wild misconception was that every mining or cow town, every lumber or farming community west of Omaha was afoul with rustlers, cutthroats, assorted thieves and bunko artists, saturated with sixgun and sawed-off shotgun-toters, were enveloped in a perpetual smog of black powder smoke, and were thoroughly dangerous places to be. This appears, in the minds of many, to be the popular image of the West just before WWI. Hollywood capitalizes on this erroneous notion still. Even though old timers aplenty stepped forward and insisted on setting folks straight, for the most part they were not successful in dispelling the myths.
There was, early in the twentieth century, a new generation of Outdoor Life readers who had formulated the misguided opinion concerning conditions of the old frontier West. The media played a major role. Sensationalistic newspaper accounts of the tabloid variety were especially to blame. Publishers relied on this twaddle and other literary garbage to increase sales and circulation. The young were also heavily influenced by the popular Western dime novel hair-raiser directed at them, many of which had been authored by writers who had never ventured west of Akron. The timing of the public unleashing of these sort of things could not have been better. The popular idea of the Old West, constructed in the press, was that the men – all of them – were armed and drunken gamblers who shot one another at the slightest provocation. Each woman was a dance hall girl with a public nickname. Each tree and boulder hid a lurking grizzly. Horses, even the plow mules, were unbreakable bucking broncos.
Chauncey Thomas did his best to straighten out the record and was instrumental in pooh-poohing the rampant misconceptions surrounding the Old West that were implanted firmly in the minds of the latter-day tenderfeet. Thomas knew whereof he spoke. Born on the banks of Cherry Creek, Colorado, in 1872, as a boy he saw Leadville in its heyday, Cripple Creek from the beginning, and herds of bison and the Indian, all free on the plains. Young Chauncey was trained as a journalist by his father, a veteran newspaperman. Later, he drifted from one eastern editorial office to another, finally returning to Denver in 1908. In demand as a lecturer, he was regarded as an authority on frontier history.
Chauncey Thomas (1872-1941) at age 39. Talented, cultured and articulate, he self-eulogized: “Whether my writing will live I do not know. Time is my sole critic so it is idle to speculate. Anyway, I have had a good time doing the work I had to do.” His name lives on in Mt. Chauncey, a 9500-ft. peak located a hundred miles west of Denver and named for him by the U.S. government.
Some of the absurdity generated by this loose type of journalism, especially as it pertained to the extent of the use of guns on the frontier, unavoidably found its way into the various departments of Outdoor Life magazine. A fair percentage of the readership was convinced that the gun was the only tool that figured prominently in opening the West, subduing the Indian, and wiping out the wolf and buffalo. Thomas endured these opinions for a while before he spoke out. He had been an eyewitness, he pointed out, and this is not what he saw.
Contrary to romance and what the tabloid media would have people believe, Thomas maintained that the gun had little to do with the West’s settlement. He spelled out the drab and disillusioning reality: “If not a pioneer after 1860 had had a gun, the West would have been settled just the same, neither better nor worse, as guns did not cut much figure either way. But the stamp mill and the irrigation ditch did – and therein lies the real romance of the West.” The real winners of the West, he wrote, were the pick and the shovel: the pick in the mountains, the irrigation shovel in the valleys. To these we might ad the ore cart, the spike driving sledge, the ox-yoke, the twin bladed axe, the branding iron and other mundane implements symbolic of exertion.
Occasionally the old-timers would even bang out a poem or two. Charles N. Easton contributed this one to the September of 1916 issue of Outers Book.
Despite Thomas’ qualified insistence that the proper function of the firearm of the West was grossly overplayed, the mainstream of Outdoor Life’s readership refused to accept the apparent heresy. Guns, after all, had been fixed in the minds of so many as being as closely associated with the true old-time Westerner as the cowboy was to the horse. Journalists, armed with their creative licenses, had seen to that. None of the readers of the outdoor magazines appeared to have an interest in hearing tales of the instruments of farming, ranching, railroading, mining or any of the truly genuine components of Western history, but they were entranced by the notion of the guns and had a special fascination with the rifles and revolvers that certainly must have seen use on the plains and in the mountains.
By about the year 1908, the real Old West was a not-too-distant memory in the hearts of the men who had lived it. Even at this late date, some gloomy die-hards rejected the thought that their West was gone, and refused to let it be relegated to the past. They embraced the futile hope that the old West hadn’t been buried just yet.
About this time, a distinct and unique episode in the history of sporting journalism began to unfold. Some of the gray-haired men sent to magazine editors descriptions of their old guns. In many cases they provided anecdotes that shed a genuine and captivating light on weapons that had been to points West under a variety of circumstances. Reminiscent Western gentlemen recalled past nineteenth century experiences and described the guns that had tagged along. Many submitted photographs. This habit, apparently encouraged by the publishers, marched to the dreaded drumbeat of progress throughout the Edwardian era. It lasted through the outbreak and duration of the War in Europe and a little beyond, until the old geezers eventually died out, or belatedly stepped into the twentieth century.
Taken as a whole, the contributors were not spinning rambling yarns. Most accounts were concise and direct treatments describing a weapon or artifact. An overview of this trend, and a sampling of a few examples, may be as useful and entertaining to modern day readers of the New Millennium as our gun crank predecessors found it a hundred years ago.
Most likely, this old Westerner did not write his own caption. A sharp-eyed reader of Recreation magazine noted that the rifle was not a Ballard, but a Maynard.
In the Spring of 1911, the editor of Outdoor Life allowed 10 valuable pages for a feature article that author and artifact accumulator Don Maquire was pleased to title “Frontier Weapons.” Mr. Maquire, incidentally, seems to have initiated the popular, but far too infrequent, mass exhibitions of Old West guns and relics. His presentation is the first of its type that I have noticed. Other collections may have varying levels of appeal, but they paled to Maquire’s 50-item display.
Don Maguire’s collection of western artifacts and weapons as profiled in the June, 1911 issue of Outdoor Life.
In the years that went by between 1870 and 1900, Don Maquire spent his time in various places in the West. His collection of Indian artifacts was extensive and important. The assembly included an assortment of lances, scalping knives, peace pipes and claw necklaces – and, of course, guns of all sorts.
Maquire’s collection of long guns included a representative gathering of pioneer and immigrant guns of the common sort. Some of these had seen their first service in foreign lands. One such was a matchlock brought over by a naïve Chinese merchant who must have had no idea what to expect on the plains but recognized the need for a gun of some type. A Swiss Army rifle, the .41 caliber Vetterli, and other out of date European military weapons were also included.
There were others. American
