My experience with Westerns is mainly from television: my father was a
mighty TV western fan and an astute observer of music.  He pointed out
that the TV version of "Gunsmoke" always used the same piano tune in
the Long Branch Saloon.  Perhaps I inherited some of his taste for
trivia: some years later, I noticed that "Wagon Train" used the same
theme for almost all of its music, whether it came out of a child's
music box or was played on a barroom piano.  This wasn't Dimitri
Tiompkin's famous "Wagon Train" theme music, but was instead some sort
of historically-approximately-correct song of the time.

Mark Kinsler
Lancaster, OH
http://www.frognet.net/~kinsler