Where To Watch
Many people, including producer George Schlatter, thought Lorne Greene epitomized the West
He represented the ideal Western hero, and many people agreed.
Between the 1950s and 1970s, the sound of horse hooves and gunfire took over our living rooms. The Western genre had a major rise on television, and it all started with The Lone Ranger in 1949.
It continued with other cowboys, heroes, outlaws, and shootouts in hit series that included Bonanza, The Rifleman, Rawhide, Wagon Train, and more.
At one point, there were more than 30 different Western series airing in primetime during the late ’50s and early ’60s. It was one of the most popular and exciting genres on television. Kids wanted to be like them, and adults wanted to escape with them.
With all the iconic Western stars, no one knew how to cowboy quite like Bonanza’s Lorne Greene. Even producer George Schlatter, best known for his work on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, agreed that Greene was the best man of the Old West.
"It's Lorne Greene's West," Schlatter said in a 1965 interview with The World News. "Who better epitomizes the West than Ben Cartwright?"
Greene played the role of Ben Cartwright on the hit series, Bonanza, from 1959 to 1973. His character was the patriarch of the Cartwright family on Bonanza. He represented the ideal of the Western hero: strong, moral, and deeply principled.
"Cowboys were vitally important to the development of the West," Greene said. "Our country wouldn't have attained the population and civilization it has out here if it hadn't been for the cowboys and cattle. But they don't do tricks with their guns. That was strictly an innovation that started with the movies."
According to Greene, a cowboy’s gun was just as important a piece of equipment as his horse or rope, but it wasn’t realistic.
Many people picture his character, who helped set the tone for how the West should be. In Greene’s mind, the most important takeaway was the Western moral code, which he tried to showcase on TV every week for thousands of viewers.
"The West, as we've seen it on television and in movies, has, of course, vanished, but it survives in the imaginations of people," Greene said. "I'm sure that's why the Western, as an art form, has always been so successful. It's a form of escapism, a time when problems were strictly those of survival and not as highly psychological as those we face today."
Related
11 Comments
People lived the way they lived in the Old West because they didn't know how to live any other way. While the unforgiving nature of the landscape and climate forced some of that on them, the fact is that life in the 19th century ANYWHERE was, by our standards, difficult.
I'd like to draw readers' attention to the 1968 Charlton Heston film "Will Penny"; while most of the film (which is truly excellent) is fairly standard melodrama, the first fifteen minutes or so is almost certainly the most accurate depiction of what it was like to be a REAL cowboy ever put on film: you were always too cold, too hot, you slept on hard ground, made little money, were always mooching food from the chuck wagon because you were always hungry, you had few real friends, and if yoou were injured, or got too old to work, you might as well crawl under a sagebrush and die, because there were no pensiona, no Social Security, and everyone else was too busy trying to survive themselves to know or care about your welfare. It was the antithesis of glamour, a vision of the Old West first popularized by Western writers like Zane Grey and Owen Wister, and then picked up and elaborated on by Hollywood.
The myth is just that: myth. Pure fantasy, and all those guns brought no one anything but death, misery and grief.
In short, George, very few people were so well fixed that they lived on enormous spreads like the Cartwrights and had the luxury of dispensing philosophy along with occasional fusillades of lead.
To be fair, most people know very little about history, as our schools pay scant heed to it,
as well as civics. George Schlatter had success as a producer, doesn't mean he knew beans
about the West, his and Greene's opinions were more in the context of television TV series.
Again, your post was excellent, I would only add that for the average person anywhere,
life didn't really improve till the 20th century and the machine age.
For example the sewing machine, washing machine and vacuum were important inventions as
they saved untold hours of drudgery enabling that time to be better spent.
I was amazed at first when a teacher taught us that in school, but my grandmother
said when she was growing up doing the wash/sewing for their family, it took all day Saturday
and after church Sunday for their farm family of 15. She and her sisters never had a
lazy weekend, life in early 20th century Iowa was hard.
True that, son of Canada Greene, Canada's prairie provinces benefited greatly from the cattle
industry, mining as well.
I always thought there should have been a Canada based Western, strange the CBC
never developed one. Lorne Green was known as "The Voice of Canada".
hire Jackaroos and Jillaroos, young men and women, perhaps on a Gap Year from school,
to work on the stations(ranches). Or just people who want to work there, for the life
experience. Australia is second only to the US for having the highest percentage of it's
people living in cities/suburbs, contrary to what many people think, the Crocodile Dundee
types are scarce indeed.
I hope your better half never wrestled a croc as well.
Still, you'd think by now Canada would have produced at least a couple of great Westerns,
like a Shane or High Noon.
"Shane, eh, come back, eh, Shane, you hoser!"
:)