"Away!"
Growing up in my East Yorkshire village, we were an ocean and many miles away from The American Wild West. And yet we were obsessed with cowboys and indians. When I say "we" I mostly mean boys. It was a story repeated throughout the British Isles. The hats that cowboys wore seemed exotic. And we noted their leather chaps, the stirrups on their biddable horses and the leather holsters that carried their lethal handguns. Sheriffs wore badges in the shape of stars and so did their deputies. When they needed to sort out trouble, they frequently formed posses and together they would gallop off in plumes of dust to reestablish justice. The indians or redskins seemed hardly human. They were fearsome savages who used tomahawks to scalp their victims. They could shoot arrows from their bows with incredible accuracy - even when galloping over parched plains. They said things like "White man speak with forked tongue" and bore names like Sitting Bull, Little Raven and Growl...