Guide to spelling, punctuation and grammar

Paragraph 3
However, it is only comparatively recently that
western movies have faced the reality that some form
of genocide was practised in relation to the Native
American tribes when the west was settled by huge
numbers of white settlers. Western movies have
generally portrayed Native Americans as savage
hordes standing in the way of inevitable progress.
How many westerns have employed the image of the
intrepid pioneers in a circle of wagons fighting off
the brutal attacks of the ‘Indians’? Nevertheless, some
later westerns such as ‘Little Big Man,’ ‘Soldier Blue’
and ‘Dances With Wolves’ have tried to redress the
balance and show the savagery that existed on both
sides of the conflict. Yet the enduring myth that was
nurtured by westerns and stayed in the American
consciousness is that of the settlers taming the land
despite the efforts of the tribes to massacre them. 
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Paragraph 4
Another central myth that the western movie
preserves and encourages is that of the bringing of
law and order to the lawless new territories by
means of the gun and the skilled gunfighter. The
role of the gun and the gunman are central to the
western genre and in turn have helped to create a
gun culture in American society with sometimes
disastrous consequences. The ‘fast gun’, the hero who
is ‘fast on the draw’, is the archetypal western hero.
Sometimes he is a straightforward heroic type, in
other films he is more complicated. The gunfighter
uses his special skills to help the oppressed to establish
law and order in communities where there has been
none. In the western movie, ‘Shane’, for example, the
hero is a professional gunfighter who is trying to
leave gun-fighting behind him, but who is drawn
back into his profession by his wish to help a
community of homesteaders against a tyrannical
cattle baron. At the end of the movie, the gunfighter
leaves the community after defeating the bad guys
because he knows there is no place for him in the
community as the brand of the gunfighter will
always stick to him. The film endorses the idea that
the settlers’ way of life has to be defended with the
gun in the hands of a professional.
Paragraph 5
Such western heroes as Buffalo Bill, Billy the Kid,
Wyatt Earp, Annie Oakley and Jesse James were first
celebrated in the pages of cheap pulp fiction and
then endlessly represented in western movies. These
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portrayals have little to do with their historical
reality but are highly-romanticised versions of their
lives, the purpose of which is to establish them as
heroic figures of the old west. They become mythical
archetypes around whom legends grow. The outlaw
figures, such as Jesse James and Billy the Kid, are
not mere criminals, but symbols of the lawless
American west, romantic heroes who have been
unjustly treated. The outlaw as a symbol of the west
is part of the American consciousness and has helped
to create the glamorisation of the criminal in
American culture and life.