In The Real Wild West

Americans and the world at large have determined that the Wild West has only certain characteristics and constraints. They believe that there is always a cowboy or lawman as the good guy. Bad guys are seen as rough, maybe crazy, and unredeemable. The terrain also gets a reputation for being unforgiving to the unprepared by being filled with danger. However, not all of these conceptions are necessarily true. By going through works over the subject that were written by historians and then comparing their findings to the public's perception of the West, the truth will be found. The good guys, the bad outlaws, and the unmistakable landscape have always been important to portrayals of the West, and there are examples and reasons not only for those

stereotypes being understood but also for when the real story strays from that form.
Typically, the good guy in a Western story presents himself as a gun slinging man on a horse. Many explanations could be given as to why that archetype is used for an easy understanding of what is good. One example of this kind of hero in real life is General George Armstrong Custer. Custer was a man who gained popularity from his fights against the Indians and the Confederates and his tenacious flair throughout life. Custer began his military career with many successes already to his name before being known as an Indian fighter. At the age of twenty-three, he was adored by the media and his men, and the latter of those two fought valiantly as they “followed him from charge to charge until he helped cut off Lee's retreat and personally received the white flag at Appomattox (Hutton 20).” Victories such as these brought the “boy general” much attention and respect from the public. Custer began his Indian-fighting career after the Civil War when his regiment “wiped out the Cheyenne Village of Chief Black Kettle” in the spring of 1867 (Hutton 21). Such a large blow to Indian culture allowed Custer’s legend to gain traction because the people of the day loved to make Indian fighters become their heroes. To cultivate his legend Custer diligently made sure his name was in press accounts and articles about the fight for the west, and he wrote memoirs of his adventures for the public who were hungry for more stories of bravery (Hutton 21). This track of building up one’s fame was not unique to Custer. A friend of his, William Cody, not only built up Custer’s story through reenactments of the fight at Little Big Horn but also crafted his own legend by claiming “the first scalp for Custer” to forge a stronger connection between the two for his production, “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show (Warren 51).” These two men are most famous in the present for their successful attempts to become known as frontier fighters, but their success came only after appealing to what the public wanted out of a Western hero.
Although the heroes of the West were usually depicted similarly, the villains could be varied in style.

The rich, the poor, the gangs, the loners, and the average joes could all fit the bill for villainy, but they all shared common ideals. These ideals typically involved benefitting off the work of others or making themselves better through any means. In the real Wild West, however, there were known evil-doers who were celebrated by their neighbors, and some would-be outlaws struggled in obtaining notoriety. “Blue” Evans is an example of this first kind of discrepancy. In Western movies like Gunfight at the OK Corral, the outlaw gangs are seen as vile by the townspeople, but Evans was immortalized as one who “laid the foundation for the county” even though it was discovered by historians that his gang of horse wranglers were responsible for a known major massacre of Chinese miners in Hell’s Canyon (Nokes 107). His murderous crime is one that affected people to the international level, but even then the Chinese were only compensated for “ten victims, not the final toll of as many as thirty-four” by the US government (Nokes 151). Elmer McCurdy stars in one of the more well-known stories of an uncommon outlaw type: the failed criminal. He, along with the Dalton Gang he worked with for a time, wanted notoriety as a “social bandit” by robbing only from big companies much like Jesse James (Svenvold 59). Unfortunately for McCurdy, he consistently became a part of operations that failed such as one train robbery that ended with “$4,000 in silver coin, almost all of it fused by the heat of four successive blasts into a glittering mass that stuck to the inside walls of the safe (Svenvold 69-70).” His infamy also comes from further failures to be buried because he died in 1911, but was not buried until April 22, 1977 due to many mishaps (Svenvold 256). Together, these men nearly encompass the trajectory of most Wild West outlaws, but they still differ greatly from the public

perception of what they should be like.
One could not properly describe the Wild West if they left out its landscape. Varying between rich plains, rocky canyons, and occasionally mountain passes, the Western frontier was worthy of healthy admiration. Sometimes this easily recognizable scenery can be enough to convey the place and time of a story or action. Early video games took the easily identifiable scenery of the Wild West as a great help because as one historian put it, “With the image of the cowboy familiar to all, a simple pixelized version generated few problems in terms of identification (Wills 292).” As video games improved graphically over the years, the West was allowed to appear more breathtaking through the portrayal of various aspects of the Western theme: “cattle thundered across the screen, vultures hovered in the air, wild mustangs brayed, and bleached bison bones littered the prairie (Wills 293).” Western land and lifestyle surely was a draw for many young gamers, and because of that, the Western genre of game persists to the present day. The scenery of the West also carried its mythology with it even when it is set against w