The iconic video game Red Dead Redemption II traverses vast swaths of North America’s geography. It follows the journey of the van der Linde gang through the cotton fields of the Deep South, through the coal-mining towns of southern Appalachia, through the sugar cane plantations of a Caribbean island, and, of course, across the wind-blown prairies and snowy mountains of the West. But in every advertisement for the game and in nearly every media review of it, only one of those regions claims the spotlight. Rockstar Games’ promotional materials promise a game about “the end of the Wild West era.” Gaming websites do the same, with IGN describing the game as a “sprawling Western tale.” GameSpot titled their review “Wild Wild West,” while PC Gamer’s review headline boasted that “the old west feels brand new again.”
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This near-universal decision to foreground the game’s western-ness was not inevitable. Of the ninety-six main story missions in Red Dead Redemption II (by my count), only a thin majority of fifty-one take place in a western setting, while forty-five are set in the Deep South, Appalachia, or the Caribbean. Why then is the game almost exclusively classified as a western? It is due to the simple fact that in American popular culture, there are no established genres called “southerns,” “Appalachians,” or “Caribbeans.” But for more than a century, there have been a jaw-dropping preponderance of “western” films, TV series, comics, novels, and, of course, games. Both the producers and reviewers of Rockstar’s game knew that of all the regions it showcases, only one is a deep-rooted genre and a national obsession.
For well over a century, Americans have marveled at the supposed “wildness” of the West while also worrying that it was rapidly coming to an end.
At the heart of Red Dead Redemption II’s western narrative is a familiar story. From the splash screen text that opens the single-player adventure—“by 1899…the West had mostly been tamed”—the game declares its intention of showcasing a fading West, an “Old” West giving way to a “New” West. Throughout their journey, almost every member of the van der Linde gang waxes nostalgic about the era of unbounded western possibility that they believed was then coming to an end. Early on, we hear Arthur Morgan, our rugged and stoic protagonist, lament the onslaught of “more and more civilization” and his yearning to “get back in the open country, or the West, or what’s left of it, and even that ain’t the way I remember it.” The ending of an era—that is the basic story of the game. As it turns out, it’s also one of the oldest stories Americans have told about the West. For well over a century, Americans have marveled at the supposed “wildness” of the West while also worrying that it was rapidly coming to an end, uncertain what this closing might mean for the American character.
Does such a narrative make sense? This chapter explores the American obsession with the West. Together, we’ll try to answer: what exactly is the West? Why have people been fascinated by it for so long, yet so quick to declare its supposed closing or waning? These dilemmas cut right to the heart of American culture and might shed light on the strange nation that the game seeks to capture.
First off: what’s in a name? We rarely question geographic containers like “the West.” Folks might dispute the precise boundaries of their West—Is the Mississippi River or the edge of the Great Plains the eastern boundary? Do coastal cities like Los Angeles or Seattle truly belong?—but few would challenge the idea that there is a wide swath of land that should be called “the West.” After all, it’s the western half of North America, right? Actually, not so simple. When we name a place by a geographical direction, we unconsciously communicate our own bias and positionality. Whether we know it or not, we are implicitly signaling a center that we are placing our subject in relation to. In other words, directional names are not neutral.
Consider a parallel example. If you grew up in the United States, you were almost certainly raised to think about “the South” as a particular corner of the country, known for its sweet tea, drawling speech, and hospitality, and one roughly filling in the geographic triangle between Texas, Florida, and Virginia. As a result, most Americans would raise an eyebrow if a foreign tourist walked up and asked whether California or Arizona was in “the South.” Of course not, Americans would chuckle; those states are in the West. Yet the tourist would insist that those states are in the southern half of the United States, and they would be undeniably right. And the tourist might wonder: why is it that these strange Americans say “South” when they really mean “Southeast”? What facilitates this bizarre logic is the subconscious assumption among most Americans that the Eastern Seaboard is the backbone of the nation, and that all directional indicators stem from that.
Similarly, when we call a place like Montana or Kansas “the West,” we are implicitly signaling that our point of reference is the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, and that those places should be understood in relation to it. And perhaps that makes natural sense in the twenty-first century, but historically, it holds little water. During most of the past five centuries, to think of the land west of the Mississippi River as “the West” would have been nonsensical.
Instead, that swath of land had been known by a range of alternate directional names, each communicating a different spatial relationship. For several centuries under Spanish colonial and then Mexican national control, our region of study would have been called “the North”—the upper frontier of either New Spain or Mexico. The point of reference here would have been Mexico City, the administrative heart of the Spanish and Mexican states, not Washington, D.C. Then, to the French, whose colonial reach extended well past the Mississippi River but whose base of operations was in modern-day Canada, perhaps our region would be called “the South.” Or to the thousands of Chinese immigrants who entered our region, it was perhaps “the East,” a distant land across the Pacific Ocean.
But the most important directional identifier, and one that is too often forgotten nowadays, is that for the millions of Indigenous Americans who inhabited this territory before and after European contact, their home was neither “north,” “south,” “east,” nor “west”—it was “the center.” They did not define themselves in relation to some distant central power but to their own institutions, whether they were Lakota, Apache, Comanche, Arapaho, or other. For centuries, diverse Native peoples were the ones who called the shots in this region. They called their homelands by many names, but “the West” sure wasn’t one of them.
The very first inklings of a “West” only began in 1803, when the French sold their Louisiana Territory to the young United States for the bargain-basement price of $15 million. (Napoleon only agreed to this deal because enslaved Haitians had recently revolted and won their independence, and the French no longer needed North American lands to feed the crown jewel of its Caribbean empire.) Now, with the stroke of a pen, much of the Great Plains and current-day Midwest fell under formal U.S. jurisdiction. However, on the ground, Native people still dominated the region. Most were unaware of the newly expanded maps in Washington, and those who learned of the new boundaries knew they were just lines on paper, representing wishful thinking rather than reality.
American claims to their “West” were further bolstered in the 1840s. First, the British government ceded control of the Oregon Territory to the U.S. Then the Americans fought a nasty, invasive war against their southern neighbor from 1846 to 1848, which resulted in the carving off of around 55 percent of Mexico’s national domain. From this point on, Americans would talk about “the West” in roughly the same terms and language that we use today. But the capture of this territory within U.S. boundaries did not immediately reorient the life of the region toward the dictates and demands of the Eastern Seaboard. For many decades following the 1840s, this area remained “the center,” inhabited and controlled primarily by Native nations. It would only be over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century that “the West” came to eclipse other directional identities, truly coming into the orbit of the Eastern Seaboard.
“The West” had to be made, and it had to displace rival cartographies—accomplished at the business end of a gun barrel, with the spilling of a great deal of blood. And it was made fairly recently, about a century and a half ago.
Yet here’s a strange quirk. For nearly as long as Americans have been discussing and debating “the West,” they have obsessively foregrounded one dilemma: that the sun was setting upon it, not just literally but metaphorically. Americans worried that the unique wildness of the West was rapidly fading, that its raw grittiness was being smoothed out, and that the consequences of the West’s taming would be far-reaching and not all positive.
We can see this narrative in the very first “Western”: a 1902 novel titled The Virginian by Harvard-educated writer Owen Wister, which tells the story of an eastern transplant on the 1870s Wyoming range. With a smoking revolver in hand, the Virginia-born protagonist takes on cattle rustlers and lawlessness, helping to establish business-friendly order and progress on the range, after which he retires his six-gun and settles down for a life of peace in a tamed West. This enormously influential book inspired many imitators and spin-offs in the decades to come. In classic mid-twentieth- century films like The Magnificent Seven (1960) or The Wild Bunch (1969), the gunslinger heroes are fish out of water, pushed aside by the steamroller of capitalist modernity. And of course, in both Red Dead Redemption games, the van der Linde gang represents the last gasp of lawlessness that was being contained by the Pinkertons, Washington, and the U.S. Army. Same basic story, different iterations.
But the original blueprint of a fading Wild West is even older than The Virginian. Indeed, if we want to find the “ground zero” moment for this obsession, we would look to 1893, just a few years before Arthur Morgan begins his adventure. We would need to time-warp to one of the grandest spectacles in American history: the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. There, among the sparkle and the fireworks, the oohs and aahs, was born the lasting Western myth that gives the basic shape to Red Dead Redemption II.
In late-nineteenth-century America and Europe, what drew massive crowds was not sporting events, films, or concerts but the series of world’s fairs hosted in cities like London (1851), Philadelphia (1876), and Paris (1889). In these elaborately staged expositions, millions of fairgoers flocked to see inventors and hucksters showcase the wonders of the modern era, from the light bulb to the telephone to the Eiffel Tower. And perhaps no fair was more grandiose than Chicago’s 1893 exposition, which ran from May to October. The timing was symbolic. It was meant to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World.
To suit the momentous occasion, Chicago constructed a vast fairground almost two square miles in size, filled it with ornate white plaster buildings, and promised a star-studded lineup of unveilings and demonstrations. The Ferris wheel made its debut amid the lights of the exposition, alongside the zipper, Wrigley’s gum, and Cracker Jack popcorn. The Pabst brewery won a blue ribbon in the fair’s beer contest, which they still haven’t quit boasting about. The exposition sold a whopping 27.5 million tickets, which would be impressive by any measure, but even more jaw-dropping when you consider that the U.S. population was just over 60 million at the time. Hoping to see what all the fuss was about, Americans from every corner of the nation thronged Chicago, alongside millions of foreign visitors.
Given its striking popularity, it’s not surprising that the fair would make a lasting impact on American culture. Yet it was not the Cracker Jacks or Ferris wheel that would leave the biggest dent. Instead, the greatest impact would come with a buttoned-up event that few fairgoers paid much attention to at the time: a conference of professional historians. That July, the American Historical Association, a professional organization founded just a decade earlier, hosted their annual meeting in Chicago, timed to coincide with the fair. Over a few days, a group of self-important white men lectured and discussed the meaning of the American past. And though most of the proceedings of the conference have been consigned to the dustbin of history, one presentation would have vast reverberations. Late on the afternoon of July 12th, Frederick Jackson Turner, a relatively unknown and rather nervous mustachioed junior professor in his early thirties from the University of Wisconsin, took his place at the lectern and delivered an address titled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” The lecture was brief and the room was hardly crowded, with just over thirty attendees. Yet in time, it would come to be known by millions.
Turner’s argument that afternoon was rather blunt. What defined the American experiment, he declared, was not the North-South conflict over slavery or the transplanting of European institutions, as some of his colleagues had argued. Instead, it was the nation’s perpetual westward expansion. The backbone of the American character, Turner argued, was born from the recurring cycles of a people taming the empty wilderness as they marched west. Americans were a people in motion, relentlessly transforming a rugged, primitive frontier of “free land”—his words—into settled, productive civilization. And this process, more than any other in Turner’s view, had given Americans their unique identity. It had made them both individualistic and egalitarian, averse to the social hierarchies of Europe with its dukes and earls lording over the unwashed masses. It had made Americans hardy, entrepreneurial, and more committed to democracy than any other people. Turner’s argument, at its essence, was that the frontier is what made America great. It was a feel-good, back-patting assertion, and one that would only make sense to white, English-speaking men. To Native peoples or Spaniards or African Americans (or even white women!), the heroic tale of brave pioneer patriarchs single-handedly taming a vacant frontier would have been laughable. In the 1893 lecture hall where the argument debuted, though, none were present to laugh.
But Turner had not come to Chicago solely to applaud Americans for their unique greatness. He came with a dire warning. The frontier experience, which had so decisively made Americans who they were, was then rapidly coming to an end. Spurring this belief was a brief declaration made three years earlier in the 1890 decennial U.S. Census report: that for centuries “the country had a frontier of settlement, but at the present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.” Those words, Turner declared ominously, “mark the closing of a great historic movement.” As he understood it, the relentless pace of white settlement had, by 1890, put the final nail in the frontier’s coffin. Population densities had risen enough to warrant “civilization” and eastern institutions had taken root. For Turner, this was a grave prognosis. For if Americans had gained their independent, free-spirited, and egalitarian identity through the frontiering process, what would become of them after its end? What would make America great in its absence?
The young professor concluded his address and anxiously looked out to the crowd. There was tepid applause, and not a single question. Perhaps after many long hours in their seats, the attendees were just eager to be done for the day. Turner, dejected, shuffled back to his rented room, “burdened with a heavy sense of failure,” according to his biographer.
But in the months and years ahead, Turner’s lecture would have a second life. It would be printed and reprinted, read and reread. In the words of another historian, Turner’s argument “rolled through the universities and into popular literature as a tidal wave.” By the 1910s and 1920s, the “frontier thesis”—Turner’s twofold claim that the frontier defined the American character but had closed by 1890—was a household phrase, taught in high schools and colleges across the nation. Turner became the most renowned and influential historian in the nation, relocating in 1910 from Wisconsin to Harvard University. For generations after 1893, the frontier thesis became synonymous with western history, and it continues to cast a shadow today. The name “Frederick Jackson Turner” does not appear in the credits for Red Dead Redemption II, but perhaps in fairness it should.
In the Red Dead Redemption games, the West wasn’t won—it was robbed, deceived, and cheated.
Turner’s argument was influential, but that does not mean it was correct, coherent, or anything but hot air. Indeed, since the 1980s, the Turner thesis has been shredded by a new generation of scholars. Once the king of the historians, Turner has been decisively dethroned. Most obviously, critics have pointed to Turner’s unabashed ethnocentrism and neglect of Native perspectives, alongside his exclusion of the rival cartographies of “center,” “north,” “east,” and others in favor of an inevitable white English-speaking “west.” And there’s the hollow claim of American uniqueness—Germany, Russia, and China, among others, have their own theories of frontier expansion instilling national greatness. And of course, there’s Turner’s overconfident declaration that 1890 marked the pivot when chaotic wilderness gave way to harmonious, law-abiding civilization in the West. Even the U.S. Census Bureau, whose 1890 declaration Turner used as fodder for his argument, admitted that their obituary of the frontier was premature in their reports of 1900 and 1910, where they reinstated a frontier line on western maps and walked back their earlier claim. And chaos, violence, and unrest certainly endured past 1890; indeed, it spiked in many regions. As future chapters will explore, some of the bloodiest battles for the future of the West took place between the 1890s and 1920s.
All of this should prompt us to wonder: if Turner’s argument was so bogus, why then did it reverberate as widely as it did after 1893? It did so because it affirmed white Americans’ sense of self. Who doesn’t want to be told what makes them uniquely great among the peoples of the world? But even more importantly, it spoke to their anxieties during the turn-of-the-century period. Particularly, Turner’s thesis about the closing of the frontier dovetailed with the looming sense of dread felt by many white, urban, well-to-do men of his day. It’s a constellation of fears that I’ll call the great American identity crisis.
Let’s recognize first of all that this was a perceived crisis more than a real one, and one that should be approached with great skepticism. But here’s the gist of it. By the 1890s, countless commentators worried that white American manhood was imperiled. Their idealized sense of masculinity was seemingly under threat from all sides. Americans had by then lived in peacetime for about thirty years, and the veterans of the Civil War generation were graying or dying off. With so many men believing that war provided masculine fulfillment, this lasting peace stoked fears of decline and degeneration. Then there was the rising women’s suffrage moment, which was winning steady victories by the 1890s and stood poised to challenge men’s monopoly on political power. Moreover, urbanization was transforming American life in ways that made some uncomfortable. In the decades after the Civil War, millions of Americans had left farms and entered the booming metropolises of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and beyond. In those big cities, many men, and particularly well-off ones, found themselves doing radically different work. Instead of plowing fields, binding bushels of wheat, or slaughtering pigs—all muscular, bodily undertakings—many middle-class men found themselves behind a desk, engaged in decidedly non-muscular pursuits: balancing ledger books, dictating letters, or typing reports. Was this work fit for a man, observers wondered? And if not, what kind of men was it making?
The future of the West also figured into the great American identity crisis. And to understand how, we must turn to the one figure whose career best illuminates their intersection: Theodore Roosevelt, president of the U.S. from 1901 to 1909. In addition to being a statesman and a soldier, Roosevelt was an obsessive chronicler and philosopher of American manhood. Born in 1858 to a wealthy New York City family, Roosevelt was raised in the lap of urban luxury. Yet as a sickly and asthmatic child, he was often sent west to recuperate in the clean air of the mountains and plains. His adolescence, spent either in rigorous gymnastics classes or on ranches in the Dakotas, convinced him first that rugged masculinity was essential to the American character, and secondly, that the frontier West was the secret to preserving it. Until his death in 1919, Roosevelt would expound endlessly on the dangers of “over-civilization” and the necessity of living what he called “the strenuous life.” He came to see an untamed West as the vital safety valve that could provide that life, allowing American men to blow off the steam of urban civilizational excess.
Therefore, Turner’s frontier thesis bit deep into Roosevelt’s psyche. He quickly wrote Turner fan mail, in 1894. “You have struck some first-class ideas,” the future president gushed, and “have put into definite shape a good deal of thought which has been floating around rather loosely.” Turner’s argument would decisively shape Roosevelt’s bombastic pseudohistory The Winning of the West, which he published that decade. But Turner’s influence also shaped Roosevelt’s actions. As he charged up San Juan Hill in Cuba during the Spanish-American War in 1898, he understood the U.S. push for a Caribbean empire as opening a new frontier beyond the borders of the United States. (Dutch van der Linde’s endless dreaming of Tahiti and Cuba to replace the closing American frontier illustrates this instinct.) And when Roosevelt drew up plans for America’s major national parks, he believed that protecting places like Yellowstone and Yosemite would forcibly wedge open the frontier, preserving a safety valve for “endangered” eastern city slickers like himself. In his political career, Roosevelt weaponized the frontier thesis and made it into American foreign and domestic policy.
The great American identity crisis therefore served as the booster rocket that lifted Turner’s thesis into orbit. Indeed, if we want to understand why Turner’s particular tale about the West stuck around long enough to shape the narrative of Red Dead Redemption II, we have to recognize the cultural strands with which it was originally entangled. Doing so ought to make us even more skeptical of recycling its clichés, for within their assumptions are ideas that are undeniably sexist, classist, and racist. Turner was ultimately wrong. The West might have shaped the American character, but not in the singular way he suggested. Nor was there a neat perforation line that distinguished a “Wild West” from a “tamed West.” It’s time that pop culture follows the historians in rejecting Turner’s legacy and dreams up a new kind of “Western.”
Where does this leave Rockstar’s digital epic? Certainly, Turner’s ghost haunts the western portions of the van der Linde gang’s adventure, from the opening minutes to the tragic finale. But the game’s gritty tale of power and inequality in the West is a far cry from Turner and Roosevelt’s triumphal tales. In the Red Dead Redemption games, the West wasn’t won—it was robbed, deceived, and cheated. It was harnessed by easterners who sought little more than wealth and power. And in the conflict between Native westerners and the military, this becomes especially obvious.
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From Red Dead’s History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America’s Violent Past by Tore C. Olsson. Copyright © 2024 by Tore C. Olsson. Reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan, Inc.
