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“Three-Ten to Yuma” was published in 1953, during an extended era in which westerns—stories set in the frontier of the American West of the 19th century—were enormously popular in the United States. In print, westerns novels by writers such as Owen Wister and Zane Grey sold steadily year in and year out while short stories in magazines such as the pulp publication Dime Western Magazine (in which “Three-Ten to Yuma” first appeared) could be found at every newsstand and drug store in the country. At the movies, western serials and cheaply made “B movie” westerns were staples in theaters, and prestigious feature films such as Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948), Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952), and George Stevens’s Shane (1953) were box office gold. Meanwhile, the budding medium of television was dominated by westerns—a trend that continued into the 1960s with weekly shows such as Gunsmoke, which ran from 1955 to 1975—frequently as the top show on TV—and Bonanza, which ran from 1959 until 1973.

The popularity of westerns in American culture has been linked to the tremendous influence on American thinking of historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”—which contained his famous “Frontier Thesis.” First presented at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, Turner’s essay and thesis held that the roughly 200-year process of settling and taming the American frontier from colonial times to the unofficial closing of the frontier in about 1890 fundamentally shaped the culture of the United States as well as the character, or ethos, of its people.

Turner’s thesis is now considered highly controversial, as and the attendant idea of US exceptionalism. Some contend that Turner’s essay essentially excuses colonialism, violence, and even genocidal policies against the Native Americans that stood in the way of expansion into the frontier. However, throughout the first half of the 20th century Turner’s thesis and views dominated thinking in the country’s history departments and the general public alike.

While most western stories and movies at the time of the 1953 publication of “Three-Ten to Yuma” tended to take a morally simplistic and highly romanticized view of the frontier that was in keeping with Turner’s ideas, starting in the late 1940s, western novels and films were increasingly becoming more complex and credible. Emblematic of this is director John Ford’s 1956 masterpiece The Searchers, which was based on a 1954 novel by Alan Le May. The film is a brutal and unflinching examination of race relations, racism, and genocide that stands in sharp contrast to the one-dimensional portrayals that had been the norm for the previous half-century. TV westerns were slower to pick up on this growing sophistication, which contributed to their gradual disappearance throughout the 1960s and Vietnam War era.

Western stories would make up much of Leonard’s creative output in the 1950s up through part of the 1960s. His westerns tend to be far grittier and more realistic than the romanticized westerns of 1950s-era TV and film. Leonard’s protagonists are not hero cowboys, but rather flawed and sometimes unsure of themselves. In interviews, Leonard said he preferred rougher, harder-edged stories set in Arizona, New Mexico, and other border states. “Three-Ten to Yuma” was one of thirty short western stories that Leonard wrote during that decade. It bears all the hallmarks of Leonard’s earthy, terse style and it is this style that stood out at a time when most westerns were still simplistic in nature.

Despite his unconventional take, Leonard admitted that one of his reasons for writing westerns was that he wanted to get the attention of film and TV studios, since western movies and TV were then booming. But as the times changed, so did Leonard’s writing. By the late 1960s, once the market had become over-saturated with westerns and the public’s appetite for them was disappearing, Leonard began to write in other genres—especially the crime genre for which he is better remembered.

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