Skeeter Skelton did an article in which he said one old Cowboy favored a .30 Luger because it was the only handgun he'd ever seen that would shoot through a wagon tongue! Why that was important, Skeeter didn't understand but the old Cowboy apparently had his reasons.
My father read a lot of gun and hunting magazines back in the 1920's and 1930's. One story he told me about concerned two Americans in Mexico who were searching for gold in the early part of the 1900's. They were jumped by two Mexican "Bandidos". One American shot his assailant once with a .45 and that fight was over. The other American shot his man 8 times with a .30 Luger and was killed with a machette before the man died of his wounds. There's no way of knowing, of course, but I suspect that the Luger was loaded with hardball as the softnose .30 was a nasty load and would likely have done the job..... especially 8 of them.
The Luger was, by all accounts I've read, quite popular in the West and Southwest before and after WW1.
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