As I understand it, in historic societies, before the invention of the Police Cruiser, banditry was a fairly common occurence. Anyone out riding in a small, unprotected group far away from society had some chance of encountering a group of unsavory individuals.
I was thinking about this when I recalled the TV series Frontier House, a recreation of what life was like for homesteaders back during the great move West. Travelling in large groups, I can see how they could get across the nation to their homestead largely unmolested. But in one episode they travel to a general store that has basic supplies for all of the homesteaders within a few miles range. that implies that the general store was receiving regular, probably small deliveries of supplies. How would these have been delivered, so as to cost-effectively arrive without being robbed?
Cargo wagons, possibly traveling in convoy, with a couple of guys riding shotgun. Bandits would be aiming for cash more than goods, so it isn’t likely the dry goods wagon would get hijacked. Wells Fargo shipped stuff everywhere.
By stagecoach is a fairly common way for goods to be transported in the late 1800s. Usually there was a driver and someone else armed to protect the goods and passengers.
If the store was way off the beaten path then items could be delivered by a wagon delivery service. Again, I would expect the driver to be heavily armed.
I doubt that robbers would go that far out of their way to rob a store or wagon since they could just as easily rob a small town store.
As far as cost effectiveness goes, the storekeeper would charge enough to cover the delivery charge. Remember, something as large and expensive as a piano could be delivered almost anywhere… but it would have been really expensive.
When I have seen, in old westerns, the characters going to some isolated store/bar, I have wondered how these places could survive. There seem to be some pretty ruthless villains around who would kill the men, rape and kill the women and steal supplies and any money they could find.
On the flip side, everybody was aware that these were possibilities. They made clear that such crimes wouldn’t be taken lightly. The penalty for a major crime was death.
There simply weren’t that many ruthless villains around. Life was too hard to survive by trying to steal supplies on a regular basis. Names and faces were circulated as widely as possible and every new arrival in town was scrutinized. If it was you against the entire population of an area every time you tried to move in from the wilderness you didn’t last long.
The old west was probably less lawless than any city of the day. You could find many new targets in cities, find places to hide out, and find friends to shelter you. None of that was feasible where you were alone and conspicuous.
Good point. In a sparsely populated area where everyone knows everyone else, where travel is limited to where you can go on horseback, and where folks are likely to resent their only local supplier of finished goods (or booze) being killed, there are powerful incentives for leaving shopkeepers alone.
Besides, if you knock off the general store, every single farmer in the township will be hunting your ass for messing with their supply line. You don’t live long when you have no place to run.
I think our modern view of privacy has warped our perceptions. Today you can live in a big apartment and never see your neighbours, drive a few miles away in minutes, and nobody knows who you are; even our business is usually transacted in anonymity among a hundred thousand others in a giant mall.
It was never like that for much of history. you ride into town, someone will have seen you and be able to describe you and your horse and what direction you came and went. Not many towns have sheltered canyons leading right to the city limits. You are riding on the open range visible for miles. Everyone gets a good look at you in town, and a stranger stands out like a sore thumb. What you don’t say about yourself, or even your accent, says a lot about you. How you are dressed also says a lot, and most people didn’t travel the west like a Best Western, with a fresh change of clothes each day. You were easy to spot and easy to describe.
It might be a two-horse town, but one of those horses belongs to the sheriff and odds are he will come ask questions of a stranger. Your modus operandi - two men, strikes at dawn, ride away quick, dark brown horse with spotted rear flanks - that will be all over the area pretty fast.
Odds are the shopkeeper does not have a big stash of cash. You’re going to risk hanging to get as much beef jerky and hardtack as you can fit behind your saddle?
There’s a reason why outlaws tended to go after the bigger banks.
There was a brief upswing of banditry in the 1920s and 1930s (Bonnie & Clyde, etc.) when automobiles increased the speed of escape and the range “outlaws” could operate in, and crossing a state line was still an effective deterrent to pursuit. But this was mostly practiced by fugitives who were facing decades in prison or worse if they were caught and were reduced to petty robbery just for cash to keep going. Such criminal “careers” were usually brief.
Of course, this problem goes back much farther than the days of the American “Wild West”. Historically, people traveling on the open roads from one city to another were at risk of being robbed by bandits, a.k.a. “highwaymen” or brigands. One was always well-advised to travel in some sort of protected group.
Scenarios like this were frequently depicted in Asterix & Obelix comics. (See, especially, “Asterix and the Golden Sickle”.)
Say I am a farmer and I spot the bandit. What do I do?
Do I run home, get my gun and shoot him on sight? Or does he shoot me when he sees that I am coming at him with a gun?
Do I take into account that by confronting him, I risk leaving a wife and a couple of kids?
Or while I am thinking about all this, does the bandit take off for more pleasant pastures?
Or do I high tail it into town and tell whoever happens to be in town at the time?
Then someone organizes a posse? Where does the manpower for this come from?
By the time all that is done, the bandit is in the next county.
So just from the thoughts above, the logistics of all this seem pretty much in favor of the bandit. A lot of downside for the farmers and shop keepers.
Someone will likely have seen them and the direction they were headed. The sheriff or someone organizes a posse… just like the cliché.
Contrary to western movie impressions, horses are not motorcycles. They can only go so fast. A horse can gallop really fast, but only for a short while and then he needs a break. And they need to eat; horse muffins are dry and fibrous because unlike cows and other ruminants, they don’t effectively digest cellulose; so they need to eat seeds, need to eat a lot of grass leaves, etc. If you try to get 50 miles away by sundown, your horse will need some serious recovery. If you’re an outlaw who needs a horse to get away, mistreating it is a bad long term strategy.
People who live in the relatively wild areas probably hunt in their spare time. Someone will track you. Getting away is a matter of luck; and returning a few weeks later simply means someone will see you and alert the rest before you can do a repeat performance. Once the word is spread, other towns will be looking for you.
There’s also probably a stage or a train that stops in the town or goes nearby. Any place that holds a store is on a route that gets traveled. Word would be sent to every community around in every direction and probably reach there before bandits do.
If you doubt this, you have to explain why history doesn’t record an endless stream of this kind of robberies.
Road bandits are still a major issue in parts of the world. I lived in an area of northern Cameroon which faces regular attacks from road bandits that plague the entire region. They would generally target busses returning from local cattle markets with cash. I would say my area saw monthly incidents.
To some degree, you accept it. The bandits were rarely murderous, as long as you complied. So you just entered voyages with the understanding that there was some risk. What else can you do? Certain times and routes were more notorious than others, but life is tough and sometimes you hop on the bus anyway and hope. When you can, you avoid traveling with money- Western Union does great business in remote areas.
Now and then a group of bandits were caught and lynched. The papers would run lurid images of them dead on the side of the road. But it was very easy for bandits to hop across the borders, so they rarely got caught.
If a road got particularly bad, sometimes the bus companies would hire armed escorts. This was not a preferred strategy as the last thing anyone wants is a gun fight.
Cargo trucks would generally travel in convoys, and when it was bad public busses would convey up as well.
Plus, you’d be going somewhere. To your outlaw hideout or to your ramshackle homestead or something. Eventually enough people are going to get together to burn you out of that canyon.
How much Old Time General Store business was cash transaction, and how much was barter?
I remember Little House on the Prarie eps. where Mrs. Ingalls would trade eggs to shopkeeper Mr. Olsen for supplies; I assume other farmers did the same with sacks of grain.
A bandit would be hard pressed stealing unfinished, bulky, or fragile items.
In my travels, I’ve been to some fairly remote areas and I’ve encountered “stores” that barely fit the description and robbing one of them would have been risking death for essentially nothing.
I remember a place in Algeria where the entire inventory of the store was two bags of rice, a bag of wheat flour, five or six cans of something and a case of Coke. He and his goods were behind a chicken wire wall and he was well armed. Definitely not Little House on the Prairie.
if you’re a local, you’d be seen often enough that people would get the idea where your usual hideout was. Someone would be out hunting enough to know the hidden canyons; your trails would become pretty obvious as you come and go…
A lot of these situations, IIRC, the shopkeeper would find themselves extending credit and settle up at harvest season or when the herd is sold. Most of the money probably went from the bank to the shop and back again.
