Dime novels told the tale of the West

The year was 1860 and the Irwin P. Beadles Company tried something different. It was the first publisher in the United States to sell paperback fiction for 10 cents a book.

The first dime novels were about Indians and the West, then later there were detective adventures, romance, and the famous Horatio Alger rags-to-riches stories.

Before long the term dime novel was affixed to almost any exciting, and simple, storyline appearing in book form. Also, these books were a forerunner of today’s mass market paperbacks, comic books, and the plethora of movies and television shows about the ‘Wild West.”

Essentially, the Wild West was born in the East with the publishers of the dime novels.

Thousands of dime novels traced the escapades of Wyatt Earp, “Doc” Holliday, “Wild Bill” Hickock, Billy the Kid and others.

There was only one problem: Most of it wasn’t true. Life in the dime novels, and life in the real West, were two different realities. Although these dime novels were sold as factual, these early-day non-fiction fiction writers created a mythical West that could only be found in the minds of the writers and those who believed.

One of the most prolific of all the dime-novel writers was Ted Buntline, who weaved stories about great shootists, Indian uprisings, and cattle rustlers.

The dime novel proved to be a perfect medium for writers who lent themselves to flights of fancy, and the result was that the West not only developed a rambunctious reputation, it literally became a tourist destination for many wealthy, and perhaps bored, easterners and Europeans.

It was not uncommon for westerners to run across Europeans on vacation, many of whom were out to hunt buffalo or some other western big game they had read about.

In fact, there were actually “safaris” with the specific purpose of bagging a real, live Indian. And to witness a gunfight between two shootists was usually high on the vacationers’ list of things to do.

Problem was, gunfights like we often view on television shows like “Gunsmoke” and in hundreds of movies was a figment of those writers’ imagination. Gunfights had none of the “proper etiquette” of facing off in the street like two duelists.

Gunfights were haphazard and whoever fired first usually won. If the winner was behind a bar or a door or a wall, all the better.

Honor existed solely in the stories, rarely in real life.

As a matter of fact, those of you who saw the award-winning movie, “Unforgiven,” will remember that a dime novelist wrote a dime novel about a shootist, “English Bob,” he followed throughout the West until he saw a real outlaw, played by Clint Eastwood, in action. After witnessing a real life shoot-out, mayhem, blood and subsequent deaths first-hand, that author probably put his pen and paper away for the rest of his life.

Without question, the dime novels became one of the most important forms of entertainment of the age. And often they were not marketed as fiction. Fantastic marksmanship, uncommon valor, heroes and villains were the fodder of these whimsical books.

The vast majority of readers accepted the fantastic accounts of superhuman marksmanship, just revenge, and heroic endeavors, as fact. Indians were the bad guys, although they had been pushed off their land since the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth.

Today, we often see the residue of these fantastical books in another medium, the cinema. To summarize in the vernacular of today, “Been there, done that.”