The Way of the Western, Part II: "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (1962) and the Pitfalls of Half-Told History

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is an awkward film. Some regard it as a classic of its genre, others as a weaker entry in director John Ford's oeuvre. Though the cast includes much of the familiar Ford "stock company," somehow the magic of his earlier films is missing. But it did manage to produce a line of dialogue that has become famous (or infamous): "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

The main story is presented as a flashback, wrapped by opening and closing scenes taking place years afterward. The famous line, spoken during the closing scene by a newspaper editor who has just listened to Senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) tell the story behind his rise to prominence, implies that what is portrayed in the flashback has been "truth," in contrast to the "legend" the editor has always believed. But a close viewing of the movie leaves one wondering—what if the "truth" of the flashback is half-truth at best?

For starters, "Print the legend" didn't come from the pen of Montana-bred Dorothy M. Johnson, author of the short story on which the film is based. When you read the story, it seems that very little of the film script actually did. In the original story, Ransom Foster (Stoddard in the film) is not a passionately idealistic young lawyer revolted by the lawlessness of the West—nor is Liberty Valance the hired gun of faceless cattlemen who are trying to manipulate political processes in their favor through strong-arm tactics. Foster/Stoddard is merely a reckless young man drifting the West, who happens to have read law in the past (that fact is not of major importance in the story) and Liberty Valance is a common outlaw who bullies the tenderfoot Foster because it's in his nature to do so. In the original story the conflict between them is personal—the political conflict that takes center stage in the film adaptation is wholly a creation of the screenwriters.

In a final bit of irony, in the story Ranse loses his first campaign for public office because the opposition makes much of his having shot a man in a gunfight...instead of immediately riding to glory on the basis of having shot Liberty Valance, as in the film.

Confusion

In my opinion, the film version of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance suffers from what authors today call poor worldbuilding. We're presented with a cattleman-homesteader conflict, told that the cattlemen are fighting against statehood for the territory in order to preserve the open range, and that the townspeople of Shinbone are strongly on the side of statehood. But from their appearance and various scraps of dialogue, many of them confusingly appear to be cowboys and ranchers themselves. Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), the primary representative of the Westerner in the film, identifies with the homesteader/statehood party, but seems to be a rancher on a small scale himself. (In spite of their fairly rugged appearance, the townspeople also exhibit the chronic inability to deal with intimidating outlaws that we discussed in the last post.) Liberty Valance is our antagonist, but if he has any driving motivation, it seems to be chiefly his own love of cruelty and bullying. Yet he's been presented as a henchmen of the unseen cattlemen, who are thus identified with him as evil.

Even the ultimate solution to everyone's problems seems to contradict itself, with Ranse Stoddard being presented as a champion of law and order, but Tom Doniphon's brand of practical "frontier justice" turning out to be the only thing that can preserve Stoddard's life, and by extension everything he stands for. If the message is meant to be that both are required, it doesn't come across very clearly.

The political conflict eventually comes to a head in a long, noisy convention scene, in which the stockmen present their congressional candidate: a well-fed, slick-looking, mustachioed rancher, introduced by a windbag of a retired soldier who spouts empty, flowery oratory on his behalf (it's never said explicitly, but from the cut of his jib the latter may be meant as an ex-Confederate, which seems like another subtle jab at the cattleman faction). They bring a stagy-looking cowboy on a pinto pony onstage to perform rope tricks to the tune of "Home on the Range." As I watched this scene I became aware that I was seeing something very strange—a "traditional" Western movie, by an acclaimed Western director, subtly but decidedly mocking one of the central figures of the genre: the cowboy.

Throughout the entire film there has been much passionate lauding of the march of civilization, the common man, and the American form of government; and this also climaxes at the convention in a gushing speech by Shinbone's newspaper editor, Peabody (Edmond O'Brien), in which he links the cause of statehood with railroads, schools, and "progress" in general—and paints cattlemen as enemies of it all. He gives them brief, token credit for their part in helping to open the West—then immediately turns around and blasts them for living by "the law of the hired gun."

By this time I had the feeling that cattlemen and homesteaders alike were being drawn as hopeless caricatures, the portrayal of their motivations showing a view of the American West that was simplistic at best.

Complexity

In Edith Eudora Kohl's Dakota homesteading memoir Land of the Burnt Thigh, we find this intriguing passage:

John Bartine was one of the most noted and romantic figures of the western plains. He had come west with a few law books packed in his trunk and no money, a young tenderfoot lawyer. He almost starved waiting for a case. There were no law cases, no real legal difficulties but cattle rustling, and nothing, apparently, that an inexperienced young easterner could do about that. But he persuaded stockmen who were being wiped out by the depredations of the rustlers to let him take their cases against these outlaw gangs. He had himself elected judge so that he could convict the thieves. And he had convicted them right and left until a band of rustlers burned down the courthouse in retaliation. But he kept on fighting, at the risk of his own life, until at last that part of the country became safe for the cattlemen.

This sounds remarkably like the movie version of Ransom Stoddard—far more than the movie resembles Dorothy Johnson's original short story. But here the young Eastern lawyer is fighting tooth and nail to protect the rights of...cattlemen! Yet by the time Land of the Burnt Thigh takes place, Bartine is working in the interests of homesteaders to fight land grafters whose dishonesty is compared to the cattle-rustling gangs of old—along with a Senator who is described as a "cattleman and business man...one of the Dakotas' most influential citizens."

It's well known that struggles over land and even full-scale range wars were definitely facts of the American West. But the picture I've formed from my reading of early novels and memoirs is a far more detailed and complex one than the noisy rhetoric of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance would have us believe. Land wars weren't only between cattleman and homesteader, but also between cattleman and sheepman, and between cattleman and cattleman. The United States Government, with its usual efficiency and discernment, sometimes compounded difficulties by encouraging homesteading in areas unsuitable for farming, which caused frustration both for the homesteaders who saw their crops fail and the stockmen who knew the land was being misused. (An interesting episode in the third season of The Virginian, "A Man of the People," actually used this as a plot device, though it blunted the issue a bit by presenting it as a scheme crafted to benefit a single politician.)

Merely as an aside, I fully admit to not having studied the subject in depth, and am quite willing to be corrected on this point, but the premise of cattlemen fighting statehood is a new one to me. I don't recall having come across it in any of my reading. (If the testimony of another 1960s film of dubious historical accuracy is of any value, the year after Liberty Valance John Wayne appeared in McClintock! as a wealthy cattleman expressing a wish for statehood for his territory.)

For just one example of how points of view and motivations varied: at the close of Land of the Burnt Thigh, Edith Eudora Kohl takes a position "locating" settlers on newly-opened Western land in Wyoming:

Eastern men were forming profit-making corporations to colonize western land. Real estate dealers were organizing colonies. Groups of homeseekers were organizing their own bands. Mr. West had many inquiries from such groups, and he had determined to do his own colonizing. They would want me to go to eastern cities, he said, bring the colonists west, and help locate them satisfactorily.

The locating fees, according to Mr. West, would run into money, and he proposed to give me 50 per cent of the profits... Meanwhile, in the 1915 novel The Flying U's Last Stand, Montana-based author B.M. Bower—who typically wrote from a rancher's point of view—crafted a blistering portrayal of a similar real-estate project, which perhaps coincidentally is run by a female character named Florence Grace Hallman:

Her firm’s policy was, she said, to locate a large tract of government land somewhere, and then organize a homeseekers’ colony, and settle the land-hungry upon the tract—at so much per hunger. She thought it a great scheme for both sides of the transaction. The men who wanted claims got them. The firm got the fee for showing them the land...

For Kohl, who first carefully inquires of her new employer whether the land he's proposing to colonize has the water the settlers will need, the project carries responsibility and high hopes. "What would this mean to the people whom I was to bring west? It was they, not I nor any other individual, whose future must be weighed...I remembered the shaking hands, the faces of the men and women who had lost at the Rosebud Drawing. There was still land for them. Land of their own for tenant farmers, land for the homeless."

Bower's fictional Florence Grace, on the other hand, talks of bringing the land-seekers out at "the psychological time" when the prairie looks prettiest, and inveigling them into settling by showing them brochures touting the land as best for whatever particular crop they're interested in raising. "There’s plenty of land ‘lying around loose,’ as you call it. How do you know it won’t produce, till it has been tried?...My business is to locate them on the land. Getting a living off it is THEIR business."

Two different sides of a coin—or two different perspectives on the same thing? Maybe both. At the very least it demonstrates that the actual business of settling the West was not as simple as the terms of the Homestead Act.

Conclusion

It is, of course, perhaps too much to ask of a feature film to successfully capture the complexity and variety of land issues in the West in two hours. (Considering the slow spots in Liberty Valance's script, there's certainly room for something more to be done, but that's neither here nor there.) What made me uncomfortable about it, though, was the skewed and over-simplified portrayal of Western history coming from a film that almost explicitly presents itself as myth-busting. Would your average 1960s moviegoer have accepted this portrayal as gospel truth?

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is in all its exterior trappings a "traditional" Western: familiar actors, familiar director, familiar styles of sets and music and cinematography. And yet somehow it's not hard to see how the attitudes of its script paved the way for the more openly revisionist films that would come along just a few years down the road.

Next time: Four Faces West (1948), 3:10 to Yuma (1957), and the problem of quasi-accurate literary adaptations.