Life in the Old West

Here are a few fascinating facts you probably didn’t know about Wyatt Earp:

He was never a town marshal or sheriff. Nope, you never could technically have called the infamous Old West lawman/gunfighter/gambler Marshal Earp or Sheriff Earp. In point of fact, he served as the assistant marshal in Dodge City, Kansas, and was for awhile a deputy U.S. marshal in Arizona. (Sure, it’s “nitpicking,” but it’s interesting anyhow, I thought.)

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Arguably, the toughest lawman in Idaho in the latter days of the Old West may have been “Rube” Robbins.

Robbins, actual name Orlando Robbins, came to the Boise Basin gold fields about a year after the rush started there. He was in his mid-20s and looking for adventure. Adventure found Rube — or he found it? — in 1864 when he became deputy sheriff in Boise. The small town of Boise and the surrounding region was polarized between the North and South as the Civil War ragged to a close, mostly to the East.

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For all you Old West “history buffs,” students, and Western writers out there who have been at this longer than I, can anyone answer the question I’ve posed in the title of this article? Did Buffalo Bill Cody and Wyatt Earp ever meet? If so, can you point me toward information about any meeting(s) or relationship between the two? If not, how or why do you think such a meeting would NOT take place?

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Most sources I’ve read suggest that “gunfighter,” and “gunman” were terms used in the later days of the Old West (probably after the 1870s or ’80s) for someone who was also known as a “shootist,” or in our post-Western movie times, the guy who had the pistol and wasn’t afraid or hesitant to use it.

According to Winfred Blevins’ highly useful “Dictionary of the American West” (to which I’ve referred here before), “gunfighter” and “gunmen” as well as “gunfight” and “gunfighting” all came along in the late 1800s — and there was never any distinction made between “gunfighter” as the sort of good guy or “gunman” as the bad guy. Blevins suggests that such terms almost always referred to pistols rather than long guns, i.e., rifles.

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“There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: when he can’t afford it, and when he can.” — Mark Twain

Pardon my absence from the blog in recent weeks. I’ve been just too caught up in, first, the big presidential election, and, secondly, the horrendous economic contraction/melt-down we’re currently going through.

I think we all can conclude that we are in the End of Days with such economic disasters. First, we’ll all go broke. Then, we’ll all be booted out of our houses, our children will be pulled away from their mothers, we will have our clothes torn off our backs, and we will finally starve to death in the bleak, cold streets of the city.

Read more on Economic downturn? Don’t ‘Panic’ — take a closer look at U.S. history…

In the fabled “Gunsmoke” television series, the Long Branch Saloon was the favored hangout and chief watering hole of Marshal Dillon, Chester, Festus, Doc, and most of the other main characters. It was owned by the dazzling but business savvy “Miss Kitty” — Kitty Russell, as I recall. It was, depending on the mood of the moment and the plot of the show, a convivial place filled with music, fun, card players, lovely ladies, and hard working trail hands, town merchants, and company.

Read more on There really was a ‘Long Branch’ in Dodge City, but no Miss Kitty…

One of the most respected lawmen of the Old West was Wild Bill Hickock. He and his faithful sidekick, Jingles, adventured throughout the west, settling into various jobs as deputies and marshalls, foiling the occasional stagecoach robbery or bank holdup.

Oh, wait, no. That was the 1950s television series, “The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickock.” The lead was played by a handsome young actor named Guy Madison. The television folks, conditioned by the success of 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s Western movies that always included a sidekick, cast Andy Devine as Madison’s jolly but whiny sidekick, Jingles.

Read more on Truth about gunfighters: It was hard to tell ‘good guys’ from ‘bad guys’…

Real life in that time and those places we know as the American West was mostly not like the movie and television fiction we learn about the Old West. Real life was generally much harder, much duller, hotter, dustier, and had little of the glamor we learn from the movies.

In the real Old West, gunfighters were few and far between. Bank robbers and stagecoach holdup artists really were a problem, just as they are in modern times. Well, more accurately, we still have the bank robbers, but not many stagecoaches have been held up since the days of Black Bart. There certainly were cowboys, though very unglamorous cowboys. There were definitely Indians, and, yes, they were called “Indians,” never by the modern “politically correct” term “Native Americans.”

Read more on Real life in the American Old West — join me on the journey…