The attitude of a gunfighter in old-time Phoenix


As much as I enjoy the West of the Imagination, including Spaghetti Westerns, I often wonder what life was really like when men walked around with a gun on their hip. And of course, once you think about it, you realize how ridiculous "fast draw" competitions are, because men who were quick with a gun in the real West didn't necessarily have lightning-fast reflexes, and weren't always sharp shooters. They had an attitude, which is an attitude you can still see today.

Being fast with a gun in old-time Phoenix would have meant the same thing as being fast with a knife, or fast with your fists. It meant striking without hesitation. And I've known a lot of people like that, and it isn't me.

Yes, I have lightning-fast reflexes, and superb eyesight (with my glasses on!), but I would hesitate. And that would mean the end of me. So while I know the techniques, my unwillingness to hurt someone would have been fatal to me in old-time Phoenix.

So, even a Winchester '73 would have been wasted on me. And a Colt revolver wouldn't have really been an equalizer for me. While I was starting to say, "Why can't we be friends..." a person who didn't hesitate would have long since shot me, probably several times. That's the attitude of a gunfighter, or any kind of fighter. They strike, they don't hesitate.

Of course, in the movies it's all about lightning speed, and the hand being quicker than the eye. One of my favorite old west movies showed a gunfighter who would pull his gun, holster it, slap his opponent, and then do it again and again. Funny stuff, and done by just speeding up the film. I think the movie was called "Trinity", although I'm not sure. I'm sure that you can think of many instances of lightning fast hands causing fear amongst the townfolk when the gunfighter rides into town.

So no, gunfighters in old-time Phoenix didn't set a stopwatch, and practice pulling their gun out of a holster by measuring in nanoseconds. They simply had an attitude, and if you looked in their eyes, you walked away, to live another day.

Image at the top of this post: Looking north on Central towards Adams in 1909, Phoenix, Arizona.

History Adventuring on Patreon

 Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more