All true fans of television westerns know the opening scene of Gunsmoke. Marshal Matt Dillon, close up and back to the camera, stands on the main street of Dodge City, Kansas. Down the street, motionless and menacing, is his never named adversary.¹

Then in a flash they pull their guns and fire. The adversary falls to the ground, and Matt Dillon stands alone, yet again triumphant in one more face-to-face high noon shootout.

Of course the fans of western history know that there were never, that's

NEVER! NEVER!
NEVER!

... face-to-face high noon shootouts in the Old West.²

Gunsmoke was one of the most popular and longest running westerns on television and was on the air each week from 1955 to 1975.³ Marshal Dillon along with deputies, Chester Goode and Festus⁴, kept Dodge City a town of law and order. Of course, to keep things peaceful Marshal Dillon, as did farmer Lucas McCain on The Rifleman, had to shoot five or six people each week.

While there is the popular view of the Old West as a place where men strolled up and down the street with guns in Mexican loop holsters and with gun battles nearly a daily occurrence, the truth is that in the Old West it was always illegal to carrying guns while you were in town. If you came to town you turned in your guns and got a receipt. So amongst historians there is a debate on just how violent the Old West actually was.

The scholars fall roughly into two camps. Some argue that the Wild West was really the Mild West and point out that in Dodge City - the Queen of the Cowtowns - from 1875 to 1885 there averaged 1 to 2 gunfight deaths in a year. In some years there were no homicides at all.

However, other historians point out that if the violence is rated by the homicide rate as it is today, then the West was far from Mild. Given that in the 1870's and 1880's Dodge City had a population of less than a thousand, then we have a homicide rate of about 150 per 100,000 residents. That's an astronomical number even by today's standards when large cities tend to run around 30 to 60 homicides per 100,000 even in the bad years.

The statistics, though, immediately raise another question. Other than a ratio of two numbers multiplied by another, just what does a homicide rate signify?

Well, usually the homicide and other crime rates are taken as an indication of risk for the average law abiding citizen or visitor to the town. For instance if a city has a homicide rate of 130 per 100,000 - and there are such places in the world - you'll see a warning that there is a serious risk to tourists and they should avoid traveling to that city. So if we go simply by homicide rate, the West was Wild indeed.

However, the West-Was-Mild scholars noddingly point out that the modern statistical methods were developed with large metropolitan areas in mind and that such calculations mean little when considering towns where the population was smaller than many of today's residential neighborhoods. For instance, in the Old West a small town might go years with no homicides at all. But then along would come some bank robbers who have a real set-to from the defending townspeople. This happened in Coffeyville, Kansas, in 1892 where four out of the five Dalton Gang met their end on October 5. So can you say that in 1892 that Coffeyville had a homicide rate of 130 per 100,000?

This "small number" problem remains a bedeviling conundrum in analyzing crime statistics. For instance, even today you may have Quaint Towns in the American Midwest with no homicides for years. Then as once actually happened, there can be a case where four people were killed in a single night in what were clearly atypical circumstances. But saying the homicide rate for that year was 2000 per of 100,000, while strictly speaking is true, is absolutely meaningless as an indication of daily risk for the citizens.

Of course, one characteristic of Dodge City, Television Territory, was there seemed to be no need for a functioning judiciary. Instead Matt would dispatch any miscreants as needed, dust off his hands, and go about his business. Matt's gun, it seems was the law.

But in the Real Old West, as is true now, if someone was killed in a gunfight then there would be a legal investigation - even if the gunfight involved a law officer in the course of his duties. The survivor of the fight was generally arrested although he was almost always allowed to post bond.

And yes, that might mean the officer would be arrested even by one of his own deputies. This happened on July 25, 1895, when El Paso Constable John Selman shot and killed John Wesley Hardin (yes, that John Wesley Hardin). Whether the shooting was in self-defense, as John claimed, is questionable - Wes had been shot in the back of the head - and Constable Selman was indeed arrested by a deputy - who also happened to be his son.⁵

Now we're not saying Marshal Dillon had an easy time of it. According to one western historian, Marshal Dillon was shot 56 times during his tenure in Dodge City. That was eight times in the left arm; six times each in the left arm, left shoulder, right side; five times each in the right arm, right shoulder, and back; four times in the left arm and right leg; three times in the chest; plus three grazes to the forehead.

And that's not all. In addition to his firearm wounds, Matt was knocked out 28 times, stabbed three times, and he was even poisoned. And he always got back up. Yessir, Matt Dillon was one tough hombre.

So how did Matt's "dealing justice" compare to a real life Old West peace officer? To this end there's probably no better example to turn to than the quintessential lawman of the Kansas cowtowns.

That, of course, was James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickock. And what we find in the comparison is, as Artie Johnson would say, veeerrrrrrrryyyy interesting.

Pinpointing when Wild Bill became a law officer is a bit complicated by the fact that lawmen often wore multiple simultaneous hats. For instance, someone might be a city constable, a county sheriff, and deputy federal marshal all at the same time. This way an officer could perform his duties in multiple jurisdictions, in towns or out in the countryside. This seems to be the modus operandi for Wild Bill.

Bill was certainly in law enforcement from 1867 to the end of 1871. At first, he was marshal of Hays, Kansas, in 1866, was a deputy federal marshal in 1868, and beginning in 1869, he was simultaneously serving as sheriff of Ellis County. Then in 1871 he was hired as marshal of Abilene, Kansas.

From 1867 to 1871, Bill was in a total of three gunfights. That's three gunfights total. He killed two men. Matt Dillon could shoot that many in the first five minutes of the show.

One of Wild Bill's most famous encounters was with two drunken soldiers which was depicted not completely accurately in one of Charles Bronson's more forgettable movies, The White Buffalo (for one thing, one of the cavalrymen was not Tom Custer, the brother of George). They tried to ambush Bill but he shot both of them and killed one.

It was in Hays that Bill also found himself challenged by a young tough, Samuel Strawhun. A well-wined Sam showed up on the street with his gun drawn and came up to Bill. Bill looked behind Sam and called, "Don't shoot him, boys!" Falling for the oldest trick in the book, Sam spun around and Bill shot him down.

Wild Bill's last gunfight as a law officer - and in fact his last gunfight, period - was when he was marshal in Abilene. On the night of October 5, 1871, and while in the course of his duties, Bill heard a gunshot down the street. He ran to investigate and found a crowd of Texas cowboys standing around. One of them, Phil Coe, held a gun in his hand. Exactly what happened next is a bit hazy, but Phil evidently fired his gun at Bill but missed. Bill then shot Phil dead.

Bill suddenly heard footsteps behind him. He spun around and fired, only to kill his own deputy, Mike Williams, who was running up to help. Wild Bill soon left Abilene and eventually wound up in Deadwood, South Dakota, where he is buried.

So we see that in four years Marshal Hickock ended up in three gunfights and he killed three men. And this was quite a high tally for a real Old West law officer.

And Marshal Dillon? What was his - ah - "score"?

By now it's clear that fictional lawmen of the Old West (and today) used their guns far more often than their real life counterparts. If we turn to the courtroom scene in the book, True Grit, we find that during the trial of Odus Wharton, the defense attorney was trying to convince the jury that Deputy Marshal Rooster Cogburn was no better than a trigger-happy legalized assassin who had provoked his client into an unfair gun battle. He asked Rooster how many men he had shot since becoming a deputy marshal.

Mr. Cogburn:	I never shot no one I didn't have to.
Mr. Goudy:	That was not the question. How many?
Mr. Cogburn:	Shot or killed?
Mr. Goudy:	Let us restrict it to "killed" so we may have a manageable figure.

As it turned out Rooster - a fictional character, remember - ended up killing 30 men in his four year tenure as a marshal at Fort Smith.

And Marshal Matt Dillon? What was his "manageable figure"?

Well, this number has been toted once more by a historian.

It was 407.⁶

James Arness - Jim to his friends - was from an acting family and his brother, Peter Duesler Aurness - yes, the name was originally AUrness - was equally visible over the years. Peter was the bad guy in the POW war film Stalag 17 but was better known as rancher and owner of the Broken Wheel Ranch, Jim Newton, on Saturday morning's Fury. Later he was the host for Biography on A&E.

But to most connoisseurs of American entertainment, Peter is best known as Mr. Phelps, the leader of the IM Task Force on the series Mission Impossible. If it has to be spelled out any further, Peter Aurness is Peter Graves.

And Jim?

Jim's career ranged close to 50 years from 1947 to 1994. When production of Gunsmoke closed down, he had a major part in How the West Was Won and in 1982, he took the title role in McClain's Law, a detective series set in the 20th Century.

But before Gunsmoke, Jim was mostly a movie actor and had already been featured in thirty films where he usually received screen credit. This was true even when we can see Jim - or rather sort of see Jim - in the 1951 movie whose full title was The Thing From Another World.

Yep. James Arness was "The Thing".

References and Further Reading

Why the West Was Wild, Nyle Miller and Joseph Snell, University of Oklahoma Press, 2003, (Original Title: Great Gunfighters of the Kansas Cowtowns, 1867-1886, Kansas State Historical Society, 1963).

The Gunfighter: Man or Myth? Joseph G. Rosa, University of Oklahoma Press, 1969.

Encyclopedia of Western Gunfighters, Bill O'Neal, University of Oklahoma Press, 1979.

Gunfighters Highwaymen & Vigilantes: Violence on the Frontier, Roger McGrath, University of California Press, 1987.

"Quick Draw Holster", Inventor: Arvo Ojala, US 2832519A, Filed: 1956-08-21, Granted: 1958-04-29, United States Patent Office.

"How Dodge City Became a Symbol of Frontier Lawlessness", Robert R. Dykstra and Jo Ann Manfra, Smithsonian Magazine, January 23, 2018.

"Gun Control Is as Old as the Old West", Matt Jancer, Smithsonian, February 5, 2018.

"How Many Times was Marshal Matt Dillon Shot on Gunsmoke?", Marshall Trimble, True West, April 15, 2013.

"How Many Men did Marshal Dillon Kill in the Gunsmoke Series?", Marshall Trimble, True West, March 26, 2018.

True Grit, Charles Portis, Doubleday, 1968.

"The Rifle, Man!", Mad Magazine, No. 53, March, 1960.

To Tell the Truth, Bud Collyer (presenter and host), Tom Poston (panelist), Kitty Carlisle (panelist), Don Ameche (panelist), Polly Bergen (panelist), Arvo Ojala (guest), November 7, 1960, Internet Movie Data Base.

"James Arness", Internet Movie Data Base.

"Gunsmoke", Internet Movie Data Base.

"Peter Graves", Internet Movie Data Base.