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The Real Wild West: Outlaws, Lawmen & the Untamed American Frontier | History for Sleep · Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries

0:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back to Sleepless History.
0:02
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm glad you're here.
0:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we are going west.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Not the West as you might see it in a movie.
0:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Not the quick draw jewels at high noon.
0:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Not the dramatic last stands on Canyon ridges with heroic music swelling beneath them.
0:18
[SPEAKER_00]: We are going to the real West, the West that smelled of horse sweat and alkali dust and wood smoke and unwashed wool, the West that was cold at night and merciless by day.
0:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The West that was a place, not a myth, and a place that existed for only a brief brilliant aching window of time before the modern world swallowed it whole.
0:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we are going to walk across its geography, meet some of its most extraordinary inhabitants, understand the forces that built it and the forces that tore it down.
0:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And by the time we reach the end of this journey together, we will have crossed about half a continent and about 40 years of history.
1:02
[SPEAKER_00]: so get comfortable and let's begin at the very beginning.
1:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Not with a gunshot, not with a saloon brawl, but with something far more fundamental.
1:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's begin with the land itself.
1:15
[SPEAKER_00]: If you've tuned in tonight to help your mind drift off, you're in the right place.
1:20
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the reason I create these.
1:22
[SPEAKER_00]: If you find this helpful, consider following and leaving a comment about where you're listening from and what the time is.
1:30
[SPEAKER_00]: I love reading through the comments.
1:32
[SPEAKER_00]: There's something surreal about knowing someone is watching at midnight in San Francisco, while someone else is starting their day in Stockholm, or grabbing a quick lunch in Sydney.
1:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Before there were outlaws, before there were lormen, before there were cattle drives or rail road crews or homesteaders breaking the prairie sod with iron plows, before any of that, there was the land and the land was enormous.
2:10
[SPEAKER_00]: This is something that is genuinely difficult to hold in the mind, even now, even with satellite maps and interstate highways that carry you from horizon to horizon in air-conditioned
2:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The American West was not simply large.
2:25
[SPEAKER_00]: It was large in a way that had a personality.
2:28
[SPEAKER_00]: a character, a presence that bore down on every single person who entered it.
2:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It was large in a way that made human beings feel quite accurately, like very small things on a very big stage.
2:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Imagine standing on the eastern edge of what we would come to call the Great Plains.
2:49
[SPEAKER_00]: You are somewhere in Missouri, perhaps, or Kansas.
2:53
[SPEAKER_00]: The year is somewhere around 1860.
2:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Behind you is the known world, cities with newspapers and church bells, rivers with steamboats, towns with general stores and painted houses.
3:08
[SPEAKER_00]: A head of use stretches something that early explorers and cartographers labelled with remarkable honesty on their maps.
3:15
[SPEAKER_00]: They called it the Great American Desert.
3:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, the word desert here did not necessarily mean sand and scorching emptiness.
3:24
[SPEAKER_00]: the way we might picture the Sahara or the Mahave.
3:28
[SPEAKER_00]: What those early mapmakers meant was something more subtle and in many ways more true.
3:33
[SPEAKER_00]: They meant a place of desolation, a place that resisted cultivation, a place that had its own rules, written not in law books, but in rainfall patterns and soil chemistry and the long indifferent logic of geology.
3:49
[SPEAKER_00]: The Great Plains stretched from roughly the 98th Meridian in the East, which cuts roughly through the middle of the decoters, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, all the way west to the foot hills of the Rocky Mountains.
4:06
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a distance of somewhere between 300 and 500 miles.
4:11
[SPEAKER_00]: depending on where you are standing.
4:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And it runs north to south from the Canadian border deep into what is now Texas, a span of nearly 2,000 miles.
4:21
[SPEAKER_00]: This was grassland, primarily.
4:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Short grass prairie in the west, where rainfall was sparse and unpredictable, and tall grass prairie in the east, where things were marginally more forgiving, the grass could be beautiful.
4:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The planes would green up in a way that travellers described as almost hallucinatory, endless rolling seas of colour, filled with wildflowers alive with bird song.
4:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Millions upon millions of bison moved across this landscape in herds so vast that early travellers reported the ground shaking beneath their feet, and the sound of their passing resembling distant thunder.
5:04
[SPEAKER_00]: But then some are wood.
5:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And summer on the Great Plains was something else entirely.
5:09
[SPEAKER_00]: The wind was constant.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It came from the south and from the west, and it was hot, and it was dry, and it carried grit that worked its way into everything into your eyes, your food, the cracks in your hands.
5:26
[SPEAKER_00]: The pages of your Bible, if you had one, the sky was enormous.
5:31
[SPEAKER_00]: There was nowhere to hide from it.
5:33
[SPEAKER_00]: In the east, a person had trees, hills, buildings, the comfortable visual clutter of a settled landscape to break up the horizon.
5:44
[SPEAKER_00]: On the plains, the horizon was everything.
5:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The sky was not a backdrop.
5:49
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the main event.
5:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Thunderstorms on the plains are among the most spectacular and terrifying phenomena in North American meteorology.
5:59
[SPEAKER_00]: They build in the afternoon, massive vertical structures of cloud that can reach 40,000 feet into the atmosphere, lit from within by lightning, announced from 50 miles away by a sound like the earth clearing its throat, and then there was winter.
6:20
[SPEAKER_00]: what the old time has called blue northeres could drop temperatures by 50 degrees in a matter of hours.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Catel would freeze standing up.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Men who stepped outside to ten their animals could be swallowed by whiteout conditions within yards of their own front door and never find their way back.
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[SPEAKER_00]: these were not occasional hardships.
6:42
[SPEAKER_00]: These were the rhythm of the land.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The West was not trying to kill you exactly.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It simply did not care whether you lived or died and that in difference was in its own way more terrifying than any active malice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now let's move west.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Further west, past the planes
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[SPEAKER_00]: The rocky mountains are not a single thing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They are a system, a complex and ancient system of ranges and sub-ranges and high-altitude plateaus that stretches from northern New Mexico all the way into Canada and beyond.
7:23
[SPEAKER_00]: To cross them, in the era we are discussing was a multi-week undertaking that required careful planning, good animals, and a considerable measure of luck.
7:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The passes that cut through the Rockies were well known to experienced guides and scouts, but they were narrow, often snow choked for half the year, and unforgiving of poor judgment.
7:46
[SPEAKER_00]: The mountains themselves have a quality that is almost impossible to describe to someone who has not stood at the base of a 14,000 foot peak.
7:55
[SPEAKER_00]: They are not merely tall.
7:58
[SPEAKER_00]: They create their own weather.
7:59
[SPEAKER_00]: They generate their own silence.
8:02
[SPEAKER_00]: The air is different up there.
8:04
[SPEAKER_00]: thinner, cleaner, cold, even in August at the higher elevations.
8:09
[SPEAKER_00]: The light is different.
8:10
[SPEAKER_00]: The scale is different.
8:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Standing in a high mountain valley, surrounded by peaks on all sides, a person understood, in a way that no amount of reading could convey, exactly how small human civilization really was.
8:29
[SPEAKER_00]: West of the Rockies came the Great Basin, the vast, arid interior that encompasses most of present-day Nevada and Utah.
8:37
[SPEAKER_00]: and portions of Oregon and Idaho.
8:40
[SPEAKER_00]: This was, in many respects, the most hostile landscape in the West.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was not a basin in the sense of a bowl or a valley.
8:49
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a series of mountain ranges alternating with flat desert floors, all of them internal drainages, meaning that the water that fell on them never found its way to the sea.
9:00
[SPEAKER_00]: It's simply evaporated.
9:02
[SPEAKER_00]: or soaked into the alkali flats, leaving behind white, crusty deposits that poisoned the water and made the soil nearly impossible to farm.
9:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The old immigrant trails, the Oregon trail, the California Trail, the Mormon Trail, cross this landscape with grim determination.
9:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The journals of immigrants from the 1840s and 1850s are full of descriptions of dead cattle,
9:32
[SPEAKER_00]: and the psychological toll of days and days of travel through country that seem to offer nothing but more of itself.
9:41
[SPEAKER_00]: They crossed the Great Basin in a race against time, trying to get over the Sierra Nevada before the first heavy snows of autumn closed the passes.
9:52
[SPEAKER_00]: You probably know about the Donner Party.
9:55
[SPEAKER_00]: They were late.
9:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Further west, descending from the Sierra Nevada into California, the landscape changed again, dramatically, generously, almost shockingly, the Central Valley of California was one of the most fertile places on earth.
10:13
[SPEAKER_00]: The Pacific Coast offered moderate temperatures, reliable rainfall, magnificent forests of redwood and Douglas Firm.
10:21
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the promised land.
10:23
[SPEAKER_00]: that the promised land's name suggested, and it drew people with a magnetism that reshaped American history.
10:32
[SPEAKER_00]: But we are getting ahead of ourselves, because before the West could be settled, before it could be tamed or exploited or romanticised or mourned, it had to be defined.
10:45
[SPEAKER_00]: and defining it turned out to be a surprisingly complicated philosophical and practical problem.
10:52
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a concept in American history that is deceptively simple in its phrasing and enormously complex in its implications.
11:02
[SPEAKER_00]: It is called the Frontier.
11:05
[SPEAKER_00]: What was the Frontier?
11:06
[SPEAKER_00]: In the most literal sense, the Frontier was a line on a map or rather the absence of a line
11:13
[SPEAKER_00]: edge of organized American settlement.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The place where the density of European American population dropped below a certain threshold.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Usually defined as about two people per square mile.
11:26
[SPEAKER_00]: and the land beyond that threshold became, in the eyes of the United States Census Bureau and the consciousness of American culture unsettled, wild, frontier, but the frontier was never a fixed line.
11:43
[SPEAKER_00]: It moved.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It moved steadily, decade by decade, generation by generation,
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1790, the frontier ran roughly along the Appalachian mountains.
11:57
[SPEAKER_00]: By 1820, it had crossed the Mississippi River.
12:01
[SPEAKER_00]: By 1840, it had pushed into Missouri and Arkansas.
12:06
[SPEAKER_00]: By 1860, it had jumped over most of the interior, the harsh, difficult middle, and established a toe hold on the Pacific coast, while the vast interior remained largely unsettled by European-American standards.
12:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, in the years after the Civil War,
12:26
[SPEAKER_00]: everything accelerated.
12:28
[SPEAKER_00]: The transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The cattle drives began.
12:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The mining booms pulled tens of thousands of men into the mountains of Colorado, Nevada, Montana, Idaho.
12:45
[SPEAKER_00]: The home-steaders followed the railroads onto the plains.
12:49
[SPEAKER_00]: The Army pushed the remaining Native American nations off their traditional territories and onto reservations, and the frontier that moving, breathing, conceptual line began to shrink with remarkable speed.
13:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to pause on one particular line because it matters enormously to the story we are telling tonight, the 100th Meridian.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Imagine a line drawn from north to south across the United States, cutting through the eastern decoters, through Nebraska, through Kansas, through Oklahoma, through Texas, roughly by secting each of those states.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This is the 100th Meridian, the 100th line of longitude, west of Greenwich England.
13:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Why does this line matter?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Because it is broadly speaking, the line where rainfall becomes insufficient for traditional farming without irrigation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: East of the 100th Meridian, you receive on average
13:58
[SPEAKER_00]: barely enough in many places, but enough to grow crops using conventional eastern farming methods.
14:05
[SPEAKER_00]: West of the 100th Meridian, the rainfall drops below 20 inches and in many areas below 15 or even 10.
14:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The Earth becomes drier, the grass shorter, the farms smaller and more precarious.
14:21
[SPEAKER_00]: A geologist and explorer named John Wesley Powell, one of the most interesting and prescient figures in American environmental history, wrote a remarkable report in 1878 in which he laid out this reality with painful clarity.
14:40
[SPEAKER_00]: He told Congress that the land west of the 100th Meridian could not support the kind of small family farming that American land policy was designed to encourage.
14:53
[SPEAKER_00]: He proposed a system of larger land grants, communal water management and ranching rather than farming for these dry regions.
15:02
[SPEAKER_00]: He was, by any reasonable modern assessment, absolutely right, Congress largely ignored him.
15:10
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, home-steaders flooded onto the semi-arid planes with their 168 acclaims, the standard grant under the Home-Stead Act of 1862, and tried to farm with eastern methods in a western landscape.
15:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of them succeeded.
15:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Many did not.
15:31
[SPEAKER_00]: The ones who did not are a long, quiet, a heartbreaking story.
15:36
[SPEAKER_00]: a failed harvests and mounting debt and abandoned claims and families who walked away from everything they had built and tried to start again somewhere else.
15:48
[SPEAKER_00]: But in the 1860s and 1870s into the 80s, that story had not yet fully revealed itself.
15:56
[SPEAKER_00]: The land seemed open, the opportunities seemed limitless.
16:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The west was a place where a person could reinvent themselves entirely.
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[SPEAKER_00]: could walk away from a past, a name, a debt, a crime, a shame, and begin again on the far side of the 100th Meridian, where the records were thin and the questions were few.
16:18
[SPEAKER_00]: This quality of the West, its openness to reinvention, its lack of institutional memory, is central to everything that came after.
16:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The outlaws who flourished their
16:29
[SPEAKER_00]: flourished partly because the infrastructure of Eastern civilization had not yet arrived.
16:35
[SPEAKER_00]: There were no reliable telegraph lines, no newspapers with wide circulation, no efficient postal systems, no databases, no photographs in every sheriff's office.
16:46
[SPEAKER_00]: A man could be many things in the West and be believed about all of them, but nature abhors a vacuum.
16:54
[SPEAKER_00]: and the vacuum left by the absence of Eastern institutions was not left empty.
17:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Into that space, stepped some of the most fascinating and complex individuals in American history.
17:07
[SPEAKER_00]: The men and women who tried to impose some version of order on a landscape that had never been asked to accepted.
17:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The people who wore the star
17:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk about law enforcement in the American West.
17:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And let's start with a distinction that matters more than most people realize, because the popular imagination tends to lump all frontier lawmen into a single category, the sheriff, the Marshall, the lone figure with the badge.
17:42
[SPEAKER_00]: When in reality, the system was considerably more complicated, considerably more bureaucratic, and considerably more interesting than the movies would have you believe.
17:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Broadly speaking, three categories of law enforcement officer in the Frontier West.
18:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The first was the United States Marshal, a federal officer, appointed by the President of the United States with the advice and consent of the Senate and answerable ultimately to the Department of Justice.
18:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The United States Marshal's primary job was to enforce federal law.
18:19
[SPEAKER_00]: This sounds straightforward, but in the west, federal law covered a remarkable range of territory, literally federal marshals had jurisdiction over federal crimes committed anywhere within their assigned judicial district, and their districts could be enormous.
18:37
[SPEAKER_00]: We will come back to exactly how enormous in a moment.
18:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The sheriff was an elected official, chosen by the voters of a particular county to enforce state law and maintain order within that county's boundaries.
18:54
[SPEAKER_00]: The sheriff's power did not extend beyond the county line.
18:58
[SPEAKER_00]: His authority was local, his accountability was local, and his resources were entirely dependent on what the county could afford to provide him, which was often very little.
19:11
[SPEAKER_00]: A county in Frontier, Kansas, or Texas might cover thousands of square miles, and the sheriff might have only a small number of deputies to help him cover it.
19:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The third category was the town marshal, sometimes called a city marshal or a police chief in the larger settlements.
19:30
[SPEAKER_00]: The town marshal was a municipal employee hired by the town council responsible for maintaining order within the town limits.
19:39
[SPEAKER_00]: This was, in many ways, the most visible and most romanticized position in frontier law enforcement.
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[SPEAKER_00]: the one who dealt with the drunken cowboys at the end of a cattle drive.
19:56
[SPEAKER_00]: The one whose office was a cramped wooden building next to the saloon, the one who most often appeared in the dime novels and the wild west shows.
20:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, in practice, these categories often overlap.
20:11
[SPEAKER_00]: and individual lawmen frequently held more than one of these positions simultaneously, or in sequence over the course of their careers.
20:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Why it up to take one example, served as a town marshal, as a deputy sheriff, and as a deputy United States marshal at various points in his life?
20:30
[SPEAKER_00]: the boundaries were permeable.
20:33
[SPEAKER_00]: But the distinction between the categories was real and it shaped what each officer could legally do where they could do it and who was ultimately responsible for paying them and holding them to account.
20:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The pay incidentally was not good.
20:51
[SPEAKER_00]: A town
20:54
[SPEAKER_00]: might make somewhere between 50 and 100 dollars a month.
20:59
[SPEAKER_00]: A federal Marshall's income was even more complicated.
21:03
[SPEAKER_00]: They were often paid through a fee system, receiving a set amount for each warrant served or prisoner delivered, which created some interesting incentive structures and which we will touch on in a moment.
21:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Now let us talk about a man who represents the federal justice system in the West, in its most dramatic and fully-realized form.
21:26
[SPEAKER_00]: His name was Isaac Charles Parker.
21:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Isaac Parker was born in 1838 in Dearborn County, Ohio.
21:35
[SPEAKER_00]: He had a conventional enough early life in Korea.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He read law, became an attorney, got involved in Missouri politics, served in the House of Representatives during the early 1870s as a Republican congressman.
21:50
[SPEAKER_00]: He was, by all accounts, a serious and competent man.
21:55
[SPEAKER_00]: A man who believed in the law with a kind of deep, almost religious conviction, in 1875, President Ulysses Grant appointed Parker to the position of federal judge for the Western District of Arkansas.
22:11
[SPEAKER_00]: This sounds on paper like a fairly unremarkable judicial appointment.
22:24
[SPEAKER_00]: At that time, had jurisdiction over something called the Indian Territory.
22:30
[SPEAKER_00]: The Indian Territory was the vast area.
22:33
[SPEAKER_00]: that would eventually become the state of Oklahoma, approximately 74,000 square miles of land that had been designated as the permanent homeland of the five civilized tribes and a number of other native American nations relocated there during the brutal removal policies of the 1830s and 1840s.
22:58
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not a state.
22:59
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not part of any state.
23:02
[SPEAKER_00]: It had its own tribal governments and its own tribal courts, which had jurisdiction over crimes committed by members of those tribes.
23:11
[SPEAKER_00]: But when it came to crimes involving non-native people, or crimes committed by non-native people against native people, federal jurisdiction applied, and federal jurisdiction meant judge Isaac Parker.
23:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Think about that for a moment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One judge.
23:30
[SPEAKER_00]: One courthouse in Fort Smith, Arkansas, right on the eastern border of the Indian territory.
23:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Jurisdiction over 74,000 square miles of territory that had, for decades, been a refuge for every manner of fugitive, outlaw, bootlegger, and murderer who wanted to disappear from polite society.
23:52
[SPEAKER_00]: The Indian territory had a reputation not entirely undeserved,
24:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The tribal police had their hands full with their own jurisdictional matters.
24:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The United States' marshals were few, underfunded, and had to cover enormous distances on horseback in country that offered no railways and very few roads.
24:18
[SPEAKER_00]: When Parker arrived in Fort Smith in May of 1875 and took up his position on the bench, he inherited a docket that was already backlogged with cases.
24:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Within his first eight weeks in office, he held court continuously, tried 91 defendants, and sentenced eight men to death by hanging.
24:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Six of those hangings were carried out simultaneously on September 3, 1875, before a crowd of 5,000 people who had come from considerable distances to witness the event.
24:51
[SPEAKER_00]: The newspapers called him the hanging judge.
24:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Parker himself did not like the title.
24:58
[SPEAKER_00]: by the accounts of people who knew him well, a man who took pleasure in ordering executions.
25:05
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a man who believed, with a kind of iron certainty, that the death penalty was a necessary deterrent in a lawless land, and he applied it consistently and without apology.
25:17
[SPEAKER_00]: In 21 years on the bench,
25:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Parker sentenced 160 people to death.
25:24
[SPEAKER_00]: 79 of those sentences were actually carried out.
25:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The others were commuted, reversed on appeal, or the defendant died before sentence could be executed.
25:34
[SPEAKER_00]: To enforce his judgments and serve his warrants across that enormous territory, Parker had a force of United States deputy marshals.
25:43
[SPEAKER_00]: At any given time,
25:45
[SPEAKER_00]: He might have had 200 or more deputies operating in the field.
25:49
[SPEAKER_00]: These were not men in uniform with regular hours and a pension to look forward to.
25:54
[SPEAKER_00]: They were, many of them, former frontiersmen, former soldiers, former lawmen from other jurisdictions, hired to go into extremely dangerous country and bring people back alive if possible.
26:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Though this was not always possible,
26:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The deputy marshals who served under Parker, worked on the fee system I mentioned earlier.
26:18
[SPEAKER_00]: They were paid for each warrant they served, a set amount, perhaps two or three dollars per warrant, and they were paid a small daily rate for the cost of transporting prisoners back to Fort Smith.
26:32
[SPEAKER_00]: A deputy who served many warrants and transported many prisoners could make a reasonable living.
26:38
[SPEAKER_00]: A deputy who had a run of bad luck, or who was assigned to a particularly remote and difficult part of the territory, might find that his expenses exceeded his income.
26:49
[SPEAKER_00]: The work was dangerous in ways that are difficult to overstate.
26:53
[SPEAKER_00]: 65 of Parker's deputy marshals were killed in the line of duty over the course of his tenure.
27:00
[SPEAKER_00]: 65 men, dead, trying to serve federal warrants in the Indian territory.
27:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The territory was not simply lawless in the abstract.
27:09
[SPEAKER_00]: It was actively, specifically dangerous, because it harbored people who had already demonstrated that they were willing to kill to avoid going back to face a judge.
27:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Parker himself died in office in November of 1896.
27:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Warn out, some said.
27:26
[SPEAKER_00]: by the weight of the work.
27:28
[SPEAKER_00]: By that point, the Indian territories days as an ungoverned wilderness were numbered anyway.
27:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Statehood was coming, the railroad had arrived, the old frontier conditions that had made his work so necessary were fading.
27:45
[SPEAKER_00]: He had spent 21 years on a bench in Fort Smith, presiding over what must have been one of the most dramatic and exhausting judicial careers in
27:56
[SPEAKER_00]: he was not a simple man and his legacy is genuinely complicated.
28:02
[SPEAKER_00]: The death penalty was applied with what modern eyes might see as alarming frequency and insufficient oversight.
28:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of the men park a sentence were probably guilty of the crimes charged against them.
28:18
[SPEAKER_00]: some were probably not.
28:20
[SPEAKER_00]: The appellate process was cumbersome, and Parker's relationship with the Supreme Court, which repeatedly reversed his sentences on procedural grounds, became actively adversarial toward the end of his life.
28:33
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a man of his time, operating within a system of his time, doing what he believed was necessary and right.
28:40
[SPEAKER_00]: But he was also unquestionably formidable.
28:44
[SPEAKER_00]: In an era and a place where the law was often whatever the man with the most gun said it was, Isaac Parker sat in his courtroom in Fort Smith, day after day, year after year.
28:56
[SPEAKER_00]: And insisted that something larger than individual force.
29:00
[SPEAKER_00]: or to govern how human beings treated each other.
29:05
[SPEAKER_00]: You can admire that impulse even if you have reservations about some of its expressions.
29:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, let us move from the federal government's attempt to impose order on the West to a different institution entirely.
29:19
[SPEAKER_00]: One that operated outside the government that was funded by private interests and that brought to the business of law enforcement a kind of methodical
29:29
[SPEAKER_00]: almost corporate efficiency that was quite unlike anything else on the frontier.
29:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Let us talk about the Pinkatons.
29:38
[SPEAKER_00]: The Pinkaton National Detective Agency was founded in Chicago in 1850 by a Scottish immigrant named Alan Pinkaton.
29:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Pinkaton had come to the United States in 1842, settled in Illinois, become involved in the abolitionist movement, worked as a deputy sheriff in
29:59
[SPEAKER_00]: By the time he opened his detective agency, developed a keen instinct for the business of surveillance, investigation, and the pursuit of fugitives.
30:10
[SPEAKER_00]: The Pinkerton Agency's motto was, we never sleep, and their logo, an unblinking eye.
30:17
[SPEAKER_00]: gave rise to the term private eye that we still use today for private investigators.
30:24
[SPEAKER_00]: From the beginning, the Pinkotans were a different kind of operation than government law enforcement.
30:31
[SPEAKER_00]: They were a business.
30:32
[SPEAKER_00]: They had clients.
30:34
[SPEAKER_00]: They kept records.
30:35
[SPEAKER_00]: They built files.
30:37
[SPEAKER_00]: They were in their organizational culture and their methods.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Something closer to what we
30:46
[SPEAKER_00]: than to the county sheriff's office, with its two deputies, and its cramped wooden jail.
30:52
[SPEAKER_00]: The Pinkatons became famous during the Civil War, when Alan Pinkaton worked for a time as head of the Union Intelligence Service, essentially the North's first organized spy operation.
31:05
[SPEAKER_00]: After the war,
31:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The agency's business expanded enormously, driven largely by one client who would define much of their work for the next three decades.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The railroads.
31:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The railroads were, by the 1870s and 1880s, among the most powerful economic entities in the United States.
31:26
[SPEAKER_00]: They were also among the most frequently robbed.
31:29
[SPEAKER_00]: train robbery was not a casual undertaking.
31:33
[SPEAKER_00]: It required planning, personnel and the willingness to commit violence in front of witnesses.
31:40
[SPEAKER_00]: But for organised gangs operating in the West, where escape routes were plentiful and pursuit was difficult, it was an extremely profitable enterprise.
31:49
[SPEAKER_00]: A single express car robbery could net tens of thousands of dollars.
31:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The railroad companies hired the Pinkotans to deal with this problem and the Pinkotans brought to it their characteristic approach, systematic, patient, thorough and relentless.
32:09
[SPEAKER_00]: What made the Pinkerton's different from local law enforcement was their ability to cross jurisdictional boundaries.
32:17
[SPEAKER_00]: a county sheriff's authority ended at the county line.
32:21
[SPEAKER_00]: A state law enforcement office's authority ended at the state line.
32:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The Pinkerton's operated wherever their client sent them, following fugitives across state lines into territories, even into Canada and Mexico if necessary.
32:37
[SPEAKER_00]: They maintain detailed files on known criminals.
32:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Photographs, physical descriptions, known associates, habitual methods of operation, long before any government agency maintained anything comparable.
32:51
[SPEAKER_00]: They were not gentle.
32:53
[SPEAKER_00]: The Pinkerton Agency's approach to labour disputes.
32:56
[SPEAKER_00]: They were frequently hired by employers to break strikes, which is a history that sits rather differently from their outlaw chasing work.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Give you some sense of their willingness to use force and intimidation as tools.
33:11
[SPEAKER_00]: In one notorious incident, in January of 1875, Pinkerton agents raided the family home of Jesse James's mother in Clay County, Missouri, throwing what they later claimed was a flare or a smoke device through a window.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The device exploded.
33:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesse's eight-year-old half-brother, Archie, was killed.
33:35
[SPEAKER_00]: His mother, Zarelda Samuel, lost her right arm.
33:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The Pinkerton's never successfully captured Jesse James and the Clay County incident generated so much negative publicity that it became a significant public relations crisis for the agency, but they were also undeniable, effective across a wide range of cases.
33:59
[SPEAKER_00]: They solved crimes that local law enforcement could not.
34:02
[SPEAKER_00]: they tracked fugitives that government agencies had given up on.
34:06
[SPEAKER_00]: They built over decades an institutional knowledge of the criminal underworld of the American West that was unmatched by any other organization.
34:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Their model, the private detective agency, operating across jurisdictional boundaries, funded by corporate clients, using systematic information gathering rather than individual heroism.
34:33
[SPEAKER_00]: pointed toward the kind of law enforcement that the 20th century would eventually develop.
34:39
[SPEAKER_00]: They were, in short, the future.
34:42
[SPEAKER_00]: But before we leave the subject of frontier law enforcement entirely, I want to spend some time on a figure who I think deserves far more recognition than he typically receives.
34:54
[SPEAKER_00]: A man who's story is, in many ways,
34:56
[SPEAKER_00]: the most extra ordinary of all the law men of the American West, and whose integrity and professionalism stand as a remarkable achievement by any measure.
35:07
[SPEAKER_00]: His name was Bass Reeves.
35:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Bass Reeves was born into slavery in Crawford County, Arkansas, in 1838.
35:17
[SPEAKER_00]: He was the property of a man named William Steele Reeves.
35:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Then later of William's son George Reeves, who moved the family to Texas in the 1850s.
35:27
[SPEAKER_00]: When the Civil War began, Bass Reeves escaped from bondage.
35:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Some accounts say he had a dispute with George Reeves and fled into the Indian territory, where he lived among the Cherokee and Creek Nations for several years.
35:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Learning their languages and the landscape of the territory with a thoroughness that would later define his career.
35:49
[SPEAKER_00]: After the civil war ended and slavery was abolished, base Reeve settled in Arkansas, farmed, married, started a family.
35:58
[SPEAKER_00]: He was, by this point, a man in his late twenties, illiterate, he had been forbidden to learn to read as a slave and the skill never fully came to him.
36:10
[SPEAKER_00]: but possessed of an intelligence and a memory and a physical presence that were remarkable.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He stood over six feet tall.
36:19
[SPEAKER_00]: He was an extraordinarily skilled horseman and marksman, and he knew the Indian territory better than almost anyone living, who was not a member of one of the nations that called it home.
36:31
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1875, the same year Isaac Parker arrived at Fort Smith.
36:37
[SPEAKER_00]: The judge began actively recruiting deputy marshals who had the skills and the knowledge to work effectively in the Indian territory.
36:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Base Reeves was recruited and became one of the first black deputy United States marshals west of the Mississippi River.
36:54
[SPEAKER_00]: What followed was a career that lasted over 30 years and that produced statistics that border on the unbelievable and yet are well documented.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Over the course of his time as a federal deputy marshal, Bass Reeves arrested more than 3,000 people.
37:11
[SPEAKER_00]: He brought in some of the most dangerous fugitives in the Indian territory.
37:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Often working alone, traveling hundreds of miles into rough country.
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[SPEAKER_00]: to track down men who had every reason to resist arrest violently.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was involved in 14 shootouts over the course of his career.
37:31
[SPEAKER_00]: In each of those 14 encounters, he survived.
37:35
[SPEAKER_00]: He killed 14 men in the line of duty.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was shot at many times.
37:41
[SPEAKER_00]: His hat was shot off his head, his belt was shot off his body, his horse was shot out from under him, base reaves himself was never wounded.
37:52
[SPEAKER_00]: His methods were creative and flexible in ways that show a man of genuine intelligence operating in a complex environment because he could not read.
38:03
[SPEAKER_00]: He memorized his warrants, sometimes dozens of them at a time, before setting out.
38:10
[SPEAKER_00]: He was known to use disguises to get close to fugitives, who would have recognized and shot him on sight.
38:17
[SPEAKER_00]: He once disguised himself as a farmer, down to a realistic looking set of farm implements, and walked into a camp.
38:25
[SPEAKER_00]: where two dangerous brothers were hiding.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He ate breakfast with them, chatted with them pleasantly, and then arrested them at a moment of his choosing when resistance was least likely to be effective.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was also, by all accounts, a man of strict personal honesty.
38:43
[SPEAKER_00]: At a time when frontier law enforcement was riddled with corruption, when badges were sometimes purchased rather than earned,
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[SPEAKER_00]: When evidence could be manufactured and witnesses intimidated, when the line between the lawmen and the outlaw was sometimes distressingly thin, base reaves maintained a reputation for scrupulous integrity.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When his own son Benjamin was accused of murdering his wife, bass reaves requested and received permission to serve the warrant himself.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He arrested his own son.
39:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Benjamin was tried, convicted, and imprisoned.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Bass Reeves never spoke publicly about this, at least not in any recorded account.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He did what the law required, and he moved on.
39:31
[SPEAKER_00]: He moved to Muscogee in what had become Oklahoma Territory when the Indian Territory was reorganized and served as a city policeman there until he was in his early 70s.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He retired only when his health began to fail.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He died in January of 1910.
39:50
[SPEAKER_00]: at the age of 71 or 72, his exact birth year is uncertain.
39:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Having spent most of his adult life in service to a country that had not always treated him as a full human being, and having served that country with a distinction that few people of any background could match.
40:12
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a theory popular in recent decades that bass reaves may have been one of the inspirations for the fictional character of the lone ranger.
40:23
[SPEAKER_00]: the masked Texas Ranger, who rides with a native American companion named Tonto, and fights for justice in the old West.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The lone Ranger first appeared on Detroit radio in 1933 and became one of the iconic American heroes of the 20th century.
40:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether or not Bass Reeves was
40:49
[SPEAKER_00]: the parallels are striking enough to be worth noting.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The real man was more interesting than the fiction.
40:56
[SPEAKER_00]: He almost always is.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter three, shadows on the trail, the outlaws.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We have been talking about the people who tried to maintain order in the West.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now, let us talk about the people who made that work so difficult, the outlaws.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But I want to begin with a concept before we get to the individuals because I think this concept will help us understand the outdoors in a more interesting way than the simple categories of good and bad that the movie's tend to offer us.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The concept is the social bandit.
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[SPEAKER_00]: the historian, Eric Hobbsborn, writing in the 1960s, developed a theory about a particular kind of criminal figure that appears with remarkable consistency in agrarian societies undergoing rapid and disruptive economic change.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He called this figure the social bandit and he described a pattern that runs from Robin Hood in Medieval England to bandits in 19th century Italy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: from peasant rebels in China to outlaws in the American West.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The social bandit is distinguished from the ordinary criminal by the relationship between the outlaw and the community.
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[SPEAKER_00]: An ordinary criminal steals from whoever has something worth stealing, regardless of social position.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The social bandit, at least in the stories that communities tell about them, steals from the rich, from powerful institutions like banks and railroads, and either shares the proceeds
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[SPEAKER_00]: or at least does not pray on the poor.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The social bandit is seen by his community, or at least by a significant portion of it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Not as a pure criminal, but as a kind of rebel, someone who is pushing back against an unjust system, even if the methods are illegal.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The important thing to understand is that the social bandit is partly a construction.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The stories that communities tell about these figures frequently diverge quite significantly from what the figures actually did.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Jesse James did not buy any reliable historical account, give money to poor farmers or rob banks specifically to protest the railroads.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He robbed banks and trains because it was profitable and because he was very good at it, and because the alternative was surrendering to a government that he hated and facing either prison or execution.
43:36
[SPEAKER_00]: But the stories told about him in the communities of Western Missouri where he grew up and operated, painted him as something quite different, a hero of the common people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A defender of the Confederate South against a repatious northern capitalism, a man wronged by circumstance, and forced into a life he would have preferred not to lead.
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[SPEAKER_00]: These stories were not entirely invented from nothing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They grew from real soil, from the genuine grievances of farmers who felt crushed by railroad freight rates and bank mortgages, and the economic disruptions of the post-Civil War era.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Outlaw became a vessel into which those grievances could be poured.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He became a symbol of resistance, even when his actual behaviour was considerably less noble than the symbol required.
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[SPEAKER_00]: With that framework in mind, let us talk about the James Younger Gang.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Jesse James was born on September 5th, 1847 in Clay County, Missouri.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His father, Robert James, was a Baptist minister who died in California when Jesse was only three years old.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His mother, Zarelder, the same woman who would later lose her arm in the Pinkerton raid was a formidable woman by any description.
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[SPEAKER_00]: fierce in her opinions and her loyalties, and she remained a central figure in Jesse's life, and in the mythology that grew up around him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Jesse had an older brother, Frank, born in 1843.
45:07
[SPEAKER_00]: who would be his partner in crime for much of his adult life.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Clay County, Missouri, in the 1850s and early 1860s, was a community deeply divided by the approaching civil war.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Missouri was a border state.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It never formally succeeded from the Union, but it had a substantial and passionate pro-conferitorate population, especially in the Western counties along the Kansas border.
45:36
[SPEAKER_00]: These counties had been the site of vicious guerrilla warfare throughout the 1850s, the conflict known as Bleeding Kansas, as pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers fought over the future of the Kansas territory.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When the Civil War broke out in 1861, the violence in this region intensified dramatically.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Frank James joined a Confederate guerrilla unit in 1862.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Jesse joined in 1864 at the age of 16.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The guerrillas they served with were among the most brutal fighters of the entire conflict.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Men like William Quantrill and William Anderson, whose tactics involved not merely fighting union soldiers, but massacring civilians, burning towns, executing prisoners.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The young Jesse James participated in several of these actions, including the aftermath of the Lawrence, Kansas raid in August of 1863
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[SPEAKER_00]: But for many Missouri guerrillas, the peace was uncertain and dangerous.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Men who had ridden with the Confederate guerrilla bands were not simply welcomed back into civilian life.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They were regarded with suspicion, subjected to loyalty oaths that some of them found humiliating or impossible to take, and in some cases actively threatened with prosecution for their wartime activities.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Jesse James attempted to surrender near Lexington, Missouri in May of 1865 and was shot nearly killed by Union soldiers who either did not know or did not care that the war was over, he recovered.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And within about a year he and Frank had begun what would become the most
47:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The first bank robbery attributed to the James Younger Gang, though the gang did not yet operate under that name, was the robbery of the Clay County Savings Association in Liberty, Missouri on February 13, 1866.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The gang took approximately $60,000, which in modern terms would be roughly equivalent to over $1 million.
48:02
[SPEAKER_00]: They also, accidentally or not, killed a 19-year-old college student named George Weymour, who happened to be walking past at the wrong moment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Over the next 15 years.
48:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The gang committed a series of bank and train robberies across Missouri, Kansas, Kentucky, Iowa, Minnesota and other states.
48:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The exact number is difficult to establish.
48:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Some robberies attributed to the James Younger gang were probably committed by other groups, and some the gang certainly committed were never conclusively proven against them.
48:39
[SPEAKER_00]: But the gang's core members, Jesse and Frank James, Cole Younger and his brothers, James, Robert and John were responsible for at least a dozen major robberies and a number of murders.
48:54
[SPEAKER_00]: The gang's operations were enabled by several factors.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Clay County and the surrounding counties of Western Missouri provided them with a network of supporters, former confederates who provided food, shelter, horses and information, and who actively misled or intimidated witnesses and law enforcement officers.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Jesse James was a genuinely charismatic man.
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[SPEAKER_00]: who cultivated his public image carefully, maintaining relationships with sympathetic newspaper editors who published his letters and presented his perspective on events.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The political tensions of reconstruction era Missouri, in which former Confederates felt themselves persecuted by Republican state government, made many people sympathetic to men who were at war with Yankee institutions like banks and railroads, regardless of the actual details of their crimes.
49:52
[SPEAKER_00]: The gangs decline began with the disastrous Northfields,
49:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Minnesota Bank robbery on September 7th, 1876.
50:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The gang rode into Northfield, planning to rob the first national bank in what seemed like a routine operation.
50:08
[SPEAKER_00]: What they encountered instead was a town that fought back with remarkable ferocity.
50:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The citizens of Northfield, many of them civil war veterans with their own experience of violence, grabbed weapons and opened fire on the gang from storefronts and upper windows as they attempted to rob the bank.
50:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Two gang members were killed in the street.
50:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Inside the bank, the gang killed the bank cashier, a Swedish immigrant named Joseph Lee Haywood, who refused to open the safe even when threatened.
50:42
[SPEAKER_00]: The gang fled, badly damaged, a massive manhunt.
50:47
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the largest in American history to that point, swept across southern Minnesota.
50:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Cole Younger and his brothers were captured after a gunfight at Hanska Slawn.
50:58
[SPEAKER_00]: They surrendered, were tried, convicted of murder and robbery, and sentenced to life imprisonment in the Minnesota State Prison at Stillwater.
51:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesse and Frank James escaped into the decoters and eventually made their way back to Missouri.
51:15
[SPEAKER_00]: They rebuilt a small gang and continued operating for several more years, but the golden period of the James Younger Gang was over.
51:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesse settled in St. Joseph, Missouri in 1881, under the assumed name Thomas Howard, living with his wife Z and their children in a rented house on a hill above the city.
51:38
[SPEAKER_00]: On April 3rd, 1882, a 20-year-old gang member named Robert Ford, who had been secretly negotiating with the Missouri Governor, Thomas Cretondon, about the reward money offered for Jesse James dead or alive, shot Jesse in the back of the head as he stood on a chair, adjusting a picture on the wall of his living room.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Jesse James died instantly.
52:09
[SPEAKER_00]: The story should have ended there, with a moral about the wages of a violent life.
52:14
[SPEAKER_00]: But instead, it transformed into something else.
52:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Robert Ford was celebrated in some quarters as a hero, but in many more, he was reviled as a traitor and a coward.
52:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The songs written about the killing, particularly the famous ballad that begins, Jesse James was a man who killed many men, explicitly condemned Ford for shooting a man in the back and created, in the years after Jesse's death, an image of the
52:47
[SPEAKER_00]: than his actual biography warranted.
52:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Frank James surrendered to authorities in October of 1882.
52:54
[SPEAKER_00]: He was tried twice and acquitted both times.
52:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Partly because witnesses were reluctant to testify against him and partly because Juries in Missouri proved unwilling to convict.
53:06
[SPEAKER_00]: He lived until 1915, spending his later years running a shoe store, working briefly as a dormant at a burlesque theater.
53:15
[SPEAKER_00]: and appearing at reunions of Confederate veterans.
53:18
[SPEAKER_00]: He died peacefully at the age of 72.
53:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Now let us move the story a little further west, and a little further forward in time.
53:28
[SPEAKER_00]: If the James Younger Gang represents the first great flowering of organised western outlawry, rooted in the civil war, operating primarily in the border states in the Midwest.
53:40
[SPEAKER_00]: then the gang that came to be known as the wild bunch represents something different.
53:46
[SPEAKER_00]: They were creatures of the later west, the west of the 1890s, a west that was already being transformed by the railroad and the telegraph and the approaching end of the open frontier.
54:01
[SPEAKER_00]: They were smarter than most of their predecessors, better organized, more mobile, and with one or two exceptions considerably less murderous.
54:11
[SPEAKER_00]: They were also ultimately just as doomed.
54:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Robert Leroy Parker was born on April 13, 1866, in Beaver, Utah Territory, the oldest of 13 children in a Mormon family.
54:25
[SPEAKER_00]: He grew up working on ranchers, drifted into petty theft as a teenager, and at some point adopted the alias Butch Cassidy.
54:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Cassidy from a man named Mike Cassidy, who had taught him the cattle business and some associated skills that were less easily explained.
54:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And butch, from a period he spent working in a butcher shop in Rock Springs, Wyoming.
54:48
[SPEAKER_00]: He was not a violent man by temperament.
54:51
[SPEAKER_00]: By all accounts, he preferred to avoid killing when possible and was notably successful at doing so.
54:58
[SPEAKER_00]: His partner,
55:03
[SPEAKER_00]: was Harry Alonzo Longobar, who went by the name the Sundance Kid.
55:09
[SPEAKER_00]: The name came from a town in Wyoming called Sundance, where Longobar had served an 18-month prison sentence for horse theft in the late 1880s.
55:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Longobar was from Pennsylvania originally, born in 1867, and had drifted west as a teenager to work as a cowhand.
55:28
[SPEAKER_00]: He was notably better looking than most outlaws, and notably more prone to violence when pressed than Cassidy was.
55:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Though he shared Cassidy's preference for robbery over murder when the choice was available.
55:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The gang that gathered around Cassidy and Longerball was a fluid organization.
55:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Different members participated in different operations, came and went, used different aliases, operated independently, and in various combinations.
55:58
[SPEAKER_00]: At its peak, the world-bunch included perhaps a dozen or so active members with a wider circle of associates, sympathizers and hideout providers extending across Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and the surrounding territories, and at the heart of their world.
56:17
[SPEAKER_00]: was a place that has become one of the most evocative geographical features in the history of American outlory, whole in the wall.
56:26
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole in the wall is a real place.
56:30
[SPEAKER_00]: It exists today in Johnson County, Wyoming, in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains.
56:38
[SPEAKER_00]: and its geography, once you understand it, explains immediately why it became such an important refuge for outlaws and fugitives.
56:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Imagine a long wall of red sandstone cliffs running north to south, a natural escarpment rising perhaps 200 to 300 feet.
56:57
[SPEAKER_00]: above the valley floor, extending for many miles.
57:02
[SPEAKER_00]: The cliffs are largely unbroken, which means that anyone trying to approach from the east would have to climb them, which is possible but slow and noisy, and leaves a person entirely visible to anyone watching from above.
57:19
[SPEAKER_00]: But through this wall of cliffs, there is a narrow gap, the hole in the wall itself.
57:26
[SPEAKER_00]: A passage perhaps wide enough for two horses to ride through a breast, hidden enough that you might ride past it and not see it if you did not know where to look and providing access to a sheltered valley on the other side.
57:42
[SPEAKER_00]: The valley behind the wall was and is, a place of surprising richness, water, grass, timber,
57:51
[SPEAKER_00]: The kind of place where a man could winter horses and cattle without anyone on the outside being the wiser about it.
57:58
[SPEAKER_00]: The hole in the wall had been used by outlaws and fugitives since at least the early 1880s, long before butch Cassidy and the wild bunch adopted it as their primary base of operations.
58:11
[SPEAKER_00]: The country around it was thinly settled.
58:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The distances to any significant town were considerable and the few ranches in the area.
58:20
[SPEAKER_00]: had complicated relationships with the law that made them disinclined to report the presence of strangers.
58:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Johnson County Wyoming had been the site of an notorious conflict in 1892, the Johnson County War, in which a group of large cattle barons hired a gang of hired guns to come into the county and kill small ranchers and rustlers they accused of stealing their cattle.
58:46
[SPEAKER_00]: The small ranchers and settlers of the county had very little love for the wealthy interests that had tried to terrorize them and very little inclination to help those interests or the law enforcement they influenced into this environment, butch Cassidy and the wild bunch fit with remarkable ease.
59:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Their method of operations was sophisticated by the standards of the era.
59:10
[SPEAKER_00]: They plan their robberies carefully, scouting locations in advance, often using fast relays of horses placed at intervals along their planned escape route, so that pursuing possees
59:23
[SPEAKER_00]: riding horses that had travelled from the scene of the crime could never catch up with outlaws who were switching to fresh mounts every 20 or 30 miles.
59:34
[SPEAKER_00]: This relay system borrowed from the old Pony Express model was one of the key reasons the wild bunch evaded capture for as long as they did.
59:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The wild bunch is most notable jobs, included the Wilcox, Wyoming train robbery in June of 1899, in which they stopped a Union Pacific train and blew up the express car with so much dynamite, that they shattered windows in the locomotive and scattered currency across a considerable area of the Wyoming landscape and the Tipton, Wyoming robbery in August
1:00:14
[SPEAKER_00]: also targeting the Union Pacific and the Wagner Montana train robbery in July of 1901.
1:00:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The Union Pacific hired the Pinkerton Agency and the Pinkotans assigned their most capable operatives to the case.
1:00:31
[SPEAKER_00]: A pink at an agent named Charles Serringo went undercover in the wild bunches social circles.
1:00:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Gathering information with patience and skill that eventually helped piece together the gangs identities, movements, and contacts.
1:00:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The net was slowly tightening, butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
1:00:52
[SPEAKER_00]: accompanied by Longobar's companion, a woman named Eta Place, whose real identity remains genuinely unknown to historians, sailed for South America in February of 1901.
1:01:05
[SPEAKER_00]: They settled initially in Argentina, in the Patagonia region, on a ranch near a town called Cholila.
1:01:13
[SPEAKER_00]: For several years, they lived quietly.
1:01:15
[SPEAKER_00]: apparently as legitimate ranchers, in one of the most remote and beautiful landscapes on earth.
1:01:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Patagonia was then and remains today, a place of sweeping wind-scoured planes and jagged mountain ranges and cold clear rivers and a quality of emptiness that would have reminded Cassidy and longer-ball perhaps of Wyoming, but they could not quite stop.
1:01:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Starting around 1905,
1:01:44
[SPEAKER_00]: they committed a series of bank robberies in Argentina and Bolivia.
1:01:49
[SPEAKER_00]: The Pinkerton Agency tracked them more or less.
1:01:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Though the communication between North and South America was slow enough that they always stayed a step ahead.
1:02:00
[SPEAKER_00]: At a place returned to the United States at some point around 1907 for reasons unknown.
1:02:07
[SPEAKER_00]: The historical record of her life after this point is essentially blank.
1:02:12
[SPEAKER_00]: What happened to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid at the end is genuinely uncertain, which is one of the things that makes their story so persistently fascinating.
1:02:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The standard account supported by a significant body of evidence holds that in November of 1908, two Americans who had committed a payroll robbery were surrounded by Bolivian soldiers in the small mining town of San Vicente, in southern Bolivia.
1:02:42
[SPEAKER_00]: After a prolonged gun battle, both men were found dead inside the building where they had taken shelter.
1:02:49
[SPEAKER_00]: one apparently killed by the soldiers, the other by a single gunshot wound to the head that may have been self-inflicted.
1:02:58
[SPEAKER_00]: The Bolivian records of this incident are consistent with a number of details we know about Cassidy and Longerborn, and most serious historians accept that these were the two men in the courtyard at San Vicente, but not everyone does.
1:03:19
[SPEAKER_00]: including members of his own family, said in later years that he had returned to the United States, that he had visited them quietly, that he had lived out his days under an assumed name and died peacefully, somewhere in the American West sometime in the 1930s.
1:03:39
[SPEAKER_00]: These accounts cannot all be verified, and some of them are almost certainly false, but they cannot all be dismissed
1:03:48
[SPEAKER_00]: The historical record is, in the end, inconclusive enough to leave the door open a crack, which is, perhaps, appropriate for a man who spent his whole life finding ways through doors that appeared to be firmly closed.
1:04:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter four, the last frontier and the iron halls.
1:04:13
[SPEAKER_00]: We have been spending our time with individuals, judges and marshals and outlaws and detectives.
1:04:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And these individuals matter, their stories are real, their choices had consequences, their lives had texture and meaning and suffering and occasional joy.
1:04:32
[SPEAKER_00]: But the American West was not ultimately won or lost by individuals.
1:04:37
[SPEAKER_00]: The forces that transformed it from a front here into a settled, organized, industrialized region of the United States were, for the most part, institutional and technological.
1:04:50
[SPEAKER_00]: They were massive in scale.
1:04:52
[SPEAKER_00]: They operated across thousands of miles simultaneously, and they changed the landscape, physical and cultural, in ways that no individual, however fierce or determined, could
1:05:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Let us begin with the most dramatic and the most visible of these forces, the Transcontinental Railroad.
1:05:13
[SPEAKER_00]: The idea of a railroad spanning the North American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific was not new in 1862.
1:05:22
[SPEAKER_00]: When Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act and set the project in motion.
1:05:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Engineers and visionaries had been talking about it for decades, but actually building it required three things that had not previously been simultaneously available.
1:05:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Political will, private capital, and a sufficient supply of labour willing to work in extraordinarily difficult conditions for wages that were not exactly principally.
1:05:52
[SPEAKER_00]: The political will came from the Civil War, with the southern states out of the Union, the long-standing political deadlock over the route of the Transcontinental Railroad was broken.
1:06:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The northern-dominated Congress chose a central route, starting from Council Bluffs, Iowa in the East, and Sacramento, California in the West.
1:06:16
[SPEAKER_00]: The structure of the project was creative to put it charitably.
1:06:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Two railroad companies were chartered to build the line, the Union Pacific Building Westwood from the Missouri River, and the Central Pacific Building Eastwood from California.
1:06:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Each company received for every mile of track laid, a grant of federal land along the right of way, eventually totalling more than 44 million acres, an area roughly equal to the size of Texas.
1:06:46
[SPEAKER_00]: and a series of government bonds for each mile completed.
1:06:51
[SPEAKER_00]: The amount varying based on the difficulty of the terrain, the more mountainous and difficult the country, the more government money the company received per mile.
1:07:02
[SPEAKER_00]: This created an incentive to build quickly and to route the line through the most challenging terrain possible.
1:07:09
[SPEAKER_00]: which explains some of the routing decisions that later struck critics as shall we say commercially motivated.
1:07:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The Labour for the Union Pacific came primarily from Irish immigrants, many of them veterans of the Civil War, supplemented by Friedman and by local workers of various backgrounds.
1:07:31
[SPEAKER_00]: They were organised into enormous mobile camps that moved with the advancing railroad, carrying with them every material needed to lay track across country, where there was nothing.
1:07:43
[SPEAKER_00]: No towns, no stores, no roads, no shelter.
1:07:48
[SPEAKER_00]: The camps were famous for their roudiness.
1:07:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Every few weeks, as the railroad progressed across the plains of Nebraska and into Wyoming, a new temporary settlement would spring up at the end of track, canvas saloons, gambling tents, brothels, all of the commerce that follows men with money and no place to spend it.
1:08:11
[SPEAKER_00]: These settlements were called Hell on Wheels.
1:08:15
[SPEAKER_00]: and they were as lawless and chaotic as anything produced by the mining camps of the earlier frontier.
1:08:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The Labour for the Central Pacific is one of the great underappreciated stories of American history.
1:08:29
[SPEAKER_00]: The Central Pacific Superintendent Charles Crocker,
1:08:33
[SPEAKER_00]: turned to Chinese laborers when other sources proved insufficient, initially hiring about 50 men as a trial and then when those 50 proved to be efficient and reliable workers, expanding the Chinese workforce until it eventually numbered around 10,000 men, roughly 80 percent of the central Pacific's entire workforce at the height of construction.
1:09:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The Chinese workers
1:09:01
[SPEAKER_00]: received lower wages than their white counterparts.
1:09:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Approximately 26 to 35 dollars a month.
1:09:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Versus about 35 dollars a month for white workers.
1:09:14
[SPEAKER_00]: From which the white workers also received board, while the Chinese workers were required to provide their own food.
1:09:21
[SPEAKER_00]: They did the most dangerous work on the most dangerous terrain.
1:09:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Crossing the Sierra Nevada, required drilling tunnels through
1:09:30
[SPEAKER_00]: and blasting with black powder.
1:09:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And later, with the then new explosive nitroglycerin, in conditions that killed workers regularly and without notice.
1:09:42
[SPEAKER_00]: At the summit tunnel, the longest of the Sierra Nevada tunnels at 1,659 feet.
1:09:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Workers chipped and blasted their way through the mountain at a rate of about 8 inches per day for much of 1866.
1:09:58
[SPEAKER_00]: The two railroads met at Promontree Summit in the territory of Utah on May 10, 1869, a golden spike, actually a few of them, a various metals for ceremonial purposes, was driven into the junction between the two lines and a telegraph operator sent the signal east and west.
1:10:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Done.
1:10:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Church bells rang in cities across the country.
1:10:28
[SPEAKER_00]: The continent had been joined.
1:10:31
[SPEAKER_00]: The consequences were immediate, vast, and in some respects catastrophic for the communities and ecosystems that the railroad crossed.
1:10:40
[SPEAKER_00]: For the plains, Indians, the railroad was a death sentence delivered in stages.
1:10:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It brought an initial flood of hunters who decimated the bison herds with industrial efficiency.
1:10:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Hunters like William Frederick Cody, who earned his famous nickname Buffalo Bill by providing bison meat to the Kansas Pacific Railroads construction crews, killing by some accounts approximately 4,280 bison in a single 18-month period.
1:11:13
[SPEAKER_00]: The bison were the economic and spiritual foundation of planes Indian culture.
1:11:19
[SPEAKER_00]: The destruction of the herds did not merely inconvenience the planes nations.
1:11:25
[SPEAKER_00]: It destroyed their ability to sustain themselves on their traditional lands and made them vulnerable to the reservation system in a way they had not been before.
1:11:34
[SPEAKER_00]: For settlers, the railroad meant access.
1:11:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Agricultural products could be shipped east.
1:11:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Manufactured goods could be shipped west.
1:11:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The trickle of settlement that had characterized the pre-rail road era became a flood.
1:11:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Kansas, Nebraska, the decoters, Wyoming, Colorado.
1:12:01
[SPEAKER_00]: These territories and states grew with remarkable speed once the railroad arrived.
1:12:06
[SPEAKER_00]: and for the outlaws, the railroad meant something quite specific, a target, a moving target, packed with express cars carrying currency and valuables running on a fixed and predictable schedule, through country where a small group of determined men with horses could easily block the track and disappear afterward into the landscape.
1:12:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Train robbery became, as we have seen, one of the defining crimes of the later wild west period, and it was made possible entirely by the railroad itself, but the railroad was not the only technology that transformed the west.
1:12:47
[SPEAKER_00]: There was another one, quieter, and in some ways even more consequential, the telegraph.
1:12:53
[SPEAKER_00]: The first transcontinental telegraph line was completed in October of 1861, eight years before the railroad, and it immediately killed the Pony Express.
1:13:05
[SPEAKER_00]: that romantic but extremely expensive system of relay riders that had been carrying male between Missouri and California since April of 1860.
1:13:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The pony express lasted exactly 19 months.
1:13:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The telegraph made it obsolete literally overnight.
1:13:28
[SPEAKER_00]: The old time has called the telegraph lines the singing wires.
1:13:32
[SPEAKER_00]: If you pressed your ear against a telegraph pole on a still day, you could hear the vibration of the wire.
1:13:40
[SPEAKER_00]: A thin, sustained tone.
1:13:42
[SPEAKER_00]: The voice of electrical current traveling at what seemed to people of the era, an almost supernatural speed.
1:13:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Messages that had previously taken weeks to travel
1:13:57
[SPEAKER_00]: the continent had a nervous system.
1:14:01
[SPEAKER_00]: For law enforcement, this was transformative.
1:14:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Before the telegraph, an outlaw who committed a crime in Kansas and fled into Colorado territory had a substantial head start on any pursuit.
1:14:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Word of the crime had to travel by horse or male.
1:14:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Days, sometimes weeks, before law enforcement in the next territory, would no to look for the fugitive.
1:14:25
[SPEAKER_00]: telegraph changed this fundamentally.
1:14:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Now a Marshall in Wichita could send a message to a colleague in Denver within minutes of receiving a description of the fugitive.
1:14:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Wanted notices could be transmitted across hundreds of miles faster than any horse could travel.
1:14:44
[SPEAKER_00]: This did not immediately make the outlaws life impossible.
1:14:48
[SPEAKER_00]: The Telegraph lines were not everywhere at once.
1:14:51
[SPEAKER_00]: They followed the major routes and a clever fugitive who knew the geography could still find routes that took them away from the wire and bought them time.
1:15:01
[SPEAKER_00]: But the effective radius of a fugitive's escape shrank dramatically with each passing year as the Telegraph network expanded.
1:15:10
[SPEAKER_00]: What had once been a week's head start became a day's head start, then hours.
1:15:16
[SPEAKER_00]: The wild bunches logistical sophistication, their relay horse systems, their carefully scouted escape routes, can be understood partly as a response to this shrinking window of opportunity.
1:15:28
[SPEAKER_00]: They were not simply outlaws.
1:15:30
[SPEAKER_00]: They were, in a particular sense, engineers of mobility, designing their operations to beat a communication system that was getting faster and more comprehensive every year.
1:15:43
[SPEAKER_00]: and ultimately they could not win that race, no one could.
1:15:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And while the telegraph was drawing the west closer together electronically, another invention was dividing it physically, drawing lines across the open landscape that seemed almost impossibly simple, but that had consequences as profound as the railroad or the telegraph.
1:16:06
[SPEAKER_00]: the barbed wire.
1:16:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Before barbed wire, the American West operated on what was called the open-range system, cattle, and to a lesser extent sheep and other livestock roamed freely across unfenced grassland.
1:16:23
[SPEAKER_00]: They were identified by brands burned into their hides.
1:16:27
[SPEAKER_00]: sorted out from mixed herds at seasonal round-ups, and driven to market along routes that crossed whatever land happened to lie between the rancher and the nearest railroad.
1:16:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The cattle trails, the chism trail, the western trail, the good night loving trail, were public corridors across which tens of millions of long-horn cattle moved between the end of the civil war and the late 1880s.
1:16:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The open range required enormous amounts of land and a particular kind of social organization, ranchers who ran large operations, cowboys who moved with the cattle, a fluid relationship between private property and common use that was deeply embedded in the culture of the range.
1:17:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, in 1874, a farmer from Illinois named Joseph Glydon,
1:17:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Applied for a patent on a design he had developed for a new kind of fencing wire.
1:17:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Glydden's innovation was not wire itself.
1:17:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Wire fences had existed for years.
1:17:32
[SPEAKER_00]: His innovation was the barb.
1:17:35
[SPEAKER_00]: small, sharp points twisted around the wire at regular intervals that made it painful for cattle to push through the fence or lean against it.
1:17:45
[SPEAKER_00]: This simple modification solved a problem that had bedeviled farmers on the treeless plains for years.
1:17:52
[SPEAKER_00]: The problem of keeping cattle out of their crops when there was no lumber available for traditional wooden rail fences.
1:18:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Glidden's barbed wire went into production in 1874.
1:18:04
[SPEAKER_00]: By 1880, his factory in Decalb, Illinois, was producing more than 600 miles of barbed wire per day.
1:18:15
[SPEAKER_00]: The price dropped rapidly as production scaled.
1:18:18
[SPEAKER_00]: From about 18 cents per pound in 1874, to about 4 cents per pound by the mid-1880s.
1:18:26
[SPEAKER_00]: The effect on the open range was swift and catastrophic.
1:18:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Farmers used barbed wire to fence their homestead claims.
1:18:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Ranchers, seeing the value of the technology, began using it to fence their own range.
1:18:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And in many cases, to fence land, they did not legally own.
1:18:47
[SPEAKER_00]: In closing water sources and public grazing land, in a strategy of territorial control that generated enormous conflict.
1:18:57
[SPEAKER_00]: The cattle trails, which had been open corridors for decades, were increasingly blocked by fenced private land.
1:19:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The great cattle drives became shorter, then shorter still.
1:19:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Then they ended, replaced by cattle shipped in railroad cars
1:19:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The conflict over barbed wire fencing were, in some areas, violent.
1:19:24
[SPEAKER_00]: In Texas, a series of incidents in the early 1880s, known as the Fence Cutting Wars, saw farmers and small ranchers cutting the fences of large landholders who had illegally enclosed public land.
1:19:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Night riders moved through the countryside with wire cutters, removing miles of fence in a single night.
1:19:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The Texas Legislature ultimately passed laws making fence cutting a felony, and the conflicts gradually subsided as the legal and economic questions settled out.
1:19:58
[SPEAKER_00]: But the open range was gone.
1:20:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The free-roaming cattle culture of the classic wild west period,
1:20:04
[SPEAKER_00]: The long drives, the cowboys sleeping under the stars on the trail from Texas to Kansas, the seasonal rhythms of the round-up, all of this was incompatible with a fenced landscape.
1:20:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The barbed wire changed not merely the practical economics of ranching, but the physical appearance of the Western landscape and the social world that landscape had sustained.
1:20:35
[SPEAKER_00]: The West that had given rise to the outlaws and the lawmen we have been discussing was visibly, measurably, changing.
1:20:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The frontier was shrinking, the institutions of eastern civilization were arriving.
1:20:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The telegraph and the railroad and the barbed wire fence were doing what no army of lawmen could have accomplished alone.
1:21:00
[SPEAKER_00]: They were making the old way of life in the West impossible.
1:21:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, in 1890, a government agency made it official.
1:21:12
[SPEAKER_00]: chapter five, the sunset of the era.
1:21:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The United States Census Bureau has been conducting a census of the American population every 10 years since 1790.
1:21:27
[SPEAKER_00]: With each census, the bureau produces not merely a count of people, but an analysis of where they are living and how that distribution has changed.
1:21:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the census of 1890, the bureau's superintendent made a statement that was, in its quiet, bureaucratic way, one of the most significant things ever written about the American West.
1:21:51
[SPEAKER_00]: He noted that up until 1880, the country had a frontier of settlement, but at this point, the unsettled area had been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement.
1:22:04
[SPEAKER_00]: that there could hardly be said to be a frontier line.
1:22:08
[SPEAKER_00]: The frontier, in other words, was closed.
1:22:11
[SPEAKER_00]: This observation was made in the context of a statistical report.
1:22:16
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a data finding, not a literary proclamation.
1:22:20
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was picked up a few years later by a young historian from Wisconsin named Frederick Jackson Turner.
1:22:28
[SPEAKER_00]: who turned it into one of the most influential and debated essays in American historical writing.
1:22:35
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1893, Turner presented a paper at a meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago held appropriately enough.
1:22:45
[SPEAKER_00]: In conjunction with the world's Colombian exposition, the Great World's Fair, celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas.
1:22:58
[SPEAKER_00]: The paper was called the significance of the frontier in American history, and it argued in essence
1:23:06
[SPEAKER_00]: that the frontier experience, the repeated process of encountering and mastering a wild, unsettled landscape, had been the defining force in the creation of American democracy and the American national character.
1:23:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The frontier had Turner argued.
1:23:24
[SPEAKER_00]: produced American individualism, American optimism, American practicality, American democracy itself, and now it was gone.
1:23:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Turn as thesis has been debated, refined, challenged, and partially dismantled by subsequent generations of historians.
1:23:43
[SPEAKER_00]: It overstated some things.
1:23:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It ignored others, most notably, the experience of the native American nations, who were the original inhabitants of the frontier, and whose own history was not a story of heroic conquest, but of dispossession and survival.
1:24:03
[SPEAKER_00]: It romanticized the frontier experience in ways that obscured its hardships and its injustices.
1:24:10
[SPEAKER_00]: But turn as basic observation that something important and unrepeatable had come to an end around 1890 was not wrong.
1:24:19
[SPEAKER_00]: The frontier was closed.
1:24:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The wild, open, ungoverned west of the cattle drives and the outlaw gangs and the hanging judges was over.
1:24:29
[SPEAKER_00]: What replaced it was a more orderly, more institutional, more modern American west that bore a family resemblance to the east, but that also quite quickly began producing something remarkable and mythology.
1:24:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Let us settle a little more deeply here.
1:24:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Let the weight of these last few thoughts settle in around you.
1:24:53
[SPEAKER_00]: The world that we have been describing tonight ended in a single generation.
1:24:59
[SPEAKER_00]: People who were born on the open frontier, who had ridden with cattle drives or served warrants in the Indian territory, or hidden out in the hole in the wall country, lived to see that world transformed, or most beyond recognition.
1:25:16
[SPEAKER_00]: The homesteads became farms, became towns.
1:25:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The telegraph became the telephone, the horse became the automobile.
1:25:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It happened with the speed of industrialization, and it left behind a generation of men and women who had lived through something that the modern world could not quite contain.
1:25:40
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you do with a past like that?
1:25:43
[SPEAKER_00]: One answer.
1:25:44
[SPEAKER_00]: was to turn it into a show.
1:25:46
[SPEAKER_00]: William Frederick Cody, Buffalo Bill, was born in 1846 in La Claire, Iowa.
1:25:53
[SPEAKER_00]: He had a genuinely eventful early life on the actual frontier.
1:25:58
[SPEAKER_00]: He worked as a driver, a herder, a pony express rider, a scout for the army during the Plains Indian campaigns.
1:26:06
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a skilled Plainsman in the old tradition, comfortable in difficult country,
1:26:11
[SPEAKER_00]: fluent in the rhythms of life on the trail.
1:26:14
[SPEAKER_00]: He killed the bison.
1:26:16
[SPEAKER_00]: He was there.
1:26:17
[SPEAKER_00]: But Cody was also from early in his career, a man with an instinct for performance and a keen sense of what the Eastern public wanted to hear about the West.
1:26:28
[SPEAKER_00]: He had, in the late 1860s and early 1870s, co-operated with a series of dime novels, the pulp fiction of the era, cheap and colourful paperback books sold at new stands and general stores, in which a fictionalized version of himself.
1:26:46
[SPEAKER_00]: appeared as the hero of various Western adventures.
1:26:49
[SPEAKER_00]: The Dimnovel Buffalo Bill was a larger than life figure, fearless and invincible, the embodiment of frontier virtue.
1:26:58
[SPEAKER_00]: The real William Cody was a complicated man with complicated finances, multiple marriages, a drinking problem, and a genuine showman's talent for reinvention.
1:27:10
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1883, Cody combined all of these elements
1:27:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Buffalo Bills Wild West, an outdoor theatrical entertainment on a massive scale.
1:27:23
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not a circus, though it resembled one in some respects.
1:27:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not a theatre performance, though it had narrative elements.
1:27:33
[SPEAKER_00]: It was something genuinely original.
1:27:36
[SPEAKER_00]: a dramatized recreation of the frontier experience performed by people who had in many cases actually lived that experience.
1:27:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The show featured elaborate set pieces, a buffalo hunt, a stage coach robbery, a re-enactment of the pony express, an attack on an immigrant wagon train, and later after 1890 a re-enactment of Custard's last stand,
1:28:04
[SPEAKER_00]: It featured real cowboys performing roping and riding tricks.
1:28:09
[SPEAKER_00]: It featured sharp shooting acts, including for many years the remarkable Annie Oakley, born Phoebe Ann Mosee in Dark County, Ohio in 1860, who could split a playing card edge on at 30 paces and shoot the flame off a candle while riding it at a gallop.
1:28:27
[SPEAKER_00]: and it featured Native Americans.
1:28:30
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the most complex element of buffalo bills wild west, and it deserves honest examination.
1:28:38
[SPEAKER_00]: The show employed large numbers of Native American performers, most famously sitting bull, the great Hunkpapa Lakota leader.
1:28:47
[SPEAKER_00]: who toured with the show in 1885.
1:28:49
[SPEAKER_00]: These performers were not slaves, they were paid.
1:28:54
[SPEAKER_00]: And by some accounts, sitting bull donated much of his earnings to impoverished children in the towns they visited.
1:29:01
[SPEAKER_00]: But they were performing a version of themselves that had been constructed by and for white audiences, reenacting battles that their nations had lost.
1:29:11
[SPEAKER_00]: playing the dramatic antagonists in a story whose conclusion had already been written.
1:29:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The historiography of this is genuinely divided.
1:29:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Some scholars argue that the Native American performers in Wild West shows were exploited.
1:29:28
[SPEAKER_00]: their cultures reduced to spectacle for entertainment and profit.
1:29:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Others point to testimony from some of the performers themselves, suggesting that they found value in the work, that performing in the show allowed them to earn money, to travel, to maintain something of their warrior traditions, in a context that was otherwise rapidly disappearing, and in some cases to negotiate a form of cultural preservation through visibility in the public eye.
1:29:58
[SPEAKER_00]: The truth, as it so often does, probably lies somewhere in the complicated middle.
1:30:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Buffalo Bill's Wild West toured the United States every summer season, from 1883 until 1913.
1:30:14
[SPEAKER_00]: It toured Europe three times, performing before Queen Victoria of Great Britain and Kaiser
1:30:26
[SPEAKER_00]: and crowds of tens of thousands of ordinary Europeans who had read about the American frontier in translated dime novels, and who wanted desperately to believe that it was real.
1:30:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And in some important sense, it was.
1:30:43
[SPEAKER_00]: These were people who had actually lived on the frontier, performing skills they had actually used, embodying a way of life.
1:30:50
[SPEAKER_00]: that had actually existed within living memory.
1:30:54
[SPEAKER_00]: The show created, or at least powerfully reinforced.
1:30:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The mythology of the wild west that became one of the most exported and most enduring American cultural products of the 20th century.
1:31:09
[SPEAKER_00]: The cowboy as a figure of independence, self-reliance, and stoic virtue.
1:31:15
[SPEAKER_00]: The frontier.
1:31:16
[SPEAKER_00]: as a place of moral clarity, where the right thing to do was obvious and doing it required only courage.
1:31:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The West is a place where the modern world's complications, its bureaucracy, its social hierarchies, its compromises and ambiguities had not yet arrived.
1:31:37
[SPEAKER_00]: This mythology was never entirely true.
1:31:40
[SPEAKER_00]: We have spent this evening looking at the actual West and while it was
1:31:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It was also complicated.
1:31:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The law men were not uniformly heroic.
1:31:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The outlaws were not uniformly romantic.
1:31:53
[SPEAKER_00]: The landscape was beautiful but also punishing.
1:31:57
[SPEAKER_00]: The progress that brought civilization to the frontier also destroyed ecosystems and displaced peoples who had lived on that land for thousands of years.
1:32:08
[SPEAKER_00]: But the mythology was not entirely false, either.
1:32:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The West was a place where some people did find freedom they could not have found elsewhere, where some people did remake themselves, where the landscape demanded a kind of physical courage and practical resourcefulness that modern life rarely requires.
1:32:29
[SPEAKER_00]: There was something real in the frontier experience, something that the mythology captured, however imperfectly and selectively.
1:32:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's something that kernel of reality inside the larger myth is why the Wild West has never entirely let go of the American imagination.
1:32:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Buffalo Bill himself died on January 10, 1917 in Denver, Colorado at the age of 70.
1:33:00
[SPEAKER_00]: He was buried on lookout mountain in the foot hills west of Denver, on a site that looks out over the Great Plains, stretching away to the east.
1:33:09
[SPEAKER_00]: The same plains he had ridden across as a young man that he had helped romanticize and transform and render into entertainment.
1:33:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The same plains that were by then crossed by highways and telephone wires and the neat geometry of fenced farmland, he had outlasted the world he described.
1:33:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of the great figures of the Wild West era did, Wyatt Earp, who would, in old age, help shape his own mythology by befriending the early Hollywood film community, died in 1929.
1:33:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Frank James, as we noted, died in 1915.
1:33:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Cole Younger was released from the Minnesota State Prison in 1901.
1:33:52
[SPEAKER_00]: went briefly into the Wild West show business himself and died in 1916, Bass Reeves died in 1910.
1:34:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The survivors of the old frontier era lived long enough to see themselves become history, then myth, then entertainment.
1:34:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The last great symbol of the irresend came in 1924, when the chism trail that great highway of the cattle drive era, along which perhaps 5 million longhorn cattle had walked between 1867 and 1884, was formally mapped and marked as a historical artifact.
1:34:34
[SPEAKER_00]: By that point, the trail had been plowed under, fenced over and built upon for decades.
1:34:40
[SPEAKER_00]: It existed as a historical concept, not a living road.
1:34:45
[SPEAKER_00]: The cattle that had once walked it, now traveled by train.
1:34:49
[SPEAKER_00]: The frontier was well and truly closed, and yet, tonight, somewhere in the American West, there are places that still feel like the frontier.
1:35:00
[SPEAKER_00]: High up in the wind river range in Wyoming, where the nearest road is many miles away, and the silence is so complete that you can hear your own heartbeat.
1:35:10
[SPEAKER_00]: In the breaks of the Missouri River in Montana, where the cottonwoods grow along the water,
1:35:16
[SPEAKER_00]: and the sage-covered hills roll away in every direction and there is nothing on the horizon that a person from 1875 would not recognize.
1:35:28
[SPEAKER_00]: In the red rock canyon country of southern Utah, where the scale of the landscape is still overwhelming, still indifferent, still magnificent.
1:35:38
[SPEAKER_00]: The West was not entirely tamed.
1:35:41
[SPEAKER_00]: It was channeled, organized, managed, mapped.
1:35:45
[SPEAKER_00]: but it did not disappear.
1:35:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The land is still there, still vast, still in possession of that quality of presence that early travellers tried to describe and rarely succeeded in capturing fully.
1:36:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The mountains are still enormous.
1:36:02
[SPEAKER_00]: The planes are still wide.
1:36:04
[SPEAKER_00]: The sky is still the most prominent feature of any landscape, west of the 100th Meridian, and somewhere in that landscape.
1:36:13
[SPEAKER_00]: If you get far enough from a highway and wait for the right quality of light in the late afternoon, you can feel something
1:36:21
[SPEAKER_00]: of what the first people who crossed the Mississippi into that country must have felt, a mixture of terror and wonder and the peculiar freedom of standing at the edge of something immense and unknown, with only yourself and whatever you carry in your character to see you through, that feeling, that frontier feeling has never entirely left us, and on nights like this one,
1:36:50
[SPEAKER_00]: It is not hard to imagine the sound of a horse moving through long grass.
1:36:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The smell of wood smoke from a distant camp, the soft weight of a blanket, and the particular quality of silence that exists only under a very large sky.
1:37:06
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the wild west in the end.
1:37:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Not the gun fights and the robberies and the hanging judges and the Pinkerton files.
1:37:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Those things happened.
1:37:16
[SPEAKER_00]: They were part of the story.
1:37:18
[SPEAKER_00]: but the deeper story, the one that survives all the mythology and all the debunking is simpler than any of that.
1:37:27
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the story of people who went into an enormous and indifferent landscape and tried with varying degrees of success and integrity to live there, to build something, to endure.
1:37:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of them did endure.
1:37:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of them left descendants who are still here.
1:37:48
[SPEAKER_00]: the country they struggled through and over and occasionally with each other on became the American West that exists today.
1:37:57
[SPEAKER_00]: In perfect, complicated, beautiful, scarred, magnificent.
1:38:03
[SPEAKER_00]: It is worth knowing.
1:38:05
[SPEAKER_00]: It is worth remembering.
1:38:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And it is a story that can hold you gently.
1:38:11
[SPEAKER_00]: on a quiet night, while sleep comes to find you.
1:38:15
[SPEAKER_00]: So let your thoughts slow down now.
1:38:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Let the images settle, the rolling planes, the sandstone cliffs, the singing telegraph wires, the wide Wyoming sky above the hole in the wall.
1:38:28
[SPEAKER_00]: The courtroom in Fort Smith, where Isaac Parker sat and the open road in Bolivia, where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
1:38:42
[SPEAKER_00]: This has been Sleepless History.