Hugh Anderson and the Archetypal West

Almost nothing is known of the man himself, aside from the fact that he was a cowboy by trade and probably a Texan by birth. As far as I am aware, only three incidents in his life are known. As such, there is a great deal of canvas on which to paint an Achilles shield of myth and metaphor. As I said earlier, he became for me the image of the end of an era, an era of human/individual, as opposed to mechanical/State violence. This is because the incidents in which he is a participant are invariable revenge stories.

He is first found in the company of the archetypal Texas gunslinger, John Wesley Hardin. His involvement in the action is on the periphery, befitting his stature as a minor character in Western lore when placed in the long shadow of Hardin. No one else could ever star in any scene in which Wes Hardin was an actor.

He next appears as the instigator of what became known as the Newton Massacre, certainly one of the bloodiest gunfights in the annals of the time. This event is in some ways typical of the results when the tensions present in the Kansas cowtowns of the time boiled over. This incident, and the individuals involved, become part of a larger political issue and social paradox: the town exists primarily, if not solely, as a destination for cattle, yet the more respectable townspeople, those without an interest in a saloon or brothel, want nothing to do with the drunken rowdiness of the Texas cowboy who has been on the trail for months on end. The growing pains of many Western railhead towns and mining settlements progressed along these lines, as change was wrought by the kind of simple acts of revenge in which men like Hugh Anderson partook.

The final event in Anderson’s life stems directly from his role in the Newton Massacre. He was taking revenge upon a man who killed a friend, and that man’s brother sought to exact his revenge from Anderson. The fact that both Hugh Anderson and Art McCluskie died ended the linear, arithmetical progression of revenge. It is a fitting metaphor for the end of the era, the last individual logic of violence. The West was tamed, and modern society born in the crucible in which what Charles Olson called “the individual responsible only to himself” was annihilated.