james, the gunfighter and. the overlooked bravado is so rare attention to their fictional sources. what do you often got? the finest western literature? what's the description of life on the frontier? whether it was the guns and their handling or the outfits the men and women wore. the routines. ranching or the buffalo hunt. how native americans carried on their daily existence. what people ate, drank. we're talking about novelists who did their homework prided themselves on such details of frontier life, which were inevitably obscured on the screen. the claims about historical authenticity have always romanticized hollywood westerns. for the most part, john wayne and the generation of screen cowboys that inherited it believe that the silent era didn't attempt or boast historicity. they were embodying masculinity, heroism, nationalism and other patriotic virtues and stories that fed hollywood fantasies about the west. clint eastwood, the premier cowboy star of our time, never pretends any historical accuracy on