How the West Wasn’t Won

I love love LOVE watching old Western shows- from the early silent films, to the 30s and 40s matinee series to the 50’s TV shows. They can be dramatic, funny, suspenseful, romantic, corny, high quality or low budget. But whatever the flavor, they seldom reflect reality.

ANIMALS

Horses can gallop hard for 25 miles or more without ever slowing down or even breaking a sweat.

A pair or group of men are travelling through the desert. They briefly stop to talk or look around. Right there in front of each horse is a neat little pile of hay for them to nibble on while they’re waiting to move again.

Someone is running on a horse, and they disappear for half a second behind a big bush or rock. As they emerge into view again, it’s a different horse! This is especially noticeable with pinto horses.

I was highly amused with one low budget western. There were two groups of cowboys at odds with each other. Every time they met up, one group would be on horses and the other group would be lounging around on the ground or something. It was easy to see why. Each group of cowboys had the same group of horses! One horse had a funny shaped marking on it’s face. I started taking note, and sure enough, the exact same group of five horses was being traded between the two groups of cowboys. Apparently the movie budget didn’t extend to ten horses.

Have you ever noticed that horses in Westerns don’t poop? Here we are, going down Main Street in a western town, horses going up and down the road, horses tied to hitching posts, and not a horse plop anywhere in sight. Except in an episode of one show I watched- a horse hitched to a wagon was drawn up on the side of the street in front of a building. And there it was – a pile of poop on the ground right beneath the horse’s butt. It was very noticeable, since you never see that. A few minutes later, the camera panned down the street and caught the same horse in the same spot, except this time, no poop!

Which makes me think of this:

Two guys meet in a bar. One asks the other, “What do you do for a living?”

Says the second guy, “I pick up horse poop off of movie sets”.

Animals are often the wrong gender. A “female” dog is an obvious male. A duck “hen” has the raspy voice of a drake, or a drake quacks like a hen.

One outstanding example is Laura’s “mare” Bunny in Little House on the Prairie. Except Bunny was no mare. In at least two scenes, “his” penis is clearly visible.

Mama cows and their calves don’t know each other.

Cows apparently can also produce milk without being bred.

Cattle are often herded from one place to another with lassos.

Have you ever noticed sheep with bright colors on their backs? Farmers have had crude methods of identifying sheep for at least a few hundred years, but those bright neon colors are modern.

Wild turkeys look like a big plump store bought turkey when baked. In fact, a lot of wild game are awfully plump and tender after being cooked.

Sometimes geese quack or ducks honk.

Chickens tend to stay in a tight little group pecking the ground in the middle until a wagon or horse and rider come flying through and scatter them.

For that matter, modern breeds of chickens that didn’t exist yet are seen in westerns and other historical films. I’m going to write a future post about the history of domestic chickens, but for this post, I’ll only point out a few inaccuracies in westerns and other historical films..

Eggs are commonly gathered in the morning so breakfast can be made. Do movie chickens only lay at night?

The chickens in those flocks are brown egg breeds, but the eggs are large white ones. It happens that large white eggs didn’t exist yet. Those came along decades later after extensive breeding of leghorns by the commercial egg industry.

Chickens also laid year around. Actually, they didn’t.

I could keep going because movies get pretty much everything wrong about chickens, but I’ll spare you.

GUNS & FIGHTING

6-guns have at least 20 bullets.

Guns and rifles are accurate at impossible distances.

Cowboys don’t know how to fight. Sometimes a single little tap knocks them out cold.

When everyone is hiding behind rocks or other obstacles, having a shootout, nobody aims at each other. They just randomly pop up, fire, and pop back down.

During galloping shootouts, bullets are flying and people get shot off the horses, but the horses don’t get hit.

Apparently, you can outrun a mounted ambush in a stagecoach.

BUILDINGS

If you watch real close, you’ll catch these oddities from time to time:

Sometimes it’s night time outside, but the shots from inside a cabin show daytime through the windows, or vice versa

Sometimes the windows you see from the inside of the house or building, are not the same windows you see from outside. The windows will be a different size/shape/placement between the inside and outside, and if there are curtains, you might see different curtains from the outside view than from the inside.

It also seems that window glass was cheap and plentiful back in the old west. No one gives a second thought about breaking windows or throwing people through them.

I also wonder if saloon owners spend every morning on the roof fixing bullet holes.

In a business building with the name painted on the front glass, the font & style is sometimes different depending on whether you’re outside on the sidewalk or inside the store.

Sometimes a character will travel from one town to another, and the second town is the same set as the first! They try to make it look different by changing the signs, and the character will enter the “second” town from the other end or a side street, but it’s definitely the same set.

PROPS

A candle or kerosene lantern can light up a barn like daytime.

Note the multiple spots of lights reflecting on the lamp chimneys (or other glass objects). Those are coming from the Klieg lights behind the cameras.

Firewood logs chopped down with an axe are all the same length and the ends are flat and smooth as a tabletop.

You’ll often see the same props moved from house to house as a scene changes.

You’ll also often see the same interior used for different houses. It’s the same layout and furniture. They just move things around and change a few props.

ANACHRONISMS

I often see modern treaded tire tracks on dirt roads.

Occasionally I see a car in the background on a distant road.

On rare occasions, you might catch a glimpse of a plane in the sky, and often you’ll see contrails.

Sometimes stock footage is from the wrong time period.

Rodeos are most common for this. The cast will be in the stands watching the rodeo. The arena will frequently be shown. It’s obviously stock footage when you see all kinds of modern things, like advertising signs, the way some people in the stands are dressed, etc.

The funniest I saw in one movie- every time the arena was shown, in one corner of the view you could see very modern cars whizzing along a very modern highway.

In one movie I watched, a wagon was travelling down the road, and in the background was a row of long flat-topped metal barns. Such barns didn’t exist in the 1800s. That was a commercial pig or poultry operation.

Anachronisms are usually unintentional, but I’ve seen several silent westerns filmed in the 1920s that really cracked me up. In that time period, a common theme was the rescue of a damsel in distress. In real life, the Roaring 20s was when women were wearing short flapper dresses and bobbed hair.

So, in some of those 1920s westerns that were supposed to take place in the 1800s, all the women are wearing prairie dresses and bonnets- except for the damsel in distress – or should I say flapper in distress – because she’s wearing a short dress and her hair is bobbed! I assume it was done this way because that was THE be-all and end-all height of fashion, and it’s what the audience expected.

PLOT HOLES

Despite the average wage in the mid to late 1800’s being about $1 a day, your average working man has hundreds of dollars to lose in poker games.

You never see anything but hens in the farm flock, but a rooster crows every morning at dawn.

Two or three men are traveling by horseback on a long trip. There’s a bedroll behind each saddle, a canteen and a not-very-big leather pouch hanging from one side of each saddle. But every night when the men make camp, they have pots and pans and cooking implements and dishes, along with a slab of bacon, a bag of flour and coffee. Where did all that stuff come from?

ODDS & ENDS

Good guys have good teeth and they’re clean shaven and dressed nice. Bad guys are often missing a couple of teeth and they’re scruffy and grubby. You would think bad guys would want to be less obvious.

I have come to the conclusion that there was a western theme book of plot outlines that everyone used. Not only do you see the same plot in various series, but sometimes they recycle the same plot in the same series a couple of seasons later, just changing a few details.

I could keep going until I filled a book, but I’ll stop here, except for this one last thing.

This is a screenshot from an old western. What does that sign say?