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The Wild West Was Actually Pretty Chill · Ridiculous History

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