Get the hair right. And the flowers. Plus the croquet games. What else? Ladies' mustaches.

 I like old movies, 1930s old movies when the conversations were fast paced and witty. For instance: His Gal Friday. Bringing Up Baby. Holiday.

Okay, so those three movies starred Cary Grant. If it was up to me, Cary Grant would have lived forever and stayed 30 years old the entire time.

But it's not up to me and that's not what I'm here to talk about.  Something that irritates me about old movies and TV shows is that they usually get the hairdos, clothes, accessories, games, attitudes and horses wrong.  You, as a writer, should not do this.  Please, as all that is good and holy, do your research by reading history and looking at historic photos to get your story right. Don't rely on TV, movies, pop music lyrics, or novels that get everything wrong.

Do you believe it when a current novel has a young Victorian woman marrying at age fifteen? Nope. The average age of first marriage for a Victorian woman was twenty-two. 

Take a 1950's cowboy movie. All the men wear the same style cowboy hat, short hair, little leather vests, and spend their free time drinking whiskey and playing poker. Oh, and the men are white. Back in the day, one out of every four cowboys were Black. Take a look at some cowboy era photos. They wore all kinds of hats, from Derbys to sombreros to leftover Civil War caps. That famous photo of Billy the Kid...he's wearing a sweater. A recently surfaced photo of Billy the Kid shows him playing croquet, which was wildly popular among cowboys of the old West. Ever see them playing croquet on Rawhide? They would have been in real life.

By the way, the most popular card game was faro, not poker.

Now we get to horses and flowers. Ever read Son of the Morning Star? It's about Custer. When the 7th Cavalry was in the Black Hills, they were amazed at the number and variety of wildflowers. So much so that when they rode off the next day the soldiers had decorated their horses with flowers. That's another thing we don't see in old movies. 

Slight mustaches on women were considered sexy. Anna Karenina has a mustache and that's not the reason she threw herself under a train.  Tolstoy brings mentions her 'tache because it was hot.

I just finished reading The Taking of Jemima Boone. One of the minor male figures had a braid so long that another historic man wrapped his braid around a tree to keep him in place. Wow! Even if that was a sapling, that was some long hair. Daniel Boone's teenage son wore his hair braided in the style of the local Native Americans. 

My whole point of this drawn-out essay is that it's okay to have cowboys playing croquet, and women with mustaches, and horses with flowers, and guys with braids because they really did. Writers don't have to drown in research, but don't depend on cliches you see online or in books on your granddad's old VCR tape.

I wandered all over the place with this, so I'll add one more to the pot. Archeologists recently discovered that medieval knights' war horses were no bigger than modern ponies. Somehow, a knight in shining armor dragging his feet on the ground isn't what we usually picture.

Not exactly how cowboys looked but still kinda cool.