The Grievous Peril of Standing Alone: Bill Watts and the Frontier Myth Part One
Bill Watts was born atop the ashes of the Comanche Empire and the culture created by that half-century long war of attrition and conquest continues to define and divide America. His work in Mid-South typifies the attitudes and mindset of the American inhabitants of the former Comancheria (Texas and Oklahoma, for the purposes of this article) who prize individualism and “standing alone” over all other values.
As America expanded westward into the frontier a mythology was created, and a cult sprang up around the cowboy. Settlers in what still were Comanche lands were praised for their toughness and their grit, their lawmen became legends, and their narratives shaped their country’s politics and culture to an incredible degree.
Neither the American settlers nor the Comanche Indians they confronted along that raw frontier in what would become Texas and Oklahoma had “the remotest idea of the other’s geographical size or military power. The Texas-Indian Wars (as the decades long series of raids and skirmishes, battles and massacres, have come to be called) took place in the middle of the country, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Historian S.C Gywnne explains that both the Anglo settlers and the Comanche themselves “had for the past two centuries been busily engaged in the bloody conquest and near-extermination of Native American tribes. Both had succeeded in hugely expanding the lands under their control. The difference was that the Comanches were content with what they had won. The Anglo-Americans, children of Manifest Destiny, were not.” (1)
Comanche warriors routinely attacked settlements of what they justifiably saw as an invading force with territorial aspirations. Fear of the murderous "other," no matter who that was, was a natural cultural reaction to such living conditions. In Watts' UWF, outsiders (not you, Scott, sit down) were constantly invading and destroying the heroes. And the self-reliance of capably violent men, the cult of the cowboy and the Colt .45, flourished.
The Comanche horsemen with whom the settlers were at war were “representatives of a military and trade empire that covered some 240,000 square miles, essentially the southern Great Plains. Their land encompassed large chunks of five present-day states: Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma." (2) This huge nation was the Comancheria.
Isolated settlers living under the constant threat of raid by hostile, mounted horsemen from such a powerful nation had to develop some admirable self-reliance. The rugged individual, his home his castle, with his rifle and his bible for justice, remains the defining American archetype. However, the idea that those who survived the war on those hot and brutal plains did it on their own without banding together with their neighbors and friends to both ward off death by arrow or elements and better prosper is untrue, arrogant and self-serving.
As America expanded westward into the frontier a mythology was created, and a cult sprang up around the cowboy. Settlers in what still were Comanche lands were praised for their toughness and their grit, their lawmen became legends, and their narratives shaped their country’s politics and culture to an incredible degree.
Neither the American settlers nor the Comanche Indians they confronted along that raw frontier in what would become Texas and Oklahoma had “the remotest idea of the other’s geographical size or military power. The Texas-Indian Wars (as the decades long series of raids and skirmishes, battles and massacres, have come to be called) took place in the middle of the country, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Historian S.C Gywnne explains that both the Anglo settlers and the Comanche themselves “had for the past two centuries been busily engaged in the bloody conquest and near-extermination of Native American tribes. Both had succeeded in hugely expanding the lands under their control. The difference was that the Comanches were content with what they had won. The Anglo-Americans, children of Manifest Destiny, were not.” (1)
Comanche warriors routinely attacked settlements of what they justifiably saw as an invading force with territorial aspirations. Fear of the murderous "other," no matter who that was, was a natural cultural reaction to such living conditions. In Watts' UWF, outsiders (not you, Scott, sit down) were constantly invading and destroying the heroes. And the self-reliance of capably violent men, the cult of the cowboy and the Colt .45, flourished.
The Comanche horsemen with whom the settlers were at war were “representatives of a military and trade empire that covered some 240,000 square miles, essentially the southern Great Plains. Their land encompassed large chunks of five present-day states: Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma." (2) This huge nation was the Comancheria.
Isolated settlers living under the constant threat of raid by hostile, mounted horsemen from such a powerful nation had to develop some admirable self-reliance. The rugged individual, his home his castle, with his rifle and his bible for justice, remains the defining American archetype. However, the idea that those who survived the war on those hot and brutal plains did it on their own without banding together with their neighbors and friends to both ward off death by arrow or elements and better prosper is untrue, arrogant and self-serving.
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