A boy in a brown cowboy hat...

Jay Silverheels, pictured here on the right next to costar Clayton Moore, played

Tonto in 217 of the 221 episodes of the "The Lone Ranger" television series.

Photo by ABC Television, 1956, Public Domain.

A boy in a brown cowboy hat

—like the red one I had as a kid—

wanders through eerie silence

past taxidermied bison and grizzly bear.

The Indian moves,

the boy fires his cap gun.

Thus we meet Johnny Depp's Tonto

in Gore Verbinski's "The Lone Ranger."

Lone Ranger stories have maybe always been

about how we see the past.

When George W. Trendle first broadcast in 1933,

the Lone Ranger was part of a west being won.

In 1949, Jay Silverheels' Tonto

rode alongside Clayton Moore's Lone Ranger,

who, like other superheroes, wore a mask

an icon of American initiative and justice.

Whatever else critics might say

about Verbinski's telling,

we feel the loss to our humanity

as life fades from Chief Big Bear's eyes.

We see "the rule of law"

can mean the rule of one kind over others.

And I understood how Mom made John Donne possible

by not letting me play “cowboys and Indians.”

“Any man's death diminishes me

because I am involved in mankind,

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

it tolls for thee.”