Dan Flores

After all, if the so-called frontier thesis was true, that Darwinian argument that the wilderness had selected out traits that created the American character, then how are we going to preserve Americanness without a frontier?

A remarkable thing in itself is that nostalgia for the Old West lasted for at least 80 years after the 1890 census announced the frontier was over.

It was nostalgia that made Bill Cody's Wild West show legendary, made the careers of painters Frederick Remington and Charlie Russell, of filmmaker John Ford, and of course it was Old West nostalgia that made Tom Mix, John Wayne, Audie Murphy, and Roy Rogers cinema stars and got Clint Eastwood his start.

Maybe writer Zane Gray captured the magic best.

The Old West, he once wrote, was the last time in the history of Earth humans got to live a sensuous life in a state of nature.

The Old West virus infected all of us.

As a five-year-old, I once found myself in an Oklahoma City elevator looking up at a fellow passenger I realized was film star Randolph Scott.

The excitement almost took me out.

I've never been without a pair of cowboy boots since.

American country music centered in the South had little beyond a regional appeal until it rebranded itself Country Western and affected cowboy hats and jeans.

Now not even Beyonce can resist it.

Even in the 21st century, the writer David Milch's HBO series, Deadwood, or as I like to call it, Back to the Fucking West, cocksuckers, proved just how resilient the Old West could be as a compelling subject.

More of Milch and Deadwood in another episode.

What I want to argue now and across the remaining episodes in this podcast is that the 20th and 21st century West has maybe been an even more thrilling place for history to play out.

Nostalgia for the Old West, as I'm about to demonstrate here with the careers of two famous artists, the photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis and the painter Vino Rice, could be pretty much a drag on understanding the possibilities of modern life in the West.

we've not yet entirely escaped the pull of the Western Pass.

But the honesty of someone like Vino Rice, painting the Blackfeet Indians of Montana from roughly 1920 to 1950, helps show us the way towards the West we actually live in or visit.

No one remotely interested in American Indians or merely the beauty and dignity of humanity ever forgets their first reaction standing before an Edward Sheriff Curtis photograph.

After the initial shock of seeing what appears to be pre-modern people preserved by a modern medium, I had no idea cameras existed that long ago, a friend said to me once.

You start looking more closely, becoming aware that the sense of age here is in part due to the sepia tones of Curtis's prints.