How the West was won has become lost to me

Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

I was 10 and in sixth grade when I got hooked on a TV Western. My father got hooked, too. Every chance we could ― but not always because my father was a police officer and worked the night shift — we would sit side-by-side on the green living room couch and trade 1957 for the late 1860s. That’s what “Wagon Train” did. It transported us.

We watched “Wagon Train” on a small black-and-white TV, which was, hands down, the prettiest thing in our parlor. My father had made it pretty. And he had made it work. He fixed TVs on the side.

The TV was junk when he brought it home. An ugly thing. He replaced tubes, soldered wires, and sanded, stained, and lacquered the wood. Our most prized possession had been someone else’s throwaway. My father not only fixed it. He made it beautiful.

But our TV and 1957 and “Wagon Train” are not what this is about. This is about now and the TV series “Yellowstone,” which my husband loves, and how he got me to watch it.

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“It’s all about the West,” he told me. “About farmers and ranchers. You’ll like it.”

I did not like it, not because it isn’t riveting. It is. But because “Yellowstone” is set, not in the 1800s, but in the now. And I am living in the now. I’m stuck in the now, and the now is already too full of real drama — murders and wars and deaths and cataclysms, the earth trying to shake us off with fires and earthquakes and viruses and disease. COVID may be in retreat but other plagues are evolving, and there are earthquakes and floods and fires and flying objects being shot down and always, always, the acrimony in politics, the hate on the streets, poverty, addiction, and mental illness. There is so much bad news all day, every day, that there is no need for fiction rife with today’s headlines.

And so, less than an episode in, I told my husband, no thank you.

But he’s a man who doesn’t give up. He suggested we watch “1883,″ a prequel to “Yellowstone,” a show set in 1883 about a group of pioneers who are part of a wagon train headed west. A wagon train, he said, smiling.

And with thoughts of the old show I loved, I sat down to watch.

The series begins with a massacre, smallpox that kills a man’s family, a near suicide, a few shoot-outs, and a hanging. Like life today, it is one tragedy after another. And like life today, for me it is all too much.

But all these things happened, my husband argued. Yes, they did. Massacres. Smallpox. Shoot-outs. Hangings. Wagon trains full of men and women unprepared for the hardships ahead. Rivers too wide and too deep to cross. Venomous snakes. Mountains that are dead ends. Barren plains. Storms. Drought. Hunger. Angry tribes whose land has been stolen from them. Bandits. And no place to hide.

Life has never been easy. That’s the takeaway from “1883.” But the other, for me, is a question. Is it all darkness? Is life nothing but hardship? Does the world, generation after generation, break us all?

“The route of the Oregon/California/Mormon Pioneer Trails has been called ‘the nation’s longest graveyard.’ Nearly one in ten emigrants who set off on the trail did not survive.” This is what The National Park Service has documented.

One in 10 people headed west died. Did everyone know this back then? Newspapers were being printed across the country but there were not a gazillion reporters broadcasting the bad news of the world 24 hours a day. In 1883, people in Boston would not know that a wagon train was attacked in Wyoming, that a pickpocket in Fort Worth had been hanged by an angry mob, that a man set fire to his home and everything in it to keep smallpox from spreading.

Are we better off knowing or not knowing? It’s important to be informed about important things. But when everything is deemed important, then nothing is. When every minute of every day is filled with a litany of bad news, we stop listening.

One in 10 people traveling west in wagon trains died en route. Nine out of 10 people did not die. Isn’t this news, too?

I was at a basketball game at the Cotting School in Lexington a few Saturdays ago. And I thought, this is what I want to wake up to. The joy here. The vibe. Young people, all differently abled, verbal and non-verbal, some with legs to hold them up, some in wheelchairs, some using walkers, together, part of a team, doing their best, having fun, smiles on their faces, smiles on their helpers’ faces, smiles on the faces of everyone in the stands.

Why do we focus on the bad and give such short shrift to the good? What would our lives be like if we paid more attention to what’s right in the world?

We become numb when we know too much. We feel less because this is how we survive. “The world is too much with us,” the poet William Wordsworth wrote more than 200 years ago.

Imagine what Wordsworth would write in his sonnet today.