AMERICA/Clive Sinclair's True Tales of the Wild West By Clive Sinclair Picador, 402pp. £9.99:EARLY EACH YEAR, when the snow still lies thick on the Ruby Mountains, Nevada, the International Cowboy Poetry Festival takes place in Elko, 300 miles east of Reno. Visiting Elko during Poetry Festival week is like walking onto an enormous Western movie set where everyone, from the sheriff down, stays in character all the time. Along the sidewalks between the Stockman's Hotel and the Convention Center, cowboys and cowgirls in sequined waistcoats and white Stetsons swagger, their spurs a-janglin'.
Through the batwing doors of Elko's bars and hotels swing Gary Coopers and John Waynes, Kevin Costners and Robert Duvalls, all played by Chinese cowboys, and gay and lesbian cowboys, and African dudes in rhinestone-studded shit-kicker boots, and low-hipped Venezuelans with the rolling perambulation of horse whisperers. The gunslingers and saloon keepers, gauchos, vaqueros, cowpunchers and wranglers are all part of the living myth of America's wild west, in which the west and the Western have merged into one.
As the Greeks and Romans had Homer and Virgil to put flesh on the bones of their most enduring myths, so Americans have Hollywood. On his recent visit to Dublin, Robert Redford spoke of how important the Western is to him, and of his hope to return to the Western format in a future film. Out on the vast, photogenic landscapes of Kansas, Arizona and Wyoming, to name just three such sets, the American version of the Iliad has been played out on tens of thousands of miles of celluloid on which the timeless triumph of good over evil, hope over despair has been enacted over and over again.
Clive Sinclair brings his readers on a whimsically entertaining ride through this sprawling heartland of the American psyche. America's myth is not just that Wyatt Earp, deputy US marshal to his brother Virgil, in Tombstone on a day in October 1881, along with his drinking buddy, Doc Holliday, and Earp's other brother, Morgan, won the gunfight at the OK Corral, ensuring in the process that good triumphed over evil; America's myth is also tied up with the various screen actors who over the past 80 years have played Wyatt Earp (who lived until 1929). Depending on your age, or your taste, "nce you'd seen Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp, everyone else - even Hugh O'Brian - seemed an impostor . . . Fonda's Earp was essentially FDR's man . . . a New Dealer. Hugh O'Brian's Earp was firmly of the Eisenhower era, a Plain . . . Dealer. John Ford . . . had Jimmy Stewart play [ Earp] as a cynical despoiler of his own reputation . . . Unfortunately, John Wayne never played Wyatt Earp, but like John Ford he claimed to have met the man himself . . . By contrast, Kevin Costner's 1994 Earp was more modest, more of an American Everyman".
The fact that Earp was a heavy drinking, brothel-loving gambler is neither here nor there when it comes to legends.
In his quest for the truth behind the legends of the Wild West, Sinclair has invented two characters, cousins, Peppercorn and Saltzman, who have grown up in England at a time when every little boy got a cowboy outfit for Christmas. This device, which the author calls dodgy realism, allows these Sinclair alter egos to set out on a testosterone-enhanced jaunt through America's west in search of the substance from which the myths sprang. They encounter the modern day Billy the Kid, Calamity Jane and many others. In Dodge City, Kansas, Saltzman finds "a real US marshal, who modelled himself upon a fictional TV character [ Matt Dillon in the TV series Gunsmoke], who was himself based upon Wyatt Earp, whose exact role in the history of Dodge City remained uncertain". As the modern-day custodian of the Jesse James homestead in Kearney, Missouri puts it: "Hollywood turns your brains to mush".
General Custer fancied Wild Bill Hickok as more than a good scout, it seems - "e looked as if he had descended from a race who valued the body as a choice possession" - while Mrs Earp was without much doubt a hooker. It remains unclear whether or not Billy the Kid "who had a voice like a songbird, and never shied from warbling" was "queer".
The last days of the lost world of the Sioux and the Apache, the Kiowa and the Comanche are explored in all their pathos by Peppercorn and Saltzman. Great chiefs and warriors such as Sitting Bull and Geronimo ended their days either murdered by government agents or in federal penitentiaries from which they were occasionally released as fairground attractions.
The cousins' jolly gallop into the prairies of the American wild west, where myth and fact have completely merged, is as revealing as it is amusing. When I put down this book, I had relived a lot of my childhood, in which Roy and Hoppy, Kit Carson, Davy Crockett and the Cisco Kid were my constant companions. It just goes to show - it's never too late to get back in the saddle again.
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Peter Cunningham is an author