As I’ve noted before, my love of the old west started with the comic books; reading Rawhide Kid and Kid Colt and Two-Gun Kid. Then there were the road trips and making stops in Deadwood, or Dodge City. These were probably the best years of my young cowboy-loving life. Shortly after this, while I was still young, Young Guns came out, and then Young Guns 2. These movies took everything to a new level for me. Now, I had to learn more. Did Billy really kill twenty-one men? Was he really a bad guy? Was he really a bullied and mis-understood kid?
There was nothing wrong with asking those questions, or discovering new questions to ask. But soon I learned about Wild Bill, and then Wyatt Earp, and then Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson, and on and on. With each new gun-hand there was a new life to explore, a new desperate character to try and understand, and following logically, new items to study and learn.
I long since stopped reading the comics as my primary western learning source; I still pick one up for fun once in a while, but they’re no longer my escape in to the old west. Movies were, and are, still a great getaway, but never watched with quite the same wide-eyed awe that they had been before. I now was cognizant of the little nuances that were inaccurate, or perhaps remarkably correct. I wasn’t watching with the same eye of wonderment, but with a slowly transitioning eye of assessment. How did these things reconcile with the truths of western history that I was now more and more becoming knowledgeable of?
None of what I decry is an absolute negative; not by any means. I very much love to research, and I maintain a passion for the west and the time of good guys and bad guys, or slick gunfighters and brave frontiersmen, but something has altered, and that element is the loss of the genuine fun that it all used to be.
I can’t say that I would turn things back, but I do miss the mystique of the unknown west, or the slightly dreamy façade of the righteous western lawman. The more that is studied and learned, the more that frontier of excitement becomes a landscape of argued knowledge versus proven fact. It may, perhaps, be best to liken the American frontier and todays’ well paved western states, to the path of a little boy playing cowboys and Indians to a research-obsessed man, learning every little detail of Wyatt Earp or Henry Antrim. There’s an excitement and purity in looking out into what we don’t know, and the anticipation of venturing forth to explore that frontier, but once we’ve gone out and learned the land and seen the sights, and made ourselves familiar with what lies beyond our present scope of knowledge, we can’t return to our position of innocence or naïve enjoyment.
I miss what the names Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, Wild Bill and Billy the Kid, used to mean to me. But conversely, I love the comprehensive picture I can now understand; one that includes Dave Mather and Dallas Stoudenmire, and an understanding of the Royal Gorge War, or how John Chisum became so prolific working cattle in the Pecos. I can’t, and don’t want, to take back or lose all I’ve learned, but I also know that I won’t criticize the casual fan, who watches Tombstone or Young Guns and thinks it’s simply just a real good time, or the one who plays Red Dead Redemption and fancies themselves an outlaw or lawman in the mold of the well worn tropes and looks for nothing more. If it brings you joy, then I applaud it. Perhaps some will harken back to the days when we fancied our white-hat heroes, the way the we take a fancy to digging up absolute truths and ugly accuracies about all of our one-time heroes.
Handy With A Gun...! 