Thomas Edison Created the Movie Industry and Produced the First Western

When people talk about the film industry, they seldom mention Thomas Edison, yet he filmed the first western at his studio in New York City. In 1903, the Edison Manufacturing Company distributed The Great Train Robbery. The nine minute film set many of the constructs for the genre. Stay till the end to see one of the motion picture industry's most iconic visuals.

I believe this makes Mr. Edison a cowboy at heart, which gives him the right to cavort in a Steve Dancy Tale. In The Return, Steve travels to New York to acquire rights to sell Edison's inventions in the Western states. Needless to say, he runs into trouble. I suppose The Return could be called a mash-up. The Old West conquers another world, one where a cosmopolitan refinement barely disguises a violent underworld run by gangs and overlords.

The Edison and gangland history is accurate. Steve Dancy's participation, not so much.

Honest Westerns filled with dishonest characters
The Return, A Steve Dancy Tale
143 Amazon Ratings for 4.6 stars

James D. Best is arguably one of the best writers of westerns, but his newest novel, The Return, is set in the East. --Alan Caruba, Bookviews

It's the summer of 1880, and Thomas Edison's incandescent bulb is poised to put the gaslight industry out of business. Knowing a good business opportunity, former New York shopkeeper Steve Dancy sets out to obtain a license for Edison's electric lamp. Edison agrees, under one condition: Dancy and his friends must stop the saboteurs who are disrupting his electrification of Wall Street. More worrisome, he has also unknowingly dragged along a feud that began out West. The feud could cost him Edison's backing ... and possibly his life.

Should the Dallas Cowboys Change Their Name?

It’s all the rage to change sport team names, especially if they’re based on Native American culture. But, hey, what about the Cowboys? I know the Dallas Cowboys reside in Texas but should football appropriate the name of a common laborer? I mean, is that culturally acceptable? Remember, cowboy has been used historically as a derogatory slur. Reagan’s enemies called him a cowboy, and they didn’t mean it in a good way. A rodeo clown got vilified for wearing an Obama mask. It was criticized as disrespectful. Then you have Wyatt Earp’s bitter enemies. They were a street gang called the cowboys, or sometimes cow-boys. In Britain, a cowboy is someone who sells shoddy goods or services. In popular culture, a cowboy is almost always portrayed as a young white male who flaunts his independence and may even embrace lawlessness. Snobs with self-described good taste disdain cowboy fiction, film, music, and even poetry. Historians, of late, have made them out as the villains in the country’s push westward.

In truth, cowboys were mostly migrant seasonal labor. They might have been hired hands, but they deserve to have their culture preserved intact and not mocked by throwing around a piece of cow skin. (They call it pig, but we know better.)

These hardy men kept the nation fed, cow towns profitable, and were so in tune with nature that they knew in which direction the sun set. Granted, they were rowdy, smelly, and profane, but they were also honorable and hardworking. It’s ludicrous to assert that their image is honored by a bunch of multi-millionaire play-boys in tight pants? 

 Let’s face it, the Dallas team-name offends the sensitivities of twenty-first century Americans. 

It must be changed for the sake of diversity and inclusiveness. 

But leave the girls alone. We like them just as they are.

P.S. Out of respect for this noble profession, there are few cowboys or cows in The Steve Dancy Tales. Instead, I appropriated the culture of miners because I liked their square toed boots.