Was Jack Schaefer’s book Shane based on any real-life Old West characters?
David Fuller
Lisbon, Connecticut
That’s a tough one. Fictional characters come from the fertile imagination of writers, but authors often have some real person in mind. We do know that Schaefer based the plot on Wyoming’s Johnson County War of the early 1890s, but it’s unclear that he had any role models for the title character.
One Old West gunfighter I could liken to Shane was Jim Roberts. I became friends w
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