ABSTRACT
As broadcast in colourful fashion by western movies from High Noon to The Wild Bunch, the gun looms large in the culture and mythology of the American frontier. In the movie Winchester ’73, ‘the gun that won the West’ earned top billing alongside James Stewart, its biography serving as the basis for an expansive cinematic narrative. In 2011, the Colt single-shot pistol – the so-called ‘Peacemaker’ – was formally recognised by the Arizona legislature as an official ‘state weapon’. Machinations of celluloid and modern politics aside, firearms have long been valorised as iconic relics of the nineteenth-century West, a continuation of earlier frontiering motifs but imprinted with a monumental and histrionic geography of continental acquisition, identity politics and a national creation story wrought through Manifest Destiny. From dime novels to dioramas, lithographs to live shows, firearms were celebrated as agents of American might and right, gleaming markers of technological supremacy, individualism and masculinity in the broader project of westward expansionism. According to hunter and ‘Wild West’ showman, Buffalo Bill Cody, a man expertly placed to comment on the fantasy architecture of the frontier and its most striking props, the gun (alongside the axe, the Bible and the schoolbook) carried the aspirations and the power of the American nation across the plains to the Pacific. Trapper Jim Bridger remained unconvinced by spiritual assistance, yet effusively confident in the almighty providence of firepower as an armament to the frontier project: ‘the grace of God won’t carry a man through these prairies, it takes powder and ball.’ In the American theatre, the gun boasted a decidedly western genealogy. 1
