WESTERNS: The Six-Gun Galahad

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As for "Bat" Masterson, he resembled the television character in only one respect: he used to bat disorderly types over the head with a heavy cane he sometimes carried. Otherwise, he was a cautious fellow who hid behind a piano in a bawdy-house when a gunman was on the prowl, later bought a gun in a New York pawnshop, filed 22 notches in the handle and, as a reporter for the New York Telegraph, set about making his own myth.

The 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 Wild Bill, who is ever ready to risk his life, and die if need be, in defense of helpless womanhood"). But the legend of the two-gun terror lingered on, and in 1902, when Owen Wister published The Virginian, the legend "came from the woodshed into the parlor."

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 set of younger writers—A. B. Guthrie Jr. (The Way West), Tom Lea (The Wonderful Country), Dorothy Johnson (The Hanging Tree).

The Movie. The western story was perhaps never meant to be told in words. Hollywood and the Wild West were made for each other, and it was love at first sight. The first real feature movie ever made, The Great Train Robbery (1903), was a western that introduced to the public a man who soon became the first of the great horse-opera heroes: Broncho Billy Anderson, a studio janitor who was drafted as a masked bandit. Hard on Broncho Billy's tracks came William S. Hart, a Minnesota farm boy who grew up among Indians. He rode a beautiful paint horse named Fritz, and when they stood side by side, it was hard to tell them apart. After Hart came Tom Mix, "the fearless man of the plains," who looked like a mail-order cowboy but was a genuine rough-string rider.