Shane & Homesteading

Here is a photograph of Ernie Wright's homestead from the movie Shane.


This might help with homesteading.  Here are some effects of homesteading.


Issues in Shane are:
1.  Family
2.  Law: how are contracts protected where there is no law?
3.  Moral Law:  How does a gun-slinger persuade law-abiding farmers of his shootings in self-defense?  Self-defense or no, law-abiding, industrious Christians might have a problem with you.
4.  Good parts about the novel: Men working in cooperation are a lot more productive, production that promises prosperity, and accomplishing goals.
5.  Joe and Marian don't cower against Luke Fletcher's threats.  Fletcher is hoping that his threats will keep the Staretts in their place.  If they had abided by Fletcher's wish, the whole valley would have accepted their actions as morally right, because what is deemed moral is by consensus.

The greatest Western is Shane (1953). Why is it the greatest? Because the constant theme is the life of the common farmer, seeking to live his life peacefully, confronted with a well-armed cattleman. The cattleman got there first. What the movie never says is this: the land was owned by the Federal government. There was a conflict because there were no property rights to land and water.

 

Who had the right of ownership? The cattleman or the farmers? The nearest marshal was a hundred miles away. Each side was represented by a gunfighter: Shane vs. Wilson.

Shane knew his era was over. So did farmer Joe Starrett's wife. But little Joe, the pre-teen, dreamed of the continuation of life with Shane, the righteous hero who could shoot fast and straight. "Shane! Come back!" is the call of pre-teen boys of every era, especially the Victorian era. Heroism had a ready market in 1890. Read any of the 100+ boys' novels written by G. A. Henty in the late nineteenth century. (www.henty.com)

The classic Western presents the representational showdown between good and evil. Both sides represent order. The question is: Whose order? This means: Whose authority? Whose law? Whose sanctions? Whose future? These are what Calvinists call covenantal issues. They are always settled by representatives: God vs. Satan, Eve vs. the serpent, Abel vs. Cain, Moses vs. Pharaoh, David vs. Goliath, Elijah vs. Ahab, Jesus vs. Israel's leaders.


The good guy defends the values of peace by means of the gun. But it is peace that he defends. He recognizes that he lives in an anomalous era and that civilization will reduce gunplay when it arrives and takes hold. But, in the meantime, there are dudes to defend, maidens to defend, families to defend.

The movie is about the clash of cultures: American vs. Indian. It is about the inability of either side to impose order. The Indians are raiders and thieves. The Army is distant. The rangers are not numerous enough. Two men do the searching. Both they and the Indians they pursue are outside the law. 

But they are all men — Victorian men. Is there any feature of the Victorian age that is more fundamental than this: A man taking risky action to defend women? A man who was not willing to risk his life for a woman was not considered a man. A man who fled all violence, unless he was a Quaker or an Amish farmer, was not a man. The essence of the Victorian mindset was this: bourgeois values of peace and justice must sometimes be defended by force of arms — masculine arms.

In an era — ours — in which women serve as equals in the military, such an outlook is politically incorrect. The Western has faded in popularity. Private Lynch has overcome Gary Cooper's Sergeant York and John Wayne's Col. Yorke (Rio Grande).  

The Searchers, 1956

The Searchers is a realistic movie.  John Ford captures American culture, a culture splintered by cultural upheavals due to the War Between the States.  Family decisions force the disruption of blood lines, legacies fall on unexpected and unworthy members, while rage burns men's hearts and their labors into a bleak condition.

Ethan Edwards, the main character played by John Wayne, returns in a Confederate uniform to his brother's farm in Texas at the end of the civil war.  That uniform is symbolic for the original principles of the fathers who founded this Christian country.  Ethan Edwards is disgusted by what his country has become after four years of fighting for liberty.  But the liberty that Ethan faces is not national liberty, but more about personal liberties and the clashes therein that lie within families.  Families of the country have taken it on the chin, and in this movie is more relevant to the 1950's in which it was filmed than the post-War-Between-The-States. 

The Big Country, 1958

Shane, 1953

I watched Shane last night for the first time since I was a kid.  I hadn't seen it in its entirety ever, and the Youtube version had editorial cuts.  Because it was and it is a classic movie and held up like Twain says as something that never gets looked at, I didn't exercise patience enough to watch it.  But it is truly an American classic.  There are so many scenes that capture the American Christian ethic.  There is a scene shortly after Shane arrives on Joe Starett's property.  Shane is about a mysterious gun-slinger who leaves a trail of dead guys behind him.  How do you enter into legitimate society after having killed a dozen or so men mostly in self-defense.  But peaceful, unthinking folks can't trust the reasons for killing from a gunslinger, so self-defense cannot convince and assuage fears and influence of a gunman.  It doesn't; it can't.  No good deed goes unpunished.  But comes to town as a stranger and is welcomed by a peaceful Christian but defenseless family man.  The pity of it is that the Christian can't shoot.  He fends off Ryker's men in the opening scene with an unloaded gun.  But Shane, the gunman and killer, stands by the Christian, by the American homesteader where any interceding law is absent.  And that is the crux of the story: how does one protect and assert the validity of a contract against a gang of contract-busting thieves, like the Obama administration or any socialist collective?  With a gun?  With the law?  There is one line in the movie that I loved: "The law is three-day's ride from here."  The marshal, who is three-day's ride from here, is usually owned in the pocket of big business guys like Ryker anyway.  Cattleman Ryker owns the town, and what others own he lets them.  Then there are those he doesn't let: foreigners or sodbusters.  Ryker doesn't want new-comers.  Doesn't want competition.  Wants to control all commerce and be a mercantilist.  Can't control everything.  When you lose control and you lose power, you call in Jack Palance.  Shane can be most useful in important conflicts with his gun.  So use it.  But Shane's gentle sincerity and his light buckskiin shirt cannot hide the killing and the violence that his past is tattoed with.  Try as he might, he cannot completely shield his past from critics.  In peaceful societies, he can never be accepted in spite of the fact that he delivers them from the clutches of demons like Ryker and Jack Wilson.  Joey and his mom talk about Shane and whether he is a good man or not.  He is.  But that doesn't finish the discussion on him.  The talk about Shane rides on ahead of him and behind him, reverberating for miles over the Grand Tetons.