Can you imagine what the Old West would have been like if Wild Bill Hickok’s eyesight was so diminished by venereal disease he couldn’t tell his own deputy from the bad guys?
Or if Wyatt Earp had been nothing more than a crooked politician and whorehouse operator who gunned the Clanton boys down in a back alley and not the OK Corral?
It would have been a much different Old West than has ever been portrayed by Hollywood in all of its many dim-witted decades of moviemaking–from William S. Hart and Tom Mix right down to Clint Eastwood and Kevin Costner.
It would have been, you see, exactly and truly what the Old West really was–a place about as noble and heroic as the West Side of Chicago on crack dealers’ payoff day.
Cable television’s Washington-based Discovery Channel is performing a public service next week that, by my count, is about 1,487,915 western movies and TV shows overdue.
With a new “Real History” miniseries called “Gunfighters of the West”–to be telecast next Monday through Friday at 8 p.m. –it does for the Hollywood mythic Western what Gennifer Flowers, Kathleen Willey, Monica Lewinsky et al. did for President Clinton’s image as a family man.
In addition to revealing that Billy the Kid only killed six men–not 21–the series blows to smithereens the nonsensical notion that the central event of life in the Old West was the face-to-face, “High Noon” shootout.
Do you know how many of these face-to-face “High Noon” draw-downs actually took place in all the recorded history of the Wild West?
“Exactly one,” said Leon Metz, former president of Western Writers of America and one of the historians participating in the series. “It took place on July 21, 1865, in Springfield, Mo., and was between James Butler (Wild Bill) Hickok and Little Dave Tutt, a gambler.
“Hickok owed Tutt a $35 gambling debt, and Tutt took his watch as collateral,” Metz said. “Hickok was so humiliated by this he told Tutt he’d meet him in the courthouse square. Tutt drew first but Hickok got him with one shot at a hundred paces.”
So how did all those gunfighters practiced their trade?
According to Metz, most gunfights were simple murders, executed with the maximum damage to the victim and the minimum risk to the gunman, with shotguns and rifles much favored over the less accurate six-guns.
“One thing most of these moviemakers don’t seem to realize is that those revolvers were single action,” Metz said. “You had to cock it each time before you could pull the trigger. There was never any of this blasting away.”
The most deadly weapon used at the famous “gunfight at the OK Corral” was the shotgun wielded by Doc Holliday, which he fired without provocation.
The Earp gunfight actually took place in a back alley–not in the corral. And, though the rival Clantons were rustlers, the real crooks were the Earps, who ran a ganglandlike protection racket and much of the bordello action in Tombstone.
Much of the acrimony stemmed from Wyatt Earp’s being maneuvered out of the lucrative county sheriff’s job, which included county assessor duties that netted the sheriff some $40,000 a year in generous inducements.
Earp and his brothers were run out of town after the gunfight, but Earp did manage to run off in the process with the new sheriff’s wife, Josey. And as the Discovery series makes salaciously clear, the one true fact of all this myth was that Josey was an extremely beautiful woman–unlike most of the “soiled doves” out there.
As a journalist, I was outraged by so much inauthenticity, and quick to blame it on greedy movie moguls whose experience with the West is limited to driving from L.A. to Palm Springs and who will put anything up on the screen that makes money.
But Metz and the other historians say it was another group of career advancers who made up all the myth, guff and nonsense. The same people responsible for the ridiculous celebrities we have today.
Us newsies.
