The Man Who Rewrote Liberty Valance

One of my favorite directors is John Ford, and like many Ford fans, I have a special place in my heart for The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). The film tells a story about two men: Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart), an idealistic lawyer, and Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), a rugged frontiersman. Stoddard arrives in the town of Shinbone with a belief in law and order. But he is beaten and humiliated by the outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). Rescued by Doniphon, Stoddard recovers and begins teaching the townspeople about democracy and self-governance. In doing so, he wins the admiration of his future wife, Hallie (Vera Miles).

Everything heats up when the territory’s statehood is at stake. Stoddard challenges Valance’s lawlessness and finds himself forced into a gunfight. At the showdown, his and Valance’s guns fire. He seemingly kills the outlaw and becomes a celebrated figure, launching his political career. Years later, he learns the truth. Tom Doniphon fired the fatal shot from the shadows, sacrificing his own future (he, too, is in love with Hallie) so that civilization can take root. Years later, he returns to Shinbone for Doniphon’s funeral, and the now Senator Stoddard confesses this to a reporter. The reporter then says the famous line: "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." As he and Hallie leave on the train, the woman Tom Doniphon lost looks out at the town’s transformation and reflects, "It was once a wilderness. Now it's a garden." We can see the mixed feelings in Stoddard’s face.

I was surprised to discover that Lafferty had rewritten the movie. His version isn’t just about settling the West—it’s about how “civilizing” forces repeatedly depopulate it. Anglo settlers displace the Indigenous inhabitants, rename the land, and establish a company town around a coal operation. But when the owner shifts to gold mining, he hollows out the town, cashing relief checks for former, deceased, or nonexistent residents to fund his new venture. Corrupt officials take their cut, but one gets too greedy. When the owner is murdered, an innocent family man takes the fall.

But this is only the beginning. Enter the novel’s true villain: a corrupt lawyer, darker even than the industrialist and his underling—one of civilization’s real pillars, a man with a law degree, just like Ransom Stoddard. As the violence escalates, the framed family man is senselessly and brutally murdered. Then the novel surges toward its astonishingly mystical climax.

This is where Lafferty most clearly echoes The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. An Indian woman who lives on town’s outskirts and a wronged child fire their guns at the corrupt lawyer at the same moment—just as Stoddard and Doniphon did at Valance. But it is her bullet that strikes, avenging the original act of Indigenous depopulation and protecting the child and his siblings.

And here lies a big difference from John Ford’s masterpiece: the child, unlike Stoddard, never learns that the legend is a lie. The Indian woman keeps the secret. Yet almost no one talks about The Reefs of Earth this way. Perhaps that’s because it’s easy to overlook how brilliantly Lafferty has inverted its structure.

I have even heard someone say the plot of the novel doesn’t matter, but it does—immensely. Lafferty rewrites the American myth of the West, taking it straight out of John Ford’s hands and re-enchanting it.

When Lafferty's novel ends, he has completely solved The Stoddard Problem. In the final night scene on the Ile de France, the Dulanty children—with their six little pairs of goblin eyes glowing green in the dark—are ready to turn the garden back into a wilderness.