Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [20]
Nonetheless, the homicide rate in many frontier towns was surprisingly low. Robert Dykstra, a specialist on Kansas cattle towns, found evidence of only forty-five homicides from 1870 to 1885 in the fabled towns of Abilene, Caldwell, Dodge City, Ellsworth, and Wichita. That works out to 0.6 killings per town per year, not quite the frequency Hollywood has led us to expect.
Citizens of the real West seemed far more appalled by the levels of violence back east. On March 19, 1872, the Missouri Republican called New York City a “Murderers’ Paradise” and reported that “New York … has settled down into the usual condition of chronic indifference, and the murdering business is carried on with an impunity which would be really amusing, were the matter less serious. Hardly a day passes that some one does not receive an eternal quietus at the hands of an assassin.”
Meanwhile, the novelists, pulp writers, and news reporters who comprised the nation’s media were busy confronting a creative challenge: how to rationalize the sheer excitement of the westward expansion, with its attendant gold and land fevers, and the mundane, harsh reality of ordinary frontier life. The answer came readily. Sheriffs became avenging angels, bar fights turned into ritualized duels in the hot noon sun. Dime novelists began transforming frontier characters into heroes even as the real flesh-and-blood figures went about the business of killing, robbing, or peacekeeping. Buffalo Bill Cody was the hero in 557 dime novels. Frank Tousey gave us the James Boys series about Jesse and Frank James even as the pair continued committing crimes. Edward Z. C. Judson, writing as Ned Buntline, turned Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok into the steely-eyed lawmen of contemporary myth. The first book about Billy the Kid appeared July 15, 1881, the day after Sheriff Pat Garret killed him. The book described Billy as wearing a dragoon jacket “of finest broadcloth” and a hat “covered with gold jewels.” Owen Wister’s The Virginian, published in 1902, became a best-seller and the prototype of the modern western. Wister gave us one of the most-quoted passages of literature when his hero, having been called a son of a bitch, replied, “When you call me that, smile!”
The press spared no exaggeration to populate the West with living legends. Between Dodge City and Tombstone, Deadwood and Sacramento, was a vast, bleak terrain whose immensity we can only begin to appreciate today when flying over such still-desolate territories as Nevada and Utah. The robberies, murders, and Indian battles that did occur were big news partly because that immense expanse of desperately lonely acreage generated so little other news.
The press rose to the challenge.
After Jesse James and two accomplices robbed a Kansas fair on September 26, 1872, the Kansas City Star applauded the deed: “It was as though three bandits had come to us from storied Odenwald, with the halo of medieval chivalry upon their garments, and shown us how things were done that poets sing of. Nowhere else in the civilized world, probably, could this thing have been done.”
Never mind that these chivalrous heroes shot a young girl in the leg.
After Jesse was murdered in 1882, the Kansas City Journal wailed, “Goodbye, Jesse!”
The National Police Gazette made a goddess of Myra Belle Shirley, known best as Belle Starr and commonly imagined as a beauty. (She was played by Gene Tierney in the 1941 movie Belle Starr.) The Gazette described her as “the Bandit Queen,” and reported: “She was more amorous than Antony’s mistress, more relentless than Pharaoh’s daughter, and braver than Joan of Arc.”
The true West of course was nothing like what readers in the East were instructed to imagine. Belle Starr, for example, was no Gene Tierney. Belle was a profoundly