The Real Wild West

     Over the course of the last century, a mixture of Hollywood entertainment, media outlets, and general storytelling has formed an image of the "Wild West" era as a time of total lawlessness, dominated by ruthless gangsters, heroic gunslingers, daring bank robberies, and savage Native American attacks. While such an image has brought the citizens of both America many countries across the world an exhilarating source of entertainment for decades, its alignment with the real history of the time may be something of question. Likely bent into exaggeration over time for the sake of entertainment, late 19th century western America (what many dub as the Old West) was actually significantly less chaotic and more effectively secured by authorities than many think. Given it did have its moments of madness as a much less modernized section of America than say the East, the Wild West was less a time of anarchy and more one of transition into a new age.

    The idea of gang domination in the Wild West is possibly the most far-fetched claim about the Old West that has been perpetuated by the American entertainment industry for nearly a century. Since as far back as the 1920's, films about this time period have depicted it as being completely overrun by outlaws, out of the control of local authorities, and plagued by bank heists and large gunfights. Such mayhem, however, was as exhilarating to watch in a movie house as it is historically false, as such occurrences were sparse and easily tackled by law enforcement. In fact, between the years 1865-1905 (what is widely accepted as the "Wild West's" lifespan), research has brought evidence to the occurrence of only a meager 8 bank heists across 15 states in the Western United States during that 40 year period. By comparison, a 2010 data collection result showed evidence for the occurrence more than 5,600 bank robberies in the Western United States within just that year, indicating the level of historical inaccuracy that Hollywood as projected in its western films for the sake of entertainment over the last century. Building on this point, even if a group of bold desperadoes found themselves attempting to rob a bank in an old western town, they would most likely be put down quite quickly by local police or law marshals due to the sheer tightness of settlements at that time. Normally, towns would be less than a square mile or two in size and law enforcement would be no more than a few steps away from shutting down any bank robbery that was conducted, foiling most plans for crime or harassment within the area and forcing most outlaws into areas far away from civilization.

 
    As far as the thrilling clashes between settlers of the Old West and Native Americans went, those were not nearly as frequent as Hollywood portrays them either. While some gunfights happened and skirmishes occurred here and their between white settlers and Indians, most of the fighting was done by troops of United States soldiers who were sent out to either kill or arrest Native Americans in order to procure their land and many times, random clashes between  settlers and Indians ended in a rather small number of deaths. For example, of the hundreds of thousands that migrated to the west via Nebraska, only a few hundred of those pioneers ended up dying in fights with Natives. Furthermore, the whole image of the revolver-baring, ammunition strapped cowboy that would spray down large groups of said Native Americans or other rivaling cowboy gunslingers is also lacks alignment with the factual lifestyle of most cowboys during the age. Instead, many cowboys did not behave in an aggressive, adventure-seeking manner in Old West, and they were mostly hardworking individuals who had jobs or owned livestock on western farms where they often lived and never left unless they managed to acquire a valuable sum of land elsewhere. In fact, the whole idea of the cowboy isn't even originally American as many people like to think in contemporary society; they actually originated in 16th and 17th century Mexican ranchos in the form of vaqueros, meaning that they have been around since before America even came into existence as a nation. So, as it turns out, cowboys are neither originally American, nor ex-gunslingers, nor from a bygone era of total anarchy, nor heroic leaders who occasionally decide to rob banks. Perhaps such fantasies serve their purpose for entertainment's sake in the movie house, but the truth is that all they will ever be is fantasy and a stretched form of yet another transitional period in American history.



Sources:

http://www.cracked.com/article_20372_5-ridiculous-myths-everyone-believes-about-wild-west.html

http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=803

http://www.history.com/topics/cowboys