The law in Montana now mandates that its citizens, including children, walk amongst carriers of concealed firearms. Here are a few anecdotes from the true West for those MAGA cowboys: In 1883 the editor of The Black Hills Journal lamented, “Concealed weapons are still carried in Deadwood in defiance of the city ordinance imposing a penalty for the offense.” Most towns in the Black Hills had similar regulations, despite current fantasies of rough-and-ready in Dakota Territory.
My great grandfather was a real cowboy in Johnson County, Wyoming, in 1885. He rode 600 miles of open range, not far from Hole-in-the-Wall pass, a hideout for outlaws. In 1888, as tensions between cattlemen and rustlers turned to war, my great grandfather left for Montana. Later he was asked if he carried a gun. “I carried a gun very little, even in those days.” He said if a man “used his head instead of a gun” he could get out of “those tight places and not have so much to think over later.” He added that wearing a gun was inconvenient and got in the way of work.
In 1909, my great grandfather got into an altercation with an armed man at a country dance. He managed to wrestle a Winchester rifle away from the man and proceeded to beat him with it. Great grandfather recalled that if both of them had been armed, one of them would have been shot. I confirmed this story in an old newspaper.
A 1910 article in the Camp Crook Gazette told of a young man shot in the groin, the result of handling a pistol carelessly. The article ended, “This is only another demonstration of what always constitutes a menace in any community, or indeed, out on the prairie — the combination of a fool and a gun.”
Kelli Gannon
Belgrade
Bozeman Daily Chronicle Letter to the Editor 3/12/21