I have no idea why the mere words "Wild West" and "Old West" conjure up such images of adventure, but they do. When I was a young boy we played "cowboys and Indians" and fought who got to be sheriff. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday were practically household names to us.
I read German author Karl May's books about the Wild West and relished the adventures of Old Shatterhand and his friend, the noble Indian chief Winnetou. Although May, who had written his cowboy and western adventures in the late 1800s, never ventured farther West than Buffalo, his books felt real and we loved them.
Later, I watched the television series "Bonanza" and many others like it, fascinated by all those stories of the old west and how people lived in those pioneering days.
As a young adult I still loved Westerns and was a big fan of Sergio Leone's "spaghetti Western" films like the "Man with No Name" trilogy, "Once Upon a Time in the West" with Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson and Jason Robards, and, of course, movies with the incomparable John Wayne. I enjoyed the hilarious humor and drama in Westerns with Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill.
Later I fell in love with movies like "Tombstone" with Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer and, especially, Sam Elliott. All of them showed the old West in the same way. Cowboys, Indians, the Cavalry, old West clothes, old West outlaws, old West lawmen, old West guns, and the towns it all took place in.
When I moved to California and drove through the country I passed through Cheyenne and Laramie, Wyoming and those two places, together with several other Western towns, personified the Wild West to me, like Dodge, Santa Fe, and so on. It was almost magical. I saw the Cartwright family's recreated Ponderosa ranch near Incline Village on Lake Tahoe and that brought back memories of "Bonanza," and then Sutter's Fort in Sacramento, close to where the California Gold Rush began in 1848, another part of Wild West lore.
There is only one problem with all this. Much of what I had seen in all those movies was a romanticized, glorified and rather one-sided Hollywood version of the Old West. There were, of course, cowboys and Indians and tents and guns and the cavalry. But it wasn't all gun-toting cowboys and tomahawk-throwing Indians.
The real Old West was quite different and much more down-to-earth. It was an exceptionally turbulent period of time when the Western part of the United States was settled between the Civil War and the end of the century. Much has been written about the Old West, but it was mostly by writers who did not actually have first-hand experience. Those who actually partook of the Old West experience were usually too busy to write about it.
I still love Westerns, but these days I am much more interested in reading how the Old West really was. I have a small library of books describing life back then, including all the adventure and hardship - the good, the bad, and the ugly. Many of those books are painstakingly compiled from various newspaper and eyewitness accounts. Some are a bit dry.
But occasionally you come across a real memoir, the story of a real lawman of the Old West, one of those rugged characters who was chasing outlaws and trying to keep the peace. This is when it all becomes more than just history, when the Old West comes alive with cattlemen's associations, hired guns, horseback cowboys, cowboy action shootouts, gunfighters, stampedes.
It all took place, and it's terrific reading about it in the words of someone who was actually there.
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