The Gunfighter: Man or Myth? by Joseph G. Rosa (review)

Reviews The Gunfighter: Man or Myth? By Joseph G. Rosa. (Norman, Oklahoma: the University of Oklahoma Press, 1969. 220 pages, photographs, $5.95.) To write about the Wild West these days is like writing a biography of Buffalo Bill; so much fiction has gotten mixed up with fact that one can hardly tell one from the other. The witnesses are gone; the material has been so often worked over that one is almost totally dependent on secondary sources. The result is that the historian, bereft of primary artifacts, must rely mostly on his own sense of reality, constantly subject to the infectious attractions of magnificent hearsay. Particularly is this true of that legendary and apocryphal figure, the gunfighter, where even the testimony of the mythic hero himself cannot, in the end, be trusted, as Joseph G. Rosa points out about Bat Masterson, whom he admits “gained his frontier reputation not only with the gun but also with the pen.” Such an admission should have warned Mr. Rosa as well as the cautious reader of his most recent book, The Gunfighter. Avowedly an attempt to separate the real from the unreal about this frontier figure, this book never quite gets rid of the romantic fictions surrounding the “pistoleer,” with the result, too often, that the ugly reality of this early American gangster is obscured by a repetition of the gallant legend. Mr. Rosa does succeed in debunking some extremes—the Western movie version of the gunfighter, for instance—but he never allows us to quite get rid of the notion that there was, in spite of their murderous careers, a quality of heroism about the gunmen of the frontier that required that they be admired. He has, in fact, repeated the gunfighter legends so well that one comes away from this book once more half-convinced the Wild West was constantly and violently just that: a series of movie scenes of men shooting Colt’s revolvers at each other in the streets. 140 Western American Literature Such an image does not square with even an elementary knowledge of reality either on the frontier or in contemporary human relationships. I am disappointed, therefore, to find nothing very new in attitude or information in this book. All of its secondary sources are familiar to the interested reader of frontier materials; all of its accounts are pretty much available in other collection: the story of Wild Bill Hickok, the shooting of Phil Coe; the story of Billy Thompson; the gunfight at the OK Corral. Such a retelling, of course, would be justified if one’s purpose through it were to provide new insights into the material. And one looks forward hopefully to just that as he opens this book. A realistic reporting of what actually happened where there was violence on the frontier might have destroyed the gunfighter legend once and for all; but the cause is defeated at the outset here with Rosa’s assumption that there was an ubiquitous profession called “gunfighting” on the frontier, and that such men spent their lives selling their prowess to the highest bidder. This is hardly a true picture. In spite of the historical facts of frontier killings which Mr. Rosa reports, he might have provided a more realistic perspective on them had he included the broader context in which they seem to occur with about the frequency of crime in the West today. In so doing, he might not only have recognized the need to make a direct analogy with the unglamorized criminal of today but also have seen how infrequent and untypical these stories are in many cases even of the men themselves (as for instance, Bat Masterson, who spent most of his life as a promoter and sportswriter, or Wyatt Earp himself, who is reliably reported to have shot only one man during all the time he was in Kansas). Instead, we get the concentrated stories of a few brutal murders as exemplary instances of life on the frontier. This direct emphasis, unfortunately, obscures and obliterates a more reliable—certainly less bloody—view of what happened west of the Mississippi between 1850 and 1900. There are vague rumors of a larger history in...