White Women’s Westerns, 1910-1970
When D. W. Griffith brought Mary Pickford, Billy Bitzer, and the rest of his filmmaking crew west to California in 1910, he chose Helen Hunt Jackson’s popular Western romance, Ramona (1884), to adapt to screen. 26 years later, it had been adapted to film three more times (in 1916, 1928, and 1936).
Back east, Alice Guy-Blaché made Western shorts like Algie the Miner and Two Little Rangers (both in 1912). Cecil B. DeMille shot the first feature Western in Hollywood, The Squaw Man, in 1914. His 1918 remake of the film was scripted by his longtime collaborator Beulah Marie Dix; his 1931 remake was co-written by Elsie Janis and Lenore Coffee and edited by another frequent DeMille collaborator, Anne Bauchens. Ruth Ann Baldwin was the first woman to direct a feature Western, ’49-’17 (1917); her contemporary at Universal, John Ford, relied on editor Dorothy Spencer to cut together many of his westerns, including Stagecoach (1939).
Popular women writers including Edna Ferber, Caroline Lockhart, B. M. Bower, Katharine Newlin Burt, Virginia S. Bartlett, and Margaret Cousins sold the film rights to their Western stories throughout the studio era; Dorothy M. Johnson’s short stories served as source material for famous post-studio system Westerns like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962) and the A Man Called Horse trilogy (beginning in 1970).
As authors, screenwriters, editors, and directors, white women contributed continually to what Mark Cousins would call the “schema plus variation” of the genre; thus, any discussion of Westerns that leaves out white women is incomplete.
A magazine advertisement for Alice Guy-Blaché’s Two Little Rangers (1912).
A judge reminisces about his time as a 49er in the Wild West, in this still from Ruth Ann Baldwin’s ’49-’17 (1917).
Before the cowboy, the “Indian”
Title screen and a still from Ramona (1910).
The tale of a young woman raised on a California rancho who is shunned after falling in love with a Native American man, Ramona is set in the chaparral and scrubland of southern California. This makes it aesthetically, if not thematically, what we expect from a “Western.” Helen Hunt Jackson was inspired to write the novel after A Century of Dishonor, her non-fiction work on the mistreatment of Native Americans, failed to shift public sentiment or change government policy. Ramona became a bestseller; with his adaptation, Griffith meant to cash in on its enormous popularity. He aimed for utter authenticity of setting, declaring on a title card that the film was shot at Rancho Camulos, “the actual scenes where Mrs. Jackson placed her characters in the story.” But authenticity in casting was beyond him: white actor Henry B. Walthall plays the Native American male lead, while Mary Pickford portrays the mixed-race Ramona.
Still, Griffith subtitles his adaptation “A Story of the White Man’s Injustice to the Indian.” So we could perhaps consider his version of Ramona the first Hollywood revisionist Western, though it was made more than 50 years before that subgenre’s heyday, before there was even much of a Western film tradition to revise. Indeed, as Angela Aleiss notes, “the Indian as a noble hero actually preceded the cowboy star” in the film industry’s second decade.
We see this again in 1916’s The Half-Breed, with a scenario adapted by Anita Loos from a Bret Harte story, which tackles similar themes: Douglas Fairbanks plays a mixed-race man whose Native American mother has died by suicide after being seduced and then deserted by a white man. Ostracized from society, Fairbanks’ character falls in love with a white debutante and attracts the ire of the racist sheriff, who turns out to be his father. In the end, Fairbanks finds love with a Mexican outlaw—a match that the film suggests is more fitting given their races and social standing.
White men, the most noble savages
While Ramona and The Half Breed are about the social ostracizing of mixed-race children in the American West, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Squaw Man (which he filmed three times) is about interracial love made possible, though not easy, by the relative lawlessness of the region. In it, an Englishman wrongly accused of embezzlement hides from the law out West, falls in love with the Native American woman who saves his life, and is eventually exonerated of his crime—just as his wife dies by suicide. Unfortunately, all but the final reel of the 1918 version is lost, and the 1931 version is unavailable for home viewing—which makes it difficult to speak about the influence of these two films’ white women screenwriters.
But we can see the thematic continuities between The Squaw Man and the 1970 film A Man Called Horse, also about masculinity and an encounter between Englishness and indigeneity. The film, which spawned two sequels, is based on a short story by Dorothy M. Johnson, a writer who provided the source material for several well-regarded Westerns of the post-studio era, including The Hanging Tree (1959) and probably most famously The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).
Like Ramona, A Man Called Horse opens with intertitles assuring the audience of its authenticity: filmmaker Elliot Silverstein thanks the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian for the research materials they provided, and notes that the “rituals” in the film are based on letters and paintings by “eyewitnesses,” all of whom are white men. The titular man (Richard Harris) is a Brit abducted by a group of Sioux, tortured and humiliated. He eventually gains their respect and becomes a member of their community. The film’s grotesque pleasure lies in watching Richard Harris’s naked white body suffer at the hands of the almost equally naked, yet terrifying, Native Americans.
Films like A Man Called Horse and The Squaw Man portray the American West as a sublime landscape in which aristocratic Englishmen were stripped of their cultural identities and ended up closer to nature—inducted into but never truly at home with the supposed barbarism of indigenous peoples. White men become the noblest of noble savages. A hallucinatory “ritual” sequence in A Man Called Horse shows a strong wind literally stripping Harris of his English clothes to reveal the mostly naked “natural” man underneath. And in both films, white men’s desire for indigenous women necessitates but also justifies their repudiation of Englishness in favor of “going native.”
These stories are absent white women, suggesting perhaps that the American West served as an imaginative space where white women writers could interrogate the experiences of other races and genders. But they also suggest that it’s impossible to imagine white women stepping out of their cultural identities.
Edna Ferber’s immigrant women
White settlers stampede through “Indian Oklahoma territory” at the beginning of Cimarron (1931).
Isaiah (Eugene Jackson) is credited in the main cast of Cimarron (1931). His role is a frustrating mixture of racist tropes and heartbreaking, emotional scenes.
Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor) immigrates from New England to the harsh American West in Giant (1956).
In contrast, Edna Ferber’s Westerns center white women who must muster all their strength and conviction to survive in the unfamiliar and inhospitable West. Ferber had two novels adapted into Westerns: her 1930 novel Cimarron was adapted twice to film, first in 1931 and then again in 1960, while her 1952 novel Giant was released on film in 1956.
Cimarron (1931), which won the Oscar for Best Picture, begins just moments before the official opening of the “Indian Oklahoma territory.” A gunfire signal sets off an overwhelming stampede of white settlers filmed in a long montage, as technically impressive as it is frightening to watch. We learn that one of those stampeding settlers is Yancey Cravat, who loses his initial land claim to quick-thinking prostitute Dixie Lee, but nonetheless carts his wife Sabra and their son off to the fictional boomtown of Osage, Oklahoma to make a new life.
The film presents two different images of white womanhood: Dixie Lee, who tries to become a farmer but is run off the land she claimed by the wives of her neighbors for the crime of having once performed sex work; and Sabra, the society woman who wants to make the growing town better for her daughter—and here better means, “no saloons, no women like Dixie Lee.” Ferber meant Sabra to satirize this strain of American womanhood (as she explains in her autobiography). Her sympathy is clearly with the oppressed characters (Dixie, Isaiah the African-American servant boy, the bullied Jewish merchant, and an outlaw called The Kid) and the film wants to extend this sympathy (as in Isaiah’s surprisingly touching death scene) but its easy traffic in racial stereotypes makes this uncomfortable. And the constant location of the emotional weight of the story in Yancey and Sabra undermines any attempt to criticize their role in colonizing the region.
In the end, both Yancey and Sabra are presented as heroes of American history—Yancey as the progressive, energetic defender of prostitutes and Native Americans who literally has a statue built to him as the epitome of the pioneer spirit, and Sabra as the conservative but indomitable Western woman who civilizes the territory. As she says during a speech to celebrate her election to Congress, “the women of Oklahoma have helped build a prairie wilderness into the state of today… the holding of public office by a woman is a natural step.” Sabra, for the first time, includes her Native American daughter-in-law in this definition of “womanhood.” The film wants us to rejoice at this as character growth.
Ferber’s Giant reverses this schema so that Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor) is the progressive force dragging her conservative, racist husband Jordan (Rock Hudson), towards something like a political consciousness; the setting is Texas, instead of Oklahoma, and we follow the Benedicts from the 1930s to the 1950s, instead of following the Cravats from the 1890s to the 1910s. But the interests of the story are essentially the same. The climactic scene, in which Rock Hudson fistfights the owner of a diner because the man refuses to serve Mexican-American customers, is much clearer in its satirical message: director George Stevens added the scene, under which “The Yellow Rose of Texas” plays jauntily, suggesting that—civil rights movement or not—the men of Texas will continue to use violence to accomplish their goals.
White women’s work in the Western genre didn’t just travel in one direction, from print media to the screen; rather, as the Western developed into a film genre with its own tropes, it in turn influenced popular prose fiction. B. M. Bower went from selling the film rights for her books to scripting her own Western films. Her work in Hollywood then inspired novels like The Quirt (1920), about a young white woman who puts the skills she learned while growing up on a cattle ranch to use as the star of Western serials with titles like “The Terror on the Range.”
This kind of metafictional commentary on the filmic myth of the American West was common in the work of white women. Women who directed early Westerns were particularly interested in stories that demonstrated the unreality of the region and the genre. Ruth Ann Baldwin, for example, was the first woman to direct a feature-length Western: ’49-’17 is about a wealthy judge who wants to relive his glory days as a 49er; his assistant must stage a Western gold mine boomtown and hire a troupe of actors to play townspeople. The fiction gets complicated when it turns out some of the actors were actual 49ers who the judge knew, and even more complicated when real gold is found in the fake mine. The West here, in 1917, is understood to already be a lost piece of history, but one that an immersive theatrical experience can bring back to life.
Nell Shipman, on the other hand, looked to the future instead of the past when she directed Something New (1920). She stars as a writer inspired to pen “something new” when she sees a rider on horseback challenge an automobile driver to a race. The bulk of the film depicts the story that Shipman’s character writes. In it, she is kidnapped by a gang of Mexican outlaws; the hero rides to her rescue across the unforgiving desert terrain in “something new”—a Maxwell automobile. Shipman’s story suggests that, rather than stay mired in nostalgia, Western films can and will reinvent themselves—a prescient message that has certainly been born out over the past century.
From page to screen to page
B. M. Bower’s authorial persona depended on her “authentic” cowgirl identity.
Westerns were a genre where white women could, and did, comment on race, gender, and power. That commentary wasn’t always progressive—white women were often responsible for stories that reinforced settler colonial stereotypes—but they also created stories that deflated the heroic myth of the West, stories that argued against mistreatment of Native Americans, and finally, stories that remind us how fully white women inhabited the region both in reality and in fiction.
The essay above is adapted from a presentation given by Alexandra Edwards at SAMLA in 2019.