I never understood why everyone in Western had American accents and spoke English all the time. With the the high levels of immigration to the US in those days I'd have though most of the pioneers would be from Europe and have a variety of interesting accents and languages. When DID 'the' American accent develop? (I put the word 'the' in quotes there because I'm sure there are hundreds of regional variations but such subtleties are lost this side of the Atlantic. You all sound the same to us. I guess the average Brit could tell New York from Kentukybut everyone else just sounds Canadian.
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I'm sure you're aware that since Westerns made in the U.S. have primarily been aimed at the American audience, it makes sense to use people who speak with "American accents," as you call them (of which, yes, there are a variety -- just as most countries feature regional variations...)...it's one of those things where historical reality has to give way to the needs of the market (at least, the needs as perceived by some...).
(I did say I was sure you were aware of that; nonetheless, although that part of your comment may have been rhetorical, I went ahead and gave an answer so as to convey my views and set up the next portions of my reply...)
You are correct that there were high levels of immigration in the 19th century, many of whom likely spoke little or highly-accented English (but keep in mind also that a high proportion of those immigrants came from the British Isles, so they at least had a leg up on the language problem -- there have been some American-made Westerns that featured characters with English or Irish accents, for instance). But as I understand it, there was a tendency for immigrants arriving over the Atlantic to get off the boat (and then off of Ellis Island, to the extent they were taken there upon arrival...) -- and then stop in the East Coast cities to, as it were, "acclimate" for a while; which resulted in them "huddling up" in the Eastern cities, thus creating ethnic pockets, such as the Irish and Italians in Boston and New York, which resulted in the creation of new "accents".
(In addition, arriving immigrants were often following in the steps of previous arrivals from their same countries, and tended to seek their co-nationalists upon arrival, no doubt feeling less insecure if they went to the same places; thus, Eastern Europeans tended to form "pockets," too, and Scandinavians settled disproportionately in such northern areas as Minnesota.... When such "pockets" developed, the people in them tended to speak their native languages among themselves, likely slowing down their learning of English and creating a new "accent" (in the small town where I lived as a child, there were a number of old people who never did learn to speak English -- their bilingual relatives had to translate for them, and even non-relatives, such as my mother, would learn a few words of their language, just to be able to communicate on a rudimentary level with them (in the case of my town, that language was called "Belgian" -- it was really Flemish, I think -- we weren't Belgian in our own origins...).
Sorry if I've wandered from the point...but let me mention that there have been a number of Western movies that featured characters with foreign accents (and I'm not counting, as an example, either the Italian westerns arising out of Sergio Leone's seminal examples, or the German Westerns) -- but those tended to be only isolated and unimportant characters...
But you are correct that we have many regional accents over here. Many of them, as I understand it, developed out of the "English" spoken by some of the earliest European immigrants -- the accents of the Carolinas, for instance, are said to have developed from the language of the Scots-Irish settlers who came to the Appalachian Mountains pre-Revolutionary War (changing with the years, of course, as well as with the influence of newcomers and of the original settlers, the American Indians...). (But note that those Scots-Irish immigrants went to the mountains because when they arrived, the Eastern seaboard's prime (and flatter) land had already been taken up, often by English immigrants who, by the time the Scots-Irish arrived, had already begun to prosper and consider themselves more "aristocratic" than the newcomers...with the result that there was a different accent in such places in Eastern Virginia than in the mountains to the west...)
Nor was it only the East Coast cities in which those "pockets" of immigrants settled -- there were ethnic enclaves in many West Coast cities, for instance; and, in a very interesting development, there was extensive immigration of Irish and Italians to New Orleans (as well as to New York and Boston) -- resulting in creation of a New Orleans accent (different from the Creole accents...) that was strikingly similar to that upper East Coast accent...
And finally, the point I've been leading up to: in this country there was, through the middle part of the 20th century, a deliberate effort on the part of media with audio components (i.e., television, radio, and movies) to hire "on-air" talent with what was believed to be the accent considered the most "un-accented" (and thus most likely to be easily accepted by listeners throughout the country). (I'm not saying that was right, or correct; I'm merely describing what I learned was the practice in those industries...).
That accent, specifically, was that of the Upper Midwest -- Minnesota, Iowa, the Dakotas, Wisconsin... A goodly number of television broadcasters from the fifties through the eighties either had such an "accent" from childhood, or were taught to use it; and for a while it was standard (on-air) across much of the country. (As a sidelight: I myself grew up in Minnesota, and for that reason many of those people I heard/saw on radio, teevee, and movies did not seem, to me, to have accents at all -- a point I finally came to realize when, while on a beach on the island of Cyprus in the '70's (an era in which the U.N. kept garrisons on the island to keep the ethnic divisions on the island from erupting into bloodshed -- garrisons that included Canadian troops), I was approached by a group of men who asked me if I were from Canada...they were Canadian troops, and a couple of them, from the area around Winnipeg, thought, in hearing me speaking with my friends, that I was from their home area...)
Dave, finished at last!
