How Hollywood Got Arizona And The Wild West Wrong, From Gunfights To Saloons
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Sunday is not only Valentine’s Day, it’s Arizona Statehood day. To find out more about Arizona history, we spoke to Arizona State University professor Eduardo Pagan, whose latest book is "Valley of the Guns: The Pleasant Valley War and the Trauma of Violence."
RON DUNGAN: The West has been portrayed in a variety of ways in Westerns. Historians seem to agree that those portrayals were not always accurate. Can you talk about that?
EDUARDO PAGAN: Sure, you know, that’s one of the things I find really interesting is that you know as Americans I think we’ve all grown up with watching these Westerns and we have this collective idea of what the West was really like. And to my knowledge, the best of my research, Hollywood was just off in so many ways.
For example, the gunfight, right? You know we’re so familiar with this notion of two guys standing out in the street waiting for the other person to twitch first and then all hell breaks loose at that point. That rarely happened.
Again in my research and study, that really rarely happened. Occasionally you would have people of a gentleman class that would try to approximate something of a duel. But by and large people tended to shoot each other in the back. They had no qualms of doing that.
DUNGAN: What about the other staple of the Western — the Old West saloon?
PAGAN: Sure. So you know this is another one of these images we have, born out of Hollywood that the saloon was this kind of, kind of the equivalent of an English pub, you know, where everyone would gather.
It’s a watering hole, and everyone gathers and entertainment could be found there of all varieties – gambling going on, honky-tonk players on the piano, the list goes on.
The truth the matter was, first of all you have to understand that the saloons were varied, in terms of what they looked like and what they had to offer, and they went anywhere from a tent where there was just a board stretched over a couple of barrels, to the really high end saloons, which were brick and mortar places and those are kind of the more classic saloons that we think about.
DUNGAN: What are some of your favorite stories from Arizona history?
PAGAN: Ha! Favorite stories. I just laugh because there’s so many. You know, Jack Swilling comes to mind. Jack Swilling is credited with having named Phoenix. No, I’m sorry it was Darrell Duppa that named Phoenix, but Jack Swilling is credited with having founded Phoenix. And Jack Swilling was a typical colorful character, who had been out in Arizona as a scout before the Civil War and actually played both sides. One time he was scouting for the Confederates and other times for the Union as well.
And by all accounts, he was someone that really wrestled with his demons and addictions, even by his own voice. You know he wrote about being addicted to morphine.
One of the original names of Phoenix was actually Swilling’s Mill.
He was the guy who actually had this hare-brained idea to try and re-dig some of the old Hohokam canals in order to get water out into areas of the Salt River Valley and kind of start to grow things again. And Henry Wickenburg up in Wickenburg at the Vulture Mine, he was desperate enough to fund this crazy idea, because Wickenburg at the time was kind of the cash cow of the territory. The Vulture Mine was a prolific, gold-producing mine. But there isn’t good farming country around Wickenburg. It’s pretty rocky and hilly. So the plan was, to finance Swilling, to re-dig these canals, to employ people to do it, and then start to flood the land and to create agricultural land out of what was at the time just desertscape. And it actually worked! It actually worked.
DUNGAN: We live in challenging times. What are some of the lessons we can learn from our history?
PAGAN: You know for me I look to the past as a way of trying to understand the present and give us some insight into the future and one of the things Phoenix’s past that gives me hope is that when Phoenix was first founded, if you went back to the 1870s, the first newspaper was a bilingual newspaper, and the first school curriculum was a bilingual curriculum. And it was because you know at least half of the Phoenix population were Spanish-speaking individuals. That is really our heritage as Phoenicians, and it is our present and it is our future as well. For me, as I look back on the past I’m not trying to paint this as any kind of cultural utopia, but people got along. They worked together, they intermarried with one another, they made it work. And if they did it then, they can do it now, and we can do it in the future as well.
DUNGAN: Mr. Pagan, thanks for taking the time to talk to us.
PAGAN: It’s my pleasure, thank you.
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