Podcast 567-Western Legends
Podcast 567-Western Legends. The first thing one learns on a big road trip of the Western US is that it is vast. That sky. Those mountains. The desert. The border. In the Southwest these features take on mythical proportions. It’s fertile ground for two of the greatest legends of the west. One of them dates by to 1881. The other is new by historical standards, dating back only to 1947. Each legend features a town. A town seemingly in ‘the middle of nowhere’. Tombstone Arizona developed quickly as a silver mining and ranching center. Tombstone quickly attracted gamblers and fast women interested in separating cowpokes and miners from their hard earned money. It also attracted a legendary western lawman from Dodge City, Wyatt Earp and his two brothers. It didn’t take long for trouble to find the ‘retired’ Earp. The gunfight at the OK corral is the kind of legend that spawns myth, and Hollywood loves legends that spawn myth. What really happened on October 26th, 1881 in Tombstone will be debated for many years to come. In modern day Tombstone the gunfight replayed everyday in a life-imitating-art-WestWorld kind of way. A new legend has captured the attention of the world in a completely different kind of way. In another desert near another lonely town something happened in June and July of 1947 that has never been completely resolved. The incident at Roswell is truly a modern legend. Podcast 567-Western Legends takes you inside homespun museums and reenactments in two different towns in two unique places in the American Southwest. These are not National Parks. In their own way, the people of Roswell, New Mexico and the people of Tombstone, Arizona are paying tribute and still trying to make some sense of the events that made their towns famous across the world and influenced the thinking of generations of Americans. Sponsored by X Government Cars.
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