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Love Western fiction? Here’s a site that reviews Westerns
Ran onto a nice resource blog for all of us who love Western novels. Don't know why I hadn't found this before. It's a blog called "Western Fiction Review," and it pretty much does exactly that: The author of the blog has some really nicely written reviews of Western novels, current and past, and some fascinating interviews with some Western writers -- also current and recent past.
I haven't looked all around the site yet, but I already would recommend it. I found this blog by Googling the name of an old friend of mine who's been a very prolific Western novelist for more years than he or I would be willing to own up to -- Frank Roderus (whom I believe I've referred to here before). Be sure to look around the "Western Fiction Review" site and read that interview, as well as several other very interesting interviews.
Wish I could locate more "About" information concerning the blogger running that site. If you should happen to read this post and recognize your blog, leave me a "Contact" message, and identify yourself, so's I can give you the credit due!
Indian Pidgin English shaped the Old West
In his excellent reference work, "Dictionary of the American West," writer Winfred Blevins has an interesting section in the introduction on Indian Pidgin English, a language of convenience which he says bridged a communications gap and traveled via explorers, traders, and mountain men across the entire continent.
Blevins makes an interesting point that this mishmash of terms came about mostly from efforts by the many Indian language groups "to learn or develop words that would work, starting a pidgin language, with expressions like big medicine, big water, big talk. ... In time, with lots of Indians using it, whites learning it and translators adopting it, Indian Pidgin English became a kind of language."
Some of the terms that are classified as Indian Pidgin English are "fire water," the use of "winter" to mean "year," the use of "moon" to mean "month," and even "buffalo soldier" to mean "black soldier." Blevins points out that some Indian tribal groups used this pidgin language to communicate with other tribal groups whose language they never learned. And, quite interesting, is his notion that the word "squaw," which actually started as an Algonquin word, was identified by most Plains Indians as a "white man" word which they considered offensive. He concludes his discussion of Indian Pidgin English with this remark:
Americans were once criticized enthusiastically by the British for corrupting English with "wigwam words." So let us now proclaim them thoroughly ours and celebrate them.
What do you call the guys with the pistols?
Most sources I've read suggest that "gunfighter," and "gunman" were terms used in the later days of the Old West (probably after the 1870s or '80s) for someone who was also known as a "shootist," or in our post-Western movie times, the guy who had the pistol and wasn't afraid or hesitant to use it.
According to Winfred Blevins' highly useful "Dictionary of the American West" (to which I've referred here before), "gunfighter" and "gunmen" as well as "gunfight" and "gunfighting" all came along in the late 1800s -- and there was never any distinction made between "gunfighter" as the sort of good guy or "gunman" as the bad guy. Blevins suggests that such terms almost always referred to pistols rather than long guns, i.e., rifles.
(Interestingly, the term "shooting iron" in reference to handguns is found as far back as 1787.)
Blevins says the first use of "gunman" was in a 1903 New York newspaper. The Old West lawman-turned-newspaper-sports-writer, Bat Masterson, used the term "gunfighter" when he wrote of his Western adventures and people he encountered. The related term "gunslinger" has been traced back to early Western movies, but isn't authentic to the Old West. It was picked up quickly by Western writers and popularized in novels and movies.
One of the interesting, archaic terms which Blevins says goes back to the days of the American Revolutionary period is "gunsman" -- which he says probably wasn't limited to those who used pistols.
Native American cultures, alliances were always diverse
To speak of some pre-European "Native American lifestyle" is more myth than reality, when it comes to the cultures and allegiances of the many ethnic groups which inhabited North America before the Spanish, British, French, and other European colonizers came here.
In reality, Indian (the preferred terminology within most Native American ethnic groups even today) bands and tribal groups were as diverse and fragmented in their culture and their alliances with each other as were any of the nations of Europe. The Iroquois Confederacy of the Northeast was a major exception to this. The five original "nations" or tribal groups which made up that alliance (Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk) -- joined by a sixth (Tuscarora) in 1720 -- were a major exception. In those regions we generally refer to as the Old West (the Plains and the Southwest), there were some 30 distinct cultural/linguistic Indian groups at the time of earliest contact by Europeans. In Mexico, Central America, and South America there were many, many more.
Population and tribal group estimates for the entire pre-Colombian Western Hemisphere are guesses at best and range from 10 million to more than 110 million. Recent scholarship tends toward the 10-20 million range. It has also been estimated that there were as many as 300 distinct American Indian language and cultural groups in North America in the year 1500, the designated starting point in many history books for European contact.
Among the many distinct tribal groups there were indeed alliances, mostly those of convenience for food gathering and hunting purposes. There were also constant and bitter wars, rivalries that extend back for centuries. In some cases among the Plains Indians in particular, there were tribes with common ancestry which became historic rivals after they were split apart by invading groups from outside the Plains. (One excellent book, though somewhat dated now, for learning more about American Indian history and culture is "The American Indian: Prehistory to the Present" by Arrell Morgan Gibson.)
So there was little cultural or linguistic unity among the 300+ American Indian tribal groups here when Europeans came to the Americas. And those alliances which did exist were often easily broken if that meant beneficial trade and treatment with the invading Europeans. We cannot possibly understand the history of the Old West without understanding more of the cultural diversity and dynamics of the American Indian groups who were here when Europeans first encountered them.