Knights in Dusty Leather

Despite the violent image of the West there were fewer fatalities in the entire history of a raucous cow town than in an average Hollywood shoot-em-up.  Between 1870 and 1875 only forty-five men died by violence in the major Kansas cow towns of Abilene, Ellsworth, Dodge City, Wichita and Caldwell. The late Joseph Rosa wrote that in his exhaustive research between the Civil War and the turn of the century, could count only thirty-nine so-called "classic" gunfights. Myths surrounding their dee