stuart wrote:
>
> When I was in American Studies at Kansas, we had a steady stream of German
> students and the first thing they wanted to study was cowboys and indians
A lotta that's probably the lingering influence of Karl May
(1842-1912), whose idealized tales of cowboys'n'indians
are still popular. May wrote plenty of well-researched
novels about the West (which, incidentally, he'd never seen
- his career crashed when he started pretending he'd
actually done all the stuff he described in the books).
Generations of schoolkids have been hooked on the stuff,
including Albert Schweizer and Hitler. Howard Lamar's 1998
"New Encyclopedia of the American West" calls May's huge
influence "pervasive and continuing."
Hey, everybody like a good yarn!
Tom Smith
