Within a decade, the “western” was a staple of silent film, and actors like Tom Mix were working out the mechanics of how to be a movie star. Dime novels, minstrel shows, and traveling exhibitions had been repackaging cowboy legends since before the Civil War, but it took the new medium of film to coalesce folklore into genuine mass culture. If the arbitrary absurdity of the census ruling didn’t kill the Wild West, The Great Train Robbery certainly did. When the leader of the outlaws stared into the camera and fired his gun straight at the viewer, early audiences reacted with panic. For many Americans, The Great Train Robbery was the first movie, period. It was also the first film to use crosscuts, double exposures, and location shooting. It’s a grubby little movie, crude and surprisingly violent. Thirteen years later, a 12-minute motion picture called The Great Train Robbery ushered in the genre of western films. Throughout the 1890s, academics debated the psychic impact of this closing on a country that no longer had anywhere to go. With one stroke of a pen, the entire Wild West-all its buttes and prairies and outlaw towns and poorly lit whorehouses-became simply the West, just one more region of the United States. And yet the 1890 US Census did precisely this, with the audacious announcement that the government would no longer tabulate western migration, as the frontier region had ceased to exist. It’s odd to think of the Wild West as something that could be “closed,” like a cardboard box or a failed department store.
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