The good, the bad and the ugly

This week's column is by Online Editor Mike Pilewski.

One of my favorite sayings, and one I try to repeat often, is: "These are the good old days."

Think about it: a few months, years or decades from now, this very moment will be part of the past. And more often than not, the past is colored by nostalgia. One day, you will wistfully remember those minutes you spent each week reading columns in English on this website.

In all seriousness, though, memory is a very selective thing. The sands of time filter out most of our experiences, which are simply average. We remember mainly the good, the bad and the ugly. Our own actions reinforce this: What possessions do we hang on to? What stories do we tell others about our past experiences? And how do those stories change each time we tell them?

I mention "the good, the bad and the ugly" for a reason: it's the title of a classic western film. Few periods in history have been romanticized as much as the Wild West. They called it that for a reason: it was a lawless environment, full of violence and danger. Would anyone alive today really want to live in it?

The fact that we remain fascinated with the Old West has to do not with what it was, but with what it represented: the last area to be settled, the last hope for explorers and fortune-seekers outside of civilization. How adventurous life must have been then!

As I write on the History pages of the May Spotlight, the Wild West existed for a very short time — only 20 years out of the 400-year history of what is now the United States. Even as it was happening, it was disappearing. The fact that we remember it at all is the result of writers, photographers and collectors trying, at the last minute, to record what they could before it was all gone.

"Buffalo Bill" Cody brought together a troupe of performers in the 1890s who could show people what life in the American West had been like. The horse riders, sharpshooters and cowboys fascinated audiences in other parts of the country and even in Europe.

As I said, though, what persists is not so much the reality of something, but the memory of it. One of the most important parts of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show was a storyteller known as Calamity Jane. Any job a person could have had in the West, Jane had had it. Any kind of adventure, she'd experienced it. Any heroic deed, she'd done it. Any famous person one could have known, she'd known him. That was all according to her, of course.

I call her the Forrest Gump of the Old West. The feelings and emotions that we have about the Old West are part of a tradition that she and her stories — whether they were true or not — began.

I invite you to read my short biography of Calamity Jane in this month's History section — and, years from now in a wave of nostalgia, to remember just how good the May Spotlight was.
 

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