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Tweetsie Railroad Is Like 'Westworld' Without the Violent Robots

The western-themed North Carolina theme park is keeping the dream of the Wild West alive.
Photo courtesy of Susannah Kay

"These violent delights have violent ends." That's the Shakespeare quote that HBO's Westworld has made its enigmatic aphorism. It's a warning—both to the titular theme park's guests and the show's audience, regarding the danger of bloody fantasies. The line also seems tailor-made for Tweetsie Railroad, the run-down but stubbornly persistent Wild West theme park where cowboys, outlaws, and Native Americans stage gunfights for your amusement.

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Founded in Boone, North Carolina (named for Daniel Boone), in 1957 at the height of the western craze, Tweetsie Railroad is built around two prized steam engine trains that take more than 100,000 summer visitors on a two-mile loop through the mountains. During the ride, they're treated to shootouts performed by local actors and recreations of classic western scenes: an abandoned mine shaft, a frontier outpost, a Native American village complete with a plastic buffalo and grizzly bear. The rest of the park features other western-themed amusements, including a Main Street, a working blacksmith shop, and a photo booth where guests can dress up as outlaws, Native Americans, and saloon girls.

A fake man sits inside a jail cell Tweetsie Railroad. Photo by Susannah Kay

For sheer ambience, Tweetsie is as close as you can get to the real-life version of Westworld. At Tweetsie, the stock characters are played by local college students, with one robot in the mix: an animatronic town drunk in the jail cell, who's been waving his cup and repeating his tale of woe for decades.

But for all their superficial similarities, Tweetsie and Westworld have nearly diametrically opposed philosophies: While the former clings to a representation of the West that dominated American pop culture for decades, the latter demands a radical rewriting in which the background characters of western mythology come forth to demand their day as heroes.

The original, Michael Crichton–directed film version of Westworld was made in 1973, when it seemed more plausible that people would pay big money to live as John Wayne for a day. In 2016, that impulse is less probable: The daydream of the West has since proved incompatible with the truth of its history, and playing "Cowboys and Indians" doesn't seem as appealing to children since genocide has made its way into school curriculums. Countless articles have declared the death of the traditional western; recent attempts to revive it such as this summer's Magnificent Seven have barely made blips on the popular consciousness.

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Westworld's return to this retrograde fantasy speaks as much to the necessity of confronting the uncomfortable past of the West as it does the uncomfortable future of artificial intelligence. As Westworld's guests constantly remind one another, they're only having harmless fun, shooting prop guns at expensive dolls. The audience knows better, though, as we're also complicit in enjoying each new episode of violent delights. Westworld's creators know you'll condemn its characters for their baser urges, but they also know you'll feel the thrill with each bloody confrontation.

Park goers ride the Mouse Mine Train, touring North America's only Cheese Mine. Photo by Susannah Kay

Tweetsie, however, asks that you indulge in simpler pleasures—and that you check political correctness at the door. (I asked the girl working the photo booth if she found it troubling to dress white people in "Indian" clothes, and I've rarely heard a "no" delivered with so much disdain.) A passably dark complexion is still all you need to land a coveted role as an "Indian" at "Fort Boone," where, according to local legend, the actors engage in spectacular debauchery while they wait for the next audience-filled train. As one Tweetsie veteran whose family members worked at the park put it: "The fort is nothing but a HUGE party in between the times the train rolls around… what else are they suppose [sic] to do for that 30 mins in between?"

Drew Fischer, who played an Indian for two summers in the late 90s, says, "We did in fact discuss how non-PC the whole story was; us Indians… all ended up dead in the end of every act. We talked specifically about how funny it would be if we actually dropped all the cowboys and took the train at least one time." Since his tenure, the park has made some nods to modernity; the current iteration of the "shootout at Fort Boone" concludes with the cowboys and "Indians" miraculously surviving, the whole thing chalked up to a misunderstanding.

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Levi Rhoten, 8, of Gates City, Virginia, points a fake gun at his dad, Billy Rhoten. Photo by Susannah Kay

Although the violence at Tweetsie is bloodless and sanitized compared to Westworld, it's just as pervasive. You'll never see as many armed children as the ones sauntering down Tweetsie's main street with orange-tipped revolvers clutched in each hand, and there are endless varieties of toy guns for sale at Tweetsie's endless souvenir shops, delightedly seized upon by kids who unfailingly take aim at their parents. There are cap-gun rifles with real working scopes, and black "Lawman" and pink "Texas Rose" models complete with belts and holsters; the cowboy actors swagger around with real revolvers firing blanks. In the arcade, there's a huge shooting range where parents help their toddlers aim heavy fake rifles at a western diorama. The most popular target is the ass of a dummy saloon piano-player; if you hit him, he bangs out a tune.

For some guests, Tweetsie's offerings fail to resonate. "Let's go home, I think the kids are over it," muttered one harried set of parents on the day I visited. The attractions here are as anachronistic as the politics, and the old carnival rides are showing their age underneath fresh coats of paint. The park's future has frequently been uncertain, with backstage infighting to rival anything in Westworld: The Wall Street Journal referred to its owners' backstabbing power grabs as "Machiavellian" in a breathless 1997 article on the park's fluctuating fortunes.

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Owen White, 3, of Stony Point, North Carolina, partakes in a rifle shooting game. Photo by Susannah Kay

But most kids are oblivious to the park's retrograde message or behind-the-scenes drama, and they take to Tweetsie with abandon. You can't blame them, either, as the West never stopped being fun—that is, as long as you never consider at whose expense the fun comes. There's an undeniable thrill to feeling the weight of a gun (even a cap gun) on your hip, and it's reliably amusing to hand a BB gun to avowed anti-firearm city slickers and watching them experience the joy of shooting at empty cans. But these pleasures were never meant for everyone: Wring your hands over white kids playing with toy revolvers, but you'll feel a far sharper stabs of anxiety when you see two black boys doing the same. After Tamir Rice, it's clear that the notion of "harmless fun" depends entirely on who is having it.

That's why the western fantasy feels so dated here, and so ripe for criticism in Westworld; it was only ever intended for white men. It's no coincidence that the prominent guests in Westworld fit that demographic and are so hungry for a reality built around their desires. But that white male–centric way of ordering the world is at last being called into question in popular culture, and the western as a genre isn't so much dead as it is being reborn to reflect modernity. The last western movie to make a significant cultural impact was Django Unchained, which (albeit imperfectly) put the guns and the story in the hands of a black protagonist.

Caleb Parks, 5, of Charlotte, North Carolina, stands inside a makeshift coffin. Photo by Susannah Kay

In the battle for the soul of the western, it doesn't feel like a stretch to find parallels with our current political climate. What do voters see in Donald Trump if not a bullish alpha male who shoots from the hip? What does "Make America Great Again" mean if not to go back to a time when Americans could guiltlessly indulge in the western fantasy? (The Donald himself hit on this recently when he bemoaned that "they don't make movies like they used to.")

Though the western's uncomplicated golden era might be behind us, there's at least one true believer left at Tweetsie: eight year-old Levi Rhoton, who expertly twirls his six-shooters while we wait for the train, opening fire on both his father and my photographer. When Levi grows up, he wants to "play cowboys and drink moonshine." I ask his dad how he got into westerns. "Him and his brother both like it," says the father, but Levi corrects him. "No, he don't like 'em anymore." "As of last week, he don't like 'em," his father concedes. "Next week he will."

Follow Elaine Atwell on Twitter.