Wild West ogregores

John Anderson's WSJ review of ‘Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War’ on Netflix highlights the collective/corporate considerations behind the individualist mythologizing of the Old West.

The second paragraph (my highlights):

“Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War,” for all its action and expansive re-creations of frontier mischief, presents Earp as not just a hero but a player in a drama that reached far beyond the confines of the O.K. Corral, or Tombstone, Ariz., or even post-Civil War America. As retold by Ed Harris—who gives a bona fide vocal performance here and should be a model for narrators everywhere—there were two reasons that the crime rate in 1880s Arizona was raising global eyebrows. In London, for instance, the banker J.P. Morgan, trying to buy faltering U.S. railroads, needed to convince his backers—with such names as Windsor and Rothschild—that America was a safe place in which to invest. The U.S. government, meanwhile, was relying on Arizona silver to pay off an onerous 16-year-old Civil War debt. All those highway robberies pulled by the Cowboys—an Old West version of sloppily organized but nonetheless ruthless crime—were making the clients of the leading stagecoach company, Wells, Fargo, very nervous.

Donald Putman, Wells Fargo Stagecoach Holdup

I noticed three here, not two:

The USG is a prototypical collective agent, aka an ogregore. It had incurred debt and needed social stability to pay it off.

Wells Fargo is another: a corporation.

The third is framed in terms of individuals like JP Morgan. However, Morgan and the other plutocrats acted in their collective interests, thus arguably constituting a group agent.

The review also discusses other collective phenomena which aren't quite agents but are influential nonetheless, like public opinion. The newspaper corporations, though, were certainly ogregores, and the two sides of the Civil War were as well.

Public sympathy was split between the Earp brothers and the Cowboys, thanks to Confederate-sympathizing newspapers taking the side of the Cowboys (who were cast as anti-corporate) and Union-leaning publications championing the Earps.