Howdy fellow Gunsmoke fans and fanfic writers!
I'm excited to share this story with all of you and I hope you'll like it. I'm not a stranger to fanfiction or this fandom. I've watched Gunsmoke and other Western shows and films since I was young and I've grown to love these characters like family. I've been wanting to write a story featuring our favorite Dodge citizens for a long time. I hope I do them justice in my writing. I'm not the greatest writer but my goal here is to tell a good story.
This is sort of a crossover western because I'm bringing Rooster Cogburn from True Grit (1969) and Blondie from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1966), and some characters from those films, into the story but they don't have those movies listed on the site that I could have marked this as a crossover.
I own NONE of these characters (except for my OCs) that will make an appearance in this fic. They all belong to their respective copyrights and owners.
This fic is rated T for the usual Western violence, language and adult situations.
GUNSMOKE: OUTLAW TRAIL
There are people back East who believe that the West is filled
with adventure and new opportunities.
Reading newspaper articles, books, and magazines
about the daily lives of cowboys, lawmen, outlaws, the American Indians;
not fully realizing the hardships and the sacrifices that actual people
in this part of the country are making
to tame and settle this territory. Foolishly believing that any man
can do what's been written in those articles.
I can tell you that it takes guts and a
willingness to do hard work to face what the Western frontier has in store.
Over the years, I've seen countless men and women succeed and fail
to make a life for themselves out here.
Many have lost their lives trying to hold on to what little they had to start out with. Others have died
senselessly, a majority of them killed by their own vices and the wrong choices they made,
many of them buried here in Dodge City, Kansas
on Boot Hill without markers; nameless and forgotten.
Those that have succeeded out here still struggle day in and day out just to survive the ravages of daily living.
It's a hard life out on the frontier compared to the civilized comforts
that people back East take for granted.
Being a lawman myself, I've seen and experienced my fair share of
what the West can do to a person.
Whether they be good or bad, old or young,
man or woman,
it doesn't make a bit of difference.
The West can change you, for better or for worse.
Matt Dillon, United States Marshal