The American West: A Heritage of Peace
By Ryan McMaken
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.
In the decades following the closing of the Frontier (as
pronounced by Frederick Turner in 1890), this perception of the
West changed dramatically. The old view of a divinely inspired
spread of Americanism changed to a more ambivalent view by
mid-century, and finally, to an openly hostile view today that
Western society was (and is) violent, murderous, and chaotic. We
are now told that the West, after the coming of the white man,
was a land of sadistic Indian murderers, psychopathic outlaws,
and misfits who had abandoned the more peaceful life back in
the good ol' civilized U.S. of A.
Whether promoting or condemning the West, though, novelists,
filmmakers, and even historians never shied away from giving us
many images of murdering Indians, or roaming outlaws, or crazy
misfits, but what in an earlier era would have been abnormal
behavior in films and images of the West, became standard
behavior for denizens of the West in later times.
Much of this revolves around the treatment of Native Americans
(and other currently popular minority groups) in film, and with the
coming of films like Little Big Man (1970) and Dances with
Wolves (1990). Americans have been treated to images of a
bucolic, ideal world disrupted by barbaric Americans who
stripped the land and all of its people of everything that was
good and decent, destroying not only the Native peoples, but
also themselves in the process.
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. And this indictment now extends not merely to bands
of conquering soldiers, but to the common settlers, fathers,
husbands, and pretty much everybody else.
Consider the 1992 film Unforgiven. Sometimes called the
"unwestern," this film portrays the West as a place of capricious
violence and chaos where law and order is regularly undone by
crooked sheriffs, vengeful bounty hunters, and abusive
cowpokes.
In recent years, this image of the West as the home of unusually
sadistic and frequent violence has been an ever more popular
topic of research on the West, with typical additions being
Glenda Riley's A Place to Grow: Women in the American West
and Clare V. McKanna's Homicide, Race, And Justice in the
American West, 1880–1920. Both of these works build on the
violent image of the West already provided in Hollywood movies
while providing a realistic revisionist picture of nonheroic
violence perpetuated by drunks and the "gun culture."
The Myth of the Brutal Frontier
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.
This latter point was made recently by William Handley in his
book Marriage, Violence, and the Nation in the American Literary
West. Handley notes that violence has always been an inherent
part of literature and film about the West. The difference
between the modern variety of violence, and the older variety,
however, is that while newer descriptions of violence in the West
are intended to highlight the victimization of a wide variety of
groups, the violence of earlier authors like Willa Cather and Zane
Grey was intended to illustrate the necessity of violence in
establishing civilization in a wild and untamed land.
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.
Thus, while the explanations for the violence changes over the
decades, the assumption that violence was the general modus
operandi of settlers on the Frontier remained in full force. Yet,
since at least the 1970's, research has indicated that both
camps may have been wrong about violence in the West.
Excluding the Indian wars of the mid to late 19th century which
were lopsided affairs conducted by the United States
government, we find that the allegedly inherent violence of the
West was not noticeably any greater than that of points east.
Historian Richard Shenkman largely attributes this to the legacy
of those reliably-violent Western films. "Many more people have
died in Hollywood Westerns than ever died on the real
Frontier…n the real Dodge City, for example, there were just
five killings in 1878, the most homicidal year in the little town's
Frontier history: scarcely enough to sustain a typical two-hour
movie."
Shenkman was basing this comment on Historian W. Eugene
Hollon's research in which he notes that in many places like
Dodge City, tales of violence were actually accentuated to
appeal to the tourist trade in the latter years of the Frontier. This
is not difficult to understand considering the movement made
popular by promoters of the "West cure," a fad (much promoted
by proto-yuppie Theodore Roosevelt) that claimed that a period
of hunting and tough travel out West would make men more
masculine.
Hollon reached these conclusions in 1976 with the publication of
Frontier Violence: Another Look in which he examined a number
of statistical indicators in order to determine the true level of
violence in the American West. Historians have been working to
refute his conclusions ever since, although the results have been
less than conclusive. Adding to Hollon's thesis in 1983, Robert
Dykstra published Cattle Towns which included an examination
of the violence in Kansas cattle towns like Abilene, Wichita, and
Caldwell. In novels and on the silver screen, these towns became
known for their shootouts. But, as Dykstra tells us, the reality
was quite different. These cattle towns had an economic interest
in ensuring as little violence as possible—and they delivered.
More recently, we find Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality
in American History, edited by Michael Bellesiles (the now
infamous author of Arming America) 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.
As with Dodge City, the excitement in the Old West in general
has been much overstated. All the big cattle towns of Kansas
combined saw a total of 45 murders during the period of
1870-1885. Dodge City alone saw 15 people die violently from
1876–1885—an average of 1.5 per year. Deadwood, South Dakota
and Tombstone, Arizona (home of the O.K. Corral), during their
worst years of violence saw four and five murders respectively.
Vigilante violence appears to not have been much worse.
According to Dykstra and Richard M. Brown, while the Kansas
code gave mayors the power to call a vigilante group from all the
men in the town who ranged in ages from 18–50, it seems, at
least in Kansas, that it was rarely done. In a span of 38 years,
Kansas had only 19 vigilante movements that accounted for 18
deaths. In addition, between 1876 and 1886, no one was lynched
or hanged illegally in Dodge City.
Given the money to be made by exploiting the exciting reputation
of the Frontier, it should not surprise us that Dodge City was
hardly alone in manufacturing tales of blazing guns to attract
men seeking adventure. Towns like Tombstone, Abilene and
Deadwood all played up their supposed histories of Frontier
violence. On closer inspection, though, the records are not nearly
as exciting. (For more, see "The Not So Wild Wild West" by Terry
Anderson.)
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 as the quintessential blood feud in the West would be
the Lincoln County war of 1878–81. As the name implies, this
unpleasantness was quite disruptive to southern New Mexico,
and produced quite its share of corpses. But even then, we find a
body count intolerably low by Hollywood standards.
Like many similar feuds on the Frontier, the Lincoln County War
began as a land dispute that turned violent following a variety of
unsavory actions taken by government authorities. The war was
touched off by a legal dispute between established cattlemen
L.G. Murphy and J.J. Dolan who used their connections with US
officials in the area as well as with the Army at Fort Stanton, to
secure economic control over the cattle and merchant
economies of Lincoln county. In 1877, Alexander McSween and
John Tunstall, along with competing cattleman John Chisum,
began to challenge the control of Murphy and Dolan as well as
the favoritism they had long been receiving from territorial
officials.
In turn, after being harassed and arrested at the request of a US
attorney, McSween was eventually legally out-maneuvered by
Murphy and Dolan as they continued to call in government favors
in order to ruin their new competition. Sheriff William Brady
received a court order to seize property belonging to both
McSween and his partner Tunstall, but on the way to the Tunstall
ranch, the Sheriff's posse gunned down Tunstall in cold blood
after he had surrendered his gun, setting off the most violent part
of the war.
Present at Tunstall's murder was a young man Tunstall had
recently taken under his wing, William H. Bonney, alias Billy the
Kid. The Kid swore to avenge Tunstall's death, and by 1881, after
a gunfight at McSween's home (where the Army was brought in
against McSween and his men, and Mcsween's house was
burned to the ground by the Sheriff's men), Sheriff Brady, several
deputies, McSween, and at least 6 of his men we killed including
Billy the Kid.
Yet, when the smoke cleared from this unusually violent
conflagration, the legend remains far more violent than the
reality. After all, authorities have only been able to prove that
Billy the Kid, generally regarded as the most blood-soaked
participant in the Lincoln County war, killed 3 people. Most agree
that he could have killed as many as three or four more people,
but considering the circumstances, it is difficult to ascertain how
The Kid managed to gain a reputation as a "psychopathic killer"
or how stories began to circulate of how he had "killed 21 men by
the time he was 21."
Much of the confusion was due, as Richard Shenkman indicates,
to American movies. Films that depict the Lincoln County War
like Chisum (1970) (which portrays Billy as a rather sympathetic
character), and Young Guns (1988) (which makes Billy look a bit
more crazy), play up the violence for obvious reasons. However,
even considering the rather alarming body count (by
contemporary as well as modern standards), events like the
Lincoln County war were hardly everyday occurrences, and in the
end, those involved were corrupt officials and cowboys who
didn't much care for having their friends gunned down by
unscrupulous Sheriff's deputies.
How this translates into the Frontier being essentially uncivilized
and coming apart at the seams remains to be seen. For its part
at least, Chisum did portray the struggle of the individual against
the state and against outlaws, and does celebrate the self-reliant
man. But the violence of the West contained in Chisum and in
hundreds of pictures like it, has helped to burn an image of an
inherently violent Frontier into the minds of Americans. And in
recent decades, this image has now been turned from glorifying
nationalism on the Frontier, to a new one of showing—almost
exclusively—the Frontier's horrors.
Western Lore and Liberty
Whether or not the American Frontier was a place anyone would
want to live is of great importance in the story of American
liberty. An essential and remarkable characteristic of the
Frontier West, of course, is that it was more or less self-policing.
In most cases, it was little more than a loose confederation of
municipalities and local governments held together only by
economic interests and a dim loyalty to a far-off national
government that in the early days of the Frontier was virtually
invisible, and in later times was still represented by little more
than small bands of cavalry.
In other words, it was a quite libertarian society where political
power was locally controlled, economic dealings were virtually
unregulated, and defense of an individual's property was usually
the responsibility of the individual.
The Frontier was a place where people went to make money, and
they stayed there if they made it. If they failed, they returned to
the East. Certainly, many people died unpleasant deaths on the
Frontier from disease, accidents, and general misfortune, but
such things were sure to befall travelers undertaking similar
endeavors anywhere in the world in the 19th century.
The truly important question is whether or not human beings on
the Frontier were less prosperous, more violent, and generally
more barbaric than their counterparts in more "civilized" parts of
the world. If this can be proven to be the case, then the case for
active government, commercial regulation, and an aggressive
police apparatus is granted much more currency in the minds of
Americans. And certainly, this is what critics of Frontier society
have been attempting to do for a long time.
The settling of the American Frontier represents some of the
most undirected, spontaneous and free settling of land seen
since the ancient world. All modern Frontier states (i.e.,
Australia, Canada, and the Latin American countries) were
settled for largely economic reasons by courageous settlers
willing to brave an unknown geography, but nowhere was the
State less involved in this settlement than on the American
Frontier.
The wagon train era which we so closely identify with the
settlement of the West was started by the Mormons, who while
also largely motivated by religious freedom considerations,
quickly set up shop (literally) in their new environs and began
trading with both the Americans in the east and with the
Mexican settlers on the West Coast (as well as Indians). While
many other Americans began to brave the plains to travel to the
riches described in the guidebooks about Oregon and California,
the trend only began to really accelerate after the discovery of
gold in California in 1849. By 1850, there were literally
thousands of wagon trains on the trail to California with one train
rarely out of sight of another.
Entire industries grew up around getting people to their
destinations, and serving them once they got there. Markets for
scouts, guides, equipment, guidebooks, and teamsters were all
readily supplied by enthusiastic entrepreneurs. While
government surveyors like Charles Fremont promoted and helped
map the West, the actual settling was always done by men and
women looking to make a better living in a new land. In other
words, civilization was brought to the West by private citizens,
private entrepreneurs, and private law enforcement.
Indeed, as Louis L'amour has noted, many wagon trains of the
day had been organized like small armies, complete with
embroidered uniforms that resembled "an army detachment."
And certainly this made sense, since once on the plains, the
settlers could look to no one but themselves for defense against
outlaws, Indians, and their own members. And yet, with no "help"
from federal regulators, police, or social workers, the American
Frontier became a source of riches for thousands and thousands
of farmers, ranchers, miners, merchants, and any other
entrepreneur willing to fill a need. Settlements sprang up where
money could be made.
Unlike government-planned Frontier outposts in British and
Spanish colonies, the American Frontier town was often formed
out of little more than a few ramshackle buildings and a latrine (if
you were lucky). But of course, wherever money was to be made,
civilization followed. Interestingly, the effects of the
government-planning approach can still be witnessed in Siberia
where the Soviets (and the Czars before them) expended much
effort and treasure attempting to settle the Frontiers of their
east.
A few withering settlements still remain there, but they are now
little more than reminders of a failed attempt to settle a Frontier
without the entrepreneurs, the bankers, the churchmen, and
everyone else that it takes to create a civilization where none
existed before. The settling of the West was unplanned,
unregulated, and free of virtually all the paternalism growing up
everywhere in the Western world.
The Civil War and the Violence of the East
In many ways, the American Civil War fundamentally changed the
way the Frontier was settled. The war changed the settlers, the
economy, and especially the federal government that would
eventually send its soldiers to put a new face on the American
West. While the settlement continued, the war, which drew men
and their families back to their cities and towns of origin in the
East (both North and South), slowed settlement considerably.
The citizens of small Frontier towns like Denver, for example,
then bickered over whether they would consider themselves to
be Northern or Southern. The stars and bars might be flown over
city hall one minute only to be torn down and replaced by the
stars and stripes the next. In many places, Northern or Southern
loyalties were decided simply by whether the majority of a
town's population hailed from Northern or Southern states. Those
unfortunate enough to be on the losing side of this discussion
were frequently run out of town. The killing, though, was mostly
going on back east, and when the war was finally over, the
settlers who returned had seen a kind of wholesale violence
never experienced on the Frontier.
Consequently, the post-Civil War Frontier was populated by men
intimately familiar with killing their fellow human beings. Just as
today, when we are scarcely surprised to hear about domestic
violence on Army bases or that Timothy McVeigh and beltway
sniper John Allen Muhammad received their weapons training in
the U.S military, so we can reason that the Civil War veterans of
the Frontier might have produced a more violent society
themselves.
To be sure, records indicate that in many places around the
country, violent crime increased by as much as 50 percent
following the war. The West was not immune to this. That the
Frontier was uniquely violent in this period, however, is hardly
the conclusions we must come to. Since the East would have
retained its share of veterans, we still find little that is uniquely
violent about the West when taking a comparative approach.
Indeed, the ethnic strife of the newly impoverished Southern
countryside and the crowded Northern cities would have made
the relative quiet of the Frontier a welcome change of pace.
The greatest change in the West, however, was the sudden
appearance of a battle hardened and well-equipped cavalry sent
by Republican presidents to clear the West of Indians. These
Civil War veterans brought a brutality and efficiency to the West
unheard of before the war. After four years of killing Southerners,
the cavalrymen of these later Indian wars cleared the way for
settlement, but also built up a federal apparatus that has
persisted to this day.
This phase of the Frontier then, would certainly fall well within
William Handley's discussion of the nationalistic explanation for
violence of the West, and this aspect of Frontier settlement has
been portrayed in countless novels and films in positive and
negative terms.
But, the true settlement of the West was not dependent on the
soldier with the rifle, but on the blacksmith, the school teacher,
and the saloon owner. The federal soldiers could have murdered
every Indian between the Mississippi and the Pacific (which
would have suited civil war "heroes" and Indian fighters like
Generals Sherman and Sheridan fine) but in the end, it is not
armies that settle frontiers. Private citizens build the towns, dig
the sewers, and ship the goods that make a decent life possible.
Government to the Rescue
All too often, however, the model of the Frontier settler that suits
both the nationalistic mythmaker and the modern anti-nationalist
mythmaker is the portrayal of the settler-as-victim. This has been
quite popular in novels and in film simply for its versatility as a
plot device, but it has also been employed as a propaganda tool.
Louis L'amour's The Tall Stranger for example, features a
battle-hardened gunfighter who saves a naive wagon train duped
by a con man (essentially a re-telling of the Donner Party story
with a happy ending). More famously, A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
and the Magnificent Seven (1960) feature similar dynamics (and
were both based on Akira Kurosawa films about wandering
Samurai saving cowering villagers from outlaws).
Probably most notable in the pathetic villager genre, however, is
High Noon (1952), with Gary Cooper fruitlessly attempting to
recruit a posse to beat back invading outlaws. By the end of the
film, Marshal Will Kane (Cooper), disgusted with the lack of
courage in the town, tosses his star into the dust of the Frontier
town "too dishonorable to deserve protection."
As film historian Thomas Doherty notes, the "slanderous central
conceit" of High Noon was that "the Old West was packed with
no-account yellow-bellies." Notably, the cowardly townspeople
are concerned about real-estate values, and boring old business
matters rather than with settling scores with the bad guys. The
government Marshal is heroic. The local merchants are cowards.
It's a formula that would work well in any anti-corporate
propaganda piece hitting the screens today, but it is especially
damaging to the image of the Old West as the supposed refuge of
the individualist.
Most writers of Western films and novels have little interest in
proving that the West was a desolate land of the victimized, yet
the images propagated by such writers is essential to how
Americans now view the settlement of the Frontier. Intended or
not, this image has now become an important component of the
revisionist efforts to portray the West as a violent free-for-all
where only the strong survive, and the weak meekly wait for a
shameful end. Research like that of Riley and McKanna as
mentioned above, therefore, naturally appeal to that part of the
American psyche that sees violence and chaos as the price of
settling in a free country.
Thus, violence, while it was first used in Western lore as a
vehicle to show the adversity overcome in order to establish the
civilizing influence of Anglo-Saxon civilization over the
presumably barbarous Indians and Mexicans, has come to be
used as a symbol of how the settlers victimized themselves. The
women and children of the West are now often portrayed in
fiction and in research as hapless victims of a society run amok.
The new paradigm is one of the West being settled by the human
refuse of the east. The solution to this horrendous state of
affairs, then, comes only when the bureaucracy, the police, and
the politicians of the East set up shop in the West and bring an
end to the chaos.
A Workable Anarchy
The American West, regardless of how it is portrayed, is a
powerful image for Americans, and few things are seen as more
archetypal to the American national identity than the life of the
Frontier settler. It is not surprising then, that such a long battle
has raged over who could claim these images as proving one's
fundamental assumptions about Americans. For both the
nationalist promoters of Manifest Destiny and the modern
proponents of the settler-as-victim image, violence has been a
key factor in describing the life of the West.
Was the West a barely livable place replete with antisocial
trigger-happy misfits and rampaging Indians and tyrannical
capitalists? Much of the evidence would indicate that it was not.
Few would argue that life in the 19th century was luxurious for
any more than a tiny minority, but even when it can be shown (as
it has) that ethnic strife, homicide, and domestic violence were
constantly present on the Frontier, this does little in the way of
showing that such problems were less of a problem in the cities
of the East.
The Civil War, even if we adjust for population density, killed
more people and ruined more lives through direct state action
than dozens of bands of outlaws and abusive husbands could
have ever accomplished on the Frontier. The violence
surrounding the "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion" campaigns in
cities against Catholic immigrants and Southern whites,
immigrant riots against blacks (as in the case of the New York
Draft Riots), Republicans against Democrats, lynchings, murders
in the slums, and so on, all illustrate the kinds of dangers that
could have been experienced in a myriad of places in the world in
the 19th century.
The defense raised in turn by the detractor of the West is that,
had the West had the population density of the East, given the
alleged sociopathic tendencies of the Western settlers, violence
per capita would surely have been greater. But of course, had the
Frontier been like the East, it wouldn't have been the Frontier.
The population in the West was small and dispersed, which was
part of the draw. For many families, it was far preferable to
scratch a living from the soil on the Frontier where one could be
left alone than to deal with commonplace violence in the cities
back east. They took with them their ingenuity, their knowledge,
and their families, and they planted civilization where none had
existed before.
Ultimately, the greatest threat to the opponents of liberty when
discussing the American West, is that if the Frontier can be
shown to be a civil and civilized society, this offers a powerful
example of a self-sufficient society existing apart from the
increasingly overbearing machinery of government growing daily
in the cities of the East and in Europe.
If the American Frontier could produce trade, towns, learning,
and prosperity in the absence of a centralized and bureaucratic
state (which it did), then the power of individuals working
together for economic prosperity exists as a significant problem
for the proponents of the modern State.
Indeed, 90% of the daily activity among settlers was
trade-related and therefore peaceful, for as Ludwig von Mises
noted, economic cooperation among individuals is the essence of
peace, while the taxation, the regulation, the policing, and the
wars produced by states is the essence of violence and coercion.
Even before Americans arrived in the West, Spaniards, Mexicans,
Indians, Russians and Brits had been trading, exploring, mining,
and living in there. Men and women settled the West with a mind
toward peace and economic independence. With the ambitions of
states, however, came wars of conquest against the Mexicans,
against Indians, and even against disaffected Americans (such
as the Mormons) who sought a life in the West free of the
meddling government in the well-regulated and "civilized" world
of the East.
And while the different economic, religious, ethnic, and cultural
groups that settled the West might have quarreled and competed
for space and economic success, the creation of a civilization
could only be done by individuals bringing with them a diverse
array of knowledge, skills, religions, and ideologies. These
individuals did always share a few things in common, however.
As historian Carl Becker noted, the men and women of the West
had learned that to rely on the State was a waste of time. Their
efforts were best placed elsewhere: "Altogether adverse to
hesitancy, doubt, speculative or introspective tendencies, the
frontiersman is a man of faith. A faith not so much in external
power as in himself, in luck, his destiny; faith in the possibility of
achieving whatever is necessary."
Naturally, many failed in their attempts to set up a prosperous
life in the West. But, no society since the dawn of civilization has
been able to offer anything more than the mere opportunity for
success. Life in all times and places has been fraught with risk.
Had Americans of the 19th century had access to the technology
and medical science we now enjoy, the settlement of the West
would have no doubt been immeasurably easier, yet it still could
not have been accomplished without those brave individuals
willing to live in a strange and unsettled land where they
possessed little to rely on other than themselves.
Glorious Tedium
Unfortunately for novelists and filmmakers, the American West
was far less exciting than we have long been led to believe. The
frontiersmen knew this themselves. In his old age, Buffalo Bill
Cody, one of the most flamboyant architects of our perceptions
of the West, openly admitted to lying about his violent exploits to
sell more dime novels. He was, after all, wounded in battle with
Indians exactly once, not 137 times as he claimed. And such
tales are no doubt popular with many Americans today who seem
increasingly open to believing almost anything about the West as
long as it is simultaneously exciting and violent and bleak.
As with so many success stories, however, the story of the West
is primarily a story of hard work, trade, tedium, and peace. The
original mythmakers would have us believe that the settlement
of the West was some kind of crusade. A war of righteous
American legions against everybody else. In reality, there were
no legions, and there was certainly very little righteousness.
There were men and women trying to make a better life for
themselves, acting under their own will, and pursuing their own
ends. On the other end of the spectrum, the purveyors of the new
Western victimology would have us believe that these individuals
brought with them messiah complexes and violent tendencies
which would never be brought under control until "civilization"
caught up with them. Yet, the messiah complexes, the "Manifest
Destiny," and the raging violence have always mostly resided in
the minds of politicians, pundits, novelists, and movie directors;
none of whom ever tamed any land harsher then their own back
yards.
--------------------
Regards,
T LEE
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within
