IM-1776: Man of the West
It ain’t like it used to be… but it’ll do
“My earliest memory is being strapped into a saddle when I was two for a ride up into the high country. We were always close to the mountains, always going back to them. When my grandfather was dying, almost his last words were about the mountains. We loved that country, all of us.” —Sam Peckinpah
100 Years of Peckinpah
A century ago this month, legendary director and screenwriter David Samuel Peckinpah was born.
Everyone knows that Peckinpah revolutionized the Western, but few appreciate his family roots, which had such a tremendous impact on his work. Unlike most directors of Westerns, Sam came from an old-stock pioneer family that included settlers Moses Church, the “Father of Fresno Irrigation,” and Charles Peckinpah, a High Sierra lumberman and the eponym of Peckinpah Mountain.
He grew up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, roping and riding with old-timers who could remember a California without fences. Far from the heroic white-hatted cowboys of golden age Westerns, these were hard men—crude, unsentimental, and morally detached. But they had known the West at its wildest, and the hard-earned virtues they did possess were both admirable and terrifying. In their own silent stubborn way, they mourned the closing of the frontier, and Sam, the artist, learned to mourn with them… and he mourned it all his life.
Born into a frontier society on the cusp of becoming a global empire, Sam was condemned to be a prisoner in what I call that “unsatisfying middle place, where old and new cannot be reconciled and crude reality intrudes on youthful dreams.”
Of course, this limbo gave Sam a powerful creative edge and turned him into a kind of Western tragedian, who not only redefined the genre but ensured its survival as America’s one true artform.
Like his ancestors, Sam was a pioneer whose revolt against the present helped him treclaim the past.
To mark 100 years of Sam Peckinpah, I wrote “Man of the West,” for IM-1776.
An excerpt:
“Sam was no stranger to the harsh realities of country life. He spent his growing-up years at Denver’s ranch, where he learned to rope, ride, hunt, and work like a man. Denver fascinated him, and the old patriarch’s stories of living hard in a land without fences pulled at his heart. The colorful characters Sam was exposed to — the dusty cowboys, bronc riders, and ranch hands — made an indelible impression, and he longed to know the West as they knew it. But the boy was caught between two worlds: a prisoner of that unsatisfying middle place, where old and new cannot be reconciled and crude reality intrudes on youthful dreams.
Sam venerated the men who had tasted the West at its wildest, but the old-timers also embodied the brutality and desperation lurking behind all the romance. These were hard men — unsentimental, rebellious, violent, sometimes cruel. High-minded principles did not move them. If anything, they shared an all-powerful desire to live on their own terms. After all, the West had not been won by poets and artists. The men who tamed a harsh and pitiless wilderness were themselves pitiless and harsh. As an artist, Sam knew he could never really experience the world as they had. The conflict between myth and reality would be his cross to bear, but it would give his art tremendous power and change the Western forever.”
Thanks for reading.
Lee