As a child regularly nourished by television Westerns, I did not realize that I was absorbing centuries-old literary motifs and archetypes. I did not yet have the vocabulary to recognize the heroic quest in the wanderings of various cowboys, but, like every human that ever sat around a fire inside a cave or a hearth inside a hut, I came to find comfort in the repetitive story lines and stock characters. That sooner or later one of the main characters would find him- or herself delivering a baby with no prior experience or being the vehicle of redemption for some rotten scoundrel exhibited not a lack of creativity on the part of the Westerns’ writers but rather an understanding of the need to be reminded that no problem exists that has not been faced and solved before.