18. The heroes of the dime novels returned on early television
Early television series based on American history and historical figures returned to the tried and true subjects which had been successful in the past in print media. Wyatt Earp and Jim Bowie. Buffalo Bill and Kit Carson. Wild Bill Hickok. The US Cavalry rode to the rescue across the plains. Wagon trains of settlers plodding west. There were fictional characters in their own universes and fictional characters interacting with real-life Americans of the past. There was little way to tell which was which. There was also little way to tell what was history and what was fiction, but in the programs featuring historical characters, it was all presented as history.
Television put a coonskin cap on the head of Daniel Boone and it has remained there ever since, though in real life he seldom if ever wore won. It gave Wyatt Earp the Buntline Special, a long-barreled revolver made especially for him. In life, he never used one. It thoroughly fictionalized Dodge City, Kansas in the long-running series Gunsmoke, and did the same for the boomtown of Virginia City during the Washoe silver boom in Bonanza. Jesse James became a Robin Hood-like character on television. The westerns produced for television revisited the clichés of the American frontier created by the dime novels which preceded them, and through them, the clichés became accepted as history.