February 8, 2018 • 31 mins
If you're like most people, the phrase ''Wild West'' conjures images of brutal gunfights in dusty, tumbleweed-ridden streets, visions of criminals slinking into the shadows of dimly-lit saloons and the vast stretch of lawless, unforgiving frontier. But how much of that image is actually true? Join Ben and Noel as they delve into the myth of the American frontier to discover how wild -- or mild -- it actually was.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:23):
Let's start today's episode by immediately traveling back in time
and with a fantastic sound cue. There we go. That
sets the mood. I'm ben hey darg Yeah, I'm knowing,
I'm gonna kill you. Are you gonna kill you dead,
(00:44):
rob your corpse and kill your sister? Are Are you
gonna do that voice the whole time? Yeah? And I
really like this Anio Morricone track he got playing because
we have to refer to the track for fair use privileges.
That's true. Ennio Morricone, one of the favorite instrumentalist composers
(01:06):
of both Null, myself and our super producer Casey Pegram. So, yes,
who we are in the wild West? Know you were
varying character. I just received a death threat. Yep, that
was that wasn't That wasn't me. That was my long
lost golden panhandling cousin jed Ah. Yeah, Jet throw tuttle Brown. Right,
(01:30):
Actually that doesn't even work. I said my name and
the voice Jake is up. But no. The thing about
the Morricone is that storied tune um soundtracks of many
a Western uh Spaghetti western has seen through the eyes
of Italian cinema. Um. That really helped kind of paint
(01:50):
a picture of the Wild West as this lawless time
where some onely just as soon shoot you TwixT the
eyes is look at you. Right, Yes, a time on
the edge of the frontier where in the closest thing
to the law might be a single sheriff and roving
bands of wild criminals hold entire regions under their sway
(02:16):
or not right, because it turns out, friends and neighbors,
ladies and gentlemen that the Wild West was actually much
more chill than fiction film and novels and even older
documentaries would have us believe. If you think about the
wild West today in your you don't know, just casually
(02:37):
remembering stuff, you might think of movies like Tombstone. You
might think of The Man with No Name or something
like that, or Wild Bunch back in pod Good, the Bad,
and the Ugly, Once upon a Time in America, any
of these kind of portrayals. Uh, it's it's a it's rife.
It's a very rich landscape and um potential for some
(02:59):
real interest characters and action to sell a story. Um.
But as it turns out, the rumors have been you know,
largely exaggerated. Yeah. One of the first rumors this. This
is something I had learned about a little while ago.
One of the first rumors concerns the length of time
(03:19):
that we would refer to as the Wild West, because
for a lot of people, there's an assumption that if
there are so many stories about this, both completely fictional
stories and completely true stories, if there's such a wealth
of lore, then surely this went on for a long
long time. However, what we've learned is that it was
(03:39):
not a very long span of time at all. It
was probably what third thirty years on the outside of
we're counting bookends and stuff. That sounds about right. Um.
I found a piece in The Independent Review, a journal
of political economy, written by Thomas J. Di Lorenzo, who
refers to two schools of thought when it comes to
(04:00):
looking at the Wild West. UM. One is considered the
frontier was violent and with dashes in between this is
this is a thing that was established by a Storian,
Roger McGrath. And then there was the the other position
that was the frontier was was not so violent. But
Bruce Benson, who did a thorough review of this idea
(04:22):
that the West was violent, he kind of discovered that
a lot of his story has just assumed that violence
was pervasive, even more so than today, and then you know,
feorize about what the likely causes of this were. What's
that called ben confirmation biased. They were looking for something
that proved their pre existing opinion. That's the one and
it is absolutely true. And I think this is bonkers
(04:45):
for a lot of people. If we were being super
generous with the time period, we would refer to let's
say maybe eighteen fifties, lady, eteen fifties, nineteen hundred. It's
what most historians would include what's called the Frontier period.
There's a great article via the FE Foundation for Economic
(05:06):
Education wherein author Larry schweik Art examines the non existent
Frontier bank robbery. So, you know, that's one of the
big stories of Western's, right, there's the great train robbery,
the great bank high so rolling into town for all
of the gold. The problem is this almost never happened.
(05:28):
If we if we look at actual bank robberies in
this time period, they seem to be myths. Over roughly
forty years across fifteen states. Uh. This author and so
as co authors identified three to four definite ones, and
then in later correspondence to try to clarify the record.
(05:51):
They found two or three others that were pointed out,
and still the records clear. Larry Schweikart is arguing there
are more bank robberies in modern day Dayton, Ohio in
one year there were than there were in the entire
Old West in a decade. You not to mention that
during that fifteen year period in the late eighteen eighties,
(06:16):
there were typically only an average about three murders a
year in towns that were established in the Frontier like Abilene,
Dodge cities a famous one. You think about having quick
draw matches in the street. Not really a thing. You
see those re enacted. There's really no historical present for that.
Or cities like Caldwell and Ellsworth and Wichita, uh and
(06:37):
those were all in Kansas and had railroad stops, which
is another thing that gets kind of a bad rap.
These railroad stop cities were hubs of scum and villainy, right, yes, yes,
And the Frontier was the place where someone who had
done some dirty deeds dirt cheap, just to follow up
the reference in the East, would travel to start again. Right.
(07:00):
But these not only were these murders very rare in
these bank heist relatively rare. It turns out that few
people had guns like it, like at all, you know,
And and like Dodge City, which Noel just mentioned, completely
banned the carrying of firearms, which doesn't really jibe with
(07:20):
the pro gun stance depicted in so many films. Oh,
not only that it was used by firearm manufacturers as
this kind of selling this image of the gun Toton
Root and Teuton outlaw or law man or a cowboy
or what have you. Um I found an article in
the journal Western Historical Quarterly called Quantifying the Wild West
(07:44):
the Problematic Statistics of Frontier Violence, written by Robert R.
Disc Truck, and it starts out with a quote from
Cormac McCarthy from No Country for Old Men's fabulous writer,
credulous book. Excellent film if you haven't seen it. But
the quote goes like this, some of the old time
sheriffs wouldn't even carry a firearm. A lot of folks
(08:04):
find that hard to believe, but it's a fact. And
and as it turns out, it is a fact, right.
And we're not arguing that there were no bar rooms,
scuffles and fisticuffs. That would be you know, that's gonna
be common wherever you find large amounts of alcohol, and
(08:26):
statistically speaking, unattached young males, dudes without family or family structure, children,
or those kind of responsibilities will tend to as a
community have higher rates of those sorts of conflicts. But
they're not out shooting each other every day, willy nilly, No,
it's it's it's fact. Gleanita Mullins kind of referred to
(08:48):
these little pockets of violence. Um, a lot of times
they were in a gold mining towns like the town
depicted in the HBO show Deadwood. Um, you have folks
that were coming there in droves because gold was found
prospectors and there was a need to protect your claim
(09:09):
from so called claim jumpers. And then of course you
introduced alcohol and gambling. Of course they are going to
be some fisticus. But here here's the interesting part. It
turns out that a lot of this stuff kind of
took care of itself through various independently organized law enforcement
agencies or groups. So with gold mining, for example, starting
(09:33):
around eighteen forty eight, the miners kind of agreed with
each other to have covenants and compacts to keep them
from getting into situations like this. So you know, there
was no government authority in these territories in California, um,
apart from the occasional military outpost um. But the miners
(09:53):
actually came to some pretty good terms and as long
as they abided by the rules, they were able to
defend their rights under these community compacts. The individuals that
would be representative of this were known as enforcement specialists,
justices of the peace, folks who would arbitrate disputes right,
and they developed their own pretty robust code of property
(10:17):
and criminal law. And this this worked quite well. There
was relatively little violence and theft. The contractual system effectively
generated the experts argue cooperation rather than conflict, and when
conflict a rose, it was effectively quelled through nonviolent means
most of the time. That's right. If this comes from
(10:38):
that article in the Independent Review, the Culture of Violence
in the American West Myth versus Reality, UM. It goes
on to talk about this kind of thinking extended to
things like wagon trains, where the settlers actually kind of
had these caravans that actually got them to where they
were going, and protections of those and things like cattle wrestling. Yeah,
(11:01):
when government bureaucrats failed to effectively control cattle rustling. The
ranchers themselves established these cattlemen's associations, they hired private protection agencies,
they even wrote their own constitutions. And some of these gunslingers,
(11:21):
you know, did have sketchy past had been associated with
crime at the time, but they never created any kind
of large scale organized crime. There was never a cattle
rustling mafia or anything. These were individuals or small groups
that the associations typically dealt with when they rustled up
the posse of their own, that's right. And there were
(11:44):
areas in parts of Oklahoma and Arkansas on Indian land
that were parts of the Cherokee Nation where you know,
there were bands of outlaws that could seek refuge and
find highouts and these hills that had caves and hollers
and the like, and they were great places for these
outlawed gangs to hide out. But they weren't coming to
(12:05):
town every day, and you know, murdering everybody in the
streets right first, that's not even sustainable, you know. And
unless you're in West World and you can just do
it every day and repeat, it will start over and over.
What a great show. The other part here that we
(12:26):
we do need to emphasize, I'm really glad we're bringing
this up, is that one of the real, most genuine
causes of violence there in the West came from the
US government's policies toward the Indian populations on the planes
or Native American populations, and that was sort of a
continuation of a lot of the you know, wartime attitudes
(12:47):
of the Civil War. Yeah, absolutely, just kind of keeping
things in almost like a police state kind of situation. Um,
the planes Indians were essentially the victims of an extermination
plan that was government sanctioned in order to clear the
way for the railroads. Yes, clearing the way for the
(13:10):
railroads and uniteteen the East and West coast. So when
we when we talk about genuine violence in the American West,
it's less a romanticized story of train robberies or bank
heist every day, and it's much more story of the
people who are native to the land being persecuted by
(13:30):
people who are moving onto their lands. And Thomas J.
DeLorenzo makes some excellent points in this independent review Peace
where he you know, he cites the fact that by
the twentieth century, like around eight hundred million dollars had
been paid for Indian lands. And then he makes this
distinction between the idea of a militia versus a standing army.
I think this is really crucial. I'm gonna read this
(13:52):
to you, um, he says, a standing army. According to
historians Terry Anderson and Fred McChesney, quote creates a class
asks of professional soldiers whose personal welfare increases with warfare,
even if fighting is a negative some act for the
population as a whole. Yeah, and this is a practice
(14:12):
that we can see in other parts of history, and
it's it's an unfortunate phenomenon. If your primary skill is
violence based, then you are motivated to pursue violent means
and violent ends. So if you don't have any other
skill to fall back on, like you can't be a
(14:33):
farrier and work with horses, or you can't you know,
be a banker or a school teacher or something like that,
then you're going to end up pursuing crime, criminal activity.
And one example of this in again very highly romanticized
book on the West, would be Core mcmccarthy's Blood Meridian,
(14:54):
where a lot of soldiers who formally fought in a
militia become mercenaries pretty much for hire by the US
government exactly, or like things like the Pinkerton's which was
like this uh private army that eventually kind of became
the tools of big industrialists and you know, breaking strikes
and just just you know, doing horrible things for the
purposes of commerce and making money. And that was totally
(15:17):
at play with this railroad situation. Uh. In eighteen sixty five,
General William to comps A. Sherman was given control of
the military District of the Missouri and the purposes were
to essentially wage a war against the plans Indians. And
this was all in the name of building that railroad,
(15:40):
and you could justify that it was for progress, but
there's a quote from Sherman that says, we're not gonna
let a few thieving, ragged Indians check and stop the
progress of the railroads. And he wrote that to his
friend Ulysses s. Grant. And politicians were making a whole
lot of money as well on this expansion and building
(16:01):
of the railroads. And there's even the credit mobilier scandal
where American politicians were pocketing a lot of money because
the railroads were being subsidized, right yeah, yeah, in a
very very dirty and corrupt way. The what would become
known as the Credit mobi A scandal occurred in eighteen
(16:22):
sixty seven, but the public didn't learn about it for
several years. They learned about it in eighteen seventy two. Uh,
here's what happened. Thomas C. Durant, who was the vice
president of the Union Pacific Railroad at the time and
fellowing George Francis Train formed Credit Mobier in eighteen sixty four,
and they based it on a pre existing thing called
(16:45):
the Pennsylvania Fiscal Agency. They were a lone and contract company.
This was a deliberate no bones about an attempt to
lie both to the government and to the public. Defraud. Yeah,
that's a good word, that's a good use of it.
Independent of Union Pacific Railroad and it's um, it's stakeholders,
its executive board, and what they were doing was over
(17:09):
paying for things. And when you when you use the
phrase subsidy or blake, you may recall listeners based in
the US, those stories that come up every so often
about corruption in the defense industry where someone says, what
why did you pay thousands of dollars for a toilet seat,
three for a hammer? Something like that through the railroad
(17:30):
they were overcharging the American public. They would um have
much higher rates than usual, and cash and nine million
dollars and discounted stocks were given as bribes to politicians,
like straight up, point A to point B. Bribes like
like I'll give you my vote if you give me
shares in this or give me a payoff. Yeah, and
(17:50):
these weren't like these weren't all you know, junior House
representatives or under secretaries. This included the Vice president, the
Secretary of the Treasury, you know, the people who are
supposed to guard the public against this stuff. That's where
a lot of the traceable violence occurs. And now now
(18:11):
the typical murder rate for a large city is going
to be higher than a typical frontier town. You could
argue methodology and say that might just be a function
of having a much higher population. I think that's valid,
But then we also run into a problem when we
try to get real world statistics from that time. The
(18:31):
compilation of homicide rates during the Wild West is still
one of the longest running controversies amongst statticians today and
probably will be for a long time. Agreed, let's get
back to the depiction of the Wild West in popular culture,
in Hollywood, in literature. Um. In that piece from Western
Historical Quarterly, the writer Robert our Di Extra talks about
(18:56):
that very thing, and he says that there were a
time where even academics fully believed in the depiction of
the Old West that Hollywood put out there. Um, there
is a writer by the name of Vernon Parrington who
wrote this on the post Civil War frontier. He said
(19:17):
all things were held cheap, and human life the cheapest
of all. Uh. Then we have another historian by the
name of Harvey Wish who wrote that the conception of
the Western, you know, gold rushed towns as being bold
and wicked, and that they were full of feuding bad men,
with swift, straight shooting marshals and that vigilante justice that
(19:42):
we know so well. But then Diestro writes that that
was kind of backed off from in the seventies and
eighties when the revised version of a popular textbook by
Ray Billington was put out, and in that he said
this he kind of toned down the rhetoric a little bit,
and he said that the shootout that's glorified in Western
(20:06):
stories and motion pictures was absolutely unheard of. And that's
the shootout we talked about earlier where two men stand
in the street and do a quick draw kind of situation. Right,
And we should also take a second just to depict
the true stories behind some of those iconic individual figures,
like Billy the Kid, right, one of the most well known,
(20:28):
at least in terms of headlines, right, one of the
most well known criminals of this period. Billy the Kid
is only known to have killed eight people, each loss
being a tragedy, of course, but that's a much lower
body count than a lot of films would have you believe.
Not to mention, I could probably count the big name
historical figures that were kind of dramatized, you know, on
(20:50):
on two hands, like I know Wild Bill, and I
know you know, uh, Doc Holiday and Wyatt Earp, and
you know Colam the Jane and and the characters that
were in Deadwood. You know that that's that's about it.
It's it's not like the kind of just endless roster
of of criminals that you maybe even you know think
(21:12):
about today with like serial killers or any number of
hardened criminals. And another thing that's interesting here is that
Billy the Kid died when he was twenty one estimated
early twenties at the latest. It's romantic, you know, right,
it's really it's romanticized, and we have to wonder does
(21:32):
it do a disservice to the people who really lived
in that time. I find it actually sort of inspiring
to learn that the people who were living at this
time were by and large trying to band together to survive,
not to kill each other, not to have some weird
proto mad max existence, but to get along as best
(21:54):
they could and to you know, help their neighbors if
their neighbors were in need. And you know, they make
a great point. I believe it's Steikstra who makes a
great point saying that it's difficult to compare. It may
well just be impossible to compare crime rates in these
towns two crime rates in the modern day, even if
(22:16):
we took a small town that was the same size. Yeah,
and that's exactly it. You talk about the issue with
um population. For example, in eighteen eighty and Dodge City,
one person, one person out of nine ninety six was killed.
But as our pal LORI l Dove rights for how
stuff works. A hundred years later, in Miami, five hundred
(22:37):
and fifteen people out of one point five million people
were killed. So, you know, although more people were murdered
in Miami, if you look at the statistics, it had
a lower rate of homicide thirty two point seven compared
to one hundred point four percent of Dodge City in
the eighteen hundreds. And we have to be careful with
(22:58):
those statistics because as counterintuitive as they may seem sometimes
and as unromantic as it is to deal with the facts,
the facts are ultimately going to be more rewarding. So
we don't need to have this sort of deification or
lionization of crime, right or criminals in what we call
(23:22):
the Old West and the Wild West as we know
it was not some sort of desolate, sin riddled place.
With the quote Lorie uh uses here that I love
is uh where dead bodies piled up in the streets.
It's it's not like that at all. And I again,
(23:44):
I find it reassuring, and I think that when we
fire up the time machine, you and I could actually
go to the Wild West and have a have a
pretty cool experience as long as we're on our p's
and queues. You know, like, just don't be like Chevy
Chase in National Lampoon's Family Vacation where you try to
talk trash to the fake bartender. Oh, I also want
(24:06):
to add one thing I found. I don't know if
you ran into this. It was very interesting. Sort of
a tangent here, and don't want to go too long
on it, but cowboys, as we understand them are also
largely an American myth. What we call a cowboys Day
is sort of a a whitewashed version of vaccaros, which
existed before any of this Wild West stuff, And a
(24:29):
lot of the slang we associate with cowboys comes from vacqueros,
which is from what culture These would be Mexican cattlemen.
They were the original cowboys, and they're everything you would imagine.
They got the big hat riding a horse, heard in livestock,
came up with term, you know, we get from the cuaros.
We get the terms bronco, lariat, stampede, and so on,
(24:52):
and this happened. They lead this life and held rodeos
and stuff for centuries. But for cowboys existed, Well, how
about that about the apparently I'm not on this a little,
but apparently the term vacuero later evolved into buckaroo. Well,
(25:13):
I'll be right, oh man, slap we with feathers and
called me a chicken dinner. I will not thank you.
That would be inappropriate for a workplace. I think that
about wraps up our topic for the day. But what
do you say we take a second and open up
the old listener mail bag. That's an excellent idea. This
(25:39):
will also be I believe, only the second time that
we have dared to open the listener mail bag. We
have been being real greedy and hoarding these delightful listener mails,
but I think we should try and fit this in
a little more often. What do you think, Yeah, let's
see how it goes. You want to do one, I'll
do one that sounds good. Our first listener mail comes
from alyssah Readings. Alyssa says, I'm a longtime fan of
(26:02):
the Whole Stuff series. You and your entire entourage of
podcast poets I like that are what have gotten me
through countless hours and miles as I trained for marathons,
ultra marathons, and countless other shorter races and therapy runs.
I I did not know ultramarathons was a thing, but
I'm gonna have to look into that. For that, I
thank you, and we thank you Alyssa for listening well.
(26:25):
I think you were all pretty perfect. I did find
issue with one minor detail in Ben Franklin's alphabet episode.
While we do credit our good buddy Ben for inventing
the bifocal, you mentioned how it was one of those
things that has not yet really been improved upon. That
was me that is actually false. As an optician in
the western New York area, I can tell you that
the line bifocal was quickly becoming obsolete. Improvements in technology
(26:48):
have lad to lenses that progress from distance vision in
the top of the lens down to a reading prescription
on the very bottom, with varying distances for intermediate vision
in between. These progressive adaptive lens this or pals for
those of us in the biz, work more the way
the eye naturally works before the inevitable help with accommodation
for reading as necessary. Um, and it does so without
(27:11):
a visible line in the lens itself. So yeah, I've
seen those lenses that have that kind of like lower
part that's further reading. Obviously, I don't wear glasses, so
I was kind of going off the top of my
head with that, but thank you so much for schooling me.
She goes on to say, pretty amazing. Maybe this could
be a topic for a future episode. Maybe it's just
the optical nerd in me. Keep up with great work,
Alyssa from Jamestown, New York. Thanks so much of Lissa.
(27:34):
We we really appreciate the high praise and I now
I'm wondering how many people listening to the show or
in the biz. If you are, let us know and uh,
best of luck with the did you say running marathons?
Marathon ng and um um I stuff. We better make
more episodes nols because marathons could take a while. And
(27:55):
you know what I say, then there's no biz like
the biz. So thank you, Alyssa. US. Next email comes
to us from mo f mosays, high, guys, I'm new
to the podcast. They just listened to your episode. When
did all caps become yelling? I very much enjoy the
history lesson as well as modern viewpoints discussed. Hearing about
the removal of the caps like key by Google on
their keyboard and some calls for eliminating the button altogether.
(28:18):
I wanted to bring in some personal perspective and also
some observations about all caps in our lives. I'm a
pharmacy technician for Osco Drug. While I can't speak for
other drug stores, I know that in every Oscar I
work at, the doctor's drug instructions known as the SIG
are written completely in all caps. My guess is that
we want to impress upon the patient the gravity of
(28:40):
following the instructions to the t. If I didn't have
the caps like key, it would be mighty annoying to
hold down the shift key while typing out every SIG.
I also noticed that all caps is everywhere we go
on traffic sign which stopped, no turn on red, etcetera,
which is always an all caps, to the signs for
business names, and even on our money. I would argue
it's most important the traffic and warning signs stay in
(29:02):
all caps. Danger Comma high voltage doesn't have quite the
same gravitas as danger high voltage. While I agree that
all caps can be quite annoying online, I think they
have a place in other areas of our lives outside
the Internet. Wait ha ha, there's life outside the interwebs.
These are my thoughts. Thank you for welcoming to share them.
Keep up the great work, Mo. That seems like a
(29:24):
pretty pretty student observation. We also had an engineer who
wrote in on all caps, I know and I love this.
I actually just pulled it up right when he said that.
He talks about this is from ted Um, just the
idea of pattern recognition. He says, some time ago, I
was given the following explanation, and it makes sense to me.
When we learned to read, we have to sound out
each letter in a word, and then once we have
(29:45):
the word, we can attach the meaning. As we get
proficient at reading, we no longer do this letter by letter,
but rather we recognize the words more by the pattern
the letters form um. And this is me interjecting here.
You I could say the same thing about reading music.
You start to see the patterns and like where they
set of space or a line on the music staff,
and you don't necessarily have to really think as deep
about it. You just recognize it right away. So ted says,
(30:07):
when we type in all caps, this pattern recognition by
the brain is broken, and we have to look at
those individual letters to form the words. And although we
can still do this quickly, it slows us down and
is more work for the brain. The extra work the
brain is doing is what makes it feel different, like
we're being yelled at. That's pretty That's a pretty interesting
(30:27):
argument there, Ted, and he goes on to illustrate it
with a bunch of words where he keeps the first
and last letter correct but jumbles up the letters in
the middle, and I was shocked to realize that I
could very easily read the whole sentence. Yeah, the human
brain is capable of all sorts of strange shenanigans and tricks.
We want to thank you Ted, We want to thank
you Mo and you Alyssa. This will conclude our listener mail,
(30:51):
but not our show. We would also like to thank
all of your brains and the brains of of everyone listening,
and we hope you will use your brains to write
us an email at Ridiculous at how stuff works dot
com or shoot us a note on any of the
social media out there Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, what have You
or we are Ridiculous History. Also, of course, thanks to
(31:11):
our super producer Casey Pegram for saving the show, Thanks
to our house Stuff Works author Lori L. Dove, and
thanks to Alex Williams for composing our soundtrack, which a
lot of people have been writing about It's true. We
hope you'll join us next time. When we asked the
question what happened when people waged war over eggs, oh man, yeah,
(31:35):
that's coming up. Yeah, So come hang out then, and
then thanks for hanging out now for ridiculous history,
Let's start today's episode by immediately traveling back in time
and with a fantastic sound cue. There we go. That
sets the mood. I'm ben hey darg Yeah, I'm knowing,
I'm gonna kill you. Are you gonna kill you dead,
(00:44):
rob your corpse and kill your sister? Are Are you
gonna do that voice the whole time? Yeah? And I
really like this Anio Morricone track he got playing because
we have to refer to the track for fair use privileges.
That's true. Ennio Morricone, one of the favorite instrumentalist composers
(01:06):
of both Null, myself and our super producer Casey Pegram. So, yes,
who we are in the wild West? Know you were
varying character. I just received a death threat. Yep, that
was that wasn't That wasn't me. That was my long
lost golden panhandling cousin jed Ah. Yeah, Jet throw tuttle Brown. Right,
(01:30):
Actually that doesn't even work. I said my name and
the voice Jake is up. But no. The thing about
the Morricone is that storied tune um soundtracks of many
a Western uh Spaghetti western has seen through the eyes
of Italian cinema. Um. That really helped kind of paint
(01:50):
a picture of the Wild West as this lawless time
where some onely just as soon shoot you TwixT the
eyes is look at you. Right, Yes, a time on
the edge of the frontier where in the closest thing
to the law might be a single sheriff and roving
bands of wild criminals hold entire regions under their sway
(02:16):
or not right, because it turns out, friends and neighbors,
ladies and gentlemen that the Wild West was actually much
more chill than fiction film and novels and even older
documentaries would have us believe. If you think about the
wild West today in your you don't know, just casually
(02:37):
remembering stuff, you might think of movies like Tombstone. You
might think of The Man with No Name or something
like that, or Wild Bunch back in pod Good, the Bad,
and the Ugly, Once upon a Time in America, any
of these kind of portrayals. Uh, it's it's a it's rife.
It's a very rich landscape and um potential for some
(02:59):
real interest characters and action to sell a story. Um.
But as it turns out, the rumors have been you know,
largely exaggerated. Yeah. One of the first rumors this. This
is something I had learned about a little while ago.
One of the first rumors concerns the length of time
(03:19):
that we would refer to as the Wild West, because
for a lot of people, there's an assumption that if
there are so many stories about this, both completely fictional
stories and completely true stories, if there's such a wealth
of lore, then surely this went on for a long
long time. However, what we've learned is that it was
(03:39):
not a very long span of time at all. It
was probably what third thirty years on the outside of
we're counting bookends and stuff. That sounds about right. Um.
I found a piece in The Independent Review, a journal
of political economy, written by Thomas J. Di Lorenzo, who
refers to two schools of thought when it comes to
(04:00):
looking at the Wild West. UM. One is considered the
frontier was violent and with dashes in between this is
this is a thing that was established by a Storian,
Roger McGrath. And then there was the the other position
that was the frontier was was not so violent. But
Bruce Benson, who did a thorough review of this idea
(04:22):
that the West was violent, he kind of discovered that
a lot of his story has just assumed that violence
was pervasive, even more so than today, and then you know,
feorize about what the likely causes of this were. What's
that called ben confirmation biased. They were looking for something
that proved their pre existing opinion. That's the one and
it is absolutely true. And I think this is bonkers
(04:45):
for a lot of people. If we were being super
generous with the time period, we would refer to let's
say maybe eighteen fifties, lady, eteen fifties, nineteen hundred. It's
what most historians would include what's called the Frontier period.
There's a great article via the FE Foundation for Economic
(05:06):
Education wherein author Larry schweik Art examines the non existent
Frontier bank robbery. So, you know, that's one of the
big stories of Western's, right, there's the great train robbery,
the great bank high so rolling into town for all
of the gold. The problem is this almost never happened.
(05:28):
If we if we look at actual bank robberies in
this time period, they seem to be myths. Over roughly
forty years across fifteen states. Uh. This author and so
as co authors identified three to four definite ones, and
then in later correspondence to try to clarify the record.
(05:51):
They found two or three others that were pointed out,
and still the records clear. Larry Schweikart is arguing there
are more bank robberies in modern day Dayton, Ohio in
one year there were than there were in the entire
Old West in a decade. You not to mention that
during that fifteen year period in the late eighteen eighties,
(06:16):
there were typically only an average about three murders a
year in towns that were established in the Frontier like Abilene,
Dodge cities a famous one. You think about having quick
draw matches in the street. Not really a thing. You
see those re enacted. There's really no historical present for that.
Or cities like Caldwell and Ellsworth and Wichita, uh and
(06:37):
those were all in Kansas and had railroad stops, which
is another thing that gets kind of a bad rap.
These railroad stop cities were hubs of scum and villainy, right, yes, yes,
And the Frontier was the place where someone who had
done some dirty deeds dirt cheap, just to follow up
the reference in the East, would travel to start again. Right.
(07:00):
But these not only were these murders very rare in
these bank heist relatively rare. It turns out that few
people had guns like it, like at all, you know,
And and like Dodge City, which Noel just mentioned, completely
banned the carrying of firearms, which doesn't really jibe with
(07:20):
the pro gun stance depicted in so many films. Oh,
not only that it was used by firearm manufacturers as
this kind of selling this image of the gun Toton
Root and Teuton outlaw or law man or a cowboy
or what have you. Um I found an article in
the journal Western Historical Quarterly called Quantifying the Wild West
(07:44):
the Problematic Statistics of Frontier Violence, written by Robert R.
Disc Truck, and it starts out with a quote from
Cormac McCarthy from No Country for Old Men's fabulous writer,
credulous book. Excellent film if you haven't seen it. But
the quote goes like this, some of the old time
sheriffs wouldn't even carry a firearm. A lot of folks
(08:04):
find that hard to believe, but it's a fact. And
and as it turns out, it is a fact, right.
And we're not arguing that there were no bar rooms,
scuffles and fisticuffs. That would be you know, that's gonna
be common wherever you find large amounts of alcohol, and
(08:26):
statistically speaking, unattached young males, dudes without family or family structure, children,
or those kind of responsibilities will tend to as a
community have higher rates of those sorts of conflicts. But
they're not out shooting each other every day, willy nilly, No,
it's it's it's fact. Gleanita Mullins kind of referred to
(08:48):
these little pockets of violence. Um, a lot of times
they were in a gold mining towns like the town
depicted in the HBO show Deadwood. Um, you have folks
that were coming there in droves because gold was found
prospectors and there was a need to protect your claim
(09:09):
from so called claim jumpers. And then of course you
introduced alcohol and gambling. Of course they are going to
be some fisticus. But here here's the interesting part. It
turns out that a lot of this stuff kind of
took care of itself through various independently organized law enforcement
agencies or groups. So with gold mining, for example, starting
(09:33):
around eighteen forty eight, the miners kind of agreed with
each other to have covenants and compacts to keep them
from getting into situations like this. So you know, there
was no government authority in these territories in California, um,
apart from the occasional military outpost um. But the miners
(09:53):
actually came to some pretty good terms and as long
as they abided by the rules, they were able to
defend their rights under these community compacts. The individuals that
would be representative of this were known as enforcement specialists,
justices of the peace, folks who would arbitrate disputes right,
and they developed their own pretty robust code of property
(10:17):
and criminal law. And this this worked quite well. There
was relatively little violence and theft. The contractual system effectively
generated the experts argue cooperation rather than conflict, and when
conflict a rose, it was effectively quelled through nonviolent means
most of the time. That's right. If this comes from
(10:38):
that article in the Independent Review, the Culture of Violence
in the American West Myth versus Reality, UM. It goes
on to talk about this kind of thinking extended to
things like wagon trains, where the settlers actually kind of
had these caravans that actually got them to where they
were going, and protections of those and things like cattle wrestling. Yeah,
(11:01):
when government bureaucrats failed to effectively control cattle rustling. The
ranchers themselves established these cattlemen's associations, they hired private protection agencies,
they even wrote their own constitutions. And some of these gunslingers,
(11:21):
you know, did have sketchy past had been associated with
crime at the time, but they never created any kind
of large scale organized crime. There was never a cattle
rustling mafia or anything. These were individuals or small groups
that the associations typically dealt with when they rustled up
the posse of their own, that's right. And there were
(11:44):
areas in parts of Oklahoma and Arkansas on Indian land
that were parts of the Cherokee Nation where you know,
there were bands of outlaws that could seek refuge and
find highouts and these hills that had caves and hollers
and the like, and they were great places for these
outlawed gangs to hide out. But they weren't coming to
(12:05):
town every day, and you know, murdering everybody in the
streets right first, that's not even sustainable, you know. And
unless you're in West World and you can just do
it every day and repeat, it will start over and over.
What a great show. The other part here that we
(12:26):
we do need to emphasize, I'm really glad we're bringing
this up, is that one of the real, most genuine
causes of violence there in the West came from the
US government's policies toward the Indian populations on the planes
or Native American populations, and that was sort of a
continuation of a lot of the you know, wartime attitudes
(12:47):
of the Civil War. Yeah, absolutely, just kind of keeping
things in almost like a police state kind of situation. Um,
the planes Indians were essentially the victims of an extermination
plan that was government sanctioned in order to clear the
way for the railroads. Yes, clearing the way for the
(13:10):
railroads and uniteteen the East and West coast. So when
we when we talk about genuine violence in the American West,
it's less a romanticized story of train robberies or bank
heist every day, and it's much more story of the
people who are native to the land being persecuted by
(13:30):
people who are moving onto their lands. And Thomas J.
DeLorenzo makes some excellent points in this independent review Peace
where he you know, he cites the fact that by
the twentieth century, like around eight hundred million dollars had
been paid for Indian lands. And then he makes this
distinction between the idea of a militia versus a standing army.
I think this is really crucial. I'm gonna read this
(13:52):
to you, um, he says, a standing army. According to
historians Terry Anderson and Fred McChesney, quote creates a class
asks of professional soldiers whose personal welfare increases with warfare,
even if fighting is a negative some act for the
population as a whole. Yeah, and this is a practice
(14:12):
that we can see in other parts of history, and
it's it's an unfortunate phenomenon. If your primary skill is
violence based, then you are motivated to pursue violent means
and violent ends. So if you don't have any other
skill to fall back on, like you can't be a
(14:33):
farrier and work with horses, or you can't you know,
be a banker or a school teacher or something like that,
then you're going to end up pursuing crime, criminal activity.
And one example of this in again very highly romanticized
book on the West, would be Core mcmccarthy's Blood Meridian,
(14:54):
where a lot of soldiers who formally fought in a
militia become mercenaries pretty much for hire by the US
government exactly, or like things like the Pinkerton's which was
like this uh private army that eventually kind of became
the tools of big industrialists and you know, breaking strikes
and just just you know, doing horrible things for the
purposes of commerce and making money. And that was totally
(15:17):
at play with this railroad situation. Uh. In eighteen sixty five,
General William to comps A. Sherman was given control of
the military District of the Missouri and the purposes were
to essentially wage a war against the plans Indians. And
this was all in the name of building that railroad,
(15:40):
and you could justify that it was for progress, but
there's a quote from Sherman that says, we're not gonna
let a few thieving, ragged Indians check and stop the
progress of the railroads. And he wrote that to his
friend Ulysses s. Grant. And politicians were making a whole
lot of money as well on this expansion and building
(16:01):
of the railroads. And there's even the credit mobilier scandal
where American politicians were pocketing a lot of money because
the railroads were being subsidized, right yeah, yeah, in a
very very dirty and corrupt way. The what would become
known as the Credit mobi A scandal occurred in eighteen
(16:22):
sixty seven, but the public didn't learn about it for
several years. They learned about it in eighteen seventy two. Uh,
here's what happened. Thomas C. Durant, who was the vice
president of the Union Pacific Railroad at the time and
fellowing George Francis Train formed Credit Mobier in eighteen sixty four,
and they based it on a pre existing thing called
(16:45):
the Pennsylvania Fiscal Agency. They were a lone and contract company.
This was a deliberate no bones about an attempt to
lie both to the government and to the public. Defraud. Yeah,
that's a good word, that's a good use of it.
Independent of Union Pacific Railroad and it's um, it's stakeholders,
its executive board, and what they were doing was over
(17:09):
paying for things. And when you when you use the
phrase subsidy or blake, you may recall listeners based in
the US, those stories that come up every so often
about corruption in the defense industry where someone says, what
why did you pay thousands of dollars for a toilet seat,
three for a hammer? Something like that through the railroad
(17:30):
they were overcharging the American public. They would um have
much higher rates than usual, and cash and nine million
dollars and discounted stocks were given as bribes to politicians,
like straight up, point A to point B. Bribes like
like I'll give you my vote if you give me
shares in this or give me a payoff. Yeah, and
(17:50):
these weren't like these weren't all you know, junior House
representatives or under secretaries. This included the Vice president, the
Secretary of the Treasury, you know, the people who are
supposed to guard the public against this stuff. That's where
a lot of the traceable violence occurs. And now now
(18:11):
the typical murder rate for a large city is going
to be higher than a typical frontier town. You could
argue methodology and say that might just be a function
of having a much higher population. I think that's valid,
But then we also run into a problem when we
try to get real world statistics from that time. The
(18:31):
compilation of homicide rates during the Wild West is still
one of the longest running controversies amongst statticians today and
probably will be for a long time. Agreed, let's get
back to the depiction of the Wild West in popular culture,
in Hollywood, in literature. Um. In that piece from Western
Historical Quarterly, the writer Robert our Di Extra talks about
(18:56):
that very thing, and he says that there were a
time where even academics fully believed in the depiction of
the Old West that Hollywood put out there. Um, there
is a writer by the name of Vernon Parrington who
wrote this on the post Civil War frontier. He said
(19:17):
all things were held cheap, and human life the cheapest
of all. Uh. Then we have another historian by the
name of Harvey Wish who wrote that the conception of
the Western, you know, gold rushed towns as being bold
and wicked, and that they were full of feuding bad men,
with swift, straight shooting marshals and that vigilante justice that
(19:42):
we know so well. But then Diestro writes that that
was kind of backed off from in the seventies and
eighties when the revised version of a popular textbook by
Ray Billington was put out, and in that he said
this he kind of toned down the rhetoric a little bit,
and he said that the shootout that's glorified in Western
(20:06):
stories and motion pictures was absolutely unheard of. And that's
the shootout we talked about earlier where two men stand
in the street and do a quick draw kind of situation. Right,
And we should also take a second just to depict
the true stories behind some of those iconic individual figures,
like Billy the Kid, right, one of the most well known,
(20:28):
at least in terms of headlines, right, one of the
most well known criminals of this period. Billy the Kid
is only known to have killed eight people, each loss
being a tragedy, of course, but that's a much lower
body count than a lot of films would have you believe.
Not to mention, I could probably count the big name
historical figures that were kind of dramatized, you know, on
(20:50):
on two hands, like I know Wild Bill, and I
know you know, uh, Doc Holiday and Wyatt Earp, and
you know Colam the Jane and and the characters that
were in Deadwood. You know that that's that's about it.
It's it's not like the kind of just endless roster
of of criminals that you maybe even you know think
(21:12):
about today with like serial killers or any number of
hardened criminals. And another thing that's interesting here is that
Billy the Kid died when he was twenty one estimated
early twenties at the latest. It's romantic, you know, right,
it's really it's romanticized, and we have to wonder does
(21:32):
it do a disservice to the people who really lived
in that time. I find it actually sort of inspiring
to learn that the people who were living at this
time were by and large trying to band together to survive,
not to kill each other, not to have some weird
proto mad max existence, but to get along as best
(21:54):
they could and to you know, help their neighbors if
their neighbors were in need. And you know, they make
a great point. I believe it's Steikstra who makes a
great point saying that it's difficult to compare. It may
well just be impossible to compare crime rates in these
towns two crime rates in the modern day, even if
(22:16):
we took a small town that was the same size. Yeah,
and that's exactly it. You talk about the issue with
um population. For example, in eighteen eighty and Dodge City,
one person, one person out of nine ninety six was killed.
But as our pal LORI l Dove rights for how
stuff works. A hundred years later, in Miami, five hundred
(22:37):
and fifteen people out of one point five million people
were killed. So, you know, although more people were murdered
in Miami, if you look at the statistics, it had
a lower rate of homicide thirty two point seven compared
to one hundred point four percent of Dodge City in
the eighteen hundreds. And we have to be careful with
(22:58):
those statistics because as counterintuitive as they may seem sometimes
and as unromantic as it is to deal with the facts,
the facts are ultimately going to be more rewarding. So
we don't need to have this sort of deification or
lionization of crime, right or criminals in what we call
(23:22):
the Old West and the Wild West as we know
it was not some sort of desolate, sin riddled place.
With the quote Lorie uh uses here that I love
is uh where dead bodies piled up in the streets.
It's it's not like that at all. And I again,
(23:44):
I find it reassuring, and I think that when we
fire up the time machine, you and I could actually
go to the Wild West and have a have a
pretty cool experience as long as we're on our p's
and queues. You know, like, just don't be like Chevy
Chase in National Lampoon's Family Vacation where you try to
talk trash to the fake bartender. Oh, I also want
(24:06):
to add one thing I found. I don't know if
you ran into this. It was very interesting. Sort of
a tangent here, and don't want to go too long
on it, but cowboys, as we understand them are also
largely an American myth. What we call a cowboys Day
is sort of a a whitewashed version of vaccaros, which
existed before any of this Wild West stuff, And a
(24:29):
lot of the slang we associate with cowboys comes from vacqueros,
which is from what culture These would be Mexican cattlemen.
They were the original cowboys, and they're everything you would imagine.
They got the big hat riding a horse, heard in livestock,
came up with term, you know, we get from the cuaros.
We get the terms bronco, lariat, stampede, and so on,
(24:52):
and this happened. They lead this life and held rodeos
and stuff for centuries. But for cowboys existed, Well, how
about that about the apparently I'm not on this a little,
but apparently the term vacuero later evolved into buckaroo. Well,
(25:13):
I'll be right, oh man, slap we with feathers and
called me a chicken dinner. I will not thank you.
That would be inappropriate for a workplace. I think that
about wraps up our topic for the day. But what
do you say we take a second and open up
the old listener mail bag. That's an excellent idea. This
(25:39):
will also be I believe, only the second time that
we have dared to open the listener mail bag. We
have been being real greedy and hoarding these delightful listener mails,
but I think we should try and fit this in
a little more often. What do you think, Yeah, let's
see how it goes. You want to do one, I'll
do one that sounds good. Our first listener mail comes
from alyssah Readings. Alyssa says, I'm a longtime fan of
(26:02):
the Whole Stuff series. You and your entire entourage of
podcast poets I like that are what have gotten me
through countless hours and miles as I trained for marathons,
ultra marathons, and countless other shorter races and therapy runs.
I I did not know ultramarathons was a thing, but
I'm gonna have to look into that. For that, I
thank you, and we thank you Alyssa for listening well.
(26:25):
I think you were all pretty perfect. I did find
issue with one minor detail in Ben Franklin's alphabet episode.
While we do credit our good buddy Ben for inventing
the bifocal, you mentioned how it was one of those
things that has not yet really been improved upon. That
was me that is actually false. As an optician in
the western New York area, I can tell you that
the line bifocal was quickly becoming obsolete. Improvements in technology
(26:48):
have lad to lenses that progress from distance vision in
the top of the lens down to a reading prescription
on the very bottom, with varying distances for intermediate vision
in between. These progressive adaptive lens this or pals for
those of us in the biz, work more the way
the eye naturally works before the inevitable help with accommodation
for reading as necessary. Um, and it does so without
(27:11):
a visible line in the lens itself. So yeah, I've
seen those lenses that have that kind of like lower
part that's further reading. Obviously, I don't wear glasses, so
I was kind of going off the top of my
head with that, but thank you so much for schooling me.
She goes on to say, pretty amazing. Maybe this could
be a topic for a future episode. Maybe it's just
the optical nerd in me. Keep up with great work,
Alyssa from Jamestown, New York. Thanks so much of Lissa.
(27:34):
We we really appreciate the high praise and I now
I'm wondering how many people listening to the show or
in the biz. If you are, let us know and uh,
best of luck with the did you say running marathons?
Marathon ng and um um I stuff. We better make
more episodes nols because marathons could take a while. And
(27:55):
you know what I say, then there's no biz like
the biz. So thank you, Alyssa. US. Next email comes
to us from mo f mosays, high, guys, I'm new
to the podcast. They just listened to your episode. When
did all caps become yelling? I very much enjoy the
history lesson as well as modern viewpoints discussed. Hearing about
the removal of the caps like key by Google on
their keyboard and some calls for eliminating the button altogether.
(28:18):
I wanted to bring in some personal perspective and also
some observations about all caps in our lives. I'm a
pharmacy technician for Osco Drug. While I can't speak for
other drug stores, I know that in every Oscar I
work at, the doctor's drug instructions known as the SIG
are written completely in all caps. My guess is that
we want to impress upon the patient the gravity of
(28:40):
following the instructions to the t. If I didn't have
the caps like key, it would be mighty annoying to
hold down the shift key while typing out every SIG.
I also noticed that all caps is everywhere we go
on traffic sign which stopped, no turn on red, etcetera,
which is always an all caps, to the signs for
business names, and even on our money. I would argue
it's most important the traffic and warning signs stay in
(29:02):
all caps. Danger Comma high voltage doesn't have quite the
same gravitas as danger high voltage. While I agree that
all caps can be quite annoying online, I think they
have a place in other areas of our lives outside
the Internet. Wait ha ha, there's life outside the interwebs.
These are my thoughts. Thank you for welcoming to share them.
Keep up the great work, Mo. That seems like a
(29:24):
pretty pretty student observation. We also had an engineer who
wrote in on all caps, I know and I love this.
I actually just pulled it up right when he said that.
He talks about this is from ted Um, just the
idea of pattern recognition. He says, some time ago, I
was given the following explanation, and it makes sense to me.
When we learned to read, we have to sound out
each letter in a word, and then once we have
(29:45):
the word, we can attach the meaning. As we get
proficient at reading, we no longer do this letter by letter,
but rather we recognize the words more by the pattern
the letters form um. And this is me interjecting here.
You I could say the same thing about reading music.
You start to see the patterns and like where they
set of space or a line on the music staff,
and you don't necessarily have to really think as deep
about it. You just recognize it right away. So ted says,
(30:07):
when we type in all caps, this pattern recognition by
the brain is broken, and we have to look at
those individual letters to form the words. And although we
can still do this quickly, it slows us down and
is more work for the brain. The extra work the
brain is doing is what makes it feel different, like
we're being yelled at. That's pretty That's a pretty interesting
(30:27):
argument there, Ted, and he goes on to illustrate it
with a bunch of words where he keeps the first
and last letter correct but jumbles up the letters in
the middle, and I was shocked to realize that I
could very easily read the whole sentence. Yeah, the human
brain is capable of all sorts of strange shenanigans and tricks.
We want to thank you Ted, We want to thank
you Mo and you Alyssa. This will conclude our listener mail,
(30:51):
but not our show. We would also like to thank
all of your brains and the brains of of everyone listening,
and we hope you will use your brains to write
us an email at Ridiculous at how stuff works dot
com or shoot us a note on any of the
social media out there Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, what have You
or we are Ridiculous History. Also, of course, thanks to
(31:11):
our super producer Casey Pegram for saving the show, Thanks
to our house Stuff Works author Lori L. Dove, and
thanks to Alex Williams for composing our soundtrack, which a
lot of people have been writing about It's true. We
hope you'll join us next time. When we asked the
question what happened when people waged war over eggs, oh man, yeah,
(31:35):
that's coming up. Yeah, So come hang out then, and
then thanks for hanging out now for ridiculous history,
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
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