Westerns

Whatever happened to The Westerns of the 60s and 70s? The John Wayne movies were great and there was just a ton of them. Even Johnny Cash did the gunfight. And then the spaghetti westerns with Clint Eastwood. It just seemed like there was a bunch of them. It was a fairly short time in history but a unique time when the six gun and the repeating rifle changed the way arguments were settled forever. There were lots of wide-open spaces and not too much law. Your horse and your hat were the only things that kept you alive sometimes.

Nowadays it's almost hard to watch some Westerns. The ones that had very little dialogue and these long scenes with people riding around on horses or watching The Horizon or sitting around the campfire. Scenes that depicted the loneliness and the expanse of the West. Nowadays people are sitting waiting for Non-Stop blazing gun battles and dynamite exploding every 5 minutes. The west just wasn't like that.

 I found out recently that some of the places called forts weren't really forts at all. They didn't have an Armory or Canon. They had a lookout up on top to spot people coming to trade. the place kind of looked like a fort it but it was actually a trading post. If it had really been attacked by say a hundred Indians it wasn't defensible. these places were for trading furs. Beaver furs or maybe bear furs once the rifle became popular in the West. My understanding is it really wasn't easy to kill a grizzly bear with a musket. The movies portray every place called a fort to have a bunch of Union Soldiers in blue With yellow bandanas. many of these trading posts didn't have any military benefit. They were never attacked, like in the movies. As the Indian way of life was wiped out these trading posts were abandoned and melted down and have disappeared. Indians could be violent and at times did try to run off the white man by using Force. But generally not at these trading posts. The Trading Posts seemed to have been on the frontier and not heavily populated. The Indians didn't see them as a threat for the most part. Of course overtime more white people came and basically wiped out the Indians. The Indians were not well organized and were no match for European technology.