Westfest 2008-2009

I've been thinking about westerns a lot these days, and what would be on my list of essential westerns, and which ones would make the cut (but only for serious students of the genre) and which ones are awful but worth seeing and so on.
And, of course, I've been thinking about subcategories and which of them people simply shouldn't miss out on.
So, I'm inviting y'all to contribute to this discussion by compiling your own lists of great westerns so we can discuss them.
To begin, I'm going to outline some of the subcategories I've identified (in no particular order):

1. Spaghetti Westerns (This has become the most identifiable subgenre in the Western and rightly so as several great films fall under this one.)
2. Jesse James (This includes movies about the James Gang and the Dalton Gang.)
3. The Earps (Even before the great contest between Tombstone and Wyatt Earp there were some truly star-studded versions of the OK Corral.)
4. Billy the Kid (Let's face it, Young Guns pretty much ran this one into the ground for a generation.)
5. John Wayne (You haven't seen a western until you've seen a John Wayne western. Not because they're always good, and not because other Westerns aren't better, but because it's like having a drink of refreshing Coca-Cola. You can't talk about what Diet Coke is or why you like RC better until you've had a Coke.)
6. The Cavalry (Some of these films could be classified as Plains Indian War Movies, and there's a whole subcategory of Custer movies, but there's nothing like a good John Ford cavalry film. Which brings us to...)
7. John Ford (The great director of Westerns)
8. Howard Hawks (the other great director)
9. Sam Peckinpah (the other other great director)
10. Gunfighters & Lawmen (Shane, High Noon, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Judge Roy Bean...)
11. Mexican Revolution (You could divide this category further into movies about the Juarez era and the Villa and Zapata era).
12. Civil War (Speaking of historical fare, most real Civil War films are better classified as "Southerns" and the Civil War features in many a good western as a backdrop of some form--even Bonanza was set during the Civil War--but occasionally you get something that really qualifies as a Civil War Western...there's even one that could be called the great SouthWestern Film.)
13. Indians (Films that help you separate your tatankas from your yotankas.)
14. Comedies (There are many good ones.)
15. Musicals (I can think of two and I don't want to see them.)
16. Wild Bill Hickock (Really, this is just a category designed to include watching 3 seasons of Deadwood which you couldn't do without.)
17. Ranchers & Cowhands (Speaking of TV, this category is really designed to cover those classic shows about big families with big ranches and big trouble or a certain show about a cattle drive.)
18. The Alamo (Because you can't have Westerns without Texas.)
19. Zorro (I'm expanding the boundaries here)
20. Moderns (Cars and helicopters in place of horses, but they're still westerns, even with a gun and a cattle prod.)
21. Pioneers on the Frontier (These are usually just straight-up dramas set in the West.)
22. Gold Rush, Gamblers, the Yukon (Sort of a grab-bag category)

Anyhow, I expect a free-for all once we start talking about what we think are the essential few that we'd want to keep in a vault and preserve.