This is the first entry in a series called American Archetypes, where James Taylor Foreman and I explore artifacts of the unique mythos of Americana. Check out James’ first entry in the series here.
His horse trod along the dry earth, kicking up plumes of dust with each strike. The sun beat down on his sullen face, partially shielded by his hat. The hat slouched in a lazy fashion, giving him a jagged line of shade and sun across his face.
He had set out from Independence, Missouri several weeks ago along the Santa Fe Trail. The trail cut through the heart of Kansas and ended in Santa Fe. It was a common passage West. And the passage was a means of rebirth. A born-again experience of dust, fire, and gunsmoke.
Cisco’s musical steps kept the beat as they moved. He left Independence seeking a better life. He was a wanted man, a branded man, a man in need of a second chance. But he was also a lonely man. He had no family, no place to call home.
“Home,” he muttered to himself. “We don’t need home, do we Cisco.”
His mind went back to when he was younger. He sat at a wooden table while his father worked the hard earth of New England. Farm life wasn’t luxurious. A man was a slave to the earth — he did its bidding and it often refused to do his. He watched his father’s toil and made himself a promise: I’m going to be something more.
And here he was. A man with a record, on his way to freedom. At least he had Cisco.
His mustang was the color of dry earth, barrel-chested and broad. Cisco had been with him for almost ten years, bought off a man outside of Boston. He moved like something half-wild, like he remembered what it was to run without a rider. Ten years together and the horse still carried that in him. Some things don’t get domesticated. They only get directed.
As he rounded a bend, he saw a wagon on the side of the trail. A family. He tipped his hat to a young boy who was watching him with wide, wary eyes. The boy had never seen a man like this — alone, unhurried, unbeholden to anyone. The cowboy held his gaze a moment, then looked back to the trail ahead.
He was one man. But he was also every man who had ever set out with nothing but will and a good horse. The cowboy was never just one person. He was a type — an American type — and the story he carried was the story America told itself about what a man could become.
The Frontier as Religious Pilgrimage
The West was the place of new beginnings. The waters of possibility washing away both sin and failure. Everyone who headed West carried a hope — but that hope wasn't free. It had to be earned in dust and distance and the things left behind. The Western pilgrim understood that to claim the promised land, he first had to leave the land where he stood. His Exodus — the American one — would take place not out of Egypt but out of the Eastern United States. And instead of donkeys and plunder, he took with him a horse and a six-shooter. The pillar of fire was not God himself, but the fire of the expanse: freedom to build a life for himself and his family.
There was a religious element to the West. The American ethos is built on second chances. We love the stories of the life turned around. We know the names Jesse James and Billy the Kid. These villains of the West represent the corrupted Cowboy ethos. The Cowboy who seeks the West to pillage and kill. The cowboy was a road to redemption for many. A clean slate.
The West was opportunity, but not opportunity without cost. The open plains and enraptured mountains offered boundless possibilities. There were no cities – no property markers – no boundaries. There was sacrifice to be had. People to be left behind. The cross of the wild to be carried. Blood was often offered as an atonement for the journey.
In many ways, the West was a liturgical space. A dirt cathedral. It is within the open boundaries of this cathedral that the American spirit was formed. The cowboy was the West’s native son. Its priest.
The frontier is a religious experience in the American ethos. The cowboy, seeking purpose and meaning, travels on a pilgrimage. He encounters hardships and trials, and only through conquering the elements does he harness the American spirit. One could argue that this mythos is pure individualism — but that is too simple. The cowboy is not a solipsist. He is the embodiment of a shared American spirit. He roams free, yes, but his freedom is in open rebellion against a flattening world. As the steam engine collapsed time and space, the cowboy continued his move westward, always seeking more frontier.
The Frontier as American Eden
The frontier was America’s Eden. But unlike Eden, it wasn’t given — it was taken. The Garden was given by God. The West had to be won. The Garden could be inhabited without death, until the fall, but the West was full of death and destruction. Like a sacrifice on an altar, blood was the price of claiming it.
And like Eden, the frontier was eventually closed. Adam and Eve were cast out; the American wilderness was not cast out but explored to its edges, and in being fully known, lost its Sehnsucht — its quality of yearning, of always promising more beyond the horizon. That quality had compelled young men to saddle up and ride out. When the frontier died, so did a part of the American soul.
Television and film tried to recapture it. John Wayne and Clint Eastwood sought to re-enchant the West. But even they couldn’t quite restore what had been lost. A myth projected on a screen is not the same as a myth lived on a trail.
Frederick Jackson Turner and the Closing of the Frontier
In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner stood before a gathering of historians and made a claim that would shape the American century. The frontier, he argued, had made America — not its institutions, not its laws, but its open land and the men who crossed it. The frontier had made the American soul.
Turner made the case that the appeal of the undiscovered runs deep in America. Since its very beginnings, America was a place of exploration and discovery. The New World was wide and mysterious. There was a relationship from the beginning between the people and the wilderness. But somewhere along the line the frontier vanished, and the question was no longer “how do we explore this vast expanse” but “how do we cultivate this land” — or, for some, “how do we profit from it.”
Turner saw that within this desire for exploration was a deeper desire: to leave children a better heritage than what had been received. To make something more of what they were.
The significance of the frontier was the ideal of discovery. The very existence of America was owed to the setting out by sea of a few hundred souls toward a land unknown. Death was small compared to the possibility of hope — of a better place to live.
The frontier also gave shape to the American ideal of democracy. The creation of a self-made people. There was no compulsion about the West. It was something attempted out of sheer will. A man went because he chose to go.
And yet the West was not only for the individual. It was for the collective too. Men who would never have found each other found each other on the trail. Communities formed out of necessity, then out of love. The cowboy rode alone, but he rode toward something shared.
The Cowboy as American Archetype
The cowboy is to America what the knight was to England. The knight, bound by a penal code and loyal posture, served the people. The cowboy is America’s knight errant. He doesn’t derive his code from authority or title — it isn’t bestowed on him. He derives it from character. His code is self-generated, and to impose one from the outside is to besiege the stronghold of his essence. We see this most clearly in Owen Wister’s Virginian — the cowboy as natural aristocrat, nobility without inheritance.
The cowboy is also a liminal figure. He lives on the threshold between law and lawlessness, wilderness and civilization, individualism and companionship. That threshold position is the source of his mythic power. He can move between worlds, which means he can protect one from the other. He is the man civilization sends to its edges because he is the only man who can survive there — and still come back.
The Transformation of the American Frontier
Today, the frontier has been tamed. Highways split across the American countryside like a snake slithering and curving across the dirt. Superhighways have connected cities and left the small towns that dot the landscape to slowly fade away.
The frontier, once emblematic of the American experience, is now just a means of travel from one city to the next. Progress has pushed Americans into a hyperfrenzy of digital stimulation — catapulting humanity into light speed, leaving behind the physical world for a digital space one can scarcely conquer or even explore in its fullness. This part of the American spirit — the explorer, the lone cowboy, the liminal figure on the unknown road west — has gone away. He’s been replaced with the tech bro, the digital edgelord, the Silicon Valley prospector. In other words, the American ethos has migrated to the cloud. Sadly, this has damaged the myths that once bound us together. We are more global than ever and less local. Issues that once demanded local attention are now globalized, and our attention is scattered without end.
Without a physical frontier, man seeks meaning in ways he was never meant to. This is the great travesty of the taming of the West. The American spirit has become dislodged, and a global spirit has taken its place. Few care about the cowboy because few have time to think about the hills, valleys, streams, and mountains that dot the fruited plain.
The frontier has been transformed, but the myths we tell about our history can still be revived — the stories of adventure and risk, danger and sacrifice. The loss of the myths we once told is not the loss of myth altogether. We simply replace them with other myths. And these newer myths seem to speak not to what makes us distinctly American, but to the slow dissolution of that spirit entirely.
This brings me to my final point: the last frontier — the West — was like a religious experience for the American people because not only was it vast and expansive but it was tangible. Today, our lives are mediated by the intangible. Notifications and alerts to pseudo-reality buzz in our pockets. To me there seems to be a connection between the loss of the Frontier — or rather its transformation into the digital universe — and the loss of civic religion.
We are appalled at the notion of place. For when we think of place, we think of who it excludes, not necessarily the value it plays in our lives as creatures. Adam and Eve were created within a place — they were confined to Eden, and prior to their expulsion this confinement was a blessing, but after their Fall the confinement shifted into roaming the world in search of a place to rest. So while the West was vast, it gave rise to a sense of purpose and place that tied the ideal of America to a land flowing with streams, buffalo, crabgrass, and more. Going West wasn’t simply a navigation of a digital frontier — moving to a different city but remaining the same person online — instead it was a moving in its entirety. Shifting from one place to another with all this entails.
As provocative as this may sound, while many bemoan the loss of religious fervor in the American ethos — the dramatic rise of the nones — as merely moral and spiritual decay, I believe there’s more to the story. America is a place — it is a land. This notion gave the Frontier its religious character. The land was trodden, bodies were buried in the dirt, crops were grown in the soil, homes were built from its resources. Now, nearly 250 years since it all started, America has tried to morph into purely an ideal — not a place but a concept. This, to me, is one of the reasons for the decline in American religious fervor. Church has become detached from reality — detached from a sense of “land.” Church is streamed online; services are abandoned at the slightest discomfort. I’ve been around the denominational world many times over — this isn’t purely an “evangelical” issue, as discontented pundits explain; it’s an American issue. The Frontier gave America a sense of place — and since this has been lost, it is little wonder the ethos has waned.
What is needed, then, is not merely a revival of religion but a recovery of place — a willingness to be rooted, to belong to somewhere rather than everywhere, to be known by a particular patch of earth rather than a diffuse and drifting signal in the ocean of digital media. The question is whether America, having traded its land for a simulacrum, has the imagination left to find its way back. I believe it does — but it will require something like re-enchantment: a willingness to recover the awe, the wonder, and the tangible rootedness that once made the American mythos something worth believing in.
I enjoyed this very much! I’m going to be thinking about it for awhile.
Have you read the novel A Lantern in Her Hand? “Communities formed out of necessity, then out of love.” This line is fleshed out in that story.
Eddie, what a fantastic piece!