7 Fascinating Facts About the Old West
7.
Multiculturalism Name me 1 western film that stars an african
american protagonist that arent Django Unchained and Blazing Saddles?
If you do know any, Let us know in the comments.
However for the most part, The classic Hollywood picture of the West involves white, all-American
tough guys teaming up with or fighting other American white guys.
Sure, you’ll get a few black people in there, maybe a handful of Mexicans and the odd Irishman
for “Comedic” purpouses, However it was predominantly true-blooded Americans, right?
Nope.
Like late 19th century New York, the Wild West was a hotbed of multiculturalism, with
people of all nationalities vying for some room.
Rock Springs in Wyoming counted as many as 56 nationalities in a population of under
10,000.
Slovakians, Finns, Norwegians, Germans, Ottomans, Swedes and Chinese all poured into the South
and Midwest; an influx that only increased with the Californian Gold Rush.
The image of the old West as a bedrock of American values is a Hollywood holdover from
a time when casting non-American voices and faces was pretty much a no go.
6.
Camels At no point in his cinematic career did John
Wayne ride a camel.
But guess what?
If he had, it would’ve been totally legit.
See, the Southwest United States used to home to hundreds of feral camels—and it was all
thanks to our meddling government.
In 1855 congress assigned $30,000 for the buying and shipping of camels from Egypt.
The idea was that a bunch of grumpy dromedaries would fare better in the scorching Southwest
than horses, making long survey missions easy.
By 1857, the army had seventy camels and early experiments were looking good—and then civil
war broke out.
In the chaos that followed, a number of camels managed to escape into the wild where they
did what any other wild animal does and bred like crazy.
For nearly 100 years, feral camels were a part of Texas’ wildlife, with the last sighting
reported in 1941.
That’s right: in your grandparents’ lifetime, the United States was home to wild camels.
5.
Gun Control Wow guns in the wild west?
You don’t say!
Yes it’s pretty much common knowledge that guns were a big part in the wild west.
Everyone and their mother had a gun.
Hell just look at Back to the Future part 3 as an example!
Yes it’s just a film but pick any western film and you’ll pretty much have an accurate
representation of what the west was like back then.
After all, if you’re visiting somewhere like Deadwood or Dodge City, you better be
ready for trouble.Except carrying a gun in Dodge was more likely to land you in trouble.
When the local government was formed, the first law passed was to prohibit the carrying
of firearms.
The gunfight at the OK Corral kicked off because Wyatt Earp was trying to enforce that law.
Nor was Dodge a one-off: Wichita and Tombstone both enacted similar laws, and enforced them
hard.
According to that link back there, the second most common cause of arrest in the Old West
was illegally carrying a firearm—meaning sheriffs weren’t messing around when it
came to gun control.
Somehow, we’ve gotten to the point that modern-day Tombstone actually has less-restrictive
gun laws than its supposedly lawless Old West equivalent.
4.
Native American Culture Before the Europeans came to do some farming,
we’re told America was a great big empty land.
Sure, there was an indigenous culture.The continent was basically a blank canvas.
Except it wasn’t.
Far from being just a bunch of ragtag tribes, Native Americans may have numbered as many
as 100 million when Columbus first missed India by a few thousand miles.
Although a devastating plague wiped out about 90% of the population before the pilgrims
arrived, at least a million still remained.
And they were damn sophisticated.
Far from just giving each other cool names and sporting funky headgear, Native culture
was all about extensive agriculture, opening up new trade routes across the continent and
building America’s first city.
Then we showed up, and any chance of recovering from that super-plague was swept away on a
tide of smallpox, STDs and genocide.
3.
Violence Again….Common knowledge that the Wild West
was incredibly violent, However whenever watching western films, We just seem to switch off
and just take it for granted.
We don’t really analyse how brutal the west was.
Shootouts, bank robberies, highly-choreographed bar brawls—if we know anything about the
frontier, it’s that it was one hell of a violent place.
Or was it?
Although still a violent time period, It turns out the popular image of the Old West as a
place where manly men solved their differences by shooting those differences in the face
simply isn’t true.
People were more likely to cooperate than fight—in a harsh and lawless world, it was
better to side with your neighbor for mutual benefit than start shooting.
Bank robberies, too, were virtually unheard of.
One estimate places the number at about a dozen for the entire frontier period.
Then you have the low-homicide rates.
The highest annual body count Tombstone ever experienced?
Five.
From 1870 to 1885, Dodge City and Wichita had murder rates of 0.6 per year.
However you cut it, daily cowboy life was nowhere near as violent as we think.
2.
Outlaws Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickok, Jesse James
. . . these names defined the wild west.
These men were so badass that their names still conjure images of macho men striking
matches off their stubble, instead of lying egomaniacs with girly voices.
Yeah, turns out not all of them were as tough as they said.
When Buffalo Bill started his Wild West touring plays, Wild Bill joined only to get fired
for sounding like a girl.
Still, that’s probably how he got his moniker—killing people who trash talked his sissy lisp, right?
Not exactly.
The whole ‘Bill’ part was a reference to his gravity-defying monster-nose; as in
it stood for ‘Duck Bill’.
Other outlaws suffered similar manliness-deficits: Jesse James was so vain he left press releases
at the scene of robberies telling everyone how awesome he was.
But the king of talking crap has to be Billy the Kid.
In his lifetime, the Kid was known for killing over 20 people.
In reality it was more like four.
Basically, he was the old west equivalent of that guy you always meet at parties who
won’t stop talking about the fights he’s been in, only somehow sadder.
1.
Cowboys The cowboy is the absolute embodiment of everything
frontier-related: a Stetson-rocking gunslinger with an absolute moral code, a tough exterior
and a tougher interior, facing down the empty American wilderness with a steely gaze and
rugged jaw.
Only they were nothing like that.
See, the job of ‘Cowpuncher’ as they would call themselves was tough, dirty working class
work.
Most of these guys were surly illiterates who got drunk on the weekends, started a fight
and spent a month or two in jail.
None of them dressed like Clint Eastwood or John Wayne or any Hollywood cowboy: they wore
practical clothes for getting mucked up in and mostly looked like homeless people.
Far from being moral, they were known to be obnoxious, and most of them had a terminal
case of STD.
Oh, and things had a tendency to get pretty Brokeback.
In 1949, a study of rural sexuality concluded that there was “a fair amount of sexual
contact among the older males in rural Western areas”—while old poems from the frontier
era are full of references to men being super-gay for one another.
So Butch and Sundance’s epic bromance may have just been, y’know, a standard epic
romance.
Don't forget to like us and subscribe For more Elite Facts