#BookReview for 5-star #western RIDE HARDER by Gordon Rottman
Of course, we all know about the Wild West. Men wore cowboy hats—white stetsons for good guys, black for bad ones. Everyone was armed with a six-shooter, and cowboys were old white dudes with names like “Tex” who’d grown up on the open range. Women came in two kickass models: good (frontier wives/ preachers’ daughters) and bad (dance-hall girls/Soiled Doves such as Big Nose Kate, Doc Holliday’s common law wife). Occasionally, the Soiled Doves—if they had a Heart-of-Gold—would become good saloon owners (like Miss Kitty in Gunsmoke) or even wives. On any given noon, there could be shoot-outs on Main Street. Or perhaps a gang of black-hats wearing long dusters would arrive in town, scope out the saloon, and then rob the bank, shooting their way out of town in a hail of bullets as they hightail it back to the Hole-in-the Wall/territory line/Mexico.