The town is full of kerchiefs, chaps, six-shooters, big silver belt buckles, bigger hats and spurs that jingle jangle jingle, with here and there a smattering of petticoats. Most of the visitors are aging baby boomers and senior citizens revisiting their youth. The festivities kick off on Friday night with a cowboy concert in the high school auditorium. Sourdough Slim sings and yodels about wanting to die wearing his .44s and his boots. It ain't Cole Porter, but then again that tenderfoot probably couldn't rope a steer or shoot worth a dern.
Movies run almost continuously.
The myth of the West was already firmly in place when it was made. When I take a bus tour out into the rocks, the scenery looks vaguely familiar. Movie stills, mounted on posts, denote the exact locations where those photographs were taken years ago. I sit on the spot where John Wayne strummed a guitar in Westward Ho , surrounded by other scrubbed yet virile cowboys. I see where Kirk Douglas saved Walter Brennan's life in Along the Great Divide and where the Indians attacked in How the West Was Won .