Читать книгу Gun Digest 2011 онлайн

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Many gray-haired eyewitnesses, and some who would have liked to be so regarded, took up a pen and offered first hand accounts of their acquaintances, friendships, chance meetings, or narrow escapes with one of the West’s celebrated desperados. Some of this must simply be taken with a grain or two of salt, but a percentage of the narratives are certainly to be considered reliable. Sifting fact from fiction is impossible. Nevertheless, this material makes mighty interesting reading.

A description of one person’s relationship with Calamity Jane, as a good example, appeared in a Hunter-Trader-Trapper magazine in 1925. Regrettably, there is no mention of her guns. Old men who remembered well not being shot by Billy the Kid wrote with questionable authority during the same time. Wild Bill Hickok seems to have left an endless string of human beings that knew him well, judging from the printed evidence.

Not everyone was entranced by the common guns of the immigrant or pioneer farmer, the guns that really won the West. Everyone was, it seems, interested in the guns of the gunman. I daresay we still are. A few of these firearms that once were used by the infamous made their way into the hands of an individual or a family, where they had been closely held for two or three decades before they were presented to readers of an outdoor magazine. Collectors had a few of them too.