The outlaws and lawmen of the Old West who are well known through popular culture were largely the creation of ink slingers, correspondents, and freelance writers for Eastern newspapers and periodicals. For every Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, Jesse James or Wild Bill Hickok there were dozens of other daring gunmen in big and little towns across the West. If one or the other performed a heroic deed or committed bloody slaughter with no journalist on hand to spread the story across the nation, to create a legend, the event was soon lost in memory or buried in the yellowing pages of an obscure frontier newspaper.