No gays, no blacks, no Irish. Just like the better neighborhoods back East.
When one works as a prostitute, a nice comfortable corset is the clothing of choice.
[Larry Storch]
“Now ‘kin I get me some fightin’ room!?”
[/Larry Storch]
Every town has a chinaman that does laundry.
Must have been something in the water.
Usually at the most inconvenient of times - when Indians were attacking, for example. On the upside, labour only took about 20 minutes, and all babies were born three months old.
all guns are equal: a pistol, held loosely in the fingers and fired without looking through the sights, is just as accurate as a carefully aimed rifle.
Unless the rifle is being used by a bad guy–then the pistol is more accurate.
A broken arm heals within a half hour, by tying a bandanna around it.
Four or five rowdies acting tough in a bar are enough to terrorise an entire town from the sheriff downwards, however a small army will not be able to persuade the crippled rancher’s daughter to sell up.
Most “cowboys” never encounter an actual cow in their lives, but spend their time aimlessly drifting from one place to another, apparently in search of this terrified community and feisty daughter.
All Cattle Barons Are Bad.
And the corollary, all sheepherders are good, though smelly.
It took about two hours to construct a house that stood up to all kinds of weahjer and the Indians.
Side note: it’s always interesting to see a log cabin out in the middle of this barren plain with no trees in sight, or even better in the middle of some desert. Pre-fab houses must have been all the rage and easily transported on conestoga wagons or horseback. Maybe mail-order houses.
Never move to a town with an ominously Biblical name like Repentance, Perdition or Golgotha: it has a Dark Secret, and it won’t be long before a grim unshaven stranger arrives muttering quotes from the Book of Revelations, and it’s all downhill from there. Never mind what the real estate agent said, it was cheap for a reason. Oddly enough, though, Indian burial grounds have yet to trouble the homeowner, particularly if he himself killed the Indians.
All cap and ball style revolvers can be reloaded with brass cartridges from the loops on the gunbelts.
Side note to side note: Forts are also constructed of the only trees for miles around, as there are never any to be seen from the fort.
Drinking more or less endless slugs of whisky is (a) casually affordable and (b) has no adverse effects on noble and heroic types, and only comical effects on others.
Early shotguns and rifles were astonishingly accurate over a great distance, particularly when a Good Man was aiming at a Bad Man across a cactus-filled plain or the rooftops of a deserted town.
Women in frontier towns myseriously had access to cosmetics and hair styling products that you might have thought weren’t invented until the latter part of the twentieth century.
At night time, every single location is infested with cicadas and crickets and any other insects that make a distinctive noise at night-time.
The keys to a jail cell were always pretty big and easily identified, and were kept on a large circular iron ‘key ring’ that was hung on a wall so as to be clearly visible from inside the jail cell itself.
People meeting for a duel to the death tended to observe all manner of polite rituals, often exchanging lengthy philosophical soliloquies before getting round to the actual shooting.
Everyone knows how to play poker, and everyone knows how to spot someone cheating at poker.
Well, if you were listening to Camptown Ladies for the 20th time that night while looking at whores who won’t have sex with you, you’d riot too.
By Federal regulation, every locomotive had to have among its complement of passengers a minister, a card sharp, an English nobleman and his valet, a beauty of dubious repute, a marshal escorting a prisoner to be hanged, and a stern old woman chaperoning an innocent young girl on her first trip Out West. The boxcars were always empty, but the baggage car always contained one large iron safe which carried the miners’ payroll: this was invariably minded by a single shotgun-toting guard who never suspected that a man in a dogcollar could be anything other than a bona fide preacher, or that a pistol could be concealed in a bible.
Every town had a Temperance League of a dozen or so strident women {and one hen-pecked husband} who wore sashes and continually paraded around playing trombones and tubas and hectoring against the Evils Of Drink, to no apparent effect.
Even if you play the harmonica you can still be a total badass.
It’s only ancient indian burial grounds that are a problem; they take about 150 years to mature.
See Lonesome Dove for a realistic treatment of this: former Ranger Captain Gus McCrae is in pursuit of the renegade Blue Duck and his gang. At one point McCrae and the gang each take cover several hundred yards apart. The gang think they’re safe because they’re out of direct-shot range from McCrae, and one stands out in the open taunting McCrae. In response, McCrae carefully adjusts the sights on his rifle for a high-elevation maximum range shot, and hits the man in the stomach. The man spends several hours dying in agony from being gutshot.
The only important thing I ever learned from a western:
“There’s something about the number twenty-three that haunts me.” –Support You Local Sheriff
The odds of escaping jail are exceptional.
All bar patrons stop talking immediately when a new person walks in.
“Whiskey” is all that is needed when ordering - nobody cares which kind. Oh, and leave the bottle.
It’s pretty likely that someone in the saloon shot somebody else’s Pa.
Nobody wins at poker unless they have four of a kind that is one value higher than the other guy’s four of a kind.