I've always been fascinated by the American Wild West, and in particular, those often romanticised and stereotyped characters: the cowboy and the outlaw.

My interest was fuelled initially by Western novels borrowed from the old library in Frith's Alley; by early TV series such as ‘Gunsmoke’, ‘Bonanza’, ‘Rawhide’, ‘Maverick’ and ‘The Lone Ranger’, and by films watched in the Regal and Ritz cinemas, such as ‘Gunfight at the OK Corral’ and ‘The Alamo’.

I was particularly keen on a recent road trip across America to visit three old Wild West towns that loomed large in my childhood imagination: Tombstone, in Arizona; Fort Worth, in Texas; and Deadwood, in South Dakota.

Tombstone is in southern Arizona, just 30 miles from the Mexican border, and is known as ‘The Town Too Tough To Die’.

Just off the main modern road lie the dusty streets, wooden sidewalks and swinging saloon doors of the rough 1880s mining town that was home to more than 7,000 silver miners.

Big Nose Kate's Saloon – owned by the brothel-keeping girlfriend of Doc Holliday – is still there, as is the OK Corral, scene of the most famous gunfight in Wild West history.

At 2pm on October 26, 1881, Holliday, Wyatt Earp and his brothers, Virgil and Morgan, confronted a gang of suspected cattle smugglers, three of whom lay dead within minutes: Billy Clanton and Tom and Frank McLaury.

The Earps were accused of murder, but the charges were eventually dropped.

Tourism has long since replaced silver-mining as the staple of the town's economy, and re-enactments of the shoot-out take place daily with scant regard for accuracy, as stagecoaches lumber up and down the sandy street.

One of the most interesting features of Tombstone is its legendary and atmospheric Boothill Cemetery.

Here are recorded violent deaths, murders, hangings – legal and otherwise – and over them all grows the true Crucifixion thorn tree.

You could easily lose an hour here reading the 300 wooden grave markers, inscribed with quirky and irreverent epitaphs such as the following.

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Here lies Lester Moore:

4 Slugs from a .44

No Less

No More

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Here lies George Johnson:

Hanged by Mistake

1882

He was right

We was wrong

But we strung him up

And now he's gone

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Billy Clanton

Tom McLaury

Frank McLaury

Murdered in the Streets of Tombstone

1881

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3-Fingered Jack Dunlop

Shot by Jeff Milton

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It is very easy to imagine yourself back in the 1880s as you wander through Tombstone.

The town of Forth Worth is an unexpected delight, set 30 miles from Dallas, but much more attractive than its huge, sprawling neighbour.

‘Cowtown’, as it is also known, is really two towns. Once you pass under the historic Stockyard Station Arch, you leave a modern city behind, and step back 150 years into a world of wooden sidewalks, old storefronts and Cowboy, Indian and Outlaw lore.

It trades off its history as the once biggest and busiest cattle, horse, mule, hog and pig market in the south-west, and a key gathering point for the most famous of all the open-range cattle drives – the famed Chisholm Trail, subject of so many Western songs, stories and films.

The American North had lost almost all of its cattle stock in the Civil War, whereas millions of longhorns roamed the wide open plains of Texas.

Enterprising ranchers would run 3,500 head of cattle at a time along the Chisholm Trail, 1,000 miles north (more than ten million cows in total).

They would buy a longhorn in Texas for four dollars and sell it in Abilene or Kansas for 40 dollars.

Fortunes were made and lost quickly, including by one Samuel Johnson, who lived long enough to see his grandson being born in 1908 – the future President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Today, the stockyards are still there, and they are vast and fascinating to explore.

Warren Presley, whose ancestors worked the Chisholm Trail, told us that one of the most alarming aspects of the trail was that the word ‘cowboy’ should be taken literally.

Many of the cheap labour herders along the trail were 12 to 16-year-old boys on horseback, who must have had a brutal education along the way in sometimes baking and treacherous conditions.

Other points of interest in old Forth Worth are the river area, where the longhorns were watered, and the adjacent area of ill-repute, known as ‘Hell's Half Acre’.

Our old friends, Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, operated out of here; Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow holed up here for a while; and it was from here that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid fled for Bolivia when the posse was closing in.

The Coliseum, with its statue of the legendary black rodeo rider, Bill Pickett, holds regular rodeo shows and contains hundreds of samples of the brands used on cattle back in the days of those mammoth drives.

The brass plaques embedded in every other flagstone along the streets of Cowtown honour many of the colourful personalities who contributed to the unique history of the Old West, from gunfighters to women survivors of the Alamo.

A re-enactment of the Chisholm Trail drive with Texas longhorn cattle takes place every morning along the main street at 110am. Fort Worth – it’s worth visiting!

The town of Deadwood, high in the hills of South Dakota, is a jewel. When gold was discovered here in 1876, 6,000 miners arrived to stake their claims, and the settlement rapidly became one of the wildest and most lawless places in America.

Gamblers, outlaws, gunslingers (including – you've guessed it – Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday) and entrepreneurs came too, and saloons and brothels flourished.

The main street is lined with many fine buildings from the gold rush era, and the hotel we stayed in, the historic Franklin, dates from 1904, and at times felt like it.

We probably know about Deadwood and that famous ‘stage a-coming on over the hill’ from the highly-romanticised Doris Day film, ‘Calamity Jane’.

Martha Canary Burke – for that was her real name – was a troubled alcoholic who dressed in men's clothes, and was infatuated with Deadwood's most famous citizen, James Butler, better known as Wild Bill Hickok.

Hickok was shot in the back at a card game on August 2, 1876, in the No. 10 Saloon by a drifter, Jack McCall.

The chair he was shot in sits above the door in the same saloon, as does the hand he was holding at the time – two aces, a pair of eights, and the nine of Diamonds, known ever after as the Dead Man's Hand.

Predictably, a re-enactment of Hickok's murder and McCall's trial take place every day.

Calamity Jane and Wild Bill are buried beside each other in Mt. Moriah Cemetery, high above the town, along with many other Deadwood notables.

Tombstone, Fort Worth and Deadwood are three towns which have preserved their Frontier heritage to an admirable degree, repay time spent there, and bring to life the Wild West that we spent our childhood Saturday afternoons imaginatively inhabiting, half a world away in Enniskillen.