Spirit of the Old West

Recently, I was fortunately able to visit Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. It’s well worth a visit and I highly enjoyed my time there. The scenery and environment are like nothing I’ve seen anywhere else. Surrounded by farms, the park is, however, fenced, and the nearby city, Medora, has the typical plethora of private businesses claiming to offer unique, special experiences, many of them introducing people to the ‘spirit of the old west’ or similar themes.

This, of course, begs the question- what is the spirit of the old west? Is it something that you would want to be introduced to? I’ve always felt ambivalent about the mythology surrounding these commercial operations.

For some in my family, cowboy stories were long favored for their easy formulas and clear moral codes, regardless of the politically incorrect bits and historical inaccuracies. There was clearly a market for the numerous silver screen pictures, and some of that still remains ripe for tourist trapping.

Old west stories and movies, after all, play up the wildness and the attrition rate of pioneer towns. In many of the stories, it seems most residents would be dead after a mere few weeks. Things like the shootout at the O.K. Corral certainly happened, but they’re famous because they stand out and weren’t frequent occurrences. It does a disservice to history to pretend otherwise.

Pioneer life was a struggle against people and the environment, though, and that’s probably why so many of these experiences are unbearably hokey. The edge needs to be taken off, somehow. I can’t stand them for that reason. It’s not real. None of it is real.

The old west is a myth, and probably always was a myth, but it clearly still brings in dollars to these areas.

In the end, if everyone gets the value out of the experience they’re paying for/being paid for, I suppose fact vs. fiction doesn’t really matter.