Word: stoddard
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...elect two representatives to the Statehood Convention; Sotddard and the townspeople want statehood--it would mean government protection of their rights, the establishment of schools and the railroad. But Liberty Valance and his guns work for the cattle barons who want to keep the territory for themselves. Valance challenges Stoddard to a show-down, although he knows Stoddard can hardly hold a gun. Miraculously, Stoddard kills Valance, wins Hallie (Tom's former girl), and goes to the political convention...
Realizing that he will be nominated on the grounds that he shot Liberty Valance. Stoddard becomes disgusted and leaves, but Doniphon stops him and reveals that it was he who actually shot Liberty Valance. His own conscience clear, Stoddard goes back into the hall and accepts the nomination; Doniphon goes home alone...
...Doniphon is the archetypal Ford hero, the John Wayne of all Ford's westerns. A man of action and few words (note his instinctive hatred of the rhetoric in the Convention speeches), Doniphon is very much an individual who minds his own business. When Stoddard nominates him as a representative to the Convention, he refuses, saying, "I've got other plans. Personal plans...
...Stoddard, on the other hand, is of another breed; the movement West, triggered by Greeley, came after the settlers in the wagon trains, and brought with it well-established Eastern customs. To Ford, Stoddard represents blind progress. Stoddard's first confrontation with Doniphon reveals absolutely no understanding between them; they eye each other as if the other were a strange animal...
Ford reveals Stoddard as incapable of adjusting to the life of the West: when Tom brings Hallie a "cactus rose," Stoddard, having seen real roses, cannot appreciate the beauty of the desert flower. Where Tom sees Liberty Valance as a source of personal conflict, a potential menace to his own well-being, Stoddard can only see Valance as the embodiment of a social evil that must be wiped out through new laws and social reform...