Behind a whole part of the United States are the traces left by adventurers, coureurs des bois, artists, entrepreneurs, lumberjacks, French-American, Creole or French-Canadian métis travelers whose names have sometimes been altered and history erased. At the time of the American presidential elections, the series American Destinies invites you to follow the trail of some of the characters from a forgotten Franco-America.
America’s sinister relationship with firearms has been growing for a long time, partly driven by the myth of the all-powerful cowboy of the conquest of the West. At the origin of the legendary and solitary cowboy who takes out his revolver at the drop of a hat is, for a large part, a French Canadian by the name of Will James, pseudonym of Ernest Dufault. Like any cowboy worthy of the name, he carries a gun on his belt…
From the Colt six-shot, the legendary revolver that became a symbol of the American West, America has now moved on to the AR-15, a weapon manufactured by the same company. Highly prized by serial killers, the AR-15 has sold nearly 25 million units since 1990. This is the weapon that was in the hands of Donald Trump’s assailant, shot dead Saturday night. It’s as if this America has never quite left the Wild West and its cowboy universe.
A real cowboy
Ernest Dufault was in Quebec in 1892, in Saint-Nazaire-d’Acton, halfway between Saint-Hyacinthe and Drummondville. He tried to hide his true identity all his life in order to better reinvent himself, willingly changing his skin, as he wished.
The stories of his adventures, largely fabricated, would inspire the entire industry of representation of this West where exchanges of gunfire appeared commonplace.
In 1907, Ernest Dufault headed west, like thousands of French Canadians. Destination: Saskatchewan, a province founded in 1905. Many Quebecers went to the Prairies. Some then went to the United States. This would be the case for Dufault. First settled in Val Marie, Saskatchewan, a village of French-speaking settlers, he was involved in a serious fight that encouraged him to decamp for good to the other side of the border. There, he changed his identity. He changed his language. He would henceforth be known as Will James.
In Nevada, he steals cattle. The authorities catch him. He is tried. Dufault, alias Will James, claims on this occasion that his parents are natives of the United States… The illusion that he projects about his own identity is perfect. Even his wife does not know the origins of the man to whom she is related. The fact remains that Dufault was always terrified that his French-Canadian origins would one day be discovered. In Nevada, he will spend a few months in prison.
From thief to stuntman
A stuntman in 1916 for the nascent film industry, where representations of this mythical West were already being produced, he became a scout in the army during the First World War, without ever leaving American territory. He wrote and published his stories first in magazines. Gifted in drawing, he even illustrated them. He invented his world, to the point of giving it a consistency that would inspire the world of the western.
By this time, Will James had already traveled the American West from top to bottom. But how to tell his story? Where to start and in what form? In 1921, he found himself on the benches of Yale University. This posh education would not be for him. But it was obvious that he was keen to learn from the best the art of putting himself on stage. Two years earlier, he had gone to San Francisco to study drawing, a passion he had had since childhood. His scenes from the life of far west are entirely in keeping with the aesthetics then in vogue. In his writings as in his drawings, he shows the harshness of the West. From this world of dust, he extracts his own light. Ernest Dufault thus contributes to establishing the traits of the cowboy as an invariant of the deep America. He is thus among the few who have inspired the most successful representations of the West. The look of the overly self-confident cowboy, the firearm never too far from his hands, is partly due to him.
From the mid-1920s until his death in 1942, he published 24 books. Several appeared in New York, with the same publisher as Ernest Hemingway. Although great literature does not bear his name, this does not prevent him from enjoying remarkable popular success in the United States. In a Nevada newspaper, he stated in 1924: “From the roots of my hair to the ground, I am a cowboy, and I always will be, no matter what I paint, draw, or write.” In the early 1920s, he published dozens of short stories in various publications, including Scribner’s Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post and the Sunset Magazine.
Published in 1926, Smoky the Cowhorse will be his great success. This book tells the story of a Western horse whose adventures are reminiscent, in some respects, of the famous White Fang by Jack London. The story will be adapted several times for the cinema. First in 1933, then in 1946 with Fred MacMurray and Anne Baxter. This production does not skimp on the means. The 20th Century Fox filmed in color, in Technicolor. In 1966, the lead role was given this time to Fess Parker, an actor known for having played Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone.
The American Myth
Virtually every library in America will have books by Will James. Many are illustrated by him. In French, the first pages of his autobiography, Lone Cowboy (1930), were translated only late. Ernest Dufault had never thought that he would be read in French. He had degraded this language even in the alcoholism that would take his life.
In his presentation of The Childhood of a Lonely Cowboye (1989), the translation of the first two chapters of Will James’ autobiography, the filmmaker Jacques Godbout rightly writes that “it is not insignificant that one of the creators of the American myth of the lost valleys was a Quebecer passionate about art and language.”
It is true that one cannot be interested in the universe of the American West without going through Will James. The anthropologist Serge Bouchard also stated that the cowboy side of Quebecers did not fall from the sky. “We must stop thinking that the ancestors are only coureurs des bois, at the time of New France. They are also cowboys,” he said. And as such, “they belong fully to the history of the continent.” According to him, we must “stop seeing ourselves as foreign to the history of this territory.”
This Western variable has long been ignored in Quebec history. Aren’t the records of Soldat Lebrun, who sings about the life of the wandering cowboy, among the greatest popular successes of the immediate post-war period? Have we forgotten that traveling theater troupes visited Quebec with great success, offering interpretations of the conquest of the West in which many recognized themselves? Crowds flocked to see this type of show, with wild beasts, all over Quebec. The most famous photo of the legend of the West, the one showing Buffalo Bill with his fringed suede jacket standing next to the great chief Sitting Bull, was taken in Montreal!
The Cowboy’s Dream
A large part of Ernest Dufault’s archives now belong to the collection of the Yellowstone Art Museum in Montana. The institution recently dedicated a vast exhibition to this man who, throughout his life, chased his cowboy dreams.
This exhibition highlighted the extent to which both his literary and pictorial work had profoundly influenced contemporary art and American culture.
In Quebec, Jacques Godbout made a documentary about him in 1988. Alias Will James will encourage the discovery of the work of this cowboy, still largely unknown in our country. Some of Ernest Dufault’s writings have since attracted the belated curiosity of a French-speaking public.
One of the distant relatives of this cowboy composer, Olivier Dufault, published a novel about him in 2017, entitled BlessingAnother distant relative, the singer Luce Dufault, dedicated a song to him in which she talks about this “king of liars”, this “Will James lonesome cow-boy”.