Writing with a Sixgun — STEVEN HARDESTY

I write Westerns not because I’m a Westerner (well, I am) or live the cowboy life (I do know a real cowboy) or even like horses (the last I rode threw me down in the dirt and galloped away sneering). I write Westerns because the Wild West is another world, a stranger world than I ever knew, and a terrifically exciting place to live for the weeks-months-years of writing a Western novel.

Whoa! Let me correct one Wild West oddity here at the start so you get the feel for what comes next: The 19th century word was not “cowboy” but “cow-boy” (Billy the Kid can confirm, so can Ike Clanton). A name never meant to be flattering or heroic but to brand a delinquent or crook or cattle rustler. And may have started out racist – 20% of men working cattle drives and ranches after the Civil War were Black (plus many Native Americans and some Japanese and Chinese and a few Canadians who couldn’t read North on a compass to get out of the heat).

Although the word’s antique origin from the Mexican word vaquero (really the Spanish of Seville, where all things cowboy were invented in the 16th century and brought to the Wild West in the sprawl of the Spanish empire) does translate “cowboy.” But the Old West made “buckaroo” of that word.

So cow-boy is the word in all my books. Just as no sensible person in my books loads six rounds into a six-shooter or stands up in a dusty street at high noon to gun-duel with a villain.

True, the Old West was a time and place where folks were more direct and open than in our own. But that doesn’t mean they jumped into gunfights or “showdowns,” as Wild Bill Hickok called them. And Wild Bill was pretty much the first – in a duel over a pocket watch – and certainly the greatest of “shootists”. (Btw, Libbie Custer thought him the handsomest man she ever met, though she never told husband George, which likely spared them both a showdown.)

No, gunfights were shocking town spectacles that made the big newspapers back East because they were less common than TV and Hollywood teach. After all, what fool would facedown another man or woman heavily armed and with murderous intent? No, no, no. Best to shoot him/her in the back, which is how front page arguments more usually were resolved (Morgan Earp was backshot likely by Johnny Ringo and died on a pool table after the OK Corral gunfight and Wild Bill was backshot at cards in Deadwood Gulch).

Seems to me the last official gunfight on record in Sacramento, California, my hometown and last station on the Pony Express (Mark Twain wrote for the newspapers there), was in the mid-1960s. When city police interrupted two idiots chasing each other around a parked car firing off shots at each other as in a Yosemite Sam cartoon. (Wyatt Earp’s ashes and those of the woman sort of his wife who was part-cause of the Tombstone fiasco are buried near Sacto. Wyatt’s post-OK Corral advice: Never walk into a gunfight without a pistol in your hand.)

So if the Wild West wasn’t that wild, what makes it worth writing about? Well, it was filled up with the same immigrant trash that filled the American Colonies, the impoverished and desperate people who had no hope in their home countries but had the courage to cross the blustery Atlantic in hope – in hope, that’s the key – of a better life.

I.e., ordinary people who became cowhands, ranchers, farmers, shopkeepers, mothers, fathers, kids happy to live the Tom Sawyer life. Of all colors, creeds and backgrounds. Ex-slaves from the ruined South, wrecked veterans of the Civil War, escapees from big city ghettos and slums. Wanderers, adventurers. Some few who tried to do right by the Native American and Mexican (and Russian and French) populations settled there before the newcomers arrived.

All making a very human story of endurance, sacrifice, heroism and prejudice. But of people forced by brushing up against other people and by the sprawl of the West to become better than they were. Making a story worth telling beyond the gaudy tales of gunfights and gun-men.

So my books are not Hollywood or TV Westerns. No stereotypes or cliches allowed, no sir. If you spot one lurking on a page, expect it will suffer a sudden twist to become something else. Something more real to the Wild West in its true time and place.

Because the true story of the West, without all its mythic trappings, is the story of ordinary people jammed into a desperate corner who must become very near to heroes to survive. That is the story I write. Sixguns and all.