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lifetime, the most famous being that with the Cheyenne, Yellow Hair (not Yellow Hand), in 1876. Contemporary accounts indicate that he realized he was spoofing himself and the West, just a little, when he organized his first arena show in 1883.
    It became known as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World—and eventually brought to amphitheatres all over America, and then Europe, such sights as simulated stage robberies and personalities such as Annie Oakley and Chief Sitting Bull.
    And if the show was still not exactly the truth any more than the dime novels had been, it was enough of the truth so that it can honestly be said that no other entertainment, and no other man, did more to implant the myth and magic of the American west in the minds of his countrymen and millions of others besides. The working cowboy did part of the job of course. But he was anonymous. (And until recent years, we’ve seldom seen him written about or depicted as he really was—often still in his teens, or barely out of them; frequently black.) Cody remains the Westerner.
    Bad management cost him the fortune he made in show business. His death in 1917 was messy and unheroic; the cause was uremic poisoning. But he was a showman to the end, making his last appearance two months before he was buried.
    Personal problems linked to flaws in his character vexed most of his later life. But he has a just claim to immortality, because he bequeathed the West to the whole world. The rest—from Zane Grey and Max Brand to John Ford and Sergio Leone—is history.
    I’ve always loved the Western in all of its permutations.
    Well, not every one. As a kid, I went faithfully, not to say eagerly, to the Saturday matinees. I couldn’t see too many of those one-hour programmers from Republic and Columbia, Monogram and PRC—with one exception: the pictures featuring singing cowboys in embroidered shirts who hopped on their too-pretty horses to chase crooks driving vintage convertibles back and forth across strange hermaphroditic landscapes, half old, half new. There is a lot of never-was in Western fiction and film, but that sort of thing was too ridiculous even for a true believer.
    Still, a believer I remained, thanks to pulp novels about Texas Ranger Jim Hatfield, richly detailed Saturday Evening Post serials by Luke Short, and Errol Flynn pictures scored in epic style by Max Steiner, a Viennese who seemed to understand the West better than most Americans.
    When I broke into writing, I divided my time between science fiction and Western stories, and wrote a couple of dozen of the latter, novelettes mostly, published by the great old Popular pulps. I can still remember haunting Indiana drugstores whenever a new shipment of magazines arrived; I knew the delivery schedules by heart.
    There is one thrilling moment in my memory in which, for the first time, I discovered my story, and my byline, among those featured on the cover (bright yellow, incidentally) of a magazine which proclaimed above its name:
Frontier Fiction by Tophand Authors
    I didn’t really believe I was a “tophand author”— I was twenty-one or twenty-two at the time. But it was heady to find someone else saying it, even as hyperbole; and saying it about one of my Westerns to boot.
    So I’m proud to have a small place in this company of men and women who, no matter how diverse their literary approaches, share belief in the verity set down by a Victorian poet and printed as the epigraph to this piece:
    Westward, the land is indeed a little brighter.

Shootout at White Pass
    H E CAME SUDDENLY, WRENCHINGLY out of the dream. Oh God it’s cold.
    His bare feet stuck from under the comforter, which had pulled out while he slept. Two woolen blankets on top of the comforter, and his nightshirt on top of his union suit with its whiff of mothballs, and he still woke with rattling teeth and shivering shanks. God God it’s cold. But then it was always cold in White Pass, except