Things I Have Learnt From Westerns...

Cafe Society
81

“Wanted” posters almost always had a few bullet holes in them.

Town pop= 300, Number of prostitutes = 1, yet no evidence of syphilus, gonereah, or other extremely common Venerial diseases

The slow talking quiet gentleman is gonna kick some ass (eventually).

Currency was almost always dollars, US Dollars (not common until near the end of cowboy “era”

No one sleeping/living on second floor of a saloon was ever shot by bullets fired upwards by mirthful merry makers celebrating on the main floor.

Horses were accustomed to riders suddenly leaping onto them from above or behind, and wouldn’t become skittish or scared by such actions.

Horses weren’t bothered by Guns being discharged just behind their ears.

Horses never releived themselves publically.

Everybody owned a horse, but unless it was important to the plot, nobody ever took care of them.

Everyone who died got a head stone, or a basic woodedn cross, neatly lettered with their full name, date of birth and death, and often a pithy epitaph.

Everyone was buried in a coffin.

The Pony express was a huge concern, judging by the number of people who rode for it (actually, something less than 10 riders in 7 short months)

Guns required little or no maintenence, and were made of a lost alloy that never required cleaning, polishing or repair.

Player Pianos would often speed up when shot, or by some magical sensing device, during a bar fight.

Night time means either a full moon or no moon, depending on what best suits the plot.

A Kerosine Lantern would provide ebnough light for a large room, bright enough so that small details on maps could be read at a distance.

At night, Coyotes howl, but politely pause between lines of dialogue.

Everyone wore cowboy boots, unless they were a prissy eastern type (who probably owned the bank) - he wore white top Oxfords

Children were very rare, and if they were present, used oddly stilted dialogue, to inform the hero that “Black Bart poisoned the well!”

Badguys were very dumb, they would invariably try and escape by “the pass”, yet everyone got “head(ed) Off” there…

Regards
FML

82

A couple of these reminded me…

And when beer cost a nickel, or whiskey a dime, no cowboy (even when he had been drinking for a while and likely had a supply of nickels and dimes from his change) ever had anything smaller than a silver dollar. Still, unless the bartender was running tabs for everybody in his head, most drinks seemed to be on the house.

Children also had the annoying habit of appearing just in time for the gunfight on Main Street, so the Pretty Young Schoolmarm could appear out of nowhere and usher them to safety.

83

There is nothing homoerotic about two men sweatily wrestling a stump out of the ground together. No sirree bob. All perfectly normal and natural. Nothing to see here.

84

There were only two types of gun in the Old West: Colt Peacemaker revolvers and Winchester Lever-Action rifles.

Ammunition for said guns was both cheap and plentiful, as well as never being prone to misfires.

Everything vaguely exotic or foreign came from “Paree, France”

There was a regular stagecoach service to every tiny farming outpost, regardless of unfriendly Indians, outlaws, or sheer inaccessibility.

The telegraph system worked flawlessly, and with better coverage than modern satellite phones.

Horses could ride fast enough to catch up with a steam train running at full speed.

Women would faint in the town hall if anyone said “Darn” or “Gosh” during a town meeting.

Dynamite was readily available, and all cowboys were fully versed in the appropriate techniques for the handling and use of explosives.

Dynamiting the railway tracks merely caused the train to stop, instead of derailing it.

Hats never blew off in the wind or when riding a horse/climbing on the roof of a railway carriage.

The chief of every Indian tribe spoke fluent English.

85

the laws of physics didn’t apply to the old west. When you were shot with a gun, regardless of caliber or range, you immediately flew back a minimum of 5 feet. Screw Newton. Equal and opposite reactions have no place on the cattle drive, partner :wink: .

86

Outhouses had yet to be invented, probably because nobody ever had to use them.

87

Oh and how could I forget, all fatal shots cause the person to die instantly. Regardless of the fact that being shot in the stomach will leave you alive for several hours /days, you would be instantly put out by one of those shots. Unless you were someone important in town. Then you’d probably survive despite the complete lack of proper medical tools and antibiotics.

88

Actually, Sears DID sell mail order houses at one time, I’m just not sure if it was in the late 1800s or early 1900s that they started it up. Basically, you could send your money to Sears, wait by a rail siding, and have all the parts necessary for a house delivered.

89

Blue was a name.
Burial Ground

90

All bad guys would know how to run a locomotive.

And people always wore one set of clothes - even the rich kids at the Ponderosa.

91

Every town has one embittered woman (usually a widow, sometimes single) who would fall for and change the bad guy.

Every town had a woman who was “one of the guys”–wore men’s clothing, smoked cigars, and drank. She either ran a saloon or was the town sheriff.

92

If a dark cloud appears in the sky (not a contrail) it will develop into the worst flood of the decade or a snowstorm to dwarf the recent Upstate New York blizzard. If the former, the entire cast will have to rush to save the herd, the town , the heroine, or the wagon train. If the latter, the hero must go up into the mountains to bring back the family who went ahead despite numerous warnings that the pass is dangerous this time of year.

If you’re in the desert on foot and have used up all the cactus you can cut and all the holes you can dig down three or four feet and find a trickle of water and have passed up several alkali pools and then pass out from sheer exhaustion, it well rain cats and dogs for the first time this decade and you will be saved. But it’s more reliable to carry an extra canteen.

93

People could shoot from a moving horse or train and hit somebody suprisingly often.

Off topic the West had trees and streams before all the settlers. Many places lost the water and plant life after a settlement showed up and dropped the water table.

94

How to send smoke signals.

95

The town sherrif was occasionally a British ex-patriate.

96

Yeah, Marian was watching those guys pretty closely, wasn’t she?

97

So how realistic was it to make a several-hundred-yard high-elevation shot using period guns and ammunition?
(The several hours dying in agony I know can’t be true, because I know not only from cowboy movies but also from war movies that wounded men are never in agony. Either they die instantly, or they are in only enough pain to cause some gasping and facial contortions, but never enough agony to scream out loud.)

98

Mexicans come in only a few varieties. Mexican men are either innocent, harmless farmers wearing white, greasy, dangerous banditos wearing dark clothes and carrying weapons, or proud hidalgos immaculately dressed in quasi-military suits. Mexican women were either nuns, whores or housewives.

99

It’s that fruity look they give each other at the end that clinches it: jeez, get a room, guys.

Prospectors spend little or no time actually prospecting, being content to look for the big strike in the nearest saloon, usually while bewhiskered, clad in a red undershirt, three parts drunk and four parts unintelligible, and all the while leering and cackling at the saloon dancers.

They are nonetheless the salt of the Earth, whilst actual mine owners are rat bastards to a man. The Old West was seemingly steeped in Marx, in that controlling the means of production as opposed to honest toil - see Cowboys vs. Cattle Barons, or owners of a small spread vs. foreclosing bankers - was an evil greatly to be deplored. This may go a long way to explaining the red undershirts.

100

Reasonably good, for a marksman with a rifle: riflemen in the Peninsular war, a good sixty years earlier, could count on an effective range of 300-400 yards, and shots of 700 yards weren’t unknown. With a more powerful breech loader and a skilled user, a shot of a few hundred yards would be quite realistic.