The nature of authenticity
Authenticity was a key to the frontier West. Today the idea back in style. What does it mean for nature?
November 1, 1904, was a sleepy afternoon in Cody, Wyoming, a dusty, nearly treeless burg centered around the two-year-old Irma Hotel. The village felt frontierish, “with board sidewalks, hitching racks, kerosene lamps on the two blocks of main street, [and] stores with false fronts,” as author Caroline Lockhart later described it.
Two men rode into town. They walked into the First National Bank, across the street from the Irma. They pulled out the guns and shouted, “Hands up!” In the ensuing frenzy, one of them chased cashier Ira Middaugh out into the street. The two men got into a fistfight, and then the robber shot Middaugh dead. The two robbers, having not yet collected any money, then mounted their horses and fled to the south, firing wildly. They were soon pursued by a quickly-organized posse.
The community was devastated, but Lockhart was unbelievably lucky. She’d arrived in town just the previous month, a plucky journalist looking for stories. And here was story with all the dramatic features of a dime novel: holdups, outlaws, murder, posses, manhunts. The western author-illustrator Mary Hallock Foote, when asked in 1889 to draw a picture of a posse, responded that she “has never yet encountered anything so sensational as a troop of armed men on the track of a criminal.” Such stories, Foote implied, were not authentic to the lived experience of the West. And yet here Lockhart, her first month in town, experienced such a story in the flesh.
Authenticity ended up being Lockhart’s calling card. She set down roots in Cody, and wrote other stories about real events. She shifted from journalism to fiction in the style of the day, with a sassy voice that always stayed close to real events but never worried too much about factual details. When she published her first novel, Me-Smith, in 1911, reviewers found her characters and plot authentic, at least in comparison to the absurd melodrama of ubiquitous dime novels. For six later novels, she similarly always did her research first: floating the Salmon River, organizing rodeos, and interviewing Wyoming’s notorious sheep queen.
Lockhart’s publicity highlighted her Cody residence, to the point where she almost got caught in an authenticity trap. She exaggerated her western-ness, falsely claiming to have grown up on a ranch, and placed much value in that exaggerated authenticity. Such dynamics didn’t play out for writers in other genres or locations. In Unsettling the Literary West: Authenticity and Authorship, Nathaniel Lewis writes, “When we read Faulkner, we assume that his creative vision is behind his South—he invented the place.” But, Lewis continues, we treat western writers’ “works as sincere attempts—often successful attempts—at representing a profound reality. In other words, the place invented them.”
In the arts, authenticity is typically the opposite of creativity and imagination. For example, Lockhart might have written better books if she’d focused less on what actually happened and more on literary techniques and imaginative leaps. They would have been better books—but more popular? Authenticity was what audiences of the 1910s demanded. Cowboy actor William S. Hart became the decade’s biggest silent-movie star by ensuring that his sets were dusty and gritty, mining that same vein of Western authenticity.
Audiences of today are demanding authenticity as well. Merriam-Webster named authentic (with definitions including “not false or imitation,” and “true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character”) as 2023’s Word of the Year. Why? Largely because authenticity is “connected to identity, whether national or personal.” We love the authenticity of Taylor Swift, BeReal recordings, and anything not generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
Amid climate change, the authenticity of nature may soon become an even bigger deal. If grizzly bears die off in a wilderness area because their food sources have dried up, is it still authentic wilderness? As the oceans reclaim Louisiana’s bayous, is alligator habitat no longer an authentic land use? If a burned-over forest regenerates with new climate-adapted plants—or even weeds—is that an authentic ecological succession process?
Lockhart’s story suggests that authenticity itself is… a bit fake. Foote was right: robberies and posses were incredibly rare in the frontier West, especially before 1900. Indeed, the fascinating thing about Lockhart’s Cody is the sense that everyone there (including the author herself) has read too many dime novels. They act out the melodramas in real life, and Lockhart captures their illusions, authentically.
Interest in authenticity regularly peaks with the rise of technologies that redefine its frontiers. For example, the dime novel took advantage of new printing presses and distribution methods to send scads of Western stories to audiences that had no way of knowing how true they were to Western life. Then Lockhart, Hart, Owen Wister, Clarence Mulford, Zane Grey, and many others mined the rich territory between the fake, the real, the seemingly fake, and the apparently real. In coming years, AI will create similarly lucrative opportunities.
But in nature, I’m hoping that we can see authenticity of nature debates as mostly fake—in other words, not really relevant to the huge issues facing our culture. Grizzly bears are wonderful, but already incredibly rare in wilderness areas. Shrimp and wading birds need habitat too. Ecological succession is never as rational and overdetermined as we expect.
Nature is about change. Change is authentic nature.
That’s where the stories come from.
Discussion:
I’m quoting Lockhart and Foote from The Cowboy Girl, chapter 5 (more sources available there). The robbery is fully described in Jeremy Johnston’s “We Want Them Dead Rather Than Alive: Buffalo Bill the Lawman.” I’m quoting Lewis from Unsettling the Literary West, page 7. I wrote about Hart here, and Mulford in Stories from Montana's Enduring Frontier.
Thanks to Wynn Miller for the tip about 2023’s Word of the Year, and the inspiration for this essay.
In the comments I’d particularly like to hear how and why authenticity is important to you—in literature, movies, or nature.
I am laughing! Setting an essay on authenticity in Cody is an act of genius. What could authenticity possibly mean in a city plunked down in the sagebrush (Cody did not evolve organically, it wasn't on the way to anywhere in 1896) by an entertainer and showman, with streets named for investors in and the manager of the first nationwide "blockbuster?" Where one of Buffalo Bill's predecessors in the area was a gunfighter who got his start in life as a French socialist, but ended up dying with his boots on in a Red Lodge saloon? Where Butch Cassidy's signature appears, like anyone else's, on a petition to build a bridge? I could continue, but will refrain.
John knows that I say all this from a stance of truly loving the Cody Country. But is it the right place in which to try to sort fact from fiction? from which to say this or that is authentic? One's first reaction is, "surely not!" And that reaction might be stronger after wandering down Sheridan. But if one sits with the thought for a while, one might ask how the casual blending of fact and fiction in the stories of the West (of course Caroline grew up on a ranch, the story isn't right without that, so it has to be so) could be anything other than authentic?
To bring in nature beyond the human, one only has to think about the saga of bringing wolves back to Greater Yellowstone and, now to Colorado. If science reigned, or if bumper stickers were required to be factual, the controversy would have passed quickly. But we humans are (many of us at least) willing to repeat outrageous lies if they make us look good to our friends and annoy our enemies. That's us, unless we make a mindful effort to be otherwise, at least. And isn't being yourself, as you "really" are, what is meant by being authentic? I think cowboys and hippies agree on that!
Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor wrote a little book on The Ethics of Authenticity that readers may find helpful. Towards the end, he says" . . . we face a continuing struggle to realize higher and full modes of authenticity against the resistance of the flatter and shallower forms." Remember that he is looking southward not just toward a distant Cody, but the entire U.S. when he writes.
So, what does authenticity mean for nature? Without us around, nature just is. No judgment about its authenticity or lack thereof is possible. Bring us into the picture and I think nature can become a selfie (with a charging bison in the near background). Taylor spends some time trying to tease out the difference between authenticity and self-indulgence (or narcissism, egoism, etc). He ends up here (and so will I, for now at least). "If authenticity is being true to ourselves, is recovering our own "sentiment de l'existence" [a phrase he takes from Rosseau), then perhaps we can only achieve it integrally if we recognize that this sentiment connects us to a wider whole."
Good read. Definitely food for thought. As an aside (sort of), the Yellowstone TV series seems to thrive, like most soap operas, by not being authentic.