Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show.

Conclusion

The silent Western was unique in its propinquity to the era it chronicled. While later Westerns looked back to a time that had since passed, the early Westerns were being shot current with the closing of the frontier. In 1908, convicted bank robber Al Jennings filmed a recreation of his own most famous hold-up in The Bank Robbery. Jennings would go on to make a career for himself as a director. The overlap between the reality being fictionalized and the mechanisms of that fictionalization was significant. Cow-handlers, sharpshooters, lawmen, Indian Chiefs, even ex-train-robbers and bandits turned initially to the Wild West Shows and then later trickled into the motion picture industry as hired-hands -- acting, writing or directing -- shaping what was once their reality into an eternal national myth. Personally and collectively it was an act of rewriting the past, transforming what at times was senseless and barbaric into something that could be handed down from generation to generation as a lost or fast-vanishing Eden.