And heartthrob! Libby Custer was smitten with him.
Note that “Cowboy” is a pretty meaningless term in the modern context and what most people think of as such would be drovers. In the 1870’s context with the OK Corral where the criminal gang called themselves “Cowboys” it was a term that meant “rustler”. The violence rate among known criminals like who would be labeled a cowboy at the time does tend to be higher than the general population.
At the end of the very brief period of time of the historical large cattle drive which was from around 1867 to the winter of 1887-88 drovers were often paid ~$30 a month.
Much of the violence that happened were in boom towns and had little to do with “stockmen” and had to do more with racial tensions and labor like the white paramilitary forces in the Thibodaux massacre or the Rock Springs massacre (miners) or criminal gangs etc…
Heck, even the local Museum from my home town has a photo of my great-grandfather up calling him a “cowboy” when he was a trapper…If you tried to call him a cowboy back in the day he would have taken great offense.
Even in Dodge city the most famous shootout was between professional gamblers etc… And the second the state was partitioned for a quarantine the town vanished as the source of money for swindlers and thieves went away.
Homicide rates were very high in the American West compared to modern rates, but while murderers may have been drovers in their younger years there isn’t any data showing that stockmen were more violent or even as violent as the miners, gamblers, smugglers, and/or gangsters that tend to dominate the famous shootouts.
Does it also count homicides in which Native Americans were the victims? That would probably increase the rate considerably. I don’t know about Arizona specifically, but several western states/local governments had bounties on Native Americans and were literally paying people to murder Native Americans (although it was not officially considered ‘murder’ by the states in question at the time.)
Ob-xkcd: History of Oregon
As far as brawls and shootouts by actual cowboys in taverns, they mainly happened when cowboys were paid off at the end of a cattle drive and then hit the bars for some adult recreation. This is where and why towns enacted gun restrictions. The Dodge City gun restriction was only for the red light district, not for the whole town.
However, other towns had high murder rates for other reasons. Mondak, Montana, for example, was a town on the state line with North Dakota where a rail line crossed. It became a center for adult recreation when ND prohibited alcohol in 1889. But the people using those recreational facilities were frequently not cowboys.
iswydt
There were very few documented instances in the Old West where total protonic reversal occurred.
I would say it does based on the general discussion in that book, though it’s not stated in the particular footnote. For example he notes that California had a murder rate of ca. 100 per 100k per yr for quite awhile in that era, and that was with a much larger population than the then tiny populations of places like Arizona. He says a lot of killing in California was racial conflict among whites, natives, Hispanics and Asians.
It doesn’t seem in general that killings of non-whites were systematically excluded from homicide statistics, though completeness of stats in that era is a issue for all types of victim. Although the homicide stats probably don’t include natives killed by the Army, and surely not those who died indirectly from warfare or just the general effects of white settlement (disease etc).
Back to the parsing of ‘cowboy’ among Old West homicide victims, the OP post said “The film and print media glorifies a bar room brawl where guns are drawn…” If the reference point is TV/movie portrayal, I again think one could debate how many killings depicted in TV/movie Westerns, even limited to scenes in saloons, were specifically ‘cowboys’, as opposed to other people hanging around saloons (gamblers, ‘drifters’, ‘hired guns making trouble’). And modern Westerns tend to depict things pretty differently than ‘classic’ Westerns of movies or 1950’s-60’s TV, so which show are we talking about, Bonanza or Deadwood?
But probably best to remember we don’t have surveillance video and background bio’s of the participants in the establishments in question and today’s depictions aren’t necessarily 100% on the money either, rather than playing to different current day sensibilities of the audience. Though modern Westerns are probably more realistic at least in things being dirtier, bloodier, use of foul language (though maybe anachronistic specific terms at times) etc that the earlier Westerns were not allowed to depict. But they might also be darker and fouler than reality in some cases. Nobody now living was there. And fiction always shows unusual cases or it would boring.
Firstly, I think our modern informal definition of “cowboy” is pretty much anyone in the Old West who rode a horse, carried a gun, wore a specific type of hat, tended to drift from town to town, and (on occasion) may have actually worked with animals.
If Westerns have taught me anything, not only was rustling a problem, but also disputes over land, grazing and water rights. If you have a bunch of armed guys working for you anyway, it’s not a stretch to imagine giving them a bit extra to go start some trouble.
You best smile when you say “shtoopid”"!
He still should have known better than to sit with his back to a door.
Indeed. The ‘Gunfight at the OK Corral’ started because the Clantons were reported as having failed to turn their guns in to the sheriff as required when entering town, so the lawmen were sent to confront them.
No, the diseases common to the ‘cowboy lifestyle’ would be cirrhosis of the liver and syphilis/gonorrhea, and those are generally long-term causes of death later. By the time they died of those, they were long retired from being ‘cowboys’.
Even carries on today. I had some very conservative rancher friends out west who were quite upset over the ‘gay cowboy’ movie Brokeback Mountin – not because of the gay aspect (they knew that many Old West cowboys had been gay) – but because the characters weren’t cowboys: they were “god damned sheepherders”. Apparently there is still animosity between those who raise cows and those who raise sheep.
In addition to all this, I would guess that, based on the frontier and unsettled nature of the area, a big part of the action was taking place outside of towns or incorporated areas, where government authority was tenuous, and violence of that sort probably didn’t make its way into the records.
That would not be responsive to the OP’s question about shootouts in bars. But to the extent that the question is expanded to how violent the Wild West was altogether, I think it’s reasonable to assume that the level of violence in a vast and mostly unsettled frontier area would not be fully captured by official stats.
An animosity that, in it’s day, accounted for its share of Old West murders:
John Wesley Hardin killed 40 before he turned 23. Prison ended his spree.
These are awesome. Thanks for posting.
These homicide rates are a bit misleading – they are given as the homicides per 100,000. But the total census population of Arizona was 9,600 people in the cowboy era (1870). A decade later, in 1880, the population was still barely over 40,000 people. A ratio like that looks much worse when the denominator is so small.
Yeah, because they were too busy murdering each other!
I’m not sure you understand how “rates” work. Would you move to a town of 9,600 people where there were a dozen murders every year? Why does scattering those people over the state of Arizona sweeten the deal? It’s like you have little chance of running into someone, but if you do, one of you is getting murdered.
I mentioned that AZ’s population was tiny at that time, compared to CA’s relatively much larger population but the murder rate there was also in the 100 range per same author. Also note the NM murder rate was twice as high in 1880 as 1870 and it like AZ presumably also grew a lot in population in that time.
I believe it goes without saying that the ‘Wild West’ portion of the US had a quite small % of the US population at the time, but we’re talking about reality v fictional depiction of that region, so it would be more misleading IMO to quote a small absolute number of murders and say it wasn’t very violent.
And fundamentally murder rates are less ‘misleading’ than absolute numbers in most cases. It’s why we tend to quote them, not an endemic desire to mislead. For example Honduras now has a lot fewer murders each year than the US does, but the rate being 80 or so per 100k there v single digits in the US as whole is obviously relevant. The social dynamics of which it’s a symptom are one reason that a startlingly large % of that country’s population seeks to migrate elsewhere.
The only way I can think of the rate as being misleading in the Wild West case is the inverse of the doubt others raised. They have suggested a significant % of murders, in say AZ, were not reported, ie the numerator should be bigger. Might well be. OTOH it’s possible the census seriously under counted all the new people in the territory as of 1870, it probably wasn’t easy to do the census in those areas. But rather than claiming the rates are exact, which obviously we don’t know, I’m just pointing to them being order of magnitude at least higher than what’s known for settled cities in the East at the same time (or London; by that time European cities had comparable or lower murder rates than US ones, per Roth US urban murder rates tended to actually be lower than European pre-Civil War).
Thanks, interesting context that’s much appreciated!
And few of their parents could afford swimming lessons when they were young. I bet a lot of cowboys drowned during these crossings.