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One of the greatest western movies ever made was High Noon, a black and white movie filmed in 1953 and starring Gary Cooper who won an Oscar for his role as a middle age to share up in a small western town who was placed in a situation where he would have to face another gunman who had sworn to kill him or run.

It was a classic drama built around an age's old code of honor to stand in fight or to run and be branded as a coward, a code of honor that most women, bless their hearts, will never understand.

Grace Kelly and her first major role played the sheriff's 23-year-old bride who threatened to leave him if he went through with it.

The movie was accentuated continuously with the ticking of a clock that signaled High Noon, the time at which the duel was to take place in the street.

The film begins with a gang of four gunmen riding toward town, the clock ticking, and the sheriff putting the final touches on a letter marked, to be opened in case of my death.

The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards, very rare for a western, which most critics scoffed at as being shoot-'em-ups that embellished history.

After all, there really weren't that many gunfights, and we didn't lose that many lawmen back then.

Truth is, on the frontier, after the Civil War, with a sparse system of law and copious amounts of alcohol available, and not much else to do other than prospect, farm, gamble, or raise hell, gunfights were pretty common, and lawmen were getting killed routinely.

Justice had a hard road to hoe on the American frontier, and it was costly.

But just as had its heroes, just as the bad men had theirs, and some worked both sides, and from all these men grew legends and legendary gunfighters.

There was a saying back in those days that went like this, God created man, but Sam Colt made them equal.

This was High Noon for Gary Cooper, one of the greatest western movies ever made.

We've seen this scene, or one like it, played out a hundred times in western movies and TV shows, and it still grips us for some unknown reason.

Men have settled their differences with weapons since the beginning of time, so why should this western style gunfight be any different?

In reality, death is an ugly business, never clean, rarely quick.

But there was a time, in the latter half of the 19th century, in a young frontier America, known as the Day of the Gunfighter.

These men, who lived by the gun, became folklore heroes, popularized in magazines like the police gazette, beetles, diamond novels, and Harper's New Monthly, and in newspapers, in stories, and in song.

In the time following the end of the Civil War to the late 1880s, these were the names that were talked about wherever people gathered to discuss the news of the day.

Some were outlaws, some were lawmen, some operated on both sides of the badge.

Their names often became legend, names like Wild Bill Hickock, John Wesley Hardin, who entered Huntsville prison known as the fastest man alive, and left 12 years later as the full fledged attorney, but could never escape the shadows of his past.

Jesse James, Billy the Kid, the mysterious Bill Mather, Ben Thompson, Harry Tracy, Wyatt Earp, Kid Curry, and Bass Reaves, to name a few.

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