What Were the Guys Who Did the Shooting Called in the Days of the Old West?

If you were living back in the days of the Old West -- what would you call the guys famous for quick draws and dead-eyed use of their pistols? Would they be gunfighters? Or gunmen? Perhaps "pistoleros," if you lived the southwestern part of the country?

Most sources I've read suggest that you probably wouldn't have called these folks "gunfighters" or "gunmen" -- at least not early on. Those terms were used in the later periods of Old Western history and lore, probably after the 1870s or '80s, for someone who was also known as a "shootist." You know the people I'm talking about I'm sure. In our post-Western movie times, these were the guys (almost always guys) who had the pistols and were not afraid or hesitant at all to use them.

The terms "gunfighter" and related words such as "gunslinger" or even just "gunmen" are part of the way popular writers throughout the years have romanticized the realities and distorted the events of life in the Old West. In fact, most people's lives were a mixture of daily boredom and sudden, unexpected violence -- with little of the heroic battles the dime novels and modern-day Westerns made it out to be.

According to one very useful resource on the history and language usage of the Old West, writer Winfred Blevins' fascinating "Dictionary of the American West," "gunfighter" and "gunmen" as well as "gunfight" and "gunfighting" all came along in the late 1800s -- and there was never any distinction made between "gunfighter" as the sort of good guy or "gunman" as the bad guy, which seems sometimes true in a lot of television and movie Westerns. And interestingly also, Blevins suggests that such terms almost always referred to pistols rather than long guns, that is, rifles.

(Another term made famous in modern television and film Westerns is "shooting iron" in reference to handguns. Unlike "gunfighter" and its variations, "shooting iron" is pretty ancient, being found in literature written as long ago as 1787, according to Blevins.)

Apparently, the first use of "gunman" in print was done by a man who once was a gunman. It was in a 1903 New York newspaper article written by Old West lawman-turned-newspaper-sports-writer Bat Masterson. He also used the term "gunfighter" in his writings about his personal work and career as a lawman. The related term "gunslinger" really doesn't rate as a true "Westernism," having come from early 20th-Century writers, picked up, and quickly popularized by early Western movie writers and early pop fiction.

Another interesting and archaic term about those guys who carried and used their pistols is "gunsman," which Blevins says goes back as early as the American Revolution -- and probably wasn't limited to handguns, but included muskets (the "rifles" of their day).

Guns and an entire culture surrounding them were crucial to the history of the Old West. They were used to sustain life on the Plains and in the mountains of the West as people used them to hunt food. And they were used to take life in all the Western warfare. Those terms we associate with cold, killer individuals who specialized in drawing their weapons to take lives hold a sort of romantic draw for fans of the Old West. We call them "gunfighters" or "gunmen" and either vilify or popularize them.

In reality, what we know about those men (and sometimes women) who used their handguns to shoot at other people has been mostly distorted and romanticized by the dime novelists and others who wanted to turn the boredom and sudden violence of life in the Old West to their own advantage. They wanted to gain readers and make a buck.

For more on what the guys with the pistols were called in the Old West and other features of life in the Old West, visit my website at http://www.lifeintheoldwest.com.

By Gary Speer