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Emerson Hough was an habitual Forest and Stream columnist through the peak of the frontier years and a familiar provider of sporting, natural history, and conservation material. When he contributed a short feature, unimaginatively titled “The West and the Gun” in the June 23, 1900, number, it must have struck his loyal followers as uncharacteristically reflective. When he published his observation, it was a trifle too early in the century for the sort of thoughts that were on his mind.

Mr. Hough spent the best part of his life in the West; for many years he was a New Mexican. He wrote that he lived through a time when seeing a sidearm strapped to a man’s hip was the usual and expected thing. He once shot – informally at targets – with Pat Garrett, the sheriff of Lincoln County, the man who ended the career of Billy the Kid with a bullet.

While visiting a Chicago gun store during the first Spring of the twentieth century, Hough caught his initial glimpse of the new-fangled Colt .38 Automatic pistol and puzzled over its complex gadgetry. It was a curious, right angled, out-of-balanced affair. Hough had grown old enough to be resistant to change and to progress. With sad strokes of his pen, Mr. Hough foreshadowed the attitude that would preoccupy the minds and imaginations of Westerners for the next 20 years when he wrote: “These Browning boys, out in Ogden, Utah, who get up all these revolutionizing inventions in firearms, are Western men, and they must have an odd reflection now and then that there is no longer any West, no longer any Billy the Kids, no longer much use for guns, big or little.”