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).