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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.