My wife and I are big fans of Gunsmoke, the radio show — William Conrad was a marvellous radio actor and is an amazing Matt Dillon. The cast and the writing was also very compelling, and we try to listen to Gunsmoke as often as we can when AM 1710 in Antioch, Illinois, plays the show. (Other good radio Westerns, and by that I mean more grown-up shows, are The Six Shooter with Jimmy Stewart and Fort Laramie with Raymond Burr.)

But Gunsmoke is also frightening. Only a U.S. marshall, a federal agent, is capable of imposing law and order on the Wild West. He uses force often, kills frequently, and sometimes capriciously, running people he doesn’t like out of town whenever he feels like it. He’s rarely wrong, and the show’s moral narrative makes it clear that the people he kills while defending the good citizens of Dodge City needed killing or chasing out. In short, the listener is asked to identify, most of the time, with Dillon and “the law” as embodied in its one living, breathing representative. He deals fairly with the Indians (protecting them when he can, honoring their customs and even speaking one of the languages), is sometimes not held in the highest esteem by the very people he protects. The good settlers of the West, for their part, were constantly being threatened by gamblers, gunmen, Texans, itinerant Easterners, and boozed-up Indians usually prompted to mayhem by sneaky whites. As I write this I realize that while the show is better written and acted than, say, The Lone Ranger or The Cisco Kid, morally, it’s not much more sophisticated.

Compare that with the real Dodge City, Kansas. As I understand it, the place never had a federal marshal and shootings were rare. The problem is not Gunsmoke (or High Noon), which are wonderful, well-done stories. The problem is that we take them as more than stories, that we make them our moral templates for understanding and acting in the real world.

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