The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Every cowboy is molded by its surroundings. In a world where everyone is against everyone, and it just takes a gunshot to create or settle any argument – with no interrupting higher forces – then it makes sense for the cowboy to become who he is. “In the West, might is right” (Matheson 895). There is no true concept of law. Nobody really cares for law, either. In the towns, there might be the occasional sheriff or marshal – but as we see in the movie “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”, when it’s time for the marshal to fight crime, he cowards out screaming “ride him out? Liberty Valance… me!?” and does nothing about it. Ultimately, Liberty Valance can do whatever he wants with very little limitations. Then you wonder why the guy is so reckless after all.

The cowboys have to work themselves in a land “peopled with sociopaths” (Matheson 891). You have to carry a handgun to get people to listen to you. Otherwise you’ll be made a fool of, which is what happened to Rance Stoddard when he tries to use the power of law in the Western scenario.
If this is the case, then you either join in the disaster or you’ll be in very bottom of the food chain of this corrupt community.

Matheson makes many true inferences of the ‘cowboy mold’. You see all the cowboy characteristics play off throughout the movie: individualistic, remorseless, and fearless. They settle their own problems. In the film, the cowboys, both villain and hero, are contrasted with a regular man from a more civilized community, attorney Rance Stoddard. He tries to blend into this lawless district, thinking that his old ways would work out in this new environment. To a certain extent, his ways seem to work, and people seem to like his ideas, and the idea of reading and writing, and the power of voting – but not the cowboy. Even John Wayne’s clean-cut character bullies and mocks his ways of books and words.
After a while of living in the Western environment, Stoddard ends up adapting some cowboy characteristics himself: he starts to practice shooting in the desert and ultimately confronts Liberty Valance in a gun-packing showdown in the most typical of Western scenarios: right in front of the saloon.