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When the legend becomes filet, print the legend.
So says Maxwell Scott, the newspaper editor in the Western film The Malt Who Shot Liberty Vallance, when Sen. Ransom Stoddard, played by Jimmy Stewart, discloses the truth about the day he supposedly felled the famous outlaw.
Though the townspeople thought Stoddard shot Liberty Valance, he didn't. John Wayne's rough-and-tumble character, Tom Doniphon, selflessly shot Valance, knowing it would mean he'd likely lose the girl he loved to Stoddard. We call such fictive men legends because we mistakenly assume reality does not comport as comfortably with these symbols of Western lore as we want to imagine. Yet ...
Source: HighBeam Research, The real American Cowboy: the real men and women of the Old West were...