The cowboy myth

Thom Hartmann -  After the Civil War, and particularly with the California gold rush and the widespread romanticizing of the cowboy myth by books and serializations in publications like the Saturday Evening Post, .... there was an explosion of southern young men and poor families who wanted to move west. Many, indeed most, of the “bandits” (a friendlier term in that era than “criminals”) were former Confederate soldiers who either were running from indictments for war crimes or had returned home from the war to find nothing left...

While in fact most actual cowboys were hardworking ranch hands and cattle herders, poorly paid and worked to death in often terrible weather, the fictional version sold to America in the post–Civil War era was an entirely different thing. Even the most brutal and sociopathic outlaws, like the James brothers and the James–Younger Gang, were transformed into tragic-but-noble figures by the pens of America’s novelists and magazine writers.

Overlooking their roles as criminals, rapists, and murderers was only part of the fictionalization of the Old West. Guns came with it.

In order for a fictional protagonist to be heroic, he must have some sort of super-ability. He must be so extraordinary at something that he can be turned into a legend, into someone to emulate—into, well, a hero.

And the heroic ability that America’s press fell in love with through the late 19th century was gunfighting.