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It's easy to see what made May's Wild West so appealing to late-nineteenth century audiences. By the time he made his breakthrough in the 1890s, an estimated 2.3 million German-born people lived in the United States, over half of whom had left the country in the previous decade alone to seek their fortune. May wrote at the peak of a collective German romanticisation of the Americas as an untamed, wild landscape full of opportunities, rugged beauty and adventure. He wrote for those who could not leave. Trapped in the grinding work mills of Germany's industrial cities, many workers found relief in the newly-popular genre of pulp fiction. After a long shift at the factory, what could be better than to escape into a fantasy world as far removed from one's own as possible but credible enough to be a dream to pin one's hopes upon? With a literacy rate close to 99 per cent, Germany allowed nearly all its citizens access to literature. Cheap printing and a multitude of libraries (including in factories) made it an affordable past-time too.

Many Germans had heard stories from relatives or neighbours who had emigrated to the United States and were thus keen to present this life-changing decision in glowing terms to those who had stayed behind. Tales of the vast open prairie were told in crammed, damp tenement flats. Adventure stories of German cowboys and their encounters with Native Americans provided much needed relief from the mind-numbing repetition on the assembly line. And who could have understood the workers' longing for this real, yet unreachable world better than May who had himself worked tirelessly to escape poverty and failed for so long to make it in the world of the burgeoning middle classes.

May's own longing for his imagined West was so great he gradually began to fall under the spell of his own creation. He began to claim he was in fact the first-person narrator of many of his stories: Old Shatterhand, Winnetou's blood brother. He claimed to have written the novels based on his own experiences in the US and went so far as to fabricate items from the stories as 'proof.' He had the character's famous rifles, Bärentöter [Bear Killer] and Henrystutzen [Henry carbine] made, as well as Winnetou's Silberbüchse [Silver Gun] -- all three can still be seen today at the Karl May Museum in Radebeul, near Dresden. May also had pictures taken in outfits that resembled those he described in books. For further corroboration, Winnetou often calls his friend Scharli, a German version of Charlie, meant as an allusion to May's first name Karl. It's hard to tell if his fans took his antics and marketing strategy seriously, or if they pretended they did in order to make the illusion of his Wild West absolute. Whatever motivated them, they wrote to May in their droves, pretending they were writing to the novels' hero and author as one and the same person. May obliged and answered many of them personally, further feeding his own myth. 

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