Jack Ass Express: Hate Mail

I don't think that some silly people will be upset to find out that John Ford's totally false, crappy and stupid movie, The Pony Express, is a fake is any reason to lie about labor history. *   

Down the years, the riders of the Pony Express galloped across the paintings of Frederic Remington and many a painter who wished to be Frederic Remington.  They galloped, too, across the motion picture screen, from the films of John Ford and those who wished to be John Ford.  Hollywood has been especially generous to the memory of the Pony Express.  One of the best known films,  The Pony Express, made in 1953. starring Charlton Heston, had Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok teaming up in "Old Californy" to start the Pony Express.  There is not a splinter of fact in that tale. 

That Charlton Heston was in it only reinforces the virtue of exposing the lies of the old west for what they are.   He, Ronald Reagan, and John Wayne are a perfect example of what happens to people who start mistaking movie "history" for history and begin to believe that junk is reality.  They can stand in for millions of people whose personal and political lives are shaped by lies told for the entertainment of Caspar Milquetoasts who can't face real life in all of its unromantic reality. Maybe if they didn't have such ridiculous fictitious men in their internal fan fiction they could lead less neurotic lives and vote other than Republican. 

Also, too.

Filmmakers loved the lone horseman galloping overland. But their paeans to the Pony only further exaggerated the story. Even the master John Ford put the Pony into his classic "Fort Apache," where the brave rider thunders into the fort to bring news of Custer's Last Stand, which, alas, took place some 15 years after the Pony stopped running.

*  I just looked it up, The Pony Express was directed by one of the John Ford wannabees, Jerry Hopper.  Though I should have waited before issuing the correction to see how incensed the reaction to getting that wrong would be from such as don't care about the actual history.   I hadn't realized that Forrest Tucker co-stared with Chuck, neither of whom would have gotten the job because they were too old, too heavy and too soft for it.