No country has folklore more deeply invested in the myth of the heroic outsider than the United States, given its revolutionary origins and veneration of the frontier, which, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued, indelibly shaped Americans’ sense of identity – their prizing of individuality and freedom and independence. The legends surrounding the frontiersman Daniel Boone (and quite probably Davy Crockett, too) would help inspire Natty Bumppo in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales – a loner and “pathfinder,” without parents or a wife or children, who lives on the edge of the frontier, knowing his way of life is doomed by the relentless advance of civilization. The lone gunslinger would also become a familiar trope in movie westerns: most notably in High Noon (1952), where Gary Cooper plays the part of a newly married town marshal who, on the eve of his retirement, must face down a notorious outlaw and his gang – with no deputy or townspeople to provide backup; and Shane (1953), where Alan Ladd plays a mysterious drifter who rides into town and saves a family of homesteaders when an evil cattle baron threatens to run them off their land.
At the end of that movie, the family’s young son begs Shane to stay, but he rides off on his horse, saying he doesn’t belong there: “A man has to be what he is . . .
A brand sticks.” These characters embody an old-fashioned frontier ethic as well as Emerson’s credo that “whoso would be a m.