American Values, Courage and Westerns, A Conclusion

In their own ways Bonanza, Gunsmoke, The Rifleman and Wagon Train portrayed a vision of America where matters came down to a gunfight and death. One website states:

 The Wild West: A time when outlaws roamed the plains, every sheriff was a sure shot and gun battles filled makeshift cemeteries with the innocent and guilty alike.

 Except that it was not. As it turns out, this exciting period in American history was not as rife with murderous debauchery as Western movies and pulpy novels would have us believe.

 During a 15-year period in the late 1880’s, there was an average of only three murders a year in Abilene, Caldwell, Dodge City, Ellsworth and Wichita – the five Kansas cities that served as significant railroad stops.  Dodge City had the most murders of the five, with 17 over nine years, which is less than two murders per year.  This was far lower than murder rates in the eastern cities of New York, Baltimore Boston at the time.  

Bank heists were a rarity.  Only about eight bank robberies were recorded in the Wild West from 1859 to 1900. And most people did not carry around a loaded six-shooter.  In fact, few people carried sidearms at all.  Many western towns, such as Dodge City, prohibited the carrying of firearms altogether.

Then what of the whiskey-drinking, gun-slinging, murderous days of yore?  There were pockets of violence, says Wild West historian Jonita Mullins, but even these “tended to be sensationalized by the press and dime novels of the day.”

Even so, a typical frontier town of the 1880’s was likely to be less violent than many cities today. You would just never know it by the way murder rates are often calculated.  In fact, the compilation of homicide rates during the Wild West era may be one of the longest-running controversies among statisticians.

Historian Robert R. Dykstra has explored the problem of analyzing frontier statistics, finding that the small populations of many circa 1880 Wild West towns skew the murder rates. Dykstra claims that if the 1880 murder rate of Dodge City, Kansas, were compared to a large city 100 years later, Dodge City would appear to have been more violent – even if the large city had far more murders.  For example, in 1880 Dodge City, one person out of 996 was killed. 

One hundred years later in Miami, 515 people out of 1.5 million were killed. Although more people were murdered in Miami, statistically speaking the city has a lower homicide rate – just 32.7, compared to 100.4 of Dodge City in the 1880s.

But if Dodge City's 1880 murder rate is compared with one of the largest cities in the U.S. 100 years later, the small frontier town will always look worse.  It is like comparing apples to oranges, and then killing all the plums.  In the end, doing so results in an inflated murder rate for cities with smaller populations.  It has also contributed to the image of Wild West towns as lawless outliers where dead bodies piled up in the streets.

True or not, the TV picture of the Old West is the basis for our lack of real gun control in the 21st Century.  It stems from a time when people may well have needed guns to protect themselves not merely from other White people, but from wild animals and Indians (whose land the Whites were trying to invade).  Matt Dillon, Ben Cartwright and Lucas McCain were idolized as examples of true courage, who took up their guns at the drop of a hat.

No one has suggested that these shows be banned from television, although there was some effort in the 1970’s to reduce violence on TV.  What has happened is that some of the Trumpist, gun-owning crowd has suggested that certain books be banned, including To Kill a Mockingbird in which hero Atticus Finch tells his daughter Scout why he defended Tom Robertson:

“(Because) I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand.  It is when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway, and you see it through no matter what.  You rarely win, but sometimes you do.” 

Remember Atticus’s words the next time you watch a shootout on TV or read about a real one in the newspaper.