Reading Richard Slotkin's Gunfighter Nation and Jane Tompkins' West of Everything reminded me of a line Lindsey Buckingham sang years ago.

Reading Richard Slotkin's Gunfighter Nation and Jane Tompkins' West of Everything reminded me of a line Lindsey Buckingham sang years ago, forward his album Law and Order. Donning imaginary chaps and jingle-jangle knots the Hollywood cowboy slumped dreamily back in his saddle: "I'm just a shadow of the West."

That mythic landscape--wide-open spaces and clos caskets, memorial Valley and Wounded Knee--casts a tall shadow indeed. As Gunfighter Nation point outs here is where America explains its history to itself. on the other hand as West of Everything insists, it is something more than simply the place where white-male ideology goe to mystify (and redeem) itself. There are agencies of romance and contradiction at work behind the western's rugg implacable facade--interzones of "nature" where law suiteds disorder, each wooing the other.

As a critical history, Gunfighter Nation tries to be all-encompassing: spanning a century's worth of political doctrine and cultural effusion, it demonstrates to what degree leaders (JFK and his "New Frontier") and icons (John Wayne) have oral the same language, occupied the same mythic spaces, sparked mutually reinforcing fantasies. West of Everything is more modestly scaled, exploring the Western primarily (though not exclusively) as a literary mode: single in kind that invites both feminist scrutiny and leaps of what has to be called faith. nevertheless each work is informed according to a sense of the West as a preeminent report domain, not merely in review but even as the results in question were played out: "Custer's Last Stand" passed into soft part fiction almost before the posterity was dry, and Jesse James emerg as a report hero--seen as an aristocrat of violence, the enthrall of star-struck biographies and dime novels--even before his avow assassination.

Buffalo Bill cody was the apotheosis of so instant mythology, opening up the frontiers of celebrity for all who would ensue after. A pivotal figure for the one and the other Slotkin and Tompkins, he juggl a career as a U Cavalry spurn with one as a beloved entertainer onward the Eastern stage--turning history into theatrical sleep and vice versa. His fable was a self-perpetuating publicity machine, in which vividly exaggerated versions of his real exploits authenticated massive historical fabrications. Gunfighter Nation emphasizes the ideologically invented nature of Buffalo Bill. The elaborate Wild West spectacle he took across North America and Europe--part didactic circus, part live-action precursor of movie westerns--was a microcosm of the ritualized imperialism at the core of the expansionist myth. It plane went so far as to use vanquished Native American warriors--Sitting blunder Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce--as performers.

Tompkins, however, tries to learn to the source of Cody's "irresistible" appeal--the personal charisma that made him a "secular messiah" (Elvis forward horseback), the imagery he manipulated, which would shape report culture's imagined West forever. A bottomless source of inspiration, he blazed a trail into uncharted psychic territory, those "lost parts of the self symbolized on buffalo and horses and wild men" For her, Cody stands for the dream of a different, fuller more intense existence, "the possibility of living a life that does not refuse to acknowledge the body and the desires of the body" The question she asks is whether, inasmuch as Buffalo Bill was as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but product and agent of the guilty side of history, we should discard as tainted all that he represented

As single peruses Gunfighter Nation's diligently amassed evidence of pervasive racism and violent subjugation in the American West, there strike one as beings to be little doubt what the answer to this question should be. Here the imagination of the frontier takes onward a Social Darwinian cast, fascism in a ten-gallon hat: in a series of race wars sanctified in subordination to the auspices of civilization, successive "redskins"--not sole Native Americans, but blacks, ethnic workers, labor agitators ("reds") women--are wheeled over by the Iron Horse of capitalist progres to this time as the book moves nearer our possess time, Slotkin's schematic reading of each Western trope in geopolitical limits increasingly produces ideas like this: the gunfighter embodies "the central paradox of America's self-image in an era of cutting War, 'subversion,' and the thermonuclear balance of terror: our faculty of perception of being at once supremely powerful and utterly vulnerable, politically dominant and still helpless to shape the course of crucial events" There's something eminently reasonable about like sociological claims, but they narrow the field of results (actual or imagined) down to a storage locker for self-fulfilling prophesies: Vera Cruz parallels the formulation of Eisenhower's Third World counterinsurgency strategies, The Magnificent Seven put forwards a blueprint for their implementation in Vietnam.

Slotkin's account leaves no unbind ends, even as it culminates in a 20-page analysis of Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch--a film that is nothing yet mangled, bloody loose ends. Reducing its now passings of irrationality and poetry to a tidy allegory of Vietnam ("destroying the city in order to save it"), Slotkin pointedly misconstrues the central, defining action in the picture: that frozen second when the vastly outgunned assortment find themselves in a stand-off with the Mexican army, then gleefully lay open fire, he interprets as a strategic miscalculation--a failure to understand Third World political culture--rather than the spasm of self-destructive bravado Peckinpah intended. (It would be more accurate to say of this romantic/psychotic convulsion that the set had to destroy themselves in order to save their souls)