Part One — The Western Explodes
The Western, as a film genre, dates back to the beginning of motion pictures. As soon as filmmakers figured out how to crank a camera, they put a cowboy hat on someone and had him shoot a revolver. It was a great staple of early films allowing studios to shoot outside in the natural light and to tell simplistic stories that were easy to get across without much dialogue.
After some time relegated to second and third-tier popcorn-throwing fare, the Western’s golden age began in 1939 with the release of John Ford’s Stagecoach which is one of the first examples — certainly the most prominent — of the genre being treated seriously. It also puts together the director and actor that will become the most recognizable team in Western history: John Ford and John Wayne.
After two decades of treating the Western as lightweight, B-picture, pablum, John Wayne spins his rifle and stops the racing stagecoach with a single look and Westerns become the most lucrative entertainment in America. Not only do they become hugely popular, but they also take on a air of being — at least related to — actual history.
But why is the mythology like this? Where did it all come from? It bears little relation to history and yet the country accepted — almost seems to have been craving — the Wayne/Ford version of the frontier as part of its ur-narrative.
Kids dress up like cowboys and recreate the Black Hat versus White Hat ballet with cap-guns and rifle-shaped sticks in fields and sandlots across the country. Westerns dominate the movies and radio and, later, television. Soon a producer of cartoons will decide, as part of a larger scheme, to recreate the Western in three-dimensional space, taking the earlier work of folks like Walter Knott and exploding it in both size and richness.
Disneyland’s Frontierland purports some educational value and asserts a vision of frontier life in the 1800s which both Walt Disney and the makers of Westerns of the time believed to be a reasonable reflection of history, but it was not. Why did they think that? Why did America believe that this was the way the West was won?
Part Two — The Frontier of Frederick Jackson Turner
Frederick Jackson Turner (November 14, 1861 — March 14, 1932) was a Harvard professor who, though his name may not be common knowledge, ranks amongst the most influential American historians — for better or for worse.
Turner’s theory, primarily exemplified in his 1893 paper The Significance of the Frontier in American History, describes the “Frontier Line” — the boundary between what Americans considered civilization to the East and the “savagery” of the West — as a sort of crucible upon which American democracy and American identity was forged.
“American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West.” — Frederick Jackson Turner
Turner believed that, in a bid to stay economically and politically liberated from the “elites” in the East, the frontiersman must venture further and further away, continually facing new challenges and surmounting them, forcing a kind of rapid evolution of the rugged individual which then, he believes, begins to take over the character of the American population as a whole.
This character exemplifies the cowboy at the center of the popular Western. He is always standing on the border of savagery and civilization. His wisdom and honor have been formed through adaptation and hardship. His thirst for freedom — open spaces and solitude — is unquenchable.
He is John Wayne’s Ringo Kid and John Wayne’s Tom Doniphon and John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards (but we’ll get back to that one later).
By the 1900s even Turner seemed to turn his back on his famous paper, refusing to defend it and insisting on new directions in his work, but his theory had already stuck. As we’ll see, eventually a lot of the country would start to question its validity, condemn its racism and push back on the whole “manifest destiny” thing; but that would come much later and, when Walt Disney was fabricating his fake frontier in Anaheim, he would — as would every kid who’d grown up in that generation — certainly have still been assuming that 1893 Turner was right.
Part Three — The Birth of Frontierland
“Frontierland. It is here that we experience the story of our country’s past. The color, romance and drama of frontier America as it developed from wilderness trails to roads, riverboats, railroads and civilization. A tribute to the faith, courage and ingenuity of our hearty pioneers who blaze the trails and made this progress possible.” — Walt Disney, July 17, 1955
A point came after World War II when Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier theory began to be questioned, but it still remained a solid basis of American history education for school kids well into the 1980s. Walt Disney would certainly have had this as the background for his beliefs about 1800s westward expansion. Since he was in the film industry and film Westerns were so deeply influenced by Turner’s philosophy, it is likely that the building of Frontierland was very much a result of Turner refracted through the lens of the popular genre. It is important to remember the Turner piece of that equation. Walt Disney was not only bringing the popular film genre to life; he would’ve been taught, thanks to Turner, that the stories and characters in those films reflected reality in a useful way.
The Western, during the period in which Walt was building Disneyland, would not remain static, however. Filmmakers such as John Ford were starting to rethink how they’d been interpreting the history that they had popularized. It is much easier for modern people to look at Frederick Jackson Turner’s work and see its racist blind spots — people were obviously already living west of that Frontier Line when the Europeans got there, and they were not “savages,” and, even if one could ignore the immoral massacres of these groups of people, the crucible that somehow evolved the eccentricities of the American character had no such effect on the people already there leading one to wonder if it was a crucible at all — but it is remarkable that some filmmakers of the time, making their fortunes off of the myth of the Western, were waking up to its problematic issues, long before most of the rest of the country did.
This was a remarkable period for these sorts of films. In 1956, mere months after the opening of Disneyland, Ford’s The Searchers was about to be released. Almost a condemnation of Ford’s own earlier films, particularly Stagecoach, the movie, in a symbolic gesture, attempted to retire the mythological character that John Wayne had been playing for almost two decades. It attempted to take the most potent of representatives of Turner’s rugged individualist, and put him to pasture.
If that weren’t enough, a few years later Ford directed The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1960) which called the entirety of the mythology of the film Western into question.
“You’re not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?”
“No, sir. This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” — The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Walt was building his park just as this transition was happening. He had been having astonishing success with his own Western television series based on a fictionalized life of Davy Crockett and was trying to capture that lightning in a bottle for Frontierland. While the revisionists were already stirring the pot by this point, Disney’s Frontierland was going to attempt remain rooted in Turner’s frontier theories.
But he could not remain immune to the state of change around him. The Golden Age of the genre changed it into something very different.
There is an effect that filmmakers and photographers refer to as the “Magic Hour.” It is a quality of light that only happens for a short time before the sun goes down and the effect, when captured on film, is inexplicably wondrous; the object captured by the camera seems to be a bit more of itself than it would be at any other time of day.
Walt built his Frontierland in the Magic Hour of the Western. Within five years of the park opening, the genre traditionalists would no longer be the driving force and Westerns would become something recognizable, but different. But for that moment of transition, from the light to the dark, Walt captured something instantly familiar to anyone of that time; but a heightened, inexplicably wondrous, version of it.
Frontierland, more than any other section of the park, thrived. It was alive.
Part Four — Frontierland: Greater than the Sum
The early Frontierland, like much of the rest of Disneyland, came on in stages. Over the next five years — the time in which the American Western film genre was busily picking apart its own threads and then weaving them into new patterns — Disney’s new frontier was fitted with attractions inspired by Disney’s own Davy Crockett and True Life Adventures, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the musical Westerns Calamity Jane (1953) (Frontierland’s Golden Horseshoe Saloon was an exact copy of the saloon in that film.) and Destry Rides Again (1939); and even more traditional westerns like 1946’s My Darling Clementine (The Frontierland Shootin’ Gallery is set in Boot Hill, the Arizona cemetery where the victims of the gunfight of the O.K. Corral are buried.)
Somehow this environment coalesced into something that worked — a recently settled western town on the edge of a frontier that was either river or desert or forests, depending on which direction you were facing, with a sense of vibrancy to it. Much of that vibrancy’s heavy lifting was being done by Wally Boag, the breakout star of The Golden Horseshoe Revue, letting his act spill out into the streets of Frontierland with comedy and the occasional shootout with the local Marshall, or the local bad guys — whoever was available when he felt like doing it. Boag, as well as a few other live musical performers, were tying the environment together.
It’s hard to say why this all worked and continued to work for a very long time, but these were all pieces of American mythology that, in a large way due to Frederick Jackson Turner, Americans recognized as pieces of themselves, at least aspirationally. These forts, both the mock-up walls at the land’s entrance and Fort Wilderness on Tom Sawyer’s Island were going to protect guests from the savagery of the wilderness outside, but if one wanted to go on an adventure past the protected town, they could. Boarding the Mark Twain would take them out into one kind of wooded wilderness and hopping on one of the varieties of transportation headed to Nature’s Wonderland would bring a whole different kind of adventure past the frontier line.
Part Five — The First Step in Recovery Is to Admit You Have a Problem
The move away from Turner’s frontier thesis had begun after World War II and was all but finished by the late-1970s. Westerns had taken a hard left turn by dealing much more directly with the violence that had previously been sanitized: in Europe with a sort of giddy embracing of it through the Spaghetti Western and in the U.S. through angry, almost accusatory takes via directors like Sam Peckinpah. Those that didn’t go that way looked for irony (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) or to mesh with current popular culture (Ride the Whirlwind/McCabe and Mrs. Miller) or for absolution (Little Big Man). It became clear that the status quo for Westerns was no longer working and, lining right up with the diminishment of Turner from the classroom, the traditional Western faded away.
This leaves Frontierland, opened in the thick of the genre’s dissolution at Walt Disney World in Florida and some decades past the primacy of its source material in Anaheim’s Disneyland, cast adrift. If the myth on which the Land is founded is no longer the prevailing one, what is this thing?
Former Imagineer and Disney Legend Tony Baxter made a Hail Mary pass to keep Frontierland relevant in the late ’70s and, in doing so, made one of the best arguments for its continued validity with Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. With a cartoonish experience that involves ghosts, magic, dynamite, and Native American curses the roller coaster seemed to be a kind of non-confrontational reckoning with the white-washing of the past and also recognized the mythology of the frontiersman for what it was: fantasy.
It was a similar argument that Baxter had tried to make with his New (New) Tomorrowland at Disneyland in 1998 (before the project got de-funded): the serious reality of the future was an ever-moving target and could not hold fast for very long and thus it was a better idea to show a version of the future that was brazenly fantastic. Similarly, popular understanding of the past is often also a moving target and, as scholars learn more and popular understanding follows behind, a fixed structure dedicated to telling the earlier version of the story becomes a contradiction.
All bets are off, though, if the contradiction is presented as fantasy and the fantasy themes are, within themselves, consistent. The Mark Twain Riverboat is a real boat and its lesson is taught without a knowing wink. The Golden Horseshoe Revue, while a silly show, was intended to be representative of a kind of nineteenth-century entertainment purported to be real (which it wasn’t, but that’s another story). The Indian Village, while clearly exploitative or not, was at least manned by Native Americans who were showing their culture to the park guests; these were not Hollywood actors. Nature’s Wonderland was peppered with visual jokes but was a tie-in to an actual series of educational documentaries.
In 1979, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad came and blew all attempts at realism out of the water showing the path away from the mire of educational pretense that Frontierland had been stuck in for a long time.
Part Six — Forging a New Past
So, whither the Disney frontier today?
Both the Frontierland in Disneyland Park and the Frontierland in Magic Kingdom in Florida are gorgeous parcels of scenery, particularly at night, but long-term indecision by the company continues to erode their identities. The saloons that occupied such a prominent place in both parks are now both Revue-less quick service restaurants. The Mark Twain Riverboat is still running, though the narration presses to further ally the boat with New Orleans Square and its more exotic attractions as if it is too grand to be a part of the withering Land of its origin. Tom Sawyer Island in Disneyland has shrunk and its once mighty Fort Wilderness has been turned into a bathroom. In Florida, The Country Bear Jamboree has been refreshed and is, by all accounts, a very nice show, but that show, an animatronic variant of ’60s phenomenon Hee-Haw (even going so far as to use ’60s songs from Buck Owens, one of the show’s hosts), hardly represents the taming of the frontier in the 1800s and was never a good fit for Frontierland. The Davy Crockett Explorer Canoes run every once in a while in Anaheim, but have been gone for decades in Florida. Magic Kingdom recently shut down its version of the Frontierland Shootin’ Arcade which could be read as simply another step in the long-term removal of guns from the parks that started in the mid-2010s, but, with its conversion to a Disney Vacation Club lounge, feels more like a cash grab on what seemed, to the company, irrelevant space.
And, in both parks, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad is Frontierland’s sole remaining E-Ticket attraction (as well as being the only attraction in any Disney park recognized as a valid medical procedure.)
Let’s be clear, Frontierland in the domestic parks is not going anywhere. Not only has Disney shown little appetite for any move that disruptive since the building of Galaxy’s Edge, but the blow-back from patrons and pundits would add fuel to a political fire that they are working hard to put out right now. The lack of new direction for the Land does amount to a sort of table veto, though. Frontierland is a pathway to Big Thunder, a place with some food, a place to sit for Fantasmic, and not much else for most casual parkgoers.
It has become untethered from its source because the source itself, Frederick Jackson Turner through the lens of the Western film, has become recognized as invalid. But Tony Baxter — or, more accurately, Imagineer Marc Davis through the lens of Tony Baxter — has shown the Disney parks a way by treating the myth of the frontier as myth.
Fill the land with performers telling tall tales; let’s face it, Pecos Bill and Slue Foot Sue have long hung in the background of the place. Let it be a land out of time with larger-than-life characters. Think Yosemete Sam more than Samuel Clemens. For that matter, think Adventureland more than the Gene Autry Museum. Go big. Go funny. Add ghosts! (Sorry Mr. Knott, but you can’t trademark ghost towns.) The Land has never been an actual representation of history, and it is time to let that be okay.
Consider the long-lamented, much-missed, Adventurer’s Club that used to delight guests of Walt Disney World in the ’90s. Every element was overwrought and very very funny — from the brilliant character actors to the talking tikis and totems to the resident ghost piano player. It was a liar’s version of history that enveloped the guest, and Frontierland — still clinging to a truth that was never truth — should be trying for the same. It would hardly need new attractions, just some tweaking of pre-existing ones by adding performers and a few rudimentary animatronics, and, of course, a new show on that beautiful Golden Horseshoe stage.
Let the frontier in Frontierland become loud and brash and funny and gloriously fake. And leave the dang Frontierland Shootin’ Exposition alone, ya hear me?!
And if a young guest walks out of the experience wondering what westward expansion in the 1800s was really like, wonderful. That’s when the learning can really begin.
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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for Boardwalk Times
