Tonto and the lone ranger.

Tonto and the lone ranger (formally the Lone ranger, with his comedy relief sidekick Tonto, whose name means “silly” in Spanish) have recently been rebooted, with the no longer silly Tonto as main character and the lone ranger as his sidekick.  Since the audience is largely white, and Tonto is authentically alien (covered in warpaint and wears a dead bird on his head at all times) this, of course, went over like a lead balloon.  Even genuine native Americans are unlikely to identify with this authentically alien representative of culture that was already dead and mythical a century ago.

Even in its original form, when Tonto (Silly) was merely a comedy relief sidekick, the Lone Ranger was already left wing propaganda, being absurdly non violent, and having lovable injuns. But, as the overton window moves ever leftwards, has to become even more left wing.

The real wild west really was a place for heroes, for men who became legend.  Bad guys were generally hunted down and killed by heroes, not the state, thus the classic western:  Bad guy does something horribly bad, victimizing elderly widows, little girls, and at least one pretty girl.  Hero does something about it.

It really happened that way, happened a lot.  Evil bad guys does evil things, good guy takes care of it.  Plus, Cowboys, horses, hostile injuns, a prairie, a campfire, a saloon, and you have a western.

The ruling morality that the good guys acted out was that found in the bible, with a fair bit of the old testament, plus that found in Blackstone’s commentaries – a profoundly reactionary morality, in which, for example, good women got special protection and privilege, but only good women got special protection and privilege.  It was a morality that is not only profoundly and shockingly reactionary by our standards, but also profoundly and shockingly reactionary by the standards of London, New York back in the day.  An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth was not good enough.  Rather, the penalty for stealing a horse was hanging, the penalty for “insulting” a woman was hanging, the penalty for just about everything was hanging.  The civilized urban contemporaries of the heroes of the old west found the real life heroes of the old West disturbingly right wing.

And, of course, there were the injuns, which for the purposes of a rattling good yarn were depicted as ever ready to kill any white person they could get their hands on in the most horrible possible fashion, and in real life really were frequently apt to kill any white person they could get their hands on in the most horrible possible fashion.

What typically happened in real life was that the injun tribe would sell some substantial part of their hunting grounds.  They would use the money partly to buy food, but mostly to buy rotgut whisky.  One day, the money would run out, they would wake up with a horrible hangover, no food, and no hunting grounds.  Some of the young hotheads among the injuns would then go to their former hunting grounds and attack some settler family, preferably one with several cute young children, and perform some incredibly horrifying over the top atrocity of torture and mutilation upon those children.

They would then return to the tribe, and say “OK, now it is war.  Who are you going to back?  Your fellow tribesmen fighting for your lands, or these evil whites whose evil rotgut whiskey gave you this incredibly blinding headache?” The tribe would, quite unwisely, choose war.

This backstory tended to be left out of the Westerns, not so much because it discredited the whites as destroying the injuns with whiskey in order to obtain their land, but because it discredited the injuns as destroying themselves with whiskey.