Читать книгу Gun Digest 2011 онлайн

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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.