The Wild West - Highwaymen

Four lines of frontier wisdom, stacked down the side of the page. The West has always been generous with sayings and careless with credits, so each one is worth a second look.

"Go West, young man" is pinned on Horace Greeley, the New York Tribune editor who urged Americans westward for decades, but researchers have not found those exact words in his writing. "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do" is tied to John Wayne, yet it appears in print earlier, in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath in 1939, where the ex-preacher Casy says a man got to do what he got to do.

"I never did a day's work in my life. It was all fun" is usually credited to Thomas Edison, and no record connects it to Davy Crockett that we could find. The saddling-up line is widely given to Wayne too, with no film or interview behind it that we could trace. All four are still good advice, whoever said them.

The picture is built like a travel poster in burnt orange: a man in silhouette, hat low and rifle in hand, with a tall cactus at his shoulder and layered mesas fading to rust behind him. Down in the corner a covered wagon and a lone rider move toward a low sun.