The most accurate thing one might say about the Western is that it is a genre of storytelling that has pretended to be America, to be that country during its making.

Its pretence is that when the land was merely harsh and unforgiving, not yet a tight map of mean streets, there persisted in some white men a rugged little crux of personal integrity even as lawlessness and anomie raged around them and that the exceptional, natural, rough-hewn integrity of these men became America, that the distinctiveness of America was this integrity.