It has, of course, afforded wondrously rich pickings for the journeymen of the mass entertainments scores of writers for pulp magazines, motion pictures, comic strips, radio, and television have hacked their way over its trails. Thousands of books have been written about it, many of them purporting to be history or biography all but a very few are fiction, and rubbish to boot. Yet this sinful world is, by any test, the most popular ever to be described to an American audience.
The history is compounded of lies, the ethic was based on evil, the language was composed largely of argot and cant, the wars were fought by gangs of greedy gunmen, the geography was elastic, and the code and costume were both designed to accommodate violence. The world of the Wild West is an odd world, internally consistent in its own cockeyed way, and complete with a history, an ethic, a language, wars, a geography, a code, and a costume.
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