How the West Was Really Won

The settling and taming of the American West has aroused the collective imagination of people all over the world, who have seen it as a place of adventure and romance.  Of course, that depends on your point of view.  The people who were there first weren’t particularly happy to have hordes of illegal immigrants from Europe ruining the neighborhoods, taking over everything and demanding that everyone speak English.  But that’s a whole other story.

Those of you who have read this already know the story about how my distant Italian uncle discovered America.[1]  What you don’t know is that my mother’s family had some colorful progenitors, too, including Amaziah MacFergus, who singlehandedly tamed the American West.

This fact came to light in 2002 when my cousin Tillie rummaged in her mother’s attic and came across some old, yellowed pieces of paper containing Amaziah’s handwritten memoirs.  She brought them to an expert, who, according to her, “laughed so hard he almost peed himself.”  He told her the pages looked like they had been written sometime in the 1950s by a fifth grader, then put through an old mimeograph machine.  “The kid probably wanted to sniff the mimeograph ink” was his assessment.  “Either that, or he had been watching too much television.”

Tillie didn’t believe him.  No kid in her family was ever literate enough to write a paragraph, let alone a fake memoir.  She showed it to her brother-in-law Bob, who had majored in History before dropping out of college.  He had all kinds of authentic-looking stamps hidden away in his desk drawers, along with a magnifying glass, a microscope that he had stolen from his high school biology lab, assorted little bottles of mystery chemicals and two empty Sprite bottles.  Bob was not only eager to authenticate Tillie’s discovery, he suggested that they “do things to make this paper look really old,” then sell it to a cable TV channel for the right price.  Tillie agreed.

Anyway, the story is that Amaziah MacFergus, known to friends and family as “Sam,”[2] first went west as a member of a wagon train.  After up-ending several wagons, accidentally shooting off the wagon master’s little finger and singing off-key when it was his turn to entertain at night, he was thrown out somewhere along the Santa Fe Trail.  “You’re more dangerous than the Indians,” shouted the wagon master.  “You have been voted off the wagon train!”

He made his way to Tombstone, Arizona.  Even though he couldn’t shoot the side of a house from two feet away, he was made a deputy marshal.  Nobody else wanted the job, and the Earp brothers figured he’d be useful for sweeping out jail cells and making coffee.  In the famous gunfight at the OK Corral, it was not the Earps who demolished the Clantons.  It was Amaziah.  He was doing some target practice up the street.  He missed the side of the house, but he got the Clantons.  He almost got a couple of the Earps, too.  They suggested that he might be happier living somewhere else, personally escorted him to the next stagecoach and shoved him in, after thanking him for ridding them of those pesky Clantons.

Amaziah went from town to town, farm to farm and ranch to ranch, repeating the same story in each place.  One by one, he demolished most of the outlaws of the Old West and almost got some of the good guys, too.  Outlaws were afraid to come out of hiding for fear they’d run into him somewhere and that he’d be target practicing.  Lawmen were tired of paying for all the damages.  So the Old West became very tame very quickly.

Eventually Amaziah got married to a woman named Lizzie, opened up a general store and settled down.  Lizzie hid his gun and all of his leftover ammunition and refused to tell him where.  They had eight children, which kept them both too busy to get into any trouble.

All of this would have been hidden from history if Cousin Tillie hadn’t decided to clean out her mother’s attic in 2002.

(DISCLAIMER:  I made this up, but I think you have already figured that out.)