The Wild West, scene of gunfighters' exploits, roistering cowboys, and rampaging killers, is as much a part of America's folklore as are its innumerable characters whose adventures have thrilled a world-wide audience for more than a century.

The mold for the "Western man" was cast by the Texas Rangers, a ragatag lot with long, matted hair and scraggly beards who looked like cutthroats but whose exploits were heroic.

It might further be said that the "Western man" was conceived when Samuel Colt pat¬ented his first revolver; that he was tested in the wild-and-wooly California Gold Rush where stagecoaches bearing the mines' output rode through country as wild as the times.

But he came into his own after the Civil War that spawned the majority of the outlaw gangs that festered in these trail-end towns. Boys like Frank and Jesse James, the Younger brothers and "Bloody Bill" Anderson were graduates of Quantrill's Raiders, a band of skilled Confederate guerillas whose leader taught his men the hit-and-run techniques they later used so successfully as criminals.

The atrocities committed by William Quantrill and his men were so bloody and brutal they earned the state the name of "Bleeding Kansas." Frank James was one of 450 raiders who de¬scended on Lawrence, Kansas one dawn and shot every man and boy in sight, then put the town to the torch-an assault unparalleled for its savagery.

Yet in spite of the fact these outlaws killed many innocent people, they were seen by many Southerners in a kindly light as modern-day Robin Hoods. They were, in effect, acting out the revenge fantasies of hundreds of thousands of people who had lost a war, lost friends and relatives, lost a way of life.

A second factor contributing to the lawless¬ness of the Wild West was the sheer vastness of it.

When the nearest friendly person might be a hundred miles away, almost every man wore a six-shooter on his hip to protect his life and property. There was no other law. If a man's cattle were stolen, his crops destroyed, or he and his family attacked, it was up to him to track down the culprits.

The vastness of the open land also worked in favor of the fugitive. A man on the run had many things in his favor. Provided he got a head start from the scene of his crime, the chance of capture and punishment was remote. He could change his name and disappear into the wil¬derness of Texas, the deserts of Nevada, or the mountains of Colorado.

Communication was extremely limited in those early days, too. Months might pass before information about a wanted man reached his pursuers. By then, of course, he could be well beyond reach.

With so little working against him, a man disposed to a life of crime would see little need to walk behind a ragged-eared mule and a plow when there was easier money to be taken from the hated banks and railroads,

There have been other great wide-open spaces, other vast, thinly populated areas, but nowhere else in the world has there been the peculiar vitality, the savage turbulence, and the rip-roaring drama of the long-drawn-out struggle for law and order in the American West.

The question that remains is: "Why is it so glamorous, so full of romantic legend?"

The answer probably lies in the fact that the West was not "romantic" to the Westerner who lived the times, but to the Easterner who could not ride a horse across the plains, could not wear a six-shooter, or swagger down a wooden sidewalk in high-heeled boots. It was the Eastern journalist, novelist and sketch artist (and later, Hollywood moviemaker) who have given the harsh frontier life an aura of colorful, adven¬turesome fantasy.

Come back in July for more exciting history