Ryan Cooper at The Week posted an analysis which dealt with some of the issues I’ve been curious about as the occupation of the Malheur refuge has dragged on; among them the self-mythology of the Bundy militia, and the insistence on raising cattle in the inhospitably arid West:

“Bundy’s ideas are nonsense — but they’re no more wrong than the entire creation myth of the American West. Though there have been Americans who could survive completely unaided in the West — men like Kit Carson and Jim Bridger — there were only a handful of them, and most were at least half-crazed. No society on Earth has ever functioned wholly on self-interested individualism — and that holds doubly true for the West. From the very start to the present day, Big Government has been the very bedrock of the settlement of the American frontier.”

“…the final and starkest example of Western socialism: the delivery of water. What people tend to forget in the age of electricity and automobiles is that the West is mostly a huge desert, some of it harsh in the extreme. Private and even state-level efforts to develop water resources sufficient to support Western agriculture and mass settlement repeatedly failed all throughout the Gilded Age, leading to the passage of the Reclamation Act in 1902. It would end with the government building, owning, and operating key economic institutions throughout the West.”

theweek.com

Cooper quotes Mark Reisner’s Cadillac Desert:

“But even as the myth of the welcoming, bountiful West was shattered, the myth of the independent yeoman farmer remained intact. With huge dams built for him at public expense, and irrigation canals, and the water sold for a quarter of a cent per ton — a price which guaranteed that little of the public’s investment would ever be paid back — the West’s yeoman farmer became the embodiment of the welfare state, though he was the last to recognize it.”

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner
http://www.amazon.com/Marc-Reisner-Cadillac-Desert-Disappearing/dp/B00N4F0EZO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1454170559&sr=8-2&keywords=Cadillac+Desert%3A+The+American+West+and+Its+Disappearing+Water%2C+Revised+Edition

More about the cultural myth of the cowboy, a 2008 article by Jennifer Moskowitz from the University of South Dakota, The Cultural Myth of the Cowboy, or, How the West Was Won

“…The knight as a representative figure of nationalism and capitalism carries over to the cowboy, for he occupies a position remarkably similar to the knight, and his movement from historical figure to literary and cultural figure is similar as well. Indeed, as with the medieval knight, the historical cowboy bears little resemblance to the literary one. Thomas Gasque explores the historical cowboy, finding that he was often Latino or black, and if Anglo was of a lower economic class (not simply a gentrified albeit poor, displaced Southerner, for example) (12-15). Milton, too, states that “Conveniently forgotten were the Mexican vaquero, the Argentinean gaucho, the Venezuelan llanero, and the Chilean buaso, also Americans in the broadest geographical sense of the term but considered cultural foreigners, if considered at all” (3). These groups were not part of the mythologization process, which was limited to the chivalric, Anglo cowboy who was, ironically, “American.” Moreover, again similar to the knight, the cowboy was a mercenary of sorts whose primary task was to protect the property (both animal and land) of the rancher for whom he worked. He was not by definition “chivalric,” did not have a “code” other than to protect what he was paid to protect…”

“…While the cowboy as representative of capitalism may seem problematic, since he is often seen as a romanticized, nostalgic figure of the Old West, a place that is generally considered agrarian, at the turn of the century and during the early twentieth century, the cowboy actually furthered American nationalism and the capitalist ideology that attended it in two important and interconnected ways. First, the cowboy supported nationalism through his existence in the neutral space of the West, which allowed him to create nationalist sentiment, fueling the nationalist movement that brought North and South together. The country needed a neutral setting in which to create new memories so that what Gellner and Ernest Renan call a “collective amnesia” (Gellner, Culture 6) could take over, thereby healing to some extent the divisions that existed in the country. Renan contends that “a shared amnesia, a collective forgetfulness” is required for a nation to form (qtd. in Gellner, Culture 6). America needed an icon that would draw attention away from contention between the two parts of the country. Part of that amnesia is the creation of new memories once order is restored – mythological memories that attend to the ideology of the power structure (7). “