I'm haunted by how Wild West was really won

...and it looked nothing like The Duke

- By James Rampton

CLASSIC movies starring America's most famous cowboy John Wayne are largely to blame for a romanticised, rose-tinted view many have of the Wild West.

Westerns featuring the Hollywood legend, who died in 1979 and was known as “The Duke”, usually portrayed the remote open plains as being populated by lantern-jawed, unimpeachably heroic men who always had right on their side.

Yet fellow big-screen icon Kevin Costner argues that almost everything we know about the US West from those movies is wrong. He contends the reality was far more brutal and bloody than Tinseltown's version would have you believe.

The Yellowstone star, 70, says too often we have fallen for the cliché of the noble cowboy. “What do we see when we think of the West? A gunfight between some small-town sheriff and a gang of outlaws? Maybe a cowboy playing his banjo under the stars?” he says.