Tea at Trianon: John Wayne Must Die: The Cowboys and the Western

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, January 4, 2022

John Wayne Must Die: The Cowboys and the Western

From Mark Steyn:

Wayne plays "Wil" Andersen, a sixty-year-old Montana rancher whose ranch hands desert him when news of a gold strike empties out the territory with fortune seekers. He has a herd of cattle that need to be driven to market four hundred miles away, and nobody to do it until a friend in nearby Bozeman tells him to try his luck at the local schoolhouse.

Wil is a hard man, made harder by losing both of his sons when they were still young men. "They went bad – or I did," he admits later in the film. It's hard to miss that he's being given a second chance when he takes on eleven boys, none of them older than fifteen, to drive over a thousand cattle through a landscape that ranges from prairie scrub brush to forest to mountain foothills.

His initial reluctance is overcome by other characters reminding him that he was still a boy when he did his first cattle drive, but Wil is sure – as most older generations are, throughout time – that he was somehow tougher, more resilient – in a word, better – than any young person now.

The cattle drive east from Bozeman to Belle Fourche, South Dakota (almost exactly four hundred miles in the real world, to give credit to the film's producers and William Dale Jennings, author of the book the film is based on), takes Wil and the boys past the site of the Little Bighorn massacre, where they find the bleached bones of Custer's troops, still lying on the battlefield.

This places the film's setting at the end of the 1870s at the earliest, just a decade before the 1890 US census that's considered the official closing of the frontier, at least according to the Frederic Turner Jackson thesis that informed so many of the movie westerns that would come years later. (The voiceover on the film's original trailer tells us it's 1878.) (Read more.)