The Western Civil War of Incorporation -- whereby large landowners, industrialists, and financiers dominated land and economic enterprises in the face of resistance by small farmers, ranchers, and the disenfranchised -- produced a conflict, indeed a kind of cognitive split, in the mythology of the Western outlaw and gunfighter. The winning side in this war bred a socially conservative myth of the hero, for example, the fictional Virginian and the real Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp. The losing side generated a dissident social-bandit myth in which the heroes were outlaws like Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Butch Cassidy, and banditos Joaquin Murieta of California and Gregorio Cortez of Texas. The socially conservative myth has been marginally dominant, probably because it engages fear of chaos against the security of order. Yet many Americans have been attracted to the losers' version of the war. These competing versions of the Western myth endure because they reflect an ambivalence in the American mind about established power and dissident protest.