Word: west
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Salt Pork & Sundown. The western hero, as worshiped in 1959, is derived from a type that was extant for only a brief moment of history-between 1865, when the Civil War ended, and 1886-87. when 80% of the cattle in the West froze to death in two savage winters. "There's no law west of Kansas City," the saying went, "and west of Fort Scott, no God." The Sioux and the Apache were making their last stands. The first big gold and silver strikes were made in Colorado and Nevada, and the no-good and the adventurous went...
...Fighting Pimps. Courage the cowboys had-enough to "charge hell with a bucket of water." as somebody said-but they were not necessarily dangerous. The Colt single-action .45 (Peacemaker) and the Colt .44 (Frontier), the preferred pistols in the West, were clumsy objects; they weighed 3 lbs. 1 oz.. stretched 10¼ in. from butt to sight. To learn the quick draw with this blunderbuss took a lot of practice, and the man who could fire it accurately beyond 20 ft. was rare. Nevertheless, the best of the gunsharks-with the help of sawed barrels, tied triggers, shifted...
Most of the famous 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...
...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...
...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 set of younger writers-A. B. Guthrie Jr. (The Way West), Tom Lea (The Wonderful Country), Dorothy Johnson (The Hanging Tree...