The story of Joaquin Murieta
The story of Joaquin Murieta and his fellow criminals began, later glorified as heroes of resistance to American expansion.
Arrows of the Wild West. Sheriffs, bandits, cowboys, gunfighters
California gangster. Hood. F. Remington
In December 1850, the gang dealt its first blow. At night, twelve people attacked the John Marsh ranch. During the robbery, they killed one man, but saved the life of two others. The bandits made a mistake, leaving witnesses, and in their subsequent raids they tried not to make such mistakes. Ten days after the robbery of the Marsha ranch, a gang seized the Digby Smith ranch. After the three people in the house let themselves be tied, two of them had their skulls cut open, and the third was cut off. Leaving, the self-satisfied bandits burned down the ranch. In February, they again attempted to commit a robbery, but were repelled by well-armed wakeiro. Continue reading
Not a single chance!
Another myth was fighters who shot at the same time from two revolvers, never missing their victims. To begin with, even wearing two revolvers, each four pounds in weight, was very tiring, and few did. And at the same time it was almost impossible to shoot accurately from them. Equally impossible was accurate shooting from a hip revolver, so popular in Hollywood westerns.
In westerns you can often see how the hero, like a real circus performer, turns a revolver on his finger, after which he accurately hits his opponents. This is another fiction of American cinema. As we saw above, to hit the target from revolvers of the late 19th century was not easy, even aiming well, and even after such juggling is generally impossible. In the 1920s, a certain enthusiast placed an advertisement in numerous newspapers and magazines in which he offered to pay $ 1,000 – huge money for those times – to anyone who could turn a revolver and then get out of it even from the smallest, most ridiculous distance . The money remained unpaid. Continue reading
Arrows of the Wild West
Despite the proverb that existed in the Wild West: “God created people, and Mr. Colt called them equal”, the most popular among the bandits and among the representatives of the law was not a revolver or a Winchester, as many believe, but an ordinary shotgun! Arizona sheriff John Slauter once fell upon a meticulous journalist tormenting him with a question why he was taking a shotgun with him in pursuit of bandits, growling in response:
“To kill people, damn dumbass!”
Arrows of the Wild West. Sheriffs, bandits, cowboys, gunfighters
Open Holster. XIX century Continue reading
Typical cowboy in caps
As a sheriff, a man with a rhino skin, bulletproof head, able to see everything around him, run faster than a horse, not afraid of anything and neither in Hades [1], nor in Coolidge; a man who knows how to shoot, like Captain Adam Bogardus, and who is better at shooting four to five drunken rowdy people before breakfast than sits down without such a morning charge.
Despite the seeming frivolity of this announcement, published in July 1886 in the Border Ruffian, Coolidge residents nodded their heads approvingly as they read it. Only such qualities could help the daredevil, who decided to take the post of sheriff in their troubled little town, survive; and only such qualities could help him pacify thieves, robbers and other troublemakers. After all, their city was in the heart of the American Wild West … Continue reading
Woe to the cowboys. Cowboy boots and toadstools.
I continue a series of articles on how to figure out and dress correctly in a cowboy style, while not getting caught in the pseudo-cowboy fashion hook. This time the story will be about cowboy boots, the most important attribute of a cowboy costume.
As I already wrote in the first part, the cowboy fashion is currently freely interpreted, people do not care about history, the cowboys themselves, they just want to take from them certain elements of clothing that they seem ambitious, funny and evoke nostalgic images from childhood, because it is from childhood that a person lays a romantic perception of the era of the Wild West in films, books and toys. Continue reading
