I love watching Westerns. I have my favorite channels. All the actors that played the cowboy game through the many years is amazing. Yet in truth the American cowboy days were short. Fifteen years after the civil war through the building of the train industry and barbed wire.
The Spaniards and Mexicans were challenged by Native Indians and then the Europeans. Carelessly leaving their horses and cattle to be taken over and bred by these new propagated cowboys. It is a brutal history as well as a beautiful one as in the current film Painted Woman. A woman was a mother, whore or missionary. Nevertheless, the women are robust and hearty characters as in the film True Grit where a young girl outsmarts many a gun shooting cowboy and avenges her father’s death.
A decade and a half are a short time for towns and saloons to be alive for this massive movement of the wild days of traveling and roaming cowboys. Then barbed wire and the movement of cattle by way of the train into mass slaughterhouses. To roam the prairie was gone.
I love these films as I do Noir films. Adventure, mystery the good and the bad guys and always the femme fatale or saloon lady entertainers.
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