Bums or Bunyans

THE GUNFIGHTER by Joseph G. Rosa. 229 pages. University of Oklahoma Press. $5.95.

The strong, silent stereotype of the Western gunfighter has been shot full of holes by a hard-eyed generation of frontier historians. To hear the debunkers tell it, the fastest guns in the West were for the most part dirty, drunken, vicious, stupid, syphilitic delinquents who seldom drew anything more dangerous than a one-eyed jack, and hardly had the cojones to face a tranquilized prairie dog in a fair fight.

To hear Author Joseph G. Rosa tell it, though, the debunkers have gone too far. A Western buff who lives in England, Rosa has written a well-informed and lively book that tries to make a balanced revaluation of the six-gunslinger in the making of America. Rosa ends by according him a special status, halfway between John Bunyan and outright bum, as a marked-down culture hero who created for his epic era a flawed but salient image of the male.

Given the violence of the age, says Rosa, the "gunfighter" was largely created through the mechanical ingenuity of one man: Samuel Colt. By 1861, there were nine main varieties of Colt revolvers (mostly known as "Peacemakers" or "hog-legs") in use on the frontier. They constituted the most dramatic revolution in sheer firepower since the invention of the musket. Colt revolvers were fast and reliable. In superior hands they could regularly hit a five-inch circle at 50 yards. At 100 yards, the Peacemaker could drive a bullet more than three inches into a pine plank. With such a weapon a skilled "shootist" became the most deadly single engine of extermination that the U.S. had seen until then.

Fortunately, real shooting skill was not a prominent characteristic of Western gunslingers. They were, as Fred Allen once remarked, only "half-fast on the draw" and far too quick on the trigger--an occupational affliction that the Rosa book implies was really an affliction of character. The Western gunfighters apparently had magnificent courage--and galloping neuroses.

Panic was their principal symptom. It is not hard to see why. In the wolf-pack society of the cattle and mining towns where most of the man-killers hung their Stetsons, the gunfighter was top dog and therefore fair game for every pup that put metal on his leg. Inevitably, the hot shots became permanently over-adrenalized. In addition to a brace of hog-legs, anxious brawlers carried as many as four "stingy guns" concealed in their clothing. Even the great Wyatt Earp grew so tense, one story goes, that his bowels refused to move properly for a year while he was Marshal of Tombstone. At the climax of one showdown, Wild Bill Hickok, the iciest killer of them all, got so rattled that he shot to death a deputy who was rushing to his rescue.

For such strain, there had to be compensations. Most of the great gunfighters knocked back a mort of whisky, most of it "of a quality that would make a rabbit fight a bulldog." They also sought peace in the company of the "soiled doves" that flocked West after the Civil War. All too often, the doves turned out to be harpies. Rosa reports an episode in which a prostitute knelt and screamed cock-a-doodle-doo as she splashed happily in the hot blood of a stranger who had just been ventilated. As for Calamity Jane, Wild Bill's putative paramour, she was once thrown out of a bordello "for being a low influence on the inmates." Money was a more reliable consolation. Apparently, most famous gunfighters, no matter which side of the law they were on, would do almost anything to get it. The James boys and the Younger brothers knocked over banks and trains; the Earps and the Hickoks put the squeeze on local entrepreneurs.

To die with his boots on was about the best a gunfighter could hope for in the end. If he died on the gallows, the amateur hangmen were apt to miscalculate the drop; at least once, the force of the fall tore the victim's head off his body. If a corpse were not carefully guarded, it could wind up in the hands of the souvenir hunters, who had a nasty habit of flaying celebrities and preserving them for posterity. For example, Big Nose George Curry, who was done to death by a posse at Castle Gate, Utah, survived his execution in the form of a man-hide wallet.

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