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CLASSIC: The Wild West Was Actually Pretty Chill · Ridiculous History

0:00
Speaker 1: It's high new.
0:02
Speaker 2: There we go.
0:03
Speaker 1: Yes, you killed with the whistle. There's a tumbleweed drifting.
0:08
Speaker 1: You know, there's a there's an old an old guy
0:13
Speaker 1: sitting on a porch in his name is Jimson Weed
0:16
Speaker 1: or something like that, a big old rifle rested against
0:20
Speaker 1: his rock and share it's high noon. Obviously you can
0:24
Speaker 1: tell from that wonderful and neo morcone there, which means
0:28
Speaker 1: he must automatically be a gunfight, right because it's the
0:31
Speaker 1: wild West?
0:33
Speaker 2: Not really apparently. Yeah, a lot less than one might think.
0:38
Speaker 2: If you're like most people, the phrase the wild West
0:40
Speaker 2: gives you those images that you are just describing ben
0:43
Speaker 2: gun fights, tumbleweeds rolling down the streets. You know, criminals
0:48
Speaker 2: are going for the big bank heist, et cetera. You know,
0:53
Speaker 2: bad guys and black hats, good guys and white ones.
0:56
Speaker 2: Saloon doors swinging, you know, with a you trigger fingers
1:01
Speaker 2: just ready to draw on your enemy. Yeah.
1:06
Speaker 1: It turns out that although we in the United States
1:10
Speaker 1: make a huge, huge deal out of the Wild West,
1:14
Speaker 1: it was actually a pretty short stretch of time and
1:21
Speaker 1: way more chilled than the movies make it.
1:23
Speaker 2: See exactly. I don't know what maybe we could keep
1:27
Speaker 2: this intro a little short because this one really you
1:30
Speaker 2: just got to kind of hear it to believe it.
1:32
Speaker 2: So what do you say? We jump right in to
1:34
Speaker 2: the wild West? Was actually pretty chill.
1:40
Speaker 1: Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Let's start today's
2:08
Speaker 1: episode by immediately traveling back in time and with a
2:13
Speaker 1: fantastic SOUNDQ. There we go. That sets the mood. I'm ben, hey, doggy,
2:23
Speaker 1: I'm knowing I'm gonna kill you.
2:26
Speaker 3: Are you gonna kill you dead, rob your corpse and
2:29
Speaker 3: kill your sister?
2:31
Speaker 1: Are you gonna do that voice the whole time?
2:35
Speaker 3: Yeah? And I really like this Anyo Moricone track you
2:38
Speaker 3: got playing because we have to refer to the track
2:41
Speaker 3: for fair use privileges.
2:44
Speaker 1: That's true, Anyo Morcone one of the favorite instrumentalist composers
2:50
Speaker 1: of both Noel, myself and our super producer Casey Pegram.
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Speaker 1: So yes, here we are in the wild West. Noel,
2:59
Speaker 1: you were very character I just received a death threat.
3:02
Speaker 2: Yep, that was that was That wasn't me. That was
3:04
Speaker 2: my long lost golden panhandling cousin Jed.
3:10
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, Jed throw tuttle brown right.
3:13
Speaker 2: Actually that doesn't even work. I said my name in
3:15
Speaker 2: the voice jig is up, but no. The thing about
3:19
Speaker 2: the Morricone is that storied tune soundtracks of many a
3:25
Speaker 2: Western spaghetti western has seen through the eyes of Italian cinema.
3:31
Speaker 2: That really helped kind of paint a picture of the
3:34
Speaker 2: wild West as this lawless time where someday it just
3:39
Speaker 2: as soon shoots you TwixT the eyes is look at you.
3:42
Speaker 1: Right, Yes, a time on the edge of the frontier
3:48
Speaker 1: where in the closest thing to the law might be
3:51
Speaker 1: a single sheriff and roving bands of wild criminals hold
3:57
Speaker 1: entire regions under their sway or not right, because it
4:02
Speaker 1: turns out, friends and neighbors, ladies and gentlemen, that the
4:06
Speaker 1: wild West was actually much more chill than fiction, film
4:12
Speaker 1: and novels and even older documentaries would have us believe.
4:17
Speaker 1: If you think about the wild West today and you're
4:20
Speaker 1: just casually remembering stuff, you might think of movies like Tombstone.
4:25
Speaker 1: You might think of The Man with No Name or
4:28
Speaker 1: something like that.
4:29
Speaker 2: Or Wild Bunch back in Pod Good, the Bad, and
4:32
Speaker 2: the Ugly Once upon a Time in America, any of
4:34
Speaker 2: these kind of portrayals. It's rife. It's a very rich
4:39
Speaker 2: landscape and potential for some real interesting characters and action
4:46
Speaker 2: to sell a story. But as it turns out, the
4:49
Speaker 2: rumors have been, you know, largely exaggerated.
4:53
Speaker 1: Yeah. One of the first rumors this, this is something
4:56
Speaker 1: I had learned about a little while ago. One of
4:58
Speaker 1: the first rumors concern the length of time that we
5:03
Speaker 1: would refer to as the Wild West, because for a
5:06
Speaker 1: lot of people, there's an assumption that if there are
5:08
Speaker 1: so many stories about this, both completely fictional stories and
5:12
Speaker 1: completely true stories, if there's such a wealth of lore,
5:16
Speaker 1: then surely this went on for a long long time. However,
5:20
Speaker 1: what we've learned is that it was not a very
5:23
Speaker 1: long span of time at all. It was probably what
5:28
Speaker 1: thirty years on the outside, if we're counting bookends and stuff.
5:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, that sounds about right. I found a piece in
5:34
Speaker 2: The Independent Review, a journal of political economy, written by
5:39
Speaker 2: Thomas J. Di Lorenzo, who refers to two schools of
5:43
Speaker 2: thought when it comes to looking at the Wild West.
5:46
Speaker 2: One is considered the frontier was violent with dashes in between.
5:52
Speaker 2: This is a thing that was established by historian Roger McGrath.
5:56
Speaker 2: And then there was the other position that the frontier
6:00
Speaker 2: was not so violent. But Bruce Benson, who did a
6:04
Speaker 2: thorough review of this idea that the West was violent.
6:07
Speaker 2: He kind of discovered that a lot of historians just
6:09
Speaker 2: assume that violence was pervasive, even more so than today.
6:13
Speaker 2: And then you know, theorize about what the likely causes
6:17
Speaker 2: of this were.
6:18
Speaker 1: What's that called ben confirmation biased. They were looking for
6:21
Speaker 1: something that proved their pre existing opinion. That's the one
6:25
Speaker 1: and it is absolutely true. And I think this is
6:28
Speaker 1: bonkers for a lot of people. If we were being
6:31
Speaker 1: super generous with the time period, we would refer to,
6:36
Speaker 1: let's say maybe eighteen fifties, late eighteen fifties to nineteen hundred.
6:41
Speaker 1: It's what most historians would include on what's called the
6:45
Speaker 1: frontier period. There's a great article via the fee Foundation
6:49
Speaker 1: for Economic Education wherein author Larry Schweickart examines the non
6:56
Speaker 1: existent Frontier bank robbery. You know, that's one of the
7:01
Speaker 1: big stories of Westerns, right there's the great train robbery,
7:04
Speaker 1: the great bank heist, rolling into town for all of
7:06
Speaker 1: the gold. The problem is this almost never happened. If
7:13
Speaker 1: we look at actual bank robberies in this time period,
7:18
Speaker 1: they seem to be myths. Over roughly forty years across
7:23
Speaker 1: fifteen states. This author and soon as co authors identified
7:28
Speaker 1: three to four definite ones, and then in later correspondence
7:33
Speaker 1: to try to clarify the record, they found two or
7:37
Speaker 1: three others that were pointed out, and still the records clear.
7:43
Speaker 1: Larry Schweickardt is arguing there are more bank robberies in
7:47
Speaker 1: modern day Dayton, Ohio in one year than there were
7:50
Speaker 1: in the entire Old West in a decade.
7:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, not to mention that during that fifteen year period
7:57
Speaker 2: in the late eighteen eighties, there were typically only an
8:00
Speaker 2: average about three murders a year in towns that were
8:04
Speaker 2: established in the Frontier like Abilene. Dodge City is a
8:08
Speaker 2: famous one. You think about having quick draw matches in
8:10
Speaker 2: the street. Sure, not really a thing. You see those
8:13
Speaker 2: re enacted. There's really no historical precedent for that. Or
8:16
Speaker 2: cities like Caldwell and Ellsworth and Wichita, and those were
8:22
Speaker 2: all in Kansas and had railroad stops, which is another
8:26
Speaker 2: thing that gets kind of a bad wrap. These railroad
8:28
Speaker 2: stop cities were hubs of scum and villainy.
8:31
Speaker 1: Right, yes, yes, And the Frontier was the place where
8:35
Speaker 1: someone who had done some dirty deeds dirt cheap just
8:39
Speaker 1: to follow up the reference in the East would travel
8:42
Speaker 1: to start again, right, But these not only were these
8:47
Speaker 1: murders very rare, and these bank heists relatively rare, it
8:51
Speaker 1: turns out that few people had guns it like at all,
8:56
Speaker 1: you know, and like Dodge City, which Noel just mentioned,
8:59
Speaker 1: canmpletely banned the carrying of firearms, which doesn't really jibe
9:04
Speaker 1: with the pro gun stance depicted in so many films.
9:08
Speaker 2: Oh, not only that it was used by firearm manufacturers
9:13
Speaker 2: as this kind of selling this image of the gun
9:16
Speaker 2: totin root and tutin outlaw or lawman or a cowboy
9:20
Speaker 2: or what have you. I found an article in the
9:23
Speaker 2: journal Western Historical Quarterly called Quantifying the Wild West the
9:27
Speaker 2: Problematic Statistics of Frontier Violence, written by Robert R. Disktruck,
9:33
Speaker 2: and it starts out with a quote from Cormack McCarthy
9:36
Speaker 2: from No Country for Old Men. Fabulous writer, fabulous book,
9:40
Speaker 2: excellent film if you haven't seen it. But the quote
9:42
Speaker 2: goes like this, some of the old time sheriffs wouldn't
9:45
Speaker 2: even carry a firearm. A lot of folks find that
9:49
Speaker 2: hard to believe, but it's a fact. And as it
9:52
Speaker 2: turns out, it is a fact.
9:54
Speaker 1: Right, And we're not arguing that there were no barrooms
10:00
Speaker 1: and fisticuffs that would be you know, that's going to
10:03
Speaker 1: be common wherever you find large amounts of alcohol, and
10:10
Speaker 1: statistically speaking, unattached young males, dudes without family or family structure, children,
10:18
Speaker 1: or those kind of responsibilities will tend to as a
10:22
Speaker 1: community have higher rates of those sorts of conflicts. But
10:25
Speaker 1: they're not out shooting each other every day.
10:28
Speaker 2: Willy nilly, No, it's in fact, Alenita Mullins kind of
10:31
Speaker 2: referred to these as pockets of violence. A lot of
10:34
Speaker 2: times they were in gold mining towns like the town
10:39
Speaker 2: depicted in the HBO show dead Wood. You have folks
10:44
Speaker 2: that were coming there in droves because gold was found
10:48
Speaker 2: prospectors and there was a need to protect your claim
10:53
Speaker 2: from so called claim jumpers. And then of course you
10:56
Speaker 2: introduced alcohol and gambling. Of course there are going to
10:59
Speaker 2: be some fisticus. But here here's the interesting part. It
11:03
Speaker 2: turns out that a lot of this stuff kind of
11:05
Speaker 2: took care of itself through various independently organized law enforcement
11:12
Speaker 2: agencies or groups. So with gold mining, for example, starting
11:16
Speaker 2: around eighteen forty eight, the miners kind of agreed with
11:20
Speaker 2: each other to have covenants and compacts to keep them
11:24
Speaker 2: from getting into situations like this. So you know, there
11:27
Speaker 2: was no government authority in these territories in California, apart
11:32
Speaker 2: from the occasional military outpost. But the miners actually came
11:37
Speaker 2: to some pretty good terms and as long as they
11:40
Speaker 2: abided by the rules, they were able to defend their
11:44
Speaker 2: rights under these community compacts.
11:47
Speaker 1: The individuals that would be representative of this were known
11:49
Speaker 1: as enforcement specialists, justices of the peace folks who would
11:54
Speaker 1: arbitrate disputes right and they developed their own pretty robust
11:59
Speaker 1: code of property and criminal law, and this worked quite well.
12:04
Speaker 1: There was relatively little violence and theft. The contractual system
12:09
Speaker 1: effectively generated the experts argue cooperation rather than conflict, and
12:14
Speaker 1: when conflict arose, it was effectively quelled through nonviolent means
12:20
Speaker 1: most of the time.
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Speaker 2: It's right. This comes from that article in the Independent Review,
12:24
Speaker 2: the Culture of Violence in the American West, Myth versus Reality.
12:28
Speaker 2: It goes on to talk about this kind of thinking
12:30
Speaker 2: extended to things like wagon trains, where the settlers actually
12:35
Speaker 2: kind of had these caravans that actually got them to
12:38
Speaker 2: where they were going, and protections of those and things
12:42
Speaker 2: like cattle rustling.
12:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, when government bureaucrats failed to effectively control cattle rustling,
12:51
Speaker 1: the ranchers themselves established these cattlemen's associations. They hired private
12:57
Speaker 1: protection agencies, They even wrote their own constantutions. And some
13:02
Speaker 1: of these gunslingers, you know, did have sketchy past had
13:07
Speaker 1: been associated with crime at the time, but they never
13:12
Speaker 1: created any kind of large scale organized crime. There was
13:15
Speaker 1: never a cattle rustling mafia or anything. These were individuals
13:20
Speaker 1: or small groups that the associations typically dealt with when
13:24
Speaker 1: they rustled up the posse of their.
13:26
Speaker 2: Own, that's right. And there were areas in parts of
13:30
Speaker 2: Oklahoma and Arkansas on Indian land that were parts of
13:34
Speaker 2: the Cherokee Nation where you know, there were bands of
13:37
Speaker 2: outlaws that could seek refuge and find high outs in
13:40
Speaker 2: these hills that had caves and hollers and the like,
13:44
Speaker 2: and they were great places for these outlaw gangs to
13:47
Speaker 2: hide out. But they weren't coming to town every day.
13:50
Speaker 2: And you know, murdering everybody in.
13:53
Speaker 1: The streets right first, that's not even sustainable, you know.
13:57
Speaker 2: And unless you're in Westworld and you can just do
13:59
Speaker 2: it every day, repeat, it'll start over and over.
14:02
Speaker 1: What a great show. The other part here that we
14:10
Speaker 1: do need to emphasize. I'm really glad we're bringing this up,
14:12
Speaker 1: is that one of the real, most genuine causes of
14:16
Speaker 1: violence there in the West came from the US government's
14:20
Speaker 1: policies toward the Indian populations on the plans, or Native
14:24
Speaker 1: American populations.
14:25
Speaker 2: And that was sort of a continuation of a lot
14:28
Speaker 2: of the you know, wartime attitudes of the Civil War. Yeah, absolutely,
14:34
Speaker 2: just kind of keeping things in almost like a police
14:36
Speaker 2: state kind of situation. The Plains Indians were essentially the
14:42
Speaker 2: victims of an extermination plan that was government sanctioned in
14:47
Speaker 2: order to clear the way for the railroads.
14:52
Speaker 1: Yes, clearing the way for the railroads and uniting the
14:55
Speaker 1: East and West coast. So when we when we talk
14:58
Speaker 1: about genuine viol in the American West, it's less a
15:02
Speaker 1: romanticized story of train robberies or bank heist every day,
15:08
Speaker 1: and it's much more story of the people who are
15:12
Speaker 1: native to the land being persecuted by people who are
15:15
Speaker 1: moving onto their land.
15:17
Speaker 2: And Thomas J. DeLorenzo makes some excellent points in this
15:20
Speaker 2: Independent Review piece where he you know, he cites the
15:23
Speaker 2: fact that by the twentieth century, like around eight hundred
15:26
Speaker 2: million dollars had been paid for Indian lands. And then
15:29
Speaker 2: he makes this distinction between the idea of a militia
15:33
Speaker 2: versus a standing army. I think this is really crucial.
15:35
Speaker 2: I'm going to read this to you. He says, a
15:37
Speaker 2: standing army. According to historians Terry Anderson and Fred McChesney,
15:42
Speaker 2: quote creates a class of professional soldiers whose personal welfare
15:47
Speaker 2: increases with warfare, even if fighting is a negative sum
15:51
Speaker 2: act for the population as a whole.
15:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is a practice that we can see
15:57
Speaker 1: in other parts of history, and it's it's an ortunate phenomenon.
16:01
Speaker 1: If your primary skill is violence based, then you are
16:06
Speaker 1: motivated to pursue violent means and violent ends. So if
16:12
Speaker 1: you don't have any other skill to fall back on,
16:15
Speaker 1: like you can't be a ferrier and work with horses,
16:18
Speaker 1: or you can't you know, be a banker or a
16:21
Speaker 1: school teacher or something like that, then you're going to
16:25
Speaker 1: end up pursuing crime, criminal activity. And one example of
16:31
Speaker 1: this in again very highly romanticized book on the West,
16:35
Speaker 1: would be Cormack McCarthy's Blood Meridian, where a lot of
16:38
Speaker 1: soldiers who formerly fought in a militia become mercenaries pretty
16:44
Speaker 1: much for hire by the US government.
16:45
Speaker 2: Exactly, or like things like the Pinkertons, which was like
16:48
Speaker 2: this private army that eventually kind of became the tools
16:52
Speaker 2: of big industrialists and you know, breaking strikes and just
16:55
Speaker 2: just you know, doing horrible things for the purposes of
16:58
Speaker 2: commerce and making money. And that was totally at play
17:01
Speaker 2: with this railroad situation. In eighteen sixty five, General William TACUMPSA.
17:07
Speaker 2: Sherman was given control of the military District of the
17:11
Speaker 2: Missouri and the purposes were to essentially wage a war
17:18
Speaker 2: against the Plains Indians. And this was all in the
17:22
Speaker 2: name of building that railroad, and you could justify that
17:25
Speaker 2: it was for progress, but there's a quote from Sherman
17:29
Speaker 2: that says, we're not going to let a few thieving,
17:32
Speaker 2: ragged Indians check and stop the progress of the railroads.
17:36
Speaker 2: And he wrote that to his friend Ulysses s. Grant.
17:39
Speaker 2: And politicians were making a whole lot of money as
17:42
Speaker 2: well on this expansion and building of the railroads. And
17:47
Speaker 2: there's even the Credis Mobilier scandal where American politicians were
17:52
Speaker 2: pocketing a lot of money because the railroads were being subsidized.
17:56
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, Yeah, a very very dirty, corrupt way. What
18:01
Speaker 1: would become known as the credit Mobier scandal occurred in
18:05
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty seven, but the public didn't learn about it
18:08
Speaker 1: for several years. They learned about it in eighteen seventy two.
18:13
Speaker 1: Here's what happened. Thomas C. Durant, who was the vice
18:16
Speaker 1: president of the Union Pacific Railroad at the time, and
18:18
Speaker 1: a fellow named George Francis Train formed Kredi Moobia in
18:23
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty four, and they based it on a pre
18:28
Speaker 1: existing thing called the Pennsylvania Fiscal Agency. They were a
18:31
Speaker 1: lone and contract company. This was a deliberate, no bones
18:36
Speaker 1: about it, attempt to lie both to the government and
18:40
Speaker 1: to the public. Fraud, Yeah, that's a good word. That's
18:42
Speaker 1: a good use of it. Independent of Union Pacific Railroad
18:46
Speaker 1: and it's stakeholders, its executive board, and what they were
18:51
Speaker 1: doing was over paying for things. And when you when
18:56
Speaker 1: you use it for a subsidy or blake, you may
18:58
Speaker 1: recall listeners based in the US, US those stories that
19:01
Speaker 1: come up every so often about corruption in the defense
19:05
Speaker 1: industry where someone says, what why did you pay thousands
19:09
Speaker 1: of dollars for a toilet seat? Three hundred dollars for
19:11
Speaker 1: hammer something like that through the railroad, they were overcharging
19:15
Speaker 1: the American public. They would have much higher rates than usual,
19:20
Speaker 1: and cash and nine million dollars in discounted stocks were
19:23
Speaker 1: given as bribes to politicians, like straight up, point A
19:27
Speaker 1: to point B.
19:27
Speaker 2: Bribes like like I'll give you my vote if you
19:31
Speaker 2: give me shares in this or give me a payout.
19:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, and these weren't like these weren't all you know,
19:37
Speaker 1: junior House representatives or under secretaries. This included the Vice president,
19:42
Speaker 1: the Secretary of the Treasury, you know, the people who
19:44
Speaker 1: are supposed to guard the public against this stuff. That's
19:49
Speaker 1: where a lot of the traceable violence occurs. And now,
19:54
Speaker 1: now the typical murder rate for a large city is
19:57
Speaker 1: going to be higher than typical frontier town. You could
20:02
Speaker 1: argue methodology and say that might just be a function
20:04
Speaker 1: of having a much higher population. I think that's valid, absolutely,
20:08
Speaker 1: But then we also run into a problem when we
20:11
Speaker 1: try to get real world statistics from that time. The
20:15
Speaker 1: compilation of homicide rates during the Wild West is still
20:18
Speaker 1: one of the longest running controversies among statisticians today and
20:22
Speaker 1: probably will be for a long time.
20:24
Speaker 2: Agreed, let's get back to the depiction of the Wild
20:27
Speaker 2: West in popular culture, in Hollywood, in literature. In that
20:33
Speaker 2: piece from Western Historical Quarterly, the writer Robert R. Dykstra
20:38
Speaker 2: talks about that very thing, and he says that there
20:43
Speaker 2: was a time where even academics fully believed in the
20:48
Speaker 2: depiction of the Old West that Hollywood put out. There.
20:52
Speaker 2: There is a writer by the name of Vernon Perrington
20:56
Speaker 2: who wrote this on the post Civil War on tier.
21:00
Speaker 2: He said, all things were held cheap, and human life
21:04
Speaker 2: the cheapest of all. Then we have another historian by
21:08
Speaker 2: the name of Harvey Wish who wrote that the conception
21:11
Speaker 2: of the Western gold rush towns as being bold and wicked,
21:17
Speaker 2: and that they were full of feuding bad men, with swift,
21:22
Speaker 2: straight shooting marshals and that vigilante justice that we know
21:26
Speaker 2: so well. But then Diichstra writes that that was kind
21:30
Speaker 2: of backed off from in the seventies and eighties when
21:34
Speaker 2: the revised version of a popular textbook by Ray Billington
21:39
Speaker 2: was put out, and in that he said this he
21:43
Speaker 2: kind of like toned down the rhetoric a little bit,
21:46
Speaker 2: and he said that the shootout that's glorified in Western
21:50
Speaker 2: stories and motion pictures was absolutely unheard of and that's
21:54
Speaker 2: the shootout we talked about earlier where two men stand
21:57
Speaker 2: in the street and do a quick draw kind of situation.
21:59
Speaker 1: Right, And we should also take a second just to
22:03
Speaker 1: depict the true stories behind some of those iconic individual figures.
22:09
Speaker 1: Billy the Kid, right, one of the most well known,
22:12
Speaker 1: at least in terms of headlines, right, one of the
22:14
Speaker 1: most well known criminals of this period. Billy the Kid
22:17
Speaker 1: is only known to have killed eight people, each lost
22:20
Speaker 1: being a tragedy, of course, but that's a much lower
22:22
Speaker 1: body count than a lot of films would have you believe.
22:25
Speaker 2: Not to mention, I could probably count the big name
22:30
Speaker 2: historical figures that were kind of dramatized, you know, on
22:34
Speaker 2: two hands, Like I know Wild Bill, I know you
22:38
Speaker 2: know Doc Holliday and Wyatt Er, and you know Calamity
22:43
Speaker 2: Jane and the characters that were in Deadwood.
22:47
Speaker 1: You know.
22:47
Speaker 2: That's that's about it. It's not like the kind of
22:50
Speaker 2: just endless roster of criminals that you maybe even you
22:55
Speaker 2: know think about today with like serial killers or any
22:58
Speaker 2: number of hardened criminals.
23:00
Speaker 1: And another thing that's interesting here is that Billy the
23:04
Speaker 1: Kid died when he was twenty one estimated early twenties.
23:09
Speaker 2: At the latest. It's romantic, you know, right.
23:12
Speaker 1: It's romanticized, and we have to wonder does it do
23:16
Speaker 1: a disservice to the people who really lived in that time.
23:20
Speaker 1: I find it actually sort of inspiring to learn that
23:24
Speaker 1: the people who were living at this time were by
23:27
Speaker 1: and large trying to band together to survive, not to
23:32
Speaker 1: kill each other, not to have some weird proto mad
23:35
Speaker 1: max existence, but to get along as best they could,
23:38
Speaker 1: and to help their neighbors if their neighbors were in need.
23:42
Speaker 1: And you know, they make a great point. I believe
23:45
Speaker 1: it's Sdichstra who makes a great point saying that it's
23:49
Speaker 1: difficult to compare. It may well just be impossible to
23:54
Speaker 1: compare crime rates in these towns to crime rates in
23:58
Speaker 1: the modern day, even if we to a small town
24:00
Speaker 1: that was the same size. Yeah, and that's exactly it.
24:03
Speaker 1: You talk about the issue with population. For example, in
24:07
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty in Dodge City, one person, one person out
24:12
Speaker 1: of nine hundred and ninety six was killed. But as
24:15
Speaker 1: our pal Luri L. Dove writes for How Stuff Works,
24:18
Speaker 1: one hundred.
24:19
Speaker 2: Years later in Miami, five hundred and fifteen people out
24:22
Speaker 2: of one point five million people were killed. So, you know,
24:26
Speaker 2: although more people were murdered in Miami, if you look
24:30
Speaker 2: at the statistics, it had a lower rate of homicide
24:34
Speaker 2: thirty two point seven percent compared to one hundred point
24:37
Speaker 2: four percent of Dodge City in the eighteen hundreds.
24:40
Speaker 1: And we have to be careful with those statistics because
24:43
Speaker 1: as counterintuitive as they may seem sometimes and as unromantic
24:49
Speaker 1: as it is to deal with the facts, the facts
24:52
Speaker 1: are ultimately going to be more rewarding. So we don't
24:57
Speaker 1: need to have this sort of deaf the or lionization
25:02
Speaker 1: of crime, right or criminals in what we call the
25:06
Speaker 1: Old West and the Wild West as we know, it
25:10
Speaker 1: was not some sort of desolate, sin riddled place. With
25:17
Speaker 1: the quote LORI uses here that I love is where
25:21
Speaker 1: dead bodies piled up in the streets. It's it's not
25:25
Speaker 1: like that at all. And I again, I find it reassuring,
25:30
Speaker 1: and I think that when we fire up the time machine,
25:33
Speaker 1: you and I could actually go to the Wild West
25:36
Speaker 1: and have a pretty cool experience as long as we're
25:39
Speaker 1: on our p's and q's.
25:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, like, just don't be like Chevy Chase
25:43
Speaker 2: in National Lampoon's Family Vacation, where you try to talk
25:47
Speaker 2: trash to the fake bartender. Oh.
25:49
Speaker 1: I also want to add one thing I found. I
25:52
Speaker 1: don't know if you ran into this, but was very interesting,
25:55
Speaker 1: sort of a tangent here, and I want to go
25:57
Speaker 1: too long on it, but cowboys, as we understand them,
26:00
Speaker 1: are also largely an American myth. What we call a
26:04
Speaker 1: cowboys day is sort of a whitewashed version of vacueros,
26:09
Speaker 1: which existed before any of this wild West stuff. And
26:13
Speaker 1: a lot of the slang we associate with cowboys comes
26:16
Speaker 1: from vacqueros, which is from what culture these would be
26:19
Speaker 1: Mexican cattlemen. They were the original cowboys, and they're everything
26:23
Speaker 1: you would imagine. They got the big hat riding a
26:25
Speaker 1: horse herd in livestock, came up with term you know,
26:29
Speaker 1: we get from vaquero's. We get the terms bronco, lariat, stampede,
26:34
Speaker 1: and so on, And this happened. They led this life
26:39
Speaker 1: and held rodeos and stuff for centuries before cowboys existed.
26:45
Speaker 2: Well how about that?
26:47
Speaker 1: How about that?
26:48
Speaker 2: Oh?
26:48
Speaker 1: Apparently I'm not one hundred percent on this little but
26:51
Speaker 1: apparently the term vacquero later evolved into buccaroo. Well, I'll
26:57
Speaker 1: be I know, right, oh man, slap you with feathers
27:03
Speaker 1: and called me a chicken dinner.
27:04
Speaker 2: I will not thank you.
27:06
Speaker 1: That would be inappropriate for a workplace.
27:12
Speaker 2: I think that about wraps up our topic for the day.
27:15
Speaker 2: But what do you say we take a second and
27:16
Speaker 2: open up the old listener mail bag.
27:22
Speaker 1: That's an excellent idea. This will also be I believe,
27:24
Speaker 1: only the second time that we have dared to open
27:27
Speaker 1: the listener mail bag.
27:29
Speaker 2: We have been being real greedy and hoarding these delightful
27:32
Speaker 2: listener mails, but I think we should try and fit
27:34
Speaker 2: this in a little more often. What do you think, Yeah,
27:37
Speaker 2: let's see how it goes.
27:38
Speaker 1: You want to do one, I'll do one.
27:39
Speaker 2: That sounds good. Our first listener mail comes from Alissa. Greetings.
27:44
Speaker 2: Alyssa says, I'm a longtime fan of the Whole Stuff series.
27:47
Speaker 2: You and your entire entourage of podcast poets I like
27:50
Speaker 2: that are what have gotten me through countless hours and
27:53
Speaker 2: miles as I trained for marathons, ultra marathons, and countless
27:58
Speaker 2: other shorter races and therapy run I did not know
28:01
Speaker 2: ultra marathons was a thing, but I'm gonna have to
28:04
Speaker 2: look into that. For that, I thank you and we
28:06
Speaker 2: thank you Alyssa for listening well. I think you were
28:09
Speaker 2: all pretty perfect. I did find issue with one minor
28:12
Speaker 2: detail in Ben Franklin's alphabet episode. While we do credit
28:15
Speaker 2: our good buddy Ben for inventing the bifocal, you mentioned
28:18
Speaker 2: how it was one of those things that has not
28:20
Speaker 2: yet really been improved upon. That was me that is
28:23
Speaker 2: actually false. As an optician in the western New York area,
28:26
Speaker 2: I can tell you that the lined bifocal was quickly
28:29
Speaker 2: becoming obsolete. Improvements and technology have led to lenses that
28:33
Speaker 2: progress from distance vision in the top of the lens
28:36
Speaker 2: down to a reading prescription on the very bottom, with
28:38
Speaker 2: varying distances for intermediate vision in between. These progressive adaptive lenses,
28:44
Speaker 2: or pals for those of us in the biz, work
28:47
Speaker 2: more the way the eye naturally works before the inevitable
28:50
Speaker 2: help with accommodation for reading as necessary, and it does
28:54
Speaker 2: so without a visible line in the lens itself. So yeah,
28:57
Speaker 2: I've seen those lenses that have that kind of like
28:59
Speaker 2: lower part that's for the reading. Obviously, I don't wear glasses,
29:03
Speaker 2: so I was kind of going off the top of
29:04
Speaker 2: my head with that. But thank you so much for
29:06
Speaker 2: schooling me. She goes on to say, pretty amazing. Maybe
29:09
Speaker 2: this could be a topic for a future episode. Maybe
29:11
Speaker 2: it's just the optical nerd in me. Keep up the
29:13
Speaker 2: great work, Alyssa from Jamestown, New York.
29:16
Speaker 1: Thanks so much, Alissa. We really appreciate the high praise
29:20
Speaker 1: and I now I'm wondering how many people listening to
29:24
Speaker 1: the show are in the biz. If you are, let
29:27
Speaker 1: us know and best of luck with the did you
29:30
Speaker 1: say running marathons?
29:32
Speaker 2: Marathoning? And I stuff?
29:35
Speaker 1: We better make more episodes, noel so because marathons could
29:38
Speaker 1: take a while.
29:39
Speaker 2: And you know what I say, Ben, there's no biz
29:41
Speaker 2: like the biz.
29:42
Speaker 1: So thank you, Alyssa. This next email comes to us
29:44
Speaker 1: from mo f Mo says, Hi, guys, I'm new to
29:47
Speaker 1: the podcast. They just listened to your episode. When did
29:50
Speaker 1: all caps become yelly? I very much enjoy the history
29:54
Speaker 1: lesson as well as modern viewpoints discussed. Hearing about the
29:57
Speaker 1: removal of the caps like key by Google on their
29:59
Speaker 1: keyboard and some calls for eliminating the button altogether. I
30:02
Speaker 1: wanted to bring in some personal perspective and also some
30:05
Speaker 1: observations about all caps in our lives. I'm a pharmacy
30:09
Speaker 1: technician for Osco drug While I can't speak for other
30:12
Speaker 1: drug stores, I know that in every Osco I work at,
30:15
Speaker 1: the doctor's drug instructions known as the SIG are written
30:18
Speaker 1: completely in all caps. My guess is that we want
30:22
Speaker 1: to impress upon the patient the gravity of following the
30:25
Speaker 1: instructions to the tee. If I didn't have the caps
30:27
Speaker 1: lot key, it would be mighty annoying to hold down
30:29
Speaker 1: the shift key while typing out every SIG. I also
30:33
Speaker 1: noticed that all caps is everywhere we go. On traffic
30:35
Speaker 1: signage stop no, turn on red, etc. Which is always
30:39
Speaker 1: in all caps, to the signs for business names, and
30:41
Speaker 1: even on our money. I would argue it's most important
30:44
Speaker 1: the traffic and warning signs stay in all caps. Danger
30:48
Speaker 1: high voltage doesn't have quite the same gravitas as danger
30:51
Speaker 1: high voltage. While I agree that all caps can be
30:54
Speaker 1: quite annoying online, I think they have a place in
30:56
Speaker 1: other areas of our lives outside the Internet. Wait haha,
31:00
Speaker 1: there's life outside the interwebs. These are my thoughts. Thank
31:03
Speaker 1: you for welcoming to share them. Keep up the great work, MO.
31:06
Speaker 1: That seems like a pretty pretty studeo observation. We also
31:10
Speaker 1: had an engineer who wrote in on.
31:12
Speaker 2: All casts, I know and I love this. I actually
31:13
Speaker 2: just pulled it up right when you said that he
31:15
Speaker 2: talks about. This is from Ted, just the idea of
31:19
Speaker 2: pattern recognition. He says, some time ago, I was given
31:22
Speaker 2: the following explanation, and it makes sense to me. When
31:25
Speaker 2: we learn to read, we have to sound out each
31:27
Speaker 2: letter in a word, and then once we have the word,
31:29
Speaker 2: we can attach the meaning. As we get proficient at reading,
31:32
Speaker 2: we no longer do this letter by letter, but rather
31:34
Speaker 2: we recognize the words more by the pattern the letter's form.
31:38
Speaker 2: And this is me interjecting here. I could say the
31:40
Speaker 2: same thing about reading music. You start to see the
31:42
Speaker 2: patterns and like whether it's at a space or a
31:44
Speaker 2: line on the music staff, and you don't necessarily have
31:47
Speaker 2: to really think as deep about it. You just recognize
31:49
Speaker 2: it right away.
31:50
Speaker 1: So Ted says, when we type in all caps, this
31:52
Speaker 1: pattern recognition by the brain is broken and we have
31:55
Speaker 1: to look at those individual letters to form the words.
31:58
Speaker 1: And although we can still will do this quickly, it
32:01
Speaker 1: slows us down and is more work for the brain.
32:04
Speaker 1: The extra work the brain is doing is what makes
32:06
Speaker 1: it feel different, like we're being yelled at that's a
32:10
Speaker 1: pretty interesting argument there, Ted, and.
32:12
Speaker 2: He goes on to illustrate it with a bunch of
32:14
Speaker 2: words where he keeps the first and last letter correct
32:18
Speaker 2: but jumbles up the letters in the middle, and I
32:20
Speaker 2: was shocked to realize that I could very easily read
32:22
Speaker 2: the whole sentence.
32:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, the human brain is capable of all sorts of
32:26
Speaker 1: strange shenanigans and tricks. We want to thank you Ted,
32:30
Speaker 1: We want to thank you Mo, and you Alyssa. This
32:33
Speaker 1: will conclude our listener mail, but not our show.
32:36
Speaker 2: We would also like to thank all of your brains
32:39
Speaker 2: and the brains of everyone listening, and we hope you
32:41
Speaker 2: will use your brains to write us an email at
32:44
Speaker 2: Ridiculous at HowStuffWorks dot com, or shoot us a note
32:47
Speaker 2: on any of the social media out there, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,
32:51
Speaker 2: what have you? Where we are Ridiculous History.
32:53
Speaker 1: Also, of course, thanks to our super producer Casey Pegram
32:57
Speaker 1: for saving the show, Thanks to our House of Works
33:00
Speaker 1: author Lorie L. Dove, and thanks to Alex Williams for
33:05
Speaker 1: composing our soundtrack, which a lot of people have been
33:07
Speaker 1: writing about.
33:08
Speaker 2: It's true. We hope you'll join us next time when
33:10
Speaker 2: we ask the question what happened when people waged war
33:14
Speaker 2: over eggs?
33:17
Speaker 1: Oh Man, Yeah, what's coming up?
33:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, So come hang out then, and then thanks for
33:22
Speaker 2: hanging out now for ridiculous history. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
33:34
Speaker 2: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
33:38
Speaker 2: to your favorite shows.