In almost every Western flick I’ve seen, the cowboys and outlaws “live fast and die young”. They live by the sword, die by the sword. A ton of people get shot, there are shootouts in bars, saloons and bordellos, and a ton of crazy characters with quick tempers are about…
In reality, quite a few of these famous gunslingers of yore were careful, cautious folks. Wyatt Earp himself famously live into his eighties.
In the photo below you can see Mr. Earp standing besides a car in 1926, nearly fifty years after his famous Tombstone shootout. He actually went to California when Hollywood was built and the movie industry was born.
And Earp, like several other Old West legends, hung around movie sets, recalling crazy stories of the past of the men he rode with and fought with. John Ford, the famous Western director, drank with him. So did several cowboy actors of the era. And the legends took off from there like never before. It always kind of amazes me how men who would ride horses and shoot at rival gangs and posses in the 1870s and 1880s were still alive to see the age of cinema come about. That they would visit movie sets, attend movie premiers, drive cars…
The “lone rangers” weren’t quite so lonesome, the heroic outlaws didn’t all die early in a blaze of bullets and glory. Some lived long enough to see and very much be a part of the modern age, and their own tall tales helped grow the very myths that defined the Western genre. By the time John Wayne hit the scene, his biggest collaborator and director, Ford, was a personal friend of a man who rode with Doc Holliday. There’s this mythological feeling to it made all the more real by those very real connections between truth and fiction.
0 Comments