Bullets, disease, mining accidents, and…Tarantula Juice?? Statistically,
you wouldn't have lasted a single day in the Wild West.
Before anyone could survive in the American West, they had to get there first — and there
was a pretty good chance of dying along the way. Britannica estimates that between the 1840s and
1860s, there were between 300,000 and 400,000 people who headed west on the Oregon Trail alone.
Of those, the National Park Service says that one in 10 died before they reached
the promised land. There were an almost shocking number of ways people died,
with some of the most common causes being gunshot wounds, accidents, weather-related
tragedies, drowning while crossing the trail's multiple rivers, and — of course — dysentery.
"What's that?!"
"That's where you poop 'til you croak."
"Uh, oh!"
And those are just the big ones, there were plenty of other risks, too. Rattlesnake bites
could turn deadly, and at the time, bison were still all over the place. A stampeding herd could
quickly and easily overrun a wagon train, and they did. The animals traveling with the convoy
were also a major danger. Most traveled with their own herds which included oxen, horses,
and mules. Beyond riding accidents, people were often kicked or killed in stampedes. And perhaps
the most tragic of these deaths are those who fell off wagons and were either crushed by
the wheels of their own or other settler's wagons or were dragged along behind them.
When Dr. Jim Kornberg
put the spotlight on "The Fastest Killer in the Old West" for True West Magazine,
it wasn't an infamous gunman as you might expect— rather, it was cholera. A bullet, after all,
can only kill a very limited number of people, but cholera is the gift that keeps on giving.
In 1873 alone, a major cholera epidemic swept through the west, and at this point in history,
the medical community understood exactly how it was spread. The bodily fluids expelled were
called "cholera poison," and in Dr. John M. Woodworth's 1,144-page report to Congress,
he concluded that disinfecting everything that could be disinfected was the way to go.
Unfortunately, disinfectant was hard to come by in the West, and people kept
dying. And that's just one disease. The National Park Service says that measles,
scurvy, dysentery, pneumonia, and smallpox were also common.
Smallpox came to the Americas with the Spanish, and once it was there,
it — and other European diseases — killed around 90% of native peoples in North and South America.
The disease drove the native populations to horrifying extremes. One incident was recounted
by historian David Dary, who found a newspaper account from 1878 of an Apache medicine man
who — after diagnosing two babies with smallpox — shot and killed them both with a single bullet.
Historian David Dary wrote Frontier Medicine, a book that gave a disturbing look into what
being a doctor in the Old West meant — both for doctors and their patients. It's
truly grim stuff, and he found that doctors were largely making things up as they went,
frequently prescribing cures that did more damage than the illness or injury.
"I had a cold, a couple years ago. I went in there, you know what he said to me, he said,
'Oh, you need an ear-nail!'. A nail! In my f- - -ing ear."
And tragically, due to cultural bias, white doctors often scoffed at the medicinal knowledge
of Native American tribes, a treasure trove of information that could have done some real good.
There were essentially three options for anyone who was sick or injured: waiting for a doctor,
treating their own problems, or just giving up the ghost. If the doctor showed up, he might perform
a bloodletting, or administer a weird medicine like the 1815 cure for arthritis and gout. That
involved killing a dog, filling the body with things like turpentine, brimstone, and nettles,
then roasting it over an open fire. Then just breathe in the fumes, and you're cured! Or not.
It's no wonder then that many turned to self-medicating for chronic conditions.
One of those people was the famous gambler Doc Holliday. Forest Tennant,
MD, says that he self-medicated with opium and alcohol when he developed tuberculosis,
and while he lived longer than expected, he was also regularly coughing up chunks of his lungs.
Watch literally any Hollywood Western, and it'll quickly become clear that bodies were
dropping left and right, nothing was sacred, and no one was safe. But is that accurate? Not really,
says Montana State University professor Terry Anderson. He told LiveScience that
despite the popular depiction of the West as a place where
everyone settled disputes with bullets, oftentimes, things were much more civil.
But they weren't exactly peaceful, either. The Ohio State University's Criminal Justice Research
Center did a deep dive into homicide rates in the old west and found some surprising stuff.
Let's take Dodge City during the boom years. Between 1876 and 1885, residents had a 1 in
61 chance of dying a violent death. Their homicide rate was around 165 per 100,000,
and while that doesn't sound like much at all,
let's put it in perspective. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that in 2020,
the homicide rate was about 7.8 per 100,000 — and even that was a huge jump from previous years.
Ohio State puts the chances of being murdered in Dodge City on the higher end,
but even the low end of the scale is comparatively high compared to
today's numbers. It was reported that Oregon had the lowest homicide rate at about 30 per 100,000.
The bottom line is, being murdered was a very real and constant fear.
To talk about the likelihood of dying in the Old West,
it's absolutely necessary to talk about the people who perished the most. Those were,
of course, the Native Americans who had been living on the land for generations.
Numbers are hard to come by, but it's estimated North America was
home to somewhere between 5 and 15 million people at the end of the 15th century. But,
by the end of the 19th century, there were less than 238,000 remaining.
Just what happened is complicated to sum up,
but here are a few of the major reasons so many Native American lives were lost. As mentioned,
smallpox was particularly devastating and was responsible for a massive death toll.
In addition to rampant disease, a series of wars — including the Battle of Tippecanoe,
the War of 1812, and the Seminole Wars — further decreased numbers,
along with outright massacres, like the Sand Creek Massacre.
Then, there were forced relocations like the Trail of Tears, which killed thousands of Native
Americans in the 1830s, where natives were forced to leave their ancestral homelands and walk more
than a thousand miles to the land that the U.S. government decided they could live on. Meaning
that tragically, the Native Americans who survived the Old West were the exception and not the norm.
It's no secret that some days are only survived by being able to kick back with a good cocktail.
But in the Old West, that cocktail at the end of a hard day could mean the end of your life.
Most Westerns might show cowboys and outlaws alike sidling up to the bar and
ordering a whiskey from the town's saloon. But according to the Tahoe Daily Tribune in
addition to locally brewed beers and plain old whiskey, saloons were much
more likely to be serving up drinks like the potentially deadly Tarantula Juice.
Drinking it allegedly caused those who consumed it to lash out violently,
because it contained the deadly and hallucinogenic strychnine.
The drink got that chill-inducing name because those who frequently partook
in it often complained of feeling like they were covered in crawling spiders.
The CDC says that only small amounts of
strychnine are needed to cause strychnine poisoning and death.
However, strychnine wasn't the only questionable substance in alcohol in those days. In many
saloons, it was all about stretching liquor as far as they could and raising profits,
which meant many saloons were cutting their liquors, and serving customers a potentially
deadly mix of booze, gunpowder, turpentine, and even ammonia. So with that said, down the hatch!
"Emit, no!"
The dangers of drinking too much are well documented, and in the Old West,
it wasn't just what they were drinking, but how much as well — starting with the
fact that according to True West Magazine, it wasn't an uncommon sight to see a teenager in
a saloon drinking with adults. Arizona's official historian, Marshall Trimble, says that before many
hit 16 years of age, they would be classified as severe alcoholics by today's standards.
According to historian WJ Rorabaugh, people of all ages — including toddlers — were starting
the day with a stiff drink and ending with a nightcap, beginning as far back as the 1700s.
Alcohol use reached a peak in the 1800s, thanks in large part to
massive corn crops and the profitability of turning that into whiskey. Basically,
everyone was drinking all the time, and by 1830, intake was astronomical.
Let's put it this way. If someone today were to start drinking like someone in the 1830s - and
we're certainly not recommending that you do - they'd be drinking three and a half
bottles of whiskey every week. Research from the book Alcohol and Opium in the Old West
says that drinking was seen as a perfectly acceptable pastime — so much so that abuse
and addiction would ultimately lead to the Temperance Movement and Prohibition.
Starting with the California Gold Rush of 1849, mining operations started popping up
all across the west. As they did, the Independence Hall Association
in Philadelphia says that more and more precious metals were found. Eventually,
miners weren't just looking for gold, they were also looking for fortunes in silver, copper, lead,
and zinc — all of which were key components to the nation's rapidly-advancing industries.
Montana State University professor emeritus of history Pierce Mullen
says it quickly became clear just how many ways there were to die in mining,
from mine collapses and explosions to falling down ladders that stretched for hundreds of
feet. Exhaustion played a huge part in the danger — and so did sanitation. Miners typically lived in
closely-packed communities that were breeding grounds for disease, and they were drinking
water contaminated by their not-so-sanitary living conditions as well as the runoff from the mines.
True West Magazine says that it was only at the beginning of the 20th
century that the medical profession started to understand why so many miners were dying
of lung-related disorders like tuberculosis. The start of the disease was in silicosis,
which came from breathing silica-laden dust. If that didn't result in sudden and premature death,
then there was a good chance something else — like carbon monoxide poisoning,
the loss of a few fingers or limbs, infection, or exposure to mercury and arsenic — would.
There were plenty of cold nights in the Old West, and countless men headed into the
arms of the so-called painted ladies and soiled doves in search of companionship.
Unfortunately, this whole industry was set up in such a way that it almost guaranteed a shortened
life for both the women and their clients. Christopher Knowlton did a deep dive into the sex
work industry on the frontier for his book Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West.
And he discovered that once women got into the industry, there was little to no chance of getting
out. Most died young of conditions made worse by things like disease, addiction, and poverty.
According to Medicine in the Old West, some estimates suggest that about 50% of the west's sex
workers had some form of venereal disease — which was spread to clients. They did take precautions,
but it's easy to see how repeatedly using solutions containing chemicals like mercury,
carbolic acid, mercuric cyanide, and boric acid might be more than a little dangerous.
It's unclear how many people died of venereal diseases from that time because the cause of
death was often listed on death certificates as something other than venereal disease. Often it
was called "cancer of the brain," because of the decay that late-stage syphilis caused.
All in all, it just wasn't a very fun time to be alive.