A Case for an Old Western

I have discovered that the old series Wagon Train is on a cable channel on Saturdays. When I can, I tune in. I expected to be embarrassed to see a show I loved so much as a kid. Sometimes I watch a random episode of something I watched faithfully years ago, and I sit there and blush at how lame the show is, and did I really enjoy watching it so much?

But I'm stuck on Wagon Train all over again. Yes, the scripts could be corny and the plots melodramatic. But the stories themselves were entirely character driven, and as a novelist I find this satisfying and fascinating. Each episode is (usually) named for the character whose story will unfold. And every episode has a different main character--someone who is traveling on the wagon train. As a vehicle (pun intended) for stories, a wagon train was perfect. You had a wagon master and his crew, who remained constant; often their conversations opened up the main character's story and interpreted it. But the people around that core group changed constantly because every trip was populated by a different set of people traveling across the country.

The plots, almost without exception, are built from the ground up on characterization. So each episode--and those episodes ran an hour and a half!--explores the character's past, personality, situation, conflict, and choices. It doesn't hurt, either, that a wagon train represents journey, unknown future, process, loss, relationships, hope, and faith. People who traversed the West in such fashion were living on the edge in many ways--leaving behind one life for another, unknown one, taking huge risks, building tentative alliances for the sake of survival. So there is never a lack of conflict; fresh plots spring up all over the place because the life of every person on this trip is both precious and precarious.

I'm sure I love this show now partly because I loved it when I was young and living in a region that had been traversed by many wagon trains a century before. My grandmother's grandmother on her mother's side never knew her true last name. She and her brother were traveling by covered wagon with their parents, and for some reason the parents left the children with a family living in the general vicinity of my home town. The parents never returned, and the children took the name of the family who took them in. Such things happened when people made long unpredictable journeys. Families disintegrated in the face of illness, accidents on the trail, sudden loss and poverty, and death at odd times and places. It was a dangerous thing to seek a new life across the known world.

Wagon Train honors the great mosaic of stories that formed during a particular era of this country. It romanticizes an existence that was probably more exhaustion and drudgery than drama. But we forgive such license because it's not the exhaustion or drudgery that interests us. It's the grit, the grace and the hope. And it's easier to receive stories that are shined up a bit. I doubt that any scout was ever as beautiful and clean-shaven and downright sexy as Cooper Smith. But I enjoy tagging along behind him for ninety minutes, trying to experience history in his steps and see the landscape through his eyes.