After a gunfight

The winner makes sure he has friends on the grand jury. If not he gets out of town fast.

In the more stylized Westerns, the gunfight is the end of the story, it justifies itself. In reality a gun battle tended to start a lot of problems.

People would probably call a doctor, assuming one was to be had. Otherwise they just cleaned up as best they could and the wounded either recovered or died.

A lot depends on how organized the area is. A county is supposed to have a coroner, a sheriff, county commissioners, judges, etc. Incorporated towns would have their own roster of officials. But a town that had just been built, or a mining camp might not have all those. A territory, as opposed to a state, might not have the resources and authority to set up counties and towns. The locals often had to make things up as they went along with miners' courts, vigilantes, and other unofficial institutions.

The dead guy would be buried by friends or relatives. A lot of guys were on their own in new frontier towns so maybe some club would take care of the deceased, eg if the guy was a Mason, then brother Masons might step in. A truly friendless drifter might end up buried in a pauper's grave.

Unclaimed personal goods would be held by the sheriff, but practice was lax and they might get passed around as trophies. The sheriff might claim a dead criminal's guns.

The winner might get prosecuted. Again a lot would depend. Corruption was pretty common so the outcome may well depend on influence as much as facts. Or the locals might be so outraged they would lynch the fellow before he got to trial.

So it wasn't exactly Mad Max in the Old West, but things could still be pretty raw. A shootout at a remote mountain cabin poses different questions than one in a gambling hall in town. A shooting in a Montana mining camp in 1864 might have very different consequences than a shooting in a Texas town in 1890.

If you are aiming at a sort of imagined, mythic West, you can wing it and make up things as you go. If you want a more concrete setting with more realistic effect, then take a close look at the time and place and start filling in with appropriate details.

Realistically, nothing happened because those gunfights didn't happen in the real old west.

What happens after in western fiction is whatever you need to happen to further your plot and develop your characters.

GUNFIGHTS

I don't know what to tell you lafcadio, you got some pretty good advice here, there are plenty of sites on the net to check for accuarcy as to how it was in the Old West, but most Americans can not tell you about it because they don't know either. Everyone pretty much had a gun of some sort for protection and for hunting and they took them to town with them as well, you wouldn't want to be riding the 20 or 30 miles from your homestead to town and not have something to protect yourself. Of course when they got to town they were required to turn them over to the Sheriff.

My family has been in the West for generations and I have grown up hearing the true history of the West, not that I am some great historian, but I just want to let you know that there is a place for both the actual western story as there is the romantized version.

I have currently put my Western/Historical novel on hold to work on two fantasies for MG and YA readers, but I can tell you that in the 100 page outline I have for the Western, I think I have one gunfight. Even the famous gun battles such as the Gunfight at the OK Corral were more exagerated than the truth, the whole gun battle lasted aproxamately 2 minutes and a lot of bullets flew but few hit thier target.

Good Luck

I always thought the undertaker would be hanging around like a vulture to claim the body and whatever money was on it.

Shadow_Ferret said:

I always thought the undertaker would be hanging around like a vulture to claim the body and whatever money was on it.

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I love a good, vulture-like undertaker.

My favorite post-homicide story is the Roy Bean tale. They found a dead body on the edge of town and took the dude to Judge Bean. Bean searches the guy's pockets and finds a pistol and $40.00. So Bean rules the corpse is in violation of concealed arms ordinance and is fined $40.00.