“The habits of violence were endemic to the land. The combination of violence and motion, after all, is what made the West so cinematic.”

Reviel Netz, Barbed Wire

The first colonists saw in America an opportunity to regenerate their fortunes, their spirits, and the power of their church and nation; but the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience.

Richard Slotkin