The Old West has been mythologized to the point of triteness. The most famous outlaws and peace officers have become clichés for the most part. So, who is left to carry on the elemental work of metaphorically excavating the American frontier?
Why is it that I find Hugh Anderson so interesting? It is certainly not a very specific interest, since all I know of him comes from reading various books in which he is mentioned, and not from a deep study of primary sources, a thorough knowledge of the era and places where he lived, or an abiding obsession with the minutia of life in the American West.
I suppose it stems in large part from an interview with Michael McClure that I was reading once. At this point I do not really remember what McClure himself said exactly, and my understanding of his point was probably imperfect as well. At any rate, he was discussing his thoughts on Billy the Kid, whom he called, if I recall correctly, a "prophet of death." As I say, I may have completely mistaken his meaning, but I got the sense of Billy the Kid as somehow symbolic of a certain kind of violence, or attitude toward violence. This is a part of Anderson's appeal to me. In the poem "The Day Hugh Anderson Died" (published in Timber Creek Review, Vol. 12 No. 4, Winter 2007), I saw in him the last vestige of a time when violence and death were a personal matter. It would behoove us to keep in mind that the Old West is not at a very great remove from the modern world we know. Custer died at the Little Bighorn the same year Major League Baseball came into existence. Wyatt Earp lived long enough to see World War I, the Jazz Age, and the beginning of Hollywood romanticizing his exploits. What most people think of as the Old West was dying out even as it began. Much like the chivalric world of Arthurian romance, in many ways it never really existed. History versus myth, fact versus fiction, all the contradictions which make up America's collective vision of the place and time are explored time and again in the popular culture.
For me, the story of Hugh Anderson is another tool for digging into the theme. He does not have the stature of Billy the Kid, or Wes Hardin, or Wyatt Earp. He is not cloaked in the dark mythic mystique of John Ringo. His image has not been used to symbolize some aspect of the time as those of so many of his more famous contemporaries have. In essence, Hugh Anderson is a blank. There are no preconceptions at the mention of his name. In the gallery of gunfighting greats, he is relatively unknown, yet his exploits can be every bit as useful at coming to grips with our perceptions of his time as those of his more illustrious company.
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.
