Word: frontiersman
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...outa these quickie westerns, but I was damned if I was gonna climb on a friend to do it. He came to me with the script of Stagecoach and said, 'Who the hell can play the Ringo Kid?' " It was a part that called for a strong, inarticulate frontiersman vengefully seeking his father's killers. "I said there's only one guy: Lloyd Nolan, and Ford said, 'Oh, Jesus, can't you play...
...trademarks of Conservative Democrat Preston D. Smith, 56. The horn rims belong to the real estate entrepreneur and 18-year veteran of public office who had to work his way through high school at such jobs as picking cotton and pumping gas. The Stetsoned Smith is the campaigning frontiersman who flew to 249 of Texas' 254 counties to shake hands and exude confidence. Horn rims or hat, there was more than enough Smith to defeat Republican Paul W. Eggers...
...Riencourt takes that outdated boast with deadly seriousness. Something deep in the character of the Puritan (an "iron-hard, practical, sober fanatic dedicated to hard work") ideally equips Americans to play 20th century Romans. When Puritan qualities are combined with the "innate and relentless expansionism" of the frontiersman, it becomes clear that "it was just not in [Americans'] dynamic temper to become the peaceful Swiss of the Western Hemisphere." Yet Americans, De Riencourt insists, have been "fundamentally reluctant" imperialists. They have not really played the game of colonialism, which he defines as an ephemeral grab for pseudo empire...
...Thrall. Often as not, the frontiersman was an antisocial misfit who helped create a climate of barbaric lawlessness. No matter. Daniel Boone and Buffalo Bill, Jesse James and Billy the Kid, hero and villain alike, all were men of the gun and all were idolized. "Have gun, will travel" was more than a catch phrase. It was a way of life. Even after the frontier reached its limits, the myths lingered and the legends multiplied, first in dime novels, later in movies and on TV. Americans flowed into great cities, but still they remained in thrall to the mystique...
...RETURN OF THE VANISHING AMERICAN, by Leslie A. Fiedler. Today's hippie, argues the free-swinging critic, is a cultural descendant of the American Indian and buckskinned frontiersman; the new West is a painted desert seen from a psychedelic cloud...