I was a "Hopalong" kinda fella, in my youth: Bill Boyd, dressed all in black, on that glorious, white horse!
My dear, long-departed grand-dad usta sit me on his knee and read to me from the Clarence Mulford books about Hoppy and his side-kicks on the Bar20, while the old fella smoked a cigar and sipped cognac from a snifter. (I'm sure that that contributed to my later lust for reading.)
I went back to look at them, as a adult, and was surprised (and revulsed) at the casual racism and sexism they so cavalierly dispensed. It wasn't unusual for the time--indeed, it was quite common--but it helps to explain how such attitudes could persist and flourish. They were completely unexceptional for the time.
Also, that "Hopalong" was called that because he had a wooden leg:
>>In 1905, author Clarence E. Mulford wrote a novel about a hard-edged, hard-talking cowboy who walked with a wooden leg and his sidekicks at the Bar 20 Ranch. That cowboy was Hopalong Cassidy, one of Western fiction’s greatest heroes. While later versions cleaned him up considerably, this is Hopalong as he first appeared."<<
Mulford wrote ALL the "Bar-20" stories while living in Maine.
Interestingly, although the population of Black "cowboys" in the old West approached 50% after the Civil War, when thousands of former slaves moved West, there isn't a single Black cowboy in ANY of the dozens of books and stories Mulford wrote about his hero, Hopalong...
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