Position:Home>History> Compare the real "Old West" to the "Old West" of Hollywood a

Well, the role of native peoples have been misrepresented!. In the old days, they were represented as being brutal savages!. Then, along about the mid to later sixties, they started being represented as noble guardians of mother earth!.

Both characterizations were unfair!. With the former, people saw Indians as being dangerous drunks, bent on the abuse of women and children!. With the latter, when someone pointed out that some tribe somewhere did something really horrible, and this did happen, they were disillusioned with the group that did this, and they applied the actions of a single band to the entire tribe or they decided that the old characterization of the savage was right all along!.

This was probably the worst thing that the movies did concerning the frontier, however, the presentation of the face down in the street was blatantly inaccurate!. Every once in a while, they'd put something in there that made sense, like John Wayne in the Shootist, saying that he only loaded his pistols with 5 bullets, leaving the hammer on an empty chamber, so he wouldn't shoot his foot off!. The western novelists called this "Five beans in the wheel"!.

The representations of Mormons has varied, the Tyrone Power movie from the forties making them look like a persecuted people!. The separatists that left the Church in the late nineteenth century when the leader announced his revelation that "plural marriage" was wrong, have caused problems for the Saints since then, and the prurient nature of our Press, puts the whole thing in a sexual context that sells papers, and sometimes leaves the facts "continued on last page"!.

The whole thing about history is that people are pretty much the same today as they were then!. They do good things and bad things, there isn't really a "good guy" and a "bad guy" but a mixture of the elements in each!.
It's like I say about putting people on a pedestal, they better hope they're wearing slacks!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

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That would be the same as compareing the space shuttle to the star wars movies!.

Its to bad that is where most people get their ideas about the old west from Usually not a shread of truth in them

And the soldiers on the frontier were little more than outcast not the brlliant men of yesteryear as in the movies you will never see what they really did in real lifeWww@QuestionHome@Com

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i think hollywood soiced it up a bit but basically the old west was a place where anything could happen from day to day depending on the circumstances!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

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