All About Cowboy Action Shooting
Chapter One " Our Cowboys Have Always Been Heros"

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So it was that the children of the first half of the 20th century grew up watching Tom Mix, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, John Wayne and all the others ride and shoot their way through Hollywood's Western fantasies. Radio, with its low fidelity speakers, was listened to religiously, portraying an even more exciting Old West. The movies we watched and the radios we listened to were as real as youthful imaginations could produce and direct. For many of us, the Lone Ranger still rides the romantic rangers of our childhood fantasies. The Reel West dreamed up by radio and motion pictures may have been mythical, but it taught whole generations to love and learn about the Real West.

Where movies took audiences to the Old West in theaters, television brought the Old West home. On televisions, the Frontier was exposed to yet another generation and in numbers undreamed of by early Western mythmakers. By 1960, when the baby-boomers were impressionable teenagers, they were already addicted to television. Eleven of the top 20 Nielsen-rated programs that year were Westerns, and all are now considered "Classic TV". Millions watched every episode of Have Gun, Will Travel and Bonanza! We watched Maverick for the humor and The Rifleman the morals. Families gathered around the TV set for Wagon Train, Death Valley Days, Wyatt Earp or Wanted: Dead or Alive. Like the theatrical Western movies and serials produced long before and now enjoying a second generation of TV addicts, these same popular episodes spun wholesome tales of good over evil and the triumph of the human spirit. They promulgated that wonderful philosophy born of the independent, self-reliant spirit of the American Frontier-what we called The Cowboy Way or The Code of the West.

Reflecting our rapidly changing society, TV Westerns began to change, revealing new historical facts along with the creation of more myths. Black cowboys, soldiers and mountain men were deemed important figures of the frontier; but not until recently were they depicted incidentally, if at all, in literature or film, From Herb Jeffries' 1935 Harlem on the Prairie (1938)-the first all-Black Western made for an all-Black audience-until Woody Strode's dramatic Sergeant Rutledge (1960), the contributions of Blacks on the frontier were largely neglected. The Western mythmakers were indifferent to the roles of Blacks on the frontier. They were downright libelous to Native Americans and Hispanics. But our national interest in and love of the Old West doesn't cotton to mere myth. Actually, the true history of our frontier emerges from its cocoon of fabrication. Truth can be stranger than fiction and students of the Old West are forever fascinated with its genuine, recorded history. The more we know of our country's frontier days, the more we strive to learn. So proud are we of our Golden Age-when America's infancy was spent "winning" the West-we've come to love the history and the myth. Folks who actively pursue both fact and fiction with equal abandon are called occihistoriophiles, i.e., those who love the magnificent "mythtory" of the Great American West.

The story of that place and time we call the Old West, or Wild West, has involved many heroic protagonists, beautiful co-stars and vicious villains. Historians constantly researching folklore to support a favorite theory, and writers forever rummaging through history for untold tales, can choose from a huge cast of qualified character types, well known to aficionados of Western literature and film.

The American Frontier lasted perhaps a century and a quarter, from the country's Independence to roughly 1900. Before 1775, remember, our frontiers belonged to England, Spain, France and Russia. The letters, journals and books of westering frontiersmen and women, some of which are still coming to light, join the legends and histories of Native Americans in a long and colorful chorus. Even so, it's the polite, soft-spoken voice of a straight-shootin' cowboy from Virginia that speaks to us even now of the Odyssey of the Plains in that lost and fabled age.

Like all ages, it was a time of war and, as ages go, it was short. Most historians agree that the Wild West started with the end of the Civil War and ended before the beginning of World War I. In the interim, we fought Buffalo Wars, Range Wars, Indian Wars and the Spanish American War. For a while, we even meddled in the Mexican Revolution.

Many consider this era the most interesting in Western American history, and it is certainly the period most exploited by writers, artists and filmmakers. The cowboy, the schoolmarm and the badman make an entertaining and exciting version of literature's eternal triangle. Indeed, the many variations on this fundamental human theme have elevated the cowboy to the status of fold hero, the tragic-comic symbol of an era gone, but never forgotten.

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