"The West for me is a haunted place. There are these mythic ghosts everywhere you go. I don’t know of a region that buys its own bullshit more so than the American West does. I went last night to a reading by a major figure in literature of the American West, who described the “settling of the American West” as starting in 1849—and I’m like, Uh, buddy when you’re doing all your walks out in nature did you ever find an arrowhead? Apparently it’s still okay for major figures to pretend that indigenous cultures didn’t exist. The way we talk about the California drought has like all the baggage of rugged individualism and Western exceptionalism all over it." -- Claire Vaye Watkins

Death of the western

Here's a death of the western theory I haven't heard before:

"The excesses and financial disaster of 1980’s Heaven’s Gate had nearly killed the Western."

Death of the western - random thoughts

The reasons why the western was popular (and is enduring) is many fold (birth of the American Myth for example) and the reasons why the genre died are many. Not the least of which is that it resisted an accurate view of the west, ignored the diversity of the west, and catered to a white, American, male audience (and was filtered through that view point). By the time the revisionist history books of the 1970's came out that showed a more accurate representation of the west and, more perhaps more importantly, the effect of those books were felt in fiction in the 1980's, it was too late for a course correction.

Also, in the 50's and 60's the ideal representative of the explorer moved away from the settler (ie: cowboys) and moved towards the astronaut. The western started to decline, science fiction started to climb. Maybe its a coincidence, maybe not.