Our Local Gunslinger: Tom Horn

When I was a Brooklyn 'yoot', back there in the 40s and 50s of the previous century and millennium, Saturday afternoon movies at the Leader Theater were all Westerns. Randolph Scott in his sombrero, Debra Paget in her Apache buckskins, gunfights, bar brawls, cavalry charges, dreaded Comanches shooting arrows into circled Conestoga wagons or falling picturesquely from jagged cliffs, and horses, horses, horses. But what, out of all these recollections, is most memorable?  Without doubt: the landscape. Majestic purple mountains, icy rivers, extraordinary rock formations, big sky. That was the West as I imagined it.  

 

Now I live in colorful Colorado, and I've never thrown (or witnessed) a chair thrown through a barroom mirror. Not a single quick-draw pistol duel, no cavalry. Not a whit of the mythologized movie West. But the mountains persist. In fact, I can see a splendid hunk of the Front Range  right now out of the window of my downtown condo. Right over my right shoulder as I type this.

 

It's not only the mountains that survive from my childhood movie-going. Right down the street, in the Columbia (aka Pioneer) Cemetery lie the remains of one of avatars of the western myth. Right here, abutting Flatirons Elementary School, where all my children learned to read and write, lie the bones of the outlaw, bushwacker, crack-shot hired gun, murderer Tom Horn, hanged in Cheyenne, Wyoming in 1903.

 

 

Although he has been mythologized, he was real. Here he is in the photographic flesh, perhaps weaving the rope by which he was famously hanged. 

And here's the movie version: Steve McQueen, slightly more glamorous.

My earlier self, the Brooklyn 'yoot', would have been happy to know that I now live only a few feet away from the mythical gunslinger.

Comments

[Kincaid]

That's mighty interestin'.