The Frontier
The frontier held an important pla
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The frontier held an important place in American history, both in its reality and as a heroic image that would outlast the frontier itself. The idea of the frontier helped shape the American character. The frontier became a place to which settlers journeyed and a place they had to tame. This created a certain ambivalence in how the frontier was viewed. On the one hand, the frontier was natural and so somehow ideal, celebrated as such by James Fenimore Cooper in the Leatherstocking Tales. On the other hand, the frontier was something to be challenged and beaten. These tensions have been apparent in the popular image of the Wild West, and as a film genre, the Western has developed around this conflict and has shown the frontier both as a place of savagery and a place of beauty, the West as a place to be tamed and a place to be celebrated. These tensions have been evident in film Westerns since the silent era, and accompanying the image of the frontier and standing as the human element of the frontier motif is the theme of community and the creation of a community out of the wildness of the frontier. The Western in its heyday served as a dramatic form depicting in stark relief the battle between good and evil, with control of the frontier as the goal. In later films in the genre, some of the accepted truths of the earlier period are questioned and reshaped for a more cynical age. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a paper at a meeting of the A
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O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona was an actual event that has been studied and written about by Western historians since the day it happened. In the film, it serves as the conclusion to which the story is tending from the first. Wyatt is a reluctant marshal for the town at first, and it is evident from his first clash with the Clantons that the story will end in the usual way, with a shootout. Ford, however, is as interested in developing a sense of community in Tombstone as in dealing with the gunfight itself. Earp is shown as a man who has been wandering most of his life but who is now ready to settle down. The life of the people of the town reflects the sort of community Ford creates in many of his films, with a dedication to music, community dances, and the goal of building a society that will make the West a good place to live. The Clantons are a family, but their values are quite different from the families that come to town trying to build for the future. The Clantons think of the here and now, while the settlers think of the future and expect the marshal to protect that for them. The Earps as a group have something in common with the Clantons in that they as well are less interested in building for the future tha
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Approximate Word count = 4382
Approximate Pages = 18 (250 words per page)
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