How Wild Was the Wild West? | The Frontier

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with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe to bring the past alive. Here we are, some time and say, late 1880s in a rough shot town of the dry dusty planes of the American West. Here in this saloon, the bartender slings bourbon shots, gamblers lean over their cards, laughter drifts down the girls in the balcony. And suddenly, 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 holster 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, surveyors 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 that far more consequential. Because once that burst, locomotive steams through town, watch out. 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 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 Toray Olsen, associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Govaals. 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, Toray, nice to meet you. Hey, nice to meet you, Don. Thank you so much for having me on the show. Oh, you're very welcome. Toray, 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, then a new version 2018 I did my research.

One of the most successful games ever made, has sold 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 in 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 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 about as complicated as my gaming was,

in red dead is the picture of the American West? I mean, is it as comic book or, 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 Apple, Action, 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, you know, stuff is made up. 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, we're really transforming American life. I mean, 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 this, 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 came about subjects that took place in the early 1870s, so it's like, you know,

“very years off or 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, by choosing 1899, they're really talking about the transition moment or transitional era of when the West really becomes part of, you know, the 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, uh, and indeed, if there's a single

documented historical episode that inspired red dead two, it probably is Butch Cassidy's whole and 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 Abelene, Kansas, Greely, 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

you know, in Wyoming, you know, fighting native peoples or, you know, engaged in violent conflict.

“And then the next week he's in New York on stage performing about it to, you know,”

gleeful audiences were eager to swallow up this sort of western mythology. So it is, you know, 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 is the frontier and frontier changes so much as the nation expands. But even the idea, I asked myself this and I look when looking for where did frontier have become a notion to certainly white people? It was really under the

moment. The Romans kind of popularized the idea because of their marches north into the Germanic territories and garlic and all that. That became a frontier area for them. And that has been carried

forth that there's always this area that you just was very dangerous but full of promise and

and off we will go and that becomes inevitably glamorized and mysterious, you know, becomes a mysterious thing. In the west around 1880, what was the average settlement on the expanse like? Are we, you know, that the image again, I'm, I'm really the guy here talking about these archetypal things, the images, the saloon, the sheriff's office, the main street with a few, you know, homes on it and so on and the stables, how typical was that? And was there some sort of guide to, to building

“a town in those days? Yeah, I mean, certainly there's outpost settlements, you know, I think”

dead wood in the Dakota territory, what's today South Dakota, is a sort of, you know, iconic place, but really they exist because there's big industries going on, right? So for dead wood example, there's gold mining, that's drawing lots of people there, often it was ranshing, agriculture, but, but large-scale ranshing undertaken. I think what's absent in so many of the mythical representations of these sleepy frontier towns is capitalism. And particularly 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, you know, that doesn't show up with 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 the significance of the frontier as this 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's this historian. And usually historians, he's a history 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 Colombian 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. But this really defined the American character that it made”

Americans democratic, a 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 that's something's going to come to an end. So in many ways, like in dozens of Western

films and certainly in Red Dead Redemption 2, which is very much a game about the sort of closing quote unquote with the frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner should be in the credits. Like he should be

given, you know, credit for coining a lot of this mythology. The problem is that it's really

mythologies, not really history. It's just, 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 America 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,

stroke they were getting with this stuff, and the frontier and the American West figures centrally

“into that, doesn't it? Absolutely. I 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's 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 decoders, ranching, writing on horseback, and all this roof 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're growing 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, for 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 man, that it was basically removing their masculine prowess. And that made him very nervous.

Right? So he sees the West as the safety valve that can restore this fading American, you know, 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? Because 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 are the antithesis, though. 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, no, hudderite colonies, you know, agricultural colonies, they're like some of the least violent places that you could imagine. Of course, you know, 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. Have to talk more about him later on. Yeah. Parts of Kansas and Texas were people like while 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. But 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 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 set up 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 are looking for to exploit this world when things are hurting 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. Everyone did what it feels like to be a gladiator facing a roaring crowd and potential death

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of the American West. All right, the outlaws, those glowering villains,

brightening and 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. You know, 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 900th. Okay. That is a absolutely bizarre overinflation of violence that took place, right? I mean, there were outlaws who, you know, had

committed homicide frequently, but there's only a handful of outlaws that even kill the dozen people. All right. So like, you know, looking at someone with hundreds of, I mean, this is completely bizarre. Nevertheless, right, there are these famous outlaws. I mean, I think Jesse James, this is 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, the garb of the Ku Klux clan, right? They would wear robes to signify their allegiance to Southern Democratic politics because they're these leftovers from the Civil War, right? They've been fighting in Missouri against a Republican union oriented U.S. forces.

So, you know, politics infuses all of this. Usually it's Democrats shooting at Republicans and Republicans shooting at Democrats. I mean, this is what is largely true of the outlaws of the West.

But, you know, the partisan identity of outlaws is something that never comes through in Hollywood

or video games. I thought a lot of have had to come out of Kansas, right, during the 1850s. Oh, yeah. Right. 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. I mean, Missouri is too. But, yeah. I mean, you know, we, we tend to separate the Civil War from the Western violence of the 1870s and 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's a, I mean,

these ex-conferred guerrillas are really what we're talking about here. And they're basically

carrying on this war, certainly in Jesse James's case. But, but also in the techniques that they've learned, you know, cavalrymen and so forth, sure, of how to operate this way. Boy, it's just a breeding ground for that kind of mentality and that sort of alienation, also, which would find a home in such wild, rural disaster out there. Yeah, a lot of them are former guerrillas, right? I mean, who'd been practicing unconventional warfare in, you know, these sorts 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 magnet for so much commerce, but also criminality, 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 1910s, in 1914, actually. But, this is not an, 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 family's owned mining company and then a really diverse group of miners who were

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, this 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, the classic example is Wild Bill Hickock.

protect the interests of the meat packing corporations, the railroads, the banks, which are almost

“all Eastern in origin, or at least Chicago in origin, Eastern Chicago or Eastern cities. And they're”

almost all Republican. And Wild Bill Hickock is a diet 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 attended 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 says 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 Rockstar Games in a bit of trouble because the Pinkerton agency still exists in a much reduced format. And they sued Rockstar 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 in 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, you know, guy or wander's

around guy, they're all these moralistic lessons that are being taught, you know, in Hollywood, utilizing the canvas of this world, which is so rich and useful to for storytelling purposes, when in fact, I mean, in Clint Eastwood case, there's an Italian director shooting in Italy.

You know, it's that far away from reality. Amazing. You know, who I love is Wyatt or, you know,

famous, of course, from the tombstone shootout. But he's the deputy U.S. Marshall 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. Just this amazing longer career than we ever give, give notice to him. 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, you know, routine and operation as we see in the movies again, or Gunsmoke on TV. Yeah, I guess at that core theme here that many of these larger and life figures are performers themselves, right? 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 achievements or advances that absolutely change the landscape,

never mind the function of these lands. And we are 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. It certainly is portrayed that way in so many movies, isn't it? While the railroads were viciously hated by many, many Westerners, who knew Western settlers, whether they were minors 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, into 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.

bitter winter, and it's all coming on rail cars, right? I mean, the railroad is the sort of

“manifestation of industrial capitalism out in the west. Yeah, there's a couple of anecdot historical”

anecdotes that fascinate me. First of all, I mean, talk about dividing the nation. You really

have a 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 can drive on Route 80 going across, you can drive these major courses, uh, intercourses 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. The other thing is 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 break, but it was the Union's fear of losing the gold 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 fork. 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-type coup, one of the 1860s and 70s, who was also widely despised in its 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. Ever wondered what it feels like to be a gladiator, facing a roaring crowd and potential death

in the Coliseum, find out on the ancients podcast from history hit. Twice a week, joined me, Tristan Hughes, as I hear exciting new research about people living thousands of years ago from the Babylonians to the Coats, to the Romans, and visit the ancient sites which reveal who,

and just how amazing our distant ancestors were. That's the ancients from history hit.

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 Cowboys and 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 U.S. 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 they South Dakota as the West. They thought of as the center, right? As their home, the Mexican 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 U.S. military. The U.S. 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 a 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.

Has everything to do with a homestead act? Doesn't it 1862? It does. There were a lot of it precedes it, of course, as well. But certainly, the homestead act brings a new pressure point of settlers coming at the 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. And, you know, not just settlers, but mining companies and, you know,

there's a tremendous pressure that results from these new invaders, essentially, right? Eastern invaders were coming to claim lands that had to work, not at all theirs. And weren't even legally available of whether or not through the homestead act. Tell me how 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. Yeah. This is something I care about a lot, because in Red Dead Redemption 2,

Uh, as well. But we really need to think of the bison hunts as an ecological struggle for dominance

“on the plains. Because bison are this, you know, 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 to 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 can graze there instead. And this meant that, you know, people with 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, there's 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 bison bubble. Now you've cleared the ranchlands for cattle. Then the, the, the, the, 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 day for 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 isn't it? Yeah. Right. Absolutely. Because capitalism is this boom and bust

phenomenon, right? People surge into a place, extract all the wealth and then the 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 at 1930s, 1940s, 1950s. This is supposedly long after the quote unquote Wild West is over. But you have some of the same conditions being created. This is why I'm allergic to the over

“declarations of, you know, the old West and new West. Like, when does this actually change?”

Yeah. A lot of the phenomena keep going much later than you might imagine. Yeah. We were doing TV show up in, uh, 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 at 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, right? I mean, pretty wild people have symptoms. On the boom towns, 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 as 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”

Easterners 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 a 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

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 supercharge their campaigns all the way from Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush. Now, 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 up, there's no good guts. 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 seen those sort of props on the side before, you know, U.S. 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 long gunmen. It wasn't from the Native Americans. It was really about the coordinated expansion of the U.S. government and private enterprise working together to claim land, extract those resources, suppress 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, it's so fascinating, right? So some of these hotspots when it came to violence, like tombstone, for example, dead wood, 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 had took no pride in it whatsoever. They knew it was going to keep visitors away.

And I like this was going to scare people off. It's only once time passes that, you know, this becomes covered in dust and safely placed behind glass, that towns are able to sort of, you know, promote their violent history as a tourism attraction. You know, now today, tons of people flock to dead wood and tombstone, just to see the recreations of those shootouts, that was not the case at the time. I mean, the city leaders were deeply embarrassed by this. And, you know, maybe the same

will happen for more recent explosions of violence. For example, like Los Angeles in the 1980s and 90s was a really violent place. You know, crack cocaine epidemic, LAPDs, you know, this was something that Americans were deeply, you know, anxious and ashamed about as well. It's not something not a feel-good story. Maybe 100 years from now, you'll get tours of, you know, of gunslingers in 1980s Los Angeles. I mean, it's hard to imagine, but history in nostalgia has a way of permeating

and, you know, 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 if we're going nowhere, we're going to only keep making movies.”

What's your favorite American movie of 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 Dead Wood, which is, you know, about 20 years old at this point. But that's a, that's a, that's a, that's one I come back to all the time. But really, I, I play more video games than I watch movies now. But, butch Cassidy was mine. I think I'm going to replace it by true grit with Jeff Jeff Bridges. I love

that depiction because of the ordinaryness of life in their epic journey. You get this 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 is the author of most recently a book we discussed at length here. Red Dead's history, a video game, an obsession in America's violent past, read that book side 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, Donna. It's a great chatting. Hey, thanks for listening to American history it. You know, every week we release new episodes,

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