In a matter of 30 seconds 30 rounds are fired: three cowboys lay dead including Ike Clanton’s brother Billy; Wyatt’s brothers and Doc Holliday are wounded while Ike Clanton gets away. Robert Redford’s The West aka The American West VIII
Wyatt and his men are portrayed as criminals … What Wyatt doesn’t realise is that by staying in Tombstone he is making himself an easy target for Ike Clanton and his gang. ibid.
‘Jesse James is shot in the back of his head by one of his own men.’ ibid. historian
The Indian population, once estimated at over 300,000, has been cut in half. ibid.
South America, 1909: According to this famous film a gun battle claims the life of Butch Cassidy. If the film version is right, who was the mysterious stranger who appeared on a Wyoming road 15 years later? A mysterious stranger who bore a strong resemblance to Butch Cassidy. In Search of s2e21 … Butch Cassidy
It’s my belief that the war in the West is at least as important as the one in the East ... The Union victory at Fort Donelson, for example, lost all of Kentucky for the Confederacy, and most of Tennessee. It saw the emergence of Grant and Bedford Forrest. It was when the northern juggernaut began to roll, and the battle of Shiloh was an attempt to stop it, a desperate attempt to stop it that failed. Shiloh was the first big battle – the first great bloody battle ... The generals didn’t know their jobs, the soldiers didn’t know their jobs. It was just pure determination to stand and fight and not retreat. Shelby Foote, The Civil War narrative
Sergio Leone established a rule that he follows throughout The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The rule is that the ability to see is limited by the sides of the frame. At important moments in the film, what the camera cannot see, the characters cannot see, and that gives Leone the freedom to surprise us with entrances that cannot be explained by the practical geography of his shots. There is a moment, for example, when men do not notice a vast encampment of the Union Army until they stumble upon it; a moment in a cemetery when a man materializes out of thin air even though he should have been visible much sooner; the way men walk down a street in full view and nobody is able to shoot them (maybe because they are not in the same frame with them). Roger Ebert
The West is hated for good reason. Noam Chomsky, interview March 2011
The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion … but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do. Samuel P Huntingdon