No university would keep him longer than a contract allowed, but for fifty years Miles Holbrook Sheridan chased down the corners of the American West that Hollywood had let slip through the cracks, one borrowed classroom at a time, and left behind the definitive book on a genre most critics hadn’t noticed was a genre at all, writes Eleanor Voss.
Miles H. Sheridan, sometime visiting and adjunct professor at more universities west of the Mississippi than most colleagues could name in one sitting, died on August 26, 2021, of complications from COVID-19. He was 78.
Sheridan was born in Sheridan, Wyoming, on March 3, 1943, a coincidence of geography he dined out on for sixty years, insisting to generations of students that a man named for a cow town owed it a scholarly debt. His father ran a ranch-supply store; his mother taught grade school. His older sister, Louise, died of rheumatic fever in 1951 at age eleven, and it was her ballet shoes, kept afterward in a shoebox by their mother, that an eight-year-old Miles quietly appropriated and eventually persuaded a bemused local instructor to let him wear to class. He studied for four years, seriously enough to have real talent, before his short stature and, as he put it, his “buffalo architecture” made a career at the barre a fantasy even a devoted twelve-year-old had to retire. It was his first education in dance as a discipline rather than a diversion, and it would resurface, unexpectedly, decades later in his scholarship. He saw his first Western the same year he quit ballet, a William S. Hart double bill at the Lotus Theatre on Main Street.
He took his B.A. in History at the University of Wyoming in 1965, then spent nine lean years supporting himself as a ranch hand, a projectionist, and once, briefly, a rodeo announcer, before completing his Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Nebraska in 1974. His dissertation, “The Closing of the Reel Frontier: Turner’s Thesis and the Studio Western, 1929–1962,” became a slim, little-read first book, Six-Gun Salvation (1979), that a small university press published to a handful of dismissive notices.
An academic career, in the conventional sense, never quite happened. Sheridan taught wherever a department would fund him for a semester, a year, sometimes three: the University of Montana, Montana State, the University of Nevada–Reno, Northern Arizona, Texas Tech, the University of Oklahoma, Boise State, Cal State Northridge, the University of Colorado, and, twice, a homecoming stint at his alma mater in Laramie. He was, by his own count, “visiting” for forty years and never once tenured, a fact he treated with more pride than self-pity in later life. “Tenure,” he liked to say, “is just the academy’s word for surrender.” Between contracts he chased down lost prints of the low-budget Westerns nobody else thought worth a vault — a habit that began at eight, when he found three reels of nitrate stock in his uncle’s hay barn that turned out to be a Hart two-reeler thought destroyed. He donated what he recovered, unceremoniously and without much paperwork, to whichever regional archive would take it.
His major work, and the book he’ll be remembered for, was The Way the West Was Waltzed (1994), a study of the singing-cowboy musical and its stranger cousins — the dance numbers stitched into B-Westerns, the choreography behind the barn dances and saloon set-pieces that most critics had filed under filler. The vocabulary he brought to it was unmistakably the one he’d learned at eight at the barre, and it turned a genre nobody had taken seriously into one people couldn’t stop arguing about. It went out of print twice and was rescued twice, the second time by a small press whose editor had written her graduate thesis under him during his single semester at Cal State Northridge. Between the two books, and around whatever he was teaching that term, he also self-published and hand-mailed a newsletter called Frontier Frame for nearly thirty years, its subscriber list never topping four hundred but never falling much below it either.
In 2015 a piece of land in Osage County, Oklahoma — forty scrubby acres inherited from a great-uncle and long dismissed by the family as worth less than the fence around it — turned out to sit over a modest but productive oil deposit. The royalty checks arrived with an irony not lost on a lifelong scholar of frontier fortune-hunting, and let him retire in genuine comfort, clear Frontier Frame’s standing debts, and, as he told anyone who asked, buy a couch that finally matched his chair.
“He graded my thesis in a diner because he didn’t have an office that semester,” recalled Dana Whitcomb, who studied under him at Boise State in 1990 and now teaches at Montana State herself. “He was the most exacting reader I’ve ever had, and also the only professor who ever noticed I hadn’t eaten that day and just ordered me a plate without asking.” Colleague Ray Delgado, who shared a rental house with Sheridan during a Texas Tech stint in the mid-1980s, remembered his stubbornness fondly: “He’d been told for thirty years that his musicals book was a curiosity, not real scholarship. He never once revised his opinion of the people who said so.”
He is survived by his younger brother, Walter Sheridan Jr., of Sheridan; several nieces and nephews; and generations of students scattered across a dozen campuses who never stopped writing to him. He never married. He was predeceased by his parents, Walter and Jean Sheridan, and by his sister, Louise.
A celebration of his life, postponed nearly a year by pandemic restrictions, was held in the spring of 2022 at the Lotus Theatre in Sheridan — the same screen where a six-year-old Miles first sat on a folded coat to watch William S. Hart.
In lieu of flowers, the family asked that donations be made to American Ballet Theatre or the National Film Preservation Foundation.