How wild was the Wild West? Not as wild as Hollywood would like us to believe.
The Wild West was the American frontier. It wasn’t called the Wild West until after the American Civil War. The general consensus is that the period of the Wild West lasted from the end of the Civil War to 1912 when the last of the western territories became states.
The American frontier was not always in the same place. When the United States of America was formed in 1776, there were only 13 colonies and they were all along the eastern edge of the continent. The frontier was any place that was on the western edge of those colonies facing into central north America. The center and west of north America was owned by Spain, but occupied by more than 250,000 native Americans divided into 80 tribes.
It didn’t take long for Americans to start spreading across the country. Land was plentiful and free for the taking. By 1820, Americans had moved about half the way across the country. Spain still owned the far west of the country. At this time, the American government was still concentrating on the eastern states and wasn’t trying to expand. By 1846, the frontier reached to the edge of Texas. The area to the west was owned by Mexico, which had taken it from Spain when they won their war of independence in 1821. During the 1940s, the idea of “Manifest Destiny” was popularized. This was the idea that Americans had the right and the duty to occupy all of the land between the east and the west coasts, no matter who currently lived on the land.
In 1848, the Mexican-American war ended and the United States now owned all of the land between the two coasts. The government realized that the best way to keep hold of their new territories was to populate them as quickly as possible. They offered land to people for free or at very low prices. Many people took the offer and moved. This increased when gold was found in San Francisco. Unfortunately, the government needed to remove the native Americans that already owned the land, which led to many wars and massacres. After the Civil War ended, there were more people looking to move west. This was helped by the opening of the Transcontinental Railway in the late 1860s, making it a lot easier to move west than it had been for the early pioneers. The Wild West began to grow.
So, was the Wild West as wild as people say it was? Yes and no. Some places were much more lawless than others and it depended on what kind of person was living there. The Wild West was a huge area that stretched from Texas and Arizona in the south to Idaho and Montana in the north. The idea that the Wild West was lawless stems in part from the fact that the government didn’t directly control the areas because the territories were not states. There was government, and each territory had its own administration, but there was less central government than there was in the eastern states. Most of the towns in the Wild West policed and organized themselves. Groups rose up to fill the gaps the government would normally fill. These groups were cattlemen’s associations, mining camps, land clubs, amongst others. Most towns banned the carrying of guns and crimes were dealt with swiftly. If there was trouble, a posse of townspeople could deal with it most of the time. Most of the famous towns we have heard of, Dodge City, for example, had extremely low murder rates. In 1880, only one person was killed.
So, why do we have the image that the Wild West was so wild? There are probably four reasons that I can see. The first is that some areas really were dangerous. Areas that had a high concentration of single men, such as gold mines or silver mines, could have a lot of crime. After a gold rush, a lot of people arrive to find gold, but another bunch of people arrive to take advantage of the first group. Studies have shown that the murder rate goes up 4% when minerals are involved. Many towns may have been wild when they were first founded, but as soon as people settled down, got married, started businesses, things became more peaceful.
The second reason is the small populations skew the murder rate. The year Dodge city had 1 murder, their population was 996 people. That means they have a murder rate of 100 in 100,000 people. Last year, New York had 488 murders, which gives it a murder rate of 5.5. If you look at numbers like that, the Wild West looks pretty dangerous.
The third reason is the dime novel industry that sensationalized the few famous gunslingers, such as Billy the Kid and the James gang. They played up the dangerousness of the towns to sell more stories. And the fourth reason must be given to Hollywood, for obvious reasons. And this is what I learned today.
Photo by Talal Hakim: https://www.pexels.com/photo/signboard-hung-on-tack-on-door-in-daytime-5024798/
Sources
https://www.livescience.com/was-the-west-wild.html
https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/wild-west-how-lawless-was-american-frontier/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_frontier
https://www.amrevmuseum.org/big-idea-5-native-american-soldiers-and-scouts
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/wild-west-states
https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=803