In July 1886, an unusual announcement could be read in the Border Ruffian newspaper:
Wanted! For the position of sheriff, a man with a rhino skin, a bullet-proof head, able to see everything around him, run faster than a horse, afraid of nothing and no one in Hades or Coolidge. A man who knows how to shoot, like Captain Adam Bogardus, and who would rather shoot four or five drunken brawlers before breakfast than sit down to eat without such a morning exercise.
Despite the seeming frivolity of this announcement, the Coolidge residents nodded their heads approvingly as they read it. Only such qualities could help a daredevil who decided to take the position of sheriff in their troubled town to survive, and only such qualities could help him to pacify thieves, robbers and other troublemakers. After all, their city was in the very heart of the American Wild West.
Establishing a law in the Wild West, where every man had the right to carry a weapon, has long been a serious problem. The vastness of the undeveloped lands of the West attracted not only honest people who were ready to work tirelessly from dawn to dusk, but also criminals of all stripes who were drawn there after the end of the Civil War from different parts of the country. In those days, it was easy for bandits to get lost on the endless plains, where no one knew them.
The territory of some counties could be 10,000 - 15,000 square kilometers, and the local sheriff was unable to keep track of everything that happened in the area entrusted to him. The sheriff was allowed to hire several assistants who simplified his job, but not enough to cope with the rampant crime. In addition to theft and robbery, representatives of the law had to intervene in clashes between owners of large and small ranches, between farmers and herders, US citizens and migrants from other countries.
Texas Rangers
Real wars were fought between cattle owners and sheep breeders. All these conflicts usually ended with shooting, in which both whites and blacks, both guilty and innocent died. Many representatives of the law died trying to restore order. In Texas alone, in the ten years from 1869 to 1878, about a hundred lawyers were killed.
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Four types of crimes were considered the most serious in the Wild West: cold-blooded murder, rape, stealing horses, and stealing livestock. Until 1874, livestock and herds freely grazed on open pastures. To prevent the owners from confusing their animals, they were branded with a hot iron. The brand could be numbers, letters or some symbols. This, however, did not prevent thieves from stealing herds and herds, and then changing the brand.
Thieves did not always manage to rebrand cattle on time
In 1874, sixty-year-old farmer Joseph Glidden patented the barbed wire he had invented and set up a company in Illinois to produce it. Soon, most of the private pastures were surrounded by barbed wire, making it very difficult to steal livestock and horses. In addition, the National Anti-Theft Association was gaining strength, whose members declared a real hunt for thieves.
This state of affairs has forced many of the bandits to retrain and direct their efforts to banks and trains. It was possible to take a big jackpot in the banks, but even if the robbery was successful, the townspeople immediately gathered a pursuit, and the bandits had to make a lot of efforts to hide.
By the mid-1870s, robbing banks became even more difficult. The townspeople began to organize detachments of volunteers to guard them. Trains were easier to rob than banks. The train could be stopped anywhere - at a small station or in the wilderness, and while the law was gathering a chase, the bandits could slip away unnoticed. But the wealthy railroad owners used the Wells Fargo and Pinkerton detective agencies. Their detectives, like hunting dogs, began to hunt for robbers and did not calm down until they caught them.
"We never sleep!" - was the motto of the Pinkerton agency. The agency's methods were so effective that in 1908, when the US government established the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the agency's model was taken as the basis.
But not all robberies were successful. A caught bandit or a thief most often immediately awaited a noose around his neck and a short trip to the nearest bitch. Executions of this kind were called "lynching." The perpetrators were usually hanged quickly and without trial, while sometimes completely innocent people suffered "by mistake".
There were cases when vigilantes in this way decided their mercantile interests, getting rid of unwanted competitors. The Wild West knew of deliberate and accidental "mistakes" and yet they considered lynching a more effective means of dealing with bandits than legal court. Indeed, with a good lawyer, caught criminals often left the courtroom fully acquitted. Although in such cases, the fate of the offender largely depended on which judge would consider his case.
No one, for example, wanted to fall into the clutches of the infamous Isaac Parker, who served for 21 years at Fort Smith, Arkansas. It was not for nothing that he was called the "Hanging Judge" - during his work he handed down hundreds of convictions. And when, in 1889, the US Supreme Court passed a ruling allowing criminals sentenced to death to appeal, out of 46 people convicted by Isaac Parker, 30 people were found to be victims of an unfair trial. "I've never hung a single person," Parker defended angrily. "The law hung them up, and I was just his instrument."
Perhaps nothing has played such a role in the emergence of interest in the history of the Wild West, as cinema. To this day, a romantic halo surrounds the noble heroes of westerns, no matter what side of the law they stand on. It seems that thanks to cinema, we know to the smallest detail how that world was arranged, how a person should have behaved in a given situation, what rules to follow and what weapons to use. But the real fighter of the Wild West was completely different from the corny movie hero pulled in tight jeans. A lot of myths were created by Hollywood cinema.
Despite the proverb prevailing in the Wild West: "God created people, and Mr. Colt made them equal", the most popular among bandits and representatives of the law was not a revolver or a winchester, as many believe, but an ordinary shotgun. Arizona Sheriff John Sloughter once fell upon a meticulous journalist who tormented him with the question of why he was taking a shotgun with him in pursuit of bandits, and growled in response: "To kill people, you damn dumbass!"
Colt Paterson, produced between 1837 and 1840
The shotgun was in many ways superior to the rest of the weapon. He did not hit as far as a gun, but had a great lethality. Many legendary figures from the Wild West, including Wyatt Earp, Wes Hardin, Bill Longley and Jim Miller, preferred it. It was the shotgun that became the weapon thanks to which the ordinary townspeople were able to inflict a crushing defeat on the Jesse James gang in Northfield and the Dalton gang in Coffeeville.
Winchester carbine, model 1866
However, the revolver was more convenient to use and could be secretly carried in a holster under the floors of a long cloak, and therefore the shotgun served only as an additional weapon in the fighter's arsenal. The mechanism of the revolvers was so unreliable that the holster for it had to be deep, often with a loop that was thrown over the trigger to fix it, and even better, a conventional army one with a closing valve. In addition to protecting against dust, dirt, rain and snow, the closable valve holster helped prevent gun loss and accidents.
In open holsters, the revolver was deeply recessed so that only a small part of the handle remained visible. Contamination of the revolver led to misfires at the most inopportune moment and even to its breakdown, and accidents from spontaneous shooting from their own weapons occurred so often that the death or injury of a person for this reason was considered commonplace.
The holster that opened half of the revolver, lowered almost to the knee and with a garter to the leg, which can be seen in most old westerns, did not exist in reality. And of course, no one has ever put a revolver in their belt in their lives - there were no people who wanted to shoot their genitals in the Wild West.
The process of pulling out a revolver when meeting an enemy was called "hitting the holster." A man carrying a revolver in a closed holster, with his left hand abruptly unfastened the upper flap, with his right pulled out the weapon and, raising it to the target, cocked the trigger with his left hand. Usually the shooter did not aim at the enemy, but only aimed the barrel at him, after which he pulled the trigger. For each shot, he had to re-cock the trigger with his left palm or thumb of his right hand. After the first shot, the weapon was enveloped in a cloud of smoke, and there was no need to talk about aimed fire.
It took much more time to pull the revolver out of the holster than many current reenactors claim. Recent measurements of the high-speed draw from an open holster with modern equipment have shown that the average time that elapses from the moment the hand touches the revolver to the bullet escaping from it is 1.3 seconds, and not 0.5, as some authors argued. But no matter how fast the shooter was, he always had to remember to be careful, as there have been cases when too hasty shooters put a bullet in their foot or knee.
The unsurpassed marksmanship of Wild West shooters, ostensibly unmatched worldwide even today, is also a myth that Wild West explorer Joe Zentner called "the most exaggerated and perhaps the funniest." How good were these guys with revolvers in hand? By today's standards, characters like Jesse James, Buffalo Bill Cody or Wild Bill Hickcock would be considered new to any shooting range. The fame of their skill reached unprecedented heights only thanks to the efforts of writers and directors.
One of the examples of the origin of such a tale is Wild Bill Hickcock. In the 1930s, three of his biographies were published at once, each of which claimed that any bullet fired from his revolver always hit the target. In one biography, the author stated that Wild Bill easily hit a running man from 100 meters away. In the other, it colorfully painted how he shot the hat off the head of a man with a shot and made a neat row of bullet holes in its fields before it fell to the ground. All this is fiction.
And the point is not only that smokeless gunpowder came into use only in the 1890s, but before that, with each shot, smoke more and more enveloped the space between the shooter and the target, making it barely distinguishable. It was the weapon itself. Frank James, for example, was considered a better marksman than his famous brother Jesse. There is a round eight-inch target that Frank practiced on. On it, he showed his best results in shooting from a revolver from twenty meters and proudly signed it personally.
Today's shooters can easily knock out a similar result on a four-inch target. An army officer, Captain Luther North, who lived in the Wild West for many years and knew Wild Bill Hickcock personally, recalled that a good shooter was considered one who could "put six bullets" into a mail envelope from ten steps. In those days, envelopes were square with sides measuring 12.5 centimeters - a very large target by today's standards.
Shotguns and revolvers of that time did not make it possible to shoot so accurately. The accuracy of modern weapons has increased seven to eight times, and the bullet fired from it flies several times faster. In other words, today's shooters have much more advanced weapons than the legends of the Wild West, and it is at least incorrect to compare them.
Another myth was fighters who fired simultaneously from two revolvers at their victims, never missing. To begin with, even carrying two revolvers, each four pounds in weight, was quite tedious and very few people did. And at the same time, it was almost impossible to shoot accurately from them. Just as impossible was the well-aimed revolver shooting from the hip, so popular in Hollywood Westerns.
In westerns, you can often see how the hero, like a real circus performer, twists a revolver on his finger, after which he accurately strikes his opponents. This is another invention of American cinema. It was not easy to hit the target with revolvers of the late 19th century, even with a good aim, and after such juggling it was completely impossible.
In the 1920s, an enthusiast placed an ad in numerous newspapers and magazines in which he offered to pay $ 1,000 (huge money at that time) to anyone who could spin a revolver and then hit the target with it from even the smallest, most ridiculous distance … The money remained unpaid.
A common Wild West prison cage for criminals
And yet, thanks to what in those turbulent times, some people defeated others under equal conditions of battle? Wild Bill Hickcock explained this to his friend who beat him in target shooting: "You can beat me in shooting at these little black spots, but if it comes to shooting people, I will beat you."
It was not the excellent accuracy and speed of handling weapons that distinguished the heroes of the Wild West from ordinary inhabitants, but internal rigidity, composure and complete indifference to their own and others' lives. Even the number of opponents killed was not always an indicator of the fighter's seriousness. Bat Masterson or John Ringo had two or three corpses on their account, but they had such a decisive character that this alone was enough to cool the ardor of squabblers. And without the trail of corpses, they were considered extremely dangerous people.
But even among such fighters, few dared to go one-on-one to a fair fight, without which the worst western cannot do. Duels, in which two cold-blooded, ruthless fighters went out into an instantly empty dusty street, released a couple of sharp phrases, and then with lightning speed drew revolvers and fired at each other, in reality were extremely rare in the real Wild West.
Such scenes became "classic" only thanks to tabloid novels and Hollywood, and then Italian Westerns, which flooded the screens of the whole world. Few, even from among the excellent shooters, in their right mind decided on such heroism. As one researcher sarcastically remarked, "It is enough to look at the surgical instruments of that period to understand the wisdom of people who did not want to be shot."
The time was brutal, the clashes were numerous, and the sentiments were unpopular. Enemies were usually killed from around the corner, from the darkness, being caught unarmed or sneaking up from behind. Famous fighters such as Jesse James, Wes Hardin and Wild Bill Hickcock were shot in the back of the head, and the infamous Billy Kid was shot by Pat Garrett, hiding in a dark room.
The basic principle was to leave the enemy no chance of a return shot. Often, one person was attacked by several shooters at once. The fallen enemy was usually finished off with shots at close range, even if by that time he was already clearly dead. Not a single chance!
And yet, duels did happen. The people who had the courage to go out to them were called gunfighters. This term in Russian-language literature is usually translated as "arrows", which does not quite accurately reflect its essence. A "shooter" is any person who makes a living with a weapon, be it a bandit or a representative of the law. Texan Bill Longley, for example, killed a lot of people, but always avoided head-to-head clashes, trying to catch his opponents by surprise. Therefore, he cannot be considered a gunfighter. But Wild Bill Hickcock was such, because he went out to open fights.
The era of gunfighters began after the Civil War and peaked in 1870-1880, sweeping across Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, California, Missouri and Colorado. The war between the North and the South spawned a large number of criminals, many of whom were from the Southern guerrilla unit, the Cointrill Riders.
But the term "gunfighter" itself became widespread only towards the end of the 1870s. Before that, people who constantly carried weapons and used them without hesitation were called "man-killers" - killers. And there was no difference on which side a person stood - law or lawlessness, he still remained a murderer, although it must be admitted that in those days this word had a less harsh connotation than today.
Life at the expense of weapons was fraught with many dangers, and the average life expectancy of fighters did not exceed 35 years. Only about a third of them died a natural death in old age. Shooters who sided with the law tended to live longer than their former counterparts in the criminal business. It is not surprising that former criminals and murderers became marshals or sheriffs.
At a time when everyone had the right to carry a weapon with him (the constitution guaranteed this to any American), there were many who wanted from time to time to try how it worked. And if a person was well drunk, and besides, he completely lost at the gambling table, he often grabbed a revolver, throwing out his rage on those around him. But even such a troublemaker thought twice, or even three times, before disturbing the order, if a man with a reputation for a cold-blooded killer served as the sheriff in the city.
Sheriffs, 1890s
Surprisingly, it was often the cold-blooded, calculating killers who became the best representatives of the law in the Wild West. A fine line separated the criminal from the sheriff in those dashing times - and he and the other solved their problems with the help of weapons. Influential people of some border town were only happy to hang the sheriff's star on the chest of a famous killer, in the hope that he would put down the presumptuous cowboys who kept the townsfolk in constant fear for their lives. One of those, for example, was John Selman, who killed Wes Hardin.
But no matter what side these people stood on - law or lawlessness, they were all united by one thing. All of them in the Wild West were called desperados - desperate.
Used materials from the book by Y. Stukalin "According to the Law of the Revolver: The Wild West and Its Heroes"