. Instead of finding a means to communicate our needs against the oppressive force of the mountain, to find our place on it, how we relate to it, what it demands from us on a season by season basis, and what needs to change in order to make it hospitable: to live on the mountain rather than transcend it. We shouldn’t take any structure or formation of language as a given, just as we shouldn’t take any land claim as destined for wealth unless the gold has been found. We ought to lean into the madness of the prospector rather than cling to the hope of some oil-rich field or the Mountain’s vena cava, a sure road to Bogart’s lonely insanity.

Rather than being in a perpetual state of feverish deterioration from the moment we stake a claim, like a rancher at war with the open range, we should recognize the claim as an insanity in and of itself. How could we possibly know the land just by panning in its streams? Each of us exists in relation to a mountain, unknowable in its entirety but yielding immense treasure. The study of language should not divide the mountain of communication into stakes and camps, nor devise a regime in which phonetics is the golden lattice that thinly supports the frame of the mountain. Rather than languishing in a choleric swamp of discovery and disappointment, relish in an ecstasy of gold! Let us cultivate methods of registering signs in our daily lives rather than the echoes of gunshots in the valley. This is the avenue to a greater understanding of the mountain, what it can and can’t yield. Thank the secrets it betrays and respect thems it don’t, remembering, knowing, that there is no method, no linguistic model, that, without accounting for the music of a Mexican dance hall, or the feeling of hatred provoked by watching a friend abused, or the nigh ubiquitous romance of the desert, could predict the Kid’s last words: “Quien es?”

 

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