We can be heroes, for ever and ever: Salon.com (click-through ad required) examines how those greatest of Western legends Davy Crockett and Wild Bill Hickok, like the Old West itself, have been remolded and retconned over the past 100 years to suit the needs of each era:

"Westerns go through cycles to match our moods. In the '50s and '60s they were seen as stand-ins for everything from McCarthyism (High Noon) to America's Cold War resolve (Rio Bravo, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, et al); in the late '60s and '70s westerns were analogies for our involvement in Vietnam (Little Big Man). Early into this century the western has gone east: to Arabia in Hidalgo, to Japan in The Last Samurai, and to North Africa in Secondhand Lions. In a couple of cases the East came west, as in the Jackie Chan-Owen Wilson movies Shanghai Noon and Shanghai Knights. (We'll probably be seeing essays any day now on how these films parallel our 'cowboying' of the East.) Whatever we use them for, and however we reinterpret our frontier legends, westerns keep coming back. As a nation, we've become like the detective in Memento: our memories stop at a certain point in the past and we seem incapable of creating new ones."

Beware: The article's first paragraph contains a major spoiler about tonight's episode of Deadwood. Consider yourself warned.