In Hollywood's latest version of the western myth, it still seems that no foreigners need apply, writes Myles Dungan

In 1882 the Union Pacific built a monument to itself in Wyoming at the highest point along the route of the transcontinental railroad. Three years later a justice of the peace in Laramie, William L Murphy, discovered that the impressive granite pyramid was not actually built on railroad property but on land owned by the federal government. He filed a homestead claim and bought the land. He then invited local businessmen to publicise their products on his new outdoor advertising site and, for good measure, advised the Union Pacific that its "rock pile" was trespassing on his ranch. For the railroad, everything that could have gone wrong had done so. Hence the expression "Murphy's law".

Truth or fiction? The facts are accurate enough and many American westerners will tell you that is how Murphy's law came about. And, as the newspaper editor in John Ford's classic film said of James Stewart's confession that he was not actually The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend".

That's the American way. When history disappoints, myth compensates. It worked for Wyatt Earp, who took the DIY route. His celebrity derives largely from his relative longevity (he died in 1929) and the fact that he ended his days in Hollywood as a friend of William S Hart, Tom Mix and John Ford, icon-makers on the lookout for future icons.

Meanwhile, "Buffalo" Bill Cody practically invented and patented the entire process of myth-making. He didn't leave his apotheosis to others. He created his own legend on stage and through his touring Wild West Show. By employing the likes of sharpshooter Annie Oakley and (briefly) Sitting Bull, and by the constant depiction of such "typical" western scenes as the robbing of a stagecoach and Custer's Last Stand, he defined the west for his own and for future generations, because what he invented was then replicated by Hollywood.

The old legends pervade.

The American novelist Cormac McCarthy has written that "there is mythology now, just as there was in the time of Homer, only we do not perceive it because we ourselves live in the very shadow of it".

It must have been fascinating for folklorists and anthropologists to watch a new nation create its own mythology, on screen, in the first half of the 20th century. However flawed their characters might have been, Cody, Earp, "Wild Bill" Hickock, Billy the Kid, Jesse James, John Wesley Hardin and George Armstrong Custer became members of the American pantheon. Once a few inconvenient truths had been glossed over first.

Myth is an idealised, often wildly inaccurate, version of the past. Myth is how we rectify our history and turn it into what might have been. Just as dreams allow us to reshape and make sense of the reality of our lives, mythology permits us to refashion our history.

If taken to extremes, our interaction with mythology becomes corrosive. A line drawn from German folk tales through Wagnerian opera and on to the Nazi Volkskunde illustrates the dangers. America's love affair with the gun stems from its own attachment to a more recent mythic past.

In my book How the Irish Won The West, I say of the western movie "it ain't coming back". How does that explain the 10-hour mini-series Into the West, broadcast in the US in 2005 and currently taking up most of Saturday night for six weeks on BBC2? Okay, after this Steven Spielberg marathon, it won't be back.

It seems that as westerns have got fewer in number they've got better. Dances with Wolves, Unforgiven and Heaven's Gate (Yes!) are as good as anything made in the golden era of the Hollywood western in the 1940s and 1950s. Lonesome Dove and Into the West are as good as any depictions of the west seen on TV. But just as Oscars for Costner and Eastwood didn't lead to a resurgence in film crew motel room bookings in Monument Valley, one mini-series does not constitute a revival.

The western faded because it had served its purpose in establishing an American mythic landscape. It was replaced by imitative genres such as the cop movie which transferred its mores to an urban environment and science fiction which reflected the modern preoccupation with technology against a recognisably "western" backdrop: the mythic American past masquerading as the future.

Though westerns have never had much connection with the actual history of the American west, they have often had plenty to do with the politics and culture of the times in which they were made. High Noon (1952) is not about the animosity between Sheriff Will Kane and ex-con Frank Miller, it's about McCarthyism. In the sanguinary Soldier Blue (1970) the Plains Indians were standing in for the Vietnamese.

Into the West has tried (often confusingly) for historical accuracy. It tells the story of how the US, in pushing beyond the Mississippi River after the Louisiana Purchase of 1804, acted as a quasi-imperialist power in dispossessing the indigenous people of the region while simultaneously demonising them for the ferocity of their resistance to conquest.

In fact it can be seen to reflect first, modern political correctness - the whites and the Indians get equal billing (though not equal time); second, American qualms about its interventionist foreign policy - is the "taming" of Afghanistan being undertaken for the same motives as the subjugation of the Native American?; and third, a belated awareness of the internecine nature of the conflict in Iraq - the animosity between the Sioux and the Crow parallels that between the Sunnis and the Shi-ites.

Comments on the series posted on www.imdb.com certainly mirror the current polarisation in American politics.

They range from a liberal blue state acceptance of the legacy of American culpability to Limbaugh-like observations that "it really feels like Spielberg was on a hate-America funk and decided to trash the US government on film".

One comment, which doesn't address the current American dialectic, is interesting. It asks, "Where are the Irish? Where are the Chinese?" The series, so far at least, certainly reflects the Hollywood "truth" that the American west was tamed by square-jawed Wasps. The extended American family which represents the "white" experience in the series, the Wheelers, is Anglo-Saxon, Protestant and Virginian.

The assumption is that the "melting pot" had long been at work by the time the western frontier opened up, and that the adventurous or discontented souls who moved westwards were all bona fide "Americans". A look at the composition of, for example, Custer's ill-fated Fifth Cavalry, challenges this assumption. Barely half its retinue (though most of its officers) was born in the US. Almost 20 per cent of the troopers were Irish. There were also sizeable contingents from Germany and Italy.

Featuring in the third programme in the series is the brief rapprochement between the indigenous nations of the plains (Sioux, Cheyenne, Crow etc) and the federal government which was formalised near Fort Laramie in Wyoming in 1851. As I point out in How the Irish Won the West (the title is tongue in cheek) that treaty was brokered by an Irishman, Indian agent Thomas Fitzpatrick, nicknamed "Broken Hand" by the Indians whose trust he had gained.

It will be interesting to see if Fitzpatrick features in next weekend's episode; he certainly does not figure in the cast list. Admittedly, he was name-checked in episode two, but without explanation. In Hollywood's renewed nurturing of the western myth, it still seems that no foreigners need apply. The Irish have only been allowed to feature as drunken comic turns in John Ford's Cavalry trilogy.

Well, it is their mythology after all. And the word "myth" can mean falsehood as well as archetype.

One thing that Into The West does achieve, however, is to issue a timely reminder about the true nature of the genocidal conflict which allowed the western "wilderness" to become a "garden".

The 19th-century American historian Frederick Jackson Turner, in his influential work The Significance of the Frontier in American History, describes the US frontier as "the meeting point between civilisation and savagery".

In the light of what we will see in Into the West, one is compelled to ask, who were the champions of civilisation and who represented savagery?

Myles Dungan is the author of How the Irish Won the West published by New Island Books (€24.95, hardback). It will be reviewed tomorrow in WeekendReview