Like many now gray-haired men of my generation, and a few women too, I wanted to be a cowboy. TV made me that way, starting with such early shoot-‘em-up characters as Hopalong Cassidy, the Lone Ranger, Zorro and the Cisco Kid, all closer to cartoons than real people but influential nevertheless.
Then came “Gunsmoke,” in 1955, “Bonanza” and more: “Cheyenne,” “Have Gun — Will Travel,” “Rawhide,” “The Rifleman,” “Wanted Dead or Alive,” “Maverick,” “Bat Masterson” and “Wyatt Earp.”
There were many, many others born of a climate of anti-communism and the Cold War, the clean-cut morality of the Western reflecting the public mood. So popular was the Western that in 1959 and 1960, it was possible, according to Donna McCrohan, author of the TV history “Prime Time, Our Time,” “for viewers to watch every minute of prime time every night of the week and arrange to watch nothing but Westerns merely by turning the dial.”
