his body is desecrated: hanged, racked,rndrawn, beheaded, and quartered as arnwarning to all traitors. Tecumseh, too, isrnslain, but his body (like that of CrazyrnHorse of the Lakota) is spirited away tornavert the sickening fate that befell SittingrnBull’s corpse. The martyred spirit ofrnWallace is reborn in Robert the Bruce,rnwhile Teeumseh’s waits like FrederickrnBarbarossa, sleeping king of the Germanicrntribes, for the day when it mayrnawake and lead its people back to freedom.rnThe central theme in this broader parallelism,rnthen, is the yearning for lost liberty,rna yearning which subsumes andrntranscends the racial content. Similady,rnone of the most powerful recent evocationsrnof the smoldering “Don’t Treadrnon Me” attitude that was to ignite ourrnown long-ago revolt against tyranny isrnachieved by The Last of the Mohicans.rnHawkeye is a New World hybrid, not onlyrnan emissary from the vanishing woddrnof les sauvages but a spokesman for thernpoor, hardy colonists who have chosen tornendure the hardships of frontier lifernrather than “live by anyone’s leave.” Thernheroine’s rejection of her father’s OldrnWorld view of the individual’s duty in favorrnof the protorcvolutionary vision ofrnHawkeye and his companions is dramarnthat electrifies every American zone ofrnthe body.rnRob Roy and Braveheart are also virtuallyrnthe same movie, set four centuriesrnand a few glens apart. The director ofrnRoil Roy has been at pains to disparagernSir Walter Scott’s Waverley novel asrna Romantic distortion of the facts, yetrnthere is more historical subtlety andrnclear-eyed ambivalence about ourrnhero/villain in Scott’s Introduction tornRob Roy than in the new film, whichrntakes much docudramatic license whilerntransposing key elements of the story.rnScott astutely explains Rob’s lasting appeal:rn”He owed his fame in a great measurernto his residing on the very verge ofrnthe Highlands, and playing such pranksrnin the beginning of the eighteenth centuryrnas are usually ascribed to RobinrnHood in the Middle Ages, and that withinrnforty miles of Glasgow, a great commercialrncity…. Thus a character like his,rnblending the wild virtues, the subtle policy,rnand unrestrained licence of an AmericanrnIndian, was flourishing in Scotlandrnduring the Augustan age of Queen Annernand George I.”rnOf course the true parallels between arnWallace and a Tecumseh are not cinematicrnbut historical. Historian JohnrnPrebble might have been describing thernviolent ruin of Amerindian ways of lifernwhen he said that his book The HighlandrnClearances “is the story of how the Highlandersrnwere deserted and then betrayed.rnIt concerns itself with people, how sheeprnwere preferred to them, and how bayonet,rntruncheon and fire were used torndrive them from their homes. It hasrnbeen said that the Clearances are now farrnenough away from us to be decently forgotten.rnBut the hills are still empty. Inrnall of Britain only among them can onernfind real solitude, and if their history isrnknown there is no satisfaction to be gotrnfrom the experience.”rnNone of the films discussed here wasrnmade solely to flog the obsessions ofrnAmerindian activists or Scottish Nationalists,rnhowever; their makers are respondingrnto a terrible hunger for human freedomrnin an increasingly nightmarishrnworld. The horrors they recreate on filmrnare the history, this time written by thernvictims, of how the yvorld got to be thernprison within a prison it is today.rnFrederick Jackson Turner’s “frontierrnhypothesis” of American history can alsornbe understood as the “anarchic freedom”rnhypothesis: the national character hasrnbeen formed by the pull of vast unpeopledrnspaces that gave birth, according tornan expedition chronicler writing in 1819,rnto an unquenchable craving for lifern”wherein the artificial wants and the uneasyrnrestraints inseparable from a crowdedrnpopulation are not known, whereinrnwe feel ourselves dependent immediatelyrnand solely on the bounty of nature,rnand the strength of our own arm” (quotedrnin Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land:rnThe American West as Symbol and Myth).rnThe frontier is the best of both worlds:rnsavage freedom embraced by a civilizedrnsensibility. As such it is inherently unstable,rna fragile and fleeting moment, thenrntragedy. The closing of “the last frontier”rnhas been announced so man timesrnthe words seem meaningless, but withrneach announcement it becomes morerndismally true. Apologists for progress arernfond of clucking that, after all, such absoluternfreedom has never actually existed,rnso there is nothing to long for, nothingrnto mourn. But anyone with sensernknows that an ideal does not have to bernactual to be real.rnHenry Nash Smith believed thatrnTurner’s thesis was inadequate, in thernend, because for some reason it failed tornlocate any “basis for democracy” inrnAmerica other than the independentrnyeomanry that began to wither with thernclosure of the frontier. More recently,rnVictor Davis Hanson’s The Other Greeks:rnThe Family Farm and the Agrarian Rootsrnof Western Civilization argues thatrn”Agrarian populism, not intellectualrncontemplation, farmers, not philosophers,rn’other Greeks,’ not the small cadrernof refined minds who have always comprisedrnthe stuff of Classics, were responsiblernfor the creation” of western democracy.rnIn other words, freedom is not arntheoretical construct inherited by readingrnthe right books but a way of lifernbacked up by genuine material independencernand self-reliance. With the deathrnof anything resembling economic autonomyrnfor the mass of modern individuals,rn”democracy” too is a corpse, muchrnthumped but impossible to reanimate.rnOur “basis for democracy” is gone, butrnits mystique staggers on, mutteringrnarcane formulae.rnIn the real Westerns that were madernuntil about 1960, the North’s destructionrnof the agrarian South was oftenrnadded to the theme of the vanishingrnfrontier, with embittered Johnny Rebsrnheading westward at war’s end for onernlast taste of unregulated living. Outlawryrnitself, in the form of the Dalton, James,rnYounger, and other gangs of dispossessedrnConfederates, was often likened to Indianrn”renegadism” a la Geronimo—a naturalrnresi^onsc to being marginalized andrnpersecuted by the relentless forces ofrnprogress. Many chronicles of white captivityrnmade the point, expressed by ZanernGrey in his first novel published almost arncentury ago, that “the free picturesquernlife of the Indians would have appealedrnto an white man; that it had a wonderfulrncharm . . . how easily white boys becamernIndianized, so attached to the wildrnlife of freedom of the redmen that it wasrnimpossible to get the captives to returnrnto civilized life.”rnSuch important insights, like so manyrnothers once the common intellectualrnproperty of Americans, have of coursernbeen extinguished in recent years. Yetrnwe are fortunate that art is still capable ofrnrcstoking these buried embers. We arernall, German, Brit, Scot, and Lakota alike,rnthe pitiable relicts of free ancestors. Andrnas the forces of progress acceleraterntheir final roundup for the One WorldrnReservation, wc are all redskins now.rnMarian Kester Coombs writes fromrnCrofton, Maryland.rn48/CHRONICLESrnrnrn