Growing up in my East Yorkshire village, we were an ocean and many miles away from The American Wild West. And yet we were obsessed with cowboys and indians. When I say "we" I mostly mean boys. It was a story repeated throughout the British Isles.
The hats that cowboys wore seemed exotic. And we noted their leather chaps, the stirrups on their biddable horses and the leather holsters that carried their lethal handguns. Sheriffs wore badges in the shape of stars and so did their deputies. When they needed to sort out trouble, they frequently formed posses and together they would gallop off in plumes of dust to reestablish justice.
The indians or redskins seemed hardly human. They were fearsome savages who used tomahawks to scalp their victims. They could shoot arrows from their bows with incredible accuracy - even when galloping over parched plains. They said things like "White man speak with forked tongue" and bore names like Sitting Bull, Little Raven and Growling Bear. Their women were squaws who mostly stayed home in their tepees or tended fires.
Generally speaking the cowboys and the indians did not get along - with one notable exception being the relationship between The Lone Ranger and his faithful companion, Tonto. They were the stars of a Saturday TV drama called "The Lone Ranger" that involved plenty of cowboys and lots of indians too.
There were other dramas that focused on this endlessly fascinating conflict - including "Rawhide", "Maverick", "Bonanza" and "Wagon Train". In postwar Britain, shows about cowboys and indians took us away from ourselves to a faraway fantasy world. Later, I guess that space was to be filled by science fiction dramas like "StarTrek".
In the late fifties through into the early sixties, toy shops catered for the cowboys and indians obsession. You could buy cowboy outfits, sheriff badges, non-lethal bows and arrows and even rubber tomahawks. Millions of small plastic figurines must have also been sold - cowboys on horseback, cowboys kneeling with rifles, indian chiefs with removable feathered headdresses, squaws and braves and even papooses. And there were little plastic wigwams and model ranches and war paint and silver pistols into which you could insert rolls of "caps" that banged when the trigger hammered down.
Nowadays children don't fantasise about cowboys and indians and there are no popular dramas about them but back then it all seemed to fill a void and a need. We lapped it up and to a big extent so did the adult population of these islands. I haven't mentioned all the cowboy novels and Christmas annuals. There were many.
Life was cheap in The Wild West. I am ashamed to say that I never realised that those "redskins" or Native Americans were terribly wronged. They were trying to protect their homelands from invaders who often arrived with fencing and huge herds of cattle. In general, the indians were the victims and not the aggressors. They were fighting back in self-defence. To a large extent they had previously lived in harmony with Nature for generations. They could have taught those goddamn cowboys a thing or two.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/STGrOju