American West, 1860-1900

The American West, a new frontier, a new promise to those who immigrated to the land, and a land where legends and myths were born. With this exciting time came violence or the threat. However, today many only know the violence as portrayed by John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and the producers and directors of the Hollywood Western. Violence in many aspects is what helped shape the New American West because the people of the Old American West were the major target of violence.

A century ago, the American West, and the process of homesteading and Americanization that took place in the lands West of the Mississippi River was seen as a triumph of American drive, ingenuity, and courage; a sheer act of will that required hard work, perseverance, and above all, a spirit of independence and individualism.

There is certainly no doubt that Native American tribes suffered greatly at the hands of government and quasi-government operations aimed at "civilizing" the West, but the unrelenting focus in recent years of these murderous exploits illustrates for us a larger agenda surrounding how we acquire modern perceptions of the American West. This agenda is one of convincing Americans that the American West was inherently violent, unusually unjust, and generally unfit for civilized human habitation. In addition, this indictment now extends not merely to bands of conquering soldiers, but to the common settlers, fathers, husbands, and pretty much everybody else.

The assumption that violence has more often than not been a central reality about Frontier life has long been popular. How we see the violence, though, and whether or not the violence is heroic or just meaningless and tragic has depended on just who is writing the screenplays or doing the research. Violence has always been an inherent part of literature and film about the West. But, the general public, under the influence of decades of "western" movies and, more recently, television shows, has come to regard the cowboy's workday activities as altogether secondary to fighting off hostile Indians, pursuing rustlers and holding "necktie parties" for them, saving the rancher's daughter from Mexican raiders, and engaging in quick draw gunfights in dusty streets.

Of course, with the rise of Post-modernism in the 1960's, traditional rationales for the settlement of the West lost almost all of their defenders. The last thirty years or so have been bad decades for the reputation of the West.

More recently, we find Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History, edited by Michael Bellesiles, which contains a number of essays by authors further examining the disappointing reality that the West was actually quite a bit more boring than the movies led us to believe. Indeed, taken together, this body of research leaves us with a West that hardly lives up to the reputation of the Wild West.

If the movies and novels about the West are so unreliable then, what can we learn from documented cases about real life violence in the West? Certainly, a case that would have to jump out at us ...