How the West was Won

In the early 1950's, Frank Ralston lived in retirement in Burbank California. When his young grandson, Stephen wanted to dress as a cowboy like Roy Rogers for a school Halloween party, Frank told him, "that's not the way cowboys used to dress. They didn't carry pistols. They carried ropes to lasso cattle." He took Stephen to the hardware store and bought him a length of rope and showed him how to make a lasso and throw it at an imaginary steer. One day, he fashioned a bow and arrows from the branches of a bush in the yard. He skinned and notched the bow and tied string to it and whittled arrows to shoot.
Sometimes, Stephen would watch Spade Cooley singing cowboy songs or watch Bob Steele ride the range in old movies on their television set, but his grandfather had been there and he knew what he was talking about.
Samuel Franklin Ralston, Jr. was born in the Territory of Montana in 1864 and grew up with the real cowboys and Indians. He was eleven years old when Custer fought Sitting Bull at the Little Big Horn a hundred miles away at the Little Big Horn. He was a ranch hand and a deputy sheriff when the massacre of Wounded Knee took place.
Frank Ralston was in his late 80's when he told his grandson stories of the real west, the west that had already disappeared by the time Gene Autry was singing "Back in the Saddle."