Word: fasts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...gunmen of the Old West would provide their romantic armchair admirers with some unpleasant surprises. Billy the Kid, of sentimental memory, was a psychopathic killer who dropped most of his 21 victims from ambush or tampered with their guns before he picked a fight; and he was not even fast on the draw. Jesse James, no matter what the legend says, never gave a buffalo nickel to the poor. Wes Hardin, the tiny Texan who was probably the most dangerous gunman in the West, was as mean as a mountain boomer; he had killed twelve men before he started...
...real life, TV's Wyatt Earp was a hardheaded businessman, less interested in law and order than he was in the fast buck. He reorganized the red-light district while he was in Dodge City, charged a fat fee for protection, and collected besides a sizable percentage of every fine he levied. He rarely fired a shot, made his reputation pistol-whipping drunken waddies...
...Novels. The trouble with most of the famous gunskinners was that they started to believe their own publicity. The legend of the West was growing almost as fast as the reality. The dime novels, with a bow to James Fenimore Cooper, had begun to give a first, rough literary form to the western story. By 1890 the "flesh-times in Kansas" were a thing of the past. Wild Bill Hickok had been tamed by Writer-Promoter Ned Buntline, and was playing in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show ("Fear not, fair maid, you are safe at last with...
Novelist Wister established the basic form of the modern sagebrush saga: the strong, silent, shy and virtuous hero; the hard-drinking, materialistic villain; the pretty, intelligent schoolteacher-heroine; the cattle politics; the slow drawl, the fast draw; the long, wary walk down Main Street to a blazing finish. And Zane Grey, a cactus-happy New York dentist who wrote 54 western novels that sold more than 25 million copies, started the mass exploitation of the Wister formula that soon turned the western story into a beltline business. Only since World War II have the cliches been rescued by a serious...
What the critters lacked in talent they made up in hard work. They wiggled through more walking lessons than Brigitte Bardot, and rasped themselves raw-handed to perfect the fast draw. Times without number they blasted holes in their own britches, and one of them, while poking his hat brim with a pistol, accidentally shot his own sideburns off. They became the prima donnas of horse opera, and sometimes it seemed as if they would rather pull hair than triggers. "Oh, Hugh O'Brian doesn't matter," Dale Robertson sniffed recently. "He's just a itty-bitty...