Notes from Toyland: 100 years of Toys and Games in Montana

Playing Cowboy: Toys and the American Western

The 1950s were a golden age for Westerns. They dominated movie theatres, television screens, and toy-chests across the country. Children of all ages and genders pretended to be Davy Crockett or the Lone Ranger -- helped, of course, by tie-in playsets, props and costumes. Some kids played with action figures and plastic playsets, acting out movie plots or making up their own dramas for the characters. Others, especially kids who lived out west and had more room to play outside, went straight to the toy guns and cowboy outfits and acted out the epics themselves.


Of course, the "Wild West" shown on TV and imagined by thousands of kids didn't look much like the actual American west of the late 1800s. Unlike on-screen cowboys, usually played by White actors like Roy Rogers and John Wayne, real cowboys were extremely racially diverse, with Mexican, Black, and Native American cowboys working alongside and sometimes outnumbering White men. The word "cowboy" is even a direct translation of an older Spanish word: "vaquero," a word which was also anglicized into "buckaroo." Fictional cowboys and gunslingers also routinely clashed with Native Americans, who often were shown less as the main villains of the story than as another hazard of nature for the White heroes to overcome, like landslides or sudden blizzards. In real life during the late 1800s, most conflicts with Native Americans in the west were fought by the United States military, as the military carried out their brutal mission of removing Native Americans from their lands by any means necessary.

Made nearly a century later, fictional Westerns weren't aiming to show the real history. A Western isn't a documentary, it's a story. Those stories have different aims, from early films glorifying the colonization of the west to later, more nuanced stories that grappled with the morality of a lifestyle defined by violence and anti-social ideals. During the 1940s and '50s, when Westerns peaked in popularity, they helped people to grapple with their own circumstances. Behind the ever-present threat of fictional Native Americans were the real-life boogeymen of first the Nazis and then the Communists, as Americans went from World War II straight into McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Westerns also appealed to people worried about how modern life and technology were changing the country. They created an idealized past that people could be nostalgic about, especially White people living in western states who could imagine their own ancestors as characters in Westerns, or at least as living alongside the cowboys and lawmen that they saw on screen.
 
 

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