Myth-busting about gun use in the Wild West

Larry Kummer, Editor

11 years ago

Summary: America’s broken Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action becomes most visible during political debates. For both Left and Right, fidelity to group dogma about “hot button” issues defines the group, about which no heterodox thought is allowed. This gives US debates their Alice-visiting-Oz feel, with one of both sides uninterested in inconvenient facts. Previously we looked at climate change to see this at work on the Left. In this series we look at similar behavior on the Right: looking at guns in America. This, chapter 7, looks at the history of guns in the wild west — myths, facts, and echos of our future.

When we think of guns in America, we often turn to the wild west for lessons. Such as how they handled widespread ownership of guns. How violent was the West? Calculating murder rates for small populations is problematic, especially for societies very different than today’s.

Still, there are lessons. Look at the famous Kansas cattle towns, where cowboys came to play: Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, and Caldwell — described in “Guns, Murder, and Plausibility“, Robert R. Dykstra (Prof History, State U of NY – Albany), Historical Methods, December 2010.

Violence in the Wild West was localized, as it is in today’s America, in certain districts. And in most western towns it was at levels far lower than that shown in cowboy movies.

{western towns’} population consisted of relatively young males. They commit most murders. … the middle-class respectables of Dodge City, male and female residents of the north side of town, faced {lower risk} of being murdered as the south-side whores, gamblers, and transient cowboys. Of the dozen founding fathers of the town’s business community, a group that included Robert Wright, all except one who died of illness survived the entire cattle-trading era without a scratch.

… Dodge City, for example, was very well policed — headquartering over the 10 years it was a cowboy town a deputy US marshal, a county sheriff, an undersheriff, deputy sheriffs as needed, a city marshal, an assistant marshal, policemen as needed, and two township constables. … Five of its 17 adult killings — almost one third — were justifiable homicides by officers. The police meant business …

But there was violence, of a different kind than drunken cowboys shooting each other. Political violence, aka terrorism.

Contention over moral reform at the cattle towns eventually reached especially uncomfortable levels. Although apparent as early as 1871 in Abilene, controversy climaxed in the 1880s after Kansas enacted statewide prohibition, then had trouble enforcing it in a few of its larger cities as well as in Caldwell and Dodge City, the two remaining cattle towns. … {t}he evangelical reformers of Caldwell and Dodge

had lost faith in the administrative efficacy of state governments;

felt that town officials were dishonest by refusing to act against the saloons;

harbored little “fellow-feeling” for their opponents; and

felt that some of their deepest values, and thus their identity, were disrespected and dismissed by local political elites.

… In Caldwell in 1884, the house of an uncompromising foe of liquor burned to the ground, allegedly torched by defenders of the status quo. Also 3 months later, anti-liquor vigilantes, having decided that a leading culprit was a bootlegger name Frank Noyes, dragged him from his cottage one night and — as a gruesome warning to other lawbreakers — strung him up. No similar lynching occurred that year at Dodge City. But a rogue faction among the prohibitionists also played arsonist, setting the downtown ablaze one night, ridding it of the several up-market saloons along Front Street as well as a number of legitimate businesses. A week later these zealots finished the job with a fire that wiped out the adjoining Chestnut Street bordellos. Mayor Robert Wright, whose flagship mercantile outlet had gone up in smoke, retaliated by firing 3 pistol bullets into the house of the prohibitionists’ leading figure …

The larger point is that the death of Frank Noyes was the only criminal fatality stemming from these many seasons of cattle-town social and political tension and unrest.

1884’s violence at Caldwell and Dodge was not random. It was instrumental, purposeful, premeditated, strategic, and targeted. The aggrieved took action not against their wives, friends, and acquaintances, but against the business enterprises of men they deemed secular and moral outlaws. This was terrorism — not real or attempted homicide.

With respect to lynching in its broader aspects, illegal executions in only three states of the Wild West (California, New Mexico, and Colorado) have been carefully studied by historians, and these three states combined suffered per-100,000 lynching rates of 5.5 in the 1860’s, and only 0.7 in the 1890s. By that last decade, rates were highest in the Deep South, as exemplified by Louisiana’s 1.2 rate for the 1890s.

In other words, lynching had metastasized from a punishment commonly meted out to rustlers, horse thieves, and frontier murderers into deadly violence against southern blacks.

Here we see a possible future for our heavily armed America. Episodes of mass murder, children killing each other with Dad’s gun, and other casual gun use will not affect the Republic — no matter how horrific. Much like the killings in Dodge’s saloon’s had no long-term effect other than giving us pulp westerns and B-movies.

But terrorism shaped the American West during the late 19th century. Violence against Indians. Against blacks. Against workers (early unions). Against small ranchers. Terrorism by armed men, directed for political purposes, directed at Americans, in an early America still riven to an extent difficult for us to imagine today by fissures of race, ethnicity, class, and geography — before the homogenizing effect of the world wars and civil right struggles. Guns allow an organized minority to dominate the public.

But new fissures have appeared, exacerbated by our loss of national identity and dying faith in the American project. New sources of violence have appeared, albeit in embryonic form: animal rights, eco-terrorists, “militia”, and sovereign nation separatists — motivated by the same four reasons listed above.

Should these these cancers grow, even mutate, other nations might look at America and see a lawless, violent land. As they did in the 19th century.

For More Information

“The History of the Second Amendment“, David E. Vandercoy, Valparaiso University Law Review, Spring 1994
“Body Counts and Murder Rates: The Contested Statistics of Western Violence“, Robert R. Dykstra, Reviews in American History, December 2003

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