How Wild Was the Wild West? | The Frontier

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Some time and say, late 1880s, in a rough, shod town on the dry, dusty plains of the American West. Here in the saloon, the bartender slings bourbon shots, gamblers lean over their cards, laughter drifts down from the girls on the balcony. Unsuddenly, two hard-eyed men square off over a pile of poker chips. One backs away, swaggering through the swinging doors. The other follows in a minute later, they're both in the street facing each other at a distance, hands hovering over their holstered guns. This is the Wild West as we often imagine it. The one we think we know. Meanwhile out there on the edge of town, another drama unfolds. Surveys hammer stakes into the ground. An engineer studies his maps. Crews prepare to lay miles of steel railroad track that will skirt past town and punch through the mountains in the distance, changing everything about this county, this whole territory, and the people who live here. Gunfight? If it even happens, lasts seconds. This other violence upon the land itself moves slowly, relentlessly, more mundane perhaps, the far more consequential. Because once that burst locomotive steams through town, watch out. What happens to the Wild West? Good day, welcome, I'm Don Wildman, and this is American History Hip. Imagine a place of relentlessly wide open skies. Vast, unforgiving terrain. Towns separated by a full day's ride on horseback at least. This is the fabled American West, as we think we know it. Epic, lawless, mythic, a land of outlaws and gunslingers, of rugged individualism and frontier justice. But how much of that all-so familiar picture is reality and how much is legend? Today we're looking past the myth to consider how wild was the Wild West. Our guide today is Tori Olsen, Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Govals. His works include the award-winning agrarian crossings, reformers and the remaking of the U.S. and Mexican countryside, and more recently, Red Dead's History, a video game, an obsession and America's violent past. Professor Olsen, Tori, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, Don. Thank you so much for having me on the show. You're very welcome. Tori, your book I just mentioned, Red Dead's History was published in 2024 very recently, and concerns the video game phenomenon known as Red Dead Redemption, which was first released in 2010, and a new version 2018 I did my research, one of the most successful games ever made, as sold in an ungodly number of copies, like 82 million or something. So as a professor of history, how useful do you find video games as a means of teaching modern college students? Yeah, well, surprisingly useful. In part, because the general public and students as well, they very often encounter history through pop culture. And I think throughout much of the 20th century, this was through the lens of television, film, of literature, and so forth. But in the last 20 years, more and more students and just general people are encountering history on this digital, playable, interactive screen. And that really matters, because I don't think that video games necessarily teach all that much history, but they do plant seeds of curiosity and of interest, which are then very ripe for someone like myself to harvest, to nurture, and to use the sort of pre-existing passion and curiosity that students have that they've learned through games as a way of actually getting them to grapple with the usually much more complicated and nuanced history of what actually happened. Yeah, it's very engaging medium. I mean, as a person, my generation who didn't grow up with them, who pinballs was as about as complicated as my gaming was, I look at these modern games like, oh my God, it's an amazing world into itself. But how accurate in red dead is the picture of the American West? I mean, is it as comic book or, you know, like the movies? Right. Well, a little bit of both. So there's really two core red dead redemption games. And my book fundamentally looks at the second one, red dead redemption two, which came out in 2018, as you mentioned, it's set in 1899 in both the West and in the South and in Appalachia. And I find that it's a lot more smarter and rich of a game than the first one. The first one has some strengths, but I really emphasize the second one in part because it's much more popular and it's much more recent. And I think in many ways, the question to ask is not, is it historically accurate? Because the game is fictionalized, right? The names of people and places are all made up. It's very hard to compare it kind of a one-to-one comparison to, you know, Wyoming or Louisiana in that same time period because stuff is made up. And I think the question we need to ask is it historically thoughtful? And to me, historically thoughtful means something a little differently. Not does it recreate the sort of, you know, granular details of everyday life, but does it engage some of the big questions and dilemmas that Americans actually cared and thought about in the time period? And I actually do find red dead redemption two to be a historically thoughtful game in the sense that it engages a lot of the core dilemmas that, you know, are really transforming American life. And the role of big corporations, the role of railroads, the cattle ranching industry as a transformer of space and of politics, the role of gunslingers, but thinking of gunslingers is beyond just the mythology that Hollywood has given us. So I actually think that, you know, on the whole, the accuracy is often suffering. You know, there's the timing is way off. I mean, red dead two is set in 1899, but it really is a game about subjects that took place in the early 1870s. So it's like, you know, 30 years offer. So, but I think there's a lot to work with in red dead two to be sure. It's a mashup in many ways. And what I find interesting is by choosing 1899, they're really talking about the transition moment or transitional era of when the West really becomes part of, you know, linked with the railroad and so forth and industry is moving out there. And it's really the, that same butch Cassidy and Sundance kind of theme of, you know, the melancholy we've lost this garden of Eden kind of feeling. But indeed, if there's a single document at historical episode that inspired red dead two, it probably is butch Cassidy's hole in the wall game. Yeah, exactly. Only my favorite movie of all time. So I want to talk though about Americans idea of this era. It takes about two centuries of American West immigrant settlement for this sort of romanticized and glamorized stylized idea of the West through all these dime store novels and widescreen movies. It's always been a story of good versus evil played out on the planes. So let's reassess this history with this conversation. If I was a non hero average Joe, you know, not a character in a video game or movie, post Civil War and I decided to go West. What would I have experienced out there? Is there a kind of typical baseline there? Not really. There's so much diversity depending on where you go, right? If you move to a farming community in South Dakota, let's say everyone around you are Norwegian immigrants. You're going to see a very different place than if you move to a mining town in Colorado or California or to a ranching town in Kansas or Texas or a place like that. So huge chunks of the West were quite sleepy and boring and very non violent to be sure. But of course there were sort of hot zones, pockets where there was a great deal of chaos and lots of strangers encountering each other in this high pressure scenarios. And it's true that those pockets, places like Abilene, Kansas, Greeley, Colorado, that could be quite violent because there's a lot of sort of colliding forces coming together and a lot of alcohol and tension and potential profits to be made. I guess this has a lot to do with Manifest Destiny, but who coined the term Wild West? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know if there's a single originator who we can give credit or blame to for this. But the term starts to become frequently used by the 1870s and 1880s. So it's in the very moment that so many Westerns are set, fictional Westerns, that this concept is arising. And I would probably give credit in part to Buffalo Bill Cody, William Cody, who is this paradoxical guy who's one week in Wyoming fighting native peoples or engaged in violent conflict. And then the next week he's in New York on stage performing about it to gleeful audiences where eager to swallow up this sort of Western mythology. So this mythology is being created at the very moment that the history is actually taking place, which is a very interesting paradox. And it's really the term as a frontier. And frontier changes so much as the nation expands. But even the idea, I ask myself this and I look when looking for where did frontier even become a notion to certainly white people. It was really under the Roman. The Romans kind of popularized the idea because of their marches north into the Germanic territories and gollic and all that. That became a frontier area for them. And that has been carried forth that there's always this area that is just very dangerous, but full of promise. And off we will go. And that becomes inevitably glamorized and mysterious thing. In the West around 1880, what was the average settlement on the expanse like? The image again, I'm really the guy here talking about these archetypal things. The image is the saloon, the sheriff's office, the main street with a few homes on it and so forth. And the staples, how typical was that? And was there some sort of guide to building a town in those days? Yeah, I mean, certainly there's outpost settlements. I think Deadwood in the Dakota territory, what's today South Dakota is this sort of iconic place. But really they exist because there's big industries going on. So for Deadwood example, there's gold mining that's drawing lots of people there. Often it was ranching, agriculture, but large-scale ranching undertaking. I think what's absent in so many of the mythical representations of these sleepy frontier towns is capitalism. And in particular, industrial capitalism because so much of Western history is about Eastern power interests trying to flex their muscles and take control of landscapes and materials and people as well in this region. And so much of the violence that defined the West in the late 19th century was actually violence about capitalism and violence about politics. And that doesn't show up in the John Wayne version of American Western history. Tell me about a figure named Frederick Jackson Turner. Yeah, well, I don't think there's any single individual who does more to popularize this sort of significance of the frontier as the sort of backbone of American history and also popularize this notion of the West as this thing that's closing, that's beginning to wane, that is, you know, being tamed and domesticated and civilized. So Frederick Jackson Turner is this historian and usually historians use a history of professor. Usually they don't have vast impact on American culture in the same way that this guy does. But in 1893 at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, which is this huge fair held in Chicago in 1893, it was meant to celebrate the 400 year anniversary of Columbus's discovery of the Americas. And he gives this address and basically says, you know, the frontier is what defines the American character. It's what makes Americans this process of taming what he called empty land. They weren't actually empty at all, but that's how he imagined them that this really defined the American character that it made Americans, a democratic like small D democratic. They made them egalitarian made them individualistic and made them different from Europe. But then he warns folks as well that, hey, you know, that world is coming to an end. The frontier is closing and he's really anxious about it, you know, because if he sees the frontier as like what made America great in that period, then he's very worried that something's going to come to an end. So in many ways, like in dozens of Western films and certainly in Red Dead Redemption too, which is very much a game about the sort of closing quote unquote of the frontier. Frederick Jackson Turner should be in the credits. Like he should be given, you know, credit for pointing a lot of this mythology. The problem is that it's really mythology. It's not really history. It's just that even the idea of an old West and a new West, I'm not convinced that there's such a neat distinction that there's like a neat perforation mark between one and the other. It's amazing how, you know, how much at least in our memory, the poets and the writers of that time period were really grappling with this major, these major themes of what American meant, you know, for better or worse, and certainly in its cruel form, you know, chasing people off their lands eventually. But in terms of the manifest destiny and freedom and republicanism and all the things that were coming up in the 19th century coming out of certainly the age of revolution, which is earlier, it's amazing how broad stroke they were getting with this stuff and the frontier and the American West figures centrally into that, doesn't it? Absolutely. And really think that when Easterners, and most of the folks writing this are Easterners, right, in the US, from New York or from Washington or Boston or something, when they look at the West, what they're really doing is looking into a mirror and trying to figure out something about themselves. And indeed, so much of the fantasy about the West is really about Eastern anxieties more than anything. For example, let's take Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt is one of these, you know, well-known chroniclers of the West. He writes this multi-book series called The Winning of the West. He was obsessed with, you know, going out to the Dakotas, ranching, riding on horseback and all this sort of stuff. Well, a lot of the reason why has to do with his anxieties of what life was like back home, which is New York, right? He's a wealthy New Yorker. He's living at a moment when industrialization is redefining American cities when people are moving off of farms and moving into factories or offices. For him, very much offices because he comes from this well-to-do background. And they're doing work that's super different than what they've grown up with, right? They're not performing muscular tasks on a farm anymore. They're balancing checkbooks. They are, you know, looking at accounting ledgers. They are typing letters. And for Teddy Roosevelt, this made him really anxious because he believed that this was affecting American manhood. He believed that office life, that industrial urban life, was emasculating men. That it was basically removing their masculine prowess. And that made him very nervous, right? So he sees the West as this safety valve that can restore this fading American masculinity or grandiosity or whatever. So when he's looking at South Dakota, he's really just seeing a mirror inverse of New York city, which is really important to know. God forbid, we end up like those Europeans. That's right. Many Americans were very anxious about that, right? They really saw, you know, especially white, well to do Americans, they'd look at Europe and they're trying to define themselves in opposition to that to be certain, right? They see the aristocracy and inequality of Europe. And they're like, we don't want to be that. We're the antifacist. How common was the violence in these frontier towns? Again, it depends where you look, right? If you look at like German American, Norwegian American, Hutterright colonies, you know, the agricultural colonies, they're like some of the least violent places that you could imagine. Of course, they came after a great deal of violence, which was the military, removing native people so that they could settle there. So they're living in the aftermath of violence. But yes, there's a lot of very, you know, peaceful homogenous communities across the West. But there are lots of places where bullets did fly. Parts of Wyoming and ranching country, the Johnson County War of the 1880s and 1890s. I mean, those are violent showdowns, different parts of Missouri where Jesse James is doing his business. I have to talk more about him later on. Parts of Kansas and Texas where people like Wild Bill Hickock are applying their trade. Yeah, there was violence, you know, and it's very hard to get like really reliable homicide data from this period just because the bean counters were not all that sophisticated at the time. From the numbers that we do have, we can tell that the sort of the most chaotic locations out West were definitely more violent than like New York or Baltimore or Boston at the time. Like the per capita homicide rate was distinctly higher in the most kind of rambunctious frontier towns in the West in the late 19th century. One of the things that's most enlightening in this podcast series of how many times you talk about economic emergencies in the 19th century, you know, major panics and so forth. And how much that really intersects with political events certainly. But also I've never really seen how it works in terms of people settling in the West. You know, there must be these surges of people that go out in response to these things, but there must be also criminals who go looking for to exploit this world when things are hurt and back home. Yeah. Let's step away for a moment and when we return, we'll talk a little more about those outlaws and the authorities on their trail. Lego Star Wars Smart Play Sets contain everything you need for interactive play, including a powerful smart brick that reacts to how you move and play. Smart bricks recognize smart tags and smart minifigures to bring play to life with amazing interactive features. So now the galaxy plays back shop all in one set for interactive play. It's been a lovely chance for me to remember her and to write a quite ordinary person back into history. A family history of is the brand new podcast that takes you inside the lives of everyday people at pivotal moments in Britain and Ireland's past. In the first three part series renowned historian Lucy Worsley, uncovers how two world wars shaped her grandmother's life. Listen to a family history of wherever you get your podcasts. Ever wondered what it feels like to be a gladiator facing a roaring crowd and potential death in the Colosseum? Find out on the ancient podcast from History Hit. Twice a week, join me, Tristan Hughes, as I hear exciting new research about people living thousands of years ago from the Babylonians to the Celts to the Romans and visit the ancient sites which reveal who and just how amazing our distant ancestors were. That's the ancient from History Hit. Hello, we're back speaking with Professor and author Tori Olsen about the for real of the American West. Part of the outlaws, those glowering villains, riding in black, slinging their guns and shots of bourbon. How much crime was really being committed out there and did it so often end up with people drawing on each other in the street? Yeah. Most of that is a complete fantasy in many ways. Yeah. I've spent a lot of time looking at the Red Dead Redemption video games and in Red Dead 2, Arthur Morgan, the protagonist, the minimum number of people that he kills during his adventure is somewhere around 900. That is an absolutely bizarre overinflation of violence that took place. There were outlaws who had committed homicide frequently, but there's only a handful of outlaws that even kill the dozen people. Looking at someone with hundreds of, this is completely bizarre. Nevertheless, there are these famous outlaws. I mean, I think Jesse James is a sort of classic example. But what gets lost in the story of Jesse James is that his bloodshed, his fighting, his bank robberies, they had a lot to do with politics. He is really a leftover from the Civil War rather than this sort of Western anti-hero. You joked about him, about the villains wearing black. Well, the James gang would actually sometimes wear all white because they wore the garb of the Ku Klux Klan. They would wear robes to signify their allegiance to Southern democratic politics because they're these leftovers from the Civil War. They've been fighting in Missouri against a Republican union-oriented US forces. Politics infuses all of this. Usually it's Democrats shooting at Republicans and Republicans shooting at Democrats. This is what is largely true of the outlaws of the West. The partisan identity of outlaws is something that never comes through in Hollywood or video games. A lot of had to come out of Kansas during the 1850s. Oh, yeah. I mean, Kansas is the very divided states, just like Missouri. Missouri even more so in many ways because Kansas, at least, was squarely within the United States. Missouri is too. But yeah, so we tend to separate the Civil War from the Western violence of the 1870s and the 1880s. But how could that possibly be the case? I mean, this is in the direct aftermath. And many of the key dilemmas of the Civil War are not resolved by the time of 1865. There's still a lot of stewing animosities about these questions. Yeah, there was a, I mean, these ex-confederate gorillas are really what we're talking about here. And they're basically carrying on this war, certainly in Jesse James's case, but also in the techniques that they've learned, you know, cavalrymen and so forth, of how to operate this way. Boy, it's just a breeding ground for that kind of mentality. That sort of alienation also, which would find a home in such wild worlds as outside out there. Yeah, a lot of them are former gorillas, right? I mean, former who'd been practicing unconventional warfare in, you know, these sort of semi-military environments. Yeah. But it's also centered around, as you say before, the hot pockets of, you know, ongoing wealth or at least discovery of wealth, those mining communities down in the Southwest, you know, Texas on over New Mexico, what becomes New Mexico and Arizona, those are places where silver is being mined and so forth. And, you know, this becomes its own little magnet for so much commerce, but also from anality, I imagine, right? Yeah, I mean, one of the most famous explosions of Western violence is in a small town called Ludlow in Colorado in the 19 teens, in 1914, actually. But this is not an app, more than a dozen people are killed in this explosion of violence around a mining town. But this is not a sort of moment of Western violence that usually makes it into Hollywood because this is about a strike. This is about a labor conflict between the Rockefeller families owned mining company and then a really diverse group of miners who are on strike. And you know, we tend to suck the politics and unionism out of the Western history story, but it was a huge part of it. How much of the law, the institution of the law, the sheriff, the deputies, all that? How much is that real and was it part of a structure that I'm not aware of in terms of how they plant the system in these new territories? Well, yeah, so it depends whether, you know, this is a territory or a state. There's, you know, a formal transition between those that's very significant. Very often the sort of the law, the sheriffs, if you will, were the representatives of Eastern businesses who were coming there to safeguard the extraction of capital of raw materials back east. And I think here a classic example is Wild Bill Hickock. Wild Bill Hickock is this peace officer who's working in ranching towns who is there to basically protect the interests of the meatpacking corporations, the railroads, the banks, which are almost all Eastern in origin or at least Chicago in origin, either Chicago or Eastern cities. And they're almost all Republican. And Wild Bill Hickock is a dyed in the world Republican as well who is trying to protect the institution of industrial capitalism in the West and keep folks from, you know, getting grit in the gears, particularly cowboys, Texas cowboys who tended to be Democrats who were much more hostile toward these big Eastern businesses. And who, you know, were still had gripes about the Civil War. This is, you know, 10, 15 years later on. So Wild Bill Hickock, you know, he's, he's this Republican who's often shooting at Democratic cowboys, which is quite fascinating. It's so similar to the Pinkerton's, you know, anywhere how private security was really the police force in so many situations that we assume there was government involved and it wasn't. Yeah. Well, the Pinkerton's is something I love to chat about because they have a very special place in Red Dead Redemption 2. They are the only institution that is not fictionalized in Red Dead 2. They are called the Pinkerton's. That's exactly the same name that they went by in the late 19th century. And this actually got to the developer rock star games in a bit of trouble because the Pinkerton agency still exists in much reduced format. And they sued rock star games saying that they were, you know, defaming their reputation by portraying them so negatively on the screen. But of course the Pinkerton's were very real. However, most of the time they were breaking unions and labor strikes and disputes rather than chasing outlaws. I mean, they did chase some outlaws to be sure. But by the 1890s, they're really this sort of hired guns of big business in a sort of industrial setting. Well, here you have the exact intersection we're talking about because the image of the sheriff, the Gary Cooper and High Noon, even Clint Eastwood and his weird guy, or wanders around guy, there are all these moralistic lessons that are being taught in Hollywood, utilizing the canvas of this world which is so rich and useful for storytelling purposes. When in fact, I mean, in the next case, it's an Italian director shooting in Italy. You know, it's that far away from reality. It's amazing. You know, who I love is Wyatt Urb, famous of course from the Tombstone shootout. He's the deputy US Marshal in Tombstone, Arizona, famous in 1881 for that. But he goes on, he has this amazing career afterwards where he ends up in boxing and all sorts of things. It's just this amazing longer career than we ever give, give notice to. But it's, he was kind of typical. I would imagine of these law enforcement officers out there who come from different backgrounds who are there for different purposes. And certainly it's not as ordered and routine and operation as we see in the movies again or gunsmoke on TV. Yeah, and it gets at that core theme here that many of these large and life figures are performers themselves, right? Yes. That they are actors representing themselves at the same time that they're engaged in the actual business that they're doing. And again, Buffalo, Bill Cody I think is the most sort of prominent example of that paradox. Another character in all of this is the railroad. Once the railroad comes out, it changes the whole story. I guess you could go even before that is the barbed wire fence, you know, like these these technological achievement or advances that absolutely change the landscape. Never mind the function of these lands. And we're not even talking about Native Americans and how that's complicating the situation as well. But the railroad comes and it becomes its own sort of villain in a way, although of course it's not. And certainly it's portrayed that way in so many movies, isn't it? Well, the railroads were viciously hated by many, many Westerners who knew, you know, Western settlers, whether they were miners or farmers or whatnot, they knew that they were dependent on the railroads because the railroads were their commercial link to the wider economy. But they despised the railroads because of their power and because they often felt that they were being taken advantage of by these large powerful corporations. And they were often right because railroads were very frequently known to, exercise monopolistic power into gouge customers and to jack up rates for some customers and reduce them for others. So, you know, the railroad is a central protagonist in the Western drama, but the railroad, and we have to think of them, they're really eastern tools of capital extraction. They are out west because they are funneling the wealth of the planes of the mountains, of the forests to into eastern hands, right? The timber is going to make apartment complexes in Brooklyn, New York, for example. The meat of the planes is going to plates in Boston and Baltimore. The coal is going to be burned in stoves to keep, you know, the Bostonians warm during the bitter winter. And it's all coming on rail cars, right? I mean, the railroad is this sort of manifestation of industrial capitalism out in the West. Yeah, there's a couple anecdotes, historical anecdotes that fascinate me. First of all, I mean, talk about dividing the nation. You really have the northern railroad, the central railroad and the southern railroads, and they kind of divide the country up that way. Most people don't realize that's where those interstates come from. You know, you can drive on Route 80 going across. You can drive these major courses, intercourse is there, and they're all tracing that same old route that those original railroads are there and still are. Well, once you blow up a mountain, you don't want to do it again. That's right. The other thing that fascinated me, and I was just out in San Francisco talking to friends of mine who are living there now, and they are staring at Alcatraz. And I said, you know, Alcatraz was this old, you know, military brig, but it was the union's fear of losing the goal that was in the mint in San Francisco, which they couldn't get back east until the railroad came that caused the need for creating Alcatraz as a fort. You know, that was the first impulse to do that. Yeah. Well, San Francisco is a huge railroad town, though I think it's less acknowledged nowadays. I mean, Stanford University, for example, is founded by Leland Stanford, who is this railroad tycoon of the 1860s and 70s. He was also widely despised in his time for all sorts of unscrupulous business practices. When we come back, we'll discuss the major costs and consequences of this continental expansion across the West, the main drivers, and the primary victims. The Lego Star Wars smart play sets contain everything you need for interactive play, including a powerful smart brick that reacts to how you move and play. Smart bricks recognize smart tags and smart mini figures to bring play to life with amazing interactive features. So now the galaxy plays back. Shop all in one set for interactive play. It's been a lovely chance for me to remember her and to write a quite ordinary person back into history. A family history of is the brand new podcast that takes you inside the lives of everyday people at pivotal moments in Britain and Ireland's past. In the first three part series, renowned historian Lucy Worsley, uncovers how two world wars shaped her grandmother's life. Listen to a family history of wherever you get your podcasts. We're talking to Torielsen about the American West and its facts and fictions. How central was violence towards Native Americans in this frontier expansion? Again, we see the howboys in Indian movies, they're called all that sort of spectacular violence was not really part of regular life, wasn't it? Well, you just don't have US, Western history. If you don't have this violent expropriation and dispossession of Native peoples, right? I mean to make the West the West, meaning that it should be defined in relation to the East, the backbone of the nation. That takes a lot of violence, right? Because Native people didn't think of Wyoming or South Dakota, which stays South Dakota, as the West. They thought of the center, right? As they're home, Mexicans thought about it as the North. It gives part of Northern Mexico, of course. So to make a place like Wyoming or California, the West took a lot of violence, took a lot of, you know, a lot of this was achieved at the end point of rifle to be certain. And of course, you know, this cinematic theme of so-called cowboys and Indians has been reinforced so often, but it was extremely rare that cowboys would be the ones engaged in combat with Native peoples. It's really the US military. The US military is the force that's doing so. By the time the cowboys show up, Native peoples have been largely removed from the picture. And the story about military encounters between Native peoples of which there's such tremendous diversity as to how they live, the languages they speak, the cultures they practice, that is a tremendous story that defines many hundreds of years, but really comes to a crescendo in terms of violence and drama in the 1860s and 1870s. I mean, those are the decades when frequent battles between Native tribes and the government through the military are happening on a regular basis. As everything to do with the homestead act, doesn't it? 1862. It does though a lot of it precedes it, of course, as well. But certainly the homestead act brings a new pressure point of settlers coming at this tremendous rate. And the settlers often cared little about what kinds of treaties Washington had negotiated with various Native groups. They were like, this is good land. We're going to move here. Not just settlers, but mining companies. And there's a tremendous pressure that results from these new invaders, essentially, Eastern invaders who were coming to claim lands that were not at all theirs. And weren't even legally available, whether or not through the homestead act. How many of the great hunts of these bison? I mean, it was such an amazing visual that people back east got. Where did that figure into this? Yeah, this is something I care about a lot because in Red Dead Redemption 2, the kind of most popular Western video game I've ever made, bison hunting is a central part of the game as well. But we really need to think of the bison hunts as an ecological struggle for dominance on the plains. These bison are this large ruminant, meaning that they have stomachs that can digest grass. Well, and Native peoples had depended on the bison for quite some time, especially in the 1700s and 1800s, on bison herds sustain themselves. But when white settlers come in, they want to replace the bison with another ruminant, this being, of course, the cow. And they don't see these two as being able to share the plains together. So the hunt for the bison by white, both the military, by private hunters, and by corporations really has to do with clearing the plains of the bison so that cattle can graze there instead. And this meant that people would shoot bison not for economical purposes. I mean, yes, you could shoot a bison and sell the hide or sell the fat or something like that. But very often, they just left a rot because they want to remove them, to remove the foundation of Native life and also to make way for cattle in their place. The connectivity of these things historically just gives me chills because you end up with this whole chain reaction where, yeah, you're getting rid of the bus envelope. Now you've cleared the ranch lands for cattle. Then the railroads coming out, the railroad comes out, Chicago develops. Chicago gets supercharged by refrigerator cars later on, which suddenly, you know, the demand for meat increases as a result of that efficiency. It's an amazing. They're coming to the Cowboys and then Cowboys. Yeah, exactly. Right. Because the Cowboys are, you know, the employees of these massive corporate enterprises. Exactly. Add to that. And then of course, more and more railroad expansion as lands are more and more exploited. Add to that the mining booms, which are all over the place, Colorado, my goodness, all over to this day still discovering gold. Yeah. And of course, down in Arizona, this is the essence of these ghost towns. These boom and bust places. Yeah. Right. Absolutely. Because capitalism is this boom and bust phenomenon, right? People surge into a place, extract all the wealth and then nothing left and they leave and they move elsewhere. And you know, this continues into the 20th century. I mean, there's a uranium rush, a copper rush. You know, there's all these mineral rushes that take place in 1930s, 1940s, 1950s. This is supposedly long after they quote unquote wild west is over, but you have some of the same conditions being created. This is why I'm allergic to over declarations of, you know, the old west and new west. Like when does this actually change? A lot of the phenomenon keep going much later than you might imagine. Yeah. We were doing a TV show up and I guess it was Northwest Colorado, cripple creek. And we were doing a gold story up there. And man, we had to go out there to get this story, first of all. And then we end up with this enormous gold mine, which was owned by a South African gold company. And they're bleeding the ground, leaching the ground with, with chemicals to get the rest of that gold out every day. They were producing a button of gold. They called it, which was worth a million dollars. You could hold it in your hand every single day still to this day. I mean, it's always been about this out west so much so many rich minerals. It's just harder to get. So maybe, maybe the 21st century, there's still such a thing as a wild west. I guess. I mean, we've been pretty wild people out there. And the boom times you bring together a lot of, you know, unaffiliated young men who are there for a quick profit. And they're better armed today than they were in the 1880s. I promise you that the American rates of gun ownership are much higher today than they were back then. So you know, I agree. The largest story of this frontier exploitation and the violence there is really an economic tale. I mean, it's industrial level. It really is. You know, it brought violence to another wise, peaceful frontier, certainly with the Native Americans for the most part. It's really the effect of the industrial revolution as so much is in the 19th century. And for that, it required land and resources. That kind of wraps up the idea in a little paragraph, doesn't it? Yeah. And you know, that's why it doesn't fit into the mythological version because Easter nerds were looking to the west and wanting an escape. They wanted a safety valve away from their capitalist troubles in the, you know, on the coast, on the eastern coast. So therefore they, you know, suck that reality out of the retelling of it. They remove and sort of scrub away the ways that industrial capitalism was also transforming the west in just the same sorts of ways. And then you find it so useful in the storytelling of Hollywood and in books and so forth, you know, how these ideas of manhood ought to be reframed with every generation. The idea of America, you know, in the Vietnam age was so much in question in the 70s. Suddenly you're seeing Clint Eastwood all over the place, you know, coming into towns and straightening things out. The west has always been that canvas upon which to, you know, cast, you know, paint the picture of America as we would idealize as we wish it was. Yeah. I mean, think about how many politicians have used that Western iconography of the cowboy who supercharged their campaigns all the way from Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush. You know, this is like a very predictable move to play in the political range. Yeah. And now you can play a game about it, right? That's the idea of Red Dead. That's right. Yeah, except I really do think that the Red Dead Redemption games are actually smarter depictions of the west than, you know, the classic John Wayne films of the 1950s and 60s because they really, first off, there's no good gods. I mean, everyone is pretty bad in these games. There's no black and white morality tale in the same way that, you know, the John Wayne films depicted and native peoples have much more of a complex and central role in the games as opposed to, you know, the sort of mythology of those of those classic westerns where native peoples are really seen as less than human or just, you know, props on the side before, you know, US white settlers arrive. The story really can be summed up in on our end, really, where the violence, the idea of the violence comes from and it really wasn't from those lung gunmen. It wasn't from the Native Americans. It was really about the coordinated expansion of the US government and private enterprise working together to claim land, extract those resources, suppressed resistance. But that's a story that's very hard to romanticize. So instead we turn that all on its head and make characters and archetypes out of all of that. Yeah. So it's fascinating. So some of these hot spots when it came to violence like tombstone, for example, deadwood, for example, I can promise you that the city leaders at that time in the 1870s, 80s and 90s, they hated the fact that these places were known for violence. They were deeply ashamed of this violence. There was nothing sensational or they that took no pride in it whatsoever. They knew it was going to keep visitors away. You know, like this was going to scare people off. It's only once time passes that this becomes covered in dust and safely placed behind glass that towns are able to sort of promote their violent history as a tourism attraction. Now today, tons of people flock to deadwood and tombstone just to see the recreations of those shootouts. That was not the case at the time. I mean, city leaders were deeply embarrassed by this. Maybe the same will happen for more recent explosions of violence. For example, Los Angeles in the 1980s and 90s was a really violent place. Crack cocaine epidemic, LAPDs, this was something that many Americans were deeply anxious and ashamed about as well. It's not something not a feel-good story. Maybe a hundred years from now, you'll get tours of gunslingers in 1980s Los Angeles. I mean, it's hard to imagine, but history in nostalgia has a way of permeating and rebranding the past into something very different than it was at the time. It's going to be hard to make the frontier of space ever seem as romantic as the frontier of the American West. So I think we're going nowhere. We're going to only keep making movies. What's your favorite American movie? American West movie? Good question. You know, I'm really more of a television guy because I like the long form of it. I really like the HBO series Deadwood, which is about 20 years old at this point. And that's a one I come back to all the time. But really, I play more video games than I watch movies now. Butch Cassidy was mine. I think I'm going to replace it by True Grit with Jeff Bridges. I love that depiction because of the ordinaryness of life. In their epic journey, you get the sort of grit and boredom of that lifestyle that was really so much of the world that they were living in. Tori C. Olson is a professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He's the author of most recently a book we discussed at length here. Red Dead's History, a video game and obsession and America's violent past. Read that book signed by side by playing the game. It looks like a lot of fun. What's on the new horizon story? Oh, I'm doing a new class at the moment that looks at US history since 1980 through the lens of the Grand Theft Auto video games. So turning to more recent history and another video games exploration of that past, which has been a lot of fun. I love it. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me, Don, who's a great chatting. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great. You'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support.