The Western has become an archetype for the founding of a great portion of the United States. The behavior of the men and women who pioneered the great, vast prairies of the land west of the Mississippi set standards which continue today. Living on the outskirts of formal settlements, they governed their lives and their children's lives with a code that lives on today, irrespective of formal laws and which serves as an underpinning of a life lived morally and consciously, aware of one's environment, one's neighbors, and oneself. Of course it recognized personal and communal responsibility. One could do much worse than subscribe to such a code in the twenty-first century.