linguistic:translation, quality:corruption, linguistic:paraphrasing, linguistic:voice_change, information:classification
Code of the West

Historians of the American West have written about the mythic West; the west of western literature, art, and of people's shared memories. The phenomenon is "the Imagined West". The "Code of the West" was an unwritten, socially agreed upon set of informal laws shaping the cowboy culture of the Old West. Over time, the cowboys developed a personal culture of their own, a blend of values that even retained vestiges of chivalry. Such hazardous work in isolated conditions also bred a tradition of self-dependence and individualism, with great value put on personal honesty, exemplified in songs and cowboy poetry. The code also included the gunfighter, who sometimes followed a form of code duello adopted from the Old South, in order to solve disputes and duels. Extrajudicial justice seen during the frontier days such as lynching, vigilantism and gunfighting, in turn popularized by the Western genre, would later be known in modern times as examples of frontier justice.