community. In , gray and a bit portly, he was invited to hang out with
Gary Cooper while Cooper prepared to portray him inSergeant York.
Later that year, Audie Murphy saw the movie twice. Then he impatiently
volunteered with the army. Soon he would be a soldier himself, more than
a decade younger than York when he was drafted and hardly two-thirds his
size. In less than two years he shot men from their saddles in Sicily rather as
he would drop bad guys in Hollywood westerns during the s and s.
In Italy Audie favored the light, rapid-firing carbine, although he usually
slung an M- rifle, too, and packed a . pistol for good measure. For all his
steely expertise as a sharpshooter, Murphy loved sheer firepower and gravi-
tated toward Browning automatic rifles, tommy guns, and most fatefully at
Colmar Pocket, the big . machine gun. He understood industrial-scale
killing. Finally, having miraculously survived the war, Audie returned to
Texas in his beribboned summer tan uniform to see his scattered brothers
and sisters and to acknowledge honor and thanks in a series of public cere-
monies. These made the still-shy man anxious, but in Dallas he met his
favorite movie star, Gary Cooper. Cooper asked if Murphy wanted to hear
just how Alvin York captured Germans. Audie declined with thanks; he
was much more interested to know how the actor had re-created York’s
gobble at the turkey shoot.
tYork and Murphy, lonely and purposeful marksmen as boys, lived long
enough to witness the disappearance of common hunting grounds that
made subsistence possible for the poor and near-poor. They had been ex-
emplary individuals, hunters, and soldiers, yet their publicized exploits—
their own and their admirers’ conscious connection of hunting with sol-
diering prowess—served also, and ironically, to illuminate the end of the
long, long era of shooting for the table. Within fifteen years or so after World
War II, the rural South was virtually depopulated. Agricultural land was
either consolidated or abandoned. Sharecropping succumbed to machin-
ery and chemicals, and huge mountain families gave up trying to farm on a
pitiful fifty acres. Old rural worlds dissolved before the cash nexus. Califor-
nia filled with migrants from Texas and Oklahoma, people not unlike the
unfortunate Murphys, who did not leave because they had no adult male
with a car to pull onto U.S. Route . Alvin and other Yorks remained in Fen-
tress County, but hordes of other ‘‘hillbillies’’ engorged the Midwest during
Alvin’s own time.^3 And poetically, I suppose, Daniel Boone, archetype of the
Euro-southern frontier marksman, was memorialized in a national forest
near Fentress, where hunting was restricted.