You’re out on the plains. You see a band of desperados about a mile away, to the north. They’re riding west, towards the mountains, which you know have only one navigable path. You’re both about a mile away from the pass, you to the south east, them to the north east.
You don’t ride straight at them. You won’t catch them that way, unless your horses are significantly faster. Instead, you ride for the pass. You’re both travelling a distance of about a mile, so you don’t have to be faster than them - if your horses are as good as theirs, you’ll get there at the same time.
So from the 19th century, I did find a story (using Google books search) where they didn’t exactly say “Head’em off at the pass!” but rather, they “headed them off in the nick of time” at “Marey’s Pass.” Page 4:
“We never would gave got them in all the world, sir… but for Pops here. He knew the way, even in the dark, and we headed them off in the nick of time.” (The previous paragraph describes the cavalry at the pas, apprehending for the bandits even as they thought they were perfectly safe).
What about live cowboy shows, like Buffalo Bill’s circus? Those were huge cultural influences in their day, and could easily have spawned a cliche like this. How much of the actual dialogue and scripts from those shows still exist?
True, but after this much effort, if this WAS a common phrase in western movies, we’d have evidence of it by now. It seems abundantly clear to me now that it was not a common phrase in western movies.
And , as the reference to Dead Unicorn Trope makes evident, something doesn’t actually have to exist to become the basis of a cliche. I’ve written about these before in the now-sadly-defunct ezine Teemings. Fu Manchu didn’t have a Fu-manchu moustache. Captain Nemo didn’t encounter a single enormous octopus or squid, and so forth.
(Interesting name. I hadn’t encountered “Dead Unicorn Trope” before, although I was familiar with the concept.)
I had to Google the Disney film to make sure I wasn’t having the most massive case of Mandela Syndrome ever, but I’m guessing you mean specifically in Verne’s books?
WAG
A phrase like that may have begun as parody. A radio comedian could have been performing a bit about cowboys one night and the next morning everybody is saying “Head ‘em off at the pass” in a western drawl. Some of us are old enough to remember the day in 1977 when everybody at school was just looking for the opportunity to say, “Well, excuuuuuse me!” That probably happened quite regularly in the early days of radio. The performances themselves were ephemeral, but a few catchphrases could have wheedled themselves into pop culture by fan repetition.
This is exactly where the phrase originated. Modern warfare has emulated this format. For many years now missiles like the Sidewinder no longer “chase the tail”, they calculate where the bogie is going and head them off at the pass.
I’m going to alter your statement by saying “frequently used in works” rather than “frequently quoted”
That’s not always true, though. Take “the butler did it”, it’s a cliche, but it isn’t like there was a spate of murder mysteries 100 years ago where the butler did it. It’s a plot device that is (and was) perceived as artless. It’s repeated over and over not in serious works that eventually develop into a cliche, but in parody of the early perception of it being a cliche.
Heading someone off at the pass is an easy phrasing of an unimaginative cowboy story idea, so it caught on as a cliche without necessarily being actually overused in serious works.
Like the oft imitated Cary Grant phrase “Judy, Judy, Judy” which was never uttered by him. He said something similar in a movie, but Larry Storch greeted Judy Garland with that phrase in Cary Grant’s voice during a nightclub act and it became legend.
Same with “Beam me up, Scotty” which attained legendary status but was never spoken in any Star Trek show or movie. Sometimes these phrases enter the public consciousness through mysterious paths.
I believe the scenario is (usually) something like this: you happen upon an ugly scene. Innocent/good people were killed/raped/whatever by bad guys. The bad guys left about 20 minutes ago on horseback. You and your posse decide to go after them.
There’s no reason to think your horses are significantly faster than their horses. So simply trying to “catch up with them” would seem like a bad plan. Another plan is to ambush them at a location they’re likely to be at, an hour or so from now. But that could mean a longer path in a shorter amount of time.
In most situations I think the only practical way to “head’em off at the pass” is if you had a different start location vs. the bad guys; you start off closer to the ambush point vs. them. Sounds reasonable, but it requires you to receive the intelligence report (“bad guys left Tucumcari at sunrise”) in a very timely manner. Perhaps telegraph.
I don’t know, man, I’m not writing a screenplay, I’m trying to explain the geometry of an intercept versus a pursuit.
The rest of your post is basically saying exactly the same thing as my post, so I think we’re pretty much on the same page. The cliche isn’t describing a situation where you’re behind the people you’re trying to catch, it’s describing a situation where you aren’t where the crime was committed when you hear about it, but you know the route the criminals have to take, and can get there ahead of them. That can be because someone sent a telegraph, or a person at the crime scene saw them coming and rode for help, or because you saw a cloud of smoke across the plains and recognized that it meant trouble.
I’ve found many cliches which have little no provenance.
Superman changing clothes in a phone booth. Never happened in a comic book. Never happened in a movie or television. Did happen once in a Fleischer cartoon.
The Butler did it! We’ve had threads about the origins of this trope, with mostly futile results. Yet when S. S. van Dine put out his Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories in 1928 #11 was “Servants–such as butlers, footmen, valets, game-keepers, cooks, and the like–must not be chosen by the author as the culprit.” Surely such stories must have proliferated even if they’ve now lost.
Leo Rosten was a Ph.D. sociologist who wrote a number of movies after his book came out. He was a close observer of the culture. Hard to imagine that he invented the phrase or that it wasn’t already considered a cliche if he said it was.
@CrafterMan. I don’t understand why you doubt the reality of racing ahead to intercept an enemy. I’ve already cited two real-life accounts in which it not only happened but described by variants of our very phrase. Here’s a third, from the Waukegan News-Sun, 25 Sep 1923, Tue · Page 9, from “Captains of Adventure” by Roger Pocock. The book was actually published in 1913; I don’t know why the late reprint.
All the Indians were firing, but the chief raced Cody to head him off at a narrow pass of the valley.
If I can find three pre-talkie uses of the actual phrase, then the circumstances in which it could be used must have been fairly frequent.
No one has said that it is a strategy in the general sense. In every example given, it was a situation where the opportunity to do so presented itself.
What makes you think that it is or should be considered a general strategy, rather than the situational tactic that it has been described as?
If you’re slower than them, then there’s just no hope. You can’t catch them. Since there’s nothing you can do, just don’t worry about that case. But even if you’re faster than them (maybe they’re on foot and you’re mounted, for instance? Or your horse is better than theirs?), there’s still not much chance: You could catch up to them, if you knew which way to go, but you don’t know which way they went. But if there’s a pass, then you know they’ll have to go there eventually, so you head for the pass. Maybe, by chance, you’ll take the same route they did to get to the pass, and apprehend them before they even reach it. But even if you don’t, you’ll catch them eventually.
Refresh my memory, then… What sea creature did they use the electrified bullets against?
