Inventing the Dream by Kevin Starr

“Living on the edge of the apocalyptic, devoid of social role, consoled by neither law nor predictability, the picaro fends off threats to his existence by audacious counterattack. Filling the dark night with bold talk, he disarms terror by embracing it as a constant in the human condition. He meets violence with parody, aping with mock gusto that which terrifies him most. Challenging reality, he makes the world seem even more cruel and absurd than it is. This, then, is what Horace Bell does with the frontier decades 1850-70, when life was so often less than nasty, brutal, and short. He makes the violent past grotesquely funny; he exaggerates it, so that its legacy of seedy violence and shabby pathos might take on some aura of the heroic, if only the mock-heroic. Bell parodies everyone and everything. His Hudibrastic approach allows him to sustain a complex response toward his memories. The founding time is evoked, judged terrifying, then defensively burlesqued; it is nevertheless put forward as something of a usable past.”

-Kevin Starr, 1985