Disturbing History - The Real "Wild West"

Episode Date: May 10, 2026

The Wild West most of us inherited is a marketing campaign. The cowboy in the lighter hat, the noble sheriff, the high-noon duel in a dusty street — those came out of dime novels, traveling shows, and ghostwritten biographies, often produced while the events themselves were still unfolding. The actual frontier was something else. It was a continent-sized arena of fraud, racial terror, corruption, hired killing, and government-protected theft, and the men we now call legends had a direct hand in selling us a version of it that left almost all of that out.In this episode we walk out into the real West.We start with the mythmaking machine itself, Beadle's Dime Novels, Ned Buntline turning William Cody into Buffalo Bill, and the way real frontiersmen quietly cashed in by playing fictional versions of themselves on stage. We reexamine Wild Bill Hickok's so-called battle with the McCanles "gang" at Rock Creek Station in 1861, which wasn't a duel against ten desperados but a debt collection that ended with three men dead, one of them shot through a curtain. We look at the Earps as they actually lived. The brothel arrests in Peoria. The horse theft charge in Indian Territory. The thirty-second gunfight in a vacant lot off Fremont Street that wasn't actually at the OK Corral. The revenge ride Wyatt led under the cover of federal warrants after his brother Morgan was assassinated. And Stuart Lake's 1931 biography, which took Wyatt's preferred version of himself and turned it into the cowboy myth nearly every later movie repeated.Then we follow the money. We walk through the Great Diamond Hoax of 1872, where two Kentucky cousins named Philip Arnold and John Slack salted a Wyoming mesa with industrial gemstones bought in London and sold the imaginary deposit to some of the wealthiest men in California for a generational fortune, before government geologist Clarence King quietly broke the case apart. We look at the homestead fraud machine that transferred enormous tracts of public land to timber and cattle interests through doghouse-sized "improvements" and signed-in-advance contracts, leading all the way up to Senator John Mitchell's 1905 conviction.We spend time in Skagway with Soapy Smith, who ran an entire American town as his personal racket, fake telegraph office and paid-off marshal and all, until a robbed miner named John Stewart finally moved the vigilantes against him on July 8, 1898.We reopen the Lincoln County War, which wasn't a moral fable about an outlaw with a heart of gold but a corporate fight over Army supply contracts.We open the Johnson County War, where Wyoming cattle barons hired a private army of Texas gunmen to ride into the county and kill a list of seventy people. We read Nate Champion's actual journal as he wrote it, alone in a burning cabin, surrounded by fifty hired guns. We walk the Pinkertons out of the detective novels and into their real job as a private violence service for railroads, mines, and cattle barons, and we meet Tom Horn, the stock detective whose signature was a flat rock under the head of the man he'd just shot from a quarter mile away. And we sit with the parts of this history that most school books leave alone. The Bear River Massacre of 1863. Sand Creek in 1864. The Marias River killings of 1870. Camp Grant in 1871, where a Tucson mob killed more than a hundred surrendered Apaches and sold thirty children into slavery in Sonora. Wounded Knee in 1890. The Los Angeles Chinese Massacre of 1871. The Rock Springs killings in 1885. The Hells Canyon murders in 1887. The long, ongoing campaign of Texas Ranger violence against Mexican-descended people along the border, climaxing with Porvenir in 1918. The sundown towns scattered across nearly every western state. And Mountain Meadows in 1857, where Mormon militiamen disguised as Native attackers slaughtered an Arkansas wagon train and walked off with the surviving children.We close with what the cowboy myth has actually been doing for the last hundred and fifty years, and with a small museum in Rawlins, Wyoming, where you can still see a pair of shoes made from the skin of an outlaw named George Parrott, worn by John Eugene Osborne to his 1893 inauguration as governor.The frontier that survived in our culture is mostly a story written by the men who came out of it on top. The one underneath it is messier, uglier, more diverse, and a great deal more disturbing. Once you've looked at it carefully, you don't quite hear the word "frontier" the same way again.Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact,

this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner. of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist.

Sometimes, the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull it threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors.

victors. Sometimes, it's rewritten by the disturbed. The story most of us grew up with goes something like this. A lone man rides into a dusty town. He's got a 10 star pinned to his chest, a six-shooter on his hip, and a coat of honor written somewhere on his soul. The bad guys wear dark hats. The good guys wear lighter ones. There's a showdown at high noon in the middle of a wide, empty street, and when the gun smoke clears, the right man's still standing. The townsfolk come out from behind their wagons and their saloon doors and orders restored to the frontier. It's a pretty story. Hollywood made a fortune off it.

So did dime novelists, pulp magazines, traveling exhibitions, and three full generations of paperback writers. The image is so deep in our culture by now that most people don't even think to question it. We just nod along when someone says, The Wild West, because we're already picturing the same set of saloons, the same wooden boardwalks, the same wooden boardwalks, the same. the same fast-draw heroes with hearts of gold. The trouble is, almost none of it's true.

We're going to spend the next while pulling that whole picture apart, piece by piece, and I think it's going to surprise you. The actual American frontier, the one with real people in it, was stranger, dirtier, more corrupt, and a whole lot more disturbing than any cowboy movie ever showed you. The men we now call legends were, in real life, often broke gamblers, drunken brawlers, and small-time hustlers who happened to know somebody with a printing press.

The lawmen we picture as noble peacekeepers were sometimes hired killers in everything but name, working for cattle barons, mining bosses, and political bosses who paid them to look the other way, or worse, to do the looking the other way work themselves. Some of the most famous gunfights you've heard about either didn't happen the way the stories say, or didn't really happen at all. And underneath it all, behind the dime novels and the showmen and the painted saloon backdrops, the Real West was carrying out a brutal ongoing project of fraud, theft, and racial terror. Massacres on a scale most Americans have never been taught about.

Land schemes that swallowed entire fortunes. Lynchings that wiped whole families out of certain towns. Whole populations driven out at gunpoint. Then quietly written out of the picture by the same writers who turned the cowboys boy into a saint. This belongs on disturbing history because the Wild West isn't just an entertaining lie. It's a lie that's been doing real work for over 150 years. It tells us who's brave and who isn't. It tells us who built this country and who didn't. It tells us which kinds of violence we're supposed to admire and which kinds we're supposed to forget. And once you start

lifting up the corners of that story, the things crawling around underneath are not the kind of things you find in a Saturday matinee. So tonight, we're going to ride out into the real west, the one your grandparents weren't told about either, the one with the salted gold mines and the murdered miners, the one with the sheriffs who were also pimps, and the marshals who were also embezzlers, the one where a man named Soapie Smith ran a small American city like his personal kingdom, and where a single piece of forged paperwork could put a thousand acres in the hands of a stranger who'd never seen the place. The one where the famous ranch wars weren't really about cattle at all, but about cornering the market on dry goods and government contracts. The one where

the famous gunfight at the okay corral didn't actually happen at the okay corral. Most of all were going to look at how the myth got built, and who built it, and why? Because that part may be the most disturbing piece of the whole story. The cowboy didn't just become a folk hero by accident. People made him one. They made a lot of money making him one. And while they were making him, they were busy looking away from what was actually going on out there and teaching the rest of us to look away to. Saddle up. We're going west, the real west. And I promise you, by the time we're done, you'll never quite hear the word frontier the same way again. Let's start with the showmen, because the story really starts with them, not with the sheriffs, not with the outlaws, with the men

who decided to sell the West before the West was even finished happening. The first thing you need to understand is that the West was being mythologized while it was still going on. We tend to picture the dime novelists and the movie makers showing up after the fact, the way historians do, putting a varnish over events that had already cooled. That's not how it worked. The varnish was being slapped on while the wood was still wet. While men were still being shot in saloons in Kansas, somebody back in New York was already writing about it, getting half the details wrong, and selling it for a dime to working people who'd never been west of the Hudson River. The biggest of those publishers was a company called

Beatle and Adams. Beetle's dime novel started up in 1860, right at the edge of the Civil War, and by the 1870s they were churning out short, lurid paperback adventure stories at an industrial pace. They cost a dime. They were maybe a hundred pages long. They were printed on paper so cheap it crumbled in your hands within a year, and they sold by the millions. Soldiers carried them. Factory workers read them on lunch breaks. Boys hid them under their school books. And inside those covers, the Wild West was being invented as fast as men could type it. The protagonists of those novels were very often, real people. The trouble was, the real people in them often had almost nothing to do with the men on the page. A real frontier scout named

Christopher Carson, the man we know as Kit Carson, was once handed one of these novels by an army officer and read about himself rescuing a beautiful damsel from a horde of howling savages. Carson, by all accounts, looked at the cover and laughed. He couldn't read very well, but he didn't need to. He knew he hadn't done any of it. There was no rescue. There was no damsel. There was just a writer in an office somewhere using his name to move copies. That was how it worked. The names were real. The stories were not. And the real men, the actual frontiersmen and gunfighters and gamblers, often only found out they were heroes after the fact, when somebody back east handed them a book. A few of them figured out the racket pretty quickly, though, and started cashing in.

The most famous of those is the man we now know as Buffalo Bill. His real name was William Frederick Cody. He was born in Iowa in 1846, and by the time he was a young man, he'd already been a Teamster, a Pony Express rider, a Civil War soldier, and a buffalo hunter for the railroads. That last job is where the nickname came from. He killed a tremendous number of Buffalo in a relatively short time, supplying meat to railroad construction crews on the Kansas Pacific. The stories he told about that period were probably a bit inflated even at the time, but he had genuine experience on the plains.

Then he met a man named Edward Zane Carroll Judson, who wrote dime novel. under the pen name, Ned Buntline. And that's when William Cody stopped being a man and started being a brand. Buntline took one look at this tall, handsome scout with long hair and a flair for storytelling. And he saw a gold mine. He wrote a story called Buffalo Bill, King of the Border Men, which ran serialized in a New York weekly in 1869. It was almost entirely fiction.

But Cody played along and Buntline kept writing, and within a few years, William Cody was being recognized in cities he'd never visited, by people who knew him only from books that bore very little resemblance to his actual life. Cody, to his credit or his discredit, depending on how you look at it, leaned all the way in. By 1872, he was performing on stage in a melodrama called The Scouts of the Prairie, with Buntline in the cast alongside him. The show was, by every account, terrible. The dialogue was wooden.

lot made no sense. Cody himself forgot his lines on opening night and just started telling stories straight to the audience. The audiences loved it. A few years later, Cody developed something far more ambitious. He called it Buffalo Bills Wild West. Note that he didn't call it a show, at least not in the official title. That was on purpose. He wanted people to think they were seeing the real thing, an authentic slice of frontier life, packaged into an arena and brought to their hometown. Indians, real indigenous people, often Lakota who had themselves fought at the battle of the Little Big Horn, were hired to ride around the arena attacking stagecoaches and homesteads, while white performers rescued white women in petticoats. Cody himself rode into the arena

dressed in fringed buckskin, and after the show was done, he'd give interviews about how it was all genuine. That show toured the United States for decades. It toured Europe. It performed for Queen Victoria, By the time Cody was an old man, the Wild West he'd helped create existed in the minds of millions of people who'd never set foot west of Pittsburgh. And that imagined West, that arena west with the painted backdrops and the staged heroics, and the carefully scripted Indian attacks with the Indians always losing on cue, became the West we all inherited. The trouble was the real men who were doing the actual riding and shooting out on the planes had to live next to that imagined version. And a lot of them, sooner or later, started reshaping their own lives to match it. Wild Bill Hickok is the cleanest example.

The real Hickok was a complicated man. He was at various points, a stagecoach driver, a union spy, a scout, a gambler, a town marshal, and a periodically useful peace officer in a couple of Kansas cattle towns. He had piercing blue eyes, long sandy hair he kept curled, and by all accounts a pleasant, soft-spoken manner most of the same. the time. He also had a serious gambling habit and a deepening drinking problem. The famous Hickok story, the one that turned him from a regional figure into a national legend, involves a fight at a place called Rock Creek Station in Nebraska in 1861. According to the version of the story that ran in Harper's

New Monthly magazine in 1867, Hickok single-handedly killed a gang of around 10 outlaws called the McCannley's gang in a battle so heroic and bloody, It sounded like something out of an old Greek epic. What actually happened at Rock Creek Station was a sorted little argument over a delinquent debt. A man named David McCown's had sold the property to the Pony Express, and the Pony Express was behind on payments. McCannles came to the station to demand his money. He was not the leader of an outlaw gang.

He was a businessman in a foul mood. He brought along his 12-year-old son and two employees. There was no gunfight in the open. Hickok shot McCallels from behind a curtain, then helped finish off the two employees, while McAnell's young son ran for his life. Three men dead. One of them shot through a piece of cloth, no gang, no epic battle, just a debt and a quick, ugly piece of work in a building no one was watching. Hickok was tried for murder and acquitted, mostly because nobody at the time cared very much. But the story sat there until a writer named George Ward Nichols, looking for color for an East Coast

magazine, sat down with Hickok years later and got himself a tall tale. Hickok by that point had probably told the story to himself enough times that the real version and the magazine version had started to blur. Nichols printed the magazine version, and that was that. The real Hickok had killed a man through a curtain. The magazine Hickok had cut down 10 desperadoes in single combat. Guess which one made it into the school books? Hickok died in Deadwood and 1876, shot in the back of the head while playing poker by a small-time drifter named Jack McCall. The hand of cards he was holding became famous afterward. Two black aces, two black ates, and a fifth card nobody can quite agree on.

The dead man's hand. He didn't die in a duel. He didn't die defending a town. He died because he sat with his back to a door, which was something he'd been careful not to do for years. And the one time he made an exception. somebody walked up behind him and shot him for reasons that had almost nothing to do with him personally. Then there's the Earps, and that's where things really start to come apart. I want you to picture, for a second, the way you've seen the Earps portrayed.

Maybe it's Henry Fonda in my darling Clementine. Maybe it's Kevin Costner and Wyatt Earp, or Kurt Russell and Tombstone. Whichever version you've got in your head, you're probably picturing a tall, calm, principled lawman in a black coat. walking down a dusty street toward a fight he didn't start, surrounded by his upright brothers, defending the town from outlaw cowboys. The real Earps were not exactly that. The Earps were a clannish, ambitious family from Illinois

who moved west in stages, looking for opportunity. By the time they ended up together in Tombstone, Arizona, in the early 1880s, the older brothers, Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan had between them held a long list of jobs, some of which were on the law side, and some of which definitely weren't. Wyatt had been a stagecoach driver, a buffalo hunter, a constable in Kansas,

a part-time deputy in a couple of cattle towns, and at least twice he had been arrested. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Once for horse theft in what was then the Indian Territory, and once for being involved in the operation of a brothel. That second one is worth slowing down for. Wyatt Earp's first wife had died young, and the woman he was traveling with for much of the 1870s was a woman named Sally Heckel, sometimes recorded as Sarah Earp, who showed up in census records and city directories listed as a sex worker.

There's pretty solid evidence that Wyatt was, at certain points, working in or running a brothel, alongside his older brother James, whose wife Bessie was running a brothel of her own with him in Wichita. The Earps weren't the only family on the frontier doing this. They weren't even unusual. But it's a long way from the noble lawman in the black hat. When the Earps got to Tombstone, they walked into a town that was already split. On one side, you had the town establishment, mostly Republican, mostly tied to the silver mining interests that were making Tombstone briefly very rich.

On the other side, you had a loose network of ranchers and small-time rustlers, mostly Democrat, mostly tied to a shadowy operation that was run. operation that was running cattle back and forth across the Mexican border, sometimes legally, more often not. These were the men the newspapers called the Cowboys, with a capital C. And in Tombstone in that period, Cowboy was not a romantic word. It was closer to what we'd call organized crime. The Earps tied themselves to the establishment side. Virgil ended up as town marshal. Wyatt became a deputy. They had business interests in saloons, in mining claims, in a tombstone pharaoh game. And they had a feud, increasingly bitter, with the cowboy faction, especially with a family

called the Clantons, and another called the McLorries. The famous gunfight, the one we all know as the gunfight at the OK Corral, happened on October 26, 1881. The first thing you should know about it is that it didn't happen at the OK Corral. It happened in a narrow, vacant, locked off Fremont Street between a photography studio and a boarding house. The OK Corral was a block over. The fight got named after it later by writers who liked the sound. The second thing you should know is that the fight lasted about 30 seconds. Three men died. Tom McClory, Frank McClory, and Billy Clanton. None of them was a hardened gunman. Billy Clanton was 19 years old. Tom McClory was probably unarmed or close to it. There's evidence that that

the McClory's weapons had been left at a hotel in compliance with a town ordinance. The fight was, depending on whose later testimony you believe, either a courageous act of law enforcement against dangerous criminals or something a lot closer to a street ambush by a small posse with a personal grudge. Both Wyatt and Doc Holliday, who'd shown up to back the Earps, were charged with murder. They were eventually cleared, but the legal fight dragged on, and the violence didn't stop. Virgil was ambushed and crippled a couple of months later. Morgan was assassinated through a window while playing pool.

What followed was something the dime novels would gloss over for the next century. Wyatt Earp organized what amounted to a private revenge posse, picked up a federal warrant for the protection of legality, and went out and started killing the men he believed were responsible. There were no trials. There was no due process. He shot a man named Frank Stillwell in a rail yard. He shot another man, Florentino Cruz, also called Indian Charlie in the desert.

He hunted down a man named Curly Bill Brocious and either killed him or didn't, depending on which historian you ask. Then he rode out of Arizona one step ahead of indictments and never came back. This was not the work of a noble peacekeeper. This was a vendetta, conducted with deputy badges as cover. And the man who did it spent most of the rest of his life trying to massage the story into something cleaner, finally getting his chance when a young writer named Stuart Lake came around in the late 1920s and wrote down the version Wyatt wanted preserved. That book, Wyatt Earp,

Frontier Marshall, came out in 1931. Wyatt himself had died two years earlier. The book was wildly popular. It wasn't a biography in any modern sense. It was Wyatt's own preferred version of his life, lightly polished by a sympathetic ghostwriter, presented as fact. It became the seedbed for nearly every Earp story that followed. Every movie. Every TV show. Every novel. The Wyatt Earp you think you know is, to a startling degree,

the Wyatt Earp that the real Wyatt Earp wanted you to know. He was in his last decade, hanging around the early Hollywood film studios, advising directors. The myth wasn't created over his head. It was created with his help, and he wasn't the only one doing it. His old friend Bat Masterson, who'd had his own colorful career as a buffalo hunter, gambler, and sometime deputy in Dodge City, ended up moving to New York City in his later years and becoming a sports writer.

He wrote a column for a daily paper there, mostly about boxing. He cultivated friendships with newspapermen, and every so often, he'd publish a long magazine-style piece about his old days on the frontier. in which he'd carefully manage the reputations of his old friends, including Wyatt. The frontier by then was being run as a kind of public relations operation by the men who'd survived it. They were old, they needed work, and the public couldn't get enough of stories about the way it used to be, or rather, the way it never quite was. It's worth pausing here, because I want you to feel how strange this is.

The cowboy hero, the figure we now think of as a near-mythological, American archetype was being assembled in real time by a group of men who knew each other personally, who corresponded, who fed each other quotes, who borrowed each other's stories, and who all had a financial interest in the West being remembered a certain way. Stuart Lake, when he interviewed Wyatt, was not interviewing a folk hero. He was interviewing a witness who had spent the last 40 years, rehearsing his testimony. While that PR machine was warming up, the actual West was full of crimes most of us never hear about and stranger frauds than the dime novels would ever have dared to print.

Take the great diamond hoax of 1872. This one is so good, I'm almost surprised it hasn't been made into a movie a dozen times. In 1871, two grizzled looking men walked into the bank of California in San Francisco, carrying a sack. The men were Philip Arnold and John Slack, a pair of cousins from Kentucky. The sack contained uncut diamonds. They asked the bank to put the contents in safekeeping, but in the way of a couple of honest country men who didn't quite know how all this fancy banking worked, they let it slip what was inside. Within days, Word had reached every powerful financier in the city.

There was a diamond field, somewhere out west. Two rough-looking prospectors had stumbled onto it. They didn't want to say where, naturally, because they were afraid of being claim jumped. What followed was one of the most expensive con game, in the history of American capitalism. The investors who included some of the wealthiest men in California threw money at Arnold and Slack to verify the find. They sent expert engineers out into the high country with the two cousins,

who blindfolded them for the last leg of the trip and took them to a mesa in what's now Wyoming. There, the engineers crawled around in the rocks for a day or two and pulled up handfuls of rough diamonds, rubies, and sapphires. The mesa had been salted. Arnold and Slack had been to the diamond cutters of London, Amsterdam, and Antwerp. They'd bought up cheap, off-cut industrial gemstones, hauled them all the way back to the western United States, and scattered them across that mesa with their own hands.

Then they led their blindfolded marks straight to the spot. The investors lost their minds. A company was formed. Twenty-five major investors put up a fortune in initial capital. Word spread to New York and to London. Tiffany and company itself examined some of the stones and pronounced them genuine, though Tiffany hadn't yet developed the expertise to evaluate rough diamonds, and what they were really evaluating was the credibility of the people in the room.

Arnold and Slack were paid off, somewhere north of half a million dollars in cash, which in 1872 was a generational fortune. They went home to Kentucky. The whole thing fell apart only because a government geologist named Clarence King happened to be doing a survey in the area and recognized the description of the supposed diamond fields. King went out and looked at the site himself. He found diamonds all right. He also found them in places that made no geological sense whatsoever. Some were in the cracks of ant hills, where someone had clearly poked them in. He found a partially cut stone, which is something you do not find lying

around on a mesa in Wyoming. Within a couple of days, he'd worked out the entire scheme. When King's report came out, the company collapsed. The investors had no recourse. Some of them tried to chase Arnold back to Kentucky, but he'd built himself a mansion and a private bank with the money, and he survived to die in another shootout. This one over an unrelated banking dispute, a few years later. Slack drifted off and ended up running a coffin company in New Mexico, which is a detail almost too perfect to put in a novel. The diamond hoax wasn't a one-off. It was just an unusually big version of something that was happening all over the West. Mines were being salted, oil claims were being faked, land was being sold that didn't exist or didn't belong to the people

selling it. The legal infrastructure of the frontier was thin to non-existent in a lot of places, and where it did exist, it could often be bought. Whole town sprang up around mining claims that were essentially imaginary. A man named George Graham Rice, the son of a Wall Street family, ran one fraudulent stock promotion after another in the Nevada mining country, selling shares in mines that had been sketched on paper instead of dug into the rock. And then there was the Homestead racket. The Homestead Act of 1862 was on paper, a beautiful piece of legislation. Any head of a household could file a claim on 160 acres of public land in the West.

If they lived on it for five years, made certain improvements, and paid a small registration fee, the land was theirs. It was a gigantic transfer of public wealth to ordinary citizens, and it built the modern American countryside. It was also gamed almost immediately, on a scale that would make a modern white-collar criminal jealous. The basic trick was straightforward. A timber company, or a cattle company, or a mining concern wanted access to a large block of public land. Direct purchase from the government was either unavailable or expensive, so the company would round up a group of people, sometimes employees, sometimes drifters paid for the day, and take them down to the land office. Each person would file a homestead claim.

The improvement requirement could be satisfied by tossing up a tiny shack, 10 feet by 12, on the land. There were stories of companies hauling around what amounted to portable dog houses, throwing one of these prefabricated shacks down on a parcel just long enough to satisfy the inspector, then dragging it to the next plot. Some of these shacks weren't even built to the legal minimum size. Investigators later found houses that were six inches by six inches, 12 inches by 12 inches. And, in one famous case, a tiny model house with windows and shingles, mounted on a board.

Once the claims were proved up, the homesteaders signed the land over to the company. Often in a contract they'd already signed before they ever filed the claim. The company got vast tracks of public land for next to nothing. The homesteaders got a few dollars for their trouble. The public lost a fortune. Timber companies in Oregon and California ran this operation for decades. Cattle barons in Wyoming and Montana ran their own version,

hiring cowboys to file on water sources to lock up the surrounding range. The General Land Office, the federal agency in charge of policing all this, was understaffed, underpaid, and frequently corrupt. corrupt. Investigators who tried to clean it up sometimes found themselves transferred, fired or worse. In the 1890s, an honest investigator named William Burns, working for the Department of the Interior, tried to take down a major timber fraud ring in Oregon. He ended up uncovering corruption that reached into the highest levels of the state's political establishment. Senator John H. Mitchell of Oregon was eventually convicted of land fraud in

1905, alongside a sitting U.S. congressman, Binger Herman. Mitchell died before his appeal could be heard. None of this was unusual in scale. It was unusual only because somebody managed to actually prosecute it. The frontier was, in a real sense, a continent-sized marketplace for theft conducted under the color of law. Land, timber, mineral rights, water rights, cattle. None of it was secure. Almost all of it changed hands. at least once through fraud or violence. And almost none of that ever made it into the dime novels, because it didn't have a hero in it.

It had a clerk, a surveyor, a few cowboys with prefabricated little dog houses on the back of a wagon. It was profitable. It was systematic. And it was the actual economic engine of much of what was going on out there. If you want to see what it looked like when one man took the same instinct for fraud and turned it into a personal kingdom, You have to go up to Alaska, to a town called Skagway, in 1898.

Skagway was a tent city that exploded almost overnight at the start of the Klondike Gold Rush. Gold had been discovered up the Yukon River in the Canadian wilderness, and tens of thousands of would-be miners were pouring into Alaska to make the trip overland. They had to come in through the coast. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Skagway was one of the main entry points. By 1898, it had a population that had jumped from a few dozen to several thousand in a matter of months.

There was no real local government. There was no real law. There was a lot of money walking around because everyone heading into the Yukon was carrying outfit money, supplies, and grubstake savings. Into this walked Jefferson Randolph Smith II, who went by Soapy. Soapy Smith got his nickname from a con he'd been running for years. He'd set up a little outdoor stand in some town or another and start selling bars of soap. He'd hold up a bar and announce that just to make things interesting, he was going to wrap some of the bars with hidden currency,

anywhere from a $1 bill up to $100. He'd let the crowd watch him wrap a few bars on the table. Then he'd start selling them at $5 a piece, much more than a bar of soap was worth. Excited customers would come up, buy a bar, unwrap it on the spot, and find a five or a ten or a twenty inside. Word would spread. The crowd would press in. Bars would fly off the table.

The catch, of course, was that the customers finding the money were Soapy's planted associates. The bars sold to genuine customers contained nothing but soap. Soapy would clear out before anyone got organized enough to be angry, count his take, and move on to the next town. By the time he got to Skagway, Soapy had refined his methods well past selling soap. He arrived with an entourage of con men, gunmen, gamblers, and informants.

He set up what looked like a legitimate office, a freight and information exchange. New arrivals coming in off the boats, dazed and overwhelmed and trying to figure out where to go, would naturally drift in for advice. They'd be told that, of course, they'd need their gold weighed and their supplies inspected. They'd be sent down a side street to a clerk who could check on prices for them. A friendly stranger would offer to show them around. Within a few hours, an exhausted prospector could be relieved of his savings, his outfit, sometimes his identity papers, by half a dozen of Soapie's people in coordinated relays.

Soapy ran a saloon called Jeff Smith's parlor that served as the operations headquarters. He ran rigged Farrow games. He ran a phony telegraph office, in which a man could pay, to send a wire to his wife back home and receive a fake reply, all while the message went nowhere. He ran a fake assayer who would inspect a man's gold and replace it with brass shavings while the man wasn't looking. He had men placed as porters at the docks, men placed as clerks in the freight offices, men placed as bartenders, men placed as preachers. He paid off the deputy U.S. Marshal for the district. He had at least one local newspaper editor on his payroll.

He sponsored civic events. He gave money to the church. He helped raise funds to bury miners who died on the trail, which was a real public service in a town with no formal undertaker, and was also a wonderful way to make sure he was the first one to know what valuables a dead man had in his pockets. He was, for a few months, the actual ruler of Skagway. The official government barely existed.

Soapie's organization handled almost every transaction in town, took a cut of nearly everything that happened and policed itself with violence when it had to. What ended him in the end was a single mark named John Douglas Stewart. Stuart was a Klondiker coming back out of the gold fields with a poke of about $2,700 in gold dust, which would be roughly $100,000 in today's money. He was lured into Jeff Smith's parlor on a pretext, and his gold was lifted off him, and he was tossed out the back. Stuart, instead of going home and feeling stupid, went to a man named Frank Reed, a town surveyor

and one of a small group of vigilantes who'd been quietly organizing against Soapy. Within a couple of days, the vigilantes had pulled together a meeting on the Skagway docks. Soapy walked down to confront them, carrying a Winchester. Reed met him at the dock. Both men opened fire at almost point-blank range. Soapy was killed instantly, shot through the heart. Reed was shot in the groin and lingered in agony for almost two weeks before dying himself. The town buried both of them.

They are both still up there in the Skagway Pioneer Cemetery, lying not far from each other. Soapy Smith ran an entire American town as a personal racket in living memory, and he is barely a footnote in the popular Western. He doesn't fit the mold. He didn't shoot it out at high noon. He didn't ride a horse into a saloon. He sat behind a desk in a lit-up parlor and ran the kind of organized crime operation we tend to associate with prohibition-era cities, only he was running it 20 years earlier

in a tent town at the edge of the world. You can see the same patterns, the corruption, the fraud, the way violence served wealthy men's interests when you look at the so-called range wars. These have been romanticized in countless westerns as noble conflicts between independent ranchers and sinister outsiders. They were not. The Lincoln County War in southern New Mexico in the late 1870s is the one most people have heard about,

mostly because Billy the Kid was in it. The popular story is that Billy was a noble outlaw caught between two warring factions of cattlemen. The real story is that the Lincoln County War was at bottom, a fight over which company would have a monopoly on selling dry goods and beef to the U.S. Army. Lincoln County in those years contained Fort Stant, which was a U.S. Army Post and the Mescalero Apache Reservation. Both the post and the reservation needed to be supplied by federal contract with food and goods.

Whoever held those contracts was in a position to make a fortune, because both the Army and the Indian agency tended to pay much more than market rates. And whoever supplied them could in turn squeeze the local ranchers and farmers, since the contractor was also essentially the only general store in the area. By the mid-1870s, those contracts and the dry goods business in Lincoln were locked up by a partnership called Murphy and Dolan, sometimes referred to as the house. They sold goods on credit at extortionate prices. They bought beef from local ranchers at depressed prices. They held mortgages on a lot of the surrounding land. They had the local sheriff, a man named William Brady on their side. They had a circuit judge on their side. They had a U.S. attorney on their side.

They were a small monopoly with the legal apparatus of the territory in their pocket. In 1876, a young Englishman named John Tunstall arrived in Lincoln County and decided to set up a competing dry goods business. He partnered with a local lawyer named Alexander McSweene and a cattleman named John Chisim. They opened a store. They opened a bank. They started bidding on contracts. The Murphy Dolan operation responded by pulling political strings, calling in legal favors, and ultimately by sending a posse to ambush Tunstall on a back road and murder him.

That murder in February of 1878 is what kicked off the actual war. Tunstall had hired a young drifter named William H. Bonnie, who liked to call himself Billy the Kid as a ranch hand. Bonnie, along with several of Tunstall's other men, formed a vigilante group called the Regul. with a shaky legal commission to bring Tunstall's killers to justice. They started killing Murphy Dolan men. The Murphy Dolan side started killing them back. Sheriff Brady was assassinated in the street. The conflict escalated through the spring and summer of 1878,

climaxing in a five-day siege of the McSween House in the town of Lincoln, where McSween was killed and the regulators scattered. Almost nothing about the standard romantic version of this story holds up. The good side and the bad side were both willing to ambush, assassinate, and burn each other out. The corrupt courts that arrested some of the participants protected others depending on which faction was in power that month. President Rutherford Hayes eventually had to send a special investigator out,

who recommended replacing the territorial governor with an outsider, none other than Lou Wallace, the man who would right Ben Hur. Wallace personally negotiated with Billy the Kid for testimony against some of the worst Murphy Dolan operators and offered a pardon. The pardon never came through. Other forces in the territory blocked it. Billy ran. He was eventually shot dead in a darkened bedroom in 1881 by Pat Garrett, the new Lincoln County Sheriff, in circumstances that are still argued about, because Garrett shot him from across a dim room without giving him a chance to surrender. And there is a real case to be made that the killing was closer to an execution than a piece of law enforcement.

Garrett spent the rest of his life cashing in on the killing. He published a book called The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, which was ghost-written by a journalist named Ash Upsen, and which was almost entirely fictional. Garrett tried to run for various offices. He failed. He took political appointments. He made enemies.

In 1908, he was shot dead near Las Cruces, New Mexico, in a roadside dispute. The man who pulled the trigger, a young rancher named Wayne Brazel, walked free after a brief trial. Many historians have argued that Garrett's killing was actually arranged by other parties who wanted him out of the way over land and political disputes, and that the man who did the actual shooting may have been a hired gun rather than the cowboy who confessed.

The case has never been officially reopened. This is the world Billy the kid actually lived and died in. It wasn't a moral fable about an outlaw with a heart of gold. It was a corporate war over army contracts. fought with hired killers on both sides in a territory whose courts were openly corrupt, and the man who killed the most famous outlaw of the era was almost certainly murdered himself by people who wanted him quiet about other crimes. The Johnson County War, up in Wyoming in 1892, was even uglier,

and it shows the pattern even more clearly. By the late 1880s, the big cattle outfits in Wyoming, organized through a body called the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, were running into a problem. A tough winter in 1886 and 1887, what the Cowboys came to call the Great Die Up, had killed a huge percentage of the cattle on the open range. Thousands of small operators,

including many former cowhands who'd quit the big outfits to start their own, were rebuilding their herds in the years after. Some of those small operators were rounding up and rebranding stray cattle. Some of those strays were genuine mavericks. Some were stolen. The big outfits accused the small operators wholesale of being rustlers, even though many of them were perfectly legitimate.

When the local courts in Johnson County declined to convict the small ranchers on rustling charges, because juries of their neighbors didn't believe the charges were fair, the big cattle barons made a decision. They hired a private army. In April of 1892, a group of around 50 men, half of them experienced gunmen brought up from Texas. Half of them cattle barons and their managers boarded a private train in Cheyenne and Road North. They had a list of targets. They had wagons, supplies, and a press release prepared in advance. The plan was to ride into Johnson County and kill or drive out a list of around 70 people,

including the sheriff, several local merchants, and any small rancher they considered an obstacle. They got as far as a remote spread called the KC Ranch before they ran into trouble. Two men were holed up there, Nick Ray and Nate Champion. The invaders surrounded the cabin and opened fire. Ray was hit early. Champion held them off for hours, alone, while keeping a journal in pencil. We still have that journal. He wrote,

Boys, there's bullets coming like hail. Them fellows is in such shape I can't get at them. They are shooting from the stable and river and back of the house. Boys, I feel pretty lonesome just now. I wish there was someone here with me, so we could watch all sides at once. The house is all fired. Goodbye, boys, if I never see you again. Champion was finally killed when the invaders set fire to the cabin and shot him as he ran out.

The invasion stalled. Word reached the town of Buffalo, Wyoming, the county seat, and within a day or two, a posse of 200 outraged citizens had surrounded the invaders at a ranch called the TA. The cattle baron's private army was now under siege itself by the very people they'd come to wipe out. They held out for three days. Only the personal intervention of the Wyoming senators in Washington, who got President Benjamin Harrison to order federal cavalry from Fort McKinney to ride in and rescue the invaders, kept the whole thing from ending in a slaughter.

The invaders were taken to Cheyenne, ostensibly to face trial, and then quietly released. Almost no one was ever convicted. The hired guns from Texas were sent home with their wages. The cattle barons paid their lawyers and went back to their ranches. The newspapers in Cheyenne, controlled largely by the same interests, ran the story of the invasion as a brave, righteous attack on lawless rustlers. And that was the version that got into a lot of the early histories. It was a private war, paid for by some of the wealthiest men in the territory, against a population of small ranchers, and homesteaders, most of whom had committed no real crime, with the goal of wiping out competition.

The U.S. government sent the cavalry to rescue the killers. The killers walked free, and not one of the people on that target list ever got justice. That is the Wild West, that, much more than any high noon duel, is what the violence out there was actually for. Now we have to talk about the violence that the cowboy mythology has buried the deepest, because it is the part of the real West that the dime novels and the movies most carefully refused to look at. We have to talk about racial terror. The first thing to understand is that the West, in the mid to late 1800s, was a tremendously diverse place. It had native peoples whose ancestors had been there for thousands of years. It had a large Mexican-descended population in what had

recently been northern Mexico, and which had become the American Southwest only in 1848 after the U.S. Mexican War. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. It had a substantial black population, including formerly enslaved people who had moved west after emancipation, black cowboys who made up perhaps a quarter of the cow hand workforce on some trail drives, and the Buffalo soldier regiments of the U.S. Army. It had Chinese laborers. It had Chinese laborers. brought in to build the Central Pacific Railroad and to mine and farm. It had Mormon settlers in the Great Basin. It had German farmers in Texas.

It had Jewish merchants in nearly every town of any size. It had immigrants of every European nationality, plus African and Caribbean people, plus Hawaiians, who were called Kanakas and worked widely in the trapping and shipping trades. The popular Wild West, the one in the picture books in the movies, washes nearly all of those people out of the frame. The cowboy is white. The townsfolk are white.

The Chinese laborer is at most a punchline. The black cowboy doesn't exist. The Mexican character is either a comic sidekick or a faceless bandit. The native person is either a noble doomed warrior or a screaming savage attacking the wagon train. None of this is accurate. All of it does work. The work of justifying what was actually being done out there. What was actually being done in many parts of the West was something very close to what we would now call ethnic cleansing.

I'm going to walk you through some of these events because most of them are not taught in schools, and the silence around them is itself a piece of disturbing history. In January of 1863, a column of California volunteers under Colonel Patrick Connor attacked a Shoshone winter encampment along the Bear River, in what's now southeastern Idaho. The Shoshonee had been raiding settled. livestock in a region where settler livestock was eating the wild seed grass that the Shoshone depended on for survival. Conner's troops opened fire on the village before dawn. When the smoke cleared, somewhere between 250 and 490 Shoshone were dead. The figure

depending on the source includes around 90 women and children. Some of the women had been raped before they were killed. Some of the wounded had had their heads bashed in with axes after the fighting was over. The soldiers suffered around 23 killed. The numbers make this almost certainly the deadliest single massacre of native people in American history. It is rarely mentioned outside of regional histories. There is no national monument. The site has only been formally recognized in the last 20 years.

The Sand Creek Massacre in November of 1864 is somewhat better known, but still not as known as it should be. Colonel John Chivington, a Methodist preacher-turned militia officer, led 700 Colorado volunteers in a dawn attack on a Cheyenne and Arapaho village along Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado. The chief of the village, Black Kettle, had been promised peace and had a U.S. flag and a white flag flying over his lodge. Most of the men of fighting age were away hunting. The volunteers attacked anyway. They killed at least 150 people and possibly closer to 230, the great majority of them women, children, and elderly. They mutilated bodies. They cut off scalps and genitalia and took them back to Denver, where they were displayed in the lobby of the local theater between performances.

There was a congressional investigation. Chivington was condemned by name. He was never criminally prosecuted. He died decades later in his bed, having lived out the rest of his life, as a respected citizen. In 1870 in northern Montana, a U.S. Army column under Major Eugene Baker, who was reportedly drunk, attacked the wrong Blackfeet village. Baker had been told to find a particular band that had been involved in raids. He found a different band, one led by a chief named Heavy Runner, and even though officers tried to tell him about the mix-up, he attacked anyway. About 200 Blackfeet were killed, most of them women, children, and people sick with smallpox. The army called it a victory. The press, when the details became known, called it a massacre.

Baker was never punished. In 1871 in southern Arizona, a vigilante group of about 150 Anglo-settlers, Mexicans and Tohono O'O. Autumn, organized in Tucson, attacked an Apache encampment near Camp Grant. The Apaches, mostly women and children, had come in to surrender and were under the protection of the Army Post. The mob caught them at dawn. They killed more than a hundred people, almost all of them women and children. Around 30 children were taken alive and sold into slavery in Sonora, Mexico, or distributed as servants among Tucson families. Pause and let that sit. Children. Sold. Into slavery in 1871. By a mob organized openly in an American city. The participants were tried for murder. The trial took 19 minutes. All of them were acquitted. In 1890 at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota,

U.S. Army troopers attempting to disarm a band of Lakota under Chief Spotted Elk opened fire after a single rifle reportedly discharged in a struggle. They had set up Hotchkiss guns, which were rapid fire artillery pieces on the surrounding hills. They used those guns. About 250 Lakota were killed. The Army awarded around 20 medals of honor for the action. Those medals have not been rescinded. These are five massacres. There were many more. There were dozens.

There were over a hundred, depending on how you count. The Modoc War. The Apache campaigns. The Long Walk of the Navajo. The Trail of Tears, which was earlier and farther east, but which was the precedent. The Indian wars were not a chivalric series of military campaigns. They were a continent-wide ethnic clearance operation, conducted with terrible violence, and we have allowed our entertainment to turn that violence into background scenery.

And I haven't even started on what was done to Asian and Mexican immigrants and to black settlers. In October of 1871, an anti-Chinese riot broke out in Los Angeles. Two Chinese factions had been feuding, and a white rancher who'd intervened in the crossfire was killed. A mob of around 500 white white. and Hispanic Angelinos, descended on the Chinese quarter. Over the course of one night, they tortured, hanged, and shot somewhere between 17 and 19 Chinese men and boys. The dead included a doctor named Jean Tong, who was hanged after offering the mob

several thousand dollars from his savings to spare his life. He had no connection to the original feud. The youngest victim was about 15. Ten men were eventually charged. Eight were convicted of manslaughter. All of those convictions were overturned on a legal technicality, and none of them were ever retried. By many accounts, this was one of the largest mass lynchings in American history, and it took place in what is now the Central Business District of Los Angeles.

In September of 1885, in Rock Springs, Wyoming, white miners attacked Chinese miners they accused of taking their jobs. The attack was sudden and well organized, the white miners, many of whom were members of the Knights of Lowe. killed at least 28 Chinese workers, wounded 15 more, and burned the Chinese section of town to the ground. Hundreds of Chinese fled into the desert. Federal troops eventually had to be sent in. No white participant was ever convicted. The Chinese community in Rock Springs was rebuilt for a time, but it never recovered, and similar attacks rolled across the west in the months that followed,

in towns from Tacoma to Seattle to small mining camps in Idaho and Oregon. In May of 1887 in Hells Canyon along the Snake River, a small gang of horse thieves and cowboys ambushed a camp of Chinese miners. They tortured, robbed, and murdered as many as 34 men. Some of the bodies were dismembered and dumped in the river. Some were never found. This was not labor violence. This was simple armed robbery and racial murder.

The killers were known locally. Of the seven men eventually identified, three were never after. apprehended. One turned state's evidence, and the other three were tried and acquitted. No one was ever punished for the killings. It is, by any measure, one of the worst mass murders of Chinese workers in American history. Most Americans have never heard of it. Then there is the long, ongoing campaign of violence against Mexican Americans in the borderlands, particularly in Texas. In the decades after the Mexican war, Mexican-descended people in what had been northern Mexico were systematically dispossessed of land, often through legal trickery, often through

outright violence. Anglo-Cowboys, Texas Rangers, and freelance vigilantes lynched and shot Mexican Americans in numbers that historians are still working to fully document. Recent scholarship has identified hundreds of cases of extrajudicial killings of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Texas alone, between the 1840s and the 1920s. The worst single incident on record is the Porvenir Massacre in January of 1918. Texas Rangers from Company B accompanied by a small group of local ranchers and U.S. cavalry descended on the village of Porvenir in the West Texas Big Bend country. They claimed to be searching for raiders involved in a recent attack on a nearby ranch. They had no real evidence connecting anyone in the village to that

raid. They rounded up 15 Mexican men and boys, some of them U.S. citizens, marched them outside of the village in the dark, and shot them. The victims ranged in age from 16 to 72. The Texas Rangers responsible were eventually fired from the force, but none was prosecuted. The captain who'd ordered the raid was forced to resign, and quietly returned to the Rangers a few years later, under a different administration.

The state of Texas eventually disbanded the company involved, and a reform-minded state representative named Jose Tomas Canales held hearings into ranger abuses. But the violence in the borderlands continued for years afterward. Black settlers in the West faced a different but related pattern. Across the late 1800s, black families came west looking for land and freedom. They founded all black towns, places like Nicodemus, Kansas, and Bowley, Oklahoma, and Allensworth, California. Some of those towns survived.

Others were broken by white violence and economic pressure. In some western states, white communities passed local laws and used informal violence to drive black people out, creating the so-called sundown towns, places where black people were told, sometimes by signs at the city limits, sometimes by mob intimidation, that they had to be out of town by sundown, or they would not survive the night. There were sundown towns in Oregon. There were sundown towns in Idaho. There were sundown towns in California. There were sunned towns in nearly every western state outside of the immediate mountain south.

Some of those communities were still effectively sunnedown towns into the 1960s. And in 1857, before any of the more famous Indian massacres, there was Mountain Meadows. Mountain Meadows is a wide valley in southern Utah on the Old California Trail. In September of 1857, a wagon train of around 140 immigrants from Arkansas, traveling to to California, was ambushed at Mountain Meadows by a combined force of Mormon militia and a small group of Paiute allies. The Mormons were dressed and painted to appear as native attackers in what was apparently meant to look like an Indian raid. The wagon train held them off for days, dug in behind their wagons. Eventually, a Mormon militia officer named John D. Lee approached

under a flag of truce and persuaded the immigrants to surrender their weapons and walk out, promising them safe passage to a nearby fort. Once the immigrants were strung out and disarmed, the militia opened fire. They killed approximately 120 men, women, and older children. They spared 17 children, all of them too young to testify. Those children were distributed among Mormon families. They were eventually retrieved years later by federal investigators. The Mountain Meadows massacre was committed by white American settlers

against other white American settlers. It was committed for reasons that included religious paranoia, frontier political tensions between the Utah territory and the federal government, and old grievances tied to anti-Mormon violence in Missouri and Illinois. Brigham Young, the leader of the Latter-day Saints in Utah, denied involvement publicly, blamed the Paiyutes, and obstructed federal investigation for two decades. Eventually, only one man, John D. Lee, was tried and executed.

He was shot by firing squad at the massacre site itself, 20 years after the killings. The Mormon Church did not officially express regret for the massacre, or publicly acknowledged that local church leaders had planned and carried it out until 2007, 150 years later. So this is the West that doesn't make it into the picture books. Massacres of Shoshone, of Cheyenne, of Blackfeet, of Apache, of Lakota. Mass murders of Chinese miners and merchants in Los Angeles in Wyoming, in Hell's Canyon. Linchings of Mexicans and Mexican Americans across Texas and California.

Sundown towns scattered across nearly every territory. A mass killing of white immigrants by other white settlers at Mountain Meadows. Whole populations of black and Asian and native and Mexican people pushed off their land, out of their towns, sometimes out of life entirely, by violence that went on. almost entirely unprosecuted, was widely supported by the local press, and was often committed in the name of something called civilization. And next to all of that, somebody back east was still cranking out dime novels about square-jawed cowboys and the noble march of progress. There's one more thread we have to pull on, because it ties the rest of it together.

That's the mythology around outlaws. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Most of the famous outlaws of the West were in fact small-time crooks, who got bigger reputations than they deserved, partly through their own efforts, partly through journalists, and very often through political agendas that had nothing to do with banditry. Take Jesse James. The popular version of Jesse James is a kind of American Robin Hood, a man pushed into outlawry by the cruelty of reconstruction, who robbed banks and trains, who looked after the poor,

who was finally killed by a treacherous coward shooting him in the back. The real Jesse James was a former Confederate guerrilla, a former member of Quantrell's Raiders, who had ridden during the Civil War with a ban that committed some of the worst atrocities of the entire conflict. The men who later became the James Younger Gang had, in their teens and early 20s, taken part in massacres of unarmed Union soldiers

and the slaughter of civilians along the Missouri-Kansas border. The Centralia Massacre, in 1864, in which around two dozen unarmed Union soldiers were pulled off a train and executed, included men who would later ride in the James gang. After the war, when Confederate veterans in Missouri found themselves on the losing side, some of them, including the James and younger brothers, simply continued their war by other means, robbing banks and trains owned in many cases by union-aligned interests. Their image as Robin Hood figures was not an accident. It was a deliberate creation, mostly through the writings of a single man, John Newman Edwards,

a Kansas City newspaper editor and former Confederate cavalry officer. Edwards published essay after essay portraying the James Brothers as gallant rebels driven to outlawry by Yankee oppression. He printed Jesse's letters in his paper. He compared the gang to the heroes of medieval romance. He turned a series of armed robberies into a political project. By the time Jesse James was killed in 1880s, he compared to the 1882, shot in the back of the head by a young gang member named Robert Ford in exchange for a reward and a pardon. The popular image of him was already an enormous distortion. The Robin Hood story came right out of John Edwards typewriter and was repeated in newspapers across the South for the

next half century. There is, by the way, very little evidence that Jesse James ever gave any significant amount of money to the poor. There are exactly a couple of folkloric anecdotes, which historians have not been able to confirm. He robbed banks and trains. He kept the money. He spent it. Bell Star, the so-called bandit queen of the Indian Territory, was largely a creation of dime novelist Richard K. Fox,

who put out a sensational novel about her after her death and turned a small-time horse thief and fence into a glamorous outlaw matriarch. The real Bell Star was a woman with a complicated personal life, two husbands killed in shootouts, a couple of stints in prison for horse theft and an unsolved death in 1889, ambushed and killed on a road near her home. She was not running a criminal empire. She was just trying to survive in a particularly rough corner of the country,

and the dime novelist turned her into something else entirely after she could no longer object. Calamity Jane, whose real name was Martha Jane Canary, was a hard-drinking, often homeless frontier figure who claimed at various points to have been a scout, for General Custer, an army nurse, a pony express rider, and the lover of Wild Bill Hickok. None of these claims survive serious examination. There is no reliable evidence she scouted for Custer. There is no evidence Hickok ever felt anything for her beyond mild irritation. She was not buried beside him because of any romance.

She was buried near him because on her deathbed in 1903. She asked friends to put her there, and they obliged. By the end, she was a periodically employed alcoholic appearing in dime museums to tell stories of her own past, most of which she had probably come to believe. The Pony Express, while we're at it, while it's not exactly an outlaw story, is one of the most overrated institutions of the entire frontier. The Pony Express ran from April of 1860 to October of 1861. That's 18 months. It was made obsolete almost the moment it began by the construction of the Trans-County. Continental Telegraph, which was completed in October of 1861, and which immediately rendered

fast horseback mail delivery economically pointless. The company that ran the Pony Express, Russell Majors, and Waddell, lost an enormous amount of money on the operation. It went bankrupt. The Pony Express's romantic image, the image you see on lunchboxes and old advertisements, was almost entirely created in retrospect by writers and showmen, after the fact. The only person who really came out of the Pony Express ahead, in the long run, was Buffalo Bill, who briefly worked as a writer as a teenager, and who built a substantial part of his stage persona around that fact. He, more than anyone, kept the Pony Express alive in the public imagination, because it suited his act. You see how this works. The famous heroes are mostly making themselves up.

The famous outlaws are mostly being made up by editors with political agendas. The famous institutions are mostly being made up by their former employees, on tour, in costume, decades later. The whole frontier mythology is, to an embarrassing degree and inside job, written by participants, surviving relatives, and friendly journalists with access. Before we move toward the close, I want to spend a little more time on two pieces of the picture that almost never get the attention they deserve. The first is the Pinkertons. When you hear the name Pinkerton, today, most people think of either the Civil War, where Alan Pinkerton ran a primitive intelligence service for the union, or some vague sense of private detective. What the Pinkerton National Detective Agency actually was in the post-war West was something closer to a private army for hire.

By the 1870s and 1880s, they had thousands of operatives, paid informers in unions and labor halls, and a willingness to do for a fee what the courts and the police were either. they're unwilling or unable to do. Railroads hired them to chase outlaws, which is the part the movies remember. They are the ones who chased the James gang, sometimes catastrophically. In 1875, Pinkerton operatives surrounded the home of Jesse James's mother in Missouri, believing the brothers to be inside. They tossed an incendiary device through the window. The device exploded. Jesse and and Frank were not there. Their mother lost an arm. Their nine year old half-brother Archie was killed. The Pinkertons denied responsibility and tried to claim

it had only been a flare. The public didn't buy it. That single incident, more than almost anything else, helped solidify the James Brothers Robin Hood image because the Pinkertons had killed a child and crippled a woman in the act of trying to catch them, and the Confederate sympathizing press in Missouri had a field day with it. But railroads were only one client. Mining companies hired Pinkertons to spy on miners and break strikes. Cattle barons hired them to gather evidence against rustlers, real or imagined. Industrialists hired them to infiltrate labor unions and report back. By the 1890s, the Pinkertons had become so notorious as strike breakers, especially after the Homestead Steel Strike in Pennsylvania, in 1892, where Pinkerton agents and steelworkers

had a pitched gun battle on a barge in the Monongahela River, that several states passed laws specifically banning the importation of Pinkerton agents across state lines for labor disputes. They were a private violence service for the wealthy, dressed up in the language of detective work. The bills they sent out and the men they put on the payroll tell a story that has very little to do with cowboys at all and a great deal to do with corporate power. That too is the West. The second figure I want you to know about is Tom Horn. Tom Horn started out as a respectable enough frontier figure. He was born in Missouri in 1860, drifted west as a teenager, worked as a stagecoach driver and a teamster, then ended up as a civilian scout for the U.S.

Army during the Apache campaigns of the 1880s. He spoke Spanish and some Apache. He was reportedly present in some capacity at the surrender of Geronimo in 1886, though his exact role in negotiations is disputed and probably exaggerated, mostly by Horn himself in his later memoir. After the Army, he drifted into work as a Pinkerton in the early 1890s, then became something more particular. By the late 1890s, Tom Horn was a stock detective for the Wyoming cattle barons. Stock detective was a polite term for what he actually did. What he actually did was kill suspected rustlers for pay, in remote places, with a long-range rifle, all. and from ambush, leaving behind a small calling card he was said to favor, a flat rock placed under

the head of the man he had just shot. Horne was paid a fee per killing, somewhere around $600, which was an enormous sum of money in that period. The men who hired him were the same kind of men who had organized the Johnson County invasion a few years earlier. They had not given up on the project of clearing the range of small operators. They had simply decided, after the public disaster of the invasion, that one professional killer working alone could do the job more quietly than 50 men on a train. Tom Horn killed several men this way, possibly more than several. We will probably never know the full count, because the killings were designed to look unsolved. He boasted about them in private. In 1901, he was finally arrested for the murder of a 14-year-old boy named Willie Nickel,

who had been shot from ambush near his family's ranch. Whether Horn actually killed the Nickelboy or whether he was framed by other parties is still argued. There's a real possibility that the boy had been mistaken in poor light for his father, who would have been a more typical target for Horn's services. Horn was tried, convicted, and hanged in Cheyenne in 1903. He spent his time in prison writing his memoir, which, like Garrett's book about Billy the Kid, and Lake's book about Wyatt Earp, is mostly the version of his life that he wanted preserved. The memoir does not mention his ambush work for the cattle barons. It paints him as a frontier scout and a man wronged by his enemies. He was, of course, both of those things, and also a hired killer. The book sold well after

his execution. Tom Horn matters because Tom Horn is what the romantic figure of the gunfighter actually looked like once you took off his costume. He was not a noble loner. He was a contract killer for a particular economic class, working in a regulatory vacuum that was maintained by the the same people paying him. While we're putting up real pictures, let's talk for a minute about the cowboy himself, the actual working cow hand. The trail driving era,

the period when cowboys drove cattle from Texas up to railheads in Kansas, lasted only about 20 years, from roughly 1866 to the late 1880s. After that, barbed wire, refrigerated rail cars, and the closing of the open range made the long drive obsolete.

So the cowboy era proper, the one we now picture as eternal and central to American life, was actually a relatively brief economic episode, shorter than the run of a popular sitcom. A working cow hand on a trail drive in the 1870s made about a dollar a day, plus food. The work was filthy, dangerous, often boring, and seasonal. Most cowhands were laid off at the end of a drive

and had to find other work in the off-season. Many of them were teenagers, many of them were drifters, Roughly a quarter of them on the big Texas drives were black, and another large fraction were Mexican vicaros. There were native cowhands. There were Chinese cooks on some outfits. The picture of an exclusively white weather-beaten older cowboy is a fiction. The work itself was repetitive. You spent most of your day in a saddle, moving cattle a few miles a day, watching for stampedes, fording rivers, sleeping outside in all weather. cattle drives were periodically punctuated by short, intense moments of danger.

River crossings drowned men routinely. Stampedes killed men. Lightning strikes killed men. Disease killed men. So did bad water. So did boredom-related drinking, which was the usual culprit when there was a fight at a saloon at the end of the drive. When the cowhands hit a railhead town like Abilene or Dodge City at the end of a drive, with a few months pay in their pockets, they did some drink.

did some gambling, sometimes patronized the brothels, occasionally got in fights, and then moved on. The cattle towns themselves had ordinances banning the carrying of pistols within town limits. Most of the famous shootouts, the ones the dime novels harped on, took place in violation of those ordinances and were generally over before bystanders could even react. The most violent year in Dodge City had something like five gunshot deaths. in one of the most lawless cattle towns of the period. By comparison, modern cities of the same size routinely have 20 or 30 murders a year and don't get called lawless. The cattle towns were not, statistically, particularly violent places.

The myth needed them to be. What was actually happening in those towns, when the trail crews rolled in, was much closer to a rough labor town in any other industry. Tired, dirty workers spending their wages in shops, and saloons that had been carefully positioned to take that money. Brothals, gambling halls, and outfitters. Town leaders making real money off the trade and managing the rough edges with ordinances, fines, and the occasional spectacular arrest.

The marshals, the famous lawmen, were as often as not on the take from the saloon and brothel owners they were ostensibly policing. Wyatt Earp's brother James was a brothel manager. Wyatt himself at various points had fight, financial interests in saloons and gambling houses that operated on the edges of the law. The lawmen and the criminals were, in many cases, doing business together in the same buildings. The line between them was not the line you've been told it was.

So why does any of this matter? I'll tell you why I think it matters. I'll tell you why I think it belongs on a show like this one. Because the myth was never neutral. The myth was doing something, and it's still doing something to this very day. and the something it's doing is not innocent. The cowboy is a beautiful image, the lone rider against the open sky,

the square-shouldered marshal in the empty street, the campfire on the trail and the long ride home. There's something in that image that speaks to something real in people, the desire for freedom, the desire to test yourself, the desire to mean something. I'm not going to pretend that doesn't matter. I grew up with those movies.

So did most of you. But that image was built on top of a lot of bodies, real bodies. Shoshone women shot to pieces in their tents at Bear River. Cheyenne children mutilated at Sand Creek. Chinese laborers tortured to death in a Los Angeles alley. Mexican boys lined up against a bluff at Porvenir. Lakota families cut down by Hotchkiss guns at Wounded Knee. Tunstall ambushed on a back road.

Champion writing his last words by candlelight, while a private army burned his cabin down. Soapy Smith's marks waking up the next morning with their pockets empty. Land office clerks signing over millions of acres to companies that never improved a single quarter section. Texas Rangers riding back into town after a night of doing the cattleman's dirty work and finding that the local newspaper had already written the story for them. With their names spelled correctly and the dead reduced to a few cold sentences in the back of the page. That's the West.

That's what was actually happening behind the cardboard. saloon. When we let the myth sit unexamined, we don't just misunderstand the past. We let the past keep doing its work. The myth tells us that the West was won by a particular kind of man, white, armed individualist, somewhat above the law, righteous in his violence. That story has a long shadow. It shapes how we think about who counts as American. It shapes how we think about violence. It shapes how we think about land and ownership, and who has a right to be where. It shapes our policing. It shapes our politics. It shapes the way our movies still get made. And it leaves out, on purpose, the people who actually built much of the West.

The Black Cowboys, who really were a quarter of the cowhands on the Great Trail drives. The Chinese workers who really did blast and tunnel the railroads through the Sierra Nevada in conditions so brutal that many of them died of exposure and and explosions and were buried in unmarked sites along the rail line, where some of their remains still are. The Mexican vicaros who invented the entire culture of cattle work, and from whom every English word for the equipment of riding and roping comes. The lariat, the chaps, the corral, the Mustang, the rodeo. Those are not cowboy words. Those are vicaro words, in English mouths. The actual builders and inhabitants of the West were a wildly diverse population, doing dangerous, often unrewarded work in a society shot through with corruption, violence, and ethnic terror.

The mythology took those people and either erased them or shrank them into stock figures and put a tall white man on a horse in the middle of the picture and told us he was the country. He wasn't. The country was bigger and stranger, uglier and more interesting. And the more carefully you look at it, the more disturbing it gets. Not because the West was full of dangerous outlaws, but because so much of what was officially called law, officially called justice, officially called settlement, was itself a long, sustained piece of organized violence and theft, conducted by people who also took the time to write their own admiring biographies before they died.

I want to leave you with one more thing. In Rawlins, Wyoming, there's a small museum called the Carbon County Museum. Inside that museum you can see, among other things, a pair of shoes. The shoes are made of human skin. They were made from the skin of an outlaw named George Parrott, sometimes called Big Nose George. Parrott was lynched by a mob in 1881 after attempting to escape a Rollins jail.

After his death, two local doctors, one of them a man named John Eugene Osborne, took possession of the body, allegedly for medical study. They sought off the top of his skull. They used the skin from his thighs and chest to have a pair of shoes and a medical bag tanned. Osborne kept the shoes. He wore them to his inauguration as governor of Wyoming in 1893.

He served a full term as governor. The shoes are still on display. I want you to picture that for a second. A man who skinned a lynching victim, who had those pieces of skin tanned into clothing and accessories, and who then wore those souvenirs to take public office as governor of an American state, while his constituents shook his hand and called him, sir. That is the West.

That is what was happening alongside the dime novels and the stage shows and the Buffalo Bill arenas full of cheering crowds. That is the country we agreed to call brave and free and noble. And those shoes are still sitting in a glass case in Wyoming, behind a small placard, while school groups walk by and look at them and try to figure out what to feel. If there's a single image I want you to carry away from this episode, that's the one. Not the cowboy at sunset, the shoes in the case. The myth was a beautiful thing, but somebody made it, and the people who made it had reasons.

And the people the myth was made about, and the people the myth was made over, have been waiting for a long time for somebody to take a careful, honest look at who they actually were and what was actually done to them. The West, the real one, isn't going anywhere. It's right here, in the documents, in the archives, in the bones we keep finding under the railroad beds, in the small stone markers off the side of the old wagon roads, in the quiet pages of old newspapers nobody reads anymore. All you have to do is look. And once you do, you can never quite unlook. Until next time, take care of yourselves and take care of each other.

We'll see you back here on the trail.