Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [22]
The Colt Peacemaker, introduced in 1873, is often called “the gun that won the West,” but it was so prone to accidental discharge that many U.S. Army officers carried the gun loaded with only five cartridges, with the empty sixth chamber under the hammer. On cross-country wagon journeys, firearms accidents sometimes proved a more serious problem than disease. On one journey, a pioneer mistook his mule for an Indian and shot it twice. Of the four men killed in the famous Johnson County War, two died from accidental gunshot wounds. In Bodie, California, Roger McGrath discovered, one man “accidentally shot himself in the jaw while inspecting a revolver that had misfired.” Even the West’s celebrities had their accidents. Clay Allison shot himself in the foot and eventually had to walk with a cane. Wild Bill Hickok accidentally killed one of his deputies. On January 9, 1876, Wyatt Earp’s revolver fell from his holster as he sat in the back room of the Custom House saloon in Wichita. According to the Wichita Beacon of January 12, “the ball passed through his coat, struck the north wall, then glanced off and passed out through the ceiling. It was a narrow escape and the occurrence got up a lively stampede from the room.”
Frontier celebrities also did their best to assist in myth manufacturing. They seemed extraordinarily aware of the great significance later historians would assign to their epoch. When Pat Garret published his rather exaggerated account of his pursuit of Billy the Kid, “his name became almost synonymous with western law enforcement,” according to Frank Prassel. Jesse James’s brother Frank, a member of the James Gang, toured the country with another outlaw, Cole Younger; they billed themselves as the “Cole Younger-Frank James Wild West Show.” Frank later opened the family farm to tourists, charging fifty cents a head. Bill Tilghman, a famous Oklahoma lawman, also toured the country and in 1914 made a film called The Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaws. A former train robber, Al Jennings, eventually wound up acting in silent-film westerns, a career that lasted from 1908 to 1920.
The frontier figure who most influenced how America now thinks about the Old West, and indeed about guns, was William Frederick Cody—Buffalo Bill—a frontier scout turned master of self-promotion who first achieved fame in 1869 when Ned Buntline featured him in one of his dime novels. Cody’s fame was greatly enhanced in 1876 when, while serving as a scout during the Plains Indians wars, he encountered a lone Cheyenne brave. Cody’s horse stumbled, causing Cody to fall. As the brave charged, Cody coolly shot him dead, then scalped him and waved the scalp over his head. By winter, he was reenacting the incident over and over in a stage drama called “The Red Hand; or, The First Scalp for Custer,” in which he played himself.
In 1882, Cody founded “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” a traveling show consisting of dramatic scenes supposedly meant to capture real life on the frontier. Real life, however, wouldn’t have sold many tickets; Cody’s version consisted of stagecoach robberies, Indian attacks, buffalo hunts, and stunning feats of marksmanship. Cody was the star of the show. As if to dispel any doubt, one showbill noted: “The central figure in these pictures is that of THE HON. W. F. CODY (Buffalo Bill), to whose sagacity, skill, energy and courage … the settlers of the West owe so much for the reclamation of the prairie from the savage Indian and wild animals, who so long opposed the march of civilization.”
The scenes presented a grossly distorted view of the West, but to reinforce