Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - How Wild Was the Wild West?

Starting point is 00:00:00 The media portrayal of the Wild West is filled with gunfights in the middle of the street, bank robberies, and vigilantes. In fact, it's very difficult to find a movie portrayal that doesn't use the Wild West as a backdrop for some sort of struggle of good versus evil and of criminal versus lawman. But how accurate is this portrayal? Have Western movies been lying to us? Learn more about just how Wild the Wild West was and the accuracy of its portrayal in movies on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pillow? Thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is exactly why Catherine Nikolai created Nothing Much Happens. Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens.

Starting point is 00:00:59 No drama, no tension, nothing you need to follow closely. Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest. And millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep. If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing. You can listen to Nothing Much Happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. When motion pictures started in the early 20th century, one of the first genres to find popularity with the public was the Western.

Starting point is 00:01:40 There were common themes in most Westerns of Outlaws and Lawmen. There were depictions of cowboys and Indians. Scores were settled in the middle of the street by two men staring each other down to see who was the faster draw. These are just a few of the tropes which exist in many Western movies and are some of the ideas which have been propagated about life in the Old West. So if we're going to look into this, let's start by defining exactly what we're talking about when we say the Old West or the Wild West. There's no set definition of the term, but we're roughly talking about the period from 1850 to 1900, in the region west of the Mississippi River. Some people might put the start date around 1860,

Starting point is 00:02:19 and some may put the end date around 1890 or even 1910. Most of the area we're talking about for most of this period were federal territories or had recently just achieved statehood. These areas had low populations and low population densities. So with that, we can start with the institution which has a central role in most stories of the Wild West, the Saloon. The word saloon is an Americanized version, of the word salon. The American use of the word came into being around the 1840s. To be sure,

Starting point is 00:02:49 there were a lot of saloons in most cities that sprang up in the West. If anything, this is one of the few facts about the West, which is downplayed in the movies. Most movies will only focus on one saloon in a town, where the action takes place because it makes the story easier to tell. In reality, there might have been many dozens of saloons, even in relatively small communities. The first saloon in the West was believed to have been opened in Brown's Hole, Wyoming in 1822. It was built to serve fur trappers. As the West grew, the number of saloons exploded. In 1880, for example, in Leavenworth, Kansas, there were 150 saloons. Saloons would often been associated with a particular brewery, many of which owned the saloon that their beer was served in, and this was

Starting point is 00:03:34 particularly true in the later part of the 19th century. Saloons would often have clientele that were served by specific ethnic groups. These would have been more akin to social clubs. Irish, Germans, Jews, Greeks, Italians, and other groups would have had their own saloons which catered to their tastes. Saloons would provide entertainment to bring in customers, and this usually involved gambling, but it could also mean dancing shows or even brothels or opium dens. One popular way of getting customers was in providing free lunches, which is where the term

Starting point is 00:04:04 there's no such thing as a free lunch originated. One of the things that is almost totally not true are the Batwing style of swinging saloon doors. Streets weren't paved back then, which would have meant dust and dirt from the street coming inside if there were doors like that. Not to mention what it would be like in the winter if you had no door on your establishment. These types of doors were used internally to separate the kitchen from the main floor of a saloon, not externally. Saloons also didn't have large windows with lots of frontage on the street. They tended to be long and narrow because minimizing your street frontage was cheaper. Being thrown out of a saloon window makes for a good shot in a movie, but it wasn't reality.

Starting point is 00:04:45 Next, let's talk about cowboys. I'll probably do an entire episode on cowboys in the future, but suffice it to say that cowboys played an important role in the West. A cowboy was nothing more than a ranch hand whose job was to protect a herd of cattle. The biggest thing they had to protect the herd from was wild animals. Only rarely did they have to worry about thieves. and cattle rustlers. Cowboys spent the majority of their time out in the field. They would stay out with the cattle for weeks at a time and then go into town for a few days after they got paid. To that extent,

Starting point is 00:05:16 a cowboy in the Old West was more like a modern worker on an oil rig or someone working at a remote mine in Western Australia or Northern Canada. One thing that is a myth has to do with cowboy hats. Cowboys most certainly bore hats. What we call cowboy hats today are also known as Stetsons or 10-gallon hats, but they were actually introduced in the 1920s. These hats have a wide brim that's curved upward on each side and indentations in the crown of the hat on top. The hat which most cowboys wore was known as the Boss of the Plains. The Boss of the Plains was introduced in 1865 by the Stetson Company. It was different from a modern cowboy hat in that the brim was straight and round and the crown was usually smooth. The modern cowboy hat developed from

Starting point is 00:06:03 the boss of the plains hat as people began putting indentations in the crown of the hat and bending the brim upward for stylish reasons. Boehler hats were also popular during this period. Many people may find it shocking that cowboys didn't wear cowboy hats, but if you go and do a search for photos of cowboys or pretty much anybody from the 19th century, you will not find cowboy hats. What about gunfights? Every western movie has some sort of gunfight. The most stereotypical type of fight involves two cowboys staring each other down in the middle of the street to see who is the faster draw. There certainly was violence in the Old West, but most of it was similar to today in that it was fueled by alcohol. It was also much less common than Western movies would have

Starting point is 00:06:46 you believe. If you got drunk and shot someone, you'd most likely be arrested and hung. The entire trope of a gunfight on Main Street is entirely fictional. Whatever basis in reality it might have came from a single incident. Bill Hickok and Davis' Tut were friends who became bitter rivals. Their rivalry with each other is believed to have started with Hickok having fathered an illegitimate child with Tutt's sister and Tutt making moves on Hickok's then-girlfriend. Hickok was playing cards at the Lion House Hotel and making a fair amount of money. Tutt stood nearby loaning players' money to beat Hickok and giving them advice on how to win. A disagreement between them began about money Hickok supposedly owed Tutt. Tutt

Starting point is 00:07:27 said it was $35, and Hickok said it was only $25. Tutt took Hickok's prize to win. gold pocket watch as collateral until he could get paid in full. Tutt began wearing the watch publicly just to humiliate Hickok. Things came to a head in Springfield, Missouri on July 21st, 1865, when the two met in the street. They stood about 75 yards apart from each other, which is a rather long distance. And what happened was more like an impromptu duel, except it wasn't with dueling pistols, and it wasn't a quick draw. Hickok reportedly rested the gun on his other arm to steady it, and both men fired one shot at almost the same time. Tutt missed. Hickok hit Tutt in the rib cage and he died shortly after. Hickok was arrested and later acquitted on self-defense grounds. The whole quick draw gunslinger thing

Starting point is 00:08:14 doesn't really make any sense if you think about it. Holsters weren't designed to take a gun out as quickly as possible. They were designed to hold a gun in place so it wouldn't easily come out. If you were riding a horse, a gun could easily get jostled and pop out. If anything, there would be straps to hold a gun in place. If you wanted to draw a gun quickly, you'd probably just put it in your pocket. The violence that did occur was usually fueled by alcohol and was done in an ambush, not in an open display in the middle of town, where there would be witnesses. When Bill Hickok was killed, he was shot while sitting at a poker table and never saw it coming. One reason why events such as the gunfight at the OK Corral became so well known was precisely because such events were so rare.

Starting point is 00:08:57 Places like Dodge City, Kansas did have a very high murder rate and would be amongst the highest in the world today. However, this was the exception and not the rule. So what about bank robberies? Robbing banks always seems to be a big part of the Westerns. This might be the thing that movies get the most wrong. There were almost no bank robberies in the Wild West. From 1859 to 1900, there were only eight recorded bank robberies in the entire region known as the West. Eight. To put this into perspective, in 2021, the state of Colorado alone had 195 bank robberies.

Starting point is 00:09:35 The reason why bank robberies are considered so prevalent has to do with a very small number of high-profile robberies, especially by Butch Cassidy. Banks were very difficult to rob. It was far more attractive to try to rob a stagecoach or a train. In the case of trains, even that was short-lived, as after the first few train robberies, trains carrying money became heavily fortified. Another common scene in westerns is settlers being attacked by Indians. This too is highly exaggerated. To be sure, there were conflicts between European settlers and Native people in the American West. Between 1840 and 1860, for example, there were 362 settlers and 426 Native Americans killed in conflicts with each other.

Starting point is 00:10:19 But 90% of those incidents took place in a single part of the Applegate Trail in what is today the state of Idaho. While native people of the region were not thrilled at the prospect of settlers occupying their land, for the most part, civilians and native people got along. For many native people, it was an opportunity to trade. They would provide food and furs in exchange for tools like knives and firearms. Settlers would have been hundreds of times more likely to have died from starvation and disease than by getting attacked. There were even more likely to have been killed by their own cattle than to be killed by native people. There were massacres of settlers, but

Starting point is 00:10:55 these tended to be sensationalized in the media back east and were usually reprisals for massacres conducted against native people, usually by soldiers. Events such as the massacre at Wounded Knee in the late 19th century Indian Wars are very in-depth subjects that will all be covered on future episodes. So how did our view of the Wild West become so skewed? It started in the 19th century. The West, especially after the passage of the Homestead Act, drew the attention of millions of people who lived in the East. Writers would travel to the West to share stories to captivate people about what was happening and to encourage migrations. Small isolated insolence would become exaggerated to sensationalize the story and to sell books and

Starting point is 00:11:35 newspapers. When movies started, they used many of the legends about the West as the basis for their films because they made for good stories. And over time, the depiction of the West in movies became what most people thought the West was like in reality. Most of the famous events of the era became famous because they were outliers, not because they were the norm. The greatest threats to people were disease in nature, not bandits. So the Wild West did have a wild element, but it wasn't really as wild as it's often made out to be. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett.

Starting point is 00:12:16 Today's review comes from listener Dog Mountain Joe over on podcast addict. They write, Gary has done an amazing job with this podcast. It is both informative and entertaining. He is both well-traveled and well-read. Being a founding member of the Completionist Club of Japan, I would like to express my gratitude to Gary for always teaching me something new about the world and inspiring me to learn and explore. Thanks, Joe. I should note that since I mentioned unlocking various countries, I've had people come forward who've left reviews in the past, but I just didn't know a country they lived in. It turns out I have had reviews from Japan, Switzerland, Austria, South Africa, and other countries that I've mentioned. But you might be one of the first members of the Completionist Club in Japan.

Starting point is 00:12:56 Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostogram, you two can have it read on the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - How Wild Was the Wild West?

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