Old West Image Is Firmly Entrenched

The Old West legends of Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok and Butch Cassidy, though discredited by a century of scrutiny, still strike a chord in America’s heart.

“The Old West is no longer a place--it’s an image,” said John Stewart, co-founder of the National Assn. and Center for Outlaw and Lawman History.

“People like to cling to an image. Even though the Old West legends are often untrue, they can continue to enjoy that illusion,” said Stewart, a Utah State University history professor.

The frontier legends popularized in dime novels portray a battle between good and evil, Western-style, that is still being recycled today, he said.

“Butch Cassidy and Jesse James and others like them became popular folk heroes not just because of the excitement of robberies, but because people vicariously, through them, could get vengeance on the railroads and the banks and other institutions that took advantage of the little guy,” Stewart said.

“Perhaps some of that has transferred to modern living,” he said. “There’s a lot of empathy for the little guy where society has become hard and cold.”

Today, instead of gunslingers in black hats being dropped at high noon by white-Stetsoned heroes with faster trigger fingers, modern “Star Wars” heroes shoot it out with lasers--not on a dusty street in a Western town and not riding the faithful horse, but on fields of stars in trusty spaceships.

“It’s really the basic good guys versus the bad guys theme, combining the basic appeal of the Old West with the gimmicks of science fiction,” Stewart said.

Keeping alive frontier legends is one of the goals of Stewart’s 9-year-old association, even though its own research often peels away layers of fiction surrounding frontier heroes to reveal a gallery of rogues.

Based at the University of Wyoming since budget cuts forced it from Utah State University, the association serves as a national archive for Western Americana literature and memorabilia. Among its 600 members are actor Robert Redford, who portrayed the Sundance Kid on film, Western novelist E.B. Mann and Pinkerton Senior Vice President William Linn.

“Legends are just that. There’s been such superficial nonsense published in the last few years,” he said.