Was the Wild West wild?
If the wildness of the Wild West is a myth then it needs to be called out. Too many Americans (including a few presidents) have believed in an ‘atavistic relation’ between ‘a man and his gun’. We examine the history behind this justification of deadly violence.
A series of land grabs and cruel clearances by the Federal government from 1781 triggered a crazy, barely-contained movement west, spearheaded by gold prospectors, cattle ranchers, homesteaders and the railroads. By 1892 it was generally agreed that the American character was forged in the violence of the shifting frontier. We look at the popular fiction and entertainment that helped create this belief: Deadwood Dick, Buffalo Bill, Calamity Jane, Mark Twain’s Six-fingered Pete and many others. And we examine what really went on!
What was the driving force behind the settlement of the American west? Was it the so-called ‘anarchocapitalism’ so admired by the Hoover Institution and some of the followers of President Trump? The violence they fetishize turns out to have been only in those places populated by young men – we’re talking not just cowpokes or gold and silver prospectors, but also vigilantes in the towns back east. The majority frontiers-people were peaceful American
The wild west goes on spawning a vast and sprawling literature, far too big to summarise here. The thing to do if you seriously want to get to grips with it is to ignore anything older than about 2015 and keep an eye on the University of Nebraska’s Great Plains Quarterly for new research and reviews of new books. For example, John Legg’s piece about the terrible violence unleashed on Native Americans in 2019, ‘White Lies, Native Revisions. The Legacy of Violence in the American West’ (pp. 331-340). Or Richard Edwards (and others) piece on African American homesteaders in the same issue (pp. 223-41). Or Michael Burns on the terrible vengeance visited on the Sioux, GPQ 2018 (pp. 77-103).
Here, then, are just some pointers to the older literature you’ll come across. And also, an outline map of the path we followed. For the authentic flavour, look no further than Charley Hester and Kirby Ross, The True Life Wild West Memoir of a Bush-popping Cow Waddy (2004). It doesn’t look like a significant historical study. But it comes out of the University of Nebraska and is in fact the memoirs of a Texan cowboy – cow waddy – from the 1870s, as recounted to a friend in the late 1930s. Ross has reorganised it into a chronological account and added explanatory notes and chapters for background. Charley, by the 1930s a minor local celebrity, is clearly enjoying himself as he recounts his young life. But his language is richly evocative and most of his details, as we now know, are remarkably accurate.
There are several decent studies of the wild west as a myth. The introduction to Will Wright’s The Wild West: the mythical Cowboy and Social Theory (2001) gives you much of what you need, including that bizarre 1972 quote from Henry Kissinger. The best study is perhaps Heike Paul’s Myths that Made America (2014.) It’s rather an intense examination by a German scholar that takes on Columbus, the Pilgrim Fathers and other favourite American fairy tales to which we’ll return. It’s not an easy read, but it perceptively surveys much of the then existing literature. If you then want to pursue, for example, Theodore Roosevelt’s contribution to the making of the myth, read Richard Slotkin’s ‘Nostalgia and Progress,’ in American Quarterly (1981), pp 608-37. Actually, anything on this subject by Slotkin is worth a look – though it’s just as easy (or difficult) to read Paul’s summaries.
William F Cody and Frank Christianson, The Wild West in England (2012) is Bill Cody’s account of travelling with his extravaganza to Britain. Cody is worth a read. But much more important is Frank Christianson’s introduction which is as sharp a life of Cody as you’ll find.
Once you get started on the historiography (the history of history writing) of what supposedly happened on the frontier, you might as well enjoy W. Eugene Hollon, Frontier Violence: Another Look (1974). It’s now a cheap second-hand classic. And it’s a fun read, which is maybe why it’s still often quoted. It famously argues that the frontier was less dangerous than modern America, though much of the evidence Hollon produces seems to say exactly the opposite. Much the same goes for Frank Prassel’s venerable Western Peace Officer (1972).
You can include here also Terry Anderson and PJ Hill’s much-quoted-on-line paper ‘The Not so Wild, Wild West’ (eg Mises Daily, 15 Feb 2010, but largely written in 1978. Also, their subsequent book). It is in reality a selectively researched manifesto for anarchocapitalism, a pie-in-the-outer-reaches-of-space neoliberal notion pedalled at that time by the right-wing Hoover Institution.
None of the wild west books of the Hollon-Pressel (or Anderson) period now stand up to scrutiny. But to find anything serious you have to hunt quite hard outside the obvious. Roger Lane’s old paper, ‘Criminal Violence in America: the first hundred years’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 423 (1976) pp. 1-13 belongs to that period but does some decent spadework, demonstrating that American violence was endemic, anything but confined to the frontier. You can flesh out Lane’s ideas in David T Courtwright, Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City (Harvard 1996).
Robert Dykstra for years fought a battle against the statistical nonsense that then started being pedalled about the scale of violence on the wild west. His ‘Body Counts and Murder Rates: the contested statistics of western violence’, Reviews in American History 31, (2003), pp. 554-63 and ‘Quantifying the Wild West: The Problematic Statistics of Frontier Violence’, Western Historical Quarterly, 40 (2009) pp. 321-347 are typical, exasperated pieces. Dykstra was right. The work he reviews is so hopelessly flawed you have to laugh. But frustratingly he doesn’t get very far in suggesting anything much better. Largely he substitutes his own equally selective – if much better researched – case studies. Most recently in Dodge City and the birth of the Wild West written with Jo Ann Manfra (2017).
What none of these historians did (or largely still do) is to come up with a typology of different frontier communities. For that you have to take a few side steps. Try Walter Nugent, ‘Frontiers and Empires’ Western Historical Quarterly 20 (1989) pp. 393-408, which gets down to the sensible business of distinguishing different kinds of frontier settlement and shows how, demographically, homesteading towns were made up of families, and ranching or mining largely young men. The conclusion is embarrassingly obvious – the west, like the rest of America, was wild in places. Link that to Darrell Steffensmeier and Cathy Streifel, ‘Age, Gender and Crime’ in Social Forces 69, (1991) pp 869-94. As they say, ‘two of the oldest and most widely accepted conclusions in criminology are that involvement in crime diminishes with age and that males are more likely than females to offend at every age.’ It’s the message also of Jack A. Goldstone, ‘Population and Security: How demographic change can lead to violent conflict’, Journal of International Affairs 56, (2002) 3-21.
Now you get to see the importance, not only of Courtwright’s old book, but also of Richard Edwards, Jacob K. Friefeld & Rebecca S. Wingo’s recent Homesteading the Plains. Toward a New History (also University of Nebraska 2017). It is (at last) the result of a scholarly study of the immense archive of surviving homesteading documents. They show what you’d expect – that the majority of frontier communities were inhabited by hard-working families who undertook a tough and largely peaceful struggle with nature. You can throw away everything written on homesteading before. What we now need are equally convincing new books on the ranching and mining areas. They must be out there somewhere.
There’s been a long and steady stream of studies of women on the frontier, busting the old tale of reluctant pioneers. Try Joanna Stratton’s classic Pioneer Women. Voices from the Kansas Frontier (1981). Or perhaps Elizabeth (Betsy) Jameson, ‘Women as workers, women as civilisers. True womanhood in the American west’ in Frontiers: a Journal of Women’s Studies 7, (1984) pp 1-8. Also, Sheryll Patterson-Black, ‘Women Homesteaders on the Great Plains Frontier’ in the first edition of the same journal (1976), pp 67-88. There have also been a number of studies of African American cowboys. Much the best is Black Cowboys in the American West edited in 2017 by Bruce Glasrud and Michael Searles.
A whole detour we didn’t take explores the extraordinary German fascination for the wild west sparked by the fantasy novels of Karl May. Germans usually stage at least a dozen Karl May cowboy festivals every year. Check out Danas Weber’s entertaining Blood Brothers and Peace Pipes: Performing the Wild West in German Festivals (2019), which must be in the running for Academic History Book on the most Niche but Intriguing Subject.