WESTERNS: The Six-Gun Galahad

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The real western hero of the period bore little resemblance to the sweet-smelling show-business variety of latter days. He was literally ''wild and woolly and full of fleas/And seldom curried below the knees." Instead of skintight pants and store-boughten fumadiddle. he wore a pair of wide "hair pants." cut straight off the cow. He stank of bear grease and was usually crawling with "pants rats," as he called his lice. He slept with whores and Indian squaws, because there weren't many other women around, and whenever he got the chance, he got bear-eatin' drunk, because the rest of the time life had little to offer him but salt pork and sundown. Somebody once counted 3,620 bullet holes in the ceiling of a bunkhouse —drilled there by cowhands who had nothing to do but shoot at flies.

The 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 grips, lowered hammers and greased holsters—could slap leather and spill five shots, all in less than a second. (The modern record is claimed by a Denver butcher named Jim—no kin to Matt —Dillon: draw and shoot in twelve-hundredths of a second.) Most of them, besides, carried a "stingy gun" and were masters of the border shift and the road agent's spin.*

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 men before he started to shave, and by the time he was mercifully shot in the back, at 42, he had slaughtered more than 40. The lawmen were not much better. Most of them were coldblooded, cat-eyed killers who spent so much time in the gambling halls and brothels that the cowboys called them "The Fighting Pimps."

In 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.