in his book Gun Crusaders, sociologist Scott Melzer exposes the role of white men with guns on the nineteenth-century frontier as a mythology not of the 1800s but of mid-twentieth-century popular culture. Guns were “unquestionably part of white westward expansion,” Melzer writes, “but the role of firearms in expansion has been greatly exaggerated,” and in reality, many settlers who traveled west found little use for firearms in their daily lives.
