Clint Eastwood's Cowboy Economics

1001 Movies to Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 33
Clint Eastwood (director/star), Pale Rider

For me, the iconic image happens when Preacher (Clint Eastwood) begins sledgehammering a large granite boulder. Hull Barrett (Michael Moriarty) believes there’s untapped gold under the stone, but he cannot reach it without breaking the stone first. And he daren’t drill and blast, he explains, lest he divert the stream the other prospectors depend upon for their meager living. Barrett cannot bear hurting the other prospectors, not even if doing so would make him rich.

Not surprisingly for a movie starring a character known only as Preacher, this movie is replete with Biblical references. Moses, in the book of Exodus, struck a rock at Meribah and opened a stream, saving his people. Likewise, the prospectors of Carbon Canyon, inspired by Preacher’s resistance to the capitalist LaHood and his violent thugs, join him in striking Barrett’s rock; indeed they find gold, which saves the prospectors from destitution. Preacher is apparently Moses.

Capitalist Coy LaHood owns nearly all his domain. He has renamed his town LaHood, and has replaced slow, tedious panning for gold with a hydraulic system. His technology has made him rich, but gradually destroys the land it occupies. Most workers around LaHood have accepted their subjection and work the mines, knowing they’ll never profit much. But why fight it? LaHood bribes state regulators and federal marshals to ensure every conflict breaks in his favor.

The prospectors in Carbon Canyon, by contrast, don’t have bosses. They have legal claim to their smallholdings, provided they stay put. Though they lack a formal hierarchy, Hull Barrett has achieved enough trust and respect that they treat him as unofficial mayor. The prospectors’ relative independence galls LaHood, who longs to control everyone and everything. So he dispatches his employees to destroy their settlement, hoping that will bring them to heel. Instead, they start praying.

Many critics have observed that this movie pinches tropes from multiple prior Westerns. The mysterious stranger who rides in to deliver the oppressed (Shane). The avenging preacher (Heaven With a Gun). Small operators standing fast against a corrupt, thuggish establishment (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance). Even Eastwood’s own High Plains Drifter. One could make a sport of spotting moments which screenwriters Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack pinch from the great canon of prior Westerns.

But this criticism misses the point. This creative team doesn’t want to open new territory; they’d rather make a point about the present, viewed through a mythologized past. Coy LaHood embodies the violent coercion inherent in unrestricted capitalism. He owns both the lawmakers and the lawkeepers, and fears no consequences for his actions. His money distorts his ethics, making him mercilessly destroy anybody who prevents him making even more money. Lucre is cause and consequence.

Opposite LaHood’s massive, dehumanizing greed, the Carbon Canyon prospectors have a distributed economy based on everyone minding their own patch. As Barrett explains in a moving speech, they aren’t panning for gold to become rich; they’re working to maintain their own patches, put down roots, and become ordinary citizens. LaHood sees money as its own goal; the Carbon Canyon community long for small holdings, distributed power, and family. They’re Distributists, before the term was coined.

(As an aside, it’s worth noting, this movie ignores that the land the prospectors’ land was stolen twice, once from Indians, once from Mexico. It also ignores that, while they pan for gold, nobody’s growing crops or manufacturing goods. Their community couldn’t survive long without more diverse production, and indeed it didn’t; prospector communities quickly dwindled in history, because somebody needed to hoe corn. Like most myths and fables, this one only extends so far.)

This parable of smallness and honesty versus bigness and corruption, remains tearfully relevant because we face this issue today. Anybody who’s tried filing a stolen wages claim against a major corporation recently, or faced an eminent domain claim, knows the system rewards those already well rewarded; to paraphrase Preacher, the system cannot serve God and Mammon. Preacher gets the credit for stopping the corrupt marshal with guns. But the community stops LaHood by standing together.

This movie was one of several Westerns released in 1985. Following the disaster of Heaven’s Gate, which tanked so badly, it destroyed United Artists Pictures, Hollywood became reluctant to touch Western themes. However, as the profligacy of the 1980s, with their cowboy President, became more overwhelming, Hollywood finally returned to the hero cowboy legend. After all, the present is always morally corrupt; from medieval romances to Singing Cowboys, true Virtue always lives in the past.